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Bankless
ROLLUP: Silver Parabolic | Aave Civil War | Uniswap Unifies | New CFTC Chair | Bitcoin vs. Quantum
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A
Foreign.
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B
Welcome to Bankless. It's the first Friday of 2026 and on this Friday we are bringing in Anthony Susano to substitute for Ryan, who got stuck in a little bit of a snowstorm. So we're bringing in our favorite substitute teacher to go through the weekly news in Crypto with us. Anthony, welcome to the show.
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A
Thanks, David. It's good to be here again and Happy New Year. And it's funny that you mentioned that Ryan got stuck in a snowstorm when it's like really hot here where I am in Australia. So it's like snow. Why is it. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Right, right, right.
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B
Yeah. We're in the middle of winter up here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There are some evergreen subjects that are, we're going to talk about, Anthony. We're going to talk about the first, the silver, gold and S&P 500 breaking all time highs because that all happened in the last seven days. And then we're going to go back and touch on AAVE in the Civil War because while that was kind of like two weeks ago, there was still some updates. And I also want to get your takes on it as well. Meanwhile, while AAVE is diverging, UNISWAP is converging. So there's a lot more alignment in the UNISWAP ecosystem. We're going to talk about that news as well as Michael Selig, the new CFTC chairman that just got named, who is a very big pro crypto CFTC chairman previously from the sec. We're going to talk about that. And then also we're going to talk about Quantum's threat because that's what I know you, I know you know about Quantum and otherwise focus on chain security. So I want to get your takes on, on all of these subjects and more. But before we get into all of that, it's the 1st of January. So what's your take on 2025 as a whole? And then also I want to pick your brain about what you're excited for, what you're looking forward to, where you think signal is coming down the pike this year in 2026. So let's start with 2025. What do you, what do you think about 2025?
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A
Yeah, I think 2025 was a kind of, you know, obviously volatile year in the markets in particular. But I think it was like a, a kind of maturation year for crypto, like for a long time. Now I remember like a lot of people in the ecosystem have wanted like a cleansing of crypto, like get rid of the scams, get rid of the Griffs. You know, all these tokens are worth so much when they shouldn't be worth as much as they are because they're fundamentally worthless. And I'm not talking about, you know, people can argue about what. What token should be worth what, but I'm talking about, like, these tokens that are part of projects that are. That are dead. So everyone wanted this cleanse, and it felt like we got that cleanse to an extent, I think, in 2025. And I think that was from the fact that, like, crypto is no longer, like, this niche thing. Right? When you have the President of the United States talking about it like, every other day, crypto is not, like a niche thing anymore. And then we have all these tradfi institutions coming in, and they're kind of like. I mean, they're coming in a different way. Some of them want to be supportive and additive. Some of them want to just obviously control everything and be extractive. But they're coming in in a really big way. They're getting excited about things like stablecoins. We've kind of gone mainstream on the tech side, I think, you know, obviously on the asset side and the market side. Everyone already knows about bitcoin. Bitcoin. But when it comes to, like, the tech side of things, I think we've gone a lot more mainstream now. And I think that it was. Was a funny thing watching people's reactions to that, because I think a lot of crypto natives didn't like that because they felt like, well, you know, are all the gains gone now? Because we're not early anymore? Like, where's the excitement? Like, where's the. The kind of fun stuff? Like, is it just going to be boring stuff like stablecoins and, like, low risk defi. You know, people gave Vitalik crap about it for talking about it because they're like, oh, this is. This is. Is boring. You know, we came to crypto because we want the fun, exciting stuff. But, you know, I think that really is kind of, I guess, like, the main theme of 2025 to me is that graduating and coming into, like, the real world and not just being a, you know, a teenager anymore. Like, crypto kind of went from being a teenager to, like, an adult now. And I think some people get left behind in that transition because they just really don't vibe with that kind of world anymore. They want it to be early. They want to be part of something that feels underground. And, yeah, I can't, like, say that crypto is underground anymore.
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B
I think maybe the, what you're saying, the word that is coming to mind for me is culling. 2025 was a year of calling where we kind of just purged exactly what you said. The, the, the DNA of crypto is like, congratulations, you found crypto, you are early. And that is just no LONGER True in 2025 and 2026. And that is so much of what this industry has stood upon is like, you're early, you're actually in the. You found, you found this weird corner of the Internet that's going to take over the world, but in 2025 and stablecoins, that is actually happening. And so much of what people came here for and some of the DNA that many projects and evaluations of tokens have stood upon is actually just fundamentally different now. And there is going to be a zeitgeist change, a cultural change for what it means to be in crypto moving forward, because we're kind of now entering the middle years of what it means to be in crypto. I think, I think this is what you're saying and what I definitely agree with.
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A
Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I think on that as well, like, if we look at, you know, just the market side of things, which is what people pay attention to, they use it for all sorts of signal. I think the big reason why a lot of these other tokens are doing so poorly is because the institutions, you know, the TRADFI folks, they're not really interested in this stuff, right? They've dipped their toes in with BTC and ETH and they're kind of, you know, building on those, on Ethereum, obviously. But like everything else, from what I've seen, they don't seem very interested in. And I think when you have like, no bidders just coming from retail and then the institutional side isn't filling the bid either for these tokens. That's why they're, they're kind of where they are. And now I think maybe in 2025 we went too far towards like one side where there are a lot of good tokens that got caught up in this as well. And, and you know, I look at them and I'm not going to mention any for obvious reasons, but I look at some of them and I'm like, you know what? This is actually undervalued now. Like, I don't think that this should be as low as it is, but then I look at other things and I'm like, wow, this thing is still worth X amount. Like, why, like, who's buying this stuff. So I think that also jaded a lot of crypto natives in that they were hoping for quote unquote alt season, right? Like where it always happens after bitcoin runs up. You know, the alts go crazy as, as they're known to do. That just didn't happen this time. And obviously we had the meme coin stuff which was I guess like a small pocket. It reminded me more of, of maybe like defi tokens when they kind of happened in 2020 rather than like a huge new thing that was bringing in tons of new capital. If anything, it actually extracted most of the degen capital that was left. And now we're left with the fact that, okay, well if the institutions aren't buying these things and the crypto natives don't want to buy them because they know a lot of them are just not, you know, not worth much and there wasn't any old season, everyone's like, ah, what's happening? So I think that's why maybe if you go on crypto Twitter you see a lot of people being depressed or sad about this and kind of burning out because you know what they came into crypto for isn't what's happening anymore. And as you said, like it's not early anymore. So that stuff is probably not going to happen going forward.
