ROLLUP: Bitcoin All-Time-High, Is ETH Next?

Summary

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Bankless Rollup: Bitcoin All-Time High, Is ETH Next?

Podcast: Bankless
Hosts: Ryan Sean Adams, David Hoffman
Date: July 11, 2025

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Overview

In this Weekly Rollup episode, Ryan and David dive into a landmark moment as Bitcoin sets new all-time highs, discuss whether Ethereum (ETH) is poised to follow, and explore the evolving sentiment in crypto markets. They cover the surge of ETH treasury companies, ETF flows, the highly anticipated Pump token ICO, prediction market controversies, the changing approach of crypto foundations, and regulatory updates on tokenized stocks. The episode captures the blend of excitement, skepticism, and critical analysis that defines the current crypto finance landscape.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Bitcoin Reaches New All-Time Highs

• Bitcoin Price Action:
  • BTC breaks above $113,000, with new highs coming minutes apart.
    • “We are currently coming in at $113,000. 562 for a Bitcoin. The new all time high happened about, yeah, three minutes ago. $13,820. $820.” — David [01:55]
• Market Impact:
  • Overcoming the $100k–$110k range after a long consolidation.
  • Movement of “whale” coins from 2011 triggers speculation:
    • $8.6 billion in BTC moves from a dormant, early-mined address.
• Rumors & Theories:
  • Motives speculated: quantum computing fears, possible connection to Ross Ulbricht, hacks, or even U.S. government OTC buys.
    • “Imagine Hodling Bitcoin for 13 years up to $8.6 billion.” — David [03:10]
    • “Some people were saying, oh, well, maybe the whale was worried about, had some quantum fears.” — Ryan [03:15]

2. Ethereum: Sentiment Surge, But Price Still Lagging

• ETH Price Moves:
  • ETH breaks $2,800, up 7–8% on the week, outperforming BTC ratio-wise.
    • “Eth price is also on the move. $2820. A recent high of $2830. But ETH BTC is up on the week as well.” — David [05:30]
• ETF Inflows:
  • ETH ETF net inflows: $211 million, closely matching BTC’s $215 million despite a much smaller market cap.
    • “Now, some people are saying that all of this sentiment shift… but what Was it, like a 5, 6% price increase?” — Ryan [10:17]
• Sentiment Shifts:
  • Noted traders, including non-ETH-maxis, are publicly bullish ETH.
    • “When traders are like, okay, Eth looks actually kind of Bullish. You know, it's true. Because that's like the last asset that they'll say is bullish.” — David [08:08]
  • Community aligns in rare, coordinated bullishness: “It's just time.”
• Treasury Race:
  • Several public companies (Sharp Link, Bit Digital, BTCS, Game, Tom Lee’s fund) racing to acquire and publicly hold large ETH reserves.
    • “Joseph Lubin has stated that he intends on buying tens of millions of dollars of ETH per day.” — David [17:28]
  • Treasury company stocks often outperforming ETH itself.
    • “S bet is up 50% this week.” — David [12:21]

3. ETH as a Store of Value & Fiscal Asset – Mainstream Narrative Update

• Institutional Buy-in:
  • Major reports (Fidelity: “Blockchains as Emerging Economies”) now echo ETH as “store of value” and compare blockchains to emerging economies.
    • “Ether can serve as a medium of exchange and store of value.” — Ryan [19:19]
  • ETH’s monetary premium narrative is becoming mainstream.
    • “Listening to people shill the new ETH treasury on cnbc legit. Sounds like I'm listening to a bankless podcast in 2021.” — Ryan quoting Ryan Watkins [19:42]
• Cautious Optimism:
  • David’s “Two Sides of ETH” post: Celebrates narrative momentum but warns not to paper over unresolved L2 value capture and scalability issues.
    • “Let's not forget those and let's still, let's still be wear our problems on our chest like we always do.” — David [23:14]
• ETH Roadmap & Scaling:
  • Focus on Layer 2 (L2) value accrual back to ETH and progress toward 10,000 TPS.
    • “There's massive improvements that have gone on with ZK proving technology… credible path in the next five years to get to 10,000 TPS.” — Ryan [25:27]

4. Competitors, Solana, and the Layer 1 Landscape

• Solana ETF:
  • $75 million in ETF inflows in first week—much smaller magnitude but notable start.
    • “Solana, the ETF saw 75 million in inflows in the first week.” — Ryan [26:34]
• Layer 1s as ‘Companies’:
  • Newer L1s like Monad follow Solana’s business-style engagement, even making acquisitions—blurring lines between foundation and for-profit company.
    • “Solana is a fintech company… Everything downstream of Ethereum is definitely a company.” — David [56:25 & 57:15]

5. Pump Token ICO: Return of High-Profile Public Token Sales

• ICO Details:
  • $4 billion valuation, 1 trillion tokens, major exchanges supporting—mirrors 2017 fever but with new scale.
  • 25% of Pump Fund revenues go to buy-and-burn, giving the token clear utility beyond meme status.
    • “Is it 25% of the pump fund revenues will go to buy and burn the token.” — David [32:17]
• Hosts’ Takes:
  • Both decline to participate personally, but predict volatility and potential for price appreciation post-ICO.
    • “There needs to be a pretty solid amount of buying pressure to counteract all of the seed investors who are exiting… but, yeah, I bet you. I would bet it ends the week higher than $4 billion.” — David [33:08]
• Web3 Social Media Disruption:
  • Pump aims to build a streaming platform rivaling Twitch, with token incentives for content creators.
• Competition & Imitation:
  • Bonk’s launchpad quickly grabs market share, challenging Pump’s dominance (Bonk: 62% Solana launchpad revenue).
    • “Bonk fun captured 62% of pump of Solana launchpad revenue.” — Ryan [37:00]

6. Prediction Markets and the Zelensky Suit Controversy

• Viral Dispute:
  • Polymarket wager on whether Ukrainian President Zelensky would wear a “suit” before July—settlement hinges on subjective interpretation.
  • Even with credible news affirming he wore a suit, UMA Oracle rules “no,” leading to user outrage and allegations of bribes, but really exposing the subjective edge cases for prediction markets.
    • “Poly market and prediction markets generally are set up to collapse in a Schrodinger sense. And so if something has to collapse, like, one or two outcomes needs to happen.” — David [42:08]
    • “Buyer beware. If you're looking at prediction markets.” — Ryan [44:58]

7. Product Updates and Emerging Trends

• Phantom Wallet & Hyperliquid Perps:
  • Phantom, originally Solana-native, integrates Hyperliquid perpetuals—a blow to Solana-first projects but demonstrates wallet-powered superapps as cross-chain aggregators.
    • “This is Umaro Roy saying this. Phantom and hyper liquid integration is bullish for Phantom, bullish for Hyper Liquid, bearish for Solana was her take on this.” — Ryan [50:03]
• Tokenized Stocks and Regulation:
  • Robinhood faces EU scrutiny for “private share” tokenization; Hester Peirce (SEC) warns against questionable structures; yet moves are afoot for compliant, regulated tokenized securities in both EU and US.
    • “Most successful crypto products start off as kind of illegal. From Coinbase to Circle to Polymarket to Uniswap to Hyper Liquid.” — (Austin, quoted by David) [59:34]
    • “By the end of the year, we'll have it done in the right way in the US too, and it'll be regulated.” — Ryan [63:44]

8. Regulatory and Legal Milestones

• Tornado Cash Sanctions Fight:
  • David participates as a plaintiff; US Treasury quietly drops case over OFAC sanctions, affirming that smart contracts are not illegal.
    • “I won by default. So I was right in my curmudgeonous of being compelled to file documents because Tornado Cash is technology. It is not illegal. You cannot make a smart contract illegal.” — David [53:59]
• Layer 1 & Foundation Business Development:
  • Solana and Monad take aggressive, enterprise-style approaches to dealmaking—unlike the Ethereum Foundation's more hands-off ethos.
    • “The Solana foundation is heavy on the BD side of things. Right? They're trying to make deals happen… Ethereum foundation doesn't do at all.” — Ryan [55:45]

