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ROLLUP: Clarity Bill Stalls | Powell vs. Trump | NYC Meme Rug | Silver Explodes | X Adds Crypto
01:06:51
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- [00:00]
Ryan Sean Adams
Foreign. Nation is the third week of January. It's time for the bankless weekly roll up. The Clarity bill, it took front and center. It was in the Senate. It was a big conversation. This week is probably the most important bill for crypto, I would say, David, even above the genius bill, which was much more straightforward, much more simple. But the Clarity bill is supposed to do what we hope, which is provide clarity to crypto on what's legal in the US and what's not. There's some horse trading going on, though. The bank lobby hates trading.
- [00:32]
David Hoffman
Horse trading. I've never heard of this phrase.
- [00:33]
Ryan Sean Adams
Yeah, horse trading. It's like all the parties are, you know, negotiating together to see what they can get in and what they'll tolerate and what they won't. You know, it's all the lobbyists.
- [00:41]
David Hoffman
Okay, we're negotiating.
- [00:42]
Ryan Sean Adams
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bank lobby wants to kill stablecoin Yield. They don't want you to have that, David, you in particular.
- [00:47]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Right.
- [00:48]
Ryan Sean Adams
Also, Coinbase is now rage quitting as of the latest. They say.
- [00:52]
David Hoffman
I saw that they withdrew their support.
- [00:55]
Ryan Sean Adams
They did. The current version of the bill they say is worse than it not passing. But there are some still that I appreciate and respect in crypto that still like this bill, even as is they say it's passable. Of course, they'd be on the Coinbase side of things in general. But we gotta figure all that out, uncover the bill and also figure out whether it's gonna pass or if we actually want it.
- [01:17]
David Hoffman
Yeah, yeah. And what. What is it going to take? What do we have to give up to get that to pass versus what can we win? But there's plenty of other things to talk about. Jerome Powell under criminal investigation from Trump's Department of Justice. Is the central bank able to remain independent. And also. Also in the world of finance and our government leaders, former New York City Mayor Eric Adams issues a meme coin and you can guess what happens next right after merely hours after you issued the meme coin.
- [01:48]
Ryan Sean Adams
Well, the first step when you launch a meme coin is you launch it. And the second step is got to rug people. You got to rug as many people as you can.
- [01:56]
David Hoffman
Don't tell me that's what happened story was any different. Also talking about it. Everyone place your bets. We're going to talk about the silver. Silver going absolutely parabolic and X rolling out crypto integrations while also killing infofi, which I'm. I think is just a fantastic thing. And also Tom Lee using his Ethereum treasury company to invest in Mr. Beast because that's the same thing.
- [02:23]
Ryan Sean Adams
He's got some comments on that before we get in. Our friends over at Zama have a message. You know, HTTP it made HTTPs. I should say that the S stands for secure. It made the Internet private. Well, Zama is doing exactly the same thing for crypto. I mean, because privacy and crypto, of course, would be very nice. In the early days of the Internet, everything was clear text, no privacy. It still feels like those days in Cryp right now on chains like Bitcoin, on Ethereum, on Solana. Well, no more. Zama is providing HTTP Z, which is the confidential web. They are launching as well, the Zama Token, applying their technology to the ico. So if you want to go experience Zama, you can actually do that as you participate in the ICO. The auction is starting on January 21, so that's coming up soon. My favorite thing about Zama, we talked to Rand, the founder of Zama. David. My favorite thing about it is it adds privacy to existing chains. You have to go to a whole new chain to get your privacy. You can get it on the chain. Privacy, yeah, starting with. Starting with Ethereum. So you can go check that out. Participate in the ICO as well. That is@bankless.com cc zama auction link in the show notes. David, let's talk about the big, big, big news on the week, which was Jerome Powell and did you see the video that he sent out last Sunday?
- [03:48]
David Hoffman
Yeah. Basically a hey world, look at this injustice that is happening to the central bank's independence. Donald Trump is coming after me. Let's watch a bit of this clip.
- [03:58]
Jerome Powell
Good evening. On Friday, the Department of justice served the Federal Reserve with grand jury subpoenas threatening a criminal indictment related to my testimony before the Senate Banking Committee last June. That testimony concerned, in part, a multi year project to renovate historic Federal Reserve office buildings. I have deep respect for the rule of law and for accountability in our democracy. No one, certainly not the chair of the Federal Reserve, is above the law. But this unprecedented action should be seen in the broader context of the administration's threats and ongoing pressure. This new threat is not about my testimony last June or about the renovation of the Federal Reserve buildings. It is not about Congress's oversight role. The Fed, through testimony and other public disclosures, made every effort to keep Congress informed about the renovation project.
- [04:53]
Ryan Sean Adams
David, what is he talking about here?
- [04:55]
David Hoffman
What is he even talking about? Why is Trump coming after him? Back in June 2025, Powell was in front of Congress and Talked about this $2.5 billion, renovation of the federal headquarters building in D.C. so they were just getting a bunch of money, 2.5 billion. To renovate the Fed building, very big building, renovating it for 2.5 billion. Federal prosecutors are looking into whether Powell lied to Congress during this. This testimony. This has nothing to do with, like, anything about what Trump wants. I think the claim here is that Trump is just finding a way to go after Powell because Powell's not doing the thing that he wants, which is lower interest rates.
- [05:35]
Ryan Sean Adams
Right. So, so, so the federal prosecutors are actually coming after Powell and coming after Fed, and specifically they' Powell misled them that the cost of this building that you see right now is more than he said it would cost. That's what they're saying. As if building projects or government projects have never, ever gone over budget in the history. But Trump is summoning the doj, presuming this all comes from Trump, which it does, to go prosecute Powell for that purpose. And Powell is saying, hey, it's not about the thing that they're saying. It's about. Right. It's about they don't like how I'm handling interest rates. Right.
- [06:16]
David Hoffman
They don't like my independence. They don't like how I am free to do what I see is appropriate for my job. Because everyone else that Donald Trump appoints to whatever other sector of government always is identified as somebody who will just do Trump's bidding. Powell's not doing Trump's bidding, and so Trump is finding a way to go after him.
- [06:37]
Ryan Sean Adams
Absolutely wild drama. I mean, this video message came out, I think, on a Sunday, right, and.
- [06:43]
David Hoffman
Around the financial world.
- [06:44]
Ryan Sean Adams
Yeah, it did. It was just full of everything that I was looking at, like, all media. Lyn Alden calls this the most direct clash between the Fed and executive branch since the 1950s. People probably don't remember that, but there's a lot of back and forth and a nibbling away of, like, a complete removal of Fed independence during the 1940s and the 1950s. And that same sort of thing is happening here. I don't know that there's ever been a DOJ prosecution of the chair of the Fed, though. That is truly unprecedented territory. Now, a lot of people, David, will say, like, including I saw a tweet from Eric Voorhees about this. The Fed was never independent in the first place. That was always smoke and mirrors. It was always a political institution at the will, the whims of the executive branch or members of Congress. And so this is just like, not a big deal. What do you Think about that. Do you think this is not a big deal? It's always been like. Or do you think this is. Are we crossing a rubricon here that the US has not crossed maybe ever or at least since like the 1940s.
- [07:47]
David Hoffman
I take Eric, Eric's point in the sense that the Fed is not unbiased. The Fed has biases, but they are different from Donald Trump's biases, which are not the same type of biases as the Fed. And the Fed can be, can be biased and still be independent from the President. And you know, the Fed has a job, it has a mandate. Like we are humans. We can apply our energies and our efforts to try and get that job done. And I think, you know, you can look back at Powell's legacy. I think like Powell's pals done a pretty good job. We were talking hella crap about Powell. I remember you and I were talking about hella crap about Powell in 2020 and 2021 during COVID And then everyone was like, oh, they, they have to thread the needle. They're totally going to mess it up.
- [08:29]
Ryan Sean Adams
He kept saying transitory inflation. That bothered me because like we kn. Much more durable than just like, oh, it'll be a few months, it'll be over.
