Loading summary
Transcript271 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign station is the first week of September. We're September 2025. I've got my co host David Hoffman back. I know you missed him. He was at Burning Man. David, okay, not less than 24 hours after you left, we had an ETH all time high, man.
- [00:18]
B
Dude, how funny is that?
- [00:20]
A
I want to celebrate that with you.
- [00:21]
B
I can just call it. We're like, okay, I'm going on some wild, crazy adventure. ETH is going to do something. And it's just so consistent to this point. That's pretty immaculate because you were kind.
- [00:31]
A
Of off the grid. You're a Burning Man.
- [00:33]
B
I was gone.
- [00:34]
A
Okay? At what point did you know that we hit an all Time high at all? It was probably gone by then.
- [00:39]
B
I was. We were watching. Me and Ben Lakoff from Bakeless Ventures, we were in Reno, driving to Burning man, losing service as ETH was flirting with All Time High.
- [00:49]
A
That had to be hard.
- [00:50]
B
Yeah, hard time.
- [00:51]
A
Lose service.
- [00:52]
B
We. We lost service and eth was like 4780 or something. And then I think I got, I like, was it. I got like a random bit of service on the Playa, like four days into it and what did I see?
- [01:05]
A
It was already over.
- [01:06]
B
I saw, I saw some message from the Discord saying somebody was like, oh, congrats on ETH All Time High. The message was like two days old or something.
- [01:13]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But unfortunately, by the time you got that, if you checked prices, it probably would have been like, you know, 4200 or something like that. Anyway, it was there. So how was Burning man though?
- [01:22]
B
Dude, Burning man is probably one of the greatest if you can survive being dirty and sleeping in a tent for an extended amount of period. Yeah, Burning man is like an incredible experience.
- [01:33]
A
Okay, this is you in the sandstorm. I was seeing all these images of like sand happening. And it was the sandiest Burning man ever. I was like, oh, David's in for it.
- [01:41]
B
I talked to like Burning Men people who had gone for like 20 times and people said that it was this storm that came in and wrecked the burn in the first day. Day was the biggest storm that they had ever seen. And they were. It was like 60 mile an hour winds. I was holding onto what we call tent city. And it's like the just like piping that holds up tarps that gives you some shade so you're not, you know, burning up in the sun. And so the tarps are just massive sails. And I was holding onto this piping to make sure it didn't blow away. And I got lifted up off of the ground.
- [02:09]
A
Oh, my God.
- [02:09]
B
Yeah.
- [02:10]
A
That's kind of fun.
- [02:11]
B
Yeah. Was it kind of fun to be. It was. No, it was a top three crisis moment where, like, the tarp started ripping and we all had to strike tent city. So that means we could just take everything. And so we built all day, and then we had to take it down because of a storm. Then we built again the next day, and then there was another storm. Not as bad, but more rain. And then it was muddy, and then there was a third storm the next day. So this Burning man got off to a very rocky start, but it all came together. It came together.
- [02:34]
A
So tell me. Tell me something you learned and something you learned maybe about yourself.
- [02:39]
B
It was definitely the most, like, hyper social. I've been like, usually I can spend time with people for like, six hours at most, and then I need to, like, go be alone. I did 10 days, and it was farthest.
- [02:53]
A
You. You're actually, like, more on the introvert type spectrum, right?
- [02:56]
B
Yeah, yeah. And people. So, like, yeah, people meet me at a conference and they expect me to be all chatty, and I'm like, bro, I'm over sensitive, over stimulated right now. But, yeah, it was great.
- [03:06]
A
The.
- [03:06]
B
The camp was great. The. The cool thing about Burning man is it's very, like, tribalistic in the sense that not like crypto Twitter tribes, but, like, you're living with a group of 50 to 100 people. You are making decisions together, you are eating together, you are adventuring together. You are having to, like, do, like, make tough calls together. And it's like living in a tribe. You all have work to do because there are shifts and you do that. And it's like the most, like, like, primal, ancestral, like, experience how we were.
- [03:35]
A
Meant to live, though, right? It's kind of how humanity has done things forever, except for a couple thousand years of the modern period. Right. And this is why we feel so unnatural most of the time. And it's increasingly feeling unnatural with all of the. The digitization in our lives. Right? And this is. People joke.
- [03:52]
B
People joke at Bernie man that Burning man is the real world and the world that we're currently in is the default world.
- [03:58]
A
Yeah.
- [03:58]
B
But it was great.
- [03:59]
A
Yeah, that's kind of cool.
- [04:00]
B
I encourage everyone to go. There's also, like. There's a lot of big overlap. Venn diagram between crypto and Burning Man. There's, like, a shared ethos there. I put that into an article. If people ever want to read that.
- [04:09]
A
Let'S put it in the show. Notes. Let's see that. Meanwhile, though, David, we got to get people up to speed on the week.
- [04:14]
B
In crypto, including you, because I got back yesterday, so I have no idea what I'm doing reading out the news.
- [04:19]
A
Well, let me give you a few things. So first we're going to talk about the mystery of the eth treasuries. All right, David, they've been buying so much eth, incredible accumulation. We're going to look at the last 90 days of accumulation. But why is ETH still down? And also, David, M Navs are down. Okay, we got big Eth Treasuries and the M Navs are below one right now. Tom Lee, though, says, have faith. I want to play you a bull clip of Tom Lee. Get your response on that. He says there's a way for us to hit 60k. All right, we just got to wait. We just got to have faith.
- [04:47]
B
Also, I come back and World Liberty Financial, the token is now trading. Apparently Trump's crypto wealth, crypto paper wealth has flipped his real estate estate wealth, which is just a crazy, crazy thing that, that exists. So we'll talk about everything about the World Liberty Financial and how much money Trump made. And also, United States citizens can now use polymarket. It's not illegal anymore. We can all take down our VPNs. That's pretty exciting. I'm pretty stoked about that.
- [05:15]
A
We got some big updates on tokenized stocks this week as well. Ondo and Galaxy Shipping, some things. Also, some more details on. You remember that stripe layer one we've been talking about, I think before you left Tempo? Okay, we got some more details on that, including an announcement post. Also, this is really exciting. This kind of happened. We might soon be able to buy spot Bitcoin and spot ETH on the New York Stock Exchange.
- [05:39]
B
How does that work?
- [05:40]
A
I'll tell you.
- [05:41]
B
Not the ETFs, not the ETFs.
- [05:43]
A
This is something else.
- [05:43]
B
That's what an ETF was for.
- [05:44]
A
No, it is. But we might also get real Spot Bitcoin, Spot ETH, ETFs. Not ETFs. Excuse me, the actual asset itself on these exchanges, both the NASDAQ and New York Stock Exchange. So all that and more coming up. But first, David, I know you are dying to tell us about Sanctum. What is our friends and sponsors over at Spanktum at Sanctum. What are they up to?
- [06:09]
B
Uh, first, I, David Hoffman, want you, listener, to know that if you are holding soul and you are not staking it, you are being a mega Idiot. Our friends and sponsors over at Sanctum want to help with that. Uh, Sanctum is the fourth largest Solana Protocol, one of the leaders in Solana staking. They give you the best performance on your stake Sol, so the value of your sol does not inflate away. They have better historic yields than Jito Soul and msol. And and in addition to all that, they're also setting a new standard for transparency in the space. They are only one of two companies to score a perfect 4040 on the Blockworks token transparency framework. So investors can get assurances about the details of the project that they hold. If you hold their cloud token, there is a report, bankless CC slash Sanctum Report, a comprehensive report that will give you a very clear picture about how exactly their business is doing. I appreciate the notion that we are getting clarity about the projects that have tokens in this space and getting a peek into the inner workings. There is a link in the show notes to see all of that and learn more about about Sanctum.
