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ROLLUP: Is the Bull Back? | The Clarity Act | Wall Street on Ethereum | Anthropic Nukes Perps
01:05:23
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Is the third week of May. David, we got another all time high in stocks. I feel like this is on repeat. Is this like the fourth weekly roll up in a row?
- [00:14]
B
Groundhog Day for Equity? All time highs. Not. Not a bad movie.
- [00:18]
A
No, not a bad movie to watch over and over and over again. I just wish I had more of those equities. Trump is meeting with Chinese President Xi this week. I guess that's why AI stocks in particular are up. But in the backdrop of this, we got inflation numbers in and that is accelerating wages decelerating at the same time bond market yields are surging. The question is how long can markets shrug off all of these counter indicators and what does that mean for crypto?
- [00:49]
B
Well, on the crypto side of things, we had a very big vote with the Clarity act which passed moments before we started recordings. We're going to give you all of the news.
- [00:57]
A
Not the final vote, not the final vote. You are right. A key vote is in the process.
- [01:01]
B
Yes, the key vote. But we are over a key hurdle. The Democrats filed over a hundred amendments. There is still the final bosses of the ethics and developer protections debate. But the odds of Clarity getting over the final hurdles are up. We're going to talk about all of that and more. Also Tradfi Ryan, did you know just loves Ethereum. Yeah, yeah.
- [01:22]
A
I think three of it. More than me at this point.
- [01:24]
B
I don't know. Three major financial institutions have all announced multi billion dollar tokenized money markets on Ethereum this week. We're going to talk about that. But then also the D day for anthropic secondaries. Yeah.
- [01:36]
A
What happened here? I want you to fill me in on that.
- [01:38]
B
Okay, Because I got you. I got the deets, I got the deets.
- [01:41]
A
Okay. Before we get into that, of course we got to thank our friends and sponsors over at Galaxy. So this one is for the institutional capital listening. Whether you are looking at the future of finance, that is crypto, of course, or the backbone of the next industrial revolution, that is AI. There's one name you need to know and that name is Galaxy. In fact, David, we have a number of Galaxy references in our episode today. They've been key in going through the Clarity act and reporting on that. What's unique about Galaxy though is how they bridge these two worlds. So full institutional training, custody and tokenization on the digital asset side of things and on the AI side of things they have data centers and they have very big data centers.
- [02:23]
B
One point, how big, Ryan?
- [02:25]
A
Gigawatts, you know, you know, one point. Six Gigawatts. That's more than a nuclear power plant, David. They've got all of that approved power feeding their helio site. They're a publicly traded company. You know the ticker GLX Y. And if you want to find out how Galaxy helps institutions in particular invest, build, and transform, go check them out. Link in the show notes. David, tell me about the two presidents. The meeting of the two presidents. We. We were talking about this right before we hit record. You were like, do we call him President Xi? Is he an official president?
- [02:57]
B
And.
- [02:57]
A
Yes, apparently he is. We have President Trump and we have President Xi. They are both presidents, and they are meeting in China this week.
- [03:04]
B
This meeting, this summit between Trump, Trump, and Xi has been planned for, like, over six or seven months. This initially, like, why is this happening? It initially got inspired by an attempt to kind of just like, quell some of the tensions with the trade war, but then Trump invaded Iran or started attacking Iran, and so that kind of added to the list of items needing to be discussed.
- [03:26]
A
Let me ask you, though, which president you think was more excited about this meeting, Trump or Xi? Look at this intro video, man. It's got to be Trump. Look at this. Oh, this is from the White House.
- [03:38]
B
For the. For the. For the video. Yes. As the. I mean, China just rolled out the red carpet for Trump because Trump's so easy to read.
- [03:45]
A
He loves, like, that.
- [03:47]
B
Put a crowd of people yelling and cheering and waving flags.
- [03:50]
A
Give me a clip I can tweet from the White House account, please.
- [03:53]
B
Yeah, make. Make me look regal. Which is what China did for Donald Trump.
- [03:58]
A
Good at that.
- [03:58]
B
Yeah, they're very good at that. Yeah. But the question I thought you were asking was, like, okay, this is a. This is like a cooperation, you know, cooperation competition between the United States and China. The optics here is like, let's make a deal. Yeah. With China, we are on opposite sides of the table amongst many issues. But look, we can. We're. We're reasonable people. We can. Despite being competitive superpowers, we can come to the table here. The question I thought you were asking, Ryan, was like, who's kind of got the more bargaining chips?
- [04:30]
A
Yeah. Who's got more leverage? Yeah. Who's.
- [04:33]
B
My take is Xi does. President Xi. China does. And the reason is, is because, like, Donald Trump tried to make some moves ahead of this summit. So this summit was planned to first happen maybe like, six weeks ago, four weeks ago, but Trump postponed it because he wanted the Iran war to kind of wrap up or progress to a more favorable position to Donald Trump, maybe he got a little bit of that, but really not a lot. And so President Xi, China actually does have a lot of leverage because Trump feels some urgency to get some deals done ahead of the midterms. Yeah. And. And President Xi doesn't have any of that pressure.
- [05:14]
A
Trump brought an entire techno corporate posse, though, with him.
- [05:18]
B
Right.
- [05:19]
A
Like, Jensen was there. Elon Musk was there. Yeah, He.
- [05:22]
B
Tim Apple was there.
- [05:24]
A
Tim Apple.
- [05:25]
B
Yeah, it was. There was, like, 12 industry executives that Trump and, I mean, China, g. They responded.
- [05:32]
A
Tim Apple. It's Tim Cook. Right. Okay. But.
- [05:34]
B
But Trump called him Tim Apple again.
- [05:37]
A
I forgot about this.
- [05:38]
B
Yeah, it was like, in a tweet or there's an official tweet where, like, Tim Apple will be joining. Joining President Trump.
- [05:45]
A
Just like what you do, David, almost every week with Michael strategy.
- [05:49]
B
That makes sense in your brain.
- [05:52]
A
Tim Apple makes sense, too. That might even make more sense. Tim Apple and Michael strategy.
- [05:57]
B
Anyway, so what does the United States want? Yeah, on the. On the United States side of the table, what does the United States want? The United States wants to secure large trade agreements, mostly planes and soybeans.
- [06:08]
A
Like, they want to sell Boeing and they want to sell soybeans, and they want to sell beef to China.
- [06:13]
B
They want to. I think we buy soybeans from China.
- [06:16]
A
Oh, do we? No, no, no.
- [06:17]
B
We're.
- [06:18]
A
We're soy exporters. Gotta be, man.
- [06:19]
B
Are we soy exporters. Got a bunch of soybeans over here.
- [06:22]
A
Agriculture is huge.
- [06:24]
B
And we also want to produce a board of trade to manage trade relationships moving forward. So we're trying to, like, smooth out the whole trade war thing. Yep. Trump also, probably more urgently, and this is probably Trump's weak spot, wants to pressure China Xi to use China's influence over Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and push Iran towards a peace deal. This is what she knows is a card that he has to play, is like Trump. Iran is a weak spot for Trump. What does China want? China has. Xi has really signaled that Taiwan is his top agenda. He wants the United States to back off from its presence around Taiwan, especially with arms sales to Taiwan. And also they want access to American technology. They want semiconductors. They want chips from Nvidia, which is very relevant because Jensen Huang was on
- [07:15]
A
the plane to China, and Jensen very much wants that.
