ROLLUP: Prediction Market Bill | Solana DEX ATH | ETH Stablecoins ATH | Zcash Implodes | Vitalik “Trilemma Solved”

Summary

Bankless Weekly Rollup – January 9, 2026

Episode Theme:
A sweeping rundown of the week’s biggest crypto stories, with a focus on the intersection of traditional finance and DeFi, prediction markets and thorny regulatory questions, the ongoing evolution of Ethereum and Solana, and high-profile developments in stablecoins and privacy tech. The show balances deep dives into major headlines with rapid-fire analysis and signature banter between hosts Ryan and David.

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Main Topics Covered

• Insider trading and regulation in prediction markets (Torres Bill, Maduro’s capture on PolyMarket)
• Solana DEX volume and role as the “trading chain”
• New all-time-highs in Ethereum’s stablecoin transfer volume
• Zcash implosion following the dev team exodus
• Lighter token airdrop: TVL, market impact, and ecosystem comparisons to Hyperliquid
• Vitalik Buterin’s claim that Ethereum’s “blockchain trilemma” is solved
• Major moves in ETF filings by banks like Morgan Stanley
• US control of potentially vast Venezuelan bitcoin reserves
• The expanding role of state-backed stablecoins (Wyoming’s launch)
• Broader reflections on value, freedom, and the future direction of blockchains

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Predictions, Insider Trading & The Torres Bill

[00:04] – [21:33]

• PolyMarket & Prediction Markets: The recent capture of President Maduro became a global headline, but crypto Twitter buzzed even louder about a single trader who placed a major "yes" bet on Maduro’s capture just four hours before it went public.
• Richie Torres (Congress): Responded with a new bill targeting insider trading by government employees on prediction markets, acknowledging growing concern over how information is weaponized via on-chain platforms.

“At some level, what is being created here is a public good because it did increase the odds and our knowledge in the world that Maduro was actually going to be captured… But it feels unfair, doesn't it? …I don't think it's that employee – like that government insiders, it shouldn't just be theirs; they shouldn't get all the proceeds from this.”
— Ryan, [16:24]

• Public Good or Unfair Edge?: Hosts weigh the transparency benefits of markets (skin in the game, better information for all) vs. outsized profits from information asymmetry, especially if sourced from government leaks.
• Open Questions: Would a clumsy law snuff out a valuable experiment for decentralized truth-seeking? And how do you prove whether a trader has “legitimate” insight or true inside knowledge?

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Solana: Surging DEX Volume and Trading Chain Narrative

[08:17] – [10:29]

• Volume Milestone: In 2025, Solana DEX volume ($1.6T) eclipsed almost all centralized exchanges except Binance, taking 12% of spot market share.
• Differentiation: Not just meme coins—70%+ of volume is in SOL/USD pairs, powered by rapid block times and prop AMM innovation that blurs the orderbook/liquidity pool distinction.

“You kind of have to tip your hat to the fast block speeds of Solana.”
— David, [09:56]

• Positioning Solana: The chain is evolving as the DeFi home for “the trade verb”, with the fastest, most competitive on-chain trading experience.
• Contrast with Ethereum: Ethereum remains the reigning king for stablecoin payments and large-scale settlement, with $18.8T settled in 2025.

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Stablecoins ATH & Banks Enter the Game

[10:29] – [12:24]

• Ethereum’s Growth: Q4 stablecoin transfer volume doubled over Q2, making Ethereum a key payments layer even as others tout “real world asset” narratives.
• Wall Street Jumps In: Morgan Stanley’s surprise filing for both Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs marks the first major US bank to make such a move, signaling a deepening shift from “crypto resistance” to embrace.

“All of the banks, the big brand name banks, are no longer resisting crypto. It definitely marks the change of the era.”
— Ryan, [11:53]

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Bitcoin & ETH: Volatility, Prices & Market Maturity

[04:19] – [06:36]

• Bitcoin’s Quiet Year: 2025 featured record-low volatility (2.24% daily), making it more palatable for institutional portfolios; more “Sharpe-ratio-friendly.”
• Market Cap Perspective: Crypto total market cap sits at $3.17T, impressive from a historical zoom-out, but down 14% YoY.
• Market Maturity: “Easy money” cycles are over; going forward, only protocols with real value will flourish.

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Zcash Implosion: Governance Gone Wrong

[27:42] – [30:44]

• Sudden Selloff: Zcash dumps as the Electric Coin Company (dev team) quits, following funding battles and disputes over protocol-level developer rewards—12% of block rewards were put in limbo, leading to team exodus.
• Systemic Issues: Dev team rage-quitting highlights the dangers of relying on block reward-funded DAOs for open source protocol maintenance.

“My question is, why did the zcash token dump? Because it definitely didn't pump for any reason related to the development of zcash.”
— David, [29:48]

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Lighter Token Drop: Airdrop Mania and Market Response

[06:07], [31:13] – [34:25]

• Airdrop Impact: Lighter’s $675M airdrop (25% of supply) caused a $250M exodus (20% TVL) from its platform—less than some expected.
• Market Value: After a volatile debut ($3.3B to $2B FDV, then recovery), Lighter is viewed as a strong, UX-forward competitor to Hyperliquid.
• Farming Dynamics: Pools were lucrative (60% APY for liquidity provision), but farming was capped unless you also traded on platform.

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Vitalik’s “Trilemma Solved” – and the Future of Ethereum

[35:27] – [45:43]

• Vitalik’s Big Claim:

  “The Trilemma has been solved, not on paper but with live running code…”
  — Vitalik (quoted by Ryan), [36:15]

• What’s the Blockchain Trilemma? Security, decentralization, and scalability—only two can be optimized, or so theory held.
• Ethereum’s Solution: Data availability sampling (“blobs”) and zkEVMs are now production-quality, with capacity far outstripping demand. “You can have all three.”
• Nuanced Take: While Ethereum remains slower than Solana, it prioritizes maximum freedom and decentralization. Block times could go as low as 2 seconds without significant risks; ultra-fast chains risk centralization.

“We value the values of Ethereum, decentralization, property rights, censorship resistance, more than we value finance. And those come first.”
— David, [41:27]

• Governance and “Soul”: Don Krad counters that not all use cases need hyper-decentralization; maybe only “digital gold” does, and Ethereum’s choices reflect that.

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Major Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “If I was a world leader now, I would have my people monitoring prediction markets for me being captured…”
  — Ryan, [16:51]
• “Crypto is the perfect breeding ground for stupid stuff.”
  — David, [07:45]
• “I appreciate tokens that launch with very simple token like total supply numbers, like 1 billion for example.”
  — David, [33:13]
• “Ethereum is the tortoise.”
  — David, [45:43]
• “May the state wars begin.”
  — Ryan, [49:58]

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Other Highlights

Zama: Privacy Layers for Crypto

[01:28] – [02:42]

• Zama introduces “HTTPZ” for encrypted, private smart contracts layered atop Ethereum—a “missing piece” for on-chain privacy.