- [08:36]
David Hoffman
He's done a great job. And so sure, maybe, maybe he's opinionated, maybe he's biased, but he's not biased to whatever like a short term president is interested in. And so I'm not sure. Eric Voorhees. Eric Voorhees. His comments talk about the Fed as like an institution, but like not about the local temporal moment that we are in right now.
- [08:58]
Ryan Sean Adams
Yeah, I mean Powell projects the opposite of the chaos of Trump. I mean even when he was going through that like just that, that's, that's prerecorded speech that we just played. Right. Poker face, you know, very monotone. Just the, the picture, the portrait of, of stability. So the question is, what's the probability that Powell gets tossed out? Obviously this prosecution is in place still on polymarket. The probability by the end of March is 4% and the probability by May 14 is 8%. This has not moved all that much.
- [09:33]
David Hoffman
No.
- [09:33]
Ryan Sean Adams
So I'm not. Maybe the market has already priced this in. Actually, David, the best take I read on some of the things happening with Trump, this Fed prosecution. Also Venezuela came from Noah Smith this week. You know, economist Noah Smith. He's got a great.
- [09:47]
David Hoffman
One of our favorites.
- [09:48]
Ryan Sean Adams
Yeah. So his whole thing was Trump is actually doing. Did both Venezuela and the Fred. The Fed prosecution, the push towards lower inflation for political reasons. And a key political reason is he knows that affordability is what the American people want. His lowest poll rate ratings are all around affordability and inflation. And so what is Trump doing? Okay, Venezuela, access to oil. What does that do? It's an inflation lever that he can actually control because if you flood the market with oil, you get gas price.
- [10:19]
David Hoffman
Down and American consumers cost of living goes down.
- [10:23]
Ryan Sean Adams
Exactly. And so American consumers notice that the price of the pump is one of the, you know, big inflation kind of things that are most notable. So he's doing that. And then also the other thing they notice is the price of their mortgage, price of their credit card bill. And so that's why Trump wants interest rates down too. So he's actually. This may look like chaos, but it's actually somewhat calculated from a political perspective at least. This is the argument Noah's making. But he calls it affordability. He calls it. Noah calls it gangster affordability. Because the way Trump is doing it is like straight up mob boss.
- [10:55]
David Hoffman
Yeah, right.
- [10:56]
Ryan Sean Adams
Let me go cap. Sure. The. The president of a sovereign country and just yoink him and then we'll open.
- [11:02]
David Hoffman
Up so it can lower our cost of living here domestically.
- [11:05]
Ryan Sean Adams
Yeah. And let me use lawfare. Let me just go like, crush, prosecute. Use my DOJ to go prosecute Powell so he'll like put the levers on him to really lower interest rates. So there could be. It was an interesting rationale for the political calculus behind all of these moves, which seems so chaotic at times.
- [11:23]
David Hoffman
That's very interesting because I was intently watching a lot of the poly market last night as Donald Trump was like, posturing to make strikes on Iran. And then he said he called off the strikes on Iran and the poly markets were all confused. You know what happened? Oil prices went down. I don't know why, but like, you watched oil prices drop by something like 4 or 5% as a result of whatever he did or did not do last night. So that's also very interesting.
- [11:48]
Ryan Sean Adams
Unstable genius. Maybe. Maybe that's what Trump's doing.
- [11:51]
David Hoffman
Unstable genius. It's actually a great brand for Trump. He should run it.
- [11:54]
Ryan Sean Adams
Kind of is. It kind of is actually he genius in a very strange way. But the question is, how did markets react? And they did react in a big way. The market that reacted the most was the silver market. I'm going to show you the price of silver in just a minute. But this is, you know, silver's going crazy when the U.S. mint suspends all sales of silver products. Okay. The U.S. mint, mints, these like collector coin. Did you ever collect coins?
- [12:18]
David Hoffman
Yeah, my dad gave me sets of coins. Like here's the. It's. It's 1999. Dave here is a penny and a quarter and a nickel and a dime, all from 1999 and 1999.
- [12:29]
Ryan Sean Adams
That's a.
- [12:30]
David Hoffman
Every single year, Every single year he would give me a new set. Yeah, I don't know where those are now.
- [12:35]
Ryan Sean Adams
Well, for coin collectors, like, I used to collect coins as a kid. Like not super aggressively, but it's very interesting. Right? It's like I find old money very interesting. Anyway, people collect coins from the mint like this. These are silver coins. And the mint, the US Mint says we can't sell anymore. Why? Because the price is moving too fast. So we're going to like lose a whole bunch of money on this. So they stopped selling them. That, that was pretty unprecedented. And this is the price of silver. This is. I'm looking at the one month. So one month price of silver, we're up 43%. Okay.
- [13:07]
David Hoffman
Ironically, on this chart for people who are watching, the silver line is colored in gold and the gold line is blue. So don't get confused.
- [13:16]
Ryan Sean Adams
Yeah, yeah. That almost confused me just now as you said that. So gold is up 7%, silver up 42%, same time range. We'll get into the price of crypto, but The S&P 500 is only up 2%. So this is a kind of a debasement, maybe fed independence type of trade. But let me zoom out. That's only the five day. Let me zoom out to the one year here. One year. Gold is up 200%. That, wow. That, that's like a volatility of a crypto asset.
- [13:47]
David Hoffman
Oh, silver is also. No, no, no. Gold is up 70%. Silver.
- [13:50]
Ryan Sean Adams
Oh, sorry, sorry. I said that's what I meant. Silver.
- [13:53]
David Hoffman
You're getting confused.
- [13:54]
Ryan Sean Adams
The thing I was looking at the wrong line. Okay, silver's up 200%. Gold is up 70%. Huge.
- [14:00]
David Hoffman
These are huge numbers and those are massive moves.
- [14:02]
Ryan Sean Adams
S and P is 17%. And of course, yeah, Bitcoin and ETH are just like flat on the. On the year. So.
- [14:10]
David Hoffman
So the market. So the crypto prices were definitely solidly up this week. Like, I got texts from my friends like, oh, we're so back. You know, bitcoin is up $96,000. Bitcoin ether is at $3,300. Are we moving in tandem with these precious metals because of all the same, like sovereignty and monetary reasons? I mean, doesn't look like we could.
- [14:26]
Ryan Sean Adams
We're getting a little bump. We're just, we're getting.
- [14:29]
David Hoffman
I mean we are still the forgotten asset class by comparison. But like there was positive price movement this week.
- [14:35]
Ryan Sean Adams
Yeah. The reason you didn' text from your silver friends is probably David, you don't have any silver friends.
- [14:39]
David Hoffman
I don't. I don't have any silver friends. Like, little did I know, you are my only silver friend. As my.
- [14:44]
Ryan Sean Adams
You think I'm a silver friend?
- [14:46]
David Hoffman
You said you collected a little. Few coins here and there.
- [14:48]
Ryan Sean Adams
I don't have any silver though, unfortunately. You know, I wish I did. That would be great. That'd be great. On a week like this. CPI numbers came in as well. They were a little bit lower than expected, so 2.6%. But we talked about the other markets and their reaction to this, which is like silver gold up. You're right. Crypto did get a bump on the week. What are the numbers? The official 7 day numbers for bitcoin.
- [15:09]
David Hoffman
Yeah. Both bitcoin and ether are up 5.3% on the week. Bitcoin's at $96,100. Ether is at $3,300. Still not crazy price action in any direction, but it does feel healthy. Getting away from that 2000 number on ether and getting closer to 100,000 on bitcoin.
- [15:31]
Ryan Sean Adams
I did see a lot of shorts coming up.
- [15:33]
David Hoffman
We are still, we are still not the star of any financial show whatsoever. We are still the forgotten asset class.
- [15:38]
Ryan Sean Adams
I did see the shorts get liquidated though. Did you? That always feels good.
- [15:41]
David Hoffman
Feels good. Feels good. Yeah. Feels good. I'm like, yeah, no, I, I'll be friends with silver people. I'll be friends with gold people. I will not be friends with crypto short sellers.