- [07:18]
B
Jensen also wants to sell chips to China, as you could imagine. Which brings us to our breaking news. We are now allowing. The United States is now allowing Nvidia to sell ships to China. That is the news that broke yesterday. And so it seems like Trump is coming with a gift right off of the plane saying, hey, gee, thanks for inviting me. Going to sell you chips now.
- [07:37]
A
Yeah. Here, meet Jensen. He's here to sell you some chips. Nvidia stock. All time highs, obviously on that news. All time highs. So where are we at? Like Nvidia, like a 7, $8 trillion
- [07:49]
B
company flipped silver as an asset.
- [07:51]
A
Flipped silver, yeah. You think it's coming for gold? Maybe. Maybe chips are.
- [07:55]
B
Why the hell not, dude? I don't know what happens in this. Nvidia is worth more than every GDP of every country in the world outside of the United States and China.
- [08:04]
A
Oh, my God.
- [08:06]
B
Wild.
- [08:06]
A
All right, well, talk about a country
- [08:08]
B
of geniuses in a data center.
- [08:10]
A
Yeah, exactly. And you know, I think probably a lot of investors feeling like geniuses if they bought Nvidia two or three years ago. Huh? Kevin Warsh, final confirmation for his Fed chairman seat as well. So new incoming chair of the Fed, Kevin Warsh, succeeding Jerome Powell. This was a pretty contentious vote, apparently. So. The most contentious in history. Is that what I'm seeing? He was confirmed on a 54 to 45 vote.
- [08:37]
B
Down party lines, basically.
- [08:39]
A
Down party lines, I guess. Okay, so the question is, what is Kevin Warsh going to be like? Is he going to be dovish or is he going to be hawkish on the Fed rates? There's some challenges for him in terms of being dovish. I know, I know President Trump would love him to lower rates, keep lowering them, bring him down.
- [08:59]
B
He was selected because he was like, yeah, totally, a lower rate.
- [09:03]
A
Well, and Kevin said it. What, you know, it was a good idea because we have this deflationary pressure from AI and a new Fed chair has to factor in that deflationary pressure from AI into the story here. And that was his reason for like stated reason anyway, for thinking about this from a more dovish perspective. But that's going to be hard to do, David, given the inflation numbers that we have been seeing recently. And this was maybe the biggest news on the week. Tell us about inflation. What did we hit on the week?
- [09:33]
B
Yeah, April inflation rose to 3.8%. That which is the highest level since May of 2023. So we all remember 2020, end of 2021, start of 2022, and all throughout 2022, fastest rate hikes in history. Inflation went up to 8, like 11%, came back down and then it got down to like below 3% and has been 2.5 to 2, 2.7% ever since then. And it jumped up to 3.8%. So highest level since May of 2023 when we got inflation under control in the first place. And so this is absolutely the high oil prices downstream of the Iran war finally showing up in inflation, like across the board.
- [10:14]
A
We're seeing this not just in, in core cpi, we're seeing this in PI numbers which are up even higher. So ppi, this is producer inflation. So this tends to be a leading indic cpi, actually. So this could be a direction of travel for CPI. It came in year over year at 6% versus the estimation here. This is what analysts estimated 4.9%.
- [10:38]
B
Yikes.
- [10:39]
A
Okay, so that is well above. Well above expectations.
- [10:41]
B
Well above. So it's going to be very hard, as you said, for Kevin Warsh to cut rates in an environment that is asking for rate hikes, actually. And in fact, I believe this is what polymarket is saying, is that this has led to a increase in the probability of a Fed rate hike in 2026, up 8% this week. It started the week at 20%. It is now at 28%. And so this is a. Of a Fed rate hike in 2026. Yeah.
- [11:08]
A
Oh my God. That was not even on my like radar at all that we'd be hiking rates.
- [11:12]
B
Yeah. There's a couple other inputs into this. Bond market yields are flashing red. So the 10 year is up to 4.5%. That's the highest since July. The 30 year treasury yield is above 5%, which is. Somebody's tweeted this out. Like this is Trump taco territory.
- [11:32]
A
Yeah.
- [11:32]
B
So around 5% yields is when Trump starts to like freak out, sweat bullets and like do something specifically to lower yields. Whatever he can.
- [11:42]
A
But we know that because we saw this with the tariff scare around this time last year is when bonds.
- [11:48]
B
This is when Trump bends.
- [11:50]
A
Yeah, he backed down. Right. And so will he back down. And something with.
- [11:53]
B
What will he do to do to bend over? I don't really know. But like this, historically, this is always what.
- [11:57]
A
Well, we've been talking about the pain. Iran pain versus US pain. This is President Trump pain right here. When you have CPI coming in at 3.8%. When you have.
- [12:06]
B
That's what you would think, Ryan. You would think that Trump would feel pain. But actually Trump was asked what does he think about America's financial situation this week from a news reporter. Let's go hear what his answer was.
- [12:20]
A
When you're negotiating with Iran, Mr. President, to what extent are American financial situation motivating you to make a deal?
- [12:28]
B
Not even a little bit. The only thing that matters when I'm talking about Iran, they can't have a nuclear weapon.
- [12:34]
A
I don't think about America's financial situation.
- [12:38]
B
I don't think about anybody. I think about one thing. We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That's all. That's the only thing that.
- [12:47]
A
There you go, you single track mind, David, not thinking about Americans financial situation at all.
- [12:52]
B
Dude, do you think that that was like he said, was that an oopsie or you knew what he was doing?
- [13:00]
A
No, I like, I think if you want to be charitable about that, you could say he was just single track mind. He like nuclear issue is a bigger issue than short term American financial, you know, pressure. That's how you could interpret this. But the sound bite is not great.
- [13:15]
B
When has any president ever said ever, I don't care about the American average American's financial situation. Yikes.
- [13:24]
A
It's not great. Oil up on the week as well. We're above 102 barrels at least at one point this week. I'm not sure where we are at the time of recording.
- [13:32]
B
So about there. That's about right.
- [13:33]
A
But all of this and like, you know, stock market is shaking this off. Stock market is roaring, dude.
- [13:39]
B
This is the big like takeaway that I have is that AI stocks and also very strong corporate earnings are just plowing through any. We have gotten so many bear cases thrown at the stock market in the last few months. We've got the Iran conflict which did dump the stock market but then it recovered. Biggest recover recovery ever. High oil prices, increasing inflation, high yields, consumer sentiment is at all time lows. Something we skipped over is that because of the inflation numbers that came in in April, real wage growth has not kept up with inflation over the last like two or three years.
- [14:18]
A
And so wait, do we have a chart of that?
- [14:20]
B
Yeah.
- [14:20]
A
Is this it?
- [14:22]
B
Oh my God, yes.
- [14:23]
A
Okay. Inflation is now eating up all wage gains for the first time in about three years. This is painful for Americans in a true financial squeeze. They're showing. Here is CPI again the 3.8% we were talking about wage gains over the past year. 3.6%.
- [14:37]
B
Yeah.
- [14:38]
A
So wages not keeping up. This is not.
