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- [00:00]
A
Foreign station. For all our American listeners out there, Happy 4th of July. Happy 4th of July to you, David. How you doing? You're not actually in America on the 4th of July, are you?
- [00:12]
B
No, I am in France, where everyone celebrates fourth of July every year, right?
- [00:17]
A
I don't know, man. You tell me. I've never been there for fourth of July. What are you doing in France?
- [00:21]
B
Oh, it's ECC week this week. One of the oldest running Ethereum conferences. Unofficial, like, not. Not thrown by the ef, just bootstrapped by the community. And it's been running ever since, like, honestly, I think before I even got into Ethereum.
- [00:36]
A
Are you guys responsible for this 7% eth increase on the week? Is that you? Is that ethcc?
- [00:43]
B
I thought. I thought that was you. I thought that was you holding down the fork.
- [00:46]
A
I'm happy to take credit for 7%. All right, we're going to talk about that. We got a lot more actually, I want to talk to you more about, etc, but let's give them a tour for what's in store on the Bankless weekly rollup Tokenization week. David, what's, what's all this about?
- [01:01]
B
3 different companies all decided to launch tokenized stocks on different blockchains this week. Not just Robinhood, not just xdocs on Solana, but also Gemini is entering the fray with tokenized stocks both on Arbitrum and also on Solana. So just three different companies just coming in with tokenized stocks. I guess they chose this week to launch them all.
- [01:24]
A
That was a good week to do it. Also a big win for Ethereum this week. So that Robinhood news that you mentioned, that's all happening on AN Ethereum layer 2. First Arbitrum and then an Arbitrum chain. So you got to give us a download on that. And David, I want to tell you about Tom Lee. This guy is going on CNBC and he is pumping our ETH bags, my friend. And I actually think this is the most bullish thing I've seen happen to Ethereum this year. And I want to tell you why I would agree.
- [01:50]
B
I actually met Tom Lee like 3 days ago @ Permissionless and I was like, oh, Tom, great, great to see you. And like, like three days later, he launches the MicroStrategy, his version of micro. Oh, I think it was under embargo probably.
- [02:04]
A
Okay. I mean, yeah, he could have said.
- [02:05]
B
That, but I would, I would agree it was a very unexpected, extremely bullish surprise for. For eth.
- [02:11]
A
Yeah, this is a Michael Saylor strategy that's effectively what he's doing. He's building a publicly traded treasury strategy. Also, Solana has its first staked etf. So we'll talk about that. We'll see how it's going. And some big news in the U.S. this Fourth of July. We've got Trump's big, beautiful bill. All right, that may have passed by the time you guys are listening to this. And what's that mean for crypto? Also, is Trump trying to replace Powell? He's got some names floating around in the ring and he's kind of threatening in the background. So we'll talk about that too. But before we do, David, tell me a bit more about Ethic, like give me the vibes. How are we feeling?
- [02:44]
B
Yeah, it's in Cannes this year. It's usually in Paris except for last year. Year it was in Brussels because of the Olympics. But we're in, we're in Cannes this year, which is a beach town that it's my first time here. Extremely hot. It is like 95 degrees every single day. So everyone is just sweating. But since we're all sweating together, it's okay. Very well received event. And so nothing is like too, no one's like too crazy, no one's too euphoric. Everyone's like kind of getting work done.
- [03:13]
A
Okay.
- [03:14]
B
ECC has been like the spawn of the side event meta in crypto conferences, but this ETHCC was different. I think people said some very positive words about the main Ethereum conference. And I just saw a lot of. I have so many talks that I have saved that I need to watch that I just haven't gotten to yet. I have been running around. The week was started off by Robinhood's event, which they, they can throw an event. They were shuttling people back and forth. Yeah, they, they, they booked this massive. They had this whole entire like bit of, of like a James Bond flip bit of Vlad driving a sports car up the like Chateau road.
- [03:55]
A
He was looking good, man.
- [03:56]
B
I like, he was going after Bond. Yeah.
- [03:59]
A
Okay. Stuff. Okay.
- [04:01]
B
Yeah, yeah. So that was the big excitement of the week. And overall. Yeah, people are having a good time. Yeah.
- [04:07]
A
So it felt sober, it felt buildy. I mean, Robin Hood was the huge. Coming out of that event. It's sort of interesting. Like, it's weird in a way, seeing them come to ECC because that's sort of a off the beaten path. Traditionally that's been kind of a dev focused, nerdy. We're talking about zk, you know, like stuff, you know, cryptography, Deep cryptography. Protocol research. And here is Robinhood, what is it, a $70 billion company coming from the U.S. 5:85. You would know, right? Hood holder.
- [04:34]
B
Depends on when you look at it.
- [04:37]
A
And they're like, they're there this year, which is big in and of itself.
- [04:41]
B
Yes. Sponsoring the main event. Right. Not just throwing the biggest side event here, but sponsoring the main event. Yeah. And like there were many reporters at the Robin Hood event, like kind of doing the live coverage and they've just been throughout can all of this week. Yeah.
- [04:55]
A
Well, Vitalik appeared on a panel with the Robin Hood folks, which is interesting. Also may have front run you on this, David, which is. I watched the Vitalik. It was like a 20 minute keynote at ECC.
- [05:05]
B
I already watched.
- [05:06]
A
Yeah, that's the benefit of being remote. You know, I can watch it as soon as it drops. You actually have to attend the the event in person.
- [05:12]
B
Why do I go to the conference when you're beating me to the content?
- [05:15]
A
Because I can't. Because I don't. And we appreciate you doing that because obviously you got to talk. You fel the vibes. You got to talk to the Robin Hood folks in person. And Arbitrum folks. Anyway, we'll talk a bit more about that at the end of the episode. I think first we got to talk about prices as we do at the beginning of these episodes. And it's looking more bullish on the week. Tell me about it.
- [05:35]
B
Tell me green. Yeah. Bitcoin up 2.6% on the week. It touched $110,000. Currently coming in at $109,700. ETH up a little bit more this week. So Bitcoin up 2.6%. ETH up 6.7%. So I'm going to go ahead and call this a Ryan Sean Adams week.
- [05:54]
A
Sure. Do it.
- [05:54]
B
Both bitcoin and eth are up in dollar terms, but eth is up in bitcoin terms. That's what I did call that. That's a Ryan week. That's a Ryan week. Well done, Ryan. You did your job. So ETH coming in at $2,595. And so overall, pretty happy times on the on the markets this week.
- [06:14]
A
All right. Bitcoin, what? We're just touching all time highs. Right. It seems like we've been range bound 100k to 110k but we haven't been able to break all time highs. But we're creeping close.
- [06:24]
B
I think the technical term for that is edging. We are edging right now.
- [06:28]
A
All right, when is our Last all time high, you know, climax, it was June 9th.
- [06:36]
B
You're nailing it actually.
- [06:38]
A
So less than a month ago we were all time high. And we might be there momentarily, I suppose, maybe by the time.
- [06:44]
B
$2,000 off of all time high. Yeah.
- [06:47]
A
That's not the only thing that's moving on the week. Tell me about some movers of the week. It's always weird seven day charts. What, what tokens you want to call out.