- [15:51]
Ryan Sean Adams
Yeah. Who, oh man. If you have any friends. Yeah. What are you doing? Who are you? What are you doing with your life? This was an interesting number though that I stumbled across on the week, which is the number of active addresses. This is comparing ETH to bitcoin. Okay. And I haven't looked at this in a long time. Probably like five years or something. A very long time. This is actually the first time that ETH has flipped bitcoin in terms of number of active addresses. The first in history. Yeah. What? Seven day moving average?
- [16:25]
David Hoffman
How does that make any sense?
- [16:27]
Ryan Sean Adams
You thought that had already happened.
- [16:30]
David Hoffman
That doesn't make any sense.
- [16:32]
Ryan Sean Adams
This is the source is the block dot. You know, this is the block. They're reliable. Yeah.
- [16:37]
David Hoffman
But Ethereum, even as like non scaled Ethereum, is it's still way more scaled than Bitcoin in a throughput standpoint. Granted our transactions are heavier and more dense and do more things.
- [16:47]
Ryan Sean Adams
Yeah, I mean it wasn't much more though like previously, I mean previous to this year it was what, like double, I don't know, like 12 transactions per second versus Bitcoin's what, seven or something like that? Right. It's really, it's been this year that's really outpaced. But anyway, that's a flipping of a story. I, I had thought that that had happened.
- [17:06]
David Hoffman
I had thought that that was what it was for years.
- [17:09]
Ryan Sean Adams
Nope, nope. I mean Bitcoin has a lot of active users, a lot of active addresses. Okay, so what are they doing? One other thing.
- [17:16]
David Hoffman
What are they doing? Ordinals?
- [17:19]
Ryan Sean Adams
No, it's not ordinals. It's, you know, the, the use case for bitcoin, which is you move bitcoin around. Um, there's also the case that Ethereum is scaling so hard right now. Here's a tweet that and reduced gas fees so much. This person says, Vito says I have no reason to use L2s anymore. Well, job Ethereum. And it's funny, if you go to how much does a L1 transaction cost right now on Ethereum mainnet, it's about 0.016 cents. So it's just a penny and a half per transaction.
- [17:49]
David Hoffman
I have not thought about the cost of my transactions in a long time.
- [17:53]
Ryan Sean Adams
It's like the same price as Polygon Proof of stake. Right now it's within the same range as Arbitrum and Base almost.
- [18:01]
David Hoffman
Now if Ethereum could just get some faster block times, it would actually start to approach parity with a lot of other very fast layer twos and other layer ones.
- [18:09]
Ryan Sean Adams
Yeah, it's good though. I mean this is eth L1 scaling and hopefully we see more of that moving forward. But I guess the question to maybe end the market section with is is this going to persist? Do you think we're going to get. We got a 5% on the week. Your prediction was slow grind up. Seems like we have the narrative, you know, at our back here, which is like there's no fed independence anymore. It seems like crypto should outperform Bitcoin especially. It seems like it's its moment. Do you think we're, we're setting a bottom here. Do you think this is the slow grind up or is there more bear to continue?
- [18:43]
David Hoffman
Yeah, other than the clarity passing, I just can't find any catalysts and I don't really know how much of a catalyst that that clarity will be in the short term. Like the clarity passes and you're going to see a bump in eth price in that moment. It's not going to it's going to be a small to medium sized bump up but it won't really define anything big. So on will also get a bump, not as much as Ethereum. Bitcoin won't really do anything at all and then we're good and it's going to be in the rear view mirror and I don't know what positive catalyst is ahead for the year in either direction. For what it's worth, I don't know why we would go down or but I guess no one does. Black swans are black swans. But nonetheless, like I'm still seeing headwinds in terms of like losing our forgotten asset class status. Like yeah, I don't know about you Ryan, but I am looking very much forward to the SpaceX IPO that is exciting to me and also anthropic and OpenAI. These are going to be very exciting financial markets moments and they're just not what the crypto industry is.
- [19:40]
Ryan Sean Adams
You're right. I mean the fact that we have Fed independence fears right now and no one's really talking about crypto, we're talking about silver and gold instead. That's kind of not what we need. Right? We want bitcoin and non sovereign store value assets in crypto to be outperforming. They're not right now. So I tend to agree with you. I mean I think that this is not the sign of now. We're entering the bull run. At least we don't have a clear indication there. But we got to talk about the catalyst that you just mentioned, which is the Clarity bill in the Senate. So much to discuss on that, including do we want it to pass and what's in it and who's fighting over it. We'll talk about all that and more. But before we do, want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.
- [20:23]
David Hoffman
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- [21:16]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
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- [21:20]
David Hoffman
Top or bottom calls.
- [21:21]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
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- [21:45]
David Hoffman
We like Michael at Bankless.
- [21:46]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
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- [21:49]
Ryan Sean Adams
About once a month.
- [21:50]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
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- [22:05]
David Hoffman
There is a link in the show notes. All right, we've got a lot to get through with the Clarity Act. We have two opposing bills being introduced that maybe, maybe they converge. We have two opposing committees with proposing those bills in the first place. And then we have Coinbase defecting, Coin center giving the thumbs up and then Elizabeth Warren ring as normal. So we're going to talk about all of this and more. First let's just level set with what Clarity is. Let's talk about that Digital Asset market. Clarity act is main United States Crypto market structure bill defines what a digital commodity versus security is. It formalizes the splitting of the jurisdiction between the SEC and the cftc. It sets the rules for exchanges, brokerages and custodians. It's a very big bill. Like Ryan said kind of in the intro. Our first bill that we got was the Genius act, this stablecoin act. Decently uncontentious. It's just stablecoins promoting dollar dominance. Not like there were some things to fight over but in the broad strokes of things just like was very obvious and needed to get. Needed to get done and did get done. The Clarity act is much more contentious because there are so many things to fight over. The securities, the Wall street is going up against, defi banks are going up against the stablecoin issuers. There's just so many different levels of surface area to fight over. And that is kind of the theme of the week is we kind of fought over all of them. The House passed their version of clarity in mid-2025 and now it's. Then it was time to.
- [23:32]
Ryan Sean Adams
And that was good by the way. We like that. The House version was pretty solid.
- [23:36]
David Hoffman
Yes. Then it went to the Senate and the Senate has been stuck. They've been trying to craft its own version and reconcile the two different versions coming out of the two different committees, the Banking Committee and the Agricultural Committee. The Ag Committee is leaning the bill towards the cftc. The Banking Committee is leaning the bill towards the SEC along with all their other defi and stablecoin stuff. And that's kind of the state of play as it relates to like what happened this week. Just before this week in December, both the banking and agricultural sides pushed their Clarity markups into January, January 2026. They just kind of punted saying like we couldn't resolve this. Let's, let's tackle this in the new year. Now it's the new year that's now. And really the fight is being over defi defi treatment. Whether the front end devs or developers at all are intermediaries and also stablecoin rewards and yields.
- [24:29]
Ryan Sean Adams
Let's talk about stablecoins rewards and yields because I think this is a big fight. Specifically the banks are on one side of this which is that American citizens, users should not get their, their stablecoin yields that only the banks should get them.
- [24:45]
David Hoffman
The banks should get the money.
- [24:47]
Ryan Sean Adams
Yes. And they're, they're saying things like well this would destabilize the financial system. Right. This would reduce credit creation. This would be really bad for smaller community style banks. I think the net of it though is David, they make a whole lot of money from interest on your savings account. Right. Again, the delta here, what is it.
- [25:09]
David Hoffman
Is destabilizing in a sense of their whole paradigm.
- [25:15]
Ryan Sean Adams
Yeah. So most of the big banks and by the way the big bank lobby, which they are well funded, they've been in Washington like forever. Right. They kind of run that town at some, at some level. What they're trying to do, this is sort of beyond the scope of the Clarity act. What they're trying to do is they're trying to do a take back from the genius bill.
- [25:32]
David Hoffman
Yeah, they did a whoopsie in the genius bill.
- [25:34]
Ryan Sean Adams
Yeah. So they got outflanked by kind of the crypto proponents, the crypto lobby. And as part of the genius bill, they thought they closed the loophole for sharing interest to users. But. And indeed issuers of stablecoins cannot do that. But exchanges or other protocols can provide that interest. The net effect is most users get that interest. Now they're trying to shut that down and they're not making a very convincing case, I think for American citizens and why this is good for American citizens. But of course they have the ear and campaign of many of the lawmakers who are weighing in on this. And as of now, am I correct, they are kind of blocking all stablecoin yield that's in at least the current version of the markup we have. Is that right?