- [14:39]
B
Wages are keeping up. But Donald Trump doesn't care about the average American's financial situation, as he just said. And the stock market is just plowing through all of those. Everything that I just said. It just does not care because for the fourth out of five days this week, the S&P 500 had its highest close ever. So since the bottom of the Iran war, which happened Right at the turn of April. So six weeks ago, you know, I'd say stock market, U.S. stocks have added $11 trillion in market value in the last one and a half months. The S and P since the bottom is up 18%. The NASDAQ is up 28%. Nvidia specifically is up 38%. Despite no Iran peace deal. Despite oil above $100, the market doesn't care.
- [15:24]
A
Capital market just doesn't care. Investors happy for sure. But I think this is the chart really. Back to the cpi. Inflation, when that is above wage growth. This is a key political indicator. This is not going to win you any elections. That time period where this was the case was 2022 through 2023. You could just see it right on the chart. By the way, these charts always crack me up. There's literally in every inflation chart that we see like from now on for eternity we're going to see this gap here. No inflation data due to government shutdown. It's on every single chart and it drives me crazy.
- [15:58]
B
Look at this, dude.
- [15:59]
A
I have a gap in the chart.
- [16:02]
B
If we just down, the government will help stop having less inflation.
- [16:05]
A
Stop inflation that way.
- [16:07]
B
Yeah.
- [16:08]
A
Well, should we check in on on crypto then? What's the story over in our world?
- [16:13]
B
I want to get into crypto, Ryan. We want to talk about the crypto prices this week. But there's first. This is it technically is about crypto. You remember IBIT broke, smashed through all records of the fastest ETF to get to $10 billion. I bet that's the BlackRock Bitcoin ETF.
- [16:28]
A
Untouchable.
- [16:29]
B
Untouchable. 49 days to $10 billion. Like beat the previous record by like 200 days or something. Something monumental. There is another ETF that is on the verge of beating iBit's record.
- [16:43]
A
Tell me it's a crypto ETF.
- [16:44]
B
It is a AI memory stomp ETF. The ticker is DRAM. It launched 42 days ago and it is at $9.5 billion. So it's half a billion dollars short and it has seven days from the time of recording. So it'll be Thursday. It's totally going to make it. The biggest components Sandisk, which is the best performing stock by far in 2026 and also Micron Mu and there's just been like a huge surgeons of memory stonks and DRAM just launched at the perfect time to capture that. And so it is basically just shy of $10 billion. 42 days live into trading.
- [17:21]
A
And this is because DRAM is kind of the main supply chain constraint right now, kind of the AI compute, you demand squeeze, basically.
- [17:32]
B
That's right.
- [17:32]
A
That's right. And, and so this is why we're seeing Nvidia all time high. This is why we're seeing DRAM all time high. I even heard last week Larry Fink started talking about AI compute being like the new oil, the new commodity. You're sort of seeing these prices, right? Bitcoin as a commodity, DRAM as an AI commodity. No wonder prices are as high as they are.
- [17:53]
B
Yeah, yeah. I think that there's like been two phases in the AI revolution so far, and we're in the middle of the second one. The first one is the rise of chips and compute with Nvidia. And just because this is the chatbot revolution, like LLMs are really good chatbots. They answer questions very, very well. And then memory is the AI agent phase of this whole thing where, okay, sure, we have good compute, but our agents are better when they can remember more things at once. They have long, longer context windows. They can work for longer. And so memory is the new bottleneck. And so this is the current inflection in AI stocks.
- [18:27]
A
You're telling me we should have pivoted to AI commodities about a year ago, David?
- [18:31]
B
A little bit more than that.
- [18:32]
A
We've been in crypto. We've been in crypto. Well, tell us about crypto on the week we're up a little bit. Bitcoin is above 80K, which is a good sign. So where are we on the week?
- [18:43]
B
Yeah, 81600 of 2.2% on the week, severely lagging the S and P. I think we talked last week about the correlation between bitcoin and qqq.
- [18:54]
A
It's correlated, but I wish it was more correlated right now.
- [18:57]
B
I think the correlation broke this week. I think. I mean, we're back up a little bit, but up until like yesterday, we were down on the week while equities were up on the week. Strategy MicroStrategy made a buy for ants. I mean, it's pretty big as far as I'm concerned.
- [19:11]
A
43 million bucks. That's. Why are they even tweeting this? What a waste of my time.
- [19:18]
B
533 bitcoins bought by strategy this week. Tom Lee bought 26,000 ether for $63 million.
- [19:26]
A
Oh, my God.
- [19:27]
B
So this is. This is one of the weeks in which bit mine actually bought more in dollar terms.
- [19:32]
A
Is he going to have a 5% eth supply party? I mean, he's getting close, right?
- [19:36]
B
Tom Lee he is at 4.31% at consensus. The conference from CoinDesk that just happened in Miami, Tom Lee said that bit mine is actually going to slow its ETH purchases as it approaches 5% of the supply.
- [19:50]
A
I mean, he's approaching 5% of the supply. He outbid MicroStrategy on the weekend.
- [19:55]
B
Yeah, this is a slow purchase this week and he's still outbid MicroStrategy. Anyways, ETH had $2,300 up half a percent on the week. Just not the same amount of like liveliness in the crypto markets.
- [20:08]
A
That's already, I mean, so if you talk to even like kind of the cycle people like Michael NATO, which I do on a weekly basis, he if we lock in above 80k, so this 80 to 85k number and we have a few weekly closes like this, it kind of breaks the back of the bear market. I mean that's how it's worked in previous cycles.
- [20:32]
B
You're talking about the whole, the whole cycle thing of just like, yo, we're in the middle of the down cycle
- [20:37]
A
and it will be unprecedented. I mean we're looking at some charts this week where like the short term holder cost basis, all short term holder cost basis. Right now it's about 79k and we closed above 79k last week. If we close above it this week and the next week and maybe the week after. Every time that's happened that has kind of marked like an end to the cycle. There's other things too, like 200 week moving average. You got to keep an eye on that.
- [21:05]
B
Can we look at the long term charts for Bitcoin and ether? I just want to zoom really far out because the very long term chart for ether.
- [21:13]
A
Are you asking me to chart? I'm just pulling.
- [21:14]
B
Well, I gave you the get go.
- [21:16]
A
Oh, you did?
- [21:17]
B
Yeah, we're still on. We're in the agenda. We're doing the agenda.
- [21:21]
A
Thanks man, this is great. All right, let me click over.
- [21:23]
B
There we go.
- [21:23]
A
Yes we can, David. We can certainly pull up those. Here's my chart. This is ETH long term.
- [21:29]
B
Okay? So this goes all the way back to 2020 and 2021. And you can see just like the bottoms. I am not a charter. This is like flashing red territory. David is drawing lines on charts, but whatever. There has just been a very solid base being established of all of the lows established in 2022 and 2023 again and then again in 2024. And where we are now, we're like right above the lows. And same thing with bitcoin. Bitcoin has just like this kind of, kind of is stable ish foundation. Yeah, it looks good. It looks good. It doesn't look like it's going to explode anytime soon, but it's looks like it's doing the thing which I said it was going to do, Ryan, at the very beginning of the year, which is slow grind up. Remember me saying those words? Yeah. The next thing that happened is we actually drastically dumped down. But I'm still in this low grind up.
- [22:16]
A
That did happen.
- [22:16]
B
That did happen.
- [22:17]
A
That did happen in February.
- [22:18]
B
Right. But now we're slowly grinding up. We're slowly grinding up.
- [22:21]
A
Well, Michael, NATO's take is that we're still headed for another dump down before the cycle.