- [06:36]
B
Yeah, it feels like crypto is going through, yeah, like I said, like a calling. It's going through a pretty tough time in 2025 and, and I think people are kind of gearing up for a little bit of continuation in that in 2026. Part of that is what we're going to talk about today. The attention is elsewhere. So three things have hit all time highs, none of which are crypto. Silver, gold and The S&P 500 silver has really been out in December. At the end of this year, it's really just gone parabolic. It's gone up 150 to 160% in 2025. And most of that has really come in December, November and December where that, this is what the, the chart I'm showing on screen, which is the silver chart is going from $36 an ounce to $71 an ounce. And these are one month long candles. So that's November and December of this year. And why is this happening? It's being squeezed from two different sides. It's being used as, you know, the silver to the gold, the monetary inflation hedge demand because gold has been on a tear. Silver's catching up a little bit, but it's also just increasingly used in solar solar arrays, electronic FES and just electronics in generally. So there's two sources of demand there. Alongside silver, gold also hit its own new all time high above $4,500 an ounce. And again gold has been a fantastic asset to hold this year. Yearly gains are 60 to 65%. And then the S P 500 the the normal stock market has hit $6,909. That's a new all time high for the S P 900500 year to date. Gains of 17 to 18 in 2025. The third straight year of double digit returns after the the 2022 drawdown which we were all kind of brought up in. And so AI gold bringing precious metals. Turns out the alt season is in precious metals. All of this is outside of the crypto arena. So while crypto kind of goes through its grow growing pains it's like it's, it's maturing and it's losing a lot of the fun of being a kid now it has to be an adult and it has to be a little bit more responsible than it ever was before. And some of it is losing some of his DNA at the same time. Attention is just in other markets and crypto is just not the first place where a wild west risk on investor goes to get returns.
- [08:54]
A
Yeah. And what I find funny about that in particular with gold is that you know bitcoiners would make fun of gold bugs for, for. Right. Because gold was actually doing nothing for a long time. It was pretty much sideways for I think over 10 years. If you look at its kind of last all time high to where it broke its all time high. Like I think it was like 2010 to somewhere in the 2000s. It just sat and kind of went sideways. So that wasn't exciting. But then obviously you had crypto which was going nuts every few years and just and posting these enormous returns which, which is kind of a funny contrast now where it's kind of flipped where crypto is going sideways not doing much but you know gold has gone ridiculous like and looks like a crypto chart and same with, same with silver. But I think you hit hit it on the head with regards to like demand as well. Like because I think people don't realize especially when it comes to like other precious metals other than gold is that a lot of them are actually used in industry. You know gold is to an extent but you could say the vast majority of gold's value is. Is speculative. Right. It's, it's kind of a store of value thing there. But with silver and other kind of precious metals, they are definitely used very heavily and as you said, because they use within kind of computing parts and AI has just inflated the cost of all of that, that's just going to feed down to the bare metal, like for. For lack of a better term. Right, literal bare metal. So I think there are also consequences of that too, where obviously hardware is just getting expensive across the board, and if the, the components to make that hardware are getting expensive, then that's just going to continue that trend in 2026. So I think at some point something will have to give where it's like, well, who's buying this stuff? Like, someone's going to be buying it in order for it to all kind of like flow down. And, you know, people have been screaming about the AI bubble bursting, all these sorts of stuff. Like, I think at some point, yeah, there'll be some kind of crash and like, just like there is in any market. But, yeah, I mean, I don't have a good read on precious metals. It's not something that I followed. But when it comes to crypto, I think it's good for us to maybe be quiet for a little while, build actual kind of products and services that people want to use and, and mature as an industry. Because I don't think what we have been previously over the last 10, 15 years is, is sustainable at all. Because it was just based on speculation only, really, it wasn't based on, you know, fundamentals. And I hope, my Hope is in 2026 we can see more of this kind of shift towards fundamentals.
- [11:06]
B
Yeah, certainly when the crypto industry collectively kind of goes through a painful period, goes through. Go through a culling of the herd, to me, I'm like, okay, yeah, I feel bad with everyone else, but I know that there's a light at the end of the tunnel that once we go through this period, you know, people drop out and people just leave and go elsewhere. Eventually that turns into the fruits for everyone who stays. And so kind of ultimately, it's just a waiting game. It's like, yeah, you have to be a little bit masochistic. You have to accept the pain. It hurts. And then one day you are a lot more wealthy because you held on while the industry grew and fundamentals were reoriented and reprioritized. And that's how we grow healthier as an industry. We have seen this cycle before, quite literally every time. There is actually a true cycle in crypto. Let's get into the crypto prices starting with Bitcoin, 88,500 on the week. We are up 3, excuse me, we are up 2% on the week for Bitcoin and then Ether. Pretty similar story. We are at $3,000, flirting with $3,000 right now, up 3.5% on the week for Ether. Matthew Sigel, who is, he's one of the analysts over at Vaneck, he tweeted out Bitcoin long term holders have flipped into net accumulators, which is something that we definitely did not see over the last year. In 2025, one of the big indicators that people like to look at is Bitcoin long term holders, are they selling or are they holding? And over 2025 long term Bitcoin holders were selling. They were putting supply of bitcoin into the market. One of the reasons why bitcoin didn't really push past its all time highs into the 130, 140 territory. So people decide to sell as bitcoin holders. But this has flipped as of recent times. Long term bitcoin holders are no longer selling, which is an indication of what appetite is and if there are new supply going into the market. So it's a very bullish setup, It's a very bullish signal to say that people are not selling Bitcoin. And then in the world of Ether there is a story with the Dats. This is sharply. Sharplink is now earning 500 ETH per week just from Ethereum staking. I don't know what percentage that is off the top of my head. Maybe you do, but it's another indication of just like oh, the Ethereum dats, for as much as there is a hangover nonetheless they were successful in soaking up supply. And whatever percentage of supply they soaked up will be a function of how much future supply issuance they will also soak up. And that's what we're seeing here from Sharplink, sharply just reserving 500 ether a week off of the secondary market for Ether. What's your commentary here Sazle?