- [07:14]
A
You got to stake your soul or you lose your soul, right? David, am I right about that? Don't want to lose your soul. Let's talk about prices. On the week we got bitcoin, it is 109k I believe. What's. What's this on the week at the.
- [07:28]
B
Current price of recording, $109,400 down 3%. I think there's a big question going on. I come back to crypto Twitter Ryan and I see two things. I see tokenized Pokemon cards and I see the subject of seasonality for bitcoin. Yeah, September seasonality apparently is bad.
- [07:48]
A
September, they always say that. They say that down timber basically. And then October is next like so October. So October, November, December have been up have been pretty good for crypto, especially during bullshit years. But Septembers have always been bad for some reason, allegedly.
- [08:05]
B
So the average bitcoin median September return is negative 3.1%. Ethereum is at negative 12.5%. Ben Cohen has a couple tweets iterating sentiment that's pretty similar to this. He says historically bitcoin finds a low in September of the post happening year and then bounces off of it into the Markel cycle top that occurs in Q4. So Bank Cowen implying a market top in Q4. And then he also has a tweet for ETH. He thinks ETH is going to drop to about $3,600. Oh, and then, and then, and then Ryan goes into price discovery afterwards going into October, obviously. So if you're into the seasonality thing. This is kind of what Ben Cowan is. Is pointing at. If you're not into the seasonality thing.
- [08:46]
A
I'm not into it. I'm not into it.
- [08:48]
B
Well, then I've got some tweets for you as well. So we have Van Spencer, who tweets out, according to bears, there are only five calendar days per year that you should be long.
- [08:58]
A
Yeah.
- [08:59]
B
Sell in May and go away. Summer is a terrible time to be long. September is bad, October is bad. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Vance saying basically this whole seasonality thing is a farce. Just be long. Which I think is. That's also, I think, Ryan Sean Adams sentiment. I agree.
- [09:13]
A
I agree. I like why. I mean, we're gonna look at astrological signs. I mean, a lot of this feels like superstition.
- [09:20]
B
People will do that.
- [09:23]
A
All right, man. I just choose to ignore that. I don't want to see 30,600eth. But if we have to go there first, then fine. I'm still. I still remain bullish. And speaking of that ETH price on.
- [09:33]
B
The week, are we up or are we down $4,300? Down 4.5%. But it's cool that like eth is at $4,300 and we're down like almost 5% of the week. I'm. Plus we were higher.
- [09:46]
A
See, if it happens, if the bull market happens too fast, David, it's actually bearish.
- [09:50]
B
I 100% agree with that.
- [09:51]
A
That means it could end this year. And I think now that we're getting some downtember action, maybe it goes a little further. That's going to set us up for an elongated and extended bull run into 20, 26. That's what my astrological signs are telling me right now in this moment.
- [10:10]
B
The low and slow is good. We like that.
- [10:12]
A
Low and slow. All right, so yeah, we did cross an all time high, David, when you were out, but I want to give you some more hopium. All right. From our Lord and savior, the man who came in and bought just incredible amounts of eth. We'll talk more about his ETH buys. Sir Tom Lee. Okay, so this clip was going around. Yes, sir. We have to.
- [10:33]
B
He's above the Ethereum.
- [10:36]
A
$5 billion. You get knighted, you get your sur title. Okay. And he is definitely there. He's got some price targets. I'm going to play this clip. It's a long one. Okay. So you know, stay tuned. And it's in Tom Lee's. You know, he's. He speaks very like. He doesn't he doesn't put a lot of expression in his words, it's just very matter of fact. But this is the bull case and some prices that he charts out for eth. I'm going to play this and get your reaction.
- [10:59]
C
Well, here's ethereum's price since 2018 and as you can see there's two periods I'm shading here. These are called bases and in Wyckoff's methodologies they say the bigger the base the bigger the breakout. And what they mean by that is that you're creating a lot of potential energy as as a stock or a network asset basis and then eventually leads to a breakout. Well, let's look at that breakout. In 2020 that breakout took place and Ethereum went from $90 to $48.66 or 54 times increase. Well the low point here in this base was 1385. So with this breakout we're expecting an upside move. Is it potentially 54x? I'm not sure but that's what happened last time. Another way to think about Ethereum is the Ethereum to Bitcoin ratio. And in our view the tail ones I'm talking about argue for an all time high in this ratio. The 8 year average Ethereum to Bitcoin ratio is 0.04790 and it's currently 0.04032 meaning we're below the long term average. The all time high in this ratio was 0.080727. Of course it started off higher but I'm talking about the 21, 2021 all time high. So we think that not only should Ethereum recover to the long term average, it should probably get to the all time high ratio and arguably exceed it. As we start talking about Ethereum acting as the chain for both Wall street to build its payment rails and the financial system as well as AI. So let's think about what that means for price. So I have a grid here. On the left side is bitcoin price levels and then going across our various levels of the Ethereum to Bitcoin ratio, our year end target, this is from the fund strat side for Bitcoin is $250,000. And if you look at the a year average, okay then you can see the range of prices for Ethereum using this ratio and different levels of Bitcoin. And here's the 2021 high. And as you can see at a $250,000 Bitcoin you get to somewhere between $12,000 and $22,000 value per Ethereum token. But that's just a ratio recovery. If you look at the replacement cost of payment rails and the banking system, that gets you to an implied value of ethereum of around 60,000. And that puts the ratio at roughly 0.2500 Ethereum to Bitcoin ratio. And as you can see, that's how you get to $62,000 per Ethereum token.
- [14:02]
A
There you go. That's as simple as that, David. That's how you get to $62,000 per ETH token, I should say. I mean a lot of people are quoting. That's the top side of his range. He's not calling for that necessarily. He's saying right here the range. If you just take the ETH bitcoin ratio and we get back to average and bitcoin goes to 250k, we get 12k ETH. If we get our 20, 21 high in the ETH Bitcoin ratio, we get 21 or 22k. So his range there is 12k to 22k. Not necessarily by the end of the year, but I don't know, maybe he.
- [14:35]
B
Said that Bitcoin, his projected bitcoin end of year price is 250.
- [14:39]
A
Okay, so he's saying end of the year.
- [14:40]
B
He, he didn't explicitly say therefore my expected ETH ratio end of your price. He didn't continue that. But it does, like there is a. There does kind of follow that. He does say that.
- [14:49]
A
Yes. And then he goes, but up above 62k which.
- [14:55]
B
Okay, you know, he's doing two things. He's combining TA and doing the whole Wyckoff, like, you know, base thing.
- [15:02]
A
Yeah.
- [15:02]
B
And then he's also making an opinionated stance. And then he about like if Ethereum captures X percent of commerce and AI, like, like agentic commerce, then you just add on to. He's. So he's combining two different strategies here, of course.
- [15:15]
A
But that's what everyone does in crypto. I feel like they combine a little bit of kind of long, more long term type TA call it. Right. The Ben Cowan type of thing. Right. This is just flavored with Tom Lee, flavored with his characteristic bullishness and now in particular his eth bullishness. So when I saw that this I thought, okay, I mean of course 62k eth, I mean that starts to get into. That doesn't sound reasonable. Tom Lee, how do you get that number? But when you look at sort of the long term ratio and the possibilities and the building momentum, that's what he said, like, you know, we've been three or four years flat, and now we've broken out of that. Right. 12k, 22k. I can see that range being totally possible now. I don't know if we hit that by the end of the year. We got to get through. Down, down. Timber. Of course. But what do you think about Tom Lee's bull case?
