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Tom Schmidt
Foreign.
Ryan Trott Adams
Nation. It's time for another weekly roll up. It is the third week of June and once again, Ryan Trott Adams is on vacation. Well deserved. And we got Tom Schmidt. Usually we tap in his seb, but we have tapped in hiseeb like so many times. So we're bringing, we're bringing my BFF back. Tom. Tom, welcome back.
Tom Schmidt
I'm glad I'm the bff, not his seb. I've seen him on Bakedlist too many times, so thanks for having me.
Ryan Trott Adams
Yeah, yeah. Really, really appreciate you. Tom. Um, you're in New York. Why aren't you at the Knicks parade?
Tom Schmidt
I, you know, I'm gainfully employed, so I felt like it's very difficult to do both that and be at the Knicks grade, but looked insane. I was like that Fulton street is completely jammed full of people. So I'm also, I'm also happy to, to just observe it digitally, you know.
Ryan Trott Adams
Yeah, I wake up and do the thing that you shouldn't do, which is I immediately open up my phone and I pulled up an Instagram and looked at stories and there were all of my friends, like I'm two hours ago already in Manhattan at like 6:30 in the morning. Jesus, what are you guys doing?
Tom Schmidt
I, I don't get it. I'm also, you know, I'm one of those, those, you know, bandwagon Knicks fans. So I can't, I can't really cop to being a Knicks fan. You know, I'm just like, I'm here.
Ryan Trott Adams
Yeah, I'm glad it's happening. The energy in the city is great.
Tom Schmidt
I get to write it.
Ryan Trott Adams
We got some news to talk about. Equities are up on the week, but crypto is down. Strategies stretch is trading 15% off par. While there's a lot of grave dancing going on on Twitter, we have the new FOMC meeting with the new brand new shiny new Fed chair, Kevin Warsh. He said while he was getting the job, while he was going through the job interview process that he's going to cut. And then once he got the job, turns out he just was saying what Trump wanted him to say now that he's got the job, he doesn't have to say that anymore. So now he's saying something else. There was the SpaceX IPO on Friday and now it's the seventh largest company in the world. And I got a question. Why is Jito, the block building software on Solana, up 70% in 30 days? And then also Coinbase launched 21 new products, all with their system update event. We're going to go through all of this and more. But first, before we get into today's episode, Tom, I got to talk to our friends and sponsors over at OkX, the Intercontinental Exchange, which is the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange. They backed OK X at a 25 billion valuation with a plan to launch tokenized New York Stock Exchange stonks and derivatives later this year on OKEx. This is putting just Tradfi and Defi into the same app. Finally. OkX is trusted by over 120 million global users and is bringing products to the US market that Wall street has been talking about for years. And OkX is delivering them. This is the OKX New Money app. It's not just a vision, but it's a roadmap with institutional backing to execute on it. Not an OKX user yet. If you are not, you can get $500 in Bitcoin through the link in the show notes. Unless you are living in New York or Texas. Sorry about that. All you gotta do, go to okX, click that link, verify your identity, deposit $100, you get some money, deposit more money, get some more money, trade more money, get more money, all up to 500. There's a link in the show notes to get started. Let's just go back to, to equities. Equities looking good on the week. Still rallying after the Iran war peace deal got minted. Bitcoin and crypto followed them shortly, but not anymore, not yesterday and definitely not today. Bitcoin is now trading back right at the 200 week moving average of $62,600. I think maybe this is just me, but I think people's eyes are all on Michael Saylor's stretch product which was starting to recover after it dipped down to $91 last week, June 5th. And they recovered up to like 96, 97. But it caught all the way down to $82. Tom this morning is trading back up to $87. So far, so far almost 20% off of its peg of $100. Making people very bearish about the confidence of strategy. I don't know if you pay attention to stretch. I pay attention to stretch quite a lot. What do you think about all this?
Tom Schmidt
Yeah, I think this is really the first time. I think we have strong evidence that sailor and strategy are weighing heavily on the market. People have been saying this for months, like why is bitcoin going down? Why is it being underperforming? And we'll say, oh well, you know, there's, there's the sailor risk. But the market was not reflecting that. And you know, it's kind of like, you know, you look at the bonds market, at the bond market to determine, you know, sort of confidence in government and credence around government policy. This feels like, you know, the, the sort of tariff tantrum equivalent. But for purposes for sailor, there was
Ryan Trott Adams
definitely a dislocation here because we could have been bullish. The equities market bullish all week. The FOMC hawkishness. We'll talk about that. But what didn't seem to be too bad crypto was going up. Everything was going up except for stretch. Stretch never recovered. And it seems to be that like it is actually kind of a focal point of the bitcoin market. And in therefore like usually we've seen assets like hyper liquid vvv, the revenue generating assets which have been countercyclical to bitcoin. This today they are cyclical to bitcoin. Bitcoin is literally dragging everything down. And it seems to be that like bitcoin can't get bullish until this gets resolved.
Tom Schmidt
Yeah, I you know obviously sailors sold a couple bitcoin, just a couple, you know, inoculate the market quote unquote. And then obviously after the fact announced I bought several times more bitcoin. But I think it seems like this is always going to be a looming issue. It's a little bit like a, you know, token, like a long dated token vest of this is just always going to be this thing dangling over your head. And so he needs to find a long term plan for it. I think people discussed hey, maybe just selling a larger amount of bitcoin now. So you have you know, a year plus worth of, of of cash to be able to pay dividends. But if anything I think we're also just interesting instrument to trade. Right. We're coming up towards the end of the month when the first event, you know should be, should be coming out. Funding has been going crazy so lighter has a stretch per and so it's I was like for a while was like 900% annualized. So some people are also doing, you know, this cash and carry trade. If they're going to hold the stretch short, the perps maybe try to collect the interest. It's just like all sorts of a super interesting environment. But I feel like we're going to get this resolved one way or another, you know, closer to the end of the month. And I, I don't quite know how because I do find I'm not a particular big Strategy or sailor bull. But he does have a ability to, you know, pull a rabbit out of a hat on demand. So maybe able to do something.