- [13:38]
A
Yeah, I think it's like if you look at the market kind of action and you showed that chart about like kind of long term selling and stuff like that. I think that was definitely what we saw across BTC and Ethan 2025 where you had these obviously with ETH, you had the DATs come online and I think a lot of early ETH investors, and I'm talking really early investors like maybe potentially close to the ICO or at the ico they probably were like well, I'm already up like a million percent, right. Like, and it feels like the ecosystem's maturing and it feels like maybe now's the time to kind of cash out. Right? Like maybe now's the time to actually when there's so much kind of like as you can call it, like liquidity, right? There's so much liquidity coming into the system because of the dats. I think they took advantage of that. I think the same was true for BTC because of the ETF liquidity. And also obviously Sailor was still buying as well and other kind of BTC DATs. So I think a lot of them did that, but then a lot of them would have also been selling and then rebuying into the, in the ETFs because it's more tax advantage way. That's why that these kind of on chain analytics actually have weaknesses as well. Like it's not just an exact science. There are, there are lots of kind of nuances here with this. But, but from what I've seen anecdotally myself and what I've, and what you can see in the market as well, it certainly does feel like a lot of these long term kind of holders, these big whales, were cashing out there. Now, in terms of like what this looks like going forward, I think we did clear most of that in 2025, if not potentially all of that. I think that ended with the 1010 crash, which obviously like reset a lot of the market and we've had to recover out of that. I think that's why we had like a pretty poor end to 2025. But I think we're mostly past that now. And I think if you look at the broader kind of investing world, pretty much like every other asset class except crypto has performed right, like, and not just performed, but like gone into what you could call bubble territory where they've just gone parabolic. And when people and smarter investors and kind of like bigger investors see that, you don't really want to be in that when it's doing that, like if you're, if you're in it already, you're going to start taking profits out of that because a parabola is by very nature not sustainable. So if you're noticing that and you're, you're thinking, okay, well it's time to take chips off the table. But you don't want to sit in cash because you expect rates to start going down, you know, next year or continue going down. So maybe you look at crypto, you know, maybe you Say, okay, well, crypto hasn't done much, you know, it's still growing though. Like Ethan BTC have these really good, you know, drivers of, of, of demand from ETFs, from, from DATs, things like that, and in particular Ethereum. There's so much happening there. Like you can make an investment case based off anything you want really, like not just stablecoins but a bunch of other things. So I think you might see a rotation back there. And it's funny because when I say every asset class, I do mean like everything, even things that people don't consider to be asset classes, like trading cards for example, have just gone nuts. Like Labu Boos, you know, stuff like that. Right. Have just gone, just gone crazy. So, so crypto really is that, that one that hasn't. And that's actually really advantageous for crypto going forward because, you know, if everything else decides to slow down a bit, then these investors are going to be like, well, where can we go next? Like, where can we rotate into next? And I do think a lot of that capital is, is definitely going to look at crypto and be like, that's attractive. You know, it's attractive at these valuations because there's nothing in a bubble, it's not in a parabola. Like it's, it's been quiet for a while. So let's kind of accumulate now.
- [16:51]
B
Yeah, yeah, let's get into some crypto native topics. I think the big one that has been ongoing is the AAVE civil war, especially culminating in Stani, the founder of AAVE, buying 84,000 A tokens. That's not $84,000. 84,000 A tokens, which are priced at something like $110 a piece. And there has been, this has been an ongoing topic. We've talked about this a few times on the roll just because it's continues to go. But let me just kind of COVID through the details since I have you, Anthony. I'll go start from the beginning and we'll go up to the current moment. So this all started in December 4th where AAVE Labs, the centralized entity that, that works around the AAVE protocol, announced an integration with CAL Swap on the AAVE front end interface. The stated goal was better swap pricing and MEV protection on the AAVE front end. But importantly, the fees earned by AAVE for this swapping feature was swapped from the DAO to the A Labs entity. That was really the trigger that really kicked off this entire cascading set of events. Mark Zeller, the pseudo accepted leader of the AAVE Dao characterized this as a stealth privatization of AAVE. Since roughly $10 million per year that would have gone to the DAO, it was now being sent to AAVE Labs through the Swap front end swap feature. A Labs led by Stani said that the front end revenue was not something that the DAO was inherently titled to. The front end is owned and operated by AAVE Labs. So therefore previous Cal Swap fees were simply donated, voluntarily donated from labs to the DAO in the past. So that's kind of where the lines are being drawn. AAVE Labs is this private company that builds products and charges for services and the dao owns the protocol but not necessarily the website or front end operations. This has created a pretty big division in the AAVE community. And a proposal surfaced from a individual in the AAVE forums called Tulip King that demanded pretty aggressive actions including seizing AAVE ip, the code and the brand, forcing AAVE Labs to become a DAO owned subsidiary, and also clawing back past revenue earned by using the AAVE brand from AAVE Labs. That proposal did not go through because it was stated to be non compliant with governance, but nonetheless kind of made waves in the discourse surrounding the topic. And then a separate proposal came from Ernesto, a former former AAVE Labs CTO now associated with BGD Labs. The proposal asked for moving the trademarks, domains and social accounts to the dao. The rationale was that if the Dao pays for development and marketing, the DAO should control the brand and key distribution assets like domains and socials. There was a snapshot vote put to a vote over this process that was opened on December 23, which notably is two days before Christmas, that was aligning with the general idea of giving AAVE holders explicit control over brand related assets, trademarks, domains, social and naming rights. Ernesto publicly objected to the timing and the process of this. He said the vote was pushed while discussion was still active and he urged people to abstain. Mark Zeller agreed with the criticism that the vote was rushed during the holidays intentionally to kind of dissuade voting participation. Nonetheless, a significant amount of AAVE showed up to vote. Ultimately there was about a million a tokens who voted no, about 55% and about 750,000 AAVE tokens that voted to abstain, about 41%. Stani voted no. Mark Zeller and the Dow side mostly voted to abstain. And basically the implication here is that AAVE Labs will retain control of the relevant brand and distribution assets under the status quo because the proposal failed. Interestingly, to note, the top three voters controlled 58% of the total voting power. The largest voter, probably stunning, I'm guessing, was 27% and the second largest was 18. And so this is kind of where things have laid off, has laid out as this all happened. The AAVE token really sold off in the market. It was down 20% on the week with an additional drop happening in the vote window. And that this is kind of where things have shaken out. Sonny, last, lastly, last thing, Sonny publicly said that the disagreement is a part of decentralized governance and he intends to make economic alignment between AAVE Labs and token holders clear going forwards. And he stated that a recent $15 million purchase of a that Stani made on the market was not used to vote on that proposal. So that's kind of the mess of everything going on. Sassle, when you were watching all of this drama unfold, what did you. What was your first thoughts or impressions? Impressions or takeaways?