- [06:56]
B
Just if you happen to have Pengu Arb, Arbitrum, the Arbitrum token or Fart Coin, Congrats. Those are the big movers of the week. All those are moving beyond 30% in a single week this week. Don't know why Pengu did it, but Arbitrum obviously did it because all of the, all of the Robin Hood news and then Fartcoin, you know, is the greatest macro asset of all time. And we got some great macro news this week, which we're going to get into as well.
- [07:22]
A
All right, the triple point asset. I mean, all of those things. Maybe there's a theme to them. Maybe the theme is just there's more liquidity in the market and numbers going up. Let's talk about this Solana etf. So lots of folks in the Solana community excited about this. This is notable because it's the first spot Solana etf, the first crypto ETF came out of nowhere.
- [07:41]
B
No one was really watching this.
- [07:43]
A
Yeah, I mean I heard some rumblings from the Bloomberg folks and then suddenly it's here. So it's notable because we have an Eth etf, we have a Bitcoin ETF and now we have a Solana etf, nothing else. And also, David, the second thing is it's staking. It's full staking enabled. So you're not buying the sole asset, you're buying the staked sole asset inside of this etf. And so I think there's a couple questions coming out of this. One, how did they get the, how did Solana get a staked ETF before Ethereum? And then two, how's it doing? So update us on that.
- [08:17]
B
Yeah, there's a weird nuance here. There's just an unusual structure as it relates to, like how an ETF typically comes into being. I don't know why, why this, how this is different, but this is a C corp, is a C Corp under the 1940 Act. I don't know what that means, but it allows a staking. Rewards to be paid out as dividends. The taxes for this thing is not as kind as if it were more of a traditional vanilla normal etf. And then of course, how did it get passed? The SEC didn't like, give this the explicit thumbs up. They just also didn't give it a thumbs down, which means that they just got to do it.
- [08:54]
A
So they just didn't say no and didn't say no.
- [08:57]
B
And then they were like, all right, I guess to do this. Yeah. I've never heard of this issuer. Is Rex Osprey Soul. I don't know who this issuer is.
- [09:06]
A
Not blackrock. It's not Fidelity.
- [09:08]
B
This is way down your file for S1. I don't even know if Fidelity did or not.
- [09:12]
A
They did.
- [09:13]
B
So 80 of the ETF is in spot Soul, and then half of that is actively staked. And then the. There's also a mix of like Judo Soul, a variety of other, like.
- [09:22]
A
Oh, only half of it. Only half of it is actively staked.
- [09:26]
B
Enough is staked. Yeah.
- [09:27]
A
Okay, interesting. And the fee, the fees on this are pretty high too. It's almost high fees. 75 bips here, I guess. It's notable though that it did seep through. I get the feeling that the SEC doesn't want to be the no sec. They don't want to say no to crypto. And so that's why this thing just kind of seeped through. I mean, any overall odd though?
- [09:50]
B
Yeah. I would be somewhat disappointed if I was like. I don't know if like Bitwise filed for a solid etf, but there's like other issuers out there that have filed for a Solana etf and I would be kind of bitter if I was them. And I'm like an ETF issuer and there's like.
- [10:04]
A
I don't know, you know, I guess there, there was with other ETFs. It was a race for first. Right. And there was a horse race. You know, who could be first, who could get the most volume. I feel like probably all the ETF issuers are happy right now because this is an SEC that's not going to say no to Crypto. And all of the things are probably going to get approved. I'm sure we see an ETH staking ETF sometime soon in the fullness of time. The volume on this was pretty strong, according to eric Balchunas, about 20 million. So that's top 1% of ETFs for first day launch. So pretty like. I guess it met expectations or exceeded some expectations. A note here. It's still kind of peanuts compared to the Bitcoin ETF and even the Ethereum ETF in terms of volume. So it's, you know, it's good for a down market. Small potatoes. It's small. Look at this. So actually on far side Crypto, you know these charts we've been looking at.
- [10:56]
B
Here'S the first day, the Solana one.
- [10:58]
A
Yeah. So they've got here. Right. So we'll be able to look at that and compare it to Bitcoin, which is absolutely massive. And then Ether has been seeing a tremendous amount of strength here recently as well. Yeah.
- [11:09]
B
I have just two comments about this. I think this is a pretty positive indicator towards the growing wave of down market ETFs that are definitely coming by the end of this year. So it's gonna be the first of many. You're gonna see a dogecoin etf. You're probably gonna see a ripple etf. We're gonna, we're gonna see this far side ETF charts just kind of populate. And then also my take is that the staking component of these proof of stake network ETFs is marginal. And I'm not like bullish, I'm not more bullish because all of a sudden there's like a staking etf. I don't really think that's going to create that much more demand.
- [11:42]
A
I pretty much agree with you that. Although I will note so the cost of just holding like something like vanilla Solana for instance is negative 4.5% dilution.
- [11:52]
B
Yeah, that's true. It's actually, it's much more critical for solana at an 8% issuance rate versus eth, which is like a 2 point something percent.
- [12:00]
A
Solana is 4.5% issuance actually. And so, but yields are high. Yields are, yields are higher because you're making money on MEV and fee revenue and that kind of thing. But yeah, but for. Yeah, I guess you're. That, that, that makes sense that you would include all of yields because that's missed opportunity. Yeah. So we've got some other commentary on the SEC here too about tokenized stocks that we'll get to. But David, I want to ask you a question. How are you feeling about your job, man? You feeling good Job security right now? What? Dude, we're business partners. This is, this is to cue you up to talk about the jobs report because you should feel great about your job. The jobs numbers are looking good. The jobs numbers are looking great.
- [12:41]
B
I keep. Yeah, all right. I guess so keep my job.
- [12:45]
A
Unemployment is only 4.1% and these are Estimates higher than what analysts were expecting. So they had expected 4.3%, it was actually 4.1%. So good macro indicators there. Here's a commentary. Strong unemployment report, interesting initial market reaction. So what happened on the back of this was stocks went up, rates, so bond rates got higher, crypto went down. And so this, this analyst is saying, tells you the market believes crypto prices are more dependent on liquidity, whereas stocks are trade are, are trading on fundamentals. And the chance of a July rate cut, Fed rate cut, just got killed. So stocks on fundamentals and crypto prices, liquidity. That's kind of a take here.
- [13:28]
B
It does feel like the stock market is the center of attention right now and the crypto markets are kind of just trend following. That's what it feels like to me.
- [13:39]
A
Yeah, I could see that. And here's a chart that Mike Nado pulled up for me yesterday when we were going through sort of our monthly fundamentals episode. This is Cross Border Capital, by the way.
- [13:49]
B
Those are really great.
- [13:50]
A
Yeah, you like those? Okay. Do you listen to those?
- [13:51]
B
You guys have only done. Yeah, I've listened the first like half. But you guys have only done two, right?
- [13:56]
A
Yeah, yeah. And toward the end he gets to this chart which is a weekly global liquidity. There's all sorts of different indices. This is one from Cross Border Capital and you can see kind of an ebbed up to 180 trillion back just, you know, I guess, you know, that was probably May and now it's back down again. But this is the measure of if you believe that crypto prices go up when there's more liquidity in terms of, you know, dollars, money, printing all of these things. Then you look at this chart and I'm a big believer, I'm a subscriber to the idea that all of these markets, especially in crypto, are all driven by this chart right here.