9. Bitcoin Ingenuity: Bluetooth Transactions

• Jack Dorsey’s Air Miner Project:
  • Decentralized Bitcoin transfers without internet—envisioned for censorship resistance and offline environments.
    • “Jack Dorsey introducing a decentralized messaging service and Bitcoin transfer service. Not using cell towers, not using an Internet connection, but just using Bluetooth.” — Ryan [57:25]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “It’s just time to be bullish.” — Ryan [07:37]
• “Let's not forget those and let's still, let's still be wear our problems on our chest like we always do.” — David [23:14]
• “I definitely think I've got some [PTSD]… you've been hurt too many times.” — Ryan [26:24]
• “I consider Solana to be a company.” — David [56:25]
• “All good things on blockchains are all slightly illegal.” — (Austin, quoted by David Hoffman) [59:31]
• “I won by default. So I was right… Tornado Cash is technology. It is not illegal. You cannot make a smart contract illegal.” — David [53:59]
• “Buyer beware. If you're looking at prediction markets.” — Ryan [44:58]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Bitcoin All-Time Highs, Whale Moves: 00:00–05:16
• Ethereum Sentiment and Price Action: 05:23–14:53
• ETH Treasury Race & Mainstream Narrative: 14:53–25:27
• Cautious Bull Thesis / ETH Roadmap Gaps: 21:33–26:24
• Layer 1 Competition, Solana, & Foundations: 26:34–27:38; 55:45–57:22
• Pump Token ICO Analysis: 31:08–36:39
• Prediction Markets & Zelensky Suit Debate: 37:55–44:58
• Phantom + Hyperliquid / Superapp Trend: 48:03–50:49
• Legal Updates – OFAC/Tornado Cash: 52:01–54:41
• Jack Dorsey’s Air Miner & Bitcoin Bluetooth Transfers: 57:22–58:40
• Tokenized Stock Regulation & Robinhood: 59:04–64:10

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Takeaway

The episode captures the current crypto zeitgeist: euphoria over Bitcoin highs, anticipation and strategic positioning around ETH’s next move, intensifying competition between protocols, and a nuanced recognition of both achievements and unresolved challenges in the ecosystem. The rise of ETH treasury companies, a renewed ICO cycle, and increasing regulatory tension provide plenty of fuel for speculation and strategic debate among crypto’s most bankless listeners.

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Transcript

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Foreign Station is the second week of July. It is time for the bankless weekly roll up. We got bitcoin all time highs. David. We made it. We did it. It's been what, eight weeks since an all time high? Something like this about that.

[David Hoffman]

Yeah. And we are just watching it go higher and higher and higher. So as I am speaking this sentence, there is yet another bitcoin all time high, different from the first all time high that started when you started that sentence just a moment ago.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

That's, that's the way we like it. Uh, also David, there's a big sentiment shift I'm feeling in ether the asset this week. Okay. There we've got eth treasury companies taking center stage, a bunch of big announcements, eth on mainstream finance on a daily basis. Getting that Bloomberg, getting that cnbc. But the question is, is this going to translate into a big price move? Okay, we got a price move on the week, but was it big enough? Not big. Not as big as it should be, I think. So we're going to talk about that too.

[David Hoffman]

The word that we're looking for is idiosyncratic and that is not yet what we have. It's what we all want. An idiosyncratic move in eth. We don't have it yet. It's going up, it's going in the right direction. Not quite there yet. We're going to also talk about the pump ICO that is starting this week. On Saturday, the pump ICO will open up on exchanges. Apparently the private sale for the pump ICO is completely sold out. And so the public sale to just investors on exchanges opens up on Saturday. We're going to talk about at $4 billion. Is Ryan a buyer or a non buyer of the pump token? We are going to give a detailed analysis of exactly what Ryan's going to do. And then also crypto gets its what color is the dress moment with the Zelinsky suit. We're going to talk about that. And then also Jack Dorsey invents a new way to send bitcoin.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

David, let's start with prices. Bitcoin all time high week. Okay. This could be a new all time high by the time bankless listeners are listening to this. But what do we got at the time of recording?

[David Hoffman]

Oh man. We haven't had an all time high in about 2 minutes and 15 seconds. We are currently coming in at $113,000. 562 for a Bitcoin. The new all time high happened about, yeah, three minutes ago. $13,820. $820. That's pretty good. We're up, like, $3,000 in the last, like, hour or so.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah, it was good. It's good to break that, you know, 100k to 110k range that we've been, like, range, like, in. For a long time. We finally broke through that also this weekend, which is kind of interesting. It was all over crypto, Twitter. The bitcoin whale woke up and moved some assets. All right, I saw this on. I think it was the day after the fourth of July.

[David Hoffman]

Right.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

We had a long weekend here in the United States of America. And I think this was on Saturday this started to happen, which was a really early address, bitcoin address. I think we're talking, like, circa 2010-2011-2011-2011.

[David Hoffman]

2011.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Okay, so super early address. A lot of the funds in this address through bitcoin mining, I believe. $8 billion on the move. An address that hasn't moved in, what, like, 13 years, something like that.

[David Hoffman]

Imagine Hodling Bitcoin for 13 years up to $8.6 billion.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

$8.6 billion. And of course, when this amount moves with one of those early addresses, like, everybody takes notice. There were a lot of rumors about this. Some people were saying, oh, well, maybe the whale was worried about, had some quantum fears. And of course, like, early bitcoin addresses are susceptible to a quantum attack in.

[David Hoffman]

A way that are most at risk.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah, the newer ones would. And so maybe they're just moving for that. Other people were saying somebody maybe got out of jail. You know, like, they've been in the clink for, like, a decade.

[David Hoffman]

Do you mean Ross Ulbricht?

[Ryan Sean Adams]

I have no. Yes, Possibly.

[David Hoffman]

Yeah. People were talking about, like, oh, well, Rosk is out of jail. And three months later, 80,000 Bitcoin move from 2011, when the Silk Road was operational.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Interesting.

[David Hoffman]

Pretty. I mean, like, there's evidence, there's only speculation, but it's a pretty good bit of speculation.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

There was also other people. People were saying someone got hacked. Quite obviously, other people were saying, this is the US Government buying. Okay, so the u. Look, man, it's rumor mill, right? Somebody was saying, like, okay, the U.S. government going OTC, and this is Trump setting up his strategic bitcoin reserve and fighting an early whale and just making a nice OTC purchase. He's getting ready to announce it. I'm recycling rumors.

[David Hoffman]

That one did not happen. That one did not happen.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Of course. Of course.

[David Hoffman]

More than that one.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

The interesting thing about this, I always find, is this is free advertising for bitcoin all the time and for crypto all the time. Because, like, it's so mind boggling to think about $8.6 billion just like moving in an instant. And so.

[David Hoffman]

And we all get to see.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

We all get to see. It's so it's free advertising for bitcoin also. It's just like we need some privacy, don't we? Wow. Everybody can see it. Every single transaction on chain. And you know, maybe it's cool for a bit.

[David Hoffman]

And then, and then when you realize that we are legitimately trying to get all of society on chain and we still haven't like, rid the world of authoritarianism, then you're like, oh, yeah, no, we need privacy.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah. So lots of things. But we, we have no idea why this bitcoin is on the move. It'll probably be unresolved for forever. May or maybe someday we'll find out.

[David Hoffman]

The bitcoiner who moved that is not going to raise his hand. It was me and here's why I did it. That will not happen.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

All right, enough about bitcoin. Tell me about ETH price, David, because we got to talk about eth for a little bit on today's episode. It was a big week.

[David Hoffman]

Eth price is also on the move. $2820. A recent high of $2830. But ETH BTC is up on the week as well. We're up, up, up about 7 or 8%. So even when Bitcoin gets all time high, ETH BTC is up about 7 or 8% on the week this week. And since ETH was up in dollar terms and up in bitcoin terms, you know what that's called?

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Ryan, what's that called?

[David Hoffman]

It's called Orion. Sean Adams week, my friend, is when they're, when they're both green, it's called Orion.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Oh, my God. I appreciate you glowing me up. You know, I. I'll take credit for this one too. I'll take credit for every week that green. That eth is green. Somebody else has got to take credit for the. For. It's not going to be me.

[David Hoffman]

Hang on. I'm going to contest you a little bit for the credit because while eth was pumping, I was actually climbing. I was on a wall.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

You were climbing, but you were climbing. What were you. So what have you been climbing lately, by the way?

[David Hoffman]

Yeah. Okay, so my big climb got canceled just due to weather, unfortunately. First time it's ever happened to me. But he's always destined, so I'm just climbing A bunch of like, smaller things rather than like a double overnight, like two overnights. I'm doing just like day climbs. This is a hike. This is like a trail run in the middle of two climbs. So yesterday I went to Italy and did a valley climb, so stayed low to the ground. Tomorrow I go actually do a summit. So it's a bigger climb. So if there's a bigger pump tomorrow, I'm taking more of the credit. I'm taking more credit.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

I feel like. That's right. And this is you on a, like a morning run through what looks like a Sound of Music style, like, landscape somewhere in France. It's absolutely beautiful. And I think you tagged this Running from the Bear. And you're talking about the bear market, right? You're just running.

[David Hoffman]

Well, no, it's not that I'm running. I'm running from the bears, meaning bearish people and running away from bearish people. And then people are like, I don't. You didn't. I didn't see any bears. I'm like, okay, you didn't get it. Maybe it's a bad joke.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah, the eth bears are really getting run out of town these days. I feel like there's a massive sentiment shift in ether right now. I don't know if you've noticed it, but.

[David Hoffman]

Oh, definitely.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Okay, this is a catch.