- [22:26]
B
I can also. Yeah, right, yeah.
- [22:27]
A
Dump down to the 60s picture that. That could happen back to fair market value territory and then we kind of slow, slow grind. So it's too early for this to happen compared to other cycles would be his take. I don't know if he's right or not. Again, some of these numbers might change his mind as well. And this cycle could be different.
- [22:44]
B
I don't know what the bear catalyst is natively to the crypto industry, but we did kind of paint the bear case earlier. High inflation, high oil prices.
- [22:55]
A
Well, that's it.
- [22:55]
B
Consumer income not beating inflation.
- [22:59]
A
It's what we're not seeing, David, is like we're not seeing the new buyers. Okay, so spot volumes are anemic right now for bitcoin and so that's what we haven't seen yet. Although ETF is showing up and microstrategy purchases are still showing up. Um, let's talk about some of these ETFs coming down the pipeline because these are new. So There's a Hype ETF and there are also some Zcash ETFs that have just launched this week.
- [23:25]
B
One filed. So the Hype ETF is live. This is from 21 shares. So backed by hype staking enabled. So this is hype staking 0.3% management fee. Cool. I mean hype is just getting more and more legitimacy, especially as the market's trading. On Hype are more and more equities markets.
- [23:45]
A
Zcash too. Right. So this is grayscale filing to launch. As you said, the first spot ETF for zcash. Zcash making in the Wall Street Journal cover. It's more a secret version of bitcoin. It's on a tear. That's what the title says. Zcash reminds Some of Bitcoin's early days, but some see its privacy features as a red flag. Zcash has been on a tear from a price perspective lately. I gotta say it is hilarious to see it in an etf. Zcash, let's do my my cypherpunk privacy coin. What are we going to do with it? Let's put it in etf.
- [24:18]
B
Zcash is the real return to cypherpunk values. I'll buy it in my brokerage. But the reason why zcash is being like touted if you will, is it because it is like partly like very institutional friendly. It has the non shielded version that institutions can touch as opposed to Monero which is just dark by default.
- [24:43]
A
You sent me this tweet by the way. This is first time Nvidia is a top asset by open interest and for the top five assets by volume are stocks. So I'm not sure what market we're looking at. I'm guessing this is a crypto native perps market.
- [24:56]
B
Is this like Hyper Liquidity, founder of Ostium, which is a perps market perps platform. And just what she's highlighting is that the most traded assets on their perps crypto perps platform is our equities.
- [25:10]
A
Yeah, I guess.
- [25:12]
B
Sign of the times.
- [25:13]
A
Our infrastructure is fantastic. Our infrastructure is so good we got more to talk about including Circle earnings day they had a price pump. Why also tell me about Anthropic D Day, David, that's the stocks took a tumble. At least the perp stocks and Hyper Liquid and Coinbase, they're doing something together. I thought they were competitors. All this and more. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this possible.
- [25:39]
B
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- [28:21]
A
Wow.
- [28:22]
B
And so there was a unique idiosyncratic jump in. Specifically USDC transaction volume in Q1. USDC now has 63% of total stablecoin volume out of all Stablecoins, which is crazy because it does not have anywhere near 60% of total market supply of Stablecoins. That's still like tether. So volume for USCC is up bigly. If you want to go down even into the grittier details of the Circle earnings, there's this newer line item from the P and L that their USYC money market fund didn't even know this existed. Is the largest money market fund in existence according to Circle. Yeah.
- [29:03]
A
What is this?
- [29:03]
B
Yeah, they have a money market fund and it netted them $35 million in Q1.
- [29:08]
A
Wait, they have a money market fund that they, they provide to investors, I guess. Tokenized money market.
- [29:13]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so this is. I, I think they have a similar problem that Coinbase had when Coinbase first went public was they had a very non diversified revenue line like Coinbase was from trading volumes. And Coinbase's big thing was the need to diversify their revenue. And I think this is happening to Circle. And so Circle has diversified revenue because of this money micro fund.
- [29:35]
A
Well, I did see another revenue diversification was the announced raising of 222 million. That's a weird number. 222 million in presale of their ARK Token. I suppose it's an ARK token, right? Is that what's being said?
- [29:51]
B
That's right. The ARK Blockchain.
- [29:52]
A
So Ark blockchain is a layer one EVM chain from Circle. We've talked about this before. A $3 billion valuation. And what is the purpose of ARK according to Circle? It's. They're building an agent led future. All right, so this is part of the, you know, AI.
- [30:09]
B
I've heard this one before.
- [30:10]
A
Circle, they're doing command line interface, agent wallets, agent marketplace. We're going to be the agent chain. Okay. That's our layer one. And on all of these earnings reports, what you just talked about and the Circle ARK announcements stock was up by 9%.
- [30:26]
B
Yeah.
- [30:26]
A
I got to ask you though, what do you think the value accrual? Like why are ARK tokens valuable, do you think? Because it's not money for Circle, stablecoins are money.
- [30:41]
B
I don't think they're asking that question.
- [30:43]
A
But these are investors and it's 2026. If we're not asking the question in 2026, when do we get to ask the question?
- [30:51]
B
I think the better question is can they make money from It.
- [30:53]
A
Which.
- [30:53]
B
The historic answer of can you make it layer one and make money from issuing a layer one token? That answer is always yes.
- [31:00]
A
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You think that, like, I mean, there's some savvy investors here. BlackRock, Apollo A16Z. Crypto investors.
- [31:10]
B
Yeah.
- [31:10]
A
So you. You just think they're just doing the L1 trade that's worked previously and they're doing that again without any. Any idea how ARK tokens will actually accrue value? Because I assumed it would be through some sort of mev. It can't really be transaction fees and. Or maybe they do kind of the mega Eth thing where they buy back in with a yield on Ark, provide some yield to the token validators or something.
- [31:38]
B
I think you're overthinking it.
- [31:40]
A
I'm overthinking a $3 billion token valuation for an L1 in 2026.
- [31:45]
B
Yeah.
- [31:46]
A
Someone get Jeremy Allaire on the phone. I want to be in the analyst call. I hope somebody asks him that in a quarter.
- [31:52]
B
How do these token value?
- [31:54]
A
Yeah, maybe we should get him back on Bankless. Maybe he'll tell us. Or maybe he won't be able to.
- [31:58]
B
I'd love to hear what the updated narrative is for. I mean, Tempo falls into this category. ARK falls into this category. Plasma falls into this category.
- [32:09]
A
Why are we still asking these questions? 6. Six years in, we still don't understand how these tokens will accrue value. And yet they do. Are valuable.
- [32:18]
B
They are. They are demanded by the market at the very least. My big question is, like, it's not even a question. I would just be so intimidated if going up against Tempo.
- [32:29]
A
Even if you're Circle.
- [32:30]
B
If you're Circle, yeah. I mean, because Circle's bread and butter is the USDC token. Doing a blockchain is a whole new thing.
- [32:39]
A
It can't be that hard, Right? It can't be that hard.
- [32:43]
B
Can't be that hard. Maybe we should launch a layer one.
- [32:47]
A
We thought about it, but we could never get our heads wrapped around value accrual.
- [32:53]
B
So we did the responsible thing and we didn't.