- [16:08]
B
I mean, the. The whole Wyckoff accumulation that he started with at the very beginning, I resonate with because that was where I got my, like, ship. Wyckoff.
- [16:17]
A
Yeah, Wyckoff.
- [16:18]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what we were looking at all throughout 2018 through 2020, when eth was flat between 100 and $300 for like, two years. Yeah. It's actually crazy that we are twice that long. And so he goes like, okay. And then there was a 454x increase from $90 to $4900. Could that happen again? Well, the Wyckoff accumulation is twice as long. And so even if you say that like, okay, you can't go 54x from $4000. Sure, I'll take that. Like, that probably should be base case. Like, you can't do another 54x into infinity. But the Wyckoff accumulation is twice as long, and we've done it once before. So there's. There is something to the notion that, like, it has coiled up for quite a long time.
- [17:01]
A
Right? Yeah. I mean, it sounds possible to me. All of this sounds possible to me. And the one thing I like about Tom Lee. Well, one of the many things I like about Tom. Sir. Tom Lee is that he is backing this up. He's putting his money where his TA is, I guess, or where his price predictions are. And he is buying astronomical mountains.
- [17:19]
B
And he licks his finger, sticks it in the air. He says, $62,000.
- [17:23]
A
No, no, no. It's better than that. Oh, by the way, there's a rumor going around while you were out that Tom Lee is going to be on Joe Rogan.
- [17:29]
B
Yeah, I came back.
- [17:30]
A
Just a rumor.
- [17:31]
B
Just a rumor.
- [17:32]
A
Just a rumor. I can't even.
- [17:35]
B
That would. That would actually be material.
- [17:36]
A
I can't even predict what that conversation would be like. Tom Lee and Joe. Joe Rogan. It's like, just like. It just doesn't seem to fit. But I guess we should play a.
- [17:44]
B
Drinking game for how many times Tom Lee says eth versus bitcoin? No, I think he says eth probably 200 times on the show.
- [17:52]
A
I hope he explains it to that. That would be very Bullish. But then I could see 62K that, that, that's in, in the cards ratio. How are we doing on the week?
- [18:02]
B
Below 0.04, which is sad. 0.03928. ETH is just retrace a little bit.
- [18:07]
A
But down a little bit. Not too bad. Yeah. And then we are below a trillion. Total crypto market cap 3.87. David, you must have noticed too while you were out coming back, gold has hit an all time high.
- [18:18]
B
Yeah, it is. This is actually kind of scary to me. When gold, gold, when go gold goes in parabola mode. I'm like, that's scary.
- [18:25]
A
Yeah. And that's what it's doing. I mean it's kind of store value asset. This is the Ray Dalio thing, you know, this is Balaji's take, which was somewhat interesting. It's basically gold is now the store of value for central banks, whereas digital assets, crypto is the store of value for individuals. And so basically what you're seeing is central banks are stacking and buying and accumulating gold and individuals are using crypto assets primarily as their store of value.
- [18:54]
B
Totally checks out which central banks is buying all of this gold. Who's moving the gold price?
- [18:59]
A
A ton of them. I'm China, Russia.
- [19:01]
B
Yeah.
- [19:02]
A
A lot of this has happened post the freezing of Russian banks. Yep, yep. And so this is what you get. Gold, all time highs. Alrighty then. David, let's talk a little bit about the Treasuries. I just want to recap the last like 30 to 90 days of Ethereum in particular because it's had an incredible 90 days with respect to its institutional accumulation story here. This is a chart of ETF flows. Blue is Ethereum. Look at this. Look at May.
- [19:29]
B
That's a lot of blue.
- [19:30]
A
June, July, August, look, August, it's all blue.
- [19:35]
B
It's like 90% blue in August.
- [19:37]
A
These are net inflows, I should say. And ETH has just led. It has dominated for the past three months and even into the past.
- [19:45]
B
For the summer. For the summer, yeah.
- [19:47]
A
This is crypto. Treasury companies, purchases by assets, Bitcoin, of course.
- [19:54]
B
Ryan, I give you permission to use the F word right here, Right?
- [19:58]
A
It's fantastic, isn't it? It's. Yeah, it's incredible. Like from June, we're talking about dominate. I know what you meant. I know what you mean. July, ETH was still smaller, but August ETH dominated in terms of treasures.
- [20:14]
B
It's not even close. There's no other colors.
- [20:16]
A
Not even close. This is a tweet from Crypto Gucci bit mine is accumulating 20 times crypto.
- [20:22]
B
Gucci.
- [20:23]
A
Gucci. What? What did I say? Gucci. Yeah, 20 times fast, whatever. 20 times faster than MicroStrategy ever did. So this is Bitmine. This is of course, Sir Tom Lee. He is doing this much faster. This is a log chart. A little bit deceptive here.
- [20:38]
B
Yeah, a little bit.
- [20:39]
A
Until you realize it's a log chart. But it is a log chart. And look at the Bitmine line being.
- [20:45]
B
Well above 10% of MicroStrategy is still pretty large given how long Saylor has been buying Bitcoin.
- [20:51]
A
Yeah. What's the way to say this? Bitmine has done what, like in 60 days, what took MicroStrategy how many, like four years to do? Three or four years to do in terms of percent of supply is absolutely incredible.
- [21:04]
B
Not only Tom Lee though, but Ether machine also bought $654 million of ETH through a private transaction. Yeah. So it brings the total holdings in nearly 500,000 ETH, almost half a million ETH as it prepares for a NASDAQ listing later this year. Uh, so yeah, Ether Machine not yet actually being traded, which is kind of interesting. Uh, and then also, you know who bought eth a bunch of ETH this year? Ryan or just recently?
- [21:30]
A
Yeah, who?
- [21:31]
B
Jack Ma. Jack Ma, the guy from Alibaba? Well, not technically Jack Ma, but a. There's like a series of events between this, like one Chinese financial group. Jack Ma owns 30% of it. He founded the thing that the current thing bought.
- [21:45]
A
Whatever.
- [21:46]
B
Young Fang Financial Group bought 10,000 ETH for 400 for $44 million to just put it in its corporate treasury.
- [21:53]
A
Yeah. This is a Hong Kong finance company and the reason that they said they bought it is as a strategic reserve asset, which is obviously narrative violation there.
- [22:02]
B
And then it jumped by 10% after the announcement, which means they have more capital.
- [22:07]
A
Yeah. One thing, David, as we kind of zoom out and we look at the strategic ETH treasuries here, all the ETH treasuries here we see Bitmine. The scoreboard is bit mine, clearly in the lead. 1.87 million. Sharplink Gaming 837,000 ETH. The ether machine under that, just under 500,000 ETH. So three horses in the top here that are still kind of competing. One thing I should draw your attention to though is this column right here, the MNAV column. Okay, so Bitmine right now, 1.05 lowest I've seen it on the week. Sharplink Gaming is under one at this point. In time. And there's some dispute as to whether it's actually under one. It depends on who's measuring how many.
- [22:51]
B
Shares equities have on the stock market, which is an insane thing to not know. Yeah, but the whole stock market, you don't know how many shares there are.