Ryan Trott Adams
Yeah, the, the, the kind of, the fundamental quandary that I see with Stretch is that the stated intention of Stretch is that if it trades below par, trades below 100, he'll simply just increase the interest rates to attract more buyers and it'll just, he'll just pay more year yield to attract more capital, you know, you know, slap your hands together. So simple. But, but the problem with that is that if you do that then you run out of money faster and there's like a confidence issue that you impose upon your asset. If you, if you like jack up your interest rates from like 11%, which is already high, like how many other yield sources are you beating with 11%? Like most of them. And so you go up to 13, 14% in order to attract more buyers of the Stretch asset. Like, well, you're just going to run out of your cash balance faster, which is going to reduce the confidence. And so it doesn't really seem to be a solid, elegant solution. It seems you're just kind of taking from one pocket, putting another and then everything like nets out at the end is still a fundamental problem.
Tom Schmidt
Yeah, I think there's a lot of businesses or investment strategies that are sort of predicated on this idea of, you know, Coinbase, CAGR from past, you know, decade or so. But you know, the problem is you don't eat ker. Right. Like the United States on average is maybe, you know, a thousand feet above sea level and then you hit the Rocky Mountains and it's like, oh shit, I was not prepared for this. And the question is, how do you sort of, you know, moderate some of this, this volatility while you are structurally long term Bitcoin? I think the plan is, you know, you should have more of a, you know, insurance fund for this kind of thing. But ultimately, you know, if you're long strategy, probably if you're buying Stretch, also long bitcoin, the question is, you know, why this instrument to express that view?
Ryan Trott Adams
Yeah, I think that's the big question going on is like, why buy and hold mstr? Jeff Dorman put out a tweet that people are really liking on Twitter. He goes, my base case right now is 70% odds that they keep on doing what they're doing strategy, which is selling small amounts of MSCR every month at non accretive levels, crushing the stock until it falls to 07m. Navigation this would at least Give stretch holders a glimmer of hope. Bitcoin would be fine, but MSCR would be hammered. He's been hammering MSCR to this point at least. It is still above mnav, but nonetheless value capture in MSTR does not really seem to be a thing. So that's his first case. 25% chance for his next case is that he does the right thing. According to Jeff, admits he messed up when he bought back the debt. Sells 3 to 4 billion dollars of Bitcoin, buys a ton of time, which is marginally good for mstr, very good for Stretch, but bad for bitcoin. And then a 5% chance that he does the nuclear option, which is just kill the dividends. Let the preferred fall to 30 to 40 cents on the dollar, which would close the capital markets to Michael Saylor. But at least he shuts off the $1.7 billion per year cash outlay problem. At some point I'm like, dude, like you don't have an infinite money printer. Like you've bought all the bitcoin that the market is allowing you to have. I don't think the last option is too crazy for him. It's just an, it's very painful. It's a bad look. There's probably lawsuits, a bunch of stuff involved with that. I don't know if you have an opinion on which is the most likely outcome here.
Tom Schmidt
Well, I see you wearing that jersey and really the question is, do you want to be Brazil or do you want to be Argentina? And those are kind of the two paths open to you, I think. One is maybe, you know, short term painful, long term better, the better path. The other was you kind of kick the can down the road a little bit more. I, I really am not the specialist, not the person to call when it comes to, you know, interrogating the psyche of, of, of Michael Saylor, which ultimately feels like you kind of have to understand and underwrite if you want to buy any of these assets. So I don't know, that's a certainly interesting area to specialize in in terms of the market. But I, I, I think if anything, again, I think you probably find some way to cover some of this, this, this short term debt and then hey, maybe we just give us, give ourselves a little bit more window and hope that bitcoin goes up in that, in that remaining window.
Ryan Trott Adams
Speaking of the psyche of Michael Taylor, this clip went around that people really didn't like. This was an interview that Michael Taylor gave on Coindesk. He was asked about how he came up With Stretch, the philosophy behind it. And he just goes like, oh, yeah, I sat down with AI and I use artificial intelligence to build stretch, which is not a good clip to have to give confidence in the market. Although I think we all you, everyone uses AI. I use AI. I'm sure Tom, you use AI. So I don't really think. I'm not blaming Saylor for using AI.
Tom Schmidt
It sounds not a good look. Maybe he was Fable 5, you know, maybe he had early Mythos access and that was, that was really what really designed Stretch. So people are underrating it. You know, we had a almost ASI level model designing this instrument.
Ryan Trott Adams
Yeah, I suppose it really depends on what model he uses. We'll reserve my bullish or bearish takes depending on the model he used. All right, let's get into FOMC meeting. So this is Kevin Warsh, a brand new Fed chair. His first FOMC meeting. There's a quote from BlackRock that I'll read. Rick Reeder, the head of fixed income at blackrock says today we believe that the Federal Reserve's FOMC ushered in a new era of monetary policy in the United States. And so this is seemingly the news that the market is trying to digest is what is the Fed's new strategy? Because there was a huge deliberate regimes change at the Fed showed by Kevin Warsh's disposition. He held rates at 3.5 to 3.75%. So that's, that's not any different. That's not the regime change that's happening. The regime change is what the Fed is communicating to the market. And so Powell had this like cookie cutter, 341 word, like typical response, like, like formulaic speech that he would give to the market. Kevin Warsh cut that by 130 words. And he also intentionally killed forward guidance. And he also was the first chair to not submit his own dot on the Fed dot plot showing to not show his cards on his future opinion on rates. And in the past, Kevin Warsh has just shown, articulated a disdain for forward guidance. And he says it just hamstrings policy. So analysts are calling it a green style span return to constructive ambiguity and so letting the market be a little confused and unsure and the Fed just not showing his cards in order to give the Fed a little bit more flexibility and, you know, ammo about what they can do. Tom, what was your reaction?
Tom Schmidt
Yeah, I, I think most of the critiques around wars were more, I felt like aesthetic. You know, it's, it's sad to see, you know, Powell out And you know,
Ryan Trott Adams
it looks like a Fed chair.
