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- [00:00]
David
Foreign.
- [00:05]
Ryan
It is the second week of October. It's not feeling like October though. On the week, David. I think our prices are down, but gold is going up.
- [00:14]
David
Something's up.
- [00:15]
Ryan
So maybe there's some hope there.
- [00:16]
David
Something's up somewhere.
- [00:18]
Ryan
We're going to talk about that, right? We're going to talk about gold at all time high. We actually did eke out a bitcoin all time high.
- [00:24]
David
That's right.
- [00:24]
Ryan
Last weekend. So it's official. Technically the Nasdaq and S and P are all at all time high. What do we make of all this? Like, what does all this mean? It seems like there's a debasement trade going on at the same time as an AI trade. And how is that going to play into the crypto cycle? We got a long discussion about that ahead.
- [00:42]
David
Not just bitcoin got an all time high. BNB has been pumping third largest crypto asset now this week. Value at two coinbases. Why? Why is it doing this? What's going on over there and what's going on on the Asian market? Because Asian tokens are just up. CZ comes back to Binance and all of a sudden the Asian token market is just.
- [01:02]
Ryan
Wait, did he really come back to Binance? We're going to talk about that later in the episode. Yeah, we're thinking.
- [01:07]
David
But maybe also we have eth staked ETFs coming down the pipe. We're going to talk about all that news. Galaxy Digital launches a Robinhood competitor and you'll never guess Ryan, who's back to leading it.
- [01:22]
Ryan
Is it sbf?
- [01:24]
David
No, but you know, you know, okay, close. Talk about that. Not close. Not close. Not close.
- [01:31]
Ryan
Close. But you know, in the vicinity there.
- [01:33]
David
In the vicinity, yeah.
- [01:34]
Ryan
Also, the New York Stock Exchange parent company, they just made a massive investment in polymarket. A $2 billion investment. That is good things for Shane Copeland who became, according to this, it says the world's largest. The world's youngest billionaire. Yeah, because I'm actually not sure if.
- [01:51]
David
That'S true, but it values polymarket at 9 billion. 2 billion in cash is invested. Does chain just open the company company bank account and just seize $2 billion there? Is that how that works?
- [02:03]
Ryan
No, I don't think that's how it works, David. But we do have a MONAD airdrop confirmation date, which is a layer one network that I think all of crypto has been looking forward to for some time, which may mean we're close to a mainnet after four years. We're close to a mainnet. Perhaps so we'll talk about all that and more apologies, bankless listeners, for my voice again. I going into the sick. You know, we're, we're gonna, we're gonna hold through this episode. David. We gotta shout out our friends and sponsors over at Immunify. So what do they do?
- [02:35]
David
Yeah, of course. Security, as we all know is the biggest issue in crypto. Security is paramount. Hacks and exploits have cost this base billion of dollars of actual dollars, but also billions of more dollars of just like legitimacy and trust that's lost with people who read headlines saying billions of dollars have been hacked from crypto. Immunify can help with this. They're one of the most trusted brands in crypto security with more than $180 billion in value protected and over $25 billion in hack damage prevented. So now they're taking even further with the first security operating operating system for the on chain economy. Think of it as a single command center that keeps your crypto protocol safe end to end. There is a link in the show notes so you can go and learn more. Bankless, CC slash Immunify. That's I M M U N E F I. If you want to keep your customer deposits safe in your crypto protocol.
- [03:28]
Ryan
And you definitely should be thinking about that.
- [03:30]
David
Yeah.
- [03:31]
Ryan
David, let's talk about bitcoin on the week. So it doesn't feel like uptember, but are we up a little bit on the week October?
- [03:39]
David
Yes, we are up half a percent on the week. We did have an all time high. So you know, even though we're flat on the week, having an all time high midweek and still being up half a percent, you know, technically still counts. It just, you know, as the moment ever.
- [03:51]
Ryan
All time high.
- [03:51]
David
October 6th, Monday or something. That was Sunday.
- [03:54]
Ryan
It was Sunday morning.
- [03:55]
David
Sunday. Sunday. Yeah. 126,000 even at these new all time high. Previous all time high was in August at basically to $124,000. We've got some commentators saying the United States government shut down loose liquidity conditions, narrowing performance relative to equities. And gold is drawing attention to digital assets. That is the CIO at a bank.
- [04:18]
Ryan
Who said that this wasn't a very noisy all time high. Like it didn't feel like there was, there was some celebration but it was fairly muted. I think that's just because it's like a technical all time high.
- [04:29]
David
Yeah, it's like $1,000 all time high. Thousand dollar higher than last time.
- [04:34]
Ryan
Yeah. It just doesn't feel, doesn't. Bitcoin doesn't feel exciting as an all time high until like 130k. That's just me. But I think we start to celebrate more when we actually get a all time high. That feels meaningful and sustained. I've been looking, you know, David, you and I are both big Ray Dalio fans. I've long been looking for Ray Dalio to weigh in directly on bitcoin. Like, Ray, what do you think about that?
- [04:57]
David
Does he validate our bags?
- [04:59]
Ryan
Yeah, he said good things about it previously. Of course. This is the big debasement guy, right? I mean, talks about long term debt cycles, the end of empires. He's a huge proponent of gold. That's probably worked out for him very well lately. And you'd think bitcoin would be right up his alley. And it is kind of. Someone finally in a podcast asked him a direct question. Ray, is bitcoin a legitimate currency? And he kind of said yes, kind of said no. So he said that he thought bitcoin, some consider it as a money, some consider it as a store of value. But the big question for him was, would central banks consider it a store of value? And he said no, probably not. And the reasons he gave, which are interesting are it's not private. So he thinks that the public nature of the pseudo anonymous and not, you know, private nature of bitcoin makes it such that central banks will not adopt it. He also says there's code risk, so there could be bugs in the system. You know, it's dependent on people, it's dependent on software, something that gold isn't. So his conclusion is I have gold and some bitcoin, but not very much of it. And I'm wondering how much of this is like a generational type take.
- [06:13]
David
It is generational for sure, especially the code risk. Like zoomers don't care about code risk. And you know, what gold has as a risk is younger generations just not caring about it. So yeah, you, you accept the code risk and you, you know, decline the boomer, the boomer risk. Like boomers are just not going to buy bitcoin and not comparatively to like zoomers and zoomers just don't care about code risk.
- [06:39]
Ryan
Well, so when you say they don't care about code risk though, um, is this because they're just like naive and they don't think about risk? They're young people, they're, you know, young and stupid and they just don't think about risks like that? I mean, to me, I think a lot of people in crypto don't care about code risk. So much as like, because these are social systems. So let's say there was some infinity bug to supply in bitcoin, some zero day bug out there in a bitcoin client. Say that happened tomorrow. Well, price would spike down. Price would react to that. But people would stop running that client.
- [07:16]
David
Yeah.
- [07:17]
Ryan
We would fix it via patch. It would get deployed and then like it wouldn't be. It's not going to drop to zero, basically like these, you know, no one would accept a infinite supply bitcoin as the actual legitimate Bitcoin. Therefore like code risk is not so much a risk as people think it is.
- [07:37]
David
Okay. But to take Dalio's side, he would probably say like, yes, you could just overcome that with like a social fork and then it's, everything's fine. But it still is a mark against the legitimacy of bitcoin because gold, gold doesn't have to have that do that thing. You don't have to socially fork gold.
- [07:51]
Ryan
Yeah, that's fair. Another clip I found interesting on the week is what does President Christine Lagarde think about bitcoin? Someone asked her that directly. Here's the clip.