- [26:20]
David Hoffman
Yeah, yeah, that's right. And maybe just to make this a little bit more clear, the BlackRock's tokenized Biddle Fund passes yield onto its holders directly on chain natively as a part of the smart contract that is also a security. And the genius bill, they blocked that from being able to be done with normal stablecoins. So if you hold USDC or tether, you cannot get the yield of the interest of the T bills that back it. But the loophole that the, that Ryan said the industry flanked around the banking lobby around is that if you hold your USCC on Coinbase, Coinbase gives you 4 point something percent, 4.25% as a reward, not as interest, as a reward, a customer for reward for doing that. And that's like the loophole that the banks were like, wait a second, that's not what we meant. And so they are trying to close that loophole in this bill. And that is the thing that they are being a very significant hardliner on.
- [27:13]
Ryan Sean Adams
David, do you see this? So on the defi, that's the stablecoin thing and on the defi that you mentioned, there are commercials being run like this one. Investors for transparency, primetime ads on Fox News urging viewers to oppose defi provisions. Now, how many Fox News viewers do you think are like, oh, defi, I hate that. I'm going to call my senator. Or defi.
- [27:34]
David Hoffman
I know what that is.
- [27:35]
Ryan Sean Adams
Yes, tell your senator.
- [27:36]
David Hoffman
Look at this.
- [27:37]
Ryan Sean Adams
Tell your senator. Pass crypto legislation without defi provisions. How many people are there?
- [27:42]
David Hoffman
Like, what is defi? Is that new zoomer? This is so funny. This is big, big suits with briefcases looking out on Some federal building. It says, don't let DEFI stall innovation. This message paid for by the Banking Committee.
- [27:59]
Ryan Sean Adams
What? It's actually wild. It's actually wild the arguments that they're making, but they are spending money. So this is Hayden Adams on that specific commercial. A group named Investors for Transparency are running public ads plus lobbying to kill DeFi, the most transparent financial system on earth. Ironic, but unsurprising. Their site does not disclose who funds them. Oh, so it must be some sort of a super pac type of. Yeah, you know, yeah, money. Yeah, money.
- [28:28]
David Hoffman
Who do we think this is? It's the banks.
- [28:29]
Ryan Sean Adams
It's the banks. We know, we know, we know. It's you guys with Elizabeth Warren. We'll talk about her a little more later. But we did get something that was very positive. It's called the brca. Can you explain what this is?
- [28:41]
David Hoffman
Yeah, the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act. And so I was talking to Austin Campbell forever ago, and he was very bearish on the Clarity act passing because he thought that there's just too much to be fighting over. And so people are going to carve out an unbundle and pass these things kind of piecemeal. And this is kind of what's happening with the brca. This is a bill from Cynthia Lummis and Ron Wyden, which. It's a more narrow bill that protects developers and infrastructure providers of non custodial services from being considered money transmitters under federal law. If you care about crypto, if you care about freedom, if you care about the developers, to be able to write code, this should string at your heartstrings. This is a very big deal. This is the Roman Storm defense bill of sorts. And it's really just trying to get pressure off of Clarity to carve out this one thing that doesn't seem to be too controversial and is accepted by many people, I think, and is simply just going to get stitched onto the Clarity Act. And it's separate from the markups from the two committees. And it just narrowly focuses on if you are a DEFI developer, if you are a front end, you are not a money transmitter and you cannot be prosecuted as such.
- [29:55]
Ryan Sean Adams
Code is not crime, basically. And you're right, this is a separate sort of bill, but it has been bundled with the latest versions of the markups of the main Clarity Act. Right.
- [30:03]
David Hoffman
Compartmentalized but then added on.
- [30:07]
Ryan Sean Adams
Yeah. So this is huge. And the senators behind this, they're doing fantastic work here. Roman Storm's obviously very excited about it. I've seen him tweet about this, basically. I mean, his whole. I don't. I don't know if this applies retroactively, but obviously, if this passes, there's no.
- [30:22]
David Hoffman
He doesn't hurt his case. That's for sure.
- [30:24]
Ryan Sean Adams
No, it doesn't.
- [30:25]
David Hoffman
Which also, we have not heard of the prosecutors reopening Roman Storm's case again.
- [30:30]
Ryan Sean Adams
Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, you're right about that.
- [30:32]
David Hoffman
They are still in that window where they could, but they have not done that. And the longer that it goes, if this passes. And if this passes, like, Roman's like, come on, come at me.
- [30:42]
Ryan Sean Adams
Come on, come on. Right.
- [30:43]
David Hoffman
We know how. How bold Roman is.
- [30:45]
Ryan Sean Adams
Okay, so there are two drafts, two markups. Right. One in the Ag Committee and the other in the Banking Committee. Are they similar? Different? What's going on here?
- [30:56]
David Hoffman
They have different biases. Like I said, the Ag Committee wants to put more of crypto under the cftc. The Banking Committee wants more of the crypto industry to follow under the sec. So there is some differences, but they are reconcilable. But they are reconcilable with time. So we need time. And so this is kind of where we are this week. The Senate Banking Committee was supposed to do its markup today. It was supposed to do it today. Thursday, January 15th. Yesterday they canceled it. The Ag Commulte Ag Committee has postponed its markup, so it got pushed to the last week of January because Senate leaders realized that they did not yet have bipartisan coalition on getting it done. So both of these things have been postponed. Why did, Ryan, the Senate Ag Committee postpone their markup, which was supposed to happen today?
- [31:50]
Ryan Sean Adams
Why did they. Senate Banking. You mean Senate Banking.
- [31:53]
David Hoffman
What did I say? Yeah, Senate Banking.
- [31:54]
Ryan Sean Adams
Yeah. I think it's because Coinbase dropped out. Right?
- [31:57]
David Hoffman
Yeah, Coinbase talked about it.
- [31:59]
Ryan Sean Adams
Yeah. So, I mean, the Banking Committee is really interesting because it has people like our favorite Senator Elizabeth Warren on the Banking Committee, who used to be a lot more powerful, influential on these types of topics, is less so. But she is trying her darndest. She had filed 38 different amendments to this specific bill to, of course, remove developer protections, make AML KYC obligations for all defi for all front ends, repeal positive OCC guidance for banks, gut the SEC's ability to allow any tokenized stocks, like all of the things you would expect. She's there and she's as a part of Senate Banking trying to push.
- [32:38]
David Hoffman
Push through all of the bad things. It's impressive.
- [32:42]
Ryan Sean Adams
Yes. Yes. And this is part of the reason people like senators like Warren, who've gotten some of this language in, some compromised version of this language in the bill, is part of the reason that you're right. Coinbase came out and they said, we don't support this bill. Right. We're out. Yeah, it's kind of a. I guess a rage quit. I think they're still hopeful that these issues could be changed, but they're. They're kind of rage quitting for now. This is Brian Armstrong. He said there's too many issues with this last bill over the past 48 hours. There's a de facto ban on tokenized equities. There's DEFI prohibitions, giving the government access to your financial records, removing your right to privacy. Erosion of the CFTC is favoring towards a sec. And of course, you're killing stablecoins and you're killing stablecoin yield. And he said, we'll keep fighting for all Americans economic freedom, of course, but we'd rather have no bill than a bad bill. Hopefully we can get a better draft. So he's still hopeful there'll be a better draft, but he's saying, if you guys try to pass this, we're withdrawing our support. Which is interesting. I mean, they're a major voice in the crypto community for sure.