Tom Schmidt
Yeah. And I think specifically people missed the, the good afternoon instead of the good day with, with, with Washington. I, I don't know, I, I think you know it's, it's still very early and ultimately like what we've seen from Fed chairs in the past is really where they kind of show their true character is when there's a crisis and that's when they decide what to do. Obviously. Bernanke, Barry, Camels with 08 Powell with, with, with, with COVID And so you know, I think there, I've seen some charts floating around where you look at not, not dot pop but like banking analysts project projections of you know, several years out of interest rates. And it's basically always wrong because there's always some exogenous event that, that ultimately ends up affecting Fed policy. And that's really the moment when these things kind of, kind of matter. So I don't know, I think we, we got a few more years and a few more maybe hectic events before we see how good wash is business
Ryan Trott Adams
as usual until something crazy happens. Until the AI bubble pops and the Fed, the Fed has to like watch to see, see if it needs to step in there or not. It is worth noting that nine of the 18 Fed officials now do see a hike by the end of the year which is not what the markets were positioned for. So the one bad week in the market or the one bad day in the market this week was right after this. FOMC which was yesterday, Wednesday S and P dropped 1.2% and two year yields jumped up. The dollar has gone up. Odds of an October rate hike has gone up to 60%. Bitcoin fell 3%. Gold sold off. It's just like, yeah, it's a one time response to the market. I don't think it's anything structural as of yet. The structural change is the game theory that Fed the game that if the Fed is trying to play around game theory. There's also something that I'm going to keep an eye on is Kevin Warsh introduced a task force. He just said task force over and over and over again. So there's a communications task force, a balance sheet task force, a data task force, a productivity and AI task force. All of these task force. I think analysts are being, interpreting them as like these are just Kevin Warsh building mechanisms to build the consensus that he wants to build. So like it's bureaucracy but like Kevin Warsh wants to do something and so he's setting a team of task force to give him the response, to give him the justification to do the strategy. So giving him leverage in the future. That's my read. That's a bunch of other people's reads. I don't know if you have any take on that tomorrow.
Tom Schmidt
I have less of a read, I will say on the data front, I was always under the assumption that really the Fed was maybe the most authoritative, most accurate source when it comes to looking at these different measures of inflation or inflation that they obviously use to influence policy. And I was talking to Tarun Chitra from Gauntlet and Robot, who's a coast on my podcast a while ago. He was on the Fed's, you know, data efforts. He said they actually have like incredibly poor data infrastructure. And it's like, you know, these, these, you know, private market investors have like, you know, way more sophisticated models for, for cpi. So maybe the answer is he's trying to turn the Fed AI native or something like that. I don't know, maybe that's favorable.
Ryan Trott Adams
That would align with what Mike Selig is trying to do at the cftc. He's just like, let's build this institution up in an AI era first. And so I like that, like that. That sounds very sci fi. I'm into this. Speaking of sci fi, let's go into SpaceX. So SpaceX is now the seventh largest company by market cap. Briefly it flipped Amazon before it fell back down. It was briefly ahead of Amazon. You know Amazon, the thing that makes like $750 billion a year in revenue. SpaceX, which makes $18 billion a year in revenue, flipped Amazon. It's now back down to number nine by total assets, by market cap, number seven by total companies, by market cap. It rallied post ipo, which I think was a little bit surprising. Not consensus. The consensus was that this thing is a high FDV low float shitcoin and all the insiders are going to dump on you. Turns out it was a high FDV low flow shitcoin which was very easy to pump. It IPO'd, it popped up to 165 and then it got all the way up to 216. It has since traded down down to 180. Brand new company in the top 10 company market caps. Tom, what do you think?
Tom Schmidt
Just to be clear, you know, that may still happen. The online schedule for SpaceX is insane. I like this Bill Ackman tweet today or yesterday. The thing that makes SpaceX so valuable is that it's so valuable. I think referring to Their ability to do all these acquisitions of X and Xai and our cursor just using this extremely high, you know, share price. And so it's this really interesting instrument where you know, you can almost say it's sort of you microstrategy like in that way where it's, you're trading at some huge premium to maybe where these assets would normally otherwise be trading, which allows you to sort of suck it up into this vehicle. And maybe there's some synergies, maybe there's you know, sort of the Elon Musk, you know, aura around it. But I think on the other hand it is like this unique, one of one instrument, right. People love Starlink and obviously Amazon has their own competitor, but everyone knows Starlink the brand and they're the ones everywhere. And not many other companies, if any, have the kind of ability to get large payloads in flight that SpaceX has. The fact that it has all these other things wrapped up into it. Maybe more of a kind of rounding error. It's kind of like square buying title or something. But I don't know, I, I think I was also surprised by how warm the market was to it post ipo where for a while it seemed like, you know, this thing was getting shopped around everywhere. Fidelity lowered the, you know, minimum assets on platform required to participate from like, you know, 100,000 to like 2,000. And it just felt like, okay, this thing is getting super shopped around. Is it even going to get, you know, filled? Ended up being obviously very over subbed and then you know, totally, totally popping after the ipo. So I don't know where it's going to go from here, but I certainly think, you know, Elon is not one to doubt.
Ryan Trott Adams
Yeah, the Bill ackman tweet that you just mentioned where they SpaceX has so much leverage because it's valuable. I think it just goes beyond, I love the take. I think it just goes beyond capital. But just like the clout of Elon and the prowess of Elon and the uniqueness of the fact that like what other company is exposure to space? The interesting thing about SpaceX is that I think it could have in an alternative timeline IPO'd on the stock market at like 1/100th evaluation and that would have been another normal day and that would have been totally fine and no one would have thought anything of it. But there's like so much surface area for financial engineering and I don't say that in like a negative way, but just Elon knows, knows this game and he intentionally did the high ftv, low float thing. There's a lot of stakeholders at play who are incented to make this thing go up. Not even just inside of this basics arena, but like yo, think about the OpenAI and anthropic IPOs that people want to be bullish on and we want those to go up and there's the whole IPO vertical around those. So if, if SpaceX plummets, that's not looking good for OpenAI and SpaceX. And so like there's just like a lot of, if you do it right and you financially engineer it correctly, you just manifest a new market cap. And it seems kind of weird that that's true. Like shouldn't be, shouldn't companies be traded on their fundamentals? But like, I think it's a question of like is it, is it hot air or is it just smart financial engineering? And I'm in the latter camp.