[David Hoffman]

I don't know how, but just like all the Ethereum communities is like, all right, we are bullish now. And that's. And it's just time. It's just time to be bullish.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

It's time to be bullish. I think it is absolutely time to be bullish. And I think the eth community is really woken up to that. Like, more on that later. I want to get some of your commentary on that and I'll give you some of mine, but this is an account that. This is a trader account. Pentoshi, do you know this guy? I don't know him really, but I know the account. He doesn't usually tweet eth, you know, bullish sentiment. And now he is tweeting eth bullish sentiment. So even when kind of traders, bitcoin maxi types start getting bullish on eth and you know something is happening right when.

[David Hoffman]

Yeah. Cause like, I feel like the eth community is kind of like misaligned with traders, and traders are generally misaligned with like, Ethereum just because, like the Ethereum's just like, no, don't trade. Just hold. But then when traders are like, okay, Eth looks actually kind of Bullish. You know, it's true. Because that's like the last asset that they'll say is bullish.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

That's right. Right. So. So once every four years, kind of all of these things align. Right. And so maybe we're getting into aligned territory. This is a. Look at this chart. Okay. This is from. This is pure eth maxi Hopium, I think. But the context for this chart.

[David Hoffman]

Irrational Eth maxi, I'll call it.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yes. The context for this chart, though, does have some history to it. And eth has a history of ripping straight up. Once it decides to go, lots of people will be left behind. Are you one of them? Are you one of them? Bankless listener. Okay, so these are the big rips in the past, right? We had a 2016 kind of big rip up. We had the 2016 ICO boom. And then, of course, we had 2017. Yeah, 2017 ICO boom. And then, of Course, we had DeFi. Summer 2020. And you could see a massive amount of price movement in a consolidated period of time. Okay. And if you. If you keep drawing the square, David, we can have a massive move. This is a chart.

[David Hoffman]

Move the square. This is a chart where we are.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah, all the way to 100K ETH. Okay. It might not be as explosive as.

[David Hoffman]

That, but there's not 100k. I'm sorry.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

When we have big price moves, it moves in a hurry and there's not much time. So you have to be positioned before eth moves. Do you think that'll carry into this cycle?

[David Hoffman]

Yeah, you know, at some point.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

How.

[David Hoffman]

As long as. How long has eth. But just been flat? It's been eth. Eth. It's been flat for so long. It's been like a third of his life.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah.

[David Hoffman]

And so at some. At some point. You know, at some point, it's just due.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah, it's due for a pump.

[David Hoffman]

It's due for a pump.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

One other metric you might be interested in is the ETF flows. So yesterday, ETH ETF flows were 211 million inbound net inflows. Bitcoin was 215 million. So that's only a $4 million difference on daily inflows, which is very.

[David Hoffman]

Which is when, like, Bitcoin is eight times larger than ETH. At $4 million. Does not matter.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah, it's fantastic. Now, some people are saying that all of this sentiment shift and we do have a price up this week, but what Was it, like a 5, 6% price increase?

[David Hoffman]

It was not. It was not. It was not idiosyncratic. It was following the market.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah. And so this is. This is Ran crypto man. Ran Ran. Right. And he said this, and this was, to be fair, before a little bit of the action on the upside this week, but he said this. I'm genuinely concerned about eth. The sentiment on my timeline is euphoric, but the price isn't moving at all. ETH bulls are celebrating 2600. Of course, now it's 2800, the time of recording, but still not an idiosyncratic pump. He said if it doesn't actually start moving soon, the next move could be down. Why do you think there's a disconnect right now between the bullish sentiment which is verging on euphoric? I mean, I don't think I've heard the ETH community this excited in a long time. Yeah, but it's, it's really, it's sentiment first. Usually, Usually you have price first and then sentiment follows price. And now we have sentiment first. What's up with that?

[David Hoffman]

It is pretty peculiar. I don't think I've ever remembered something like this happening quite this way before. You do have to point towards all of the ETH treasury companies that have come online. Tom Lee was the unexpected white swan of ETH evangelism to Wall Street. Like, I don't think anyone really saw Tom Lee coming and he's a very credible figure. Yeah. And it's. That's after Joseph Lubin and Sharply Gaming, and Now there's like 3, 4, 5 more that are all coming online.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Oh, yeah.

[David Hoffman]

And so, yeah, sentiment can kind of get ahead of price here. But also that makes sense with what treasury companies do. Like, treasury companies have this expectation of buying more ETH than what they currently hold. And so there's all of these vehicles that are now. It's their number one job to go out and source as much ETH as possible. And all of them pumped this week. And so maybe the price didn't show up in the ETH price. It did a little bit like 2 to $300 price increase. But all of the ETH treasury companies are up between 15 and 50.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

That's true.

[David Hoffman]

S bet is up 50% this week. Oh, that's true. Did you ever buy any S bet? We don't actually talk about what we buy. Did you ever buy any S?

[Ryan Sean Adams]

But I'm not going to say I didn't, David. How's that?

[David Hoffman]

Okay, I buy. I bought S. When like all of crypto. Twitter was like grave dancing on it because it, like, it did this crazy move up to 35, $50 and then it crashed down to like 7 or $8. And all of crypto Twitter, the anti eth people are like, there's crime, there's crime here. And then turns out there was no crime. And there was just like the cohort of people who are gleefully grave dancing on something eth related. I'm like, you know what? I'm, I'm going to buy. And that's what I bought. And that's 80%. I'm up 80% right now.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

That's funny. I bet there's a lot of ETH believers, long term investors who are actually like, you know what, screw it, I have enough eth, but maybe I'm going to do some of these treasury stocks and they're probably up like, you know, 2x, 3x 4x on those treasury stocks. So maybe that accounts for some of it. I also. You want another bullish take on the sentiment move before price? I'll give it to you. Okay. I think it's signal because I think this is holders and long term investors who are just saying what you said a little bit earlier. Enough is enough. Price has got to go up. We are bullish. And to see that on crypto Twitter, to see sentiment first before price, I think that's a signal because often you get kind of like, you know, price moves and traders, you know, kind of action and they're pumping after the fact and they want to keep the momentum. But we're seeing, to see kind of the build in sentiment before we get a good price move. It feels more foundational, it feels just a bit more fundamental here and I think could be a good sign.

[David Hoffman]

I think all of this is gonna be determined by the ETH price over the next like two weeks. Because if there's no move then, then it was just Hopium. We were just tough in Hopium and we were all just passing Hopium around. But if it did move, then we're all gonna pat ourselves on the back and be geniuses. And also that will inspire momentum for the next move because there is a, like a positive feedback loop of 7 eth treasury companies go online eth pumps by $500. All of those treasury companies pump by like 3x. They have more premium to issue more assets so they can buy more eth. And so we are in a very critical point right now. I would say with the ETH market where there needs to get some momentum under these ETH treasury vehicles so that the appreciation of ETH can show up in the equity so they can start the flywheel. And it has to happen like pretty soon.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

The thing that is new that we have never seen across any cycles is so much mainstream attention on ether the asset. So this is a clip. This Joe Lubin on cnbc. You can see him, he's like on the hot seat most of the time. You've seen bitcoin folks be like on CNBC and Bloomberg and some of this traditional finance. We've got Vlad from Robinhood talking about tokenization. So he's a credible figure on traditional finance. You mentioned Tom Lee. You got Joe Lubin in rotation. You and I. David just did an episode with Thief Eth treasury company Bit Digital. And the CEO, he's been making the rounds. So that is something new this cycle. And you were talking about the eth treasury companies right now there does seem to be some kind of a race for acquiring as much ETH as possible, maybe a race to $1 billion. So we have, of course, let me filter. You could find all this at the strategic ETH reserve, by the way. Let me filter by Treasury's website.

[David Hoffman]

Dot XYZ.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah, dot XYZ. So we got Sharp Link. That's Joe Lubin SBET. They're number one. They've got almost 600 million ETH right now. Then we've got bit digital. Number two, that's the CEO Dave and I just interviewed. That episode's gonna be out next week. They've got close to 300 million in terms of ETH and followed by this company, BTCS. They've got about $40 million of ETH. But just this week they announced a Plan to purchase 225, more million. More, I should say. And we also have Tom Lee, who's not yet on this chart, but we know is coming soon with a $250 million buy and some kind of a promise to be like the biggest of all of them. So he's doing that. And then there was this fifth company that announced this week. The ticker for this company is game, okay. And they announced an intent to purchase $100 million worth of ETH. And interesting. This is a gaming company of some sort. I haven't looked into the detail, but you know the Fortnite streamer, Twitch streamer ninja, he's somehow involved in this. So, like all of this just happened in a very short period of time. And I think that's all feeding into sentiment right now.

[David Hoffman]

Yeah, it does feel frothy when like unrelated Twitch streamers are doing eth treasury companies. I'm like, ugh. I would like that to be a little bit more closer to. I prefer Joe Lubin, personally, I prefer Tom Lee.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

I feel like it's not frothy if ETH is not at all time high. My God. I mean, if this is frothy, if we're frothy in the 2000s, we got to get to like at least 5k to like do something to like make me excited.