- [32:57]
A
This is a pretty big deal. Another, I guess, feather in the cap of USDC and Circle. There's always the question, if you're bullish, usdc, do you buy Circle or do you buy Coinbase? Right. I always have a question there. Because coinbase does get 50% of all USDC revenue. Am I wrong about that? That used to be the case.
- [33:13]
B
That's right.
- [33:13]
A
Anyway, so USDC is now deploying on hyperliquid There was a Coinbase and Hyper Liquid partnership of some sort. Maybe. You get me up to speed on this. What are we looking at?
- [33:23]
B
Yeah, so there's some backstory here. So a while ago there was a competition to the native stablecoin issuer on Hyper Liquid.
- [33:31]
A
Last summer, wasn't it was a while ago.
- [33:33]
B
Yeah. And they did this just because hyper liquid had 8% of all USCC lived on hyper Liquid. Crazy number. Except all the yields from that 8% of USCC was going to coinbase their competitor or Circle, just like they had. They had all of this 8% of all USDC yields. That's an incredible amount of money. And so they were. They auctioned off the right to use the USDH ticker, the USD Hyper Liquid. This was won by an organization called Native Markets which got the contract to issue and manage the aligned stablecoin.
- [34:07]
A
There was a whole DAO vote, right. There was a request for a proposal. I remember that drama.
- [34:11]
B
Yep, yep, yep. And so Native markets one, they could issue usch. They would manage the Treasury Treasuries in the back, basically just. Just like Circle or Tether but native to hyperliquid. Native markets would pocket 10% of the yield and then they would give 90% of the yield back to hyper liquid. One half of the yield that Hyper Liquid would get would go to Buy and Burn Hype. The other half would be distributed to HIP three deployers that were using the USCH trading pair. That only got so much traction. It got some traction. Not a lot, not enough to displace actual USDC on hyperliquid. And so this is where we get to part two of the story, which is what's being announced today. Coin. Coinbase is saying that, okay, we are the native issuer of USCC on Hyper Liquid and we are partnering with Hyper Liquid to basically resemble the same deal structure as usdh. And USDH is being sunsetted. Coinbase sounds like they bought the IP and assets from native markets. And so Native Markets is being sunsetted in favor of of USCC from Coinbase. And Coinbase is the default official treasury manager for USCC on hyper liquid.
- [35:25]
A
Wow. 1 comment stablecoin network effects undefeated here is showing USDC dominance. Other Comment I thought Coinbase and Hyper Liquid were competitors. Don't they both have perps platforms? Aren't they both kind of on Chainy?
- [35:39]
B
I kind of don't get it.
- [35:42]
A
Wait, what don't you get to your point?
- [35:44]
B
Just like Coinbase is rolling out their Persp platform, Hyper Liquid is the perps Platform Coinbase also in addition to this is now staking 500,000 hype. And so because this is a requirement to, to do the job. And so there's all boats rise.
- [36:00]
A
We all win together. This is like President Xi and President Trump together. And I guess, I guess.
- [36:06]
B
But like economically Coinbase and Circle were making more money because they pocketed all of the yields. And clearly Hyperliquid wasn't able to displace USDC with their USDH plat very much. And then Coinbase was like, eh, we'll just give it to you. Here you go.
- [36:24]
A
Who's bending the knee to whom I wonder? I think this is still, I think this is still a net win for Circle. Coinbase actually over hyperliquid.
- [36:33]
B
Why?
- [36:34]
A
Because it's their coin and they have established network effect dominance. And hyperliquid tried to unseat them and couldn't and they're back at the table now.
- [36:42]
B
Coinbase did, but they tried to unseat them and couldn't which means that Coinbase and Circle won and they get to keep all the yields. But now they're just giving it to Hyper Liquid. It's like we won, but you guys win.
- [36:55]
A
I think they're playing a longer game post genius network effects you get, you're the COIN on Hyper Liquid, then you win everything else, you win all of the other platforms as well.
- [37:05]
B
I agree with you. You have to invoke Tether there in order for that to really make sense is like this is now a defensive moat against Tether from ever penetrating into hyperliquid. But, but just to be clear, this is a big economic dub for Hyper Liquid. Hyper Liquid revenue. Do you know how much Hyper Liquid revenue grows from this? Oh yeah, like 25% it goes. Hyper liquid revenue grows by 25%. There's going to be like $450,000 of hype bought and burnt every day because of this proposal. And again, what does Coinbase move get? They, they kind of get like an optics thumbs up.
- [37:43]
A
Hyper Liquid is just a money printing machine. You know, you saw the coinbase layoffs like 14 or something, 700, 800 employees.
- [37:51]
B
And Hyper Liquid has like 14 employees. Yeah, yeah.
- [37:54]
A
Are you going to say they laid off? More like they laid off like I don't know, 10x more than hyper Liquid actually has as employees which like insanely
- [38:03]
B
profitable for all the reasons to be bullish. Hyper Liquid, which I'm sure there's plenty, one of them is that they are, are already ahead of the curve in terms of just like labor in the world of AI.
- [38:13]
A
Oh yeah.
- [38:14]
B
It's like you don't have anyone to lay off at hyperliquid. They're the most lean protocol of all time.
- [38:19]
A
Yeah, it's. It's pretty impressive. I mean, tether is. Is similar in this way too, I suppose. So there's the high margin, low employee. Businesses are the future.
- [38:27]
B
Speaking of hyper Liquid, I have a. I have a conspiracy about how this came to be.
- [38:31]
A
What? How? I think.
- [38:32]
B
I think there was. I think it has Kobe fingerprints all over it.
- [38:35]
A
You mean Kobe. Kobe's still working for Coinbase, right?
- [38:38]
B
Correct. And he's also a hyper liquid bull.
- [38:40]
A
You think he's. Oh really?
- [38:41]
B
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [38:43]
A
All right.
- [38:44]
B
Well, that is. I think this is Kobe influence.
- [38:46]
A
All right, well, he'll never claim it, I'm sure. At least not publicly. Hyper liquid. Speaking of them, like, more and more things are getting priced first in our crypto perps markets, including this CBRS.
- [38:59]
B
What is CBRS is a company that just IPO'd on the trad market today. The IPO price was $185 per share. And so that's what people bought it at, raising $5.5 billion. It is an AI chip maker specializing in just super high performance inference chips. It's a new new Nvidia. New age Nvidia IPOing very, very hyped. The interesting story here is that the pre market shares for CBRS was trading on hyperliquid and it was pricing it. Hyper liquid traders were pricing it around 300. So IPOing for 185. Hyper Liquid is pricing it at 300. And then this morning at the day of the listing, it opens at $363. And so there is just a. The conversation is giving hyper liquid traders clout for correctly pricing this thing.
- [39:50]
A
Okay, so what you're saying, what you're implying here is that hyperliquid is actually
- [39:55]
B
doing price discovery for these for illiquid pre IPO stonks. Yeah, that's right.
- [40:01]
A
Okay. I mean, and so that worked here, but also on the week, there's sometimes where it doesn't work so well. So this was the D day for anthropic secondaries. And you're gonna have to get me up to speed on this story, how this came across. My feed was basically like anthropic perps trading down like $300 billion or something like this after they announced that they weren't going to honor pre market pre IPO deals or something. Tell me what happened here.
- [40:35]
B
So what was potentially the trigger was this tweet from Casey Craig out of Euphoria. Euphoria. The tap to trade app on Megameath, which just went live today. We'll talk about that later. She tweeted out a pretty funny tweet. She goes in quotes. I'm buying spot anthropic on the Solana blockchain. End quote.