- [14:31]
B
Because it's the denominator. Global liquidity is the denominator of especially crypto assets, which are commodity money assets. I'll add one more nuance that a lot of the bitcoiner macro, like an analyst that I pay attention to will all say that bitcoin price is a two year lagging indicator of global liquidity. So global liquidity shows up and then two years later that shows up in the bitcoin price. And this global liquidity indicator has been going up straight since December of 2022. And Bitcoin has been following that trend. The bull, the bull hopium that I will happily dish out here is that we have like another year plus of Bitcoin up and therefore crypto up because of global liquidity.
- [15:14]
A
I think that's true. And you can chart it as a straight line, but there are, you notice in the chart these dips, right? It goes kind of like up and then there's a little dip down and then there's another. There's. Yeah, it's a sawtooth. I like that, man. You're a charter, aren't you? Okay, so here's the thing that could affect global liquidity coming from the US It's a one, two combo punch. So you gotta look at monetary policy, of course, and what's Powell doing? What's the Fed rate doing? And then you have to look at fiscal policy. Right? Because Lyn Alden told us nothing stops this train. So let's look at both first. We'll talk about monetary policy on the week. So Powell has been, people call him hawkish. I don't know, maybe he's just being normal. But Trump wants him to be very, very much more dovish. He wants him to cut rates. And he's looking at, he says unemployment's, you know, doing very well. That's a indicator, you know, inflation. CPI is kind of down. So he's like, Powell, why don't you cut rates? And this week the conversation coming from Scott Besant and also Trump, I mean, he's always talking about this is that a Fed chair, Powell successor is coming in as soon as weeks from now. So indicating that Trump is going to name Powell's successor. Okay, you imagine that if your boss was just like named your replacement, it.
- [16:32]
B
Was like, while you still have a job.
- [16:34]
A
Yeah, you suck and I hate you. And we're going to hire this new guy and I wish you weren't here. And here, here he is like, that's.
- [16:41]
B
And his name is Rady McRae Cut.
- [16:44]
A
Exactly. So I don't know this. The successor has not been named, but the successor could come, according to Bessant, weeks from now. So there's a poly market, of course, for this. Who will Trump announce as the next Fed chair? And guess who one of the answers is. You'll never guess.
- [17:02]
B
Scott Bessette.
- [17:03]
A
It's Scott Bassett.
- [17:04]
B
It's Scott Bessett. Oh, he's at 21%.
- [17:07]
A
Yeah, it's all the second highest. So. So yeah, that's. One of the chief candidates is, you know, Scott Besson. 21%.
- [17:15]
B
You can just put. The Federal Reserve is supposed to be a non political organization and Scott Besson is a member of Trump's Administration, what's going on here?
- [17:24]
A
Yeah, well, you just take, take the treasury guy and you move him to, you know, a Fed, Fed chair. And you could do that. We all know what Scott Bessant would do. I mean, he's very much with Trump. He was with him with all of the tariffs, even though the rest of Wall street thought that was a good idea. He's very articulate. He's a good communicator. I mean, you could totally see Scott Besant.
- [17:44]
B
I enjoy Scott Besant.
- [17:46]
A
You enjoy his, he's, he sounds so reasonable.
- [17:49]
B
Yeah, I enjoy him. I think he's better than any Democratic, like, economic advisor that I've ever listened to.
- [17:55]
A
So whether it's Scott Besant or whoever Trump names, what do you think he's.
- [17:58]
B
Going to do to rate cuts is cutty McCutty face.
- [18:02]
A
Yeah, it's going to be cutting McCutty face. All right, so, yeah, now Powell's, you know, tenure goes to May of 2026. All right. And so there's this, technically, this seems like there's no way to fire Powell. Right. And no one has ever done this. So no president in the full Fed history has actually named the replacement before while the guy was on the job.
- [18:25]
B
Right.
- [18:25]
A
So this is all unprecedented territory. But this points to, we're just looking at the liquidity charts. What do you think in the, in the fullness of time, whether it's in the, you know, coming months and Powell capitulates and starts cutting rates or whether it's his replacement rates are getting cut. Right. Am I like, am I wrong?
- [18:43]
B
Like, crypto prices are going up for the remainder of the Trump presidency if he gets his way.
- [18:48]
A
It feels very much the case. All right, so that's the, the monetary side. And let's check in on the, on the fiscal side. So we've talked about this before, the beautiful bill.
- [18:57]
B
The point I made about Scott Bessant being on the Trump admin moving into the Federal Reserve is the fiscal side penetrating into the monetary side. So it's really fiscal all the way down. Because nothing stops this trade.
- [19:11]
A
Yeah, it kind of. Exactly. And you know, you're, you're civic. So Congress is supposed to hold the purse strings of the entire U.S. government on, you know, the U.S. government layer one in monetary and fiscal policy and all of these things. And they are looking at a bill. Probably by the time people listen to this, that bill will have passed the House. But we don't know. Bankless listeners are living the future currently, for David and I, it's up for Vote in the House. And it passed the Senate. Passed by one vote. Okay, so they had to call in. It was really tight.
- [19:42]
B
The Vice President.
- [19:42]
A
Yeah, they had to call in JD Vance to pass it. So pass the Senate. Looks like it's going to pass the House. The reason I know that is because we've got some odds here, 92% odds on polymarket that it will have passed by the time bankless listeners are listening to this. So let's assume it does. That's about 4 trillion to the deficit in the next 10 years because it's a combo of pretty big tax cuts, no tax hikes, and, you know, some expense cutting as well. Right. So it's a deficit bill. It's caused some division in the Republican Party. Elon Musk has infamously or famously said, like, you do this, I'm going to launch a whole nother political party. You know, so. But it looks like it's going to pass. And so the US is essentially deciding to double down on its deficit and double down on its debt. This is the one, two combo punch, David, for global liquidity.
- [20:35]
B
How much is the current amount of US debt?
- [20:38]
A
I mean, 36 trillion, something like this.
- [20:40]
B
30, 36 trillion. So we're just adding four more trillion. So. So we're adding. What is that? We're 10%. No.
- [20:47]
A
Yeah, yeah, 10%.
- [20:48]
B
Yeah, we're adding 10% onto the debt. Wow, that's a large number.
- [20:51]
A
Do you think that's a large number? I mean, it's all a large number. Right? And I mean, the question is, how do you. What. What do you think? How do you think this ends?
- [20:59]
B
We're adding four bitcoins to the debt.
- [21:03]
A
That's. That's one way of looking at it for sure.
- [21:05]
B
Excuse me. Only two bitcoins. I forgot bitcoin. How high bitcoin is? I mean, Bitcoin's 2 trillion.
- [21:10]
A
There are some bulls on the back of this that say, look, you, tax cuts, you stimulate the economy. We just grow our way out. Right? And there's maybe, there's maybe some case out there that AI tech, the frontier here totally, is so bullish.
- [21:23]
B
Totally.
- [21:23]
A
Look, man, I just got off a podcast earlier this week while you were out, Cathie Wood was telling me we're going to grow at 7 to 8% GDP. Okay? The US is going to be on the back of AI and the AI and innovation stack. If that's the case, maybe there. Maybe this doesn't matter so much. All right? So you could bet on that.