Ray Dalio’s Market Take

[02:54] – [04:19]

• Recaps 2025 as a “devaluation of the dollar trade”; S&P might be up in USD terms, but down 28% in gold.

Polymarket’s Real Estate Bets

[24:29] – [25:39]

• New category lets users trade on home price indices and other real estate metrics, aiming for price efficiency and more open data.

The US & Venezuela’s Bitcoin Reserves

[21:33] – [23:43]

• After the capture of Maduro, rumors swirl that the US may seize up to 600k BTC (though only hundreds are confirmed); hosts debate whether any asset haul truly belongs to the Venezuelan people.

State Stablecoins

[48:14] – [49:48]

• Wyoming launches the first fully state-backed (and yield-accruing for the state) stablecoin on Solana; hosts imagine a world of “statecoin” competition mapped across chains.

SEC Update

[45:55] – [46:29]

• Commissioner Crenshaw, the last Gensler-era skeptic, resigns—potentially ushering a pro-crypto era for US securities regulation.

Payments: Bitcoin at Starbucks & Walmart

[46:29] – [48:14]

• Big-box adoption of direct crypto payments has become “meh”—hosts see more promise in native stablecoin payment rails.

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Closing Reflections

• The episode is optimistic about the maturing crypto market—there’s less “free money,” more selectivity, and big players from TradFi entering in earnest.
• Hosts maintain faith in Ethereum’s design north star but appreciate the diversity of chains and approaches.
• Tech and policy progress is rapid, but regulatory overreach and internal blockchain governance remain key fault lines to watch in 2026.

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Key Timestamps

• [00:04] – Prediction markets, insider trading (Torres bill, Maduro)
• [08:17] – Solana DEX all-time high, order book/AMM innovation
• [10:29] – Ethereum stablecoin ATH, L1 as payment/settlement
• [11:03] – Morgan Stanley ETF filings
• [14:11] – Detailed breakdown of the “Maduro bet” and Torres’s bill
• [25:39] – Real estate prediction markets on Polymarket
• [27:42] – Zcash dev team resignation, governance funding debate
• [31:13] – Lighter airdrop, TVL and market comp to Hyperliquid
• [35:27] – Vitalik, the trilemma “solved,” Ethereum scaling roadmap
• [45:55] – SEC update, Crenshaw’s resignation
• [48:14] – Wyoming state stablecoin launch

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For listeners and non-listeners alike, this episode unpacks the major headlines shaping 2026: new regulatory risks for prediction markets, the institutional flood into crypto ETFs, the growing specialization of layer-1s, and Vitalik’s vision for Ethereum’s endgame. The blend of technical, regulatory, and market-driven discussion makes it an indispensable snapshot of crypto’s new normal.

Transcript

[David]

Foreign.

[Ryan]

Is the second week of January, the first week I've been back. It's time for the bankless weekly roll up. We got a lot going on. A prediction market trader placing a large bet on Maduro's capture four hours ahead of his actual capture. And a bill from a Congressman Richie Torres saying, I don't like this. This looks like insider trading inside the government. What is going on? We'll talk about that.

[David]

I think that's going to be a reoccurring theme for this year as we figure out what to do, what we think about and we being society, what we think about people using special information on prediction markets.

[Ryan]

But nonetheless, I don't even know what I think about it though.

[David]

Yeah, I'm fascinated by it. I think it's an interesting topic to pay attention to in 2026. Expect more news like this as this happens more and more and more. Meanwhile, on the crypto native side of things, Solana Dex volume hits an all time high. Ethereum stablecoin transfer volume hits an all time high. And trouble in Zcash. Why is it down something like 20% on the day? Something happened and we're going to talk about it.

[Ryan]

Yeah, we also cover the lighter token drop. David, you're going to have to fill me in on that. And Vitalik Buterin, he's coming back in 2026 with a full m' lady arc. I would say he's got a lot of tweets out there, one of which is claiming that Ethereum has solved the notorious blockchain Trilemma. David, you remember the Trilemma couldn't be solved.

[David]

I remember the trilemma, yeah.

[Ryan]

Solved now. Okay, we fixed it.

[David]

Mission accomplished.

[Ryan]

Yes. Before we get there, got to thank our friends and sponsors over at Zama. I'm, I'm truly excited about what Zama is providing because it's a missing piece of the crypto stack and in particular the Ethereum stack.

[David]

As we get more and more into mainstream and people are looking at the onchain world as to where to build a finance, I think we need a little bit more privacy. That is exactly what Zama is doing. Think of it as HTTPs for crypto. You know how the HTTPs made the Internet secure first before we just had HTTP, which is like the Internet in clear text, no privacy, everything's readable. HTTPs allows us to have the Internet but also with data in encrypted form in transit and communication so we can communicate things like credit card information. Now incoming is HTTPZ for cryptography. The data is encrypted during the process. With Zama's fhe mechanism, a blockchain can run smart contracts that remain encrypted the entire time. So just add privacy onto your on chain life. They are also having a token sale for their Zama token. There is information. We covered this in a previous episode. There's information at Bankless CC Zama Auction if you are interested in learning more about what Zama is doing and about their token sale.

[Ryan]

I love that they're just layering privacy on existing blockchains like Ethereum instead of doing something net new. I think that's going to be hugely valuable. David Ray dalio released a 2025 post mortem. Did you catch this?

[David]

I did not. But I know that you read every single Ray Dalio thing. So I was like, why do I have to read that? Ryan?

[Ryan]

Yeah, you tell me what I can. I can just synthesize it. I read Ray Dalio, Howard Marks, like a few investors in space. Like I just read everything they write. But Dalio's take was basically this was a devaluation of the dollar trade that happened last year. Okay, it wasn't that stocks were up new. I know, but it's Dalio kind of doing a victory lap I think at some level and just underscoring it for us. So he said the S and p, it returned 18% for dollar based investors, 17% for yen based investor, 13% for renminbi based investors and 4% for euro based investors. He just compares all of the different assets and their appreciation versus the different fiat currencies. And he paints the picture that yeah, EU, the S& P was up, but it didn't even account for the demonetization of the dollar effectively. Go look at gold for that. Go look at commodities for that. So he really underlines it.

[David]

Is the S and P up versus gold this year? I don't think so.

[Ryan]

Yeah, it's not David. So the S and P fell 28% in gold money terms this year. So if your benchmark was gold, the S and P actually didn't return. It was up in dollars, was down in gold. Right. So that's what's going on. It's the demonetization phenomenon. And Ray Dalio doesn't want you to forget that that happened last year and it's going to continue into 2026.