- [40:51]
A
Spot anthropic.
- [40:53]
B
Yeah. Not one of the funniest phrases I've heard all week. There's nothing spot about this, brother. You are four layers of financial abstraction and broker crime away from touching actual anthropic share certificates. Your spot position is a tokenized receipt for a possible future economic exposure to a Cayman SPV that owns shares in another Delaware SPV that maybe owns rights to further future equity pending transfer approval. You are approximately anthropic adjacent at best.
- [41:23]
A
That's kind of right though. There's not a lot of property rights on the tokens. People are buying, buying in these pre
- [41:29]
B
ipo and then you do like another tokenization process of that Delaware SPV of a Cayman SPV that's trading on the Solana blockchain. Okay, so that, that Tweet goes around 24 hours later. There is a new article on the Claude support page titled unauthorized anthropic stock sales and investment scams. Basically saying, hey, like if you guys aren't approved by us, which they have the right to. This is true for all, all private companies. They have to approve all share transfers. And so it doesn't matter if you SPV and SPV and spv. If anthropic doesn't approve it, like you're not getting it.
- [42:04]
A
It's so you might have a useless iou. You might actually not have any rights to the token. They say this in the press release. Any sale or transfer of anthropic stock or any interest in anthropic stock that has not been approved by our board of directors is void and will not be recognized on our books and records.
- [42:21]
B
Yes, yes. And like this is stocks that trade on like a, on a platform like Hyper Liquid or Solana or some to organize pre market. It's pretty adversarial to the interests of the private company that the stocks are represents. So there are approved transfers. Happens all the time. It's a very big market. And then there are unapproved transfers and there is a growing amount of unapproved transfers. And then there's also Ryan just straight up fraud as well. People saying, hey, I've got like, I've got an SPV with $50 million of Anthropic shares. Send me money and I will hold that money for you and then I will give you stocks later. But then they don't give them the stocks later and they also don't hold their money. That's also happening.
- [43:02]
A
OpenAI is saying the same thing as well. They did a press release right after Anthropic and so this led to Anthropic shares on pre stocks on Solana. That's I guess one of the platforms that are doing this. They dropped 34%. OpenAI tokens fell 40%. So evaporating, you know, I guess hundreds of millions in billions, I should say,
- [43:25]
B
in perceived value, in perceived market cap
- [43:27]
A
value on these platforms.
- [43:29]
B
But this is what happens, Ryan, when the private markets are just so large for so long. Like what do you expect? People want access to the coolest companies ever. They're going to do crazy things to have exposure to things like anthropic and OpenAI and SpaceX.
- [43:45]
A
I mean big picture, it's so shitty that all of these companies in the, in the AI boom that we're experiencing now, generational event. Last time this happened was the dot com boom. All of these gains are private, you know, and that sucks. That sucks on the way up, on the way down.
- [44:01]
B
But then it also sucks that when people attempt to get exposure to these things, like they finagle their way. Yeah. Then Entropic says hey, that's not allowed and then nukes everyone by 40%.
- [44:10]
A
Yeah. I think at this stage, David, public markets in the US like they're almost non functional with respect to new entrants and new assets.
- [44:22]
B
Because we need like a regular, we need like a regulation jubilee. It just costs too much to become publicly listed and it's too encumbering. We need it to be less encumbering for start from scratch.
- [44:34]
A
Rebuild. Rebuild.
- [44:35]
B
Yeah.
- [44:36]
A
Yeah.
- [44:36]
B
I mean, yeah, dude. Like I don't know if the next generation can take another stripe or open AI or Anthropic turning into a trillion dollars without any like 0.001% of a generation getting access to that.
- [44:49]
A
Yeah, it's brutal. And you know, I don't, I don't see a lot of people in Congress talking about it at all. No, because the way. Because their public markets have failed.
- [44:56]
B
They're trading, they're. Yeah, they have trading against us.
- [44:59]
A
Yeah, that's right. David. We got more to talk about. Maybe some of the fix could be the Clarity Act. We get these tokens available to the public sooner. There was a make or break vote. That just happened. We'll tell you the results. Also, three of the biggest financial institutions in the world just released tokenized money markets on Ethereum. We'll explore that too. Before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.
- [45:23]
B
Quick shout out to OkX. They are live in the States building the new Money app and Wall street is taking notice. The parent company of the NYSE just invested at a 25 billion valuation and took a board seat. That's the New York Stock Exchange coming to crypto, not the other way around. And why OkX? It's the only app combining a full centralized exchange and self custody wallet in one place. Sex trading, dex access on chain activity all in a single interface. Nora bouncing between five apps, copying pasting addresses or bridging tokens in separate tabs. They support Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana Base and more. Millions of tokens, just a few clicks and an infrastructure that processes trillions in transactions actions and keeps assets fully backed. OkX users are set to get tokenized New York Stock Exchange stocks and derivatives later this year. Traffi and Defi finally in the same app, Head to the link in the show notes, download OKX and see why it's the NYSE's go to for going bankless in the United States, not investment advice services not available in New York and Texas. When the market pulls back, most people just wait. They hold cash, hoping things stabilize. But there's another move. And that's where Nexo comes in. Nexo is a platform built to help keep your digital assets productive. You can earn daily interest on supported crypto assets through their yield product or get funds through a crypto backed credit line without having to sell any of your assets. So if you want optionality, Nexo gives you both sides of the equation. You can put your assets to work or borrow against them when you need flexibility. Nexo has been around since 2018 and has over 8 billion in assets on the platform and has paid out more than $1.3 billion in interest to clients globally. So if you're a new US user, there's a welcome incentive waiting for you when you sign up. Check it out at the link in the Show Notes. And as always, this is not investment advice.
- [47:01]
A
Big vote on the week for the Clarity Act. It just happened and it passed before before we get to that, let's talk about Brian Armstrong. This is him in the halls of Congress. He was talking about Coinbase's support for the Clarity act in its current manifestation. Let's listen.
- [47:17]
C
Hey everyone, Brian Armstrong here. I'm back in the Senate office building in D.C. in anticipation of crypto market structure legislation going to markup on Thursday, which would be a historic moment. And the energy here is just palpable. So first off, just want to say a big thank you to the Senate and of course their staff who have been putting in countless hours to get this bill to a good place. I don't think it's ever been in a more strong position and more bipartisan position. And I also want to thank the 3.7 million stand with crypto advocates who have made their voices heard to get this legislation to where it is today. Now, there were a number of open issues that have now made incredible progress. Stablecoin Rewards was a big one. You know, I think there was a healthy compromise there brokered by Senators Tillis and also Brooks. And you know, it was a good compromise because both sides left a little bit unhappy, but at least we got to a place that we can all live with. And then of course, the other issues which I mentioned in my expost back in January that were problematic in the prior draft, things like defi and tokenized equities and CFTC authority, these have all been improved and fixed from our point of view. And so the bill is stronger than ever. It's bipartisan, it's ready to go to markup, and I'm incredibly bullish on what this could mean for American innovation and ordinary Americans benefiting from this technology. So we'll keep you updated and keep fighting the good fight. Thanks.