Tom Schmidt
I, I think there's a lot of yeah, like path dependency to it. Right. Like the, the way in which you, you raise the capital. And you know, I think of almost some of these other, you know, businesses as almost like kind of filling in the gaps in like a, you know, jar of nuts of like oh yeah, you can't just rely on this very chunky, sort of not as immediately repeatable or sexy like government contracts to do these space launches. We also have all these little things kind of, kind of sprinkled in that allow you to sort of get there long term. In addition to obviously, you know, the Elon aura, I think there's also an incredible vindication for pre IPO perps and on chain perps. I don't know if you talked about this on the last show, but I think Trade XYZ, which is the RWA per platform on hyper liquid H I P3 markets, they priced the IPO pretty much perfectly. They priced at like 160 and got there at the end of the trading day. And even today they're still doing hundreds of millions of volume on SpaceX. And so we saw a little bit of this with the Cerebres IPO a couple of weeks ago, but it just feels like this is something that we're going to see continuing for OpenAI Anthropic and every new hot IPO that's coming out this year in coming years.
Ryan Trott Adams
I think that's right. I don't have that in the agenda, that topic in the agenda, but you're totally right. I do think that the Cerebres Cerebras IPO was the shot across the bow where like you saw the Cerebras, you saw the picture of the people on the trading floor with Hyper Liquid pulled up and you could see the red banner of like banned in your jurisdiction. But it doesn't matter because they were just looking at it for the price action. And that was like the first indicator that was the spark. And everyone was watching Hyper Liquid as just for, just for the pricing data. Like it wasn't. People on Wall street probably weren't trading it, or maybe they were, but that didn't really matter. It was about the brand of Hyper Liquid and the effectiveness of the pricing mechanism showing up. And now it showed up for the biggest IPO ever. Like, this was game time for Hyper Liquid and the pre IPO markets and they hit it out of the park and there's two more gargantuan IPOs coming down the pike. So it's actually pretty cool to see something come out of the crypto world. Kind of like the tail that wags the dog in the tradfi world. Like that's one of our victories. That's a huge Hyper Liquid victory. It feels like a little bit of a crypto victory, which we are desperately in need of these days. And so I kind of expect this to be an unfolding story as the private markets still get more kind of frothy and bigger and all the tradfi world kind of pays attention to the perpetual and all this kind of stuff.
Tom Schmidt
Yeah, totally agreed. I mean, in some ways it reminds me of kind of the 24 election and polymarket and hey, you have this, you know, third market that you're probably not paying attention to, but it's providing way more signal, way more insight and, and you know, way more accurate information than you're getting through kind of your conventional signals. And that ultimately ends up being, you know, the way market to market goes.
Ryan Trott Adams
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Tom Schmidt
Yeah, I think as always it's like it takes one person to kind of break open a category and then you have many fast followers. I think some of them definitely have a right to be there and they take the original idea and twist a little bit or serve a unique audience or you know, have, have some interesting distribution story. Some of them I will say also as a VC do not and you as soon as you know some new categories been out for a year you get like a million new copycat kind of pitches. It is interesting to see I would say like the next evolution of a lot of these, you know, pretty OG D5 protocols and that have maybe hit the ceiling of what their original market looks like. And so if you're Jito, okay, great, you have this great product on Solana, works super well. You eaten up a pretty good share of, of kind of liquid staking volume. Where do you go next? I think if I look at you know, something like, like Etherfi right on, on Ethereum there's only so big, you know, the restaking market could be and moved into building a neobank which has been pretty successful. It seems like Jito is kind of going the opposite route of hey, where do we kind of go next with the next big market. And obviously there's a lot of synergies between you know a product that can do really good order Routing and really good block building and something like a per deck which you know, naturally needs you know, a matching engine that has fairness and transparency and you know, good execution. So it's cool. I mean I'm excited to see it in the wild.
Ryan Trott Adams
I do enjoy the perp phenomenon simply because it's the most revenue generating product crypto has ever produced since blockchains themselves. I think that's a correct statement or maybe Dex is like uniswap makes a bunch of revenue too. And so like that's what gives me some amount of like hope or hopium about the phenomenon of perp. Dex is it does feel like the making of a bubble. Like we are somewhere up the euthanasia roller coaster. I don't, I don't know quite where. Doesn't seem to be too frothy at the moment but I don't know, I don't know if, if you have an opinion on this.
Tom Schmidt
I think at the very least I don't think we're seeing you know, a bunch of leverage or credit being pumped into this that are going to come to unwind at some point. Made like maybe you could argue with
Ryan Trott Adams
ironically though the product is itself leveraged.
Tom Schmidt
That is true. That is true. Luckily self contained. It's like little you know, implosion in a dome or something like that. But I also think we're working our way through the Alphabet when it comes to the taxes. You know we already had ftx, there's no gtx. Luckily we got htx, we got jtx. I don't know what's next but I would encourage entrepreneurs maybe to think outside the box a little bit. And there are other naming conventions.
Ryan Trott Adams
Get away from the X. Yeah. What is tx? Is that a thing at all?
Tom Schmidt
I don't think so. I forget what the actually FTX stood for. Initially there was some acronym which I'm totally clear.
Ryan Trott Adams
This is always for exchange. I don't know how T got there.
Tom Schmidt
Yeah, I.
Ryan Trott Adams
What did FTX stand for?
Tom Schmidt
I'm just going to Futures Trading Exchange.
Ryan Trott Adams
I don't know FTX stand for. I got nothing dude, nothing. Futures Token Exchange. Futures Exchange. Token Exchange. That doesn't even make any sense.
Tom Schmidt
F Futures Exchange. But yeah it futures. You know, bad name, bad damage. Yeah. Probably don't want to follow in their footsteps but
Ryan Trott Adams
let's talk about the, the Coinbase system update. So they announced 21 products all at once. This was on a June 16th under this like everything Exchange brand and push trying to become users primary financial account not just for crypto but for everything. So some of the headline products that they released tokenized stocks backed one to one by US shares with on chain dividends and shareholder rights. Pretty cool. But this is only for non US customers of Coinbase. Kind of ironic, but this does allow for 24,7 trading on US equities. Kind of cool. In the coming months they announced options trading for crypto and stocks. They also announced real world asset perpetual futures and pre IPO perps. Anthropic and open AI they hinted as coming soon. They also popping open the hood of Coinbase. They talked about a unified order book liquidity like order, like order book platform for their US Spot international derivatives Darabit and so one single order book to power all of their front ends. They also announced private transactions on base to bring privacy to base. And then also Coinbase Advisor. This is a Lincoln MERS project out of Coinbase. The first SEC registered AI investment advisor. Seems pretty hypey. Tom, what do you, what do you, what's your most exciting, exciting to you here? Out of all these products?