[David]

Well, that's why we are into crypto. Speaking of crypto, let's talk about some bitcoin prices. Bitcoin had its least volatile year ever this last year. Ryan, in 2025 daily volatility in 25, 2025 fell to 2.24% percent the lowest reading in history according to K33 research. This reflects growing market depth, institutional driven flows from the ETFs and also a maturing derivatives market. Just an aging of bitcoin. This is always the plan. We've always seen bitcoin dropping in volatility. It was at 2.8% in 2024. So even 2024 wasn't even all that volatility vol volatile to begin with. And what does this mean? What does this mean for investors? This means that sharp style risk adjusted metrics which are just Tradfi loves sharp ratios, risk ratios, volatility adjusted.

[Ryan]

Right.

[David]

Yes. They can improve and then that means bitcoin can fit into more portfolios if it has a lower volume. And so it's just more appetizing because tradfi doesn't like scary things and volatility is scary to tradfi.

[Ryan]

Yeah, that's right. 90,500 on the week. Right. Bitcoin. So what's your take on that? Do you think we're.

[David]

I don't know.

[Ryan]

You think we're going up it felt. Are we?

[David]

What did I say? Slow grind up. Slow grind up.

[Ryan]

I talked to Mike from the Defi Report earlier this week and he's like yeah, there's going to be a grind up. I expect to see possibly over 100k bitcoin but that's going to be a bull trap essentially. And he still predicts we're going down below 70k before this is.

[David]

He still has risk off as he was hun.

[Ryan]

Yes, he is still as risk off.

[David]

He's still full, full risk off. Well I am not.

[Ryan]

Yeah. So you hope for different things but yeah, we'll have to see what the, what the months to come bring. How about eth price?

[David]

Eth price also looking good on the week. Did we. We crossed over 3,000. So we, we hit almost 3,200 on the week. We are at 3,100 right now. We almost.

[Ryan]

Wow.

[David]

We almost got up to 3,300 in the first week of January. Up 4% on the seven day.

[Ryan]

4%. I mean that feels good, right? It's a good start.

[David]

Yeah, we're okay with that. We're okay with that. We're okay with that. And then the total crypto market $3.17 trillion. That 3 number just feels so close to 2 which I don't like.

[Ryan]

Well Nick Tomato of One Confirmation VC been here for a while says you got to zoom out, David. The total crypto market cap is 3.1 trillion. That's down 14% in the last year. But if you zoom out, we've gone from 0 to 3.1 trillion since 2009. He goes on to say, the era of easy money, too much easy money being made, that's probably over. It's going to get harder moving forward, but that doesn't mean there's not money to be made in key spots. So I've seen this take from a lot of crypto investors that were getting into the kind of prove it type era. Like, we've figured out all of the possible or many of the possible use cases. And now it's time for the smoke and mirrors and the speculation to kind of fade by the wayside. And the actual applications and protocols and networks that prove it will be the ones that appreciate into the future. I hope so. That's always what people say. I think when there's a bear cycle that, you know, the speculation, the gambling, the stupid stuff is going to burn off and all we'll be left with is kind of pristine, perfect crypto. Maybe this time it happens a bit more.

[David]

Maybe. I think, yeah, the trend is always that it happens a bit more. But I think crypto is also the perfect breeding ground for stupid stuff.

[Ryan]

Yep.

[David]

So I would. I would not see that stupid stuff out. Yeah, it's not out.

[Ryan]

Maybe I get some of the stupid stuff, though. I mean, starting to get a little frothy over there, maybe. I mean, so far the AI improvements on a, like, monthly basis are blowing my mind. So it still feels like it's. Yeah, actually delivering meaningful value, but I'm sure it could get a little stupid over there. Maybe they absorb some of that stupidity.

[David]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe, maybe. I mentioned this in the beginning. Solana on chain spot. Volume has overtaken all sexes, all centralized, extraneous exchanges except Binance in 2025, the Solana processed $1.6 trillion in all of last year. In 2025, that's 12% of global spot market share in crypto. That's passing by Bit, Coinbase and bitget in total volume, which is kind of crazy. Binance did 7.3 trillion in 2025, Solana doing 1.6. But nonetheless, like, you got kind of got to kind of tip your hat. And also one question you might have, Ryan, and the listener is, okay, but what are the tokens? What are the tokens doing the volume on Solana? Because I could think a lot of people might first reaction be like oh, it's just the meme coins. So it's like whatever. It's just funny money volume. Nope. It's actually 70% Solana USD volumes.

[Ryan]

Oh really?

[David]

According to Blockworks research. Yeah. And there's like a little bit of an anecdote as to like how this happened. There's like a lot of prop AMM innovation and just like competitiveness going on with Solana. And what that means is like AMMs like Uniswap are just like liquidity pools. Except prop amms are the combination of like opinionated when we put liquidity and where inside of a single block. So it's an AMM prop but people are starting to treat it like an order book. And that, that that sector is very, very hot. Has been growing in volume quite significantly. And overall that's all to do with Solana. The US dollar pair and the Solana block times are fast enough that you know how people on Ethereum because Ethereum has slow blocks, they will put in an. They'll buy stale orders on Ethereum because the binance price changes.

[Ryan]

Yeah.

[David]

Apparently you can do both legs of the trade on Solana. So it's a fully on chain volume. Both, both the introduction, the, the in leg and the out leg. And so you do kind of have to tip your hat to the fast block speeds of Solana.

[Ryan]

I kind of see Solana evolving into almost like a, a trading chain. You know, I.

[David]

Not the Dex chain.

[Ryan]

Yeah, that seems to be the direction.

[David]

That they're defi instead of slow defi.

[Ryan]

Yeah, super fast defi but particularly around that the, the trade verb. And I wonder if that's where, you know, they're, they're, they're finding the most product market fit. And we'll do that moving forward.

[David]

On Ethereum land, Ethereum in Q4 doubled its stablecoin volume versus Q2. So it's up to $4 trillion in just stablecoin transfers. And so this is just using the Ethereum layer one as just a payments layer or, or like a large settlement layer of stable coins. For all of 2025, Ethereum settled $18.8 trillion of stablecoin volume. Q4 was 40% of that 40%.

[Ryan]

That's funny. So for all the talk recently about Ethereum not being optimized for real world assets, it is still the king, the reigning king by some degree.

[David]

I don't think it matters. You know what Ethereum's optimized for? Being awesome.

[Ryan]

Speaking of kind of awesome, so Morgan Stanley just filed for Bitcoin Solana ETFs. And then also they followed up a day after and filed for an Ethereum etf. This was actually a shocker to the ETF boys like Eric Balchunas and James Seyfert from Bloomberg. They were actually surprised by this because Morgan Stanley is a big name, David. It's like the bank of banks. This is the first major US bank to file for crypto ETFs. And on CNBC they're even saying it's a huge endorsement. So the floodgates are completely open for the banks getting into crypto now.

[David]

Interesting. Okay, why is the first big bank. Why is that significant? Because we already have ETFs, so why is this anything new?