- [48:34]
A
So David, he was talking about the latest rendition of the Senate Banking Committee draft of the Clarity act. And there was a key vote that happened on Thursday. We have the results of that vote. It passed the Senate Banking Committee. What was, let's see, 15 to 9. Okay, that was, that was the vote in the Senate Banking Committee. And it wasn't conclusive either that it would pass or that we'd get as many Democrats on board to vote in favor of this bill as we actually did. So it looks like the results of this vote were better than many in crypto actually expected. And there was some question going into this vote too about how they might edit it, what amendments might be in play here. One was the brca. We've talked about this previously. This is something we care a lot about at Bankless Coin center cares about. This is non custodial developer protections.
- [49:31]
B
This is the Roman Storm part of the bill.
- [49:34]
A
Yes. And it's pretty much a bankless defi red line here. Like, it has to be in. And Coin Center's put in yeoman's work to actually make this happen. From 2018, they got the BRCA tied to Clarity Act. Fantastically, David, BRCA actually made it through this committee. And this was a committee that it might not have made through. So that's fantastic news.
- [49:56]
B
We're over a big hurdle that could have killed us.
- [49:58]
A
We are now. What passing means is that the committee is marked up the bill and then they're going to send it to the full Senate floor. Okay, so this is a banking committee. This is not the Senate floor yet. But even passing this is a big deal. What has to happen next is we actually have to get 60 votes in the Senate. That happens in June. I'll remind you that we had 68 votes for the genius act, so that's kind of the precedent. And that was approved. So we need to get 60. And that will require many key Democrats to come aboard here. But it passing the Senate Banking Committee is a good sign, certainly. And then after that, by the way, after it gets through the Senate, we have to go through the House. Remember, there was another bill in the House there.
- [50:46]
B
There's so much left.
- [50:48]
A
Takes a long time, and then ultimately you get to the presidential signature. So the White house goal is July 4th. Of course, you know, that might slip into August. But this was a key vote. And, David, there was a lot of pushback here. I don't know if you saw on your timeline, all of the banks, like, sending mailers, sending emails out, freaking out.
- [51:08]
B
I wasn't totally tapped into what was going on.
- [51:12]
A
Yeah, I mean, I just saw some of this. Like, here's. It looked like a bunch of banks in. This is a tweet. The banking cartel is in full panic mode. While Americans were celebrating Mother's Day with their families, the CEO of the American Bankers association sent a frantic alert to every bank CEO in the country demanding immediate engagement. So they're still freaking out. They're still worried about the stablecoin yield issue. So this is Robert Nichols. He is the ABA President. That's the American Bankers association saying, like, this is, we need your help. You gotta contact your senators. You know, this is gonna cause capital flight and deposit flight from our banks if the yield issue goes through untouched. So anyway, the banks are trying their best, but despite that, Clarity has gotten through Again, some compromises. We discussed the compromises last week. Can you remind folks what is actually in this version of the Clarity bill?
- [52:07]
B
So there's three main things. There's the splitting of the Oversight between the SEC and the cftc. SEC surprise gets security like tokens. CFTC surprise gets commodity like digital assets. It also creates a mature blockchain chain test so tokens can migrate from a security to a commodity once the network is full sufficiently decentralized. With a pretty fantastic definition of decentralization, like one that actually did its homework. Then there's stablecoin yield. It bans the passive yield, allows activity based rewards. Still kind of like TBD on what that means. And that's a question that I have for Alex Thorne when we interview him tomorrow. Or I think I, I'm, I'm on that interview, you're not. So that'll be a question that I will ask him. Jake Stravinsky tweeted out yesterday. The Clarity text came out pretty good last night. It's not perfect, but nothing that passes Congress ever will be. If we want a market structure bill, we need to be pragmatic. There are compromises here, but the deal is decent now we wait for it to survive the amendments.
- [53:08]
A
I'm happy enough with it so long as we get brca. And again, that's not a given. So there's still some pushback. Senators, particularly Democrats, they want some give on ethics provisioning, preventing Trump from doing things in crypto that's still contentious. I'm not sure how that will pan out, but that could be some fly in the ointment. David, one of the things I was most excited about reading was actually this. You said it was a fantastic definition of decentralization. It really is. So in the Clarity act there are three. There's like a full definition of what decentralization actually means. So if you're going to get into that commodity status, you have to be fully open source, you have to be permissionless, incredibly neutral. So there can't be a person or group that has unilateral ability to restrict, censor or prohibit use of the system at all. It has to be distributed. And they define that you can't have more than 49% of outstanding units. So you know, kind of the voting power has to be distributed. Autonomous digital ledger system. So the it has to abide by something decentralized, has to abide by consensus rules. Like it has to be in code. You know, this has to be fully open for everyone to see and then economically independent. So Gabe Shapiro says the US Congress is officially more cypherpunk than most of you on here are. He was talking to the crypto Twitter crowd because this is like a really strong definition of decentralization. And it made the Clarity bill here. It's pretty solid.
- [54:43]
B
So the Democrats in total in aggregate made something like 100 plus, maybe 200 plus amendments. Proposed amendments. Elizabeth Warren made 16 proposed amendments to the bill.
- [54:55]
A
Yeah, she's not happy about this.
- [54:56]
B
Do you know how many of her 16amendments actually made it through?
- [54:59]
A
No, actually zero. Really?
- [55:01]
B
None of them?
- [55:03]
A
Well, she was trying to amend crazy things. Like I saw something probably there was anti defi amendments in there. There was definitely some things that would scale back the BRCA in there. I think there was things that were glommed on to prevent crypto companies from opening master accounts with the Fed. So there's all this weird stuff that they tried to tie in here. It looks like that got.
- [55:24]
B
Just trying to choke out whatever she can about crypto left and right and just, just not getting any of them. Let's go to the Polymarket Clarity act signed into law in 2026. Question mark. We've been watching this Polymarket, probably our most watched poly market ever, coming in at 69% chance likely. Nice. That is up just from last week where it was like 60%. So we're up 9% on the week still. Like I want it to be higher,
- [55:53]
A
but you saw it has to go through all of this process still. Even still. But this was a pretty major step. We'll take. We'll take percent odds here.
- [56:01]
B
Yeah, yeah. Okay. Money markets on Ethereum. Three of the biggest financial institutions of the world, BlackRock, JP Morgan, Fidelity, all shipped tokenized money markets on Ethereum this week. I actually kind of thought we already had tokenized money markets on Ethereum from all of these.
- [56:17]
A
Not like these. So we had Biddle. Okay.
- [56:21]
B
Which wasn't a tokenized money market. That was tokenized T bills.
- [56:24]
A
That's right. Now BlackRock is doing two new tokenized funds. They have filed this week for that. So. So BIDL is about 2.5 billion in AUM. These new ones are going to digitize an existing treasury liquidity fund that they have, a $6.1 billion fund. So they're going to put that on chain. And they're explicitly targeting stablecoin holders with this. So this is BlackRock, like full steam ahead, just rolling out tokenized funds. You can see the Biddle charts here, by the way. This is. Well, I have this somewhere in the charts. Yeah. Real world assets, wallets, dot com. The bigger one I thought on the week from a news perspective was JP Morgan. So this, they're going to launch their second tokenized fund on Ethereum. So they had Something called Money M O N Y. But this one is even bigger. It's, you know, jltxx. So this stands for JP Morgan on Chain Liquidity Token Money Market Fund. And this is an actual registered government money market fund. Okay. So it's a big deal and it's really purpose built for the genius act that comes out of kind of the genius act of requirements. And if you build, if you buy a money market fund, say you want that, you know, 3 to 4% yield in your brokerage account, you're probably doing something like a Vanguard type fund. You might be paying fairly high basis points on this. This is only 16 basis points. Okay. So the best available right now is Vanguard 11. This is 16. So this is, this is very competitive. And again, this is JP Morgan releasing it. The third was Fidelity, so they released something called filq. Same playbook. This is international. Anyway, it's very clear to me that all of the biggest, like look at who just said JP Morgan biggest bank.