- [23:00]
A
It's. It's hard. I mean, so we've got different dashboards claiming different things and they're all like, pretty close. This is actually the official sharply dashboard that they publish. This might not even be accurate, but this has an NAV of 0.84. Okay, so there's that, there's. The strategic ETH reserve is 0.87. Blockworks was somewhere around there as well. So different dashboards are giving you different numbers. Here's another one.
- [23:24]
B
That is crazy.
- [23:26]
A
It looks like it may be one. It might be one or it might be under one at this point in time. So what's your take on that? I guess one thing it means is the ATMs, the at the market purchases where these treasury companies can basically dilute their shares in order to buy more eth. They're not going to be able to do this anymore with MNAV at one or below one. So that's a, that's an obvious takeaway. Some of that buying has to stop. But what do you think about these treasury vehicles? Like, are you worried about this? Do you think that this is a buy?
- [23:56]
B
I think we need more data, really, just with the ETH treasury companies, because it's still such a new phenomenon. But my current understanding of MNAV is it's kind of an oscillator in the sense that it will oscillate above and maybe, and I guess also now below one, and it'll oscillate around kind of like retail sentiment, retail froth around ether the asset. And so one potential path forward is like maybe we do this whole downtember October thing. Yeah, maybe. Maybe M navs even go way lower. Maybe they go to 0.8 or something and everyone gets wrecked. But then ether goes into price discovery and M navs go back up to 1.2, 1.5, maybe even 2, and it just oscillates back up and it's kind of just like a.
- [24:41]
A
It just overshoots.
- [24:42]
B
It's a sentiment checker on steroids.
- [24:44]
A
Sure.
- [24:44]
B
And so if retail is bullish eth then M navs go to 2, and then all of a sudden more eth goes on the balance sheet. And right now we're just in a depressed state. Like every. There was a Lot of froth like last month and now everyone's like okay let's, let's check if like we're all still good here and you know, let's like let the tide go out a little bit. Everyone's still wearing shorts. Okay, we're good. All send it back up and I kind of feel like that's where we are right now.
- [25:08]
A
Well if that's the case, if you're right about that, then it does seem like some of these treasury companies below one could be a big buying opportunity I would say. And I spoke to Joseph Shalom from Blackrock last year.
- [25:18]
B
That was a good, really good episode.
- [25:19]
A
You caught up with that. Yeah, these guys are long term oriented. It's Joseph Lubin, he's been holding ETH forever, right?
- [25:24]
B
Yeah.
- [25:25]
A
The two Ball Joes, man, they're going to get us there. Another thing that's happening with ETH treasury companies, Ethzilla I think that's number four, I think the largest ETH treasury company, they are deploying 100 million into DeFi. They're putting it into Ether Fi.
- [25:39]
B
The rest is why Ethereum is so cool is because you can, you can buy the asset and you can recirculate it into the economy that supports the asset. Ether's got 11 billion TVL. It's what is the largest risk taker. And I just love the fact that we can actually repurpose our capital. That's why Ether is so excellent as an asset is the capital efficiency. You can buy it and then you can do things with it to get more yield. Why are they putting it into Etherfi? Because Etherfy gives you some of the best yield on your ETH and yeah, so that's pretty cool. That makes sense to me. In addition to that, speaking of Etherfi, they're kind of having a moment right now. So Etherfy also has a credit card so you can deposit ETH into or like stables into your Ether 5 vault. It gets yield kind of similar to like yearn back in the day if you remember. But then you can swipe your Etherfry credit card and it spends the money straight out of your accounts on chain. So that's pretty sick.
- [26:32]
A
So you're bypassing a bank altogether.
- [26:34]
B
Bypassing a bank. Yep. It goes, it's just straight non custodial on chain. Pretty.
- [26:38]
A
So cool.
- [26:38]
B
Apparently Brazilians figured this out and Brazilian signups for Etherfy credit card is just like up into the right and this is basically like a, just a huge revenue stream for Ether Fi. So congrats to The Ethereum on the success like seeing actual adoption of their product plus deposits from ETH treasury companies is pretty cool.
- [26:58]
A
All these ETH treasury companies are looking for yield. It's hard not to think this is going to cause a defi and Ethereum defi echo boom as some of these large Treasuries go and look for yield on that lido. David, I don't know if you noticed this Lido, they launched a new earn product this week which is kind of cool. So this is them kind of going up market and it's basically blue chip earn potential for your Ethan. So this like thing is called Lido DVV and it gives you 4.5% APR on your ETH and it kind of distributes it to blue chip defi essentially. So with one click button you can get that yield. So I think blue chip ETH yield is going to be a big thing to watch.
- [27:36]
B
Yield, yield, yield, yield. Yeah, something that's also happening. Strategy. I'm going to put my eyes on strategy right now. Looking at a potential inclusion into the S&P 500 which is the end game.
- [27:48]
A
That's free money.
- [27:49]
B
That's for all treasury companies. If you get into The S&P 500 you just have the permanent infinite bid. Like if you're a hardcore bitcoiner, which I definitely appreciate these perspectives at times you kind of understand Microstrategy is like an attack on the United States dollar. Just short the dollar as much as possible, long bitcoin as much as possible. And if you get into the S&P 500 you get a free flow of capital to continue unlimited.
- [28:14]
A
It's just, it's all that passive yield. I don't know if you caught that.
- [28:17]
B
You're in 401ks ex because you're in all of the funds. So people have to buy microstrategy. And what does Michael Saylor do? He he translates the value of the MSCR stock into Bitcoin on the balance sheet. And if you're in The S&P 500 you just have free flows to constantly reload your ammo to buy more Bitcoin. Yeah, this is the end game for all treasuries. MicroStrategy is almost there.
- [28:39]
A
An east treasury could get there someday. I mean before you get to S and P you get to like Russell, which is another index of like what is, I don't know, thousands of companies. So they're all trying to get into these indices. That's why it's a power law winning game as well. David, the Nasdaq looks like it's tightening some of its disclosure requirements for DATs.
- [28:56]
B
Though I think they are very aware that there is a DAT bubble happening. There are quite a lot of DATs and there we're going down the long tail of the shitty assets in crypto and they're getting dads like story protocol is getting a dat. Yeah. So the headline reads, the NASDAQ is tightening scrutiny of companies raising cash to buy crypto. They are beginning to require shareholder votes for some deals and pushing for more disclosures. They may also suspend trading or delist firms that fail to comply, according to anonymous insiders mentioned by the publication. And so actually following the news, share prices of several DATs actually fell. So I think even owning these assets like know that there was probably some shenanigans going on and I am just perfectly okay with this.
- [29:40]
A
More disclosure is good. Uh, yep, thanks. Coming up next, David, we gotta talk about World Liberty Finance. It's a token just started trading and the Trump's crypto wealth. They are now like crypto mega billionaires and stacking in quite a hurry to talk about that. Also maybe this caused Gavin Newsom to want to launch a meme coin. All right, he actually said this?
- [29:59]
B
No thank you.
- [30:00]
A
I think he's going to do it regardless of what we said. We're going to cover all that and more. But before we do, got to thank the sponsors that made this possible including Uniswap Browser, Wallet, Mobile wallet. The best place to do defi including the Unichain. Go check them out.