- [21:42]
B
I cannot imagine ourselves growing out of $40 trillion of debt accruing 4.5% interest.
- [21:50]
A
Well, that's what that, that's what the strategy is. And unless something drastic changes, we can't grow our way out. So this means that, God help anyone holding U.S. treasuries and bonds right now. I mean, that is just slow motion. Exit liquidity for doing that. And I think this is bullish for gold, for Bitcoin, for Ethereum, for commodities, for capital assets. Oh God. When you went there, David, what do we have coming up next?
- [22:14]
B
Coming up next, not one, not two, but three different companies that launched tokenized stocks all across the blockchain ecosystem. We're going to talk about all of them leading with Robinhood as the event that I went to. So I can tell you exactly what that Robinhood event was like on the ground. In addition to the tokenized stocks products, it's a slew of other products as well. Very aggressively getting into the crypto space. You know, Robinhood and Coinbase were kind of in their own lanes for a good long while for this small section of like, you know, that you could buy Bitcoin and a few other cryptos on Robinhood. Now they are very much breathing each other's air. So we're going to talk about that and also the Robinhood layer 2 on Arbitrum, using Arbitrum to equity and talk about all of that and more. But first a message to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make that show possible, like Uniswap. It's a browser wallet, it's a mobile wallet. It's the best place to do defi. Let's go hear from Uniswap. Right now, Uniswap is your gateway to a more efficient defi experience. With Uniswap. Swapping and bridging across 13 chains is simple, fast and cost effective, helping you move value wherever, whenever. Thanks to deep liquidity on the Uniswap protocol call, you'll enjoy minimal price impact on every trade. And now Uniswap V4 takes it even further. Swappers benefit from gas savings on multi hop swaps and eth trading pairs, while liquidity providers can create new pools at 99% lower costs. The best part, you don't have to do anything extra. Each trade is automatically routed through Uniswap X, V2, V3 and V4, so you get the most efficient swap without even thinking about it. Whether you're swapping, sending on, ramping off, ramping, or bridging. Uniswap's web app and wallet Gives you the tools to unlock DeFi's full potential on Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, Unichain and more. Use Uniswap's web app and wallet for a more efficient way to use Defi. Imagine if your checking account and Defi wallet finally spoke the same language. That's Mantle banking, an all in one fiat and crypto account. It lets you save, spend and invest all from one dashboard swipe for coffee, Stake me three yield or even use virtual cards for payments through Apple Pay. So it feels web 2 simple yet stays web 3 sovereign for allocators. Meet mantle index 4 the S&P 500 of crypto. A tokenized institutional grade fund seeded with $400 million from the mantle treasury and balance across Bitcoin, Ether, Sol and Yield enhanced stables. One asset, broad exposure, pure Defi composability. The Momentum is real me faults, FBTC, bridges and a $2.4 billion community treasury are all powering the next phase of on chain finance. Mantle brings real world access, yield and utility to digital assets. Ready for the next era of on chain finance that actually belongs in 2025? Explore Mantle at mantle XYZ or follow mantle underscore official Mantle bridging Tradfi and Defi so you don't have to we.
- [24:45]
A
Got Robinhood announcing tokenized stocks and an Ethereum layer two. This is big, big, big stuff. And David, you know how I know is this is Vlad, the CEO of Robinhood and he is armed with a smart guy chalkboard here and he's doing some smart guy drawing on the chalkboard to diagram what I think he's describing, which is tokenized stocks on Robinhood. You were there for this presentation at EthCC. Tell, tell me what was going on. What is Vlad describing in this video?
- [25:15]
B
He's just doing a good old like whiteboarding session, chalkboarding session of like drawing the diagrams of here's Bill. Bill wants to buy tokenized stock. Bill sends his money to Robinhood. Robinhood sends its money to like the broker dealer. Broker dealer goes to the marketplace, buys a stock, stock goes back and then like that's the basic, like pretty normal. But then he was like, okay, but here's what happens when it's after hours and Bill wants to buy a stock because then it goes to the after hours exchange, which is our exchange bit stamp that we bought. But then also if it's a better price on Arbitrum where we're deploying these stocks, it's going to go to Arbitrum. And so he was just like you know, drawn all the lines to, like.
- [25:55]
A
I'm really enjoying your voiceover of what he's doing here on screen.
- [25:59]
B
He did a great job. I was like, looking at him and he was like, okay, he's using these. Correct amount of space on the chalkboard. He's out cramming his letters. Clearly he's done this a few times. Overall, their whole entire presentation was like one gigantic bit, which was like, it was pretty scripted. It was kind of cheesy at times, but I enjoyed it. It was fun.
- [26:18]
A
Yeah. Okay, so this presentation or something like it. Yeah. To catch a Token, the presentation, 22 million clicks on Twitter. I think a lot of people watching Vlad on the chalkboard, they were streaming.
- [26:28]
B
It directly on Twitter on x. And yeah, 22, like, as an X view is pretty like, like cheap. It's just like one click and one person watch it, watches it for one second. But yeah, 22 million people. I clicked in and, and looked at it for at least momentarily.
- [26:41]
A
Oh, well done. I mean, that's just like smart guy vibes when you're drawn on a chalkboard in front of it, you know, well done here. Okay, tell us. I know you interviewed him. You talked to him. You also talked to the Arbitrum folks. What, what are the highlights of what Robinhood announced here? Tell us about the tokenized stock thing and anything else you want to cover.
- [26:59]
B
Yeah, overall, when I was talking to everyone, I was like, all right, like, did this event and all of its announcements, did they meet your expectations? Was it under your expectations? Where were, where were all the announcements as it relates to your expectations? And almost everyone said it exceeded their expectations specifically because of the tokenized private equity, which is a derivative of their tokenized stock announcement. So we'll start with the tokenized stocks. They are doing tokenized stocks for EU citizens. So this is only for European Union citizens. And, you know, they just have the broker dealer relationships. You can buy Apple, you can buy all the regular stocks. And now they are deploying them as tokens on the Arbitrum 1 blockchain, like 200 stocks.
- [27:40]
A
Like a pretty good selection, right? US. US capital stocks.
- [27:43]
B
Yeah, indeed. And like, I've been talking to some EU people and they have, they express that, like, apparently this is actually a difficult thing to do in the EU is access American stocks, which I was surprised to learn somebody was telling me of a story of like, they wanted to buy Nvidia and they're. They had to go to their brokerage and they had to go, like, please, I would like to buy Nvidia. And they were like, no, it's too risky. And that's what it was. Yeah, well I was surprised. That's like when you and I complain about going to our, our banks and we have to like wire money and they're like, what is the wire?
- [28:14]
A
So it's even more nan right over there.
- [28:16]
B
Yeah, exactly, yeah. Like they like Nvidia, which is something that's on the publicly traded on the U. S stock market. Their brokerages don't allow. I don't know if this is pervasive. Maybe this is just this one individual story. I don't really know how pervasive this is across Europe, but apparently accessing US equities is not trivial in the EU.
- [28:34]
A
And even for us, right, there's benefits in being on chain. So you've got fractional ownership. So if you can buy a portion of a stock, right, with our tokenized stuff, you can buy any micro fraction of any of the tokens you want. In traditional brokerages, you have to buy the full amount or basically nothing. So it's more divisible in that way. Also it's 24, 7, 365. It's like crypto markets, it never shuts down. That's a benefit.