Tom Schmidt
I actually thought the, the base private transactions were pretty cool. I feel like we're seeing this, this, you know, privacy mini, mini renaissance obviously starting with, with zcash and then I saw recently, today or this week Zama was doing these private deposit pools with Morpho and now we have this. And so it feels like again this sort of missing elephant in the room. Sometimes it's missing and it's also an elephant in the room when it comes to crypto. And now we're seeing, hey, maybe there's some green, green sheets popping up around bringing privacy back. I think this feels, I mean cool suite of products. I think some of these are obviously again followers of other companies that have, have gotten there first and now Coinbase is being the second mover with their distribution. But the question is just like, hey, can they actually get people to treat them as the everything exchange? And when they wake up in the morning and they want to, you know, go buy some, some, some SpaceX, are they going to think I'm going to go to Coinbase or are they going to think I'm going to go to Robinhood or Fidelity or whatever my other brokerage is and you know, to compete at least you need, you need something special to get people.
Ryan Trott Adams
That's right. Yeah, that's, that was exactly what I was thinking. It's important that Coinbase becomes feature complete and so I can buy Bitcoin alongside SpaceX and I want that in the same spot. And I don't Want a new tab. I just want it all right then and there. But that's like kind of getting up to par and they need, they need to get there. I don't know why they would. Why the generic user of the world, the generic investor of the world would use Coinbase over Robinhood over Interactive Brokers. And so there needs to be a little bit of secret sauce there and I don't know quite know what they tap into in order to unlock that.
Tom Schmidt
Yeah, I, I do always think too, I, I think they could use a little bit of a rebrand, ironically, I think actually.
Ryan Trott Adams
Are you talking about the UI? The UI of Coinbase.com?
Tom Schmidt
oh, I mean that I feel like is always, every, every two months they're, they're moving things around. I think more weirdly enough, I think Base would have been a great rebrand for Coinbase versus Base, the chain. You know, when you, when you're thinking about going to Coinbase, you know, the name really says it all. You were thinking probably thinking about trading some coins versus maybe thinking about getting a mortgage or maybe thinking about opening a 401k but a little minor niche.
Ryan Trott Adams
I don't know if that's minor because like crypto has the worst brand has ever had ever. And I kind of don't see that changing anytime soon. Like crypto right now seems to be kind of fading into its backend infrastructure era where like hyper, Hyper Liquid is just trying to become a platform. You know, the theory is becoming a platform. All the blockchain is fading away as designed was always supposed to be this way. And I think that kind of reduces our industry's ability to like change our brand because no one interfaces with us anymore. And so it's just left with how it is, which was FTX and Donald Trump like implosions and Griffs. And I don't know how we like take control of our brand and that maybe that's bearish but like Coinbase could, to your point, just like step away from it and be like, we're just not a crypto company anymore. We serve crypto products, we also serve stocks. The fact that it's tokenized is not your concern. That's our concern. Like you just buy the thing and we take care of the rest, which is how brokerages work.
Tom Schmidt
Yeah, I think that's, you know, probably a much bigger, you know, audience today and seems to be the way even the crypto world is going. Or if anything, I think it's more, maybe more bifurcating where, you know, stablecoins are very hot. So maybe they should call it stablecoin Base and do the other rebrand.
Ryan Trott Adams
You mentioned privacy and how privacy is having a little bit of renaissance. This isn't in my agenda, but I do want to talk about near confidential, intense tvl, which is climbing. It's still pretty small. So it's, this is actually a little bit of old data. This is three days old. I think it's past like 40 million. But what near is doing is near is providing a confidential pools, kind of like, kind of like zcash privacy pools, but for other chains and other assets. So on here is a near, but also USCC and zcash and Tether and eth. And so it's creating little privacy pools for other blockchains. And it's also growing. There is a little, there is a big privacy renaissance happening at the margins. You know, zcash is growing, near is growing base has private transactions. Zama is doing stuff. And it feels good. It feels good that we are getting privacy in where like, it's kind of like the crypto industry putting our money where our mouth is.
Tom Schmidt
Yeah, I, again, it's, it's been something that's been long promised and it's cool to also see just the real adoption. I think a lot of builders in the space and there've been a lot of false starts throughout the years. Not, not for any particular reason. But hey, just the market wasn't there, the liquidity wasn't there, the demand wasn't there. And now people see, oh, if I want to live my entire financial life on chain, I probably also want privacy. If I'm going to be spending, you know, with, with a, with a debit card out of my wallet or, you know, custodying my, my, my tokenized stocks and my, my wallet, I probably also want to be able to then, you know, go, go spend and not let everyone know, you know, what I hold. And I think the numbers, numbers kind of speak for themselves.
Ryan Trott Adams
Are you a Z Cash bull, Tom?
Tom Schmidt
Do you know, not financialized. We do hold, you know, zcash and I think it has, you know, kind of a special, special place in the industry and obviously give them a lot of credit for pioneering. I think a lot of the ZKP research that has influenced in a lot of other, you know, downstream products have ended up using.
Ryan Trott Adams
I want to bring up this post from Nathan McCully who works at Anchorage. He said exciting launch today. Anchorage Digital's linked staking and trading for Hyper Liquid is now live. Clients can simply link their Anchorage Digital Staking account to any external trading account, no bridging, no changes to custody status, and no interruptions to staking operation. Why I think this is interesting is in the trad world, you have segregation of brokerage and execution, so the exchange does not also custody. And this is the actually the same market structure that's emerging here where you have Anchorage for custody, but you just like plug in to Hyper Liquid to do exchange. And this is actually something that ironically, Gary Gensler always pointed at the crypto industry is like, look at these hooligans doing uncompliant things. We've learned these lessons. Don't conflate, don't do it. Coinbase is doing, which is put custody and exchange in the same place because you have potential things that look like Alameda and ftx. And like, we've learned these lessons and like all the people in the crypto industry, myself included and I still am, are like, it's just more efficient and easier. And this is what blockchain technology enables. Like actually it's blockchains that are doing the custody and Coinbase is actually just the exchange. But yeah, new technology kind of breaks people's brains. I do find it interesting that we are now mimicking traditional infrastructure via regulatory compliance, but we're kind of doing it on our own. I don't know if you have any takes or any thoughts on that.