[David Hoffman]

Anyway, so the Ethereum Network issues about $6.5 million of ether at present prices. 2,330 ether a day. Joseph Lubin has stated that he intends on buying tens of millions of dollars of ETH per day. So just Joseph Lubin alone is sucking up all net new issuance and that's just the one treasury company and there's like five more to follow on top of that. So like at some point, like it has to actually show up in the ETH price. How much, like what the magnitude is remains to be seen. But like it's, it's got it. Something's got to give.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

I'm also excited about the way it's being pitched. By the way. I don't know. I know you've been hiking the mountains this week, but did you catch this report that Fidelity put out?

[David Hoffman]

No, I did not actually.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Okay, so basically the title of this report is Blockchains as Emerging Economies. And this is again, I like that title.

[David Hoffman]

I love that title.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

You will, you will absolutely love this report actually. I totally think you should read it or at least put it in ChatGPT.

[David Hoffman]

Remember when we had Haseeb on? I think it was the first time we ever had Haseeb on and he had just released this article like blockchains or cities. And then it was, it was a good episode. And at the very end we were like, Haseeb, we think they're countries.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah. And have for a long time. I mean I was actually going down memory lane. David, do you remember this episode, A Bankless Nation, episode number 17, Core Bankless.

[David Hoffman]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Basically that the way to think of layer one networks and blockchains as emerging economies, the way to think of their money is as a currency, particularly store of value currency. Guess what? That's exactly what this Fidelity report says. Look at some of these charts. Right. In the same way that, you know, blockchains can incorporate a GDP like framework to illustrate how their economic activity has developed. Yeah, they compare. They compare, you know, like nations. Exactly. To Ethereum, they talk in terms of gdp. Look at this one. The following sections will also demonstrate that Ether can serve as a medium of exchange and store of value. Okay. Like, the way they couch it and the way they're pitching it is like they totally understand it. They totally get it. It's kind of how we've thought about them for a long time, and now it's seeping into the Fidelity reports, which is fantastic. In fact, this is Ryan Watkins. Okay. I'm not sure if he's a fan of Bankless. Maybe like, not so much. But he said this.

[David Hoffman]

We've had him on the show.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah, okay. He said, listening to people shill the new ETH treasury on cnbc legit. Sounds like I'm listening to a bankless podcast in 2021. I don't know if he meant that.

[David Hoffman]

As a call when ETH was all time high and market Domina an all time high. Fantastic. That's great.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah. So the narratives are getting through here too. And yeah, it's basically the narrative of ETH as a store of value asset. Now Tom Lee is saying a bit more. He's saying, like, stablecoin, you're bullish. Stablecoins. ETH is the stablecoin platform, therefore you should be bullish. Eth. This is kind of another report that came out this week from Electric Capital, which says as much. Also says ETH is a store of value, asset, reserve asset. But they make the case for, you know, ETH as a store of value and a place for stablecoins tokenization. Anyway, this flood of reports, the flood of ETH treasuries, feels like it's all happening at once. And all of this has contributed to the massive sentiment change.

[David Hoffman]

Beautiful. Yeah, it does feel like 2021, which feels really good, actually. That was like, my favorite time.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

So, as you know, since I've come back, David, I've been more the. The, like, the reckless bull. I'm just like. I'm kind of doing what a lot of ETH people are doing right now, which is like I deciding to be bullish. Why?

[David Hoffman]

Because you're leaning over your skis. Not leaving. Not. Not leaving too far. I didn't say that. But you are. When you want to go fast down a mountain, you lean over your skis and you are leaning over your skis.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

That. That. That's a way to frame it, I would say. I'm just like. What I'm saying is, like, all of the elements are there. Like, my take is, like, all of the elements are there for eat to be worth way more. And we just haven't captured the narrative for people to realize that. Anyway, I came back. I decided to be Blue Money Gospel bullish. Right. Since I've come back, it feels like you are bullish eth, but you're also more. If I'm a reckless bull, right now you're more of a cautionary type bull.

[David Hoffman]

Yeah, I'm leaning back on my skis.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Okay, so you wrote this blog post this week called the Two sides of eth and just give us your take. Cause I think you're wrestling there's two wolves inside of David Hoffman. One is the ETH bull, maxi bull and the other is kind of someone who's concerned about the. The Ethereum roadmap, at least to some degree. And tell me what you were getting across in this article that you published.

[David Hoffman]

Yeah, so what I'm. My concern is that we have, we have a lot of great narratives with Ethereum and narratives do couple to fundamentals in some degree. And like you see Tom Lee going on CNBC and talking about all of the great reasons that ETH is valuable. You see fidelity doing it now. And so like if you want to paint a very bullish narrative for Ether, it's easy. It's easy to do that. And we are watching that happen in real time. That's what all these ETH treasury companies are doing, which is great. Telling the ETH story always. Ethereum always needs to have its story told. It's one of the more complicated stories ever. What I am concerned about is that we can use narrative and storytelling to like paper over cracks. And cracks will never be perfectly filled. Every blockchain has its own foundations that have cracks in that like Bitcoin has its security budget, but it just papers that over with the 21 million hard cap, you know, and that works.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Don't look over here, don't worry about, don't worry about security budget.

[David Hoffman]

Yeah, yeah. Like don't look at the, the stake rated QoS centralization of Solana. Like you know, they just chain goes fast, you know, decentralized nasdaq. And so it's very easy to paper over problems or incomplete parts components of the Ethereum fundamentals.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Okay.

[David Hoffman]

And what I'm trying to say is let's not forget those and let's still, let's still be wear our problems on our chest like we always do. Talk about them, focus on them, talk about how to fix them. Because when we do fix them, then ETH can be even more bullish. And so like I'm in pursuit of like kind of taking the hard path.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah.

[David Hoffman]

Of just trying to just take all of the pain now so that we never have to have any of the three, four years downwards price action that ETH has had in the last four years ever again. And we have to do that by like taking the medicine, building the foundation right, because if you build the foundation right then you just give so much more ammo to people like Tom Lee and Joseph Lubin. So I'm kind of just advocating to like not paper over our problems and still prioritize them and emphasize them and it's okay to talk about them.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

I, there's that's impossible to disagree with. That's a complete agree from my perspective. What are those things that you see as kind of the problem now in Ethereum that need to be worked on and yeah, like what would you name.

[David Hoffman]

I think the big thing is just the layer 2 value capture question and there's no real way to like we can't go back, we're not undoing layer twos.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Right.

[David Hoffman]

But we can heavily encouraged and research and push towards base and native rollups is like one possible solution. But there's needs to be a stronger supply chain of like Ethereum's layer 2 roadmap and the value capture of ETH and there's no we, we can't tariff the layer twos. That's nonsensical, that's not going to work. What we can do is we can build out standards for like native rollups or base rollups that use more layer one resources so that when somebody buys and sends a billion dollars of stablecoins that actually does have a meaningful value flow into ether the asset. Whereas today, now if you just buy and send $10 billion of US E C on base, ETH gets like less than one penny of value captured from that transaction.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah, I, look, I get that. And it also seems like very much that ETH has bent the roadmap in that direction anyway. I mean there is massive work on base in native rolls.

[David Hoffman]

That's a lot to do.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

There's a lot to do. Did you catch the Justin Drake at ETHCC who's talking about how we get to 10,000 TPS, right? There's massive improvements that have gone on with ZK proving technology, real time, ZK proving technology and there's a credible path in the next five years to get to 10,000 TPS. Not to say that that work still doesn't need to be done. It absolutely does. But like there is definitely a shift towards prioritizing, scaling the L1, prioritizing based on native rollups and prioritizing interoperability but I totally get the take that like job's not finished. Right. And like if we lose sight of that then we won't be able to sustain this momentum beyond kind of the narrative pump. That said to me, I do feel like ETH doesn't need a reason to pump at this point. It's got a lot of catch up to do. It has a lot of bitcoin and I think it has that. I also think a lot of the ETH bulls in this space have some PTSD from the last four years as well.

[David Hoffman]

I definitely think I've got some of that.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah, you've been hurt too many times. Yeah. So I totally get it. I think you'll feel a lot better at 5k, David.

[David Hoffman]

So I think you're right.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah. Let's talk about some other things too because ETH does have some competitors nipping at its heels here. Solana, the ETF saw 75 million in inflows in the first week. So remember we were kind of watching that. Yeah, it's pretty, pretty respectable. So here they are on the charts. 75. Eric Balchuna says it's all much smaller than Bitcoin or ETH, but there's a lot of green numbers and that's good. So 70, 33 million in a day. That was their biggest day. For context, I think Ethan Bitcoin had a, you know, 200 million plus day on the same day. So just like much smaller. But there's only one of them right now. And also, I don't know if you saw this. Bit Mining is converting its holdings to a sol treasury and raising up to 300 million to support a solana facing strategy.