- [30:13]
B
Ethereum's layer 2 universe is exploding with choices. But if you're looking for the best place to park and move your tokens, make your Next stop Unichain First Liquidity. Unichain hosts the most liquid Uniswap V4 deployment on any layer 2, giving you deeper pools for flagship pairs like ETH USDC. More liquidity means better prices, less slippage and smoother swaps. Exactly what traders crave. The numbers back it up. Unichain leads all layer 2s in touch. Total value locked for Uniswap V4. And it's not just deep, it's fast and fully transparent. Purpose built to be the home base for defi and cross chain liquidity. When it comes to costs, Uni chain is a no brainer. Transaction fees come in about 95% cheaper than Ethereum Mainnet, slashing the price of creating or accessing liquidity. Want to stay in the loop on unichain? Visit unichain.org or follow at Uni Chain on X for all the updates. Degen started as a tight knit community on Farcaster and organically grew into one of the top meme coins on base. What began as a simple idea tip anyone who joins the fun sparked an economy that turned into a movement. The community runs the show from the logo and the lore to funding and building ambitious ideas. Together over 1 million degens now power each other with their generosity, creativity and ability to get things done. At the center is the Degen Token. It rewards engagement, fuels tipping and drives the marketplace for builders and fans. That same energy gave rise to Degen Chain, a fast low cost layer 3 for new projects and now the Degen app. The easiest way to connect, earn and participate in decentralized social media with a built in wallet and real token utility and Degen the hat stays on. Join Degen and get on the app waitlist at www.degen.tips. the World Liberty Financial Token finally started trading. It's officially listed on major exchanges on both spot and perps on Monday. Started on September 1. There are a total supply of 100 billion tokens, which makes some of these maths pretty, pretty simple. 24.6 billion tokens were unlocked. So effectively 25% float. Not bad, not flat, not bad. If you are in the pre sale, 20% of your tokens have unlocked and so pre sale investors have unlocked. The remaining roughly 75% of supply will remain under vesting schedules. Different vesting schedules for depending on what kind of tier you are in the first day of performance the opening price was 30 cents which gives it a fully diluted valuation of $30 billion. We are down to about 1718 cents. So that's about $18 billion fully diluted valuation, a market cap of effectively almost $5 billion. That puts World Liberty Financial at number 39.
- [32:44]
A
Wow.
- [32:45]
B
In all crypto assets, which is pretty crazy.
- [32:48]
A
Eric Trump says even though it's down, this is just the beginning. So a long way to go. We should do kind of a reminder of what World Liberty Finance actually is and like what they've launched.
- [32:59]
B
Do we know they don't have a functioning app?
- [33:02]
A
Yeah. Okay, so they do have some stuff. Let's just go here for a second. I'll pull it up. Okay, so first of all there's the USD one. So they have a Stablecoin.
- [33:11]
B
Stablecoin, Right.
- [33:12]
A
Okay. It's not nothing. I was looking at the charts. It's actually $2 billion stablecoin at this point in time. Wow. Okay, so that's launched.
- [33:20]
B
There is something here.
- [33:20]
A
There's a stablecoin. It's a 2 billion dollar stable, 19 providers there. And then of course you have the token. The token is the product. All right, so okay, so we got.
- [33:31]
B
We got two tokens.
- [33:31]
A
World Liberty Finance, the WLFI token. You can stake that if you, if you so choose. You could also buy it, you could sell it.
- [33:38]
B
What do you do? What happens when you stake it?
- [33:40]
A
I don't know, who knows, you can trade it. Maybe you can't stake it. Look, I guess delete that. Maybe you can't stake it. You can unlock it, you can trade it. All right. And you could do governance. There was a governance proposal.
- [33:53]
B
That's great.
- [33:54]
A
There was a governance proposal actually to distribute the profits back to WLFI token holders.
- [34:01]
B
Profits of what?
- [34:02]
A
Well, this is the stuff that's tbd WLFI app soon. And so there's going to be an app and there's lend and borrow. What I think this is going to be is basically aave. So you know how AAVE had go, they have their stablecoin, they have borrowing and lending. I think this is like World Liberty Financial America, Trump branded AAVE kind of wrapped with a meme. WLFI meme token basically. Trump family.
- [34:28]
B
Can we launch a website with a bunch of features that all say soon on it and make a token?
- [34:32]
A
No, you can't because you're not Donald Trump. Okay. So you know, it's, it's harder to do if you don't have that.
- [34:39]
B
Can I tell you what the first governance proposal is on Liberty Financial? Yeah, you actually mentioned it. Buybacks. So they announced that they kicked off a governance proposal where 100% of the fees earned by WLFI's protocol in the future liquid.
- [34:53]
A
No, no, not fees now.
- [34:54]
B
No, no, current, current. The protocol owned liquidity. So that there is owned like ether and stables.
- [35:00]
A
Oh, that's right.
- [35:00]
B
They put that into, into. They collect fees on that by like lping it into amms or something. They collect fees and those fees go back to burning, buy and burn.
- [35:10]
A
It's pretty ohm like you don't want to show your revenue here. You know, you gotta imagine the revenue possibilities. It's worth more as a meme coin. Speaking of how much it's worth. Crypto is now the biggest portion of Trump's family's paper net worth. So big in real estate. But all of their real estate holdings were worth like $2.5 billion or something. World Liberty Finance alone at one point was worth $5 billion. And that's not to mention the Trump.
- [35:38]
B
Family'S ownership of World Equity Finance.
- [35:40]
A
Yes. And that's not to mention, you know, Trump Media and Technology holdings, they have 15k bitcoins, 1.6 billion. They also partner with crypto.com on the CRO type deal. They have a holding company which is a crypto treasury vehicle, the Trump Suns. Also this week they launched a Trump backed bitcoin company called American Bitcoin. This is a bitcoin treasury and a bitcoin mining company. They have a chunk of that. That's 7 to 8 billion in terms of market cap right now. I don't know how much market cap.
- [36:15]
B
Okay.
- [36:15]
A
Total, but I think, I don't know, I was reading maybe 30% of that. Look, dude, it's, it's definitely, I don't think it's double digit billions but like 5, 6, 7 billion that Trump has just in crypto holdings at this point. And keep in mind they are doing.
- [36:29]
B
A fantastic job of doing all of the things. The role of the President.
- [36:34]
A
Yeah, all of the things.
- [36:35]
B
No one's done it better.
- [36:35]
A
Oh, last week while you're out, Trump Jr. Became advisor for Polymarket.
- [36:41]
B
Yeah, yeah, we've got that. Later in the agenda we're going to talk about that.
- [36:44]
A
He's like all of the things. So this has caused probably people like a Democrat, Gavin Newsom who is like in a meme war with Trump right now to talk about launching a meme coin. I'm going to play this and if.
- [36:57]
B
You want a real prediction, I know we talked about the Taylor Swift prediction. The real prediction is, you know, we're about to put a mean coin out and you know what, Donald Trump, we'll see how well your coin does versus our coin. I mean we're just trying, trying to tune up to turn up the heat and trying to tune people into the absurdity.
- [37:16]
A
Is it going to be called Gavin Coin?
- [37:17]
B
No, it's I think Trump corruption coin. Gavin, you're, you're going to lose, man.
- [37:22]
A
His heart's not in it, is it?
- [37:25]
B
You're going up against Trump. You, Gavin's a, he's not a bad meme but he's going up against Trump. Like you're not going to out meme that man. What would be funny though? Because Trump launched his meme coin on Solana. If Gavin launched his meme coin on Ethereum just for the sake of the meme, just like put all the libs on Ethereum. Oh God.
- [37:43]
A
I don't want, I don't want those political wars to bleed over into crypto. I just, it's funny. I just don't think Gavin's heart is in it. I don't know if he's actually going to do it, but I think he.
- [37:53]
B
Just threw out that comment.