Tom Schmidt
Yeah, I think in many respects this is kind of just an extension of the shift towards off exchange settlement for centralized exchanges that we saw post FTX where you saw stuff like, you know, fireblocks and, you know, copper clear loop, you know, take off as a way to again, segregate exchange from settlement. And I think, you know, I'm assuming a lot of Anchorage customers are probably asking for, for hyperliquid. I know I've talked to, you know, a couple different primes and trading desks and they have a lot of demand for hyperload exposure, specifically people wanting to trade perps or other instruments on Hyper liquid. And so the answer is, how do you go about doing that? Well, we can plug it in like we do any other exchange. And now it's a new venue that people are able to trade on. And so I think it's the cool thing about crypto, as you know, we've been saying, is, hey, it's transparent and programmable. And so if you, you know, want to go and, you know, custody your assets on a single exchange and trade there, you can. But hey, you can also, you know, trade via ADEX and sort of See what's actually happening on Chain. It's all, it's all modular and transparent, which is kind of the ultimate crux of what a lot of this technology is about.
Ryan Trott Adams
Yeah, yeah, I just looked it up. Anchorage has about $28 billion in a, um, which now in theory is just like one click away from Hyper Liquid. That was always kind of the problem with Hyper Liquid is bridging onto the exchange. This is kind of fitting in. Like one of my stories of the year I pay attention to. Like this is just my own internal model that I have about threads, story threads to pull on. Michael Saylor's stretch is like a story I pull on. And the platformization of hyperliquid is a story that I'm paying attention to. Like how far can Hyper Liquid go from migrating from just being a first party exchange that like me, the user goes onto and presses buttons versus becoming a backend platform? And this is firmly in the latter camp of like this is Hyper Liquid growing up and evolving into being a black backend platform tapping into the aum of the world. Doesn't matter where the capital is, but the capital comes to Hyper Liquid because everyone wants to trade on Hyper Liquid.
Tom Schmidt
Yeah, I think it's, it's kind of another flavor of this, this defi mullet idea, I think of even, you know, coinbase. Yeah. Is that the rule? Maybe, maybe, maybe we'll debate this, we'll have a settlement offline. But I, it does seem like this is a natural way for these, these markets to, to end up again like the Internet where you have different layers with standardized, you know, protocols that you really do their one single layer well and then kick the other responsibilities up to another layer of abstraction that can get more specific and sort of serve end clients. And you know, maybe the answer is we have, you know, one big global standard for liquidity and everyone else can build their own, you know, brokerage or their own execution services or their own, you know, apps on top of it or whatever it might be. And so I don't know, it's, it's very cool to see how rapidly this has been getting adopted as well as just again, it feels like this is kind of the, the boring revolution of crypto where you're using it in the back end and you don't even realize it.
Ryan Trott Adams
Yeah, yeah. Speaking of the boring revolution of crypto, crypto volumes are down the lowest ever since September 2024 on centralized trading volumes. Meanwhile, real world asset perps are hitting record highs. And so we've seen this in the Coinbase S1 and the Robinhood S1 is just like crypto trading volume, Bitcoin, ether, the blue chips and all the, all the coins as well just down and revenue just down for these centralized exchanges as a whole. But real world asset perp volume is up and to the right. And this really started with Hyper liquid doing listing gold at the start of this year, right before the gold mania, followed by oil at the start of the Iran war. And there's been a growth of real world asset trading volumes on perps. And so again this kind of is the story that we always said was going to happen and unfortunately it seems to coincide with like a lowering of trading volume of Bitcoin and ether now that we have like golden oil traders are trading gold and oil and they don't really care about Bitcoin and Ethereum. But it does seem like the sign of maturity of like we have real world asset perps. I do think that there's a very big real world asset perp story for the second half of this year.
Tom Schmidt
Yeah, I think like hip three volumes already hit like 40% of hyper liquid volumes and I think are growing and I think there's a good chance through the end of the year that we see a day where HP3 volumes actually exceed the rest of, you know, crypto volumes on hyper liquid and other exchanges again probably looking very similar. I do think a lot of these assets and that this asset focus is very, very cyclical. Right. Like people want to trade oil when oil is very volatile and see some, some volume spike and then it goes back down. And you know, a year ago no one really wanted to trade oil. And the beauty of a lot of these perp dexes is they are able to very quickly and aggressively list new assets as they come online. You have to wait for, you know, IB to list, you know, SK Hynix, you can just go, go trade the perp today. And I, I think as long as we can do see this kind of like hot ball of money, you know, new focus asset dynamic. I think it's actually pretty bullish for, for perps that have a lot more agility and ability to list these new assets in the same way that I would say, you know, Uniswap did in kind of 202021 where you know, new defi token comes out. Well, it's on Uniswap before it's on Coinbase. And that is just a leg up and a, and a liquidity moat that kind of builds on itself.
Ryan Trott Adams
Yeah, especially with being able to implement Any asset that you can turn into a perp, which is anything, so long as there's a bull market somewhere, so long as there's a frenzy somewhere that's kind of bullish for the relevant per platform. The only thing that's like bearish for a per platform is if like there's a global recession and all trading volumes go to zero because then your business runs out. But I mean if Bitcoin goes from 140,000 down to 60,000, but oil goes up, gold goes up, people want to trade those things anyways. That's probably a decent amount of the reason why the hype token has just. You don't see the bitcoin bear market in the hype token whatsoever.
Tom Schmidt
Yeah, I think you just see this again, this dispersion. I think that's kind of what a lot of these crypto exchanges are now trying to do of hey, we need to diversify away from just crypto trading. I think Coinbase and 2022 was really trying to push outside of just trading going into, you know, savings and yield and other types of assets which you've kind of seen now see manifested through their, their card and you know, their, their other types of yield products. And maybe we're seeing that same kind of revolution but you know, moving away from even, you know, crypto specific products as well. I do think, honestly even in a recession, I think people are still going to want to trade. It's, it's one of those like almost, you know, recession proof kind of things where humans love to speculate and it feels like the cultural trend of speculating is just has continued, gone up and to the right and I think short of some sort of, you know, external force that's going to kind of revert, seems like this is going to be something that's going to kind of kind of proliferate.