[David Hoffman]

All the bitcoin minor companies are abandoning bitcoin Bitcoin mining to buy shitcoins accordingly. A bit shitcoin from the frame reference of bitcoiners. Yeah. That's so funny, dude.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

I know, I know. So that is happening too. So a lot of things going on, David, but what do we got coming up?

[David Hoffman]

Coming up next we're going to talk about the pump token. Everyone comes to Bankless to get Ryan and David's take on the pump token. We've got all the details. We're going to talk about what we think about the 4 billion valuation. But just like Ethereum, Pump also has its competitors that are nipping at its heels. And so bonk is the new pump question mark. So we're going to talk about the bonk metrics that have come to. This is Ryan's favorite subject. You can see in his face bonk all the bonk metrics that are interfering in pumps, please tell me in pumps market. And then we're also going to talk about the Zelensky suit drama and what it teaches us about prediction market. So we're going to get to all of that and more right after we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, like Uniswap. It's a browser wallet, It's a mobile wallet. It's the best place to do Defi. Let's go here from Uniswap Right now, Uniswap is your gateway to a more efficient Defi experience. With Uniswap, swapping and bridging across 13 chains is simple, fast and cost effective, helping you move value wherever, whenever. Thanks to deep liquidity on the Uniswap protocol, you'll enjoy minimal price impact on every trade. And now Uniswap V4 takes it even further. Swappers benefit from gas savings on multi hop swaps and ETH trading pairs, while liquidity providers can create new pools at 99% lower cost. The best part? You don't have to do anything extra. Each trade is automatically routed through Uniswap X, V2, V3 and V4, so you get the most efficient swap without even thinking about it. Whether you're swapping, sending on, ramping off, ramping or bridging, Uniswap's web app and wallet gives you the tools to unlock DeFi's full potential on Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, Unichain and more. Use Uniswap's web app and wallet for a more efficient way to use Defi. Binance is the world's number one crypto exchange, over 275 million users. Users already trust their world class security. Binance makes starting crypto as simple as it should be. Whether it's learning about crypto on Binance Academy or browsing hundreds of assets and viewing your newly created portfolio in a clear, easy to track dashboard, Binance helps you go at your own pace. For hardcore traders. Binance Pro opens up industry leading services for trading professionals with fully bespoke trading products, along with a suite of white glove services for VIP and institutional clients. Need support 24. 7 customer service is on hand whenever you need it, and with some of the lowest fees and deepest liquidity in the market, it's no surprise why over 275 million users trust Binance for everything. Crypto Download Binance today and get started in minutes. Binance is not available in certain countries, including the United States Check its terms for more information. Pump Fun is launching the Ticker Pump token through an ICO beginning on July 12th. That is this Saturday. On their announcement tweet, they tweeted out, our plan is to kill Facebook, TikTok and Twitch on Solana. So what's the. What are the details? One trillion tokens. Remember when everyone back in like four years ago was like issuing one billion tokens and I was like, all right, you guys are really playing into the unit bias thing pretty hard. Well, Pump's coming in hot with 1 trillion tokens. Of course, 24% of the tokens are reserved for the community and ecosystem initiatives. 20% is going to the team. 2.4% ecosystem fund, 2% for foundation and 13% for existing investors. 3% for live streaming, which I think might be streaming incentives, which I'm assuming is quite a lot of the chunk of the $700 million raise that they raised from private investors. And they're also looking to raise even more from the public ICO, which is the thing that I just talked about. $4 billion at the ICO price. All that got filled up in that 700 raise by private investors. All tokens sold will be fully unlocked in 72 hours.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

I think you could just ask a question.

[David Hoffman]

We will see the Pump Token trading on. Believe that's how that works. How can you buy into the Pump ICO if you are so interested? If you have an account with Bybit, Kucoin, Bitget Me, MC Max C, Kraken or Gate, IO, all of these have partnered with Pump Fund to do their ico because you need to be kyc. Because I'm. I could only assume. I doubt American United States citizens are going to be allowed into this ICO for probably regulation reasons. And yeah, that club be ready at 2pm on Saturday UTC. I don't know what time zone that is. Figure that out. And those are the details. Ryan, what's the biggest thing that comes to your head when you see all this?

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah, I guess my first thought is this. This video itself, the promo video, is absolutely hilarious. It's exactly what it feels like to look at Pump Fun, at least for me. And I could see the appeal to some people for sure. Another thing that comes to mind is ICOs. Again, like, I don't think any company would dare to do this under the Gensler regime. So the fact that we're doing this maybe means something. I think there's still this, like, what is the Pump token? Does it have utility? Is it a pseudo equity?

[David Hoffman]

Is it 25% of the pump fund revenues will go to buy and burn the token.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

And that is a good thing, right?

[David Hoffman]

Yeah.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Because it adds value and adds utility.

[David Hoffman]

And adds revenue share.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

It's not just a meme coin, basically. Right.

[David Hoffman]

It's a utility meme coin. But, like, where did it launches meme coins?

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Where does it fit in the whole, like, we still don't have clarity from the SEC as to where it fits. So, I mean, I guess that's, that's, that's good that they're doing this. I mean, ICOs are better than not having ICOs.

[David Hoffman]

I like ICOs. I really like ICOs.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah, it's. I guess the big question for me.

[David Hoffman]

Is, like, sale mechanism I'm actually quite happy with because people. People are going back and forth $4 billion overvalued, undervalued. What you. What do you. And there's no consensus, which means, I think it's fairly priced.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah. So are you a buyer at 4 billion for. For of pump?

[David Hoffman]

Will I be buying it? No, because I'm lazy. Do I think it will go up? Yes, I think there will be some initial volatility because, like, the seed investors are getting unlocked. So, like, people investors are unlocked in day one, and there is a lot of people who have made a lot of money. And so there needs to be a pretty solid amount of buying pressure to counteract all of the seed investors who are exiting. Yeah. And so there's gonna be a lot of volatility inside of like the first day. But, yeah, I bet you. I would bet it ends the week higher than $4 billion.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

I'm not a buyer just because it's not my thing, but, like, it's not your thing. Yeah, it's just not my thing, but that's fine. What do you think of this? So this is one of the founders saying now we're aiming to kill legacy social media platforms with Pumpkin. Right. This is obviously hyperbolic, but do you think there's an element of. This is a disruption to Twitch and to. And to Instagram, as they were saying in the initial tweet.

[David Hoffman]

Yeah. So he. In his second tweet, Alon says users today are slaves to the algorithm, throttled against monetization and subject to censorship. Buy Pump and you'll be become a part of creating this reality. I just skipped a bunch of the middle ground. But he was like, yeah, buy Pump as like a way to like, like, if you. Buying Pump is a way to like, signal like, you are opting out of this system and you're gonna Opt into new rules and in my mind is like, okay, if you're gonna try and kill TikTok, Facebook, like Twitch, all of these things, like you're gonna replace them with Pump. Is that a different algorithm that we. Wait, is that better?

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Is that not clearly better? To me, but it is different, not.

[David Hoffman]

Clearly better to me. I'm, I'm happy that there's more choice. There's going to be content that's going to be funny and interesting and engaging on the, on the Pump streaming platform. Is it allowing people to break free from the shackles of Web2 algorithms? I don't know that that's what it's going to do.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah, it's definitely a different algorithm. Like, the question is, like, net, is this good for society or not? Or does this kind of like, you know, foster the continuation of like, nihilism, whatever. You know, I definitely could make the argument that it's just, you know, creating shackles in a new type of algorithm, but it is different. It's like the existing platforms are not running the, you know, token meme, coin price play that Pump is running right now. So it's novel.

[David Hoffman]

I think we might have skipped a step in this conversation, which is actually talking about what Pump Fund wants to do. For those who haven't been privy to it, they are looking to build a direct Twitch competitor, a streaming platform where your stream is a Pump token. And so there's a chart that goes to the stream. And a lot of the money that they've, they've raised are raising like $700 billion or $700 million is likely going to go to, like paying streamers to stream on the platform. This is a normal thing that you do in the Web2 streaming world. So getting big streamers, streamers like Ninja, the guy that just launched the E. Treasury company, to come stream on Pump and bring their fan base on Pump. And so they need a lot of marketing dollars for that because they're trying, they're. They're shooting for home runs. And so got to give them props for being ambitious. And so they're just trying to make a streaming platform competitor. And so that's what they need all the money for. I think that's pretty valid. And like, again, I think that there's going to be very hilarious and viral moments that come out of the Pump streaming platform that would have never come out on Twitch. And I'm looking forward to seeing those. The just positioning that they're trying to take down all of Web2 with a tokenized streaming platform doesn't I don't. I'm not on that boat.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

The other question is, well, how big is the moat for pump? Right. And can it be unseated? There have been some attempts, but actually, like, just this week, there was maybe the. The most successful attempt yet. Bonk fun captured 62% of pump of Solana launchpad revenue. The entire market for these launchpad types things did that we've never seen pump.