- [58:13]
B
These are the two big to fail banks.
- [58:15]
A
Yeah, Biggest asset manager in the world. BlackRock Two more Fidelity8.8 trillion in assets under management and they're all doing money market funds. So they see that this is the future and they'll just do more of this post Clarity act as well.
- [58:29]
B
I have mixed opinions on this. Obviously it's good. We want more value capital to go onto Ethereum. The contrast, the juxtaposition that I'm seeing is a couple weeks ago we had the worst exploits in Defi where people were were looping these crypto native assets on these crypto native protocols to get extra yield. And so we were looping RS eth or the KELP restate eth in AAVE crypto native asset crypto native protocol hooked to another crypto native protocol to juice up the yield. And then on the flip side of this, the juxtaposition is we're getting the too big to fail banks, putting some of the world's safest yield directly on chain. And so it's like an antidote to the problem that we just had that we just created for ourselves with these crypto natives looping to really get the yield. Like okay, we now have maybe it's less yield, but we now have like very safe and stable yield. But we're getting it from the banks and we're not getting it from DeFi. So I feel mixed about that.
- [59:27]
A
I was thinking too, actually. I've been doing a lot of reflecting because David, we're six years in to the Bankless podcast now and the Bankless Thesis. And actually, James on our team, he rolled out all of our transcripts. So if you're a Bankless Premium member, you can now access this. You can have an MCP connection. So dial your Claude, dial your ChatGPT into the entire Bankless content library, and you can get that beamed into your interface.
- [59:57]
B
The amount of data that this represents, the amount of conversations that we've had with literally everyone. Yeah, that's crazy.
- [60:06]
A
I know. And so it's 1230 episodes that we have in this library here. And I hooked it up to my clock.
- [60:13]
B
1200. 1000, 2. 1,200.
- [60:15]
A
230.
- [60:16]
B
Yeah.
- [60:16]
A
Not. Not 12,000. 1230 episodes. That's right. All of our transcripts. Everything.
- [60:24]
B
I mean, we have been doing this for so long.
- [60:26]
A
I know. And so I was going down memory lane, and the question I had is, you know, our first 10 episodes, which I feel like were cornerstone to the entire Bankless thesis, we did Economic Bandwidth episode, We did Triple Point Asset ETH episode, we did Money is a Meme. All these.
- [60:43]
C
Correct.
- [60:43]
B
We basically painted our own roadmap of understanding everything for the next, like, four years.
- [60:48]
A
That was kind of the Bankless thesis in those first 10 episodes. And so I asked Claude to analyze all of the transcripts and now give us a report card six years later. How well. How well did it hold up?
- [61:01]
B
Did you make sure that, like, hey, don't glaze me.
- [61:03]
A
No, I didn't ask it to. Not to glaze me. All right, so we have a little
- [61:08]
B
bit of glaze in here.
- [61:08]
A
I feel like my claw doesn't glaze me, but that's probably what everyone says.
- [61:12]
B
Maybe your claws just really smart.
- [61:13]
A
Yeah, my clot is smart. I know this. Anyway, here's what it gave us. Overall grade on the Bankless thesis was an A minus. Okay. On the ETH bet specifically, we got a B.
- [61:25]
B
And it would have been an A in a different era.
- [61:27]
A
Yes, it said we got the macro call. Right. Okay, so our very first Bankless episodes were during March 2020. Covid. Okay? We predicted fed money printing, all that stuff. ETH is a triple point asset. Claude loved that. It said that became the industry standard way of evaluating ether.
- [61:46]
B
Let's fucking go.
- [61:47]
A
Oh, I forgot to tell you our stats. Okay, so since our first episode recording, eth is up 20x.
- [61:54]
B
All right, okay, so bitcoin up thread guy earlier, and he asked me what the best business decision we ever did at Bankless was, and I just go talking about ETH.
- [62:05]
A
Well, you had to do it in 2020, right? If you did it in 2022, not so much.
- [62:11]
B
Yeah.
- [62:12]
A
All right, so ETH was 110 at the time. Bitcoin was 5K. Crypto market cap. We're up 20x since our first episode. DeFi TVL this is where we outperformed David. We're up 320x in DeFi TVL so and those were our big bets. Right. It was bitcoin, it was ether. Ether in particular as a monetary asset and defi. Right. So that's why we're getting the A minus, I think. I look at those price, I'm like, okay, that's justified. Maybe if you started listening to bankless in 2021, maybe not so much.
- [62:43]
B
Yeah. Like if the frame of reference really matters here.
- [62:47]
A
That's right. And then so we got defi. We got a B plus on that aspect of it. Again, it's summed up to an A minus. But the things where we got lower scores were. It said we were too triumphalist. The bankless Future arrived through TradFi ETFs BlackRock stablecoins. This is what I was just saying, not against it. Exactly. And so it said this is the framing that needs work. It wasn't actually a. It was a hybrid future. It wasn't a fully bankless future. And also said ETH didn't lead the decade. So ETH underperformed relative to like what we were hoping at least to this point. We had a multi chain blind spot and we were underweight on stablecoins. So that's, that's kind of how I feel.
- [63:28]
B
That's fair. Yeah, I know. I agree with the analysis. I think the grading is perhaps subjective, but the analysis I think is spot on.
- [63:35]
A
Yeah. I was going to give us more like a B overall.
- [63:38]
B
Yeah.
- [63:39]
A
Although. Although, I don't know, maybe like, you know, 20x, that's a territory. It depends on when you measure it from.
- [63:46]
B
Yeah.
- [63:48]
A
David, you want to tell me about Euphoria? I know you're very excited about.
- [63:53]
B
We like crypto native apps. This is a. Euphoria is a tap to trade app on Mega Eth. It's probably the most excited anticipated mainnet release on Mega Et Eth. I already know you, Ryan. You definitely have not traded done this app. Use this app.
- [64:08]
A
No, no, I'm not into trading you for it.
- [64:10]
B
No, just it's a, it's a price line and it, and it's like one second charts and there's a line and you, you press your finger on parts of your screen and this little square gets highlighted and if the price line goes into the square, then you get money.
- [64:24]
A
Is this investing? Is that what we're doing here?
- [64:26]
B
No, it's trading.
- [64:27]
A
Okay. Trading?
- [64:29]
B
Are you trading? You're making bets like 17 seconds into the future?
- [64:33]
A
Oh my God.
- [64:35]
B
Anyways, they just went live. It's pretty fun. There's going to be a trap to trade competition or a bunch of other like activations. So I think it's pretty cool.
- [64:43]
A
You can only do that on a very high TPS blockchain, I'm guessing, so.
- [64:47]
B
That's right.
- [64:48]
A
That's part of the mega picture. That's right. We got to end it there. Of course, none of this has been financial advice. You could lose what you put in. 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.
- [65:00]
B
That.