- [08:00]
David
Who is that? That is the. She works at the EU Central bank. So we have the European Union.
- [08:06]
Ryan
Yeah, she's Europe's Jerome Powell, basically.
- [08:08]
David
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
- [08:09]
Ryan
Here's the clip. So can bitcoin be like a digital form of gold? Okay.
- [08:14]
Christine Lagarde
No, that's the final answer.
- [08:17]
David
Right. Shall we leave it?
- [08:19]
Christine Lagarde
You know, I hesitate to say that, but I say it because I have no fear, because I know that the social media tonight and tomorrow is going to hit me like, like, you know, like crazy. Because that's, that's the community that they form and that's the belief that they have and that's the confidence that they generate amongst themselves. But I still am of the view that there is no intrinsic value and there is no underlying value to it. Which doesn't mean to say that there is no hype created as a result that some can associate with a value, meaning a price, which then moves up and down depending on what happens. Who, who is is instrumenting all this.
- [09:00]
Ryan
It's fascinating to me, David, that the reason she gives is there's no underlying value to bitcoin. That's the reason it's not valuable. Which like begs the question of why is gold trading at $27 trillion on the week Again, do you think this is a generational thing? The idea that gold can be backed by nothing of value but bitcoin? Oh, that's a bridge too far, obviously. That can't exist. That's not a real thing.
- [09:24]
David
I mean, this. This person is just the spokesperson of Fiat. They are just Fiat incarnate into this real world. They are the voice of Fiat Money. And so that's. This is what Fiat Money would say. It was like, yeah, don't believe in bitcoin because my. My life depends on this.
- [09:40]
Ryan
Yeah, they're paid to not understand this, I guess.
- [09:42]
David
Yes. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. There's. There's an interesting graph that went around. Who owns Bitcoin in 2025? Bitcoin, then, the year of our Lord 2025, is still predominantly owned by retail. 71%, almost 72% of Bitcoin is owned by retail. 7% of Bitcoin is in ETFs. 5% is left to be mined. 5% is owned by Satoshi Nakamoto. 4 1/2% owned by public companies, and 2 1/2% owned by countries and governments. Crazy how dominant retail holding of bitcoin is.
- [10:17]
Ryan
Do you hear the headline take here? Which is, I'm not selling bitcoin until the country's bubble becomes as big as the retail bubble today. Do you think that is the end state? Regardless of what Dalio and Christine Lagarde think about it, central banks are going to have to acquire bitcoin and hard crypto assets. That's just the future. Or maybe just younger generations take control of these institutions and they effectively become that.
- [10:42]
David
Yep, that's exactly right. But that's always been. The plan is bitcoin only works as a grassroots revolution for, like, central bankers to actually end up holding the bag and then having to buy all of our bags because we were buying drugs on the silk Road in 2013.
- [10:59]
Ryan
Wait, speak for yourself too. Okay? Speak for yourself. Hold on now. More evidence of this, though. Actually, some news. On the weekend, we have the first EU sovereign wealth fund allocating to bitcoin. This never happened before. It's the country of Luxembourg, though. They bought a Bitcoin position, 1% via an ETF. So we're already working up that scale. You know, we got to the level of massive institutions, the blackrocks of the world. Now we're getting into the big money, the big institutional capital, which is sovereign Luxembourg. You gotta start somewhere, man.
- [11:35]
David
Gotta start somewhere. You know, no shade against Luxembourg.
- [11:39]
Ryan
They're like a startup country, right? Like, don't they have like digital identity rolled out, all of these different things?
- [11:44]
David
That's right, Yeah. I think a very high GDP per capita.
- [11:47]
Ryan
Yeah, just the. The capita size is pretty small.
- [11:50]
David
I guess you should say. Yeah.
- [11:52]
Ryan
How about little brother eth on the week? We should check in.
- [11:54]
David
Down 3 or 4% on the week. Down 3%. $4,300 hit 7, 4750. It was getting me real excited. And then immediately went down. So sad. But Overall just down 3%.
- [12:07]
Ryan
Was that it, man? Was that October? Are we done?
- [12:10]
David
I gotta ask for October 9th. We got 20 more days.
- [12:13]
Ryan
Okay. So I know you had a conversation. I was not feeling well, so I couldn't. But with Tom Lee and Arthur Hayes, and I'm hopeful you asked the question to them of what about the cycle. Because again, ticking clock right now. If this cycle ends like previous cycles, we only got about two months. What did they say to this?
- [12:35]
David
Short clock. Yeah, short time left on the clock. Yeah.
- [12:38]
Ryan
Give me some good news. Do they say something a little bit different?
- [12:41]
David
Oh yeah. They're like, no, no, no. It's Fed liquidity, brother. It just is a coincidence that the four year cycle has just lined up with Fed liquidity events. And Arthur Hayes in the episode just goes through it. It's like, all right, the bitcoin bubble in 2013. Well, here's the Federal Reserve liquidity event in 2017. Here's the corresponding Federal Reserve liquidity event. So he maps it out, he correlates it. And that's why I think that this cycle hasn't felt so frothy, is because interest rates are at not all time highs, but like have been higher than they've been in forever. And the Federal Reserve is only slowly cutting them, but they are cutting and they're cutting them now slowly. And so my takeaway from that is like, oh yeah, just again this, the whole plan is the slow Cook throughout 2026.
- [13:25]
Ryan
So there is a case that the cycle ends this year, but Arthur, Arthur Hayes and Tom Lee are making the case that we get an extended cycle just because the money printers are just starting to fire up right now, not only in the US but in China as well. Did they give end of year price calls, by the way?
- [13:42]
David
Oh yeah, but I mean, come on, the listener's going to have to go listen to the episode. No, no, no.
- [13:47]
Ryan
Tell me what. Okay, okay, leave that tease out there then to listen. That episode, it's in the queue. Good news, David. The bull market indicators, remember the coin glass bull market indicators that we checked in? None of them have hit sell. Nothing's frothy right now. So this is kind of what you wanted. I feel like you kept telling me the last couple of months, hey, I want Slow, steady up. I don't want anything crazy.
- [14:11]
David
We got a good thing going. We got a good thing going. Things are just up slowly. Like maybe one month is down, the next month is green. But quarter over quarter over quarter over quarter. We are just grinding up, dude. We're just grinding up.
- [14:25]
Ryan
We're all not as exciting, okay? We're all getting rich slowly.
- [14:28]
David
And by slowly, I mean over three years.
- [14:32]
Ryan
It's great, David. We have the ETH staking. ETFs a world first. Who's doing it?
- [14:38]
David
Grayscale. Grayscale. So they launched the first US Spot crypto ETF that allowed access for investors to have staked Ethereum via ETH and ethe and also soon for Solana as it's waiting for regulatory approval. So eth eth e the grayscale ethe will now pay distributions and then. But also eth the other one just eth they have the. They have the ticker eth for the ETH etf. That's crazy. They will just roll staking returns into the nav. And so it'll just compound over time. But also Eth E, the old one charges a 2.5 management fee, so Eth, the better one charges 0.25 management fee. So.
- [15:19]
Ryan
Yeah, 2.5%. You should say 2%.
- [15:22]
David
Yes.
- [15:22]
Ryan
That's two hundred and fifty bips.
- [15:23]
David
Yeah.
- [15:24]
Ryan
Two hundred and fifty.
- [15:24]
David
Yeah. Two hundred and fifty big rides.
- [15:26]
Ryan
It's 25 pips, which is a big difference. What would you prefer? Do you prefer getting the cash distribution every month or would you prefer just.