[David Hoffman]

Funds, market dominance in token launchpads this small by comparison. And this is just a very short snapshot in time. Like, overall, pump dominance has been just gargantuan, but it has been compressed over the last. What candles are these, like one day candles? It has been compressed by bonk more than it's ever been compressed by.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

So tell me about bonk, because I haven't really been paying attention to stuff. So bonk is a meme coin. I know this. It's a long standing Solana meme coin, you know, with some legitimacy.

[David Hoffman]

I don't know if Solana, same bonk.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Okay. I assumed it was, but you tell me. And then now they're launching. They're launching a launch pad, basically.

[David Hoffman]

Yeah. I mean, this launchpad has been around for a while. I don't why it's resurging right now. I don't know. I'm on the website and it looks like a Pump Fun clone.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

There's our knowledge on meme coin launchpads, David. So let's turn to the Zelensky suit.

[David Hoffman]

Okay, I know a little bit more about this one.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Now, you compared this in the intro to the blue and gold dress. And I think there's a lot of people who maybe don't know what you're talking about. But you're talking about this image, right?

[David Hoffman]

Yeah, yeah. What color is that dress?

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Okay, so this dress is gold, quite clearly, when I look at this dress.

[David Hoffman]

But yeah, it was white and gold.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah, white and gold. That's what I see.

[David Hoffman]

Yeah, that's what I see too. Apparently some people see black and blue.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

They see black and blue. Okay.

[David Hoffman]

And this is like a viral thing that happened like a decade ago or something. It was like everyone was like, what, what color is this dress? And there was like the black and black and blue people, and there's the white and gold people. Okay, when you look at this picture of Vladimir Zelensky, is that a suit? And there, there are further pictures. You can keep on scrolling down.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

I can keep on scrolling. Okay, the first one. Second one. Okay. Look at him. It's all black. It's definitely there's some sort of a suit type of jacket here.

[David Hoffman]

He has a lapel, there's lapels there.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

There'S a collared shirt. Some cat. Yeah. You know, I think it could pass as like a casual designer type suit. It sort of depends on what you mean by suit, man. I'm not in the fashion.

[David Hoffman]

That's a fantastic point, Ryan. It really does depend on what you mean by suit.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Why does this matter? Why are we talking about this week?

[David Hoffman]

Because the poly market for this, which had some. A number of millions of dollars on riding on this. Because this wasn't really just, you know, gamblers gambling on whether, like, Zelensky will wear a suit. This is indicative of like, because why won't Zelensky wear a suit? Because he's at war. And so that's what he said. He was betting on whether he would.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Wear a suit or not. Right. That was the poly market. Well, he wear a suit. Well, Zelensky wear a suit. Before July is the bet.

[David Hoffman]

Yeah. Them is the bet. And so if the, if the war ended before July, then you would see Zelensky wearing a suit. In theory, this is like how some people have thought. And so it's a proxy market for other larger, more geopolitical things. It's also a proxy market of like, okay, will Zelensky bend the knee to Donald Trump? Because that he was made fun of. And so, so it's not just like, let's roll the dice and see if he's gonna wear a suit is a proxy for a bunch of other things.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

But he wore this in the month of June.

[David Hoffman]

He wore this.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

And now there's some dispute as to whether it's a suit or not.

[David Hoffman]

And so the. It settled in the no, he did not wear a suit. So according to polymarket, which this went into dispute. And so it was initially, I think it was actually initially saying, yes, he did wear a suit.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah.

[David Hoffman]

One issue with his story was that Zelensky has worn this suit before in a previous polymarket betting market also already settled no in the past. And so it's. There's already been precedent for this suit is settled as. No. A further hiccup is on this poly market event. There was one of the conditions was credible news sources would report that Zelensky was wearing a suit, which did happen. And so like seven or eight or nine different news companies.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Oh, that was the criteria. They listed some criteria.

[David Hoffman]

Yes. And it's still settled to no. Why did it settle to no? Because when poly markets go in, are in contention and they Go into dispute. They go into the uma, the court. It's like a court. Uma, Universal Market Access.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Uma, which has a very old project. Yeah.

[David Hoffman]

Which has its own token. And if you are a token holder, then you are the Oracle. Basically, you get to vote in the Oracle. Oracle. And so it's ultimately like, governance by UMA Oracle.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

And this is all poly market markets. Right. Uma Protocol.

[David Hoffman]

And 99% of the time, it never goes to UMA because they just settle normally without, you know, fair and orderly.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah.

[David Hoffman]

This one did not. It went to the UMA Oracle and they said, no, it's not a suit. Why did they say that? Maybe because the market before this had already settled. No. And it was the same suit. And so they wanted to keep it continuous. If you are on the. Yes, that is a suit, you are very upset. People have been critiquing UMA token holders as being corrupt. I don't. I haven't seen any. Subject to bribes.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

To bribes. Subject to bribes. The protocol is corrupt.

[David Hoffman]

They're, you know, ultimately my big takeaway for this. Here's my big conclusion, Ryan.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah.

[David Hoffman]

Poly market and prediction markets generally are set up to collapse in a Schrodinger sense. And so if something has to collapse, like, one or two outcomes needs to happen.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah.

[David Hoffman]

And in this universe, it's entirely possible that the position does not collapse, actually. The position stays open. And why was Zelensky wearing this suit? Well, because he was trying to actually split the difference. Because he. He wanted to, like, wear a suity enough thing to, like, appease Donald Trump, but still appear that he is a military leader who is at war. Which is exactly what he did. Which is why there is now a poly market dispute, which is like, did he wear a suit or did he not? Which means Zelensky did his job of confusing everyone, is like, okay, he kind of wore a suit, but he also kind of didn't. And now there's, like, millions of dollars on the line about who wore the suit or if it was a suit or not.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Isn't this just a hole or a flaw in prediction markets? Like, number one, like, couldn't you just argue that you can't have a prediction market with a binary outcome that collapses if we don't even have social consensus on what a suit is? Like at the very beginning, when you showed me that, I'm like, well, it depends on your definition of a suit. And I don't know, there's not a standard definition of a suit. It's like, it's a fashion Is this art beautiful? Is this person beautiful? It's all subjective, Right. So you can't really make. Maybe it's the way that the question was asked or the way the market was defined. That's the problem here.

[David Hoffman]

I would agree. And yeah, so, like, like, I think it's really just a quirk of prediction markets that they are expected to collapse and sometimes they don't have to necessarily collapse. And yeah, the way that you phrase the question is very important. How you set up the criteria is very important. I don't think Polymark is at fault at all. I don't really know what's going on behind the scenes at uma. It's not. The token holders aren't that distributed, but no one really knows. Again, people are claiming corruption. I don't really think that's there's any evidence.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

I think it's kind of like buyer be like you have to be careful of what markets you bet on. Like, there's another element of this too, which I've always wondered. Right. So let's say Zelensky wanted to bet in this market. Okay. So like, Zelensky could bet anonymously in this market. He could bet on. Yes. I'm going to like, wear a suit. Zelensky's gonna wear a suit, and then the next day he could put on a suit and wear it. Like he has some level of control over the outcome of this market. And there's lots of markets like that. Right. I don't understand how that even works in a prediction market sense. Right. If there's.

[David Hoffman]

I think that's a part of the game. I don't think that is within the rules.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

So you just, like, you just basically know that if you're betting on a market that there is somebody influential who could just decide to change the outcome of what happens and win money as a result of that.

[David Hoffman]

They are not perfectly orderly because they're predicting the future. Right. It's not going to be perfectly orderly every single time.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

There you go. Buyer beware. If you're looking at prediction markets, Dave, we've got a lot more coming up. Phantom Wallet adding Hyper Liquid perps. People are saying this is a loss for Solana. It definitely seems like a win for Hyper Liquid. So we'll talk about that. Also, you won a case, a court case against Janet Yellen and the US Treasury.

[David Hoffman]

Did I want to hear about that, though. The government just gave up.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

They lost.

[David Hoffman]

Which counts.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Which counts. I feel like you won by default then. Also Commissioner Hester Persh, she's raising an eyebrow on these things that people have been calling tokenized stocks. We'll talk about all that and more. But before we do, we want to thank FRAX Decentralized Central bank some of the best yields in Defi. It's like Circle, Athena and Maker all had a baby. Fantastic stablecoin here. Let's go hear from FRAX right now.