[Ryan]

I think it's more of a branding type thing. Probably just first big bank milestone. I mean, obviously blackrock was the big mover in this space and when they entered they got all of the size. But Morgan Stanley still has a ton of capital, a ton of kind of investors, a ton of people that, that trust their assets to this institution. And now they're going all in crypto. So it's like all of the banks, the big brand name banks are no longer resisting crypto. It definitely marks the change of the era.

[David]

Yeah. Matt Hogan says Morgan Stanley manages 20 ETFs, but mostly under the Calvert, Parametric, Eaton, Eaton Vance brands. I don't know what these are, he says, but these will be the third and fourth ETFs to bear the Morgan Stanley brand, which he says is pretty remarkable. Matt knows more than me, so if he says it's pretty remarkable, I guess it has to be pretty remarkable. Coming up next, Richie Torres wants to stop insider trading on prediction markets. Perhaps this was because of what happened after President Maduro's captured. Perhaps it's because of all the, all the other instances. And then also there's also a conversation, Ryan, about the United States stumbling into a surprisingly large amount of Venezuelan bitcoin. Do. Do we get that? Do we get that? Now we're going to talk about that. And the lighter airdrop has hit the market, so we're going to talk about that and more. But first we're going to talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Few people in crypto put real skin in the game when they make public top or bottom calls. The Defi Report is one of them. The week before the October 10th flash crash, Michael from the Defi Report emailed his entire newsletter since saying he's going aggressively risk off and sold the majority of his book from Crypto into cash. This is when Ethos about $4,000 and Bitcoin was 110. Michael runs the Defi Report an industry leading research platform built on data cycle awareness, risk management, transparency and most importantly skin in the game. We like Michael at Bankless. We like his analysis and that's why you hear him on the Bankless podcast about once a month. And the Defi Report is giving Bankless listeners one free month of access to the Defi Report. So if you're looking for some sharp data driven analysis to make better informed decisions around your portfol can learn why and how Michael called the top and what he's doing next all in the Defi Report pro. Check it out there is a link in the show notes okay so Ryan, last Friday I'm sure you heard the news that the United States just went down to Venezuela and yed President Maduro in an overnight operation.

[Ryan]

Absolutely wild. Yeah.

[David]

Surprise. So there's a poly marketed account that was created last December that only made four trades ever, all related to the US intervention in Venezuela. Invested $32,500 predicting that Maduro would be out by January 31, purchasing shares at $0.07 which implied that the probability that this would happen would be 7%. And so what that means is that 7 cents turns into a dollar. So a very large return. Maduro's capture was confirmed Saturday morning and those those shares resolved to a dollar yielding a profit of $400,000. So that's a 1200% return in less than 24 hours. Pretty good return. Pretty, pretty good return. Another poly market trader earned $80,000 betting on Maduro's capture after he noticed Domino's Pizza orders near the Pentagon, which is a. I don't know if you pay attention to those Twitter accounts, but there are like pizza Pentagon pizza alerts to let you know if there's ever a spike in pizza orders near the Pentagon to let you know that like something, something's happening. I don't think that is insider information. That's just a guy paying attention. But nonetheless, this and other instances like this have caused issues I think. In Capitol Hill, Richie Torres has introduced a bill, the Public Integrity Integrity in Financial Prediction markets Act of 2026. Pretty straightforward title, no creativity there targeting insider trading on prediction platforms. So the bill will prohibit federal officials and employees from trading prediction market contracts related to government policy or political outcomes if they have non public information from their duties. A Torres spokesperson said the bill has been in the works for a bit, but the news of the Venezuela bet underscored the urgency of introducing the bill as soon as possible. Okay, so Ryan, what do you think about the trader that the. Nevermind, the guy who was just smart and used the Pentagon pizza Twitter account to like predict something. What do you think about the trader who like very clearly had insider information and put in $32,000 and then got $40,400,000 out inside of 24 hours? What do you think about that?

[Ryan]

Well, at some level what is being created here is a public good because it did increase the odds and our knowledge in the world that Maduro was actually going to be captured. So it increased our, the public prediction capacity and it provided information, knowledge to the world and that has value.

[David]

It did that four hours ahead. So we had that benefit, that public good for four hours, which is a.

[Ryan]

Pretty big freaking deal. I mean, I think that's a big deal. Yeah. If I was, if I was a world leader right now, I would have my people monitoring prediction markets for me being captured, you know what I mean? Like, and if it spiked, if it spiked, like is that a four hours before I'd be, holy shit, get me down in the bunker. Right?

[David]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

I don't know if that's a public good specifically, but just the idea that information and knowledge is getting captured in a, like Vitalik wrote a post about this and I mean he said it much more eloquently, but just the idea that this is an incredible public good for the world is much better than somebody's opinion on social media. It's skin in the game now. That's one side of it. The other side of it is it feels unfair, doesn't it? It feels unfair that somebody inside the government somewhere, likely or somebody with a leak is selling that information at some level. They kind of are selling it, aren't they? And.

[David]

Yeah, well, selling it to the market.

[Ryan]

Yeah. Isn't that our information? And I mean, like, shouldn't the American people benefit from this? Why does a government official, like specifically a single person that does this first, like, why should they have the ability to benefit from this? I mean, we talked about this with Joey Krug. Remember there was a Google employee that made a lot of money predicting the.

[David]

Next Gemini release, release of the model which he probably built or something.

[Ryan]

Maybe, or maybe he like, who knows, right? But he's inside and is it his? Like, shouldn't that just go to Google shareholders? Like, why does this specific person get this? And so there's a level of unfairness to it. So I love, I like the public good side of it, but I Don't the rules are like, we've got to do something about the mechanism because the, you know, we, we, we can't incent it this way. And I don't think it's that employee like that government insiders. It, it shouldn't just be their, they shouldn't get all the proceeds from this is, is I guess what I'm saying.

[David]

Yeah. Plus you also have to think about, you know, there were people on the other side of that trade who were selling, you know, Maduro's not going to be captured by the end of this month. And like how do you think those people feel? And this is like why I think the title of this bill is called the Market Integrity Act. Like markets grow larger when participants consider them to be fair and equitable.

[Ryan]

Yeah.

[David]

And I don't know if this is without, without some sort of like rule around integrity that like the, I think prediction markets might be smaller.

[Ryan]

That's a result. That's right. Yeah, that's right. If we can, if we can make prediction markets fair and orderly and have integrity, then I think we grow the size of it. I guess we're making the assumption though that this was a government insider and we have no, there's no way to tell. It actually is. It could be someone who's just a regular civilian who is monitoring Trump, just.

[David]

Tweets his buddies like, yo, my dad's gonna yoink Maduro.

[Ryan]

Well, maybe, maybe, maybe it's someone, someone like you know, monitoring kind of your pizza orders at a specific time. Maybe someone's monitoring something in airspace.

[David]

Maybe someone's super smart. Yeah, maybe someone has like, has all the strings with all the pictures on the wall.

[Ryan]

Exactly, exactly.