- [29:00]
B
This is, this is a really cool thing that showed me that Robinhood had done a very good job creating a pretty elegantly integrated ecosystem. So they have their normal brokerage which gives them the stocks, then they make a token and that token can now go trade on bitstamp, their exchange that they bought like two years ago. And so when the stock market is down. Pop quiz, Ryan. About what percentage of time is the stock market not trading?
- [29:29]
A
It's, I've never, I haven't quantified it, but it's gotta be more than 50%. Cause you got holidays and then you've got just, you know, all of the non business hours, right? Is it 60%?
- [29:40]
B
It's 81% of time.
- [29:42]
A
God, that's stupid.
- [29:43]
B
81% of the time markets are closed, which like the notion of a closed market is insane to me. Markets are a phenomenon. They are an emergent phenomenon. They don't in theory close. The fact that we just close. Our markets are just, is just silly. And so with tokenized stocks that can trade on a crypto exchange, we now have stocks that can have like 24, 7, 365 price discovery. Because that's just this, that's just the speed of the world that we live in in 2025. And then also Robinhood can like Order route. If the price is preferable on bitstamp, the exchange or if the price is preferable on on chain like on Arbitrum Uniswap or wherever. Like they can just go source the best price. So it's worth noting how impactful 24,7 365 price discovery is. You can always kind of tell when something is happening in the world because Bitcoin will move on the weekend and that will inform the stock market on Monday. But like now the stock market has a venue which Rob it's Robin hood to trade. 24, 7, 365 also say for example some crisis, some global crisis did happen and Robinhood's the only place to get price discovery there they get all those fees on bitstamp or on or on their chain which they announced, which I'll get into in a second. Overall pretty cool.
- [31:00]
A
Let's talk about, we'll talk about the structure of these things, you know, in a little bit. But the other thing I want to get to is it's I had FOMO already. I'm like I'm not EU citizen, I can't access this these on chain stocks yet. But then also my FOMO just skyrocketed when I saw actual private shares of companies that I'd really like to own, like OpenAI SpaceX here too. So it's not just the public companies. Robinhood also threw out some private company tokens as well. You can't access in US market, you just can't access anywhere. How what is this and how did they do it?
- [31:37]
B
You if you try really, really hard, you can go find a way to go get SpaceX shares, OTC or OpenAI shares, OTC. Just because they are not publicly traded does not mean that they are not tradable or sellable. It's just a little bit of a different dynamic.
- [31:52]
A
Like some peer to peer OTC debt type thing. Like you got to find the seller, you know, and it's an employee somewhere, right.
- [32:00]
B
And companies can approve those sales or not approve those sales because that's just the nature of what happens when they're still private. But like oh, SpaceX shares do trade with some amount of like frequency and volume that's not unheard of. OpenAI is the new one. Vlad said that they somehow had this relationship with some private wealth manager hedge fund that had access to some of these shares and that's how they got a hold of these things. But they are now tokenizing private companies starting with OpenAI and SpaceX. So they're doing this Big campaign where they're going to just airdrop these tokens to EU citizens who sign up over the next seven days.
- [32:34]
A
AirDrop for free?
- [32:35]
B
For free, yeah. But it's probably going to be like 5 or $10. Still pretty sick. Yeah, but man, like OpenAI, I would smash buy on that for up to a very high price. It's just pretty cool. Like there's other companies out there like OpenAI, SpaceX, also Stripe. These are some of the coolest companies and the world of like, you know, private venture backed trad companies, they're just staying private for longer. They don't need to go public. Which is kind of a bummer for people like me. You the listener who wants to get our hands on these things.
- [33:04]
A
Yeah, that's the part that remains to be seen is how much access they actually have to this pipeline. Whether it's just kind of a one time thing for promo purposes or whether that's sustainable and durable. There's actually a little bit of drama around this as well where OpenAI actually tweeted this out. These OpenAI tokens are not OpenAI equity. We do not partner with Robinhood. We're not involved in this. Do not endorse it. Any transfer of OpenAI equity requires our approval. We did not approve any transfer. Please be careful. What's going on here?
- [33:34]
B
Yeah, so like I said, if you're a private company, you have the authority to approve or not approve sales of your equity, of your stock. And so it really, the how Vlad and Robinhood came to acquire these tokens really matters, or what the nature is between the investor ownership over those tokens. I don't really think we know that story, but it would be a pretty big blunder for Vlad to just say that they have these things and then not actually have some amount of assurance that they do actually have them. So I'm going to lean with the benefit of the doubt. Like, yeah, Robinhood, Vlad does have a real claim on these things somehow. Maybe they're a derivative of a token. Maybe, maybe some market maker is just agreeing to set a price. I don't really know. But he tweeted out saying like, yeah, they're not technically equity, you're right, but they are 1 to 1 of the value. I think we're all kind of looking for more clarity as to how this works.
- [34:26]
A
Well, that's the thing. Okay, so these tokenized stocks in all cases that we're going to talk about them, aren't sort of like one for one equity? At least this is my understanding. So and the scenario with the Robinhood stocks, for instance, you're buying some sort of vehicle iou you're not buying the stock directly. Right. You're buying a vehicle that is almost like a derivative for the actual shares that Robinhood owns. And they're kind of issuing this derivative on chain. And there can be weird things that happen with that. Right. So when you're trading the market 24 hours a day, that sort of on chain asset can change, like, can not mirror exactly the price of the actual asset in real life because there is a different liquidity profile, effectively. So there's some downsides to these assets. They're not as good as the. The actual owning the actual, you know, tokenized stock in an exchange. I think there are a lot of people on. On Twitter who are pointing that out as well, that this is almost like a beta version of the thing. You don't actually own the equity itself.
- [35:33]
B
Yeah, it's likely a pretty convoluted process as to how a user will actually come to own these things. And like you said, the investor protection is probably not as strong. It's just not dissimilar from like, OpenAI is like the Federal Reserve. And then they're looking at all the dollars in the offshore tether bank account and then they're saying those aren't really dollars. And technically they could make them not really dollars, but would they? It's. And then also there's like another entity, middleman, entity, like making this whole thing work. So it's just a little bit convoluted. We'll see how good of a product these things are based on how much trading volume there is and how much, like, true price discovery there is. And like, you know, there's a bunch of things to iron out. But my big takeaway, we're going to get into the remaining other two tokenized stock companies. But there's a. Just a big foot in the door. Like the Overton window is moving here. And the notion of accessing these companies and tokenizing stocks on chain is like, very real. This is a very real thing.
- [36:32]
A
And Robinhood, we should let everyone know, is a broker dealer for stocks already in a way that Coinbase is not, in a way that Kraken is not. I mean, that's their whole shtick. They've been selling stocks for, you know, not a decade, but, like, many years. That's the thing that they do.
- [36:46]
B
Robinhood has been selling stocks for a decade. They came out for a decade. 2013.