- [33:49]
David Hoffman
Yeah. I mean, major voice, major funder. And so when Coinbase withdraws their support, like, what does that mean for Coinbase to withdraw their support? They're not a senator, they don't have involvement here. They just kind of fund everyone, which is a very big deal. So I'm assuming the support of Coinbase is highly related to the hundreds of millions of dollars that they pumped into the campaign last cycle. Interestingly, Neeraj from Coin center tweeted out, actually, this bill's pretty good, and kind of voice out some support from the bill. So there's a mixed response from the crypto industry about their stance on the Clarity act as it stands, I think here's my interpretation of what's going on. Brian Armstrong and coinbase are definitely focused on the economic side of the Clarity Act. Stablecoin yields, being able to tokenize securities like more financial assets in more expressive ways to go to more people, all that kind of stuff. And they are not satisfied with that arena of the Clarity Act. Mirage from Coin center are primarily more narrowly focused on DEFI protections, developer protections, individual freedoms and individual rights from prosecution. And it seems to be that this bill does strongly protect DeFi. Not completely, because Brian Armstrong also said that there needs to be more DEFI protections. But I think that's why we are seeing two different opinions from Coin center versus Coinbase.
- [35:17]
Ryan Sean Adams
Coin Center, a fantastic organization. They've been protecting like crypto and helping crypto self sovereign values from the very beginning. I think they see the BRCA that we were talking about earlier as such a big win in that it protects non custodial developers in the Roman storms of the of the world. That regardless of anything else, if that passes, they still count this as a net win. And I think that's kind of the difference. Of course they'd want all of the things Coinbase also wants. But creating a bill, as you can tell, there's a lot of compromise involved in getting something that like no one loves perfectly. For sure. It is interesting though, there are a number of other crypto organizations that still like this bill even as is. I mean they want more, but like ripple, Kraken, a 16Z.
- [36:03]
David Hoffman
I don't care what Ripple thinks.
- [36:05]
Ryan Sean Adams
Robinhood, okay, but like they've all said it's not so bad. It's not so bad. So I kind of wonder, I mean, where this stands, I guess on the defi thing that was my big question, right? Which is like how much of defi is protected versus under threat. Jake Trinsky says in the current version of the bill, the latest draft leaves ambiguity about about whether all sorts of developers and infrastructure providers could be forced to KYC users register with the SEC or comply with other rules that don't fit defi. Okay, so there's still some rulemaking, some loose language around this. Even if a Roman storm can't be prosecuted in the way it was prosecuted, maybe front ends have to enforce KYC for users. Like a lot of things that are pretty crappy coming from the Elizabeth Warren side of the House here.
- [36:54]
David Hoffman
Yeah, yeah. All right, so what happens next? Like I said, the Banking Committee was supposed to do their markup today. It got canceled due to Coinbase's withdrawal of support. The Ag Committee announced that its markup was scheduled to January 27th. So that's kind of the next big milestone. That is in how many days that is in math, 12 days. The time, the time that we have here. So we have 12 days before the Ag Committee does their stuff and then the Banking Committee has it their stuff again as well. At least that allows these two different tracks to kind of like reconcile and get over some differences and see if we can make things things more simple and come to agreement with certain things so we can kind of narrow the energies and the focus on the disputes, which is probably going to be stablecoins and DeFi. To summarize what the crypto industry wants out of this bill, Jake Stravinsky put five things into a list. Five things that Jake Stravinsky thinks that we need to focus on as an industry. One, preserving yield for stable coin holders. Clarity section 404 currently kills. This. We don't currently get. This is basically just. The Senate is either going to pick the banks or the crypto industry as a winner and a loser.
- [38:06]
Ryan Sean Adams
Well, I'd say citizens, it's not just the crypto industry. It's like, yes, true, true, true.
- [38:11]
David Hoffman
Notably, I like this line from Jake Tritzky. There's no valid policy reason for restricting stablecoin yield or rewards. So there's no legal precedent. There's no policy reason. Somebody just gets the yield. Either we protect the banks and we prop up that industry, or we allow innovation and allow the yields to go to the stable coins. AKA end users, AKA people.
- [38:32]
Ryan Sean Adams
Yeah, people are the banks. It seems pretty clear.
- [38:34]
David Hoffman
People are the banks. People are the banks. Yeah. So that's, that's the stablecoin issue. Second thing that Jake Trubinsky would like to see fixed, authorizing the SEC to enable tokenized securities. He says last year SEC chair Paul Atkins launched Project Crypto, an ambitious effort to upgrade the financial system by moving it on chain clarity. Section 505 appears to stop him from achieving that goal by eliminating his authority to treat crypto fairly. He follows up with, I bet Citadel loves this Citadel Trad 5. Who's that? Who's that? Ken. Ken Griffith. That guy? We don't like him. Third, reducing burdens on token issuers. We want more tokens to be launched and issued by people in the crypto industry. Jake Stravinsky says in this current form of The Act, Title 1 includes onerous equity level disclosures not too different from public companies. Audited financials at all works for mature companies, not for startups. It may be better to go offshore or sell stock instead. Basically, just like if you want to issue a token as a startup, you have to go through what is essentially a going public process which is infeasible. Infeasible for protecting DeFi developers. Title 3 of the Clarity act has several references suggesting that the surveillance state could take over defi. These must be removed or fixed and then five, allowing institutions access to DeFi. He says section 308 almost fixes this, but it gets wrong by imposing burdens on the institutions that will scare them away from defi even more than the status quo. So those are the five things that Jake Stravinsky wants fixed in order to have an A plus bill.
- [40:07]
Ryan Sean Adams
In my opinion, right now, the bill is like D, D plus, maybe C minus, D plus probably. Like, I kind of. I'm on the coinbase side of things. Like, it's not great. In a lot of ways, this, all of that gets it to an A. Are we going to get all of that? I think probably not. But then the question is, do we support it, do we want it passed.
- [40:27]
David Hoffman
Or what do we give up? Yeah.
- [40:28]
Ryan Sean Adams
This is David Sack saying, of course, part of the Trump administration passage of market structure remains as close as. However, the crypto industry should use this pause to resolve any remaining differences. Now is the time to set rules of the road and secure the future of this industry. Of course they want to get it done. They want to get it passed, but it has to be good. It has to be good. So, yeah.
- [40:47]
David Hoffman
What is a polymath of what we can give up in order to get this passed? Because this is still a sticking point is the President's relations with launching crypto projects. This is still a sticking point. Like, we have not. Can we just give that to the Democrats?
- [41:02]
Ryan Sean Adams
That's.
- [41:02]
David Hoffman
Let's give that. Let's give them that one. They can have that.
- [41:05]
Ryan Sean Adams
Sure, sure. Yeah. But then Trump won't sign it. David, the probability that the Clarity act is signed into law in 2026 on poly market right now, there's a 44% chance. So we got a coin flip. Right now, this is on fairly low volume, about 10k volume.
- [41:18]
David Hoffman
Very low volume, Very low volume.
- [41:19]
Ryan Sean Adams
That could change in the future. But. Okay, I like those odds. 50. 50. Matt Hogan, the clarity act is the Punxsutaw of this crypto winter.
- [41:28]
David Hoffman
I don't know what that reference is.
- [41:29]
Ryan Sean Adams
It sticks its head out, you know, like the Groundhog Day groundhog sees his shadow, you know?
- [41:34]
David Hoffman
Yeah, I know.
- [41:35]
Ryan Sean Adams
Groundhog Day, weeks of winter versus doesn't. That's Punxsutawney Phil. He's Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. Right.
- [41:41]
David Hoffman
Who.
- [41:42]
Ryan Sean Adams
So he's just saying. Okay.
- [41:44]
David Hoffman
Is he the guy that pulled the groundhog out?
- [41:47]
Ryan Sean Adams
No, no, no. That's the actual groundhog. Is his name Punxsutawney Phil? Yeah. Is his name Phil the groundhog? You know this?
- [41:54]
David Hoffman
No. Is it the same groundhog every year?
- [41:57]
Ryan Sean Adams
Anyway, that's the groundhog. So if the groundhog sticks its head out but fails in Congress, the winter could continue. And if it passes, then winter is over. Basically, he's saying that this is like going to determine how Deep the bear market is. So it's really important. Really important. This passes. David, we got more coming up.
- [42:17]
David Hoffman
Such a long word.
- [42:18]
Ryan Sean Adams
Why are you stuck on New York City gets a meme coin and it's already been rugged. We'll talk about that. Also, Polygon going all in on stablecoins, two big acquisitions, Tom Lee and Mr. Beast. Teaming up for something is Mr. Biden.