Ryan Trott Adams
Let's get into my neck of the woods. Crypto media blockworks has acquired Messari. So Masari is like an OG data analytics platform that also just integrated like a news and research engine as well as this was founded by Ryan Selkis. I don't know what he's up to these days. I have him used on Twitter, most people do. And this is actually 20 president.
Tom Schmidt
I don't know if you saw. No, 20, 28. Let's go.
Ryan Trott Adams
No, he's not.
Tom Schmidt
Well, anyone can run for president if you know you're 35 and born in America.
Ryan Trott Adams
Is he seriously running for president?
Tom Schmidt
I don't know. Was Trump seriously running for president? Was Kanye seriously running For President. Who knows?
Podcast Announcer
Sure.
Ryan Trott Adams
But Trump was Trump. And that's like, you can't, you can't say. Yeah.
Tom Schmidt
Let me put it this way. He changed his handle.
Ryan Trott Adams
What's his handle?
Tom Schmidt
I think, I think it's like Ryan Selkis, 20, 28.
Ryan Trott Adams
No way, dude. Hang on, I have to look this up. Oh my God. Wow. All right, good luck, Ryan Selkis.
Tom Schmidt
Sorry I have to show you that.
Ryan Trott Adams
But yeah, yeah, you really did. Anyways, Ryan Selka has left Missouri forever ago. I think he got kind of kicked out by the board because he was being deranged on Twitt. That's why I'm reacting in the way that I am. It was a. I don't know if we know specifically how much was paid, but we. The one rumor is that that is somewhere north of $10 million for Missouri, which is actually a pretty steep discount because there was a raise that Missouri did a series b back in 2022 which valued Missouri at over $300 million. Approximately $300 million. And so it is actually just a sign of a media. Broadly, news is hard. Media companies are not what they are today in the world of like AI, volume based media is just not the same. Like it's all kind of like creator led media rather than volume led media. And Blockworks got a deal for $10 million. So Congress to the Blockworks team for picking up. Picking up Mazari.
Tom Schmidt
Yeah, it's pretty crazy to see. I mean I, I feel like when I got in the industry, Missari was like authoritative. I mean we had a Messari sub and I was thinking back in those days, I mean Cilkis was also just such a force on Twitter and in person. And it was a large part of the far more. I mean, yes, I mean consensus was also just such a big event.
Ryan Trott Adams
There was Missouri mainnet.
Tom Schmidt
Missouri mainnet. And you know, I think, I think you. Once the kind of error starts to leak out, it's hard to kind of kind of plug the hole. So. But it is a good product. So kudos to everyone involved. On the. On the acquisition.
Ryan Trott Adams
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Podcast Announcer
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 Naito. 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.
Ryan Trott Adams
Tom, you got kids?
Tom Schmidt
I do not have kids.
Ryan Trott Adams
Neither do I. So we're going to talk as if we, we do have kids. This is a Keir Starmer. He's the, what's his title? Prime Minister of the uk. He tweeted out, I am simply not prepared to be a bystander when the safety and happiness of our children is at stake. We got governments coming to protect children by banning social media access for children under 16 to give children their childhood back. So this is the UK banning social media for children. Now, broadly, I kind of agree. Like, kids don't be on Instagram, go play tag. And at first glance I think that's, I think everyone can like kind of agree with that. But if you get into the implementation details of how you actually ban the Internet for a specific person and not another specific person, I think that's when it gets a little bit crazy. I don't know if you have a take on banning social media for kids tomorrow.
Tom Schmidt
Yeah, totally agree. I don't think there's anything, I think most people would agree actually with keeping under 16s off of social media. I think maybe one, the points of disagreement might be having this being implemented by the government instead of parents choosing to have this for their children, which I think most parents are probably choosing to have this for the children. And then two, like you said, how do you do this? You need more ID aids, verification, which just ends up creating this kind of slippery slope. This obviously also honey pot for, you know, KYC information. And so I think that's kind of thing people, you know, push back on is today it's, you know, ID verification for, for, for kids, you know, tomorrow it's, it's, who knows what this does.
Ryan Trott Adams
I know the UK is no longer Europe, but this does seem like a very Europe thing to do. And I don't really have too much faith in their leadership over there, to be honest. And so I am kind of worried that Europe or the UK is going to allow this foot in the door because it's like a slippery slope. Right? Like once one government figures out how to do this, they kind of set a model for any other interested government to follow suit. And you know, you ban one piece of the Internet over on our shore domestically in the United States, we had a piece of our Internet get banned this week and that was fable out of anthropic, you know, one service, one tiny little service out of all the billion users of the Internet. Like not too many people were using it, but still government took down a small piece of the Internet. And I don't want to see that trend grow. And the reason why I put this in the agenda is because crypto definitely feels like the bulwark against this. Like crypto knows no borders, knows no government. You know, same thing with like VPNs. There's like anti government, anti border technology out there. And so this is something I'm kind of keeping my eye on because if this gets a little bit too authoritarian, some probably won't be next year, probably won't be this election. But I could see this being a growing Trend into the 2000 and 30s. Crypto is going to have a role to play here one way or another.
Tom Schmidt
Yeah, I think, I think crypto and decentralized technology ultimately is, it's the ultimate opt out. Right. A lot of private companies, you know, choose to implement these, these kinds of, you know, age limiting features or other limiting features. I mean, discord added, you know, age gating.
Ryan Trott Adams
Right.
Tom Schmidt
Pretty recently. But it's a private company opting in and they use some kind of smart text, you're not uploading your ID or whatever. The problem is when you can't escape, what do you do? And I think always having an option to let people, you know, choose their own path is, is pretty important.
Ryan Trott Adams
Tom, that's all my topics. I got one more topic, but I, I want to throw it to you first. What are you excited about? What are you interested in? What, what's rattling around in your brain this week?
Tom Schmidt
What am I excited about? I, I was looking actually at some of the new AI models that again, in the spirit of letting people choose their own path, there's sort of this newfound open source AI Renaissance. And so people are pretty happy about GLM 5.2, which is this Chinese model that came out and has performance that is on par, maybe surpassing Opus 4. 8. And people say, hey, if you orchestrate it correctly, it's similar to Fable or openrouter, which was founded by Alex Atala, Pharmacy of opensea.