- [36:50]
A
Okay, so let's talk about the second thing that moves the Overton window and is kind of a big shift, which is the Robinhood chain. So at first my understanding is they're issuing these tokenized stocks on the Arbitrum chain itself. The Arbitrum chain. Right, the one that, you know, that's been in Mainnet for a while. In the future though, they're going to have their own official Robinhood chain that uses Arbitrum tech, but is its own separate chain, one would assume completely integrated with Arbitrum 1, but an official Robinhood chain the same way that Coinbase has the base chain. Is that right?
- [37:25]
B
That is exactly right. And the, the way I like, it was a huge deal when Coinbase made the base chain because it was the largest company, traditional company, equity company, to make a. Make a blockchain. It was very validating of some of the things that we've said before is like, oh yeah, financial entities will all use their own chain. They'll use chain, the blockchain to have their logic run on chain. It's gonna be great. But the difference here is Coinbase is crypto native. Robinhood is firmly in tradfi. Robinhood doesn't have to do this. Coinbase needs to like, invest in the ecosystem for their own benefit. Right. They need to like spawn products. They need to like really expand. Growing on chain. Robinhood doesn't necessarily have to do that. Robinhood is Tradfi. They sell stocks. They sell. You know, crypto represents 30% of their revenue, but not a hundred. And so like, this was very optional for them to do and they did it. And I think that is a huge vote of confidence to the notion that financial entities will make chains and they will put assets on those chains.
- [38:29]
A
Big win for Ethereum here. And it's also nice too, with like that we have multiple competitors entering the fray. We got Base, we have Arbitrum or sorry, and we have the Robinhood chain. And as you said, this is a traditional company going on chain, which is a big deal. Okay. So by the way, Hood shares were up like 11% on this, the date announced. Arbitrum's been catching a bid. We Talked about the ARB token earlier in the episode. Eth. Completely flat. Well, I guess up 6% on the week, but not directly as a result of this announcement. So how this plays out in the market remains to be seen. What else did Robinhood announce? Just go through the list.
- [39:04]
B
Yeah, they launched perpetual futures for EU citizens. And so they have this very slick perps interface which. God, retail is just going to love. Retail already. Loves options on Robinhood. Options is where Robinhood makes a lot of their money. Perps, I think is just options, in my opinion, but better. Maybe you can do some funny things with options, some more expressive things, but Perps is just like. It's a leverage slider. Retail's gonna love it. And they've built out the slickest perp interface. Again, only available for the eu, but you would imagine as soon as the CFTC green lights this for the United States, they're going to just. Just open this up in United States. So Perps is a thing and then also just a few other things as well. Crypto staking. So you can now stake your eth. Stake your solana inside of Robinhood. And also a crypto credit card. So they already had Robinhood, already had a credit card. You get like 3% cash back, but now you can get 3% cash back. That goes and buys your preferred crypto asset.
- [39:59]
A
Yeah, I should mention all of this is integrated in the slickness of the Robinhood app. Right? It doesn't even feel like you're on chain. Remember we talked to Vlad like three years ago when he came to a permissionless conference. That was our first conversation with with Vlad and it was clear that they were new to crypto, but he was telling us about the user interface and how important haptics were, you know, like a little buzz. You got a buzz feedback in your mobile phone when something goes back. I'm sure they're doing all of those things, which is. Which is pretty cool.
- [40:25]
B
A mobile wallet with haptics to tokenize stocks. Robinhood. You guys have done great.
- [40:30]
A
We need more dopamine hits. This is DC Investor, in case it isn't clear. Robinhood and Coinbase are going to full on compete head to head against each other to drive on chain adoption on Ethereum via Optimism and Arbitrum. And they're not going to be the last ones to join the fray either. Bullish. I think the community sees this as pretty bullish.
- [40:48]
B
I think the Robinhood vs Coinbase take is the pretty easy take to have. I just did an episode with David from Blackworks Research and Omar from Dragonfly. Omar representing Robinhood and David representing Coinbase. And we kind of like sussed out this conversation of like, how competitive are these two entities? And like the big takeaway from everyone there was like actually the, the swim lanes are pretty distinct. Like they're mostly sticking to their own lanes. Coinbase is really trying to go to like crypto as a service and plug into like TD ameritrade and like Fidelity and like all the boomer brokerages who are just never going to build their own crypto exchange, they're just going to plug into Coinbase and have crypto exchange via Coinbase. And so Coinbase is going to do a little B2B stuff. And they're also going competitive with Visa to do payments with Base and usdc. And so Coinbase is actually leaning to be more of a service provider towards Tradfi financial pre existing entities. Whereas Robinhood is strictly just, we are retail retail products, retail finance. And like the swim lanes are pretty distinct. And like, yes, now there's bas versus Robinhood chain. They're both trying to do tokenized stocks. So now they are starting to actually like, you know, interfere in each other's air. But for the most part there was consensus about like these two entities are definitely going to coexist pretty well.
- [42:12]
A
That's interesting because when I look at this at a higher level, it just looks like pure convergence. But maybe there is some different place here. A few other points of convergence. That was not the only tokenized stock thing in the news this week. X Stocks on Solana, which is a partnership from Backed Finance. Okay, this is the issuer of X Stocks. And Kraken and some others launched a similar tokenized stock offering this time on Solana. And the way this manifested in my feed was tweets like this, this one from mert, where I think MERT is swapping some fart coin for S&P 500. All right. Which you can now do on Solana using this vehicle.
- [42:50]
B
I feel like you should go the other way.
- [42:53]
A
You should, you should sell Your S&P 500 for Solana, I guess if it's liquidity season and you definitely have the option to do that. So not only this, but you also mentioned Gemini is launching tokenized stocks. I think we really need to dig into what these things are. We actually have an episode we're recording with one of the issues Denari and they power partially the Solana X stocks, tokenized stocks, and also this Gemini tokenized stock offering. And they were just approved as the first platform to be able to get their broker dealer license and to offer tokenized U.S. stocks to domestic investors. So, David, I don't even know what all of this means yet and I feel like you and I need to do an entire episode to figure it out, like what these different tokenized stocks offerings are, how good they are compared to existing stocks that you buy in your brokerage and what the future is here. This is a tweet thread from somebody who is kind of bearish on the.
- [43:50]
B
This is Rob from Dragonfly.
- [43:52]
A
Okay. Yeah. What's Rob's take here? Why, why is he bullish on these offerings in general or bearish, I should say, on these offerings?
- [43:58]
B
Yeah, he's basically saying there's just a lot of hurdles that these things need to get over in order to be effective products. Because when tokenized stocks trade during after hours, then without, because there actually is not one to one backs, they're more of a derivative product. Then there's market, there's pricing risk that market makers have to account for. And overall it's just a blunt tool. Denari is one to one backed. But there's just a lot of details that I think everyone's trying to understand about these things. Like for example, how does Denari not have a white list? Those are freely transferable blacklist tokens, whereas the Robinhood tokens, those are whitelisted. So like you need to have KYC to in order to get your hands on those things. So how these work is going to be really interesting if Denari continues to offer stock, but like say Lazarus Group hacks a smart contract and then all of a sudden Lazarus Group owns Apple. Like.
- [44:52]
A
Sure, it's a tether. It's the tether problem too. It's the tether problem, right? Yeah. So all of those kinks need to be worked out. I mean, at the end of the day, I think Rob is, is bullish, but sees these as kind of like, you know, early stage beta type version.
- [45:06]
B
Everyone's very excited.