- [15:33]
David
No, I just wanted to roll it. Roll it into the nav. Roll it into the nav.
- [15:37]
Ryan
Why not?
- [15:37]
David
Yeah, because then. Because then I'm not taxed. You're not. You're taxed on income with distributions, right?
- [15:42]
Ryan
Oh, that's right. It's more tax efficient.
- [15:44]
David
Yeah.
- [15:44]
Ryan
Dude, well done.
- [15:45]
David
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I've been brushing up all my taxes. Okay. Dats are not done yet though, because dats also want to provide staking, which they do. They're easier to provide staking. So. Joseph Shalom, former Blackrock ETF guy, now s bet, strategic bet on eth. He says, quote, having worked on Blackrock's, Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, I've seen how powerful these vehicles are for institutional access and adoption. But some limitations are unlocking. Your staked eth can take up to 40 days. It's not. It's usually not that long. And then also ETH to ETH ETFs will have to keep a large portion of their ETH holdings liquid, aka not staked at sharply. We are able to stake 100% of our ETH generating superior yield. On top of the yield, we'll develop new businesses that have ETH nominated revenue increasing our ETH concentration. Concentration even further. So Joseph saying, hey, we are a better product than even staked eth ETFs.
- [16:40]
Ryan
Because our yields are higher. Basically. Our yields are higher.
- [16:42]
David
Yeah.
- [16:43]
Ryan
Yeah. I mean that, that feels like. That lines up to me.
- [16:46]
David
I was going to say higher yields also more risk. More risk. Not too much more risk. They're like they're trying to be conservative with it.
- [16:53]
Ryan
Well, not just staking like, I mean they can stake a hundred percent. So right there that's risk free. That portion is risk free.
- [16:59]
David
I guess that. And that's identical. The risk profile is identical.
- [17:01]
Ryan
Yeah. Yeah. David, they're not the only etf. This is not the only ETF news. I should say. Seems like it's going to be. We're days away from Solana getting its first. Not their first etf. They've had some.
- [17:15]
David
Their first good etf. They kind of have this like, kind of hacky ETF that has been around for a bit.
- [17:21]
Ryan
The grayscale, the 21 shares, the bitwise, the Franklin, the Fidelity, those are coming to Solana. And the final SEC deadline is actually, I mean today, today by the time listeners will listen to this, the 10th of October. So Bloomberg is pricing like odds of approval is 95% here. So it seems like it's going to be a slam dunk that this thing is going to be approved. Gotta expect this will be. I mean what do you think? Do you think this will be a price catalyst for Solana? You think the market's already priced this in? What's your take?
- [17:52]
David
I don't think the staked the staking component of ETFs is a big price catalyst.
- [17:57]
Ryan
Maybe it is a staking. It's all these Solana ETFs. Oh, this is getting its first like fleet of all of these super legitimate ETFs.
- [18:05]
David
I mean we saw what happened. We saw what happened with a bitcoin and ETH price after they got their etf. So I would expect to see some correlation with that.
- [18:12]
Ryan
Well, what did ETH do? I mean it kind of slumped after actually volumes weren't that exciting.
- [18:17]
David
Yeah but, but Solana doesn't have grayscale unlocks to deal with. So that's actually a privileged position that Solana has.
- [18:23]
Ryan
I think they have some right. Have a gray scale that's rolling over. They must have some unlocks there. Haven't looked into this.
- [18:28]
David
We'll see. I mean the reason why Blackrock has been. I don't think Blackrock has a Salana ETF in like BlackRock's position is like we don't see demand for a Salana etf. That's why we're not doing it. But I mean that was a while ago, so maybe there's more demand.
- [18:41]
Ryan
Yeah.
- [18:42]
David
Coming up next, we're going to talk about the debasement trade. Gold has hit another all time high and shows no sign of slowing down. What is that telling us? And scary. Is that scary? But also there's the AI trade too, also perhaps scary. Yeah. And then ENB has now become the third largest asset in crypto, up 40% in 30 days. Why is all of Asia catching a bid? We're going to talk about this and more, but first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. 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. Uni chain leads all layer twos in 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 unichain on X for all the updates. 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. You are 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 F BTC backed by developer grants, ecosystem incentives and top distribution through the app reward stations and BYBIT launch pool for MNT holders. Every economic activity in you are drives value back to you, embodying the entire entire stack and future growth of this super app 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 Kgen, aka Verify, the world's largest verified distribution protocol or VDP. If you're trying to grow a real protocol or app, you need real users doing real actions. If it's not Verify, it's just noise. At the core of verify is Poggy KJN's identity and reputation Framework. It helps you reach humans, not bots. Improves what your users actually did so your budget goes to the right. With Verify, you can run verified user acquisition with confidence, keeping people coming back with retention tools like loyalty rewards, quests and achievements and even power AI training and evaluation using trusted verified user groups, ensuring your models learn from clean data. And when it's time to reward your community, there's the K Store, a global rewards marketplace where users can redeem perks that connect directly back to your app. Put simply, when growth is built on real users, you grow faster. And that's exactly what Verify Delete. If you're building a Web three AI or gaming, request a demo to grow your protocol@www.kgen.IO demo. That's www.kgen.IO demo.
- [21:56]
Ryan
The big news in all of finance this week was the gold all time high. Let's start there because this signifies something that a lot of people are calling the debasement trade. What happened was gold hit a new all time high, surpassing $4,000 per ounce earlier this week on Monday for the very first time. And just to put some perspective on it, this is up more than 50% this year. Gold. Okay, up more than 50% this year and it has more than doubled over the past two years. Reason for this consistent buying of foreign central banks. China's definitely one of them. People say a lot of this is happening after the 2022 US imposed sanctions against Russia and other, you know, non US aligned countries are like, well we're not keeping our money in Treasuries. So they're buying gold and that accounts for a lot of the price action. Also, retail is allocating to gold as well. But David, when you look at this, you know the list of the world's largest assets. Gold is now like there is no second best here. It's not even close.
- [23:08]
David
It's not even close. Jesus.
- [23:10]
Ryan
Gold is 27 trillion in market cap. Okay.
- [23:15]
David
That's so big.
- [23:16]
Ryan
That means over the past couple of years, David, they've added about, let's see, $12 trillion. 12 trillion. So how many bitcoins is that? Six bitcoins.
- [23:27]
David
Six bitcoins.
- [23:28]
Ryan
When gold moves, I mean with 50, 50% or doubles over two years, these are like deca trillion dollar moves here we're talking about. Nvidia is the second largest asset in the world worth 4.6 trillion. So. Oh, by the way, gold is having its own alt season too. Not talking about it, but like silver is catching a pretty massive bid on this too.
- [23:51]
David
The litecoin to gold. Yeah, that's right. I mean this is the debasement trade. Obviously it's just kind of crescendo ing right now and why it's crescendoing. I think we would probably have to talk to some macro people to really get that, to get that answered. But this is at some point, this has always been the trade. This has been the trade as long as I've gotten into crypto.
- [24:14]
Ryan
It's just like the debasement trade.
- [24:15]
David
You talk about the debasement trade. Yeah, yeah.
- [24:17]
Ryan
It's basically like fiscal deficits, fiscal dominance. The US is like 7% of GDP deficit this year. Congress isn't stopping it. The economy's doing pretty well. And still Trump is like, yeah, you know, we could use some rate decreases. We could replace Jerome Powell with somebody who is much more dovish and willing to cut rates. And we're doing this at a time when can we afford to actually do it? I guess maybe we can. We can't afford not to with our interest rate payments as a nation being so high as well.