[David]

Oh, he. After Maduro, I, I cracked it. I saw that.

[Ryan]

Completely fair, doesn't it?

[David]

That totally seems fair. Yeah.

[Ryan]

But I guess we don't know. So the fact that we don't know.

[David]

Yeah. And I bet you there are a bunch, a bunch of circumstances, a bunch of like trades markets that could happen where like we would point to be like, that was super unfair. And then other instances where like, oh, same insider trading thing but like, oh, but this one is totally fair depending on the context and the circumstances. So it's hard to be homogenous about it.

[Ryan]

It is. And so I don't know how I feel about this bill, to be honest, because what I'm worried about, David, is that regulation gets into over regulation territory and then we just start nerfing and killing the experiments and we lose an incredibly valuable public good that quite frankly we're going to need in the 21st century with AI we need prediction markets and truth consensus mechanisms out there. And I hope this bill doesn't kill it. The kind of thing that could if it's done in a ham fisted way. And do you really trust our legislators to not push this forward in a ham fisted way? It's too early. Is a take I have.

[David]

Yeah, yeah. The facts and details and circumstances of that bill in question does obviously very much matter. What people are doing now Ryan are people are scouring polymarket to find large traders, large trades made by accounts that have never made a trade before. One of them is a an account that has made a $34,000 position on will China invade Taiwan by the end of 2026.

[Ryan]

And so yikes.

[David]

This one one account has made one trade and it's a decently sized position about China invading Taiwan.

[Ryan]

Lovely.

[David]

We'll see what happens. One thing about the whole Maduro capture Ryan is that there is now potentially a shadowy bitcoin reserve by Venezuela rumored to be as high as 600,000 bitcoin. So the media speculated that US authorities might seize any verified regime linked coins and yoink them along as we did with President Maduro by sending them to our bitcoin treasury. So we don't know. Only 240 Bitcoin is officially linked to the Venezuelan government through public records and on chain trackers. But investigative reports and intelligence sources suggest that Vena has accumulated much more Bitcoin than what has been officially reported by swapping and selling for gold oil exports in bitcoin or tethered to bypass sanctions and also confiscating crypto and mining equipment from local miners. There's actually a decently large Venezuelan mining community then this happened in all of 2024 and 2025. And so Venezuela has lots of Bitcoin is the takeaway. And apparently people are discussing whether or not we are going to just seize it.

[Ryan]

Okay, a couple of things. So it's unclear whether that bitcoin is actually verified. Right. So we don't actually know. There's not actually records. So this is all speculation. Don't know how speculation any that the Venezuelan government owns. But secondly that's messed up like the US if anything Venezuela's bitcoin reserves or crypto reserves belongs to the Venezuelan people, doesn't belong to the US government.

[David]

The claim is that this is big. Bitcoin is being sold or received by Venezuela as a part of Maduro's like narco terrorism charges.

[Ryan]

Okay, give it back to the Venezuelan People though, why should the US get this? That's insane. Am I wrong?

[David]

You're totally right. But like if, if we, if you give it back to the Venezuelan people, it is just like kind of an arbitrary gift from Venezuela from. Because it's like it's, it's, it. Should it be Maduro's? Probably not because it's drug, Bitcoin. And so, yeah, like in theory it goes to the Venezuelan people, but I mean there's, is there legal precedent for.

[Ryan]

That if the U.S. government is just going and deposing leaders and then yoinking like all of their oil and all of their cash reserves and all of their hard assets. Right. I mean, like, what is the US doing? I mean not to get political here, but like that's just raiding and pirating. Right.

[David]

It sounds like a little bit like Russia.

[Ryan]

Yeah, it does, yeah.

[David]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

Anyway, we don't know how much they own, but yeah, I guess, I guess if it's a hard asset and the US wants to take it, I mean, they could take their gold reserves too. Does Venezuela have gold?

[David]

I think the argument is that if it is a part of the narco terrorism, if it was revenue from selling drugs that got put into the United States, which is what Donald Trump's worried about, then they might want that as compensation.

[Ryan]

What? Okay, yeah, this is new. Sue, tell me about this. Polymarket is rolling out real estate prediction markets.

[David]

Yeah. So each market inside of the poly market real estate category is going to be a very clearly defined question, like will the US median home price be above X on date Y or will cities in the real estate market finish up or down on the year? And this is just being used by. There's an Oracle here. Settlement will be based on parcel parcels independently publish daily home price indices, parcel aggregates, county records, new constructions, real time listings in the city and nation level benchmarks. So we like have a pretty good resolution of home prices, real estate prices across United States, just from data oracles. And the polymarket is turning that into a new category of prediction markets that you can take a position on.

[Ryan]

I love that. I think that's going to drive price efficiency and transportation.

[David]

Sophisticated adult use of prediction markets.

[Ryan]

Yeah. And the Realtor, I feel like Realtors in the United States have all of this data that only they can have access to and they really protect the MLS database. Right. And so this starts to open that up a little bit more and I think there'll be a lot of innovation on top of this.

[David]

Yeah, yeah. In addition to that, we also have an announcement we have Polymarket as an incoming sponsor. And so with that, we have the Poly Market market of the week segment. Ryan, we're going to be doing this every single week. We're going to pull out a market that we find interesting as relevant to this week. This polymarket market of the week this week is, will Infinix public sale have a certain level of total commitments into it? Ryan, are you paying attention to the FUD around Infinix on Twitter this week?

[Ryan]

A little bit, but not as much as maybe I should be. What's happening?

[David]

I don't, I don't know if you need to be because the story around the FUD is that Kane Warwick, the founder of Infinix, just kind of like fudded the whole Info Phi vertical. He said like Kaido, Kaido and Kaido bot farmers are just like the bane of his existence. He said some probably worse words. You know, Kane's kind of spicy. So he was basically fudding the whole Info Phi vertical, which, you know, he was fighting the income, the salary of all these people who like Gamify Kaido and the infomarket markets. And so kind of a bad idea, actually, who, if you're, if you are fudding the thing that kind of controls the Twitter narrative, the Twitter discourse, incentivized discourse, discourse management. And so now all of those people who like, use Kaido for their revenue was like, you know, I hate Infinix. Infinix is bad. I don't like it. I think it's going to fail. Token's totally going to flop.

[Ryan]

Okay?

[David]

And so we just don't have. So this was all the FUD on, on Infinix and this is Polymarkets market around the Infinix public sale total commitments. And so now we can just route around the messy infofi bots and just look at exactly what the market thinks the Infinix public sale is going to do. So there is a 95% chance that Infinix will sell out of its 5 million allocation and a 52% chance that they get $7 million of allocation of their 5 million total. And so that doesn't really. The numbers coming in at Polymarket don't really align with a FUD on Twitter, which is a useful tool from Polymarket.

[Ryan]

Some free alpha there. You can access that in the show links.

[David]

And that is the Polymarket market of the week.