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A
Yeah, I mean this has kind of been a tension, I think within the DeFi protocols for quite a while now in particular where yeah, there's. They've got this kind of Labs entity which is a centralized entity and it basically has developed everything up until that point. And then you have this DAO that really doesn't really have that much power over. Over things. Right. Some projects will say, well, everything belongs to the dao so we're just going to give it to the dao, like some of the, the, the labs kind of teams and then dissolve the foundation or dissolve labs or whatever it is. Some will spin it off into different entities and give some kind of control to the dao. But yeah, I mean we saw this tension with Uniswap as well for a while, which has kind of been funny to see because that's done a 180 and I think we're going to discuss that as well. They've done a 180 on that. But yeah, I think that if these things are to succeed long term and be sustainable and not be capturable to an extent and kind of. And kind of fend off like not just. See this is the thing about capture is that like if it's ave Lab's doing it, then yeah, okay, it's relatively transparent. You can probably rely on them to have the best interest of AAVE at heart and not want to kill anything. Maybe they just want to make money for themselves. But that's, you know, that's not too bad considering that what could happen if a hostile takeover was done by a competing protocol or by someone who just wanted to destroy Abe for whatever reason. Like, then it starts to get really, really kind of messy with. With the DAO model as well, where it's like, okay, if the Dow owns everything, then how do we prevent that from happening? How do we prevent that from. From kind of killing the protocol and aligning all these incentives? As you mentioned there, Steiny wanted to align the economic incentives here. So I think maybe the cleanest way to do it is really to give everything to the dao. Because, like, if you're talking about something that's supposed to last, like, decades, you know, if that's what your kind of aim is, you can't have some centralized entity just like, bolted on and kind of leeching off, right? Like where it's kind of like a cancer, where it keeps leaching off and then eventually it keeps growing and growing and growing and kind of like kills the host sort of thing. Because that's what we see in the. In the kind of real world where these centralized entities, if they don't, you know, a lot of centralized entities get bought up by private equity firms. And these private equity firms comes along and they just. They're a cancer. They just suck everything out. And then that business goes under because it's just like they're done with it, right? They move on to the next thing. So that could happen with. Within crypto protocols as well. Whereas with a dao, you have more distribution of power. You have more kind of, I guess, like, distribution of. Of of how many people are involved with this thing. And it's not necessarily centralized. There are people that have more power than others. But it could potentially lead to better outcomes than the way it's currently structured, and fair outcomes, too, because people want to feel like they're actually, you know, especially token holders. They want to feel like they're actually getting value out of it, and they want to feel like their investment's going to go up too. Uh, and I think that it's a nice way to kind of protect against that. But, yeah, it's. It's kind of funny seeing this play out with aave, because it's like, I would say the biggest defi protocol in terms of just like, general awareness as well. Because if they can't fend off against these sorts of stuff and they can't work this out, then the smaller ones, like, it's kind of like, okay, well how are the small ones going to do it then? Like, so I think that's another signal that gets sent to. To the market is that like, if AAVE can't do it, then what's the chance these other smaller ones can? So I think that if AAVER can work it out and they can kind of come to a nice conclusion there. Same with Uniswap, obviously. Aaver Uniswap probably be the, the two heaviest hitters there. If they can kind of make something that works, that's really positive for all of DeFi. Especially in this, I guess new era where making it so that tokens can share in the, the revenue and the profits of the protocols is actually not going to get you arrested now because we have a, a different government in the U.S. right. So I think that was a, a big thing as well. That plays into all of that.
- [24:52]
B
Yeah, the, the reason why this is happening to AAVE and Uniswap is because of how simply old AAVE and Uniswap are. They just come from such a long history like at Uniswap, the entity Uniswap was made in 2019. AAVE, I think even earlier than that. And that was actually a pre, pre Gensler era. That was who was the SEC commissioner before that, forgetting, forgetting his name. But it was similarly not as welcoming to having tokens directly capture value. And so the foundation model was established even before Gary Gensler to really protect around this. And I don't really think the industry at the time really considered or knew or had the foresight to understand that creating two differently owned entities, one owned by a token and one owned by equity shareholders, would produce the long term consequences that we're dealing with today. And I think, you know, newer foundations, for example Morpho, the fact that it's an A competitor, completely unrelated, but just there just happens to be only one asset with Morpho. And I know Kane Warwick from Infinix and also Synthetics, he also made synthetics, also did this with the same strategy. That's actually just one asset. There was never any equity around synthetics. And same thing with Infinix. And that just happened that he's got a little bit lucky. Kane's a little bit more risk. He's into. Kane's into risk, let's say that. And so the nature of how these things came to be developed back in the 2018-2021 eras really matters. And I don't really expect this to be as relevant from, for a newer protocol launching like in the last year, because they just don't have the same baggage. The AAVE labs and the AAVE DAO has had years and years and years of buildup of team members and sophistication and process, and they've just ultimately come to be very divergent, even though they are both growing towards the same outcome of growing the AAVE protocol. There's just such different organizations. Like there are. There are org charts, respective org charts for, for each of those. Not for the dao, but it has its own process. And so I think this is like a unique example just to talk about these two projects the most. And so I think this is an important conversation for the industry to really learn about how do we have complete investor protections and investor rights so that there is only one asset to own and hopefully it's the token. But nonetheless, I kind of expect this to be largely constrained in industry impact to really just these two protocols and the other ones that have foundation versus equity misalignments. I don't really expect this to be. I expect this problem to be solved in real time because we are all watching this as an industry.
- [27:29]
A
Yeah, yeah. I don't think it's a, it's an insurmountable problem. I do think for newer teams, what they have to be careful about is not going straight down. I think that that actually leads to worse outcomes because then if you go straight down, you have way too many cooks in the kitchen during the earliest phase of the protocol. And they expect to get paid. Right. And they expect to. For the token to go up. So I think, because like you can have a DAO without a token, but normally they go kind of hand in hand. And if you do a token too early, I think that's pretty, pretty bad for some, some, some projects. So I think, yeah, you can start off quite centralized and that's what this safe harbor things about in the US I know the SEC wants to do this where essentially you can have like safe harbor for like three years. You can remain centralized, build out your thing, and then you decentralize it over time, I think that's the better model because, yeah, if you go straight dao, from what I've seen in the past, it's. It doesn't. Doesn't do very well.
- [28:19]
B
Yeah, I think DAOs need to decentralize as necessity. You don't make a DAO for making a dao's sake.
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A
Yep, Yep.
- [28:25]
B
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 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. 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 saying he's going aggressively risk off and sold the majority of his book from crypto into cash. This is when eth was 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, science. 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 portfolio, you 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. All right, so with AAVE diversion we have Uniswap converging. So we'll move into the Uniswap part of this conversation which is actually going in contrast, very smoothly. So there was a vote not terribly long ago. What day did this happen? This happened on December 28. The unification proposal out of the Uniswap Labs and Foundation entities was voted on and passed by all of the UNI token holders. So now the foundation is going to absorb the dao. Excuse me, the foundation is going to absorb Labs effectively. Labs is going to be a service provider to the DAO and the economic value of Labs is going to be something that the DAO has governance and control over. So the DAO pays Uniswap Labs for their services to The Uniswap protocol now and this vote went forward on the 28th. Importantly, the Uniswap web app, mobile wallet and browser extension, which are all products made by Uniswap Labs now have all of their front end fees. The fees that they are charged to swap are gone. There are no front end fees or fees on positive slippage or any other app level fees in the Uniswap ecosystem. What that is saying is that the Labs is no longer taking a cut of the products they have made, which makes Uniswap a better product. I think this is giving Uniswap, if I'm reading between the lines here, giving the Uniswap the green lights like yo, guys turn on the protocol fees. Like the, the higher level fees are being turned off. That gives you guys the margins to turn on the protocol fees. So I think this is setting up the Uni token to turn on the fees of the fee switch and then capture value for the token holders. Anthony, were you following the story?