- [42:34]
David Hoffman
Why does it make sense? Why does it make sense?
- [42:36]
Ryan Sean Adams
Maybe it doesn't, but we'll see. We'll talk about all that more. But before we do, want to thank the sponsors that made this possible.
- [42:42]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Hey, Bankless Nation, it's David. If you're hearing this, that's because you are listening to the free Bankless podcast feed. Did you know that there is a premium Bankless RSS feed? The premium feed has extra interviews that I do for my own personal research and just deeper questions that I want answered about the crypto industry. Questions that I want to answer so I can be more informed as an investor, both at Bankless Ventures and also just in my own personal portfolio, too. Also, there are no ads, which means if you listen to the premium feed instead of the free feed, you'll get about 20 hours of your life back every year because you choose to support Bankless directly. So if you're interested in getting extra content all while skipping the ads, or.
- [43:15]
David Hoffman
You just appreciate what we do here.
- [43:17]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
And want us to keep doing it, we'd appreciate it if you signed up for Bankless Premium. And there is a link in the show notes to get started. Cheers to a good 2026.
- [43:24]
David Hoffman
Ryan, my former New York mayor, launched a meme coin this week. To the surprise of everyone, no one saw it coming. It's called New York City coin. Oh, ticker NYC.
- [43:38]
Ryan Sean Adams
Great ticker.
- [43:39]
David Hoffman
And that ran to a $600 million valuation before guess what happened next. Just moments after it launched, after it reached a $600 million valuation, all the liquidity was pulled for about $2.5 million.
- [43:55]
Ryan Sean Adams
Okay.
- [43:56]
David Hoffman
Yeah, so that's what happened. Eric Adams. And maybe listeners might remember we've played two clips of Eric Adams over the last, like, year and a half of him just like, kind of just taking a huge victory lap about how he agreed to take salary.
- [44:11]
Ryan Sean Adams
Bitcoin. Yeah. And he's the smartest guy in the world.
- [44:13]
David Hoffman
Yeah. And he was just, like, teasing. People were saying I was dumb. Look who's laughing now. That's what he said. Look who's laughing now. So that's the guy. Launch the memo right now. And then the liquidity Rugs. It's a meme coin on Solana. That's where you launch meme coins that you want to rug.
- [44:32]
Ryan Sean Adams
I find it hilarious the way he branded this David. So this is his original tweet. He's proud to launch the NYC Meme Coin, a new token built to fight the rapid spread of antisemitism and I anti Americanism across the country and now in New York City. Very civic minded.
- [44:50]
David Hoffman
Yeah.
- [44:51]
Ryan Sean Adams
In.
- [44:51]
David Hoffman
In this meme coin buy nyctoken.com I think the way that they was supposed to actually combat the spread of anti Semitism and anti Americanism is like a charity is like the. The value goes to charity. Did it though?
- [45:05]
Ryan Sean Adams
I mean that's all been very vague. Right. Like, I mean we don't know where the money is going to or who it's going to. That hasn't been disclosed. It just looks like. Like Eric Adams is kind of using his celebrity to just launch a meme coin rug pull. That's what it looks like. Do you have evidence to the contrary?
- [45:24]
David Hoffman
So here's what happened. Developer created a one sided liquidity pool on Meteora. I think you were. This is when you were on your little hiatus earlier this year, Ryan. But Meteora was the empicenter of the Javier Malay Meme coin. That's where the Javier Malay meme coin and it's where just a lot. It's a lot of attention got put on this Meteora complex of pump and dumps from. From Hayden Davis. This is following the Hayden Davis playbook to a T. Why is he doing that?
- [45:50]
Ryan Sean Adams
It's been so bad. Why is he burning his reputation like this? Who?
- [45:55]
David Hoffman
Eric Adams?
- [45:55]
Ryan Sean Adams
Yeah.
- [45:57]
David Hoffman
Well, I think the idea is to target somebody who just doesn't know any better because Eric Adams was like the. He made out a. He made a public statement claiming that they did not move or withdraw investor funds or personally invest in NYC taken or profit from the launch. He says that liquidity moves were by partners to manage high demand, not to scam traders. Which is exactly what a scammer would tell him to say if they were scamming him for sure. So they're just using. They're the puppet master behind the scenes.
- [46:23]
Ryan Sean Adams
Like Eric.
- [46:24]
David Hoffman
We're gonna launch the screen point. Everyone's gonna love you.
- [46:26]
Ryan Sean Adams
So you're. You're saying it could be the case that Eric Adams is also a scammer. It could also be the case that he's just like not.
- [46:33]
David Hoffman
He's a useful idiot. That's kind of. He's a useful idiot.
- [46:37]
Ryan Sean Adams
Yeah. That's your take on why that's.
- [46:38]
David Hoffman
Well, that's. That's what how Javier Millet. It wasn't Javier wasn't Milei wasn't a scammer. He was a useful idiot.
- [46:44]
Ryan Sean Adams
I know but this has happened so many times. Like somebody in Eric Adams orbit would have to say, hey, yeah, but before you do this, should you look at what happened to Javier Millay like it was like an absolute disaster. It's going to tank your reputation. I mean it's stupid any way you cut it. That's what Hayden Adams says. Part of what's so sad is celebrities.
- [47:02]
David Hoffman
Notably different from Hayden Davis.
- [47:04]
Ryan Sean Adams
Yeah. Can easily monetize their fame without scamming. Like you can still launch a coin and not rug, he said. Hayden goes on. He's saying there is a way to actually do meme coins where you don't rug, but it seems like it's kind of a lemon market.
- [47:19]
David Hoffman
Anyone who doesn't want to rug a meme coin doesn't launch. Doesn't launch. Yeah.
- [47:24]
Ryan Sean Adams
So when's your meme coin coming out, Dave?
- [47:26]
David Hoffman
Is that never? We do have Dave Dow out there of 200 good Daves. That's a good call to action. I haven't done a Dave Dao. Call to action. If your name Dave David Dawood. Davide. Any derivative of David, hit me up on Twitter so I can add you to Davedao. We have 200 strong Davids are going.
- [47:42]
Ryan Sean Adams
To run pull everyone else. Huh? That's what you want to support David?
- [47:46]
David Hoffman
We've actually tried. Not anyone different Davids have tried to launch a David coin and all the other Davids are like we don't want it.
- [47:53]
Ryan Sean Adams
You have to have consensus among the.
- [47:55]
David Hoffman
Davids before you launch.
- [47:57]
Ryan Sean Adams
Speaking of consensus, this was a non consensus move. Okay, Tom Lee, Bitmine debt. He's still buying ether, still buying a ton of ether. All time highs in terms of the amount he owed. I saw this week that he is now staking over a billion dollars worth of ether.
- [48:13]
David Hoffman
Nice.
- [48:13]
Ryan Sean Adams
Just a billion. That's just Tom Lee in Bitmine. But this week he invests 200 million not in buying ether the asset, but investing in Mr. Beast Media. That's right, the YouTube creator, Mr. Beast, one of the most popular creators on the planet. He is setting aside 200 million through the DAT to invest in Mr. Beast. People asked Tom Lee, why are you doing this? I thought you were an Ethereum debt. This is Tom Lee in his own words as to why he's doing this.
- [48:42]
Tom Lee
As you know, Bitmine is the largest Ethereum treasury company in the world, the largest holder of Ethereum. And it's our view that Ethereum, which is a smart contract platform, is the future of finance, where digitalization of not only dollars, but stocks and equities is going to take place. And over time, that really blurs what is a service versus what's digital money. And that's where a collaboration and investment into Beast Industries makes sense. As you know, Mr. Beast is the number one content creator in the world. His content is watched more than for each of his videos. 252 million views a month, which is more than the Super Bowl. And really, he is probably the iconic person for Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and arguably Millennial. So he is probably one of the most important creators in the world.
- [49:38]
Ryan Sean Adams
So that is why David. Now do you understand?
- [49:40]
David Hoffman
No, that wasn't. He never explained it. He explained. I was, I was. That was a good setup. That was a good setup to. For him to tell me and follow through with what, how it can Synergy this year.