[Ryan]

Let's talk about some crazy times for zcash. There was a zcash dump. Do you see that? It just happened this morning. Let's look at the price.

[David]

Well, I don't own any zcash, so I didn't see that.

[Ryan]

You're not looking at that. Down 12.5%. Let's see, 24 hours, it's down about 12.5%. So it has recovered somewhat. It's down 20% at one point earlier. Do you know why?

[David]

Yeah, because the development team resigned.

[Ryan]

Yes, this is kind of emerging, but seems to be the case. Ignis. The Twitter account Ignis Defi Ignis gives a pretty good description of what happened. The entire team development team led by the electric coin company, that's ecc, resigned after quote, employment was changed in ways that made it impossible for us to perform our duties. So do you remember zcash, like the way they fund development? Do you recall how that works?

[David]

Yeah, yeah. Block rewards.

[Ryan]

It's block rewards. Like 12% of all mining rewards are actually funneled into a DAO sort of apparatus, a governance based apparatus and they go to fund the developers, the ECC. And the 12% is a lot. 12% is a lot. So in late 2004 actually that model ended and the community 2024. 2024 I should say to move that 12% cut into a lockbox. And now there's debate as to how to unlock the lockbox and what to fund with it. And apparently this debate has caused the ECC to just be like, well screw it, if you're not going to give anything to us, we're not getting paid, we're leaving. So governance issues on zcash.

[David]

Remember how like every year there seems to be somebody who's like, I've got an idea for how to defund Ethereum development. Let's siphon off some block rewards. And like all of us have been in Ethereum for that hasn't happened for.

[Ryan]

Four or five years. But yes, that used to be a.

[David]

Recurring somewhat recently somebody recently said this and was like, dude, don't do this again. Like, no, we've done this. We've done this so many times.

[Ryan]

The point is we're right, you know, you can't. It's very difficult to arbitrarily fund public goods in a DAO type structure that leads to this type of thing.

[David]

Yeah. My question is, why did the zcash token dump? Because it definitely didn't pump for any reason related to the development of zcash.

[Ryan]

Traders doing trader things. I mean the dev team Rage quitting is kind of a big deal, but it doesn't mean the dev team is done. So the take was that the dev team was going to try to spin off their own company and build for zcash. So they would still build for zcash. And Ignis's take here is as an investor, these civil wars suck and I hope they can resolve the funding and disagreement issues asap. Almost reminds me like just last week you and Anthony Sasano, right, you were talking about aave. Another GAAP governance thing just gets particularly messy when you're dealing with a layer one protocol. I think there's supposed to be all sorts of other governance things built on top of it. If you're struggling at the base layer things feel a little shaky. I'm sure they'll resolve it. I'm sure they'll figure it out. But man, still an issue for actively developed protocols.

[David]

And people have been branding zcash as just encrypted bitcoin. But I don't know if Bitcoin has governance issues on its layer one.

[Ryan]

They definitely do, but they don't have a doubt.

[David]

It just means a lot less. Whether we're going to censor arbitrary data on the Bitcoin layer one or not is actually a relatively insignificant question. They should probably focus on quantum. Anyways, let's move on to lighter and the lighter infrastructure token or lit. That's the, that's, that's the ticker. It's not my joke, it's not my pun. So they have introduced lit as the financial infrastructure, equity and fee token, which is intended to of course value capture value from execution, verification data and pricing services across the lighter stack, also used for governance, ecosystem incentives and economic alignment around lighter perp decks and future products. It's the lighter token. It's the lighter token. 25 of the 1 billion supply was airdropped to traders and the ecosystem participants on the lighter platform came in valued roughly at $675 million at the time of the AirDrop. That was the 25%, not the whole, not the whole FTV. Placing lighter in the some of the largest airdrops in in history. Just airdropping $675 million. Quite quite a significant deal. After the token was introduced and airdropped $250 million, Ryan was withdrawn from the platform. That represents 20% of lighter's $1.4 billion of TVL. Decently expected. Like why are people, why are people putting TVL on lidar? Oh, because Hyper Liquid set a precedent. Very very valuable. Lighter actually did attract a ton of traders and a ton of volume. Therefore the lighter token is going to be valuable. So people want to come and farm that 20%. I think if you told me like only 20% of the volume leaves, I'm saying like that's, that's a, I'll take that as a win. Yeah, yeah.

[Ryan]

What's the FTV of lit right now? I guess I looked this up huh. Compared to Hyper liquid.

[David]

So with the, with the departure of 20% the valuation of lighter dropped to $2 billion. I think it came in at around $3 billion but it has since recovered. It launched, it launched at 3.3 billion, dropped 30% over the next day and then has recovered to where it is now at 3.13 billion. I do have to appreciate tokens that launch with very simple token like total supply numbers like 1 billion for example. So when I see the lighter price of $3.13. Okay, I can do the math. Like $3.13 billion is how much lighter's worth. How much is hyper liquid?

[Ryan]

25 billion. 25 billion.

[David]

Hyper liquid lighter is three.

[Ryan]

Yeah. Okay. Not bad. I really like the lighter project and I think UX is fantastic. I think they are a strong competitor to Hyper Liquid.

[David]

Might be the UX is fantastic. Have you, have you traded on lighter?

[Ryan]

No, I'm not as a user from a user perspective but from an investor perspective, you know, pretty, maybe pretty attractive at these rates. We'll have to see.

[David]

Yeah, I do want to know if they are opening up so you could deposit money into like the, the on chain market maker fund, the automated market maker fund and you are getting 60% APY just by providing liquidity to lighter. The only problem is that they would only allow you to deposit 1/4 of your money. You had to like in order to farm the token. You had to and get more access to that pool. You had to actually trade on, on lidr which I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to get liquidated, which I did. But I do want to know, yeah, I do want to know if they are opening that up to like I would like to deposit 100% of my money into that 60% APY pool. I don't know if it's still 60% but it's pretty lucrative for a while.

[Ryan]

We got more coming up. Vitalik says that Ethereum is solving the blockchain trilemma. Maybe already has also. Donkrad doesn't quite agree. He's got a different take, he's got a different direction. He thinks Ethereum should have gone in and Wyoming is launching a stablecoin. We'll talk about all that and more. But before we do we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

[David]

Hey, Bankless Nation, it's David. If you're hearing this, that's because you are listening to the free Bankless podcast feed. Did you know that there is a premium Bankless RSS feed? The premium feed has extra interviews that I do for my own personal research and just deeper questions that I want answered about the crypto industry. Questions that I want to answer so I can be more informed as an investor both at Bankless Ventures and also just in my own personal portfolio too. Also, there are no ads, which means if you listen to the premium feed instead of the free feed, you'll get about 20 hours hours of your life back every year because you choose to support Bankless directly. So if you're interested in getting extra content all while skipping the ads or you just appreciate what we do here and want us to keep doing it, we'd appreciate it if you signed up for Bankless Premium and there is a link in the show notes to get started. Cheers to a good 2026.