[David Hoffman]

In the Wild west of Defi, stability and innovation are everything. Which is why you should check out FRAX Finance, the protocol revolutionizing stablecoins, DeFi and Rolex. The core of FRAX finance is Frax USD, which is backed by BlackRock's Institutional Biddle Fund. Frax designed Frax USD for best in Class yields across Defi T bills and carry trade returns all in one. Just head to frax.com then stake it to earn some of the best yields in Defi. Want even more? Bridge your Frax USD over to the Fractal Layer 2 for the same yield plus Fractal Points points and explore Fractal's diverse Layer 2 ecosystem with protocols like Curve Convex and more. All rewarding early adopters. FRAX isn't just a protocol, it's a digital nation powered by the FXS token and governed by its global community. Acquire FXS through frax.com or your Go to Dex Stake it and help shape Frax Nation's future. Ready to join the forefront of DeFi? Visit frax.com now to start earning with Frax USD and staked Frax USD and for Bankless listeners you can use use frax.com r bankless when bridging to Fraxel for exclusive Fraxel perks and boosted rewards. Imagine if your checking account and Defi wallet finally spoke the same language. That's Mantle Banking, an all in one fiat and crypto account. It lets you save, spend and invest all from one dashboard swipe for coffee, stake me three Yield or even use virtual cards for payments through Apple Pay so it feels web 2 simple yet stays web 3 sovereign for allocators meet mantle index 4 the essence S&P 500 of crypto a tokenized institutional grade fund seeded with $400 million from the mantle treasury and balance across Bitcoin, Ether, Sol and Yield enhanced stables one asset broad exposure, pure Defi composability. The momentum is real me faults, FBTC bridges and a $2.4 billion community treasury are all powering the next phase of on chain finance. Mantle brings real world access, yield and utility to digital assets. Ready for the next era of on chain finance finance that actually belongs in 2025 explore mantle at mantle XYZ or follow mantle underscore official Mantle bridging tradfi and Defi so you don't have to. Phantom Wallet has added Hyper Liquid perps into its wallet. So if you are now a user of Phantom, you can just go and get a perp done right inside of the wall and never have to leave, they wrote. Phantom's intuitive mobile first design will allow you to easily open, close and manage positions directly within your wallet. No Azure apps, no confusing interfaces, and no compromises on speed, control and performance. 100 markets 40x leverage powered by hyperliquid. Hyperliquid Ryan has. I know. I'm gonna guess you have not bridged to Hyper Liquid.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

I have not bridged to Hyper Liquid though it is pretty cool. It's very exciting to see like perps in a, you know, more open finance type way.

[David Hoffman]

The bridging to hyperliquid has always been probably the big bottleneck for getting to Hyper Liquid because you got to go to Arbitrum and then you got to bridge over and apparently it's not very easy. I am also not bridged over to hyperliquid, but because neither of us are traders, the fact that they are now in Phantom Wallet, the mobile wallet on your phone, super easy, is a pretty, pretty big deal for Hyper Liquid.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah. And one thing that's notable here is that Fantom is integrating hyperliquid. Right. So some in the Solana community are saying Fantom could have chosen Jupiter Exchange as the perps provider. It's a solana native project, 1.4 billion. Remember that Fantom is kind of like Solana's wallet. It sort of grew up in that space. I know it's multi chain now supports Ethereum, supports all sorts of layer twos. But you know, I think many in Solana. Yeah, okay, so many in Solana. I think so. I think a number of them. But. And many. And many in the Solana community have always thought of Phantom is kind of their chain. The fact that they're going to hyperliquid instead of Jupiter, some of the Solana community are saying, well, this seems like a loss for like, for Solana and I don't think they're wrong about that. But I also think that of course this is what Phantom was going to do. I mean this is an interesting thing where it sort of puts successful wallets in kind of the super app type category. Right. They are the user aggregator and they can just pick the best chain of all of the chains to do the functions that their users want to do. And so, like, why should they only do things on one chain and have chain loyalty? From this perspective, they're just going to integrate whatever they want. And they're in a great position here with these like, app specific chains that are doing one thing and doing it really well in that they can kind of direct traffic and their users wherever they want.

[David Hoffman]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's. Those are all my takes as well. Fantom has just done an incredible job slowly building out the right features in the right time and just adding hyper Liquid. It just makes a ton of sense.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

This is Umaro Roy saying this. Phantom and hyper liquid integration is bullish for Phantom, bullish for Hyper Liquid, bearish for Solana was her take on this. So, yeah. What do you think of the hype token, by the way? Do you.

[David Hoffman]

You a buyer? I could be. I've thought about it.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

12 billion or so. 13 billion. Throwing off a lot of cash.

[David Hoffman]

It's only 12. I feel like it should be higher than that. 14.3.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

So compare it to like Robinhood or something like that. That's got some perps, right. You know.

[David Hoffman]

Well, Robinhood's at $85 billion.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah.

[David Hoffman]

So Robinhood is very room to grow. Fully diluted, maybe. I'm a boomer for saying it. Fully diluted. 40. Diluted of $43 billion. So, yeah. So half of a Solana. Yeah.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Some big unlocks coming. Some big unlocks. That's why I've always stopped, like from doing it. It's just I'm always like, the unlocks look, the. But that's probably a dumb take.

[David Hoffman]

I just think of hyperliquid as just like, it's just the next generation version of Bitmex. And Bitmex was huge. And why did Bitmex get taken down? Well, because it was centralized and a bunch of other reasons. And so like, yeah, like a hyper liquid likely has a permanent fixture in the crypto world just because perps do. But I don't know if I have edge there buying hype and so, you know, stick to what you know.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah, well, one thing you know is how to beat the US Government in your court cases, David, because you had a win this week. All right, this is the official news. The U.S. court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit Court officially ended the legal fight over U.S. treasury sanctions against tornado cash. Of course, there's still the Roman Storm trials that are happening. I think they're maybe happening next week, actually. Dave, we've got to cover that. It's coming right Up. But there was also some court battles between whether users actually had the right and ability to use Tornado Cash. And you were a plaintiff in this case, actually. Give us some details. What is this case? What happened here?

[David Hoffman]

Yeah, it'll take us all the way back in time. Right after OFAC put Tornado Cash contract addresses on the OFAC list, meaning that if you use it, that's a felony, so you can't use it. A bunch of people in the Ethereum ecosystem got dusted, so some. Somebody else sent 0.1 eth outbound to like. You got dusted? I got dusted. Shaquille o' Neal got dusted. And so technically, since we touched the contracts, we were all in violation of the OFAC sanctions list.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

List touched us in a way, but that's.

[David Hoffman]

They touched us, I didn't. Contracts. But it doesn't really matter because they're like, my address is now linked to like David Hoffman Eth address was linked to Tornado Cash. So I had to go. It pissed me off because when I go and talk to the lawyers, they were like, oh yeah, you just violated ofac. I'm like, I just did nothing though. I didn't do anything. I said on my hands. And they said like, yeah, you need to go fill out this form now. And so like I have to go fill out a form. Like, I do this one time a year when I file my taxes. It's the only time I'm ever compelled to do anything. Now I have to be compelled a second time to do this. Pissed me off.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Okay, so it was the documents that pissed you off.

[David Hoffman]

It wasn't about protecting Americans privacy to do something.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Okay.

[David Hoffman]

It was. They forced me to do something or else apparently I'm gonna be a felon. I'm gonna have to go to jail because somebody said, insane, right? Absolutely insane. Violation of my freedoms.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Sure.

[David Hoffman]

And so Coin center reached out to me and they were like, hey, if you would like to be a plaintiff in this case, we will go sue Janet Yellen. And I am like, fuck, yes, let's do this. And really, that's about as much involvement in this case that I've had. They update me every now and then.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Well, this is the latest update. The latest update.

[David Hoffman]

This is the latest update. And this is the latest update. There will be no more updates because this is the end.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

The US government was just like, we dropped the case. Which is admission that you were right, you know, so you didn't technically win, you didn't lose, but I think that means you won by default. They gave Up.

[David Hoffman]

I won by default. So I was right in my curmudgeonous of being compelled to file documents because Tornado Cash is technology. It is not illegal. You cannot make a smart contract illegal. And that is the precedent that has been established by this case.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Oh, well done, David.

[David Hoffman]

Huge tip of the hat to all the Coin center people for actually doing all of the hard work. I just got dusted. Yeah.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

And now Tornado Cash is no longer on the OFAC sanction list. I believe that was removed under the new administration. There's still a court case to win, which is the Roman Storm court case. Yes. I think he almost has a lot.

[David Hoffman]

It would be such a tragedy if we got access to Tornado Cash and we set the precedent that smart contracts cannot be illegal and Roman Storm still went to jail. That would be a huge tragedy.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah. You can still give to that, by the way. Look, man, he almost raised all of his support here. He's at 92%, which is awesome, but you could still donate to that caus, help Roman Storm with his legal defenses there. David, let's pivot the conversation. Some layer ones are making moves. It's kind of a different environment than. Than, you know, the environment we grew up with with respect to foundations. So this is breaking bullish, which is a crypto exchange, is going all in on Solana. This is the Solana account tweeting this. The crypto exchange, with 1.4 trillion in trading volume, is migrating their core infrastructure to Solana native stablecoins to power custody payments, trading and settlement. You really get the sense that the Solana foundation is heavy on the BD side of things. Right? They're trying to make deals happen. They're actively engaging. This is something that the Ethereum foundation doesn't do at all. It's just like, not in their DNA, not in their ethos to do. And it's not just Solana. It's like, here's Monad. So this is a layer one that hasn't yet launched. It's going to be like an EVM layer one going to launch. It's coming very soon. It's been coming soon for a while, but yeah, it's coming soon.