- [49:54]
Ryan Sean Adams
Yeah, I kind of think Tom Lee just had an opportunity and really wanted to buy into Mr. Beast Media, which, like, who wouldn't? And so this was a vehicle for doing that.
- [50:05]
David Hoffman
Yeah, like, the last time he did this, he invested in the World Coin vehicle and then it like immediately did an 8x and then he just pocketed that gains and like, I would presume maybe put it into Eth either after that. So if he's making opinionated investments in like Mr. Beast and then he has a liquidity event, he can buy Ether from that, then. Okay, sure.
- [50:24]
Ryan Sean Adams
Unless Mr. Beast. Do you think Mr. Beast is going to start chilling eth? You think beast becomes Mr. Beast becomes eth Maxi and he's just, you know, proselytizing.
- [50:34]
David Hoffman
You know what? I. I love Mr. Beast. I actually, I watch Mr. Beast Guy and like, I mean, like, I kind of feel like I'm watching Brainrot and I feel like I'm a zoomer, so I lose like 5 to 10 years off of myself. But like, yeah, I'm like zoned out watching him throw cash around at these, like, very viral. Yeah, Mr.
- [50:53]
Ryan Sean Adams
Beast is great.
- [50:54]
David Hoffman
Especially.
- [50:54]
Ryan Sean Adams
Maybe there's some. Maybe there's some synergy. And I mean, Tom Lee, I mean, say what you like, he is buying a lot of Eth and he is certainly investing in things he's bullish on. So he's bullish on Mr. Beast. Maybe we can get him to say nice things about Ether. We'll see.
- [51:08]
David Hoffman
All right.
- [51:09]
Ryan Sean Adams
Right.
- [51:09]
David Hoffman
Moving back on Chain Ryan World Liberty Financial. What is that, do you remember what that was supposed to be?
- [51:15]
Ryan Sean Adams
Donald Trump and company, his family, their Stablecoin. And also wasn't it a borrowing lending protocol? Didn't they like fork aave, something like this?
- [51:24]
David Hoffman
That was always the original plan is they were supposed to fork AAVE and be a borrowing and lending application. So in that same vein, they have launched World Liberty Markets, a borrowing and lending platform meant to expand the usage of the USD1 and WFLI tokens along with other things that you can deposit like ether and stuff like that. Is it aave? No, it's Dolomite, which is a borrowing lending application that is founded by one of the advisors to World Liberty Markets, this guy Corey, who's got a cryptopunk who looks very similar to mine, the founder of Dolomite. And he got, he became one of the World Liberty Financial advisors. And now World Liberty Financial is using is integrated with Dolomite, which is up 17% on the week, 12% on the week.
- [52:13]
Ryan Sean Adams
Yeah, I mean I think I always thought they were going to do this. I think why it's interesting in the context of this week is Elizabeth Warren really, really, really, really hates this and is trying to prevent wlfi, it's bank app, it's trying to file for a banking license. It's trying like Warren is trying to tie some of this language of Trump can't do this and Liberty Finance can't get a banking license into the Clarity bill. And that's why it all gets complicated. To your point earlier, it would be really nice if all parties involved could just kind of divest their direct interests of this sort of thing. So we don't have Trump meme coins and World Liberty Finance and Stablecoins in.
- [52:55]
David Hoffman
The Trump bribery things up.
- [52:58]
Ryan Sean Adams
But I don't think we're gonna get that. David. Polygon is making some interesting moves on the week. They acquire two companies, CoinMe and Sequence for I believe $250 million. What are these companies? They are regulated payments companies. Okay, so this is CoinMe in particular has a US license, fiat on ramp and off ramp and a retail network. And Sequence is an enterprise wallet in orchestration infrastructure. What they're doing here is Polygon has become a tempo. Pretty pretty. Yeah, a tempo. Basically Tempo of course is, you know, Stripe's upcoming Stablecoin chain. Polygon has had a ton of stablecoin transactions in traffic. It's one of the largest ones actually. If you kind of look at the numbers, even in terms of Stripe, stablecoins and settlement, that's happening to a Large degree on Polygon. And this is them going, I guess, would you call that up market? They are verticalizing, really in that they are getting the other stacks that they were missing, which is the on ramp, off ramp, and bridge type stock stuff. So this is Polygon saying our pivot really is a stablecoin chain and we're going to be sort of a tempo or a circle arc or some of the other competitors in this space. What do you think of this move?
- [54:18]
David Hoffman
Yeah, my first thought is that it's just very clear that there is no such thing as a generalized layer two anymore. Like, you have to be opinionated. You have to verticalize, you have to choose a vector, a sector, and you have to penetrate deeply into it in order to be a chain at all in these days days. And so that's kind of an app chain. Basically everything is an app chain. Or at least like. Or the apps must be built by the chains. Like the what. What chain is launching and being like, come build on us. Like, no, like, Mega Mafia is like this native app ecosystem built on mega eth. Monad is incubating its own apps. World has all the world mini apps. Zello has, Zell has mini pay in all of their apps. Like, everyone's kind of got their own verticalized app app ecosystem. And it makes sense that Polygon is putting this pretty. Like, it's not like in the code of the chain, but it's in the code of the company in a sense. Like, what I mean by that is, like, it's a formal, intimate part of the actual company of Polygon and what their goals are.
- [55:18]
Ryan Sean Adams
And so that kind of just makes sense as an alt L1 or EVM or like L2. You can't just copy clone Ethereum L1 DeFi and just be like, yeah, we're that, but we have cheaper gas fees.
- [55:29]
David Hoffman
Yes. I think Solana was the last person. Last chain person. Huh.
- [55:32]
Ryan Sean Adams
To be able to do that.
- [55:33]
David Hoffman
To. To be able to do that.
- [55:34]
Ryan Sean Adams
Yeah, yeah, that's a good take. Um, David, do you see what's going on with X this week? So two things. One, they're doing smart cash tags, and two, they are restricting API access to Kaido. You talk about those?
- [55:50]
David Hoffman
Yeah. So Nikita Beer has been the subject of a lot of crypto Twitter's ire this last week, mainly for kind of like, like nuking a lot of the algorithm around crypto Twitter content.
- [56:03]
Ryan Sean Adams
But he's product lead X. He.
- [56:05]
David Hoffman
Yeah, he's a product lead X and he's also an advisor to the Solana foundation, which this relates to both of these two stories. So smart cash tags, what are they? They're these interactive tickers. So the way that a ticker used to work on Twitter is you would do like a dollar sign btc and then you would click into that ticker and then it would show you all tweets. It would filter all the tweets of the universe by tweets that had that same ticker in it. So you could see what people were talking about about that same financial asset. That works in tradfi where there's a very narrow number of tickers that are all kind of orderly and non overlapping because there's not that many. Doesn't work in the crypto context. Do you remember blinks, Ryan? We talked about blinks like once or twice. Blockchain links, something that was pioneered by the Solana Foundation. This uses blinks, this uses Solana blinks. And so it connects to a token on Solana or you would presume on, on an Ethereum layer two. You see the base token ticker right there and it'll show you the chart and the other financial information of a specific asset. So even if there are multiple assets with the same ticker, you type the ticker and then a little pop up shows up and you choose the asset. Kind of like how you do in TradingView you and then it gives you more information. And so it's not just about filtering tweets at this point. It's being framed as this everything app. So social markets and also payments.
- [57:31]
Ryan Sean Adams
Well, it's because it's not just showing you the chart, it's not just information you could buy and sell. Like in defi. Using this.
- [57:37]
David Hoffman
Right? Is in this markup.
- [57:38]
Ryan Sean Adams
Yeah, buy, buy and sell. Right. That's the, that's the blink part, which is pretty cool because what does this turn X into? Kind of a crypto super app, sort of a financial super app. I mean that's the direction of travel here, here.
- [57:51]
David Hoffman
Did you know that X has money transmitter licenses in 12 different states and is also in the back end building X Money? So you would in theory just be able to connect this later to like swaps and custody and payments.
- [58:03]
Ryan Sean Adams
It's a dark horse for a wallet competitor and also for a stripe competitor, to be honest. That's not the only thing they did though. There was a restriction of Kaido in infofi. What's this?