- [37:54]
A
He threw out that comment. You think? This is a Jake Travinsky take, which I resonate with World Liberty Financial will make it wait harder to get market structure legislation done in the Senate where we need seven Democrats to vote yes and for whom a pro crypto vote will be politically challenging, to put it mildly. No matter what the bill says about policy. Happy fall. So we got genius.
- [38:14]
B
Always been the danger of politicizing and getting. Putting crypto behind one political party. Stuff like this becomes more difficult.
- [38:21]
A
Yeah. So I think he's right about that. I don't know how this bodes for clarity, but I'm a little bit worried about this. In better news though, David, we have a clear, a possible clue, clear path now for Spot Bitcoin and Spot Eth to be sold on the New York Stock Exchange and the nasdaq.
- [38:41]
B
How does this work? All right, so are there other things that are just directly listed on the Nasdaq? How does that work?
- [38:46]
A
Okay, so you know, currently there's like two worlds. You have crypto exchanges and then you have Tradfi exchanges. Yep. And those two worlds are pretty much separate. The CFTC and the SEC issued a joint statement. That in itself is notable. A joint statement like they're actually talking to one another, cooperating and cooperating. Who would have thought? Well, that's happening. So very bullish on that side. They basically said the path is clear and they were looking for proposals for these large US based exchanges, TradFi exchanges, to submit a proposal to be able to list assets like Spot Bitcoin or Spot Eth on the New York Stock Exchange, on the NASDAQ and the cboe. Okay. Now in order to do this, there are some hoops that these organizations would need to go through. They would need to figure out, you know, the filing itself with the SEC custody and CFTC custody and clearing as well. So they're not going to store it. They use like Coinbase or Kraken or somebody else to actually store the assets. And the surveillance hurdles. Right. So SEC and CFTC have surveillance laws, but if they get through those things and they submit a report, the SEC and CFTC are saying it's legal, you could do this. In fact, we want to see these reports. And David, one reason why this is significant is because these exchanges alone, they do about 600 billion in daily volume across their Assets in comparison, our largest exchanges in crypto do about 20 billion. Okay. So we're talking about massive volume. If these assets spot bitcoin, spot eth are listed on these exchanges, it's not gonna happen overnight. But now the path is clear for them to do that.
- [40:29]
B
Okay, here's what I'm a little bit confused about. First, this seems competitive with some of their current customers being like BlackRock, Fidelity, Bitwise, who have listed actual ETFs. And so they're going to be competitive with their biggest customers. Like I wouldn't want to piss off blackrock and I'll. And also they're going to have to charge fees for custodianship and other things. And are they going to be fee competitive with BlackRock, who's coming in at I don't remember how many bips, but a low number of bips with Bitcoin ETFs, you mean? Yeah. So if like NASDAQ lists their own financial products which are competitive with what they're supposed to offer, a service of a platform to trade, but then they're also offering products that are competitive with other people. I'm kind of confused by how this works.
- [41:11]
A
Yeah, I don't know that they would be offering the products themselves. They would just be like, these products could be available outside of an ETF from some other issuer, I suppose.
- [41:22]
B
Okay.
- [41:23]
A
Yeah. And so the only way they've been available right now is an ETF form.
- [41:27]
B
I'm not sure what like what that unlocks. Yeah, what do we unlock here? Because like the ETF is like the ERC20 token for TradFi. Like it's the composable thing. You can collateralize it in your brokerage. It's like what everyone is used to. I don't know what this unlocks here.
- [41:43]
A
I don't know that it's going to lock a lot of pent up liquidity that hasn't been able to access these assets right away. But it is a marker of the convergence here that's happening between the world of you have crypto exchanges over here and then you have all New York Stock Exchange, all the tradfi exchanges over here. And now these can list crypto assets. The tradfi exchanges and the crypto exchanges, we're seeing them evolve to start listing equities and tokens. So it's just another marker of the growing convergence that we're seeing between these worlds.
- [42:11]
B
I did like that line in your recent debate with Omid versus Austin Campbell. Great fucking episode.
- [42:17]
A
Excuse me.
- [42:18]
B
Where the premise was that there's like currently the tradfi world and the crypto world and in the future there's just going to be one big financial world and these things are going to bleed together. I did like that line.
- [42:27]
A
Speaking of that, we got some details on Stripes Layer 1, the Tempo release. We're talking about that. Also some big moves in the tokenized securities world, both on Ethereum and Solana. And David, you got of a ton talk to me about tokenized Pokemon. I don't know how I missed this last week, but you came back and you told me that was a thing happening in chat.
- [42:46]
B
Possibly miss the tokenized Pokemon Meta.
- [42:48]
A
We'll get to all that and more, but first we want to shout out our friends over at FRAX some of the best yield in Defi. We're just talking about blue chip yield like Circle, Athena and Maker all had a baby. Go check it out.
- [42:59]
B
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 rollups. The core of FRAX finance is Frax USD, which is backed by BlackRock 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 and explore fractals 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 frax.comrbankless when bridging to Fraxel for exclusive Fraxel perks and boosted rewards. Imagine a world where traditional finance meets the power of blockchain seamlessly. That's what Mantle is pioneering with Blockchain for Banking, a revolutionary new category at the intersection of TradFi and Web3. At the heart is you are the world's first money app. Built fully on chain, it gives you a Swiss IBAN account blending fiat currencies like the Euro, the Swiss Franc, the United States Dollar or the Renminbi with crypto all in one place. Enjoy real world usability and blockchain's trust and programmability transactions. Post directly to the blockchain compatible with Tradfi, Rails and packed with integrated DEFI futures. UR transforms Mantle Network into the ultimate platform for on chain financial services, unifying payments, trading and assets like the MI4, the MES protocol and functions FBTC backed by developer grants, ecosystem incentives and top distribution through the UR app reward stations and BYBIT launch pool for MNT holders. Every economic activity in UR drives value back to you, embodying the entire stack and future growth of this super app equipment ecosystem. Follow Mantle on X at Mantel Underscore Official for the latest updates on blockchain for banking. That's X.com mantel underscore official introducing Tempo, a payments first blockchain incubated by Stripe and Paradigm. This interestingly got broken on Twitter by Matt Huang from Paradigm before anyone I saw from Stripe actually tweeting it, but the people from Stripe followed up a few minutes later. So here are the details. Tempo is a purpose built blockchain for stablecoins and real world payments born from Stripes, Stripe's experience in global payments and Paradigm's expertise in crypto to ensure Tempo serves a broad array of needs. We're excited to be working with an incredible group of initial design partners including anthropic, Deutsche Bank, DoorDash, Lead Bank, Mercury, Nubank, OpenAI, DoorDash, get in there, Shopify, Standard Chartered, Visa and more. Interesting to see some of the AI companies in there. Obviously blockchains and AIs go together. How are AI is going to send money on a blockchain? It makes way more sense. Tempo is being designed to be a payment. I'm all reading from Matt Huang's tweet. Tempo's Payment first design includes predictable low fees payments and gas in any stablecoin via an enshrined amm. What does that mean? That means that the Tempo blockchain has an AMM built directly into the blockchain Paradigm. Also, Dan from Paradigm just basically helped build Uniswap V3 and V4, so I would assume this is very significantly overlapping with Uniswap. Just put that right into the blockchain and then because it's enshrined, you can just pay for gas via any token by having liquidity access straight through the amm. That's kind of cool. Payments First UX Dedicated Payment Lane memos, access lists etc. Opt in privacy scale 100,000 transactions per second with sub second finality. And this is all built on Reth, the Rust Ethereum client pioneered by Georgios in the Paradigm team. So this is Reth's first big debut in production as a dedicated client for a layer one blockchain. And then lastly, Tempo eases the path to bringing real workflows on chain such as global payments, pay in payouts, pay ins and payroll, embedded financial accounts, fast and cheap remittances, tokenized deposits for 24. 7 settlement microtransactions and agentic payments. Interestingly, we. We are building Tempo. This is Matt again. See it's always been Matt. We are building Tempo with principles of decentralization and neutrality. That includes stablecoin neutrality. Anyone can issue a stablecoin and any Stablecoin can be used for payments or gas along with an independent and diverse validators validator set with Ryan, a roadmap to a permissionless model which I find interesting.