- [45:07]
A
He's throwing some cold water on it. Okay. But you know who's actually, you know who actually hates it is traditional finance. This is the financial industry. They're pushing back on tokenized equity, urging the SEC to reject crypto firms exemptions because they say this is going to cause liquidity fragmentation. You're going to lose investor protection with these things. They're not real stocks. And this is all like risk to market structure. And by the way, to your point, you know, North Korea compliance, AML, KYCs, price discovery is going to suck. Don't let this happen, sec. So this is old traditional finance, not new traditional finance like Robinhood pushing back on this whole concept because their entire business is at stake, David. These banks do not want, you know, new entrants to go and chomp and, you know, software eat their, their entire business. So the big question is, what does the SEC think about this? You can imagine if this was the Gary Gensler regime. You'd already like none of this would be happening. Banhammer just like speeches and tweets and all sorts of things. But this is Paul Atkins, who was asked on CNBC this very question by the interviewer, and here's what he had to say. This is Paul Atkins, the new chair of the sec.
- [46:20]
B
What do you make of these sort of tokenization efforts? I mean, it seems to me that we have rules. We could debate whether the rules are the right rules and maybe they should be changed, but. But given the rules that are in place and the intention of the rule today, it seems to me that the. The effort to sort of quote, unquote, tokenize something, you know, an underlying asset, and to sort of use this structure is really effectively just a workaround to what the actual intent of the rule is.
- [46:48]
C
Well, I guess I disagree with that a bit, because tokenization is an innovation, and we at the SEC should be focused on how do we advance innovation in the marketplace. And so I would argue here, over the last several years, the SEC has been standing athwart efforts to innovate in the marketplace because things have been unclear. The rules have not been clear. We've had regulation through enforcement. That day is over. We are now. I. My whole goal is to make. Make things transparent, you know, from the regulatory aspect and give people a firm foundation upon which to innovate and to come out with new products and so that they know what they're doing.
- [47:31]
A
David, this is not an SEC that's going to say no.
- [47:34]
B
Wow.
- [47:35]
A
Yeah.
- [47:35]
B
That is. This is truly a overtone window being pushed. It's one thing for them to, like, get our. Get their boots off of our neck, but just to give not a green light, but like a keep going. Like, wordage to tokenize stocks is huge. Andrew, like, made a very good point. Like, these things are workarounds.
- [47:53]
A
Yeah, they are.
- [47:53]
B
I think, you know, one of the reasons why I'm in crypto is, like, some of the things that we do, the new things that we do in crypto are all kind of slightly illegal. And that's what makes it exciting.
- [48:02]
A
They're workarounds. Okay?
- [48:04]
B
They're work around. You know, we're great. It's all gray areas. All it questions a lot of the rules that we have in how we operate in the world. And now that we have workarounds, we have alternatives. And. And I see Paul Atkins being like, you know what? Why are the old ways, the ways to do it? Let's do it in the news? And I am a huge fan of that.
- [48:26]
A
So am I? We got more bullish stuff after the break. Tom Lee. I call him David the Wall Street Whisperer. He set up a microstrategy for Eth and he's calling ETH the next bitcoin on cnbc. We'll talk about that. Also, Coinbase tucks in an acquisition and is your crypto coworker secretly working for North Korea? My God, that sounds like a buzzfeed headline. We'll talk about all that and more. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including frax. This is a decentralized centralized bank. This is a stablecoin, some of the best yield in Defi. Imagine if Circle, Athena and Maker had a baby. That's frax. Let's go hear from her now.
- [49:00]
B
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- [50:50]
A
All right. I think this is the most bullish thing to happen to Ethereum this year. And we've had a number of bullish things, but this tops them all. This is Tom Lee. He is starting a ETH treasury company. He's going on cnbc. He's saying things like, eth is the next bitcoin, all right? And he's basically pulling the microstrategy play. So he's taking a publicly traded bitcoin mining company. It's called Bitmine, and He's announcing a 250 million private placement to buy ETH. So he's basically taking the shell of an entity. They're stopping the bitcoin mining. And he's announcing a Treasury strategy. It's very similar to. We just talked about Joseph Lubin, what he's doing with sbet. Different business, but similar strategy. The raise is backed by major crypto traditional finance investors. You know, you got your Pantera, you got your Galaxy, you got your Founders Fund, you got your Kraken. But the difference between this and. I think SBET and Lubin is almost like the difference between what we were talking about, Base and Robinhood. All right, so, like, Coinbase is a crypto native company. Joseph Lubin, he's crypto native. Of course he's gonna do eth. Of course he's. Is it a surprise that he's bullish on ETH and wants to stack more in a public entity? Tom Lee is not one of us, okay? He is from traditional finance. He is a Wall street guy.
- [52:09]
B
He's one of them.
- [52:10]
A
He's one of them. Look at him. He wears a suit, okay? Look at him. So he is now starting this treasury fund. It's the first of its kind for ether the asset. And I think he is like a. He's a tradfi Kol David. And he's got a. The other thing is he's got a history of success. He's on CNBC almost every. All the time, every week. And he started talking about bitcoin in July of 2017. And do you remember him during the bull run of 2017. That whole era of crypto, he was like the only guy on CNBC saying things like at the time what bitcoin was trading in the the thousands. He was saying that bitcoin could cannibalize gold and it could be worth as much as 55,000. And in 2017, that was batshit crazy.
- [52:58]
B
That was a 55X.
- [53:00]
A
Yes, that was a 55X and it was crazy. And he was saying it to Tradfi and CNBC and they'd be like, okay, Tom, whatever, but tell us about stocks. All right, so he's got that history almost ten years back of, of saying, hey, the bitcoin. You remember when I made those calls when bitcoin was trading in the thousands and now it's a hundred thousand. Now he's like doing it again. I'm doing it again, except I'm going to like do this in a treasury fund and ETH is going there as well. And you know what, we should just play a clip. Let me, let me tell you. Like his pitch, it's different than what our pitch would be for Ether, the assets.
- [53:35]
B
Let me guess, it's for tradfi.
- [53:37]
A
He calls stablecoins the OpenAI for crypto and Ethereum. Anyway, this is what he says. This is how he pitches it.
- [53:44]
D
Underneath the stablecoin industry is Ethereum. That is really like the backbone and architecture of stablecoins. So it's important to create a project that essentially accumulates Ethereum to essentially protect and have some influence on the network. So that's why we're creating this treasury vehicle to buy Ethereum. The more Ethereum that's accumulated, the more secure the network is. And I think it's also sort of the architecture that future banks will have. You know, when Goldman issues a stablecoin and JP Morgan doing it on Ethereum as a layer one blockchain, they're going to want to secure it by staking Ethereum. So we're trying to get in front of that by creating a trade.
- [54:25]
A
That's the pitch. You guys are already bullish on stablecoins, right? Most of the stable coins are issued on Ethereum. Okay. Most of the banks will issue stablecoins. Those banks will want to have a stake in the network and buy eth. And I'm just front running that.
- [54:39]
B
That's his entire pitch with Robinhood and Coinbase. Like, like both of Robinhood's at all time highs, Coinbase is very close to all time highs. And those are the two big crypto companies as it relates to Tradfi. And you have Robinhood making a chain issuing tokenized stocks. People are very stoked about stablecoins Circles through the roof. Where is all of circles? USDC is on Ethereum and so like previously your and my like bull case would for ETH would be like uncensorable money, uncensorable defi. All that kind of stuff.