- [58:14]
David Hoffman
Okay, so they revised their API policies to basically ban infofi products specifically. I don't know if you share the same opinion, Ryan, but I Think infofi has completely plagued Twitter to really incent noise, not signal. And.
- [58:31]
Ryan Sean Adams
Well, talk about what you mean by that. You're talking about Kaido primarily, right? As. Because there's other infofi, like prediction markets are infofi. I don't think that's where your ire is. Right. And that's not what they're restricting access to. It's things like Kaido that basically.
- [58:44]
David Hoffman
Specifically.
- [58:45]
Ryan Sean Adams
Yeah, yeah.
- [58:45]
David Hoffman
They provide it.
- [58:47]
Ryan Sean Adams
What do they do? What does Kaido do?
- [58:49]
David Hoffman
They basically, like, provide income for people to produce engagement about a particular project or something. And so if projects want, like distribution or awareness or people to tweet about them, they will create an incentive campaign in order to do that. And this is very, like, we kind of think that this is very common in places like India and Africa where, like, a lot of people are using this as income to go tweet about something. But it's completely distortive. It distorts this. The noise. It creates slop. Yeah. Yes. Terrible. It just degrades the value of Twitter as an information ecosystem because it incensed noise, basically. So they just cut off the APIs and the Kaito token is down something like 20%. It looks like Kaido got exploited.
- [59:37]
Ryan Sean Adams
The aggregators have all the power in this type of situation.
- [59:41]
David Hoffman
Yeah. And so, like, I'm not upset here. Like, my Twitter experience has been meaningfully degraded. I'm not crying whatsoever. Yeah.
- [59:50]
Ryan Sean Adams
BitGo IPO that is coming soon. So they have filed. This is the next big crypto ICO. About $2 billion is what they're targeting now. Bitgo is a crypto custodian company. They've been here forever. They've had some wrapped bitcoin type products as well. But primarily the use case is custody. They have about a hundred billion crypto assets, digital assets, in custody right now. So it revealed the terms that is going to IPO at some point in the future this quarter is what it looks like. So that's the next one.
- [60:21]
David Hoffman
They're raising at a 1.9 to $2 billion on a fully diluted basis, expecting to raise around $200 million. So pretty chunky raise with a pretty chunky valuation.
- [60:32]
Ryan Sean Adams
This is cool. As we close this out and talk about markets we're excited about. Depali market was at the Golden Globe. Globe. Okay. So the Golden Globes, a cultural moment for those who participate in.
- [60:44]
David Hoffman
In this during a cultural epicenter. Not my cultural epicenter, but many people's cultural epicenters of like, arts and culture, you know.
- [60:52]
Ryan Sean Adams
Yeah.
- [60:53]
David Hoffman
What do the Golden Globes do. That's movies, right?
- [60:55]
Ryan Sean Adams
The Oscars are movies.
- [60:58]
David Hoffman
Golden Globes. What does the Golden Globes do?
- [61:02]
Ryan Sean Adams
We're really dialed into the Golden Globes.
- [61:04]
David Hoffman
Yeah, Cultural moments, awards, awards presented for excellence in international film and television. Film and television is what it is.
- [61:12]
Ryan Sean Adams
Film and tv. Yeah. And it wasn't just film. I guess it's a lesser Oscars, but also includes tv. Anyway, so during the Golden Globes where they announced who's going to win what award, what movies, what, what like films, this sort of thing. Polymarket was at the bottom, so I was predicting.
- [61:28]
David Hoffman
So they showed the odds ahead of time. And so they like, here are the candidates, they read out the candidates and then the polymarket market would show up with a polymarket logo at the Golden Globes. I mean, here are the odds that people are trading on about the polymarket.
- [61:39]
Ryan Sean Adams
Or about the Golden Globes in the momentum we've seen, I think on prediction markets, things like poly market this year has been pretty phenomenal. I mean, you got to see how this just continues. Right. The Maduro market was absolutely insane to watch at the time of its capture. I know you are watching this market right now. Iran's supreme leader, will he be out by January 31st? There's January 31st and there's. Every month there's a prediction of the probability that he was, he would be out. This has been spiking. This has shown some really interesting movement here lately. What's your take on this?
- [62:16]
David Hoffman
I have just been glued to this particular one, specifically Jan 31, which is down to sadly 10%. I want this to be a hundred percent. Kameny is a terrible person. We should remove him. In my opinion, as, as a leader and Trump is currently doing this. Is it a head fake? Is it not a head fake thing? That we don't really know. And so my eyes have, for the last like week, Ryan, have just been glued to this one particular market.
- [62:41]
Ryan Sean Adams
Is this speculation that it would be a Trump and Maduro type thing or is this inside revolution or is this he.
- [62:47]
David Hoffman
He gets a curse Information is that Trump, Trump yesterday started saying, oh, Iran has stopped the killing of the protesters. They said they're going to stop the execution. And everyone was watching him and was like, what are you talking about? They are mowing protesters down. Why are you changing your tune all of a sudden? And then, and then the reaction was, oh, this is a head fake. There is signs of fighter, fighter pilots flying over the Iran Iraq border. So Trump is just head faking. And then this morning he says like, oh, they Called off the strike. There was going to be a strike, but they called it off because they didn't have the assurances that they would actually be able to have a clean attack on the regime. And so they called it off. But now some people are saying that that's a head fake because they wanted to scare Iran into going into their secret bunkers. What that they know that they were going to do if they were ever attacked by America. And so they just trigger them to go into their secret bunkers. And now they know where their secret bunkers are. And so it's actually. That's a head fake. No one knows what the hell is happening. No one knows nonetheless.
- [63:51]
Ryan Sean Adams
But you can participate in this market.
- [63:53]
David Hoffman
You can participate in this market.
- [63:54]
Ryan Sean Adams
Okay, so 34%. The odds he would be out by the end of 2026. That was just the beginning of January and it spiked all the way up to 66%. Now it's at 47%. David, you like those odds? Would you participate on the, on the yes side or the no side for this market at 47%.
- [64:13]
David Hoffman
Oh, dude, I. So I had money in the January 31st market.
- [64:17]
Ryan Sean Adams
I had it for short term trading. This. You're not doing the one year, huh?
- [64:21]
David Hoffman
No, dude, because, like, the window of opportunity is now. But I've, I've. People who have been following me on Twitter have known that I have just been incessantly tweeting about the importance of removing the Iranian regime. And as a result of that, a lot of Iranians have been in my DMs telling me about the very limited conversations that they've had with their families in Iran. And the last 48 hours, 24 hours, have the sentiment has shifted very negatively. The amount of death that has been reported is extremely significant. So it seems like the morale of protesters has gotten and gone quite down, combined with Trump's not attacking Iran. I think morale is very, very low.
- [65:02]
Ryan Sean Adams
It is just surreal to see geopolitical events being reflected in price charts. And that's really where we are in 2026. Like something like this that is so heavy and also provides public service in the form of information. Right. You sort of know what the sentiment is, what the probability is at any particular time. But these are really important things that are happening around the world, for sure.
- [65:26]
David Hoffman
Yeah. I think that is going to be a cultural theme probably for the rest of the 2020 IS. IS. I think a lot of people just find it unsavory that there's money and government.
- [65:37]
Ryan Sean Adams
Somebody's making money on this market. Either way.
- [65:39]
David Hoffman
Yes. Yeah, either way. And so, like some, I think a lot of a large swath of society is just not ready to understand that there can be a relationship between money and, like, people's lives. And that is going like this is a point that Haseeb made on the most recent chopping block episode is just like, there's a lot of just, like, cultural taboo, and it's about making money when it comes to, like, events like this.
- [66:01]
Ryan Sean Adams
I gotta tell you, as a media consumer, right. Rather than read another 10,000 headlines or Twitter opinions. Right. To be able to see this in a chart is so much more valuable to understand the probability and state of the world of what various outcomes could be and how they might shake out.
- [66:16]
David Hoffman
Yeah.
- [66:17]
Ryan Sean Adams
Guess we got to end there. Into the frontier we go. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in. But we are headed west. It's not for everybody, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.