- [24:54]
David
I mean, when the United States national debt is $38 trillion and we're paying like four and a half percent on that interest payments on $38 trillion. Like gold doesn't need a reason to go up. That's got, that's plenty reason alone.
- [25:08]
Ryan
Yeah. I mean when you even zoom out, right? It's always been taught to me that, hey, like the Warren Buffett thing, why would I buy something that doesn't have cash flows? Is not a Productive asset. Why would I buy something like gold? That's stupid. You should buy US stocks. Okay. Over the last five years, our best performing indices in the world has been the NASDAQ. It is up 98% over the past five years. Gold is up 112% over the last five. Gold this inert.
- [25:38]
David
You know, if you owned real estate 100 years ago, it's about the same value as it was in gold terms.
- [25:46]
Ryan
Yeah, it's incredible. Some more stats. Gold up 50% in nine months. The S&P is up 10% in the same time. If you go back in time all the way since 2000, what if the stock market gains were measured in gold? This is if they were measured in gold. This is all stocks around the world, all in the U.S. it's basically, you know, down only as far as, you know.
- [26:11]
David
That's crazy, right?
- [26:12]
Ryan
See, I mean, the gold bugs. Your crazy uncle's right. The entire time, gold is on pace for its best year since 1979, up 51%. Of course, as we said, if you.
- [26:22]
David
Look at these numbers and the world's.
- [26:24]
Ryan
Biggest asset, the last time we saw something in, like, higher than 50% going back through these years here was all the way back to 1979. And so what happened in the 1970s, you get some really good return years for gold. 1972 was about 50%. 73 was 73%. 74, 66%. 79 was on the stock.
- [26:46]
David
What happened in 1971?
- [26:47]
Ryan
We got off the gold standard.
- [26:50]
David
We made our fiat currency worthless.
- [26:52]
Ryan
We killed Brentwood.
- [26:53]
David
Gold goes on a tear.
- [26:54]
Ryan
So it's the 1970s with respect to debasement again. That's what the 2000s are, it seems like.
- [27:00]
David
Yeah, yeah, in the 70s, we took our dollar off the gold standard. And then in the 2020s, we can't pay our debt. So now we're printing a ton of money.
- [27:08]
Ryan
Well, the question is, like, at what price point, though, does this become alarming? So right now, gold bulls are like, yay, celebrate, celebrate. But I mean, if we keep having 50% years, this implies something is going very wrong with our fiat money systems. There's a comment from Twitter. Gold's parabolic move towards 4000 is sending a warning sign to the traditional finance system. Developed market nations are losing clout as being good stewards of capital. This comes on a day when the US Government has shut down due to dysfunction. France's prime minister resigned after three weeks, and Japan's new prime minister plans stimulus at a time of elevated inflation. Nation states are just like not handling their finances well. And so people are resorting to gold. But at some point this gets like scary, right? This gets into like, I mean you're.
- [28:01]
David
Making comparisons to like when fiat currencies collapse relative to gold, it's usually not a good time. Like the Weimar Republic in Germany, the Bretton woods in the 70s. I mean it's not a collapse, but it wasn't great. Anytime a fiat currency collapse, there's like discord and chaos. Like hyperinflation is different from gold appreciation. So we can cut off those comparisons. And also at the same time, like we're in 2025, like things are very liquid and fluid in capital markets. And so, I mean, you investors have more optionality and more escape valves from the fiat system better than ever. And so I mean part of that is just like, yeah, it's very easy to buy gold now.
- [28:42]
Ryan
Yeah. And let's talk about one of those other escape valves, which is crypto. So how about our digital gold products? How about our non sovereign store values? How about gold versus crypto? We could look at that on the year, David. So gold, as I said, is up 50%.
- [28:56]
David
Never thought that gold would be beating Both Bitcoin and ETH on the year.
- [29:00]
Ryan
It so Bitcoin up 30% on the year. ETH up 30%. 33%. Gold up 54% on the year, which is pretty funny. Now if you zoom out though, okay, if you zoom out all the way to bitcoin inception in 2012 and you price bitcoin in gold terms, okay. Gold has been down only relative to bitcoin. All right, So I guess the answer is kind of zoom out. Although.
- [29:27]
David
Yeah, that's not fair though.
- [29:28]
Ryan
It's. It is fair, but it's not fair. I think it's like another look at it, right?
- [29:33]
David
Yeah.
- [29:34]
Ryan
But I think the big question is will now that gold is 27 trillion. Okay, well we can just like make like bitcoin can catch up to that, right? Crypto can catch up to that as an asset class. And the question is, do you think.
- [29:49]
David
It will over the long period of time? Yeah, it's just like again, it's a generational thing right now. It's. I think it's because the central banks are freaking out because the United States has all this debt to pay and it's just debasement. And so banks are like the largest financial institutions in the world, are making this trade, which is why it's such a big move in gold. And like trillions of dollars are sloshing around but like, if we are long term investors, and I'm talking like decades, like what am, what am I going to put my life's denominator into? It's going to be the Internet equivalent of what is exactly going on. Because slowly the balance of power will shift from the analog to the digital. That's the whole crypto thesis. And millennials and zoomers, as we get our hand on Boomer Capital, central bank capital flows down into zoomers hands. All of a sudden they're like, all right, you know what? One day, Ryan, there will be a millennial. Jerome Powell, what's, what are they going to do? Like, are they going to buy? They're going to be like, we have a lot of gold and not very much bitcoin. I am going to equalize those things.
- [30:49]
Ryan
I mean, we have to wait for.
- [30:50]
David
The millennials to own the banks.
- [30:52]
Ryan
That's probably the case. That goes back to the clips we played earlier. Although I will say what you just said is more the narrative, right? And this is certainly the bitcoin crypto narrative, which is, hey, crypto is also a debasement hedge. Okay? There have been periods of time where it traded like that, where it was correlated to gold. So there was a long stretch from late 2022 to late 2024 that the CME summarized that gold rose 67% while Bitcoin surged nearly 4%. And there was a relatively tight correlation. But there are other times. In fact, most of the time, these two assets have been pretty decoupled. Okay, so it's a narrative that bitcoin should catch up to gold and trade like gold and as a debasement hedge. But it's actually when you, in point of fact, bitcoin is much more correlated to what the NASDAQ is doing. And so Michael Nadeau from the Defi Report wrote an entire post, which is basically the question of does bitcoin follow gold? And even should you have gold in your portfolio if you own crypto assets? And his conclusion was basically like, if you look at the data. No, not really. Bitcoin behaves as a distinct tech like asset driven by adoption, liquidity and reflex reflexivity. It's not like levered gold. Gold is inversely related to real rates and the dollar. Bitcoin shows zero, almost zero relationship to either of those things, which is somewhat interesting. So we've got the narrative that says, yeah, it's just like gold, it'll catch up to gold, it'll do what gold does. But in point of fact, it's actually still Very much correlated to tech stocks and not the basement trade. So we'll have to see if that changes.
- [32:35]
David
Yeah, I do think Bitcoin and Ethereum, especially when they are so early in their lifespan, Bitcoin's 15 years old. And so the first 7, 8, 9, 10 years of Bitcoin are just, it's like infant age. And same thing with Ethereum. And so like the next 10 years of Bitcoin where it's more an adult. And same thing with Ethereum, I think it's going to have different investment properties, different comparatives than, than what we have when it's like a child.