Ryan Trott Adams
We also came out a podcast with him next week.
Tom Schmidt
Oh, cool. Also came out with this sort of hybrid model that allows you to stitch together many different models to get sort of cable level performance. And so it feels like there's this cool undercurrent and sort of similarities actually between crypto, what's happening in the industry right now in terms of a move towards open source and sort of self sovereign compute, which is I think, a much more optimistic vision for the future than, than the alternative.
Ryan Trott Adams
Do you see that intersecting with crypto in any way or is it just kind of like the ethos that overlaps?
Tom Schmidt
I think we see some kind of fruits of that today. I think just hey, in terms of, hey, how do these things ultimately get funded? How do you actually access compute for this? If it gets restricted on a inference provider level, Maybe there's a way to tap into a more distributed inference network in order to actually access some of these models. But today it's more of a personality and sort of ethos alignment, I would say, where you see a lot of early crypto people coming to AI and vice versa, but ultimately driven by these same sort of ideas that again go back to kind of the early days of computing.
Ryan Trott Adams
There was one project I was talking to, there's a growing trend of AI labs kind of bait and switching you with their model, where they tell you one model, but then you ask it, and I would like to use this particular model and then you ask the query and then they really just serve you another model on the backend and don't tell you. And you know, to some degree, I. When I ask. When I accidentally ask, you know, opus 4.8 max, a stupid question, I don't need it. I can. It can, like, downshift me. But that's one thing. If I'm. If I'm, like, actually being intentional about my work and they're telling me I'm using Fable, but I'm actually getting some sonnet, I think that's a growing trend. And I have seen a handful of crypto projects trying to go after verified compute. I think this is what Noctain is going after. And so actually verifying the model and everything kind of end to end is kind of, like, auditable and secure in the same way that we would expect our blockchains to be. And so this is also a growing trend that I know is out there. I'm not. Definitely not an expert in it, but, like, something is brewing over in that neck of the woods.
Tom Schmidt
Totally. And I think there's also this in sort of private compute component in terms of just data. You know, people, I think, trust, you know, these chat bots with a whole lot of personal information that they probably would not trust even. Even Google with, not realizing that, hey, this is, you know, can be retained for, you know, arbitrary amounts of time by the. By these companies that's subject to, you know, subpoena, can be trained out, they could leak, whatever. And I think that. That it seems unsustainable to me that maybe a future is one where, yeah, people that have their entire personal lives you held on a single company's servers. And it seems like there's a move towards having, you know, local or distributed private data, maybe accompanied with some sort of remote compute. But it does seem like these two are kind of going to collide at some point.
Ryan Trott Adams
Isn't everything you're saying is what near is doing, right?
Tom Schmidt
Near is doing a lot of this? Yes, I think it's. It's like these sort of parallel currents between AI and crypto are kind of what I'm observing.
Ryan Trott Adams
Yeah.
Podcast Announcer
Yeah.
Ryan Trott Adams
Uh, we got the USA game tomorrow. Tommy gonna watch it?
Tom Schmidt
Probably not. I am not really a sport.
Ryan Trott Adams
You're not a sports guy?
Tom Schmidt
No.
Ryan Trott Adams
I mean, neither am I, to be clear.
Tom Schmidt
Wait, wait. You're wearing Argentina jersey. What is this?
Ryan Trott Adams
Uh, yeah, you know, I'm. I get Argentina pride for some reason, like. Like down into my soul. Uh, and so I. Let me tell you about a trade that I made this week, Tom. There is the July 3rd Miami game, which is like the 1J versus 2H group, and that is the first. The first winner of the J group plays the runner up in the H group or vice versa. One of the two. There's like a 85 chance that that's Argentina versus someone. And so I bought tickets for that game on the chance that it's Argentina, which feels, it feels good. It's probably priced accordingly. But if Argentina doesn't advance, then it's like I, I don't. Oh, yeah, I could hedge it. I could hedge it on Polymarket, which is exactly what I'm going to show you right now. That's actually not even where I was going with this, but like the, if Argentina's got a 12% chance of winning the World cup, but let's, let's go and see the actual chances that they win the. The bracket. Yeah. So Argentina, 84% odds on polymarket that it wins its J Group. It has a game versus Austria on the 22nd. And that's going to be like my ticket either goes up in value or it goes down in value if Austria wins, and if it goes up in value, it'll go up 15%. But if, if Argentina doesn't make it, then it's, then the, the new game is Austria versus like, I think it's going to be like Uruguay or Spain or something. And that's just not as exciting because it's like, it's. This is Messi's last World cup and so I'm excited. I, I'm going to go down hopefully to Miami and watch the game. But this all rise on Argentina actually making it through their, Their, their group.
Tom Schmidt
Yeah, I, I hope for your sake that they do because, you know, Austria versus Uruguay does not sound nearly as exciting, but as our versus Spain.
Ryan Trott Adams
Yeah. Anyways, that's the trade I'm in. Tom, thanks for coming on the show and helping fill in for Ryan. Always a pleasure to have you.
Tom Schmidt
Thanks for having me.
Ryan Trott Adams
Bankless Nation. You guys know the deal. Crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in, but this is frontier. It's not for everyone. And we're glad you are with us on the bankless journey.
Tom Schmidt
Thanks a lot,
Ryan Trott Adams
Sam.
Date: June 19, 2026
Hosts: Ryan Trott Adams & Tom Schmidt
This week’s Bankless Rollup dives into pivotal stories shaping crypto and global finance: the market impact of Michael Saylor’s “Stretch” product, the first FOMC meeting under new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh, SpaceX’s blockbuster IPO, and Coinbase’s expansion into the “Everything Exchange”. The episode also explores trends in RWA (real-world asset) perps, Solana’s surging Jito token, the privacy renaissance in DeFi, and more. The hosts maintain an energetic, insightful tone with a mix of analysis, opinion, and offbeat banter.
This episode serves as a vital pulse check for anyone following the convergence of crypto, traditional finance, and broader tech trends.
For anyone in crypto, DeFi, or finance, this is a must-listen recap with incisive analysis and lively debate.
End of Summary