- [31:33]
A
Yeah, I was. I think as you said, like it's the right way to do things. I think people are very happy with this after obviously years worth of back and forth with, with the kind of the Labs and Uniswap kind of core team there. But I think as we were discussing before, that was due to a very hostile sec. I mean they literally went after Uniswap like themselves. Right. So Uniswap Labs and, and I think Hayden himself, the founder there. So I think this is, there has been a long time coming and I think that obviously now is the right, is the correct time to be doing this because there's very little risk of anything happening to you from like the law side of things. But also at the same time it is as you mentioned before, better for investors and better for investor protections and better for everyone involved in the ecosystem that there isn't this kind of, I guess, dislocation of incentives where the Labs entity has one incentives, the token holders have another. Whereas the token holders before were getting nothing at all. Like the token was basically a meme, like, and Labs was getting everything they were getting. They had tokens that they could sell and they had the profit coming in from whatever they were doing on the app layer fees. So I think, yeah, I mean it's, it's aptly named, right, Unification. This is unifying all of that so that around the token as well, right around the Uni token so that everyone is aligned incentive wise and that's the way to do it. Like, you know, if you. If AAVE wants a playbook or that, that's it. And if any other defi protocol wants a playbook, and I should say mature defi protocol, like, don't do this at the start, but, like, once you're mature and you've got product market fit, this to me is like the playbook to follow, and this is what you should be doing. And I. I think there might be some temptation from protocols to do things differently just for the sake of it. And I understand that because that happens across everything in life. Right. People just like, okay, well, they're doing it this way. And yeah, it's really awesome. But, like, people are going to be bored of that. We have to try it a different way. And usually it doesn't go very well if you try a different way, because there is, like, a really optimal way to do things a lot of the time. And if you just change something for the sake of it, it usually ends badly. So I think that people should be kind of copying this and obviously altering it for their own protocols to make sure it encompasses everything, because not everything. Every protocol is like uni swap. They will have different considerations because then, you know, they're a money market. They're not doing swaps and stuff like that. So I think when you. When you look at it from that perspective, it's a. It's a blueprint to kind of follow. But, yeah, you can add your own things, remove things that you think are unnecessary, but this is, to me, the gold standard right now.
- [33:54]
B
Yeah. Notably with the successful vote of the unification, which was overwhelmingly successful, this was not a controversial vote. It's something like 98.8% voted for and 1.2 voted against. Can't imagine who voted against with that vote.
- [34:11]
A
Sushi swap.
- [34:12]
B
Million, yes. Sushi swap, yeah. 100 million uni tokens was sent from labs to the burn address, which represented the retroactive revenue that the Uniswap protocol would have burned if they had turned on the fee switch during the Gensler era. So kind of like a retroactive. Sorry for the trouble. It wasn't our fault. It was Gary's fault. Here is the money you would have made. We're going to go ahead and burn that. And so a very significant amount of uni tokens was burned. Maybe I misspoke earlier because in this tweet, it says fees are on for Uniswap V2 and a set of V3 pools on Mainnet. So it sounds like the uni protocol is capturing fees in addition to the fees that are Also coming from the uni chain. So fees, chain fees on the uni chain are also burning uni tokens as well. There has has been some discussion on Uniswap revenue. I actually have a prediction from Omar from Dragonfly. I had him on the podcast when I wanted to talk about Coinbase versus Robinhood. Unrelated though, Uniswap uni tokens. Excuse me. Uniswap uni token holders realized that their new protocol fees will be de minimis and won't offset token grants. Tokens that come from grants from the uni Foundation. Frustrated with price performance, they will vote to turn back on front end fees. I think turn back on front end fees and hopefully burn more uni tokens from the front end fees. So interesting prediction from Omar here. Do you have any commentary or comments on just like the magnitude of Uniswap fees?
- [35:38]
A
Yeah, so if we look at, I guess kind of what's happened with fees generally across the board, and we've been through this many times with regards to, you know, fair revenue, but also burning that fear of a new and how that drives value to the, the underlying kind of tokens. We went through this with Ethereum, right, where you know, a lot of ETH was burned with fair revenue and all that. And then, you know, maybe you could say that it did something positive for the price leading up to it. But if you look at like the longer term, it doesn't seem material to the value of eth. It seems like the value of ETH really has come substantially from the fact that it's valued as a store of value and there's people buying it because of that. And obviously revenues have collapsed since we were burning lots of eth in 2021, 2022. So I, I think when it comes to, yeah, fair revenue and specifically burning, I don't know how much value burning actually drives. Whether it's, you know, the layer one protocol or a defi protocol, doesn't matter. I feel like it's all about the demand. And if something's burned like it's, it's, it's kind of, it depends on how it's burnt as well. Like when ETH was getting burned, it meant that the ETH had been bought already, so that demand had already been kind of realized and then it's burned. We don't know when that ETH was bought. Was it bought five years ago? Was it bought like you know, a day ago? So with Uniswap, I think it's a little bit different where essentially like the fees will get collected and then burn kind of uni. All the fees will get kind of paid out there. But then you have to make assumptions about okay, well how much fees are going to get collected here. Like what's the sustainability of this, this model for uni swap? Like are they going to keep growing from here? They're already pretty much like the biggest that, you know, have been the biggest for a while. Are they going to be competitors? So that's, you know, when you start buying things based on, on fear of a new. Yeah, like it starts getting very muddy and it starts getting pretty brutal out there. And that's a huge reason why I've beat the drum. That shouldn't be valued on fear of when you. I mean one of the reasons. There's a lot of other reasons. But yeah, I think I agree with this point where what ends up happening. And there's actually like a skit about this in this show Silicon Valley where he, you know, this, this guy basically says like as soon as you start talking about revenue, it's never enough. Like people, your shareholders or your token holders will always demand more revenue. So yeah, I kind of, I agree with this kind of prediction where if, you know, they're frustrated with price action and they want more fees, they're going to try and extract fees from where they can. And then obviously like the easiest way to do that would be the turn on the front end fees because that has been shown to materially drive revenues.
- [38:02]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The difference between eth, burn and Uniburn is that as I understand, the revenue going into the Uniswap protocol will actually buy uni on the secondary market and burn it. Whereas with eth, as you said, it's just paid for for gas. So that ETH already existed in the pockets of gas spenders anyways. And so there is actually buy pressure. So revenue is buy pressure for the uni token. And the other thing that's nice about the buy back and burn model is that it is relatively cypherpunk. It's just like kind of the governance free. No opinions about what we should do with this. We just burn it. And that's the protocol. And so there is. Well, well I agree with you that the value capture is weak because it will show up in the price as like the last possible thing at least with things like eth. Whereas like, oh, that when there is a, when finally a wave of demand comes, well, there's less supply on the market and that's. But that's the thing that happens last rather than First. Well, as opposed to the UNISWAP model where like there is, you know, revenue is by pressure at the same time.