- [33:00]
Ryan
I think I agree with you too. Okay, so that's the debasement trade. But the interesting point in history where we are, David, is that's one thing that's happening. It's not the only thing that's happening. We have gold all time highs, but we also have stock market all time highs. We have NASDAQ and S&P 500 all time highs. So they are both up about 20%, 20 and 15% respectively on the year as well. And the real driver of growth, of course we know 40% of US GDP growth this year has been AI. Okay, if you look at 80% of all of the gains of the US stock market this year, it's all been AI companies. An economist out of Harvard this week said this. Without data centers, GDP growth in the U.S. would be 0.1% in the first half of 2025. Okay, so all of the CapEx spend, all of the growth that we're seeing, it's highly concentrated on AI. And we also, you know, there was a time where I think AI bulls have been saying, well, all of this is with cash rich tech companies. They have really strong balance sheets and they're just financing all of this capex spend with retainer. That has been true. It's starting to be less true. So here's a report. The amount of debt tied to AI has ballooned to $1.2 trillion. So we're starting to get some debt in the system to fund some of this capex. It's not just retained earnings. And of course we know what this looks at like, right? So here's kind of a diagram of almost the human centipede of AI right now where it's like a very small number of companies that are all cutting deals with one another and all pumping each other's shares up. Right?
- [34:51]
David
So just as Nvidia has a bunch of money made it an investment, or OpenAI made an investment in India, Nvidia, who bought, you know, a bunch of Oracle stuff, who, you know, we make a deal with intel, who, you know, competes with AMD and then all flows back into Microsoft.
- [35:06]
Ryan
Exactly.
- [35:06]
David
All the same money sale. It's all the same like $500 billion this week.
- [35:10]
Ryan
Like OpenAI does a deal with AMD and AMD shares are up 27%. And what was part of that deal that OpenAI would get AMD shares? What the heck?
- [35:20]
David
Hey man, okay, when the fiat money is worthless, like this is to be expected.
- [35:25]
Ryan
Okay, so, but this is kind of weird. We got debasement going on at the same time we have something that looks like hyper growth. Hypergrowth like, or what's maybe another word for hypergrowth that starts with a B? Is it bubble? Notable investor Paul Tudor Jones had a great interview on CNBC that I enjoyed very much. He actually compared all that's going on to the 1999 tech boom and bust. Okay. And he predicted that a blow off the top was coming soon. So he said, hey man, I was there in the late 90s. This looks a lot like that. Right now you're saying we're in 1999. For those that don't know the timeline here, October 1999, tech stocks were still booming like crazy. Meanwhile, by the way, the Fed was actually increasing rates. So monetary policy was tightening. It's going like from five to five and a half to six Anyway during this time there was still a bull run ahead. And then we got massive gains from October 1999 in the NASDAQ to the top, which was March 2000. And he said, I see something similar here. We got price increases, we got the tech fervor, we've got the build out. You know, everyone calling AI a new paradigm. And he's saying this seems a lot like what we have seen before.
- [36:46]
David
This feels a little forced to me. I mean the dot com bubble was truly a bubble in the sense that, you know, bullshit was getting priced at billions of dollars because you know, it had just like a, you had an investment brochure. It's like the same thing with the ICO bubbles. I could spin up a website, you could get hundreds of millions of dollars investment. And so like it was purely all just hype driven. And like, you know, AI. It's not hype, man. It's like these are the largest companies in tech. These are Google, Microsoft, Facebook, meta like Nvidia. These, these are the, these were all pre existing companies before AI came in. So that's a big difference, right? It's not just like anyone spinning up an IPO because they have a website, which is what happened in the, in the dot com bubble. And yeah, also like these are real products. Like I pay open AI do have a $200 software subscription to OpenAI. Like I'm paying them $200 a month. That's ridiculous. Jeff park pushed back on this. He had a tweet that I thought was useful. I'll read a small part of it. He says, I occasionally hear macro traders comparing the current bubble to 1999 because of the AI mania and stretch valuations. But this is quite a lazy thing to say in my opinion and should be taken with a grain of salt. Then he goes on to say a few things that you iterated like the Fed was raising rates in 1999 and it's cutting rates now. I think the big one that I like from Jeff Park's Tweet was in 1999 there was no bitcoin, there was no social media, there was no smart smartphones. And today money moves so fast and there are just escape valves everywhere. And you know, markets are just way more informed these days. I mean the 1999 tech bubble was because of the existence of the Internet. We didn't have the Internet to talk because that's what we were speculating on at the time. Today we have the Internet. Like markets are much more efficient, much more informed than they were back then and investors have like a lot more optionality. And so I kind of see that all as like bubble armor, bubble resistance, at least as it compares to like the 1999 bubble.
- [38:44]
Ryan
I think that there is some bubble resistance, but I'm going to take more the Paul Tudor Jones case on this. Not necessarily that this is exactly like 1999, but you can see like over investment allocation towards one specific area. I mean there's at some price point where AI is just like promising far more than it can immediately cache the same way the Internet did. Like everything in 2000 about the Internet did prove to be true. It just took another like five to ten years for that to germinate. And I think that might be true at AI, not necessarily now, but at some point. Now Paul Tudor Jones does say that like, hey, in situations like this, you cannot afford to be out of the market for the months preceding the blow off top. Okay? You gotta be absolutely allocated because that's the time you get the 2x, the 3x. Things get crazy. You just have to be cautious. And I do think it's worth being cautious about what is going on in kind of AI, he, someone, they asked him, what assets should you allocate to? And this is what he said.
- [39:52]
Paul Tudor Jones
If you look at the biggest winners, right, the biggest winners are gold. I think it's up 46, 47%. Bitcoin, I want to say it's up 50 or 60. I'm not even sure. There's a Morgan Stanley basket that's a retail flow basket that has all the meme stocks, right? It's up 67, 68%. So it's really what retail jumps on. So crypto, digital gold, that's obviously something that's very, very appealing.
- [40:22]
David
I mean, you're jumping on all of that right now.
- [40:24]
Paul Tudor Jones
Well, I'd want to have positions in all of it, for sure. So if you said to me, what are going to be the winners? Again, we have this race. The race, realistically is certainly to the end of the year, because that's when everyone marks institutionally, and then you have to figure out what's going to go on in next year. So what would I want to have? I'd want to have a combination of gold, crypto, probably the nasdaq. I think I want to say that. I've said that before, and I think that's still the right one. And I think whatever, the fastest horses at this point in time probably has a good chance of being that on deck 31 there.
- [41:05]
Ryan
Whatever, the fastest horse probably has a good chance of saying it. So he's saying crypto, he's saying gold, and he's saying the nasdaq. The question is, though, if this is a bubble, what do you, like, escape into? Do you sell? You sell for Treasuries, Just keep these assets. Like, if the denominator is shifting, what do you actually sell in some kind of an AI bubble? And, I mean, I don't think that's clear.
- [41:27]
David
Yeah, well, that's why I think part of this is happening. It's like all of these tech companies have hundreds of millions of dollars to slosh around because of the debasement. So on one end, we have debasement because there's so much money, and then where does all this money go? It went into AI. And so that AI is propping up the valuations, not because. Not just because it's a bubble, but also there's too much money around. Speaking of money sloshing around, we can get into some crypto native subjects. Finally, this big Marcus episode this week. BNB, a top five asset over the last month because it's up 40% on the month, 20% week over week. And you know, it's crypto, things move. Volatile. Things are volatile in crypto. So 40% a month, it's not crazy. But when you're a top five asset and you move 40%, that's something like 30 or 40. Excuse me, no, that's like 60 or 70 billion on a fully diluted valuation. So.