[David Hoffman]

It's coming soon.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

All right.

[David Hoffman]

It's coming soon.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

David maybe knows. Okay, so they just. The Monad foundation just acquired a stablecoin infrastructure company called Portal. And this is even more of an escalation. It's not just bd. We're actually doing acquisitions at the foundation level. Right.

[David Hoffman]

And they're enshrining a stable coin, not enshrining. But they're going to have like a Monad flavored stablecoin on Monad chain at block number one, I think. Yeah, I mean it makes sense in the sand age because you need to have apps on your chains. You can't just have chains in this day and age.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

What does this make you think of though? This is like kind of operating much more like a company than, you know, the foundations of years past. That's how I think Solana is a fintech company.

[David Hoffman]

I consider Solana to be a company.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah. A fintech company with a protocol, would you say? Or do you think the protocol is like part of the company and it's all just like Fintech?

[David Hoffman]

Yeah. Blurry lines. Blurry lines.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

I sort of think the same with Monad as well. That seems to be.

[David Hoffman]

I think that the grand trend shift, starting from Bitcoin and Bitcoiners will point to Ethereum, be like Ethereum the company. And then Ethereum will look at close, not even close, but comparison to Bitcoin.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Right.

[David Hoffman]

Ethereum does grants. Ethereum did a grant to Uniswap. Now Uniswap is a huge institution on Ethereum. So you can see some of the patterns.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

There's a spectrum here.

[David Hoffman]

There's a spectrum. Yeah. Then Ethereum looks at Solana, be like, that's a company. And then Solana's going to look at Monad and be like, well, that's a company. And I'm on the Ethereum side where Ethereum's not a company, but everything downstream of Ethereum is definitely a company.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think. Well put. My comment is I didn't know foundations could do that. I guess they're doing that now.

[David Hoffman]

You're going to have to do that in 2025, I guess.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

So if you're new and starting in 2022, this is kind of cool. This is something I'll always appreciate about the bitcoin ecosystem and Bitcoiners is the lengths that they go to to make sure you can like do niche cases on Bitcoin. This is Jack Dorsey introducing a decentralized messaging service and Bitcoin transfer service. Not using cell towers, not using an Internet connection, but just using Bluetooth. Okay. This is an open source app that he built so that if I'm near you, I can, you know, send you some bitcoin via Bluetooth. Now you're like, how does that work? Because obviously it has to connect to a node and settle on the Internet. It does like peer to peer kind of in the background. And syncs sort of later. But there's some way to get like some instant confirmation type or some fast confirmation type guarantees if I just want to send you Bluetooth from my phone to yours without an Internet connection. Kind of cool, right?

[David Hoffman]

Yeah. In the science experiment kind of way.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

In an end of the world type way too. The cell towers are down. All we got left is Bluetooth. And no, I don't think it's a.

[David Hoffman]

Cell towers down kind of thing. I think it's a authoritarian government kind of thing. Yeah, I think it's censoring your bitcoin anyway.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

I love that bitcoiners do that. It's fantastic, David.

[David Hoffman]

Fantastic ROI on some of those.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

We should do a tokenized stock check in. So did you see this? This week, Robinhood was engaging the regulators over tokenized equities. So regulators in the EU were saying, hey, this whole private shares thing, like OpenAI, what are you guys doing here? Is this even legal? And giving them some grief. So I guess, is that expected? What do you think of this?

[David Hoffman]

Kind of makes me bullish, Vlad.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Makes you bullish Vlad? That he's like pushing the envelope.

[David Hoffman]

Yeah, that's what it takes. There's a tweet that I really like from my friend Austin who works at Dragonfly. I hope he has a pin pinned. He tweeted out something along the lines of. No, he doesn't have a pinned. He tweeted out something on the lines of like, all good things on blockchains are all slightly illegal. Nice. I like that.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Just, just, just touching on illegal. Well, this was.

[David Hoffman]

Here's what he says. Most successful crypto products start off as kind of illegal. From Coinbase to Circle to Polymarket to Uniswap to Hyper Liquid. If no one thinks the product is a little illegal, it's probably not that interesting. This is only natural crypto exists to skirts around incumbent power structures. If the product can succeed within those structures, then it doesn't belong on chain anyway. Obviously building in good faith alongside counsel is necessary, but respectfully, don't ask for permission to build something people want. Like, and I'm like, yeah, vibes, dude. Like, let's go back to like early, early crypto.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

I largely agree with that, except I would say there's an important axis to look at which is like, whether the product is actually good or not. And does was what it says it will do. Right? Right. And Robinhood aside. So I had a conversation. I know you couldn't make this one because of your Internet, but the podcast getting released with the Guy a tokenized stock company called Denari. This is Gabriel Ott. And his take was basically like, you know, the things floating around in X stocks, those are just like not good products, okay? They're, they're trading at massive deltas to the actual product that you're buying. So if you buy Apple and X stock format, that price could be totally out of whack with the Apple on an exchange. It's not one for one backed. Right. And if we're going to do the whole tokenized security thing, let's make sure we don't take shortcuts and we do it right. It's kind of like if we're going to do the stablecoin thing, let's not do a Terra Luna like debacle that's going to screw everyone over. Let's do something that actually works like a make or die or, you know, something like circle or tether. And so his take was basically like X stocks are just, they're just not good products and they're probably illegal. And there are ways to do this.

[David Hoffman]

So you get fully DTCs without KYC. Definitely illegal.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Well, one thing about some of these instruments, Hester Purse was actually weighing in. And you know, Hester's like, she is a crypto advocate. She's, she knows the technology, she is very rational. She wants to support free and open capital markets. But even she was raising some eyebrows and you could tell it. So she published this speech. It's a very short speech by Hester Perse standards, but basically I'm going to give you the paraphrase because I feel like by now I can speak a little Hester Persse. She's basically saying like, be careful making these Liechtenstein domiciled SPV stock IOUs. Your tokenized stock thing. She was basically saying because this is illegal probably and could be kind of a bad thing for capital markets and for protecting investors. And before I bring the hammer down on you guys, you should probably come in and check with us because we really want to make tokenized stocks work for crypto, but some of these instruments are not the way to do it. And she wasn't talking necessarily about xdocs, but I kind of feel like she also was. Anyway, that's my paraphrase interpretation and it was pretty much validated by conversation I had with Gabriel Ott that's coming out on, on Monday, all about tokenized stocks and kind of what they are and like what they should be.

[David Hoffman]

Yeah, I'm pretty excited for that episode. You were telling me it's a Pretty good download on, like, how a stock becomes a stock and then how a stock becomes a token out on Monday. So, yeah, I'm gonna listen to that one when I. When that comes out. I think when like, tokenized stocks or like pseudo tokenized stocks is probably what these actually are when they first come, they're just destined to be bad products because we can't have the real thing. Because, like, you have to have a workaround. That workaround is going to be janky. We are seeing the first generations, generation zero of tokenized stocks right now. They all kind of suck. And really, in order for them to be good, there needs to be a clear path that the SEC needs to make and bless as saying, like, anyone can do this path and you can have a legitimate compliant tokenized stock.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

This is what's so cool about the Gabriel conversation. He's like, we have that, basically. So Robinhood is actually doing that apparently in the eu.

[David Hoffman]

Oh, really?

[Ryan Sean Adams]

He's like. He's like, x stocks. I don't know what that is, but Robinhood is doing it the right way. And by the way, probably by the end of the year, we'll have it done in the right way in the US too, and it'll be regulated.

[David Hoffman]

It'll be like one to one year.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

End of the year, dude. Okay, Because. And they have their broker dealer license with a checkbox for tokenized stocks. And they're like, we're meeting with the sec. Like, we've shown them demos. They like it, they're gonna bless it. Like, this is all going to happen. I'm just saying, like, right now, in the summer, some of these products aren't so great, but it's coming pretty soon anyway. That's the episode on Monday. And you gotta listen to it. It's a great conversation.

[David Hoffman]

Wow, I'm so bullish. Robinhood tokenized docs. Are you serious?

[Ryan Sean Adams]

Yeah, I know.

[David Hoffman]

What a killer product.

[Ryan Sean Adams]

It's pretty great. We've come a long way, Dave. We've come a long way. All right, risks and disclaimers, guys. You know, none of this has been financial advice. Crypto's risk, you lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. Not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bangless journey. Thanks a lot.