- [39:02]
A
Yeah, yeah. And I think one last thing on that, like Amar mentioned that with regards to supply and that's another thing, right. Like we went on about ultrasound money, you know, ETH being deflationary kind of for a while there. And it's all about, you know, how many new tokens are coming onto the market versus how many are burned, if you want to look at it from, from that perspective. But it's not just the burn that's driving demand, whether it be for ETH or uni. It's obviously people buying uni for, you know, speculative reasons or whatever. People buying ETH as a store of value. But yeah, when you look, when you kind of like take it as a, as a whole there Amar mentioned, you know, there's going to be all these, these uni kind of tokens being given out as grants and we can be pretty confident that to be sold, right? Like pretty much 100% of that's going to be sold. So if you have more grants being paid out than uni being burned and the only real kind of, I guess value driver for uni is fair revenue because no one's really buying uni as a store of value. Right. And obviously there's speculative value, but that's not lasting, that's not sustainable. That's a short term thing. Then you could argue that, yeah, the price will either go sideways or go down because yeah, you have this kind of more, more sell pressure than buy pressure. I mean at the end of the day it's all supply and demand. But yeah, when you reason about the different kind of dynamics here, that's why you could potentially get that, that scenario there. And then as Omar said, they, the token holders would be like, well, we need to increase revenues. How do we do that to offset these grants? Well, let's turn on more fees, let's collect more rents as, as they call it. Right. To offset this. So yeah, it's a tricky game. It definitely is. And when it comes to revenue, especially within crypto, I think people really like obsess about it a lot, especially for early stage projects, which kind of puzzles me. And then they, and then they take the other side of it where they'll say, well, it's earning $0 today, but like I think it's going to earn way more than that in the future, so I'm going to buy it now. I was like, yeah, okay, you can do that. And That's a, that's a valid strategy. But then you have to consider, like, why it would be earning, you know, that much fear revenue as well. So, yeah, it's, it's a tricky game. Investing is not easy. People think thought it was easy because crypto did this thing where it, like the old season, right, like after bitcoin ran up and everyone's like, I'm a genius. It's like, no, investing is actually really hard. Like, fundamental investing is really hard. Driving, you know, revenue is really hard. So I think that's another thing as, as we talk about at the beginning of, of the show, that's another thing I think going to, going into 2026, people are going to have to come to terms with is that, yeah, you can love revenue and that's fine and that's good, but you got to be really realistic about the fact that there's not going to be many protocols that generate huge amounts of revenue. And if you actually go and look at these tokens, a lot of them are already worth way more than the revenue that they're generating. So, yeah, if you, yeah, it's, it's not a, it's a culling, as you said. Like, it's not, it's not, it's not a fun time for people, I think.
- [41:40]
B
Yeah, well, something that is fun is our friend Mike Selleck. He's a new CFTC chair. He just got confirmed and so he was confirmed by the Senate on Thursday, December 18th. He will be sworn in as the 15th Chair of the CFTC, replacing Chair Carolyn Pham, who has already announced her next role at crypto payments firm Moonpay.
- [42:02]
A
Interesting, that rotating door.
- [42:04]
B
Yeah, rotating Dory. We actually had Mike Selleck on as a podcast guest. He's been a couple on a couple times. Two years ago I had him on when I was kind of just investigating securities law. Back a couple of years ago, I was just interested in securities law. He works as a. Has worked as a derivatives and digital assets lawyer. He also worked as the chief Counsel for the SEC's Crypto Task Force and a senior advisor to the SEC chair. So he's just been around the space. He's been in crypto, he's been in the sec. Now he's at the cftc. He also previously clerked for former CFTC chair Chris Giancarlo and he's always been known as being relatively innovation friendly on crypto. So definitely a friend that we now have in the CFTC, which definitely feels good. He was confirmed on a 5343 tally. And you might be asking Anthony and also listener what will be on the top of Mike's to do list when he gets into the cftc? When he gets into the office he wants to first he's going to focus on crypto market structure and spot oversight. Congress may give the CFTC primary oversight of spot crypto and non security tokens. Mike wants the CFTC to be ready for this, including staffing up the CFTC on this subject, harmonizing rules and reducing regulatory overlap with the sec. That would be nice. We definitely ran into those problems over the last four years. Also prediction markets and events contracts. The CFTC is currently under pressure regarding prediction markets due to the high profile litigation and surging retail volume. Just the growth of prediction markets. Mike is going to be key in determining how restrictive this regulatory regime becomes on prediction markets. And overall, Mike's enforcement policy is a principles based, steady hand approach kind of guy. Fewer surprise theories, more formal guidance and adapting customer protections, market integrity and anti fraud to digital assets. So if you want to get a picture of just who Mike is, we'll link in the show notes to two podcasts that we did with him. I'm kind of proud of us here at Bankless, Anthony, because we found Mike pretty early in his career before he was even anywhere close to getting named CFTC chair. And so you want to know who he is a little bit more really friendly guy. There's a few podcasts to listen to if you are interested in that. Any thoughts about Mike?
- [44:15]
A
Yeah, I think this just continues. Obviously the positive trend that we're seeing in the US with regards to crypto after having such a negative trend for a while under, under the Democrats, obviously with Gary Gensler and others as well, there's, but it's kind of funny to me, like I am not an American. Like I'm Australian, I'm on the other side of the world and I'm looking at like the kind of American political landscape from, from that lens and not to get too political here, but I think that, you know, I'm really glad to see all of this stuff happening. I'm really glad to see positive crypto stuff happening. But like I wonder how much, you know, it offsets the negative stuff happening. Like I feel like the reputation that Crypto got in 2025 was that it was just another way for Trump to grift people because he did his own meme coin and like people around him kept doing various things within crypto. And, and, and, and I think this, you know, this kind of positive stuff that's happening offsets that. But yeah, I, I, I, I think that crypto has a really bad kind of reputation at the moment as a branding problem with a lot of people. Maybe not institutions, they're, they're kind of warming up to it now, but I guess like just retail everyday people in general. And I think that's why we saw a lot of kind of crypto just do poorly in 2025 as well, like from a market perspective. So yeah, I'm hopeful that this kind of stuff allows us to, you know, innovate more, allows the industry to, to do a lot more kind of positive things and offset like some of that other stuff that's going on. Because yeah, like everyone that I talk to in my real life about crypto, they, they know about, you know, because of Trump, like just his grift that he's, that he's been doing, especially with the meme coin that he launched.
- [45:43]
B
It's the first topic of conversation.
- [45:45]
A
Yeah, yeah. And they're very turned off by that, regardless of their politics like that Some of these guys like pretty much agree.
- [45:51]
B
With Trump's politics, who enjoy Trump and voted for Trump are like, yeah, but that crypto thing is kind of unfortunate. Exactly.
- [45:57]
A
Exact. Like, I really hope that we can fix in 2026 as well, like a lot of crypto's branding problem here, but we'll see. But like, I think it is very positive to see like, you know, obviously this new CFTC chair, same with the SEC chair, they're doing a lot of good things for crypto so it should offset that. But yeah, I just wish we had like both, I just wish it was good all around, but I guess maybe that's wishful thinking.