- [42:17]
Ryan
And it puts them at number three, Right, the third largest crypto asset, just behind Ethereum.
- [42:22]
David
Behind Ethereum, yeah. They're also behind Tether, but of course, let's not count tether.
- [42:25]
Ryan
They were ahead of Tether earlier in this week. So it's, they've been back and forth.
- [42:29]
David
Tether is coming in at $178 billion of stablecoins. BNB. Yeah, it's a stable coin, but I mean, you know, I think it's, I think it's funny.
- [42:38]
Ryan
Do you think that this price is justified? David, why is BNB worth anything? Is BNB money? Is BNB a utility? What's the rev profile of bnb? Do you think it should be the third largest crypto asset?
- [42:52]
David
I mean, you're asking very intelligent questions. I'm not sure if those are the right questions to ask in order to get it.
- [42:57]
Ryan
Let me ask you another one then. So at this valuation, BNB Token is worth 2x the market cap of coinbase.
- [43:04]
David
Yeah.
- [43:04]
Ryan
And interestingly, BNB token is, is not the same as shares in Binance.
- [43:09]
David
No. So Binance revenue used to burn bnb. It no longer does that. All we can really talk about are some of the things that have happened in the last month. Aster, which is one of the new perp Dex to come in after Hyper Liquid CZ has kind of like king made Aster. And so if you're on binance marching, Aster is like the thing. And there's just been a bunch of wealth effect downstream of, of Aster. So if you're, if you're an assert token holder, you're just a. You're doing great. And so there's been a, there's been a binance smart chain wealth effect. Downstream of that is meme coins. If everyone's on binance marching is rich, then like what happens next is meme coins. And so meme coins have attracted a lot of the meme coin traders on Binance smart chain. And overall just revenue on binance marching is like 3x over like a month long period. It's like 3x more activity. So fee revenue has now exceeded Tron, which used to be just like a number one or two chain in terms of fee revenue. So Binance Smart chain is like a tide. It's like only. Only hyper liquid is generating more fees than Binance marching right now, which is kind of crazy. And so all of these have have started to happen the waves, the momentum behind Binance has definitely because is because of all the on chain activity. Why it's two times a coinbase, I don't know dude.
- [44:29]
Ryan
Yeah, all of those reasons I think are right. There's also BNB holders get access to Binance airdrops so it's like something like 2.4 billion in airdrops in 2024 ordered a Binance holders so I guess that makes it a cash yielding asset as well. Thing as I was digging into this that I didn't realize is there are reports that cz holds between 60 to 70% of BNB tokens. And this is not transparent. This is a reporter who worked on an article for Forbes. I'll include some sources in the in the show notes. I didn't fully do the sleuthing to look this up myself, but it seems like it could be the case. Right, Because Binance has a whole bunch of BNB tokens and he traces the wallet to that. CZ has a whole bunch. Personally CZ owns 90% of Binance. He might have between 60 to 70% of the BNB supply. He's probably not selling, right?
- [45:21]
David
Yeah, it makes it really easy to go up if your largest holder holds 60% and isn't selling.
- [45:25]
Ryan
Oh, there you go. But it's a different type of asset than something like Bitcoin or ETH or some of the other assets that are much more evenly distributed.
- [45:32]
David
Yeah, yeah. I mean there's been a wealth effect across Asian crypto. The Asian side of crypto. So Mantle has been on just a pretty crazy run. Mantle's trading at $2.50 whereas just like three months ago it was trading at 60 cents. Mantle is like the Bybit token and that's downstream of the Bybit exchange. So that's also gotten a wealth effect. So overall just the Asian markets are very, very hot. I didn't go to token 2049. Neither did you, Ryan. Apparently the Token conference is just flush with cash and so there's just like a lot of lot of liquidity over there too.
- [46:06]
Ryan
Oh, there we go. David, what do we have coming up?
- [46:08]
David
Coming up next, the world's largest tradfi Exchange gave Polymarket $2 billion making Shane Koppelman the youngest self made billionaire. Also, Galaxy has launched a Robinhood competitor it's not what I expected to come out of Galaxy and you wouldn't guess who's leading it, who's back? Who is back to be the CEO. And also Ryan here has got three things that he's excited about, so we're going to get to all of that and more. But first I want to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Introducing FRAX USD the Genius aligned Digital dollar from frax. It's secure, stable and fully backed by institutional grade real world ass assets, Custody by BlackRock, Superstate and Fidelity. It's always redeemable one to one, transparently audited and built for payments, defi and banking. The best of all worlds. At the core is fraxnet, an on chain fintech platform built to align with emerging US regulatory frameworks where you can mint, redeem and use FRAX USD with just a few clicks, deposit usdc, send a bank wire or tokenized Treasuries and receive programmable digital dollars straight to your wallet. Fraxnet user benefits from the underlying return of US Treasuries and earn just by using the system. Whether you're bridging, minting or holding your FRAX USD works for you. FRAX isn't just a protocol, it's a digital nation powered by the FRAX token and governed by its global communities. Join that community and Help shape Frax Nation's future by going to frax.comr Bankless Frax designed for the future of compliant digital finance Bit Digital Ticker BTBT is a publicly traded ETH treasury company that combines the two biggest metas of our time, Ethereum and AI Compute. Bit Digital believes that ETH will power finance and AI Compute will power everything. Bit Digital gives you direct exposure to both. Bit Digital holds more than 150,000 ETH with institutional grade staking and validator operations. On top of that, the company owns roughly 73% of White Fiber, an AI infrastructure business that runs high performance GPU data centers that adds a meaningful exposure to the growth of AI compute with over 27 million shares. This is an ETH treasury backed by real operations designed to capture staking yield today while positioning for the future of intelligent computing tomorrow. The ticker is btbt. This ad is not financial advice. Do your own research, learn more about Bit Digital and try their M nav calculator@bit-digital.com that's bit-digital.com Bankless is being compensated by Bit Digital for this ad. You can find out more information by clicking the link in the Show Notes. Do you think that you're one of the best traders in crypto? Now's your chance to prove it. Bullish has launched their pro trading competition, a global challenge for professional traders now open to to US residents. This isn't leaderboard clout. It's real capital, real strategy and real rewards. The top three winners will each manage a one year separately managed account funded by Bullish, with a total of $14 million in Bitcoin equivalent capital on the line. Winners earn a 1% management fee plus 20% profit share subject to high watermarks. Finalists will be judged by a panel of leading digital asset managers with recognition across strategies and regions, exposure to multi manager funds and quant firms, and perks like access to coindex data and indices and consensus conference benefits. Build your legacy. Seize the mandate and Register today at bullish.compromotions/protrader. That's bullish.com/promotions/ protrader. There's a link in the show notes for more information. All right, ice, the Intercontinental Exchange, which is the New York Stock Exchange parent company, is investing into Polymarket with $2 billion valuing polymarket at about $9 billion. Wow, $9 billion valuation for polymarket, apparently in cash. I don't know. Right. I think, I think Shane has a Bank account with $2 billion in it. That's what I'm reading.
- [49:40]
Ryan
Yeah, that's pretty good.
- [49:41]
David
Yeah.
- [49:41]
Ryan
Shane, they're not only investing, right. They're also distributing. So again, this is the company behind the New York Stock Exchange is also planning to distribute Poly Markets. Not exactly sure what that means, but that's part of the deal here.