- [47:36]
A
It is interesting. And so this is evm, which is cool. It's all Reth. So you can see this is really a fusion of. There's a lot of Paradigm influence in this as well. I actually got some of the inside scoop because I talked to Zach Abrams earlier this week. That episode's going to be out on Monday, I believe. And Zach is the guy who sold Bridge. It was basically a payments Stablecoin payments company. He sold Bridge to Stripe for a billion dollars. And Matt's had a key role in actually selecting this platform and going with an L1. And so I asked him, I was like, Zach, why did you guys do it? And he went through a case, actually he tweeted about this. But one of the things that they had been trying to do at Bridge was do like basically an airdrop. Imagine for instance, if you remember the Stimmy checks we all got. Imagine if you wanted to issue Stimmy checks to like 50 million Americans. And they did some of this. I forget what country he mentioned, but they were doing large scale airdrops of stablecoins to some users for some particular use case. He said none of the chains, none of the L1s could actually support that use case. They were too slow, cost too much in terms of gas. They even tried things like Stellar so people don't remember. But Stripe was an early investor in Stellar and that was a chain that they were attempting this on. Yeah, okay. And so his take was basically we couldn't accomplish this with any public L1 and so we needed to roll our Own. And so if you want that sub. Second finality and if you want the, even the privacy and like low gas fees, layer one for them, he said was the only option. So that's some of the reason why and some of the use cases around it. Now he.
- [49:19]
B
I find that answer incomplete, but I'll accept it for now.
- [49:22]
A
Yeah. He was also very quick to say this isn't Stripeschange. Right. Hence you saw that consortium of other companies. It almost reminds me a little bit of the resurrection of Libra, just on a smaller scale.
- [49:33]
B
This is just Libra.
- [49:34]
A
This is Libra, but Libra was not evm. Now they're doing a Libra version with EVM and sort of a consortium.
- [49:40]
B
So this is the spirit of Libra. Same kind of which honestly you have to give credit to Libra for being way ahead of its time.
- [49:47]
A
Yeah, it just wasn't politically tenable at the time and now it totally is. That's why they're doing this. Yeah, yeah. David, there's some big moves in the tokenized securities world. The first was Ondo. So Ondo launched tokenized securities on Ethereum. So are you familiar with Ondo at all, David?
- [50:05]
B
I know the name. I haven't really ever done the rabbit hole deep dive and it's been around for a very long time.
- [50:10]
A
They've been pretty big in the world of like tokenized Treasuries for a while and this is their first attempt, I believe. Oh, it's restricted. So here's the thing, it's not available for people in the us so I'm not on a VPN right now. Just like a good American. I can't access this, but it has a whole bunch of stocks, ETFs. There are some limits in terms of how much you can buy, ETFs, all the big things. I don't know. It's like 100, 200 different stocks and ETFs that you can buy. And the benefit here is it's not like xdocs. So the benefit here is you get better liquidity guarantees. So the problem with some of the tokenized securities like xdocs was their almost like a synthetic version and they would trade off the price and liquidity of kind of the primary versions of these assets that were on like real tradfi exchanges. This gets around that and I'll tell you how it gets around this. This is on Ethereum, but it's actually using intense infrastructure. Okay. This is actually a unique use case for Ethereum, real world assets, how they work. So I was Talking to the team, our liquidity model, they said, is fundamentally different from existing permissionless solutions like X stocks. We do not rely on on chain market inventory. Instead, their architecture runs on intense based systems where the tokenized stock is only minted when investor demand occurs. All right, so there's some investor demand, like I'm doing a, you know, 10k buy for Apple shares, let's say, and then an intent clicks and that is fulfilled on the other side. So this allows them to not pre fund the liquidity on chain. So it lowers the capital cost of bringing traditional markets on chain. And it was beneficial for them to launch on Ethereum because Ethereum has very well developed intense based infrastructure to support that type of a use case. So it's interesting, I think it's an evolution of what we've seen with tokenized stocks like X stocks. Kind of janky, had some problems. This is better from the liquidity side of things. It's still not the same as like actually owning a stock. All right. But you can redeem it very quick and it should trade closer to the price.
- [52:14]
B
Well, Ryan, if you want to actually own a stock, you can actually own Galaxy stock. You're just going to have to go to Solana to do it. Because Galaxy has tokenized their actual stock, not an IOU of a stock, but the actual stock is now tokenized on Solana. This is with Robert Lesher's Super State. There's a, there's a coingecko page which is pretty cool. It's not yet trading, so there's no price or like, you know, price action at all. But the fact that there is a coin gecko page of what is an actual stock, again, not a redeemable native security that we see native security on, on a blockchain, which is pretty damn cool. I of course went right to my DMs with Robert Leshner and I was like, Rob, why is it on Solana? He says if you are the issuer of said stock, you get to choose what chain you put it on. Apparently Galaxy just chose Solana.
- [53:06]
A
Yeah, I think this is a big step forward, actually getting native securities on chain. And that's much better than the xdoc design. Much better. I guess from a property rights perspective of the.
- [53:16]
B
Because it is the property.
- [53:17]
A
It is the property. The problem is though, it is going to be harder to bootstrap this and to get. Because like what this requires is that every single issuer like want to do this, cooperate, create a new legal structure specifically for their tokenized stock on chain. So like it seems like you could get one or two or some niche players. It's going to be hard to get the type of volume that Tradfi is getting right until you kind of break through that bootstrapping problem. Hopefully this is where everything goes and we get actual native stocks on chain, but it could take a while to get there and we'll have these hacky type solutions until then.
- [53:53]
B
Well, I want to push back a little bit on that because. Yes, yeah, everything you said.
- [53:57]
A
Right.
- [53:57]
B
Is correct and right. It's like there's friction. Your new legal entity, all that kind of stuff is going to have some costs. A there are IPO costs and so costs are being paid to access liquidity one way or another. But like if our thesis about defi is correct, which is you get capital efficiency, you get, if you put a token on Ethereum, you get access to Ethereum's complete defi like toolset. There's a very strong gravitational pull to be able to put your stocks inside of AAVE or Morpho or you know, any sort of defi app.
- [54:24]
A
I think for crypto native companies it could be worth it for them. Right, because they already have the crypto customers. But if you're looking at like the liquidity of basically, you know, the traditional exchanges and 600 million in securities volume and then you go, you look at crypto securities liquidity and it's like, I don't know, 20 million a day or something, you're definitely going to want to put your asset where the volume is. And that's just the bootstrapping problem you have to get over.
- [54:48]
B
And now it's Robert Lechner's job to go and seek out the larger and larger deals so he can go start climbing the ranks of publicly traded companies and be like, hey, you want to get your tokens on crypto? And the more he does that, the more liquidity flows, more like stablecoin. All time highs are being broken every single day and so the size of the gravitational pull is increasing. It'll just take some time.