- [46:20]
B
Yeah, yeah. Anyways, I do think I agree with you that 2026 will be a positive year for some of the, of crypto's branding just across, you know, there's usually probably a pretty big lag time between when some of the biggest companies are getting into crypto and they, they're not pounding their chest about crypto yet because they haven't finished building their products. But overall, I think, you know, crypto has this like retail brand problem that won't really ever change because there's nothing for those types of people to come into crypto because like, obviously if we had something for them, they would have come into crypto already. But that's going to change when some of these big companies, big institutions have crypto products and it just kind of becomes accepted and like it'll Just slowly transition from like, oh, yeah, this is where retail goes to speculate on meme coins and Trump launch scripts to, oh, this is the backbone for stripe. And, you know, Western Union has a stable coin. And just like, all of these brands that I'm familiar with are legitimizing crypto. And I didn't really think about it, but now crypto is everywhere, and I'm just okay with that now.
- [47:23]
A
Yeah, one of the people I spoke to recently actually said that they're like, oh, I saw that you can, like, borrow against your kind of crypto now with like, JP Morgan or whatever, and he's like, oh, that's huge. And in my head, I'm just like, well, you've been able to borrow against crypto for ages, but, you know, that's me being the crypto, Right. Yeah, exactly. So for him and for, like, the normies as we. As we call them, as we refer to them, you know, they're kind of seeing that as a huge positive signal now because they're like, oh, okay, if you can borrow against, then it must be legit. Then, you know, JP Morgan's behind it sort of thing. So, yeah, I agree with you that there's more legitimacy, which should lead to a better kind of reputation for. For crypto, especially for people seeing things built on it. Because a lot of people I talked to, the same guy had no idea that you can build things on crypto. They just thought it was the assets. So the more we can educate people that it's more than just the assets, the better.
- [48:11]
B
Yeah, it's just the assets is an accurate statement for 2017 crypto. So to know that there are people who are like, eight years behind on crypto fundamentals and foundations is like, maybe it is so early, you know?
- [48:23]
A
Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, yeah. Yes and no. I think, like, it's. It's. It's funny when you look at it that like that, because I think on the asset side, it's. It's. Yeah, it's not early. It's like that.
- [48:34]
B
That's for sure.
- [48:34]
A
Yeah, exactly. But on the tech side, sure. But, you know, you could argue that a lot of that kind of stuff has been quote, unquote, priced into an extent. But, yeah, we'll. We'll see.
- [48:43]
B
Speaking of getting priced in, let's talk about Quantum. So this is Murmurations number two from Nick Carter. He's been publishing on his substack. He calls it Memories, Bitcoin in the Quantum Problem. He has three pieces about bitcoin and Quantum. The third is yet to come out. I'm eagerly awaiting it. But overall, Nick Harder has been causing a lot of trouble in bitcoin land because he's arguing that quantum computing is bitcoin's long, biggest long term risk. Once quantum is strong enough. Shor's algorithm, a quantum algorithm could derive private keys from exposed public keys. It's not a today problem, but Nick and others cite doomsday clock style models putting plausible timelines in the late 2000-20s to early 2000-30s. Nick says the urgency is practical. Migrating bitcoin. The project of migrating bitcoin into a post quantum state could take close to a decade, he says. And waiting until the threat is obvious is just simply far too late. The community reaction in the bitcoin world is very split. Adam Back and other bitcoin influencers and bitcoin developers are say, say that they're already doing quiet R and D and reject the urgency framing. Nick and his supporters argue that the ecosystem is complacent. And critics say that Nick is talking his book because his fund investment in a post quantum transition tooling startup, which I just think is ridiculous because you can't discredit an entire vertical of concern around quantum just because Nick invested in a potential solution to it. Quantum risk is appearing in large financial disclosures, including ETF filings out of BlackRock. And institutional allocators increasingly want clear contingency plans before increasing their bitcoin exposure. And Nick is trying to sound the alarm saying, hey, no one is solving this problem. We need to solve this problem and we should probably start today. Sazzle, what do you think about all this?
- [50:36]
A
I mean, I've been a pretty outspoken kind of critic of bitcoin in particular with the kind of security budget issues that they're going to have.
- [50:45]
B
Like this is separ text bitcoin.
- [50:47]
A
Yeah, yeah. This is another, I think like critical issue that they've just buried their hands in the sand over, which I also don't think they're going to be able to fix in any kind of clean way. But yeah, I, I, I kind of, you know, the quantum thing, like the, I guess like the reason I hadn't focused too much on it was because it did feel like it was, you know, very far away. But now with recent advancements, it does seem a lot closer than, than, you know, otherwise thought that it was otherwise thought to be. But I think this just speaks to the fact that bitcoin ossified way too early as a, as a protocol. I think that yes, they argue that Ossification was necessary for Bitcoin to grow, but there is a cap on that growth, I think, because of the fact that you have these risks now. And I consider those two things to be critical risks, the security budget and also the quantum threat here. And I agree with, with Nick that there's no urgency. I haven't seen any urgency around this. I think it's going to take a long time to do anything, if they can even do it. And it also begs the question of like, who's going to do it? Who's going to build it? Because there's not that many bitcoin core developers. And like, it's not like Ethereum, where you have hundreds of core developers and research working on all this stuff many, many years in advance in bitcoin land. It's, it's extremely slow, like development of very simple basic features like Taproot, for example. Like they take many years. Like these aren't like Ethereum upgrades at all. And they have no culture of upgrades either. They have absolutely no culture of hard forks. They have no culture of, of planning things, of naming upgrades, of doing like hard forks, as I mentioned, like, stuff like that. It's just not in their DNA. So I look at this from that perspective and I'm like, can they actually fix it or will they just like go down with the ship? Because there's also going to be a lot of bitcoiners who are like, well, this isn't even a risk. This is not something that we should be concerned about.
- [52:23]
B
It's not even real. It's not even real.
- [52:25]
A
Exactly, exactly. Just like they do with the security budget stuff, it's not a real thing. And by the time maybe they realize it is a real thing, it's probably way too close to when this thing will actually materialize as a threat and they don't have enough time to defend against it. So I have very little faith that they're going to be able to fix this. And this has been a huge a thing for me for many, many years now. And why I haven't actually invested in BTC or held any for a very long time. Why I haven't spent any time there is because I do think that, that bitcoin long term is not going to survive. And I think Ethereum will, because Ethereum is tackling this in a really pragmatic way. Vitalik's been talking about quantum threats for like a decade now, ever since like the earliest days. And we have real ways to mitigate this in Ethereum because we have that culture of shipping and fixing things and doing hard forks and no one's against that and we don't have all this concern around it or this concerned trolling, if you will. So yeah, I'm very, very, very pessimistic on bitcoin's future. Not just from Quantum, but also the security budget issues, which I actually think are harder to fix because security budget issue fix is breaking the 21 million cap, which, which is like, you know, the thing you don't do.