- [49:56]
David
Oh, interesting. I don't know what that looks like, but that's awesome. That's great for Polymarket. Shane Coplin, founder of Polymarket, 27 years old, and this makes him his net worth over a billion dollars, which, I mean, congrats to Shane. I mean on paper he has to IPO or drop a token, which he hinted at this week.
- [50:17]
Ryan
Okay.
- [50:17]
David
The Poly market token was officially hinted at, not confirmed, but hinted at from a tweet from Shane Coplin who just tweets out a bunch of tickers. Bitcoin, eth, bnb, Seoul and then ticker sign poly with a little, you know, emoji.
- [50:34]
Ryan
Well, there's a certain order to this because this seems to mirror the current crypto market cap by like order. So first bitcoin, then eth, then bnb, then Solana, then poly.
- [50:44]
David
So he's implying in terms of attention, not market cap. This is an intention. Oh, Attention. This is attention. Yeah.
- [50:52]
Ryan
Maybe he's going for number five though in, you know, market cap there. This is not confirmed, of course, but would you call this a tease?
- [50:59]
David
The founder of Polymarket just tweeted out a ticker that says Poly dude with a little emoji. So no, this is not confirmed. But like. But it's confirmed. Come on, come on. Now. Is this the, you know, equity or pseudo equity of polymarket or is this a.
- [51:15]
Ryan
What does the token do?
- [51:16]
David
Right. We don't know what the token does. We don't know what the token does, but pretty interesting tweet nonetheless.
- [51:21]
Ryan
Galaxy launched Galaxy One. What is this, David?
- [51:24]
David
It's a finance app, so I'd imagine you can deposit money into it and then there are different strategies as well as stocks and ETFs without commissions and so just pulling straight from the Robinhood playbook, earned interest can automatically be reinvested into crypto and stocks. I'd imagine Galaxy has a bunch of products and indices and ETFs. I would imagine that they are first class citizens inside of the Galaxy app.
- [51:49]
Ryan
I didn't expect this from Galaxy app.
- [51:51]
David
I did not expect this.
- [51:52]
Ryan
It's a Robinhood competitor, right? You have crypto, you have stocks, you can do staking, you can do all the things, yield all the things inside of an app. I always thought of Galaxy as more of like a institutional Wall street type brand and that's what they have been doing, OTC trading, that kind of thing. Now they're getting into retail and they brought a retail guy in to run it. Who is this?
- [52:13]
David
Zach Prince, the former CEO and co founder of BlockFi, which doesn't have the best reputation, but it's been a while so you know, it's only been three years, David.
- [52:22]
Ryan
It's been that long.
- [52:24]
David
Plenty of time. Plenty of time. Okay, so for those that weren't around or just don't remember, blockfi was part of the downstream contagion after FTX and Celsius as well.
- [52:34]
Ryan
So co founded by Zach.
- [52:36]
David
Co founded by Zach. Zach was the CEO and so he. It was a bitcoin depository institution. So you could deposit your bitcoin and you could get yield something like it started off at like 3% but then it started to creep up 4%, 5%, 6% started to be pretty compelling way to like get a bitcoin loan or just get yield on your bitcoin. Turns out when FTX exploded and also Celsius was also caught up in that, you know, the wave, the tide went out and Blockfi was caught swimming without trunks, and so they just didn't have money to repay the customers because they were giving out loans to Three Arrows Capital as well.
- [53:13]
Ryan
Well, mostly it was. Most of the loans were Alameda Research, and then they had about 350 million on FTX. Yeah. So they had their money on FTX and they had an $700 million loan to SBF, crypto hedge fund, which was, like, defunct and bankrupt, and that's where they were getting a lot of the yield. So that was blockfi, depositors funds. So that money was gone.
- [53:40]
David
Yeah. So a lot of customers lost money with. With BlockFi, and that's kind of the story there. Zach Prince testified during the criminal prosecution of Alex Mashinsky. And so we were able to kind of get some insights there. My big takeaway from Zach Prince was that he was kind of draw. Dragged down into the mud by competitors that were cheating. Like Alex Mashinsky was. He was a fraud. He was cheating, and he. He made all of his competitors made their life way harder because he was giving. He was literally giving away a Ponzi scheme, and legitimate competitors had to compete with that. And so they kind of got dragged down into the mud in order to just be market competitive with a cheater. And so that's kind of like the.
- [54:20]
Ryan
He wasn't a criminal.
- [54:21]
David
He didn't have the more forgiving interpretation. Yeah, right, right.
- [54:24]
Ryan
Alex Mashinsky had criminal charges. Wait, did he get. Is he in jail right now?
- [54:28]
David
I can't remember. Alex Mashinsky's in jail.
- [54:30]
Ryan
That's right. He went to jail. Zack had no criminal charges.
- [54:33]
David
Right, no criminal charges for that.
- [54:34]
Ryan
But he did make a huge mistake from a risk perspective, in giving funds to Alameda and SBF. He got totally SPFed. And as someone who lost money in black Blockfi, I'm just like. That still kind of hurts. Yeah. You know, in their bank, it's a.
- [54:49]
David
Little insulting to see him as the CEO of Retail Deposit a little bit.
- [54:54]
Ryan
You know, asking for more crypto, asking for more yield.
- [54:57]
David
But also, who's got more experience than Zach? Oh, yeah.
- [55:01]
Ryan
Totally run it back differently this time. I mean, I do feel for, like, the entire industry got screwed by Sam Bankman, Fried and ftx. But at the same time, I'm, like, raising a little bit of an eyebrow on this.
- [55:12]
David
Yeah.
- [55:12]
Ryan
We will have Zach on the show sometime, and he can tell us what happened.
- [55:16]
David
But I think you're. I think you're cursed with context. Did.
- [55:20]
Ryan
I'm cursed with only getting 50% of my collateral and paid In Fiat, not in actual, like Bitcoin. But, you know, another story there.
- [55:28]
David
Galaxy Equity on The NASDAQ jumped 8% after the announcement of Galaxy One. And so Galaxy is just an institution these days. They're in everything.
- [55:39]
Ryan
Yeah, doing quite well. I mean, there is a case for their stock at these levels. I mean, they're a $15 billion stock. Look at Robinhood. But they're north of 100 billion.
- [55:50]
David
They're like almost 200 billion now.
- [55:52]
Ryan
Coinbase is 80 to 90. 15 billion. They got the institutional side now if this Galaxy 1, the retail takes off. I mean, they've got a value appreciation story here. So that'll be exciting to watch.
- [56:07]
David
Yeah, Robinhood coming in at $133 billion. All right, for those that pay attention to things like this, for the degens, people in the trenches, the Monad airdrop. Monad, the Twitter account tweeted out the Monad airdrop claim portal is incoming on Tuesday, October 14th. End of tweet. That was a whole tweet. And so we're getting. I don't know how they're determining who gets an airdrop because they don't have a blockchain to the airdrop to users, but somehow air tokens are going out and community stuff. Community stuff. And we will find out how, who and how we are getting tokens on October 14th.
- [56:45]
Ryan
But that means they're going main net, right? Yeah, it's gotta mean that.
- [56:48]
David
I think it's like a open secret that like the Monad blockchain is running up and running somewhere. It's just not publicly accessible.
- [56:57]
Ryan
Oh, we should say for people who don't remember, this is a layer one. It's an EVM layer one that they maxed out efficiency for.
- [57:06]
David
Yeah, they reconstructed, rebuilt the EVM from scratch. Brand new database, brand new execution engine. So right now it could be, in theory, a brand new Ethereum client because it's EVM equivalent. It's not just EVM compatible, it's like the same thing.