[Ryan]

Vitalik has been on a Milady arc this year. Ending these posts with Milady. It's gonna get a little sassy. Well, actually this post ended with Onward, which I appreciate. But yes, this feels to be some. I don't know, Dave. I might call it North Star content coming out of Vitalik as one of the primary leaders in Ethereum right now. So this is a quote from a tweet this week, the Trilemma. He's talking about the notorious blockchain Trilemma. The Trilemma has been solved, not on paper, but with live running code, of which one half data availability samplings on mainnet today and the other half zkevms is production quality on performance today. Safety is what remains. What's he talking about here? What? Do you recall what the trilemma actually is? And why does anything itself now?

[David]

Yeah, the blockchain trilemma is there's three properties of a blockchain and you get to pick two of them. There is security, scalability and decentralization. And like famously, everyone has only ever been able to pick two. So Ethereum and Bitcoin have optimized for the same things, security and decentralization. But as a result of that they are slow. What did Ripple do? Ripple picked security and scalability, but they lost decentralization. That's what we would say. Also Solana has done. Solana has optimized for something close to that end of the spectrum. And really the infamous blockchain trilemma is like, it's really hard to get the third. Ethereum's strategy to get the third is zk. ZK and data availability sampling, which is sharding. So sharding and cryptography, basically. And through those things we can get both parallel processing of independent nodes running, running in parallel while also having the scalability and preserving decentralization. So like it's always been on the Ethereum roadmap to solve the trilemma. And Vitalik saying the technology is here now.

[Ryan]

Okay, if he's saying it's solved, why isn't Ethereum, you know, a thousand TPs right now? It's only like, you know, 25, something like this.

[David]

Well, I think what he's saying, as I understand it, is like we have the engineering and now we need to put it into the chain, right?

[Ryan]

Right.

[David]

Yes, we need to update the chain. We have to hard fork.

[Ryan]

And the data availability sampling he's talking about in particular, what that's doing for L2s right now, which is. And I think we just got another blob size increase just this week. The new target size for blobs has gone from 14 to 18. Oh no, to 21. A maximum of 21. And this is basically, blobs are the fast lane for L2s. And this is data availability sampling. So this is sharding for layer 2s. And Vitalik is like, that's already not just in production, it is on its way to scaling up. Like this can be scaled up again and again and again and again. And blobspace will not be a constraint for L2s anytime soon. And that's certainly the case. And so that part is in production and it's on its scaling path. And then the other piece of this is zkevms. So that would be scaling the layer one itself and execution on the layer one itself. And that initiative has just kind of started. It's where maybe blobspace was, say two years ago. And that is happening with zkevms. That entire episode we did with Justin Drake kind of captures that. And Vitalik says that's production ready. What just needs to be, I guess, vetted and hardened is the safety side of things. So making sure there's no critical bug, making sure that we have some formal verification plan, making sure that we roll this out slowly so there's not some catastrophic event on the ZKEVM side. But he says with both of those technologies combined, the trilemma is no longer a trilemma, it's solved. You can have all three you can have all three.

[David]

You can have all three. Have you looked at the, the blob supply versus blob demand chart? No, because it's looking very good. So we increase blobs in April of 2025 from a target of 3 to 6 and we at the by the around now is starting to approach six finally. But we first did then the most recent hard fork, we increased the supply from 6 to 10 and we are nowhere near filling 10 up. And now we just went from 10 to 14 and we are still nowhere near filling any of that up. So like there is so much slack in the system to add capacity on layer twos and now layer twos just need to like learn to use them. Like yo guys, you can take off the brakes, you can go really fast, more transactions. But like in terms of data availability, there's just no. Like there used to be, I used to be about a year ago fundamentally concerned with like oh, just base. Base wants to soak up all of the blobs. Yeah. And also so does Worldcoin and those.

[Ryan]

Are just a chill. Yeah, maybe they'll have to use an alternative DA layer or something like this and it won't be on a thing.

[David]

That does not seem to be the case. We seem to have plenty of blobs actually.

[Ryan]

Yeah, I think it's pretty exciting to hear Vitalik say it. I mean he's a guy that popularized the blockchain scaling trilemma. So to hear him say it these years later is kind of a big, big deal. He also tweeted this out. Now this is more on, I guess the social, social side of things and the spiritual side of things. He said this Ethereum was not created to make finance efficient or apps convenient. It was created to set people free. And he goes on with an entire A post about this. But his take is the priority is for Ethereum to be first in format, most decentralized, permissionless and resilient block space and make that more abundant. He's really, I think, throwing down the gauntlet and saying we're not going to be the fastest chain in the world. We're not going to have the fastest, you know, the highest TPS or the, the fastest block times. That's not the optimization that Ethereum is going for. Instead it's going for max sovereignty, max censorship, resistance, max decentralization. And he equates that to max freedom. So this means saying no to some things, doesn't it? And it means saying yes to some other things. Donkrat had a, a comment on this. But what's your take on Vitalik's post?

[David]

Yeah, so he, he's saying that we value the, we value the values of Ethereum, decentralization, property rights, censorship, resistance, more than we value finance. And that, that those come first, which I think I directionally agree with. What I'm kind of disagreeing with is like you can use the valuable properties of Ethereum that we are trying to preserve at the highest order and we can apply them to things that matter, primarily finance. And so I'm like, Vitalik is kind of positioning it as like an either or, as like. No, we're not optimizing for finance, we're optimizing for freedom. I'm like, well, what if we apply freedom to finance? You know, like can't, can't we include like Ethereum will not sacrifice its values, will not lose its soul by going from 12 seconds to 2 second block times. And we would be able to apply our freedom to more places if we went from 12 seconds to 2 second block times. So that's kind of where I'm at. It's like, I don't know why it has to be so antagonistic.

[Ryan]

Did you see Vitalik's other post? I mean he's getting into the technical details here. So this is one from this morning and he actually talks about block times. Let's see.

[David]

And he talks about.

[Ryan]

I think the summary is, I think moderate latency. He says latency decreases are more centralizing. Right. And he gives an entire reason why. I'll send this to you after the episode. But he said that I think moderate latency decreases are possible without losing all the decentralization properties to the 2 to 4 second level, but very much beyond that. And you start to get into the high frequency trading games and you lose.

[David]

Centralization below two seconds. I'm like, okay, I don't, I think job well done at two seconds.

[Ryan]

So if you're max efficiency finance, then you would want to be well below two seconds. You'd want to be Monad and Solana and like Speed of Light and irbl. And he said the, the reducing latency piece of it is what gets you into the high frequency trading and you kind of like lose your soul type game. And he's doubling down on that. So two seconds is in the realm of what could be possible on Ethereum. But I don't know, 300 milliseconds is not, not on the layer one. And that's the gauntlet. He's, you know. Yeah, he's throwing down on that.

[David]

I'D say, okay, well I'm fine with that. Can we get to 2 seconds though?