- [55:09]
A
I agree with that, David. Polymarket finally got the green light. Do you want to read this tweet?
- [55:15]
B
Yeah. Yeah. So this is from Shane Koppelman, the founder and CEO of polymarket. Polymarket has been given the green light to go live in the United States by the cftc. So they received a no action letter they filed saying, hey Ken, are we going to get in trouble if we allow U.S. citizens? And the CFTC said we're no, basically no you're not. And so we can all take down our VPNs now. United States citizens can now access a Polymarket directly. And this is pretty cool. I mean this is huge. Just for, I think just like assurances and sentiment, I would say it'll will be kind of cool, I guess. Also, funds can now go trade on polymarket. I don't really think this really stopped any individuals, but it definitely stopped funds from trading on Polymarket if they want to take a position in something.
- [56:00]
A
I think I feel like it stopped Polymarket from going as mainstream as it could have. And it probably will go post this. Right. Just because there's friction in a vpn. Yeah. You know, like how many people are going to.
- [56:12]
B
Not no friction in getting USDC on the Polymarket, but plenty of friction because of the VPN. Yeah.
- [56:17]
A
Is this Mr. Beast talking about his own.
- [56:20]
B
Beast was on a live stream looking at polymarket and he just was having a good time. So yeah, like, like Mr. Beast on Polymarker. Polymarket is becoming just like a household name. As we mentioned earlier in the show, Donald Trump Jr. Takes a stake in the prediction market platform Poly Market. So he bought, bought a bunch of shares and now is on the advisory board. Interestingly enough, he's also on the advisory board of Kalshi. And have you been following the Kalshi Poly Market just a little bit? Absolutely. Boiling like war between these two organizations.
- [56:53]
A
Big hatred. Right. It's a big rivalry.
- [56:54]
B
I don't think I've ever seen a level of hatred between.
- [56:57]
A
Get them on for a debate. The founders, both founders, just like, I.
- [57:01]
B
Don'T know if there's any debate to be had. It would be more of like a mediation. Okay, so there's a, there's a tweet from this guy, William Legate, who I thought was pretty interesting. And by interesting I mean hilarious. He said, when I joined Kalshi a year ago, Tarek, some guy at Kalshi made their mission clear. Quote, copy everything Polymarket does. Our moat is regulatory capture. And then he's tweeting out the fact that CFTC granted Polymarket the approval to list to make available to US citizens. So William continues and says today that moat no longer exists. I couldn't be more proud of my decision to join Polymarket. Why copy the best when you can build it? So basically now I've done that Polymarket, he, he, he flipped from Kalshi to Polymarket because polymarket is the cooler one to, to, to be the founder or somebody of Kalshi came into his replies. No way. This, this Is a lie. Tarek did not say this. You are just spreading misinformation. And he shares an email from William talking shit about polymarket trying to get a job at Kalshee. I don't know what the hell is going on here, but, like, the. Oh, God. There's some huge beef.
- [58:08]
A
I mean, there's rumors that Kalshee. I don't know if I should say this, but there's rumors.
- [58:13]
B
I've heard that they call FBI swatting of Shane Koppelman. I heard those rumors.
- [58:17]
A
That was like. That they had reported him or had some sort of antiplate. I mean, it's. There's beef there. That's a rumor. I don't have evidence of that, but no one does. You can see why there's some beef there. We also see why they want some political protection. Right. FBI is going to raid your house. How about getting the president's son to invest in your company? I'll do that.
- [58:37]
B
God, I hope the political pendulum doesn't swing so hard next year.
- [58:40]
A
It could swing so hard. So hard. So enjoy this brief period of time we have David and Tell me about tokenized Pokemon, because we can still do that right now.
- [58:50]
B
Dude. Okay, so I come back online from Burning man, and I log into crypto Twitter, and we are doing two things. We are ranking crypto Twitter accounts and we are buying tokenized Pokemons. And I'm like, oh, nothing's changed. We are doing the same thing. Okay, so this is the current trench meta of tokenized Pokemon cards. There's apparently three different platforms, but this one platform, Collector Crypt, has taken off. It is real tokenized. Excuse me, physical Pokemon cards.
- [59:17]
A
The actual physical Pokemon cards.
- [59:19]
B
Pokemon cards held in a vault somewhere. Like a physical vault.
- [59:23]
A
So it's a real world asset.
- [59:25]
B
It's a real world asset tokenized by this one project called Collector Crypt. And you can go and you can, like, open up. You can buy for 55. You can buy a pack, a Pokemon card pack. And you open up the pack and there's a Pokemon card in there. And, like, some people are, like, celebrating, like, oh, I opened up a Charizard. And then you can sell it on the marketplace. You're not going to get a Charizard, statistically speaking, but technically it's possible. And so, yeah, this is the current meta.
- [59:48]
A
We always knew this was going to happen at some point, right?
- [59:50]
B
Yeah. Yeah.
- [59:51]
A
Are you. Are you a collector? Did you ever do Pokemon cards? Cards or magic cards?
- [59:54]
B
I did back in the day? Never. Never once did I ever play the Pokemon game. Didn't even know that there was a game. I thought the point was to just buy the cards. I had my binder with my like Charmander and my Bulbazar. Who didn't?
- [60:05]
A
This is how we reach out to the next generation. Okay. It's not. Not our like D5 boomer stuff. It's Pokemon cards on chain. I knew this would.
- [60:12]
B
But. But when can you put them in a. It's.
- [60:14]
A
Yeah, good question. Good question. All right. Actually, I'm going to show you something. David, you showed me tokenized cards here. Pokemon cards.
- [60:23]
B
Did it. Has anyone alerted Richie Torres to this fact?
- [60:26]
A
Richie Torres. We actually have it now. It's. It's, you know, Gary Gensler cannot stop us. This was kind of cool though. And we'll end with this. You can now borrow in defi using your credit score. US Credit score. This is always a use case I thought would be cool. And it's just started happening. So you know you have a credit score based on your credit history in the U.S. right?
- [60:48]
B
Yeah.
- [60:49]
A
You pay your rent, like mortgages, whatever. Do you pay your credit card bills? And this is score. I don't know what your score is. Some people track this to the nth degree.
- [60:59]
B
As soon as I got into crypto, I was like, I don't care about this.
- [61:02]
A
I don't care about this. There's like a 600, 700 is better.
- [61:05]
B
800, whatever's good. Yeah.
- [61:06]
A
Okay. So you can just import that into defi and using this protocol called. Let's see what it's called. 3 Jane. You actually just borrow money on defi using your credit score. So get your credit karma score, whatever, beam it in here and it'll give you a certain amount based on your credit score of what you can borrow. So this is like a credit use case using a real world credit score.
- [61:31]
B
Do I need to put my ID in?
- [61:33]
A
Probably. I don't know. Probably.
- [61:35]
B
So like I can't. If I run away with the funds, can they come after me or is it.
- [61:39]
A
It'll hurt your credit score. Don't do that. I don't care if you don't care. It's a one time only thing, David. If you don't care if you're never gonna use the credit score again.
- [61:49]
B
Saw a screenshot with $42,000 on your screen. If I can go to this app and I can. My credit score for 42,000. Do it.
- [61:56]
A
You'll take that trade any day. Your credit score is literally dropping as we speak because someone's probably listening in and is like we're not giving this guy any money. Let's end it there. You know, crypto is risky. You lose what you put in. But we're headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.