- [57:18]
Ryan
And they did open source it, which is like credit to them. However, it's not a layer two. It's its own separate layer one.
- [57:27]
David
How much will the token be worth? We don't really know. But we do know that the OTC valuation for Monad as a whole is coming between 11 and 14 billion dollars.
- [57:37]
Ryan
Wow.
- [57:37]
David
So not a small chain.
- [57:39]
Ryan
Not a small chain at all.
- [57:41]
David
All right, Ryan, we got three things that Ryan is excited about. And we got three minutes left in this episode. So you got one minute per second, one minute each.
- [57:49]
Ryan
First thing is lighter. So we talked about it last time. This is a layer 2 perps on Ethereum. They just debuted on layer 2B, so they're getting a lot of traction.
- [58:00]
David
They got their report card. Their security report card.
- [58:02]
Ryan
Yeah, they got their security report card and it was exciting from a couple of angles. Number one, doing quite well. So you know how hard these pie slots on L2B are to acquire. They got four out of five in the green. Okay, wow. Now they're still stage one, but they're pretty close to being stage zero. Stage zero, stage zero, excuse me. And they're pretty close to being a stage one. Not only that, they are debuting at number six, the sixth largest layer two that exists by tvl. By tvl. Not only that, if you exclude all of the other layer ones and just focus on app chains. App chain is kind of like single purpose app. All they're doing is perps. They're the largest app chain in Ethereum. And I'm just like, kudos, they're doing it the right way. This is the founder, his comment was being in layer one is a bug, not a feature. And L1 is just an Ethereum layer two without any of the security and verifiability parts. As a property rights maxi, I love that because Lightr is showing that you could do an app chain, be super fast, performant and actually pass on Ethereum property rights. It's kind of the way Vitalik has always wanted it to go and it's an experiment we're seeing on that. So that was exciting to me. That's number one.
- [59:15]
David
We have a podcast with him, we are recording with him on Tuesday, next week. So that will be in your podcast feed soon.
- [59:21]
Ryan
Number two, David, is Coinbase and Brian Armstrong doing the defi mullet? Just continuing it. It's been a like a number of weeks. We've talked about this. This is Brian Armstrong. Now everyone in the US can access millions of assets on Coinbase, excluding New York. Sorry David, but this is within the main Coinbase app. You can go in Coinbase, you know anyone of your friends, your family that has Coinbase and they can buy pretty much anything. They can buy fluid, they can buy meme coins, anything on base, anything on base they can buy, which is a whole lot of things on Ethereum and they're doing this through a dex, so it's going through base on chain, but you get the same user experience as if you're on the centralized exchange, except it's creating a non custodial wallet for you. You're Doing it through Uniswap or Aerodrome, some sort of Dex aggregation, and you're doing it on chain. So this is the defi mullet in action. They are also. And they rolled out Morpho. And this is of course like defi borrowing and lending. And this is at already 200 million in USDC. So this is Coinbase. The thing preventing us from doing the defi mullet has always been regulation. And now regulatory is open. And so we're doing it. And you love to see it. That's the second thing.
- [60:38]
David
Last thing. What is it?
- [60:39]
Ryan
Last thing is Ethereum's privacy wallet reference implementation. Okay, so the EF has been talking a lot about privacy recently. And I'm like, okay, you're talking about it, but like, what are you doing? Well, this is one of the big things that they're actually doing. It's Kohaktu, I believe I'm saying this right. So this is a privacy wallet. They're taking the Ambire wallet, they're forking that and they are totally building it. So this is the EF actually building kind of a wallet building.
- [61:07]
David
Wow. The EF is building a product.
- [61:09]
Ryan
Yeah, but they're doing it like full soup to nuts. Full privacy. Because if you look at all of the wallets in crypto just in Ethereum on the market, none of them pass the privacy test. Right. You have private token transactions. No, no, no, no, no, no. Not like your rpc. It's known they can track your IP address. So this is a wallet from scratch that's going to do soup to nuts. True crypto privacy. Private sends through various privacy protocols that are exist, like Railgun, private receipts, private payment payments. You're even running the Helios Light client behind the scenes. So you're creating one account per address. Anyway, this is the EF being like, okay, we haven't seen a good wallet on the market that respects privacy to the degree we want it to. So we're building it and you guys can use this as a reference implementation. It's great to see.
- [62:01]
David
That's the most bullish thing I've heard out of the ef, because no chain has privacy other than actual privacy chains. But then you can't do anything because you can only do privacy if they can actually, actually establish privacy standards for crypto wallets. That's just a huge selling point for cipher bots.
- [62:17]
Ryan
One of my cypherpunks, I've seen them too. David, we got a moment of Zen. You found this for us. Set it up.
- [62:22]
David
Yeah.
- [62:22]
Ryan
Okay.
- [62:22]
David
This is El Coco. We have done moments of Zens from El Coco before. He is a fantastic singer songwriter and he makes songs about crypto, about eth. It's our favorite subject. And I don't know, I just listen to these. These little songs that he makes. They're really well done. They're really good. I'm just like. I just get a little. I get proud. I get proud of our. Yeah, it's very wholesome.
- [62:42]
Ryan
It reminds me of 2021, 2022. So enjoy this, guys. Gotta let you know, of course, none of this has been financial advice. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in. As I'm losing my voice right now. But we are 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.
- [63:02]
El Coco
ETH is money. It's a big improvement on the current system and it ain't even funny now the word money is confusing. It's more than just current currency. So I did research and wrote this song about what money means. What is money? What does it mean? It's a way to get you to do something for me when I don't have the thing that you particularly want. Because we all bring different things to the table and that's what makes society a thing that people want it like a thirst and they always put it first it's the thing everybody uses to measure other people's worth it's easy to move there's enough to go around it should retain its value and that's what we all call sound I may come up as cynical But I just understand Humanity's doomed But there's still room to improve things while we can and need some better money yeah, eat some better money Hard money A future built on money Legos is looking kinda sunny when the system's built to not extract it's amazing what you get how about a loan you don't have to pay back Self repaying debt what executes no matter what is told Ethereum what inflates less than gold but will issue enough in perpetuity to up hold security it's the same he's going to use in Daps and L2 when bass roll ups interoperate what will be the glue? If we want to scale to worldwide use Then no chain is prepared but only one chain's really facing this no others compare so what's so good about it? Don't have to store it in a bank where the greedy CEO that keeps all of the Interest made on all your hard earned dough. Don't have to put it in a mattress or hide it in the dirt. You retain complete control while you put your funds to work. You can loan your REIT to the highest bidder on the other side of the globe. He's guaranteed to pay you back. It's written in the code. You can start a business enterprise with strangers you just met and no one needs to know your name. No red tape from the government. And money. Eth is money. Programmable money. The current system costs too much and it's as low as honey. Why the hell do I need permission to Venmo, my friend who paid for lunch? Why do I need to put my name and address and Social Security number and whole goddamn life story into a big honey pot so the banks can say, hey hackers, look here, I got a whole company full of employees for you to socially engineer. Eth fixes this by the way. And eth is money. Just try to take it from me.
- [66:02]
David
You can't.
- [66:03]
El Coco
The most pristine collateral used in defi. And it ain't even funny. It takes away the power from the banks and the governments money. Money's just a product of people agreeing and they're deciding, it seems to me. And when people use ethereum rails, the money's always eath. So when Ethereum's used by all the governments, companies and people in the world, what's the money underneath? Well, it ain't bitcoin, you know that's right.
- [66:44]
Ryan
Well you know what? At least it's an authentic human sounding episode, right? AI can't do that.