[Ryan]

I think we can. Don Krad's comment on this was I'm not sure that the world needs what you're designing except for the use case of non sovereign storage value, a digital gold like a Bitcoin type use case. And so stablecoins, I think donkrad would say don't need that. And so you're over provisioning for a product market fit that only exists in a small realm of global store of value, digital store of value type of thing. So you're effectively saying ether is money with these design choices and that's what you're optimizing for. What do you think?

[David]

I think we can find use cases and we could actually only find use cases that need censorship property rights, you know, decentralization, if we have that in the first place. And so those things that will emerge from those properties need those properties to emerge. And so yes, maybe we can only think of AAVE or excuse me, not even aave, just ether as the primary use case of all of this abundant trustless centers of resistance block space. But like in order to produce things like I'm glad that AAVE is as censorship resistant and decentralized as it is and that I trust my ether inside of there among with some other apps. And as that part of Ethereum grows, it needs to have those properties in order to grow. And so I'm saying like I'm holding out, I'm happy to hold out for future use cases but like we need to preserve the properties.

[Ryan]

I think the counterpoint Donkrad might make is okay, but we've had 15 years at this, you know, over a decade at this.

[David]

Yeah, but the first half of that like didn't count.

[Ryan]

Wow, so you are a very long game, huh? You're a very end game that we can create all of these different possibilities on max decentralized block space.

[David]

Ethereum is the tortoise.

[Ryan]

All right, well it's going to tortoise into 2026. David, do you remember Caroline Crenshaw? Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw of the sec?

[David]

How could I forget? She was like Gary Gensler's second hand lady. Yes, I would say, Lieutenant, I have.

[Ryan]

No idea how she stuck around the SEC for this long, but she's now gone. So she was the last remaining, I would say acolyte or kindred spirit of Gary Gensler left on the SEC and she has now resigned effective January 2nd. So the SEC as far as I can tell, is full Crypto innovation. And there's no one really in there that's going to stop this. It's the complete opposite of the Gary Gensler administration at this point.

[David]

Yeah, don't let Thor hit you on the way out. So there are some major US retailers that are accepting crypto directly as payments. This is a news headline that I think we get every now and then. Walmart, Starbucks, other major retailers are opening up to crypto payments. And so Walmart's OnePay app will allow users to buy, hold, sell bitcoin and eth in store and also for online purchases. And then also Starbucks. Starbucks doesn't accept bitcoin directly, but it can use apps like Bakkt or Flexa which instantly convert digital assets into United's USD to use it on a Starbucks card. Brian, do you care about these news headlines anymore? Because like I think we would have been bullish on them in like 2020 and 2021 but like I just don't care about spending ether or bitcoin at Starbucks. That's not a thing that I care about or I think matters.

[Ryan]

I remember, I think it was like maybe it was 2018 or something like this. Anthony Pompiano was very excited about something like Kroger was accepting Bitcoin on the Lightning network. I don't even know if this was actually real or actually happened or if it was just one tiny pilot or something. But yeah, I'm no longer excited about that type of, I mean for store of value asset, do you actually want to spend it?

[David]

Yeah, it's like Walmart allows you to use gold at Walmart. Like does anyone care about that? No one's gonna use it.

[Ryan]

Does anyone want to do that? No one wants to do that. It is good that they're connecting to crypto Rails. Obviously it does seem like stablecoins is going to be the way that practically people will pay. Wire that into an Apple like my Apple wallet. That'd be fantastic.

[David]

Can I just have a USDC wallet in my Apple wallet please?

[Ryan]

That's what I want. That's what I think that's what most people want. And you know that's coming. That's on the way for sure.

[David]

Yeah. Speaking of what most people want, Wyoming wants a stablecoin and is going to get it. So the Frontier Stablecoin FRNT is the first fully state issued fiat backed stablecoin. It's structured as a dollar pegged of course with a state managed reserves of cash and T bales. And you know who gets the yield on this on the on the Wyoming stablecoin. Wyoming gets the yield on the Wyoming stable coin. That's kind of actually cool, right?

[Ryan]

It's a tax revenue stream.

[David]

Yeah, it's a tax revenue stream. And so like, I don't know, does like Salon, it's on Salana. Does Wyoming want all of its Wyoming citizens to like pay their taxes in the Wyoming dollar?

[Ryan]

It's amazing. Can you imagine if all 50 states got their own kind of stablecoin and just incented to, to pay and like, you know, you'd have like Texas dollars, New York dollars, California.

[David]

Why not? Why not?

[Ryan]

Let's every state could inflate their own currency too.

[David]

Let's divide up all 50 states into different layer ones. So like, so congrats on the board of risk. Wyoming. Solana gets Wyoming.

[Ryan]

Yes.

[David]

I bet my home state of Washington state. I bet that's a pretty ethereum. And also Colorado. Colorado. Colorado Republic. Goodsy. You know, Denver, I think that goes to Ethereum. New York also going to Ethereum. So I bet California is like contested territory that could go to Solana.

[Ryan]

Wow. I, I, I still don't know. I, I do think there's a limit on these. If I'm remember remembering the genie spells something like $10 billion. Like the, the state issued stable coins couldn't get over a certain cap or something.

[David]

10 billion, that's a pretty high cap, I think.

[Ryan]

You think so? For a state, an entire state. That seems like small potatoes to me, but I guess, yeah.

[David]

All right.

[Ryan]

May the state wars begin. This is another thing that was a story, I think, leading off from last year. Do you remember how strategy, Michael Saylor's strategy, he was trying to fight to get it into all of these indices like the S&P 500 and that sort of thing. And he was getting some pushback from that. Well, the MSCI has decided not to exclude strategy and other DATs from its indices. There was talk that they were going to just take all the treasury companies and say, nope, they couldn't be in any indices like the S&P 500. And they've decided not to do that. So strategy could be included in the S&P 500 maybe sometime this year. It's a possibility. They still have to vote on that, but the door is now open. David.

[David]

Okay, I think that's gotta be bullish. I mean like that is the end game for Datsun. And if that endgame is close to them, I think the investment case kind of takes a pretty big bad hit.

[Ryan]

Yeah, the M nav premium is much less attractive, I think. And it's much more attractive if you get included in the indices and basically all passive investors are forced to buy a little bit of microstrategy. Wouldn't that be nice for Michael?

[David]

The Ponzi just gets self sustaining. You pick up the Ponzi into the money printer.

[Ryan]

I thought you said we weren't supposed to use the word Ponzi anymore for what we're doing. Do you know, like, some people don't understand what you mean when you say Ponzi?

[David]

Did I say that? I think I did say that.

[Ryan]

Yeah, you did say that.

[David]

I did say that. Well, here's to a good 2026, Ryan.

[Ryan]

We'll end it there, guys. Got to let you know, of course none of this has been financial advice. Crypto is risky. You 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.

[David]

Sam.