- [55:11]
A
Yeah, he doesn't say any of those things.
- [55:14]
B
The most pragmatic, the most effective bull case for ETH that I, I'm seeing like evolve is just like ETH is where stablecoins are. ETH is where asset tokenization is. ETH is where all the institutions are making layer twos on. It's just the like there's been like a, an effort to try and have this like rigorous eat value capture conversation from the John Charbonneaus and all those. And I'm, I'm like intellectually interested in those conversations. But then there's just the ETH is just proximate to the bajillions of stablecoins and to like the Robin Hood chain and the Coinbase chain and to all the other like players that are doing there. And it's just eth. It's just that's the eth, it's the institutional asset. And I see like a growing amount of energy.
- [55:54]
A
Oh yeah, it's very left and right of the curve which makes sense. It's not an over complicated narrative. And the stock price is doing pretty well on this as you might guess. BMNR is the ticker. It jumped about 1000% on the back of this news, so doing kind of well on that. Also sharplink, of course, which is Joseph Lubin's Treasury. Every week they're doing kind of the MicroStrategy project.
- [56:21]
B
38% yesterday.
- [56:23]
A
Did it really? Oh that's.
- [56:24]
B
Yeah, it went up big. I was like, I guess I didn't see this announcement but I guess when you announced that you're going to buy 200,000 more eth, you go up 35%.
- [56:32]
A
Well also it also helps when the ETH price jumps, you know, 7% and then you get an amplifier effect on top of that. So they're just buying every week.
- [56:41]
B
We have just been completely Stockholm syndrome as the ETH price movements. We are like ETH went up like 7%. We're at $2,600 now. Like, like hang on, we're gonna go up like 300 in a day and we're gonna remember what a true pump is. Like we had it not too long ago but we like, we forget what frothiness can look like in eth price.
- [57:02]
A
Oh, I know. I mean, I made this comment. There's an entire generation lost in crypto who's never felt an eth like an actual ETH bull market. And that's why none of them believe that it's happening. And because the last four years, right from 2022 to now, if you entered crypto, it's not been great.
- [57:19]
B
Eth goes down is what eth does. Yeah. E still on the tradfi side of things, the design app Figma it has filed to go public. This wouldn't otherwise be news, but they are doing so with $70 million of Bitcoin on the balance sheet. Just moving the Overton window of bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset for public companies. So that's pretty cool.
- [57:38]
A
I surprised people, right? It's like they're going public and oh, we got 70 million on the balance sheet in bitcoin. Kind of nice.
- [57:43]
B
Oh, yeah, by the way, we own a ton of bitcoin. And then on crypto native news, Coinbase has acquired their fourth company in 2025. Liqu Liquify is just a token management management platform for early stage, like tokenization process. So if you need, if you're going to issue a token and you need compliance, you need token ownership, tracking, vesting, distribution, all that kind of stuff, it's just a compliance platform for token creation. Uniswap foundation uses it, Op Labs uses it, Athena Zora, they use it. And now that's integrated into Coinbase. So Coinbase is expanding their, their suite of offerings.
- [58:18]
A
And lastly, this is Zach XBT saying there might be as many as 900 workers in crypto, like maybe some of your co workers, bankless listeners that aren't who they say they are, that are actually working for North Korea and they might do something nefarious with your code base, steal your assets, who knows? And this is. These workers have somehow gotten through the interview process.
- [58:39]
B
Yeah. Between 345 to 920 possible jobs are actually done by North Koreans. Zach alleges that crypto firms have paid at least $16.5 million in salaries to North Korean IT workers since the start of the year. That's why monthly payroll of 2.75 million. Is it really an exploit if you're just working a job?
- [59:00]
A
If they're doing good work, they're just working.
- [59:03]
B
They haven't gotten fired. Is that, is that an exploit? I mean, they're definitely looking for exploits. They're definitely looking for exploits, but it seems like they might also just be clocking in to work every day.
- [59:14]
A
I don't know, man. But you know how we always talk about crypto is front running the opportunity. It's front running things in general. Okay. I think like, this type of thing is starting to happen with AI companies. Do you hear about this? This Indian worker who's like working for like four or five different firms the same time?
- [59:31]
B
Why was he doing that? Just to collect salaries, I assume.
- [59:35]
A
So probably. I don't know that it was as nefarious as what we might expect from the North Korean regime, but yeah, that kind of thing. We're just front running things. I mean, this is going to happen all the time. I mean. Yeah. Do you really know who you're working with if you haven't met them in person? We've met, yeah.
- [59:53]
B
I haven't seen you in a while. You've been off the radar.
- [59:58]
A
Am I still me?
- [60:00]
B
I feel like we need to do a yearly check in. You know, technology's adapting really quickly.
- [60:03]
A
Yeah, yeah. Some proof of humanity is required. I'll just look, man, I'll just do Sam Altman's worldcoin thing. I'll get my eyes encoded and we can, you know, we can work from there. All right. One thing I did want to talk to you about is I do think you should go check out this Vitalik Buterin keynote that he gave at EthCC, David. So I know you missed it, but he had this great line in here which is talking about the purpose of decentralization. He says, look, the purpose of decentralization is to make users free. And it really brought me back to like, man, he's really good on that subject. He's fantastic on talking about the why we're here type of subject. And he basically said this, he put up this meme. He's like first in the first era of crypto. So we're decentralized because we have the top decentralized Kols as advisor. Right? We're decentralized because others believe we're decentralized. And then the next stage is we're decentralized because we use decentralized tech. You know, we have ZK tech and we have cryptography and we're a layer, whatever, and that makes us decentralized. All right? And that's kind of the next level. But now crypto really needs to move to this third level, which is we're decentralized because we make our users free. We have actual like property rights guarantees that if the things disappear, users still have the ability to access their assets. Users have still have the ability to move assets from one place to another without any third party interference. Right. And he's like, this is the thing that crypto really needs to focus on now. It's kind of a message to like, hey, the decentralized theater. Kind of like that got us here, but there's still a lot of that. Now let's actually do the thing crypto was meant to do, which is make our users free, sovereign individuals of the Internet. And I think sometimes we're talking about, at least this year for me, there's a lot of exciting things going on with stablecoins and real world assets and all of these things that are exciting. I every once in a while, want to get back to the why we're here, like, why we're going bankless, what this is all about, and what the unique thing that crypto is bringing to the world. No one better to talk about that than Vitalik.
- [62:06]
B
So.
- [62:07]
A
So I guess I'm just. I'm shilling this. This episode. Maybe we'll put a little clip from. Yeah, I'm sure I'm shilling the talk. Maybe we'll put a clip from Vitalik in the talk in the moment of Zed, but you got to check this out.
- [62:18]
B
Yeah. The link to the talk will also be in the show notes, so y' all can go watch it right now.
- [62:22]
A
There you go. You all know that crypto is risky. 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. So, basically, level one, we're decentralized because we have the top decentralization kols as advisors. Level two, we're decentralized because we use decentralized tech. Level three, we're decentralized because we make our users free. So if you're building something, the first question to ask is, are you making your users free? It.