- [53:32]
B
Yeah, I think people, to me, the security budget problem is a more of a valid debate than the quantum problem where people can kind of go back and forth and a bitcoiner who says the bitcoin security budget isn't a problem. I could see a timeline where ultimately bitcoin just turns into a proof of authority of binance coinbase and like the next, the next biggest exchange. And it's really those exchange operators that ultimately control the bitcoin blockchain. And that's kind of just what the, the illogical conclusion of the, the, the security budget debate is. It just turns into who controls the exchanges. There's like more on that on like separate threads and then somebody who's a bitcoiner who would say yeah, and, and I was totally right. The security budget was never a concern. They, they and they would be considered to be right. Whereas this is different with Quantum where I think if, if you agree that Quantum is going to actually turn into a full production scale computer that will be able to do the things that people say that it does, which is like a lot of people's base case, then bitcoin does truly like divide by zero. It does actually collapse. It's not a, like there's a potential way out that we don't really see like the security budget. It is truly like if bitcoin does nothing, bitcoin will break. The satoshi coins will be stolen by likely either China or the United States or whoever's got the biggest quantum computer inside of those respective economies. So one of those two countries is very likely going to hold those bitcoins, a massive amount of bitcoins, over a million bitcoins. And then as the quantum computer gets even more powerful, they'll be able to derive the private key of a bitcoin transaction before it actually lands in the blockchain. And so you know when we'll even be able to make bitcoin transactions if they do nothing. And so for this the, the bitcoin security budget to me is like possible to debate. Even though I know you think you know the answer and other people think they know the answer. To me, this one is not possible to debate. Like you, we, the bitcoin system, the bitcoin has to solve this problem. It has to transition to a post quantum state. And I think you're going to slowly, over the next four years, over the rest of this decade, you're going to slowly see Bitcoin be priced accordingly to its progress against quantum.
- [55:48]
A
Yeah, I think so. And I think, yeah, like when it comes to the consequences of this, like as you said, like you know, divide by zero, Bitcoin kind of breaks and kind of goes to shit for lack of a better term. Yeah. The consequence of this is the BTC price literally like not going to zero maybe, but like collapsing a lot while the rest of the market may collapse along with it in the short term. Because that's happens in the short term. Like, but then, you know, once Bitcoin, like maybe if we talk about the worst case scenario where bitcoin literally just dies and that's it, like it's done, eventually the rest of crypto will survive that. Like, you know, prices may go up and stuff like that. But yeah, I think at the same time, like it's not a good outcome for all of crypto either. Like I don't think that Ethereum needs.
- [56:30]
B
The happy cat path, that's for sure.
- [56:31]
A
No, no. And I don't think Ethereum needs Bitcoin to survive, for Ethereum to survive and thrive. But if Bitcoin was to collapse and literally die, that's not going to be good for Ethereum at least in the short term. Right. It's not going to be good for the eth price. Ethereum, the network will be completely unaffected by this. As long as we fix Quantum, which I have confidence that we will, we will make Ethereum quantum resistant. But yeah, it won't have a direct effect, but yeah, it will. Like the prices and everything, like will will collapse like they've never had before. But at the same time there is a realistic path where it just as you said, keeps getting priced in over time. So when that actually does eventually happen, it doesn't really cause much fanfare because everyone's already like, well bitcoin died years ago. Like we already, we already dealt with that. Like that's, that's the consensus now where we're doing this other stuff. So it's kind of funny to think about because it's been 15 years plus of, of Bitcoin dominance. Right? Like with Bitcoin's dominated everything. But you can imagine in 10 years or five years. Yeah, we're in a post bitcoin world where like the, it's just gone, like, it's just not a thing anymore and, and we continue on with Ethereum and other protocols.
- [57:34]
B
It does just seem crazy to say that if bitcoin does nothing, then it will literally fail as a project because there has been, you know, decades and billions of dollars of people raising money saying, you know, bitcoin's broken, I'm here to fix it. But to actually like, and I have almost never really said bitcoin is like fundamentally broken except for the security budget prior to this. But like it's, it's crazy to say that like I think bitcoin, if it does nothing, will actually fail as a project and like actually completely believe that if it does nothing, if it continues to do nothing. And we, you and I, Anthony, we've been fighting with like bitcoin, the bitcoin ecosystem, the bitcoin community, just because of our ideological differences between Ethereum and bitcoin for a decade now. And let me tell you, they are some of the most hard headed, tribalistic, ideological group of people who just fundamentally think that bitcoin is capital G good. And having somebody like Nick Carter enter the arena and be like, yo guys, I'm going to sound the, the siren. These guys are trained to try and get everyone else to think that there's nothing wrong with bitcoin, that is the culture. It's like there's nothing wrong with bitcoin. Anyone who's fudding is trying to sell you something. That's why they critiqued Nick Carter for investing in a, in a post quantum tooling startup, like all this kind of stuff. And so the bitcoin community I think is going to be a encumbrance in bitcoin itself, actually making it over the hurdle of becoming post quantum.
- [59:05]
A
Yeah. And it's just, it's like a natural kind of, I guess like mechanism for anyone really. Not just the, the kind of hardcore bitcoin they do take it to the extreme. But like anyone will have that natural mechanism of when something you care about is being kind of attacked, you're naturally going to be defensive about that. You're right. And I mean we do it like I do it especially with Ethereum.
- [59:24]
B
We totally do it with Ethereum.
- [59:26]
A
Yeah, we do it. I like to think I'm a bit more practical than the bitcoin maxis that go on the hardcore side of things. I'm a little bit More reasonable. But yeah, I do it as well. And I do it with. Not just Ethereum, just with a lot of things that I care about. And that's just a natural human thing. But yeah, where it becomes a problem is where it goes to the extreme end where you literally don't admit that there is any issue at all. You're not even open to the idea that there could be an issue with the holy bitcoin. Right. It basically takes on the, like a religion. It basically becomes a religion or a cult where if you dare question anything, like, you're wrong and we need to like shun you and like expel you from our ecosystem because you're bad for us. You're bad for the things that we care about. And they don't even even, like, it doesn't even enter their consciousness to think that this could be something that's real. It's. It's straight away, as you said, like automatic kind of denial, Denial, denial of this being an issue. And then, yeah, you. You eventually convince yourself that it's not an issue either by doing that. Like, you keep telling yourself that it's not an issue, then it's not. Right.
- [60:22]
B
You don't even open yourself.
- [60:23]
A
Yeah, you just kind of like brainwash yourself.
- [60:26]
B
Right.
- [60:27]
A
So, yeah. And you know, you spoke about kind of the craziness about like how we're even talking about the possibility of bitcoin collapsing. Like, I wonder what the Romans felt like if someone was to come along to them, you know, in ancient Rome and said to them, one day your beautiful and awesome kind of city is going to collapse and it's going to be like, just tourists that care about it. In a thousand year, a few thousand years, that would call you crazy as well, right? They would say that you were insane. And no one at the time would. Would imagine that this great and beautiful thing that, that everyone thought was going to last forever would collapse. And then it did. And you know, the world moves on, of course, and things kind of get re. Get birthed out of that. So I think the same could be true here where the thing that everyone thinks isn't going to collapse, it happens, but then that's it, it's done, we move on. Just like with terror. Like, Terra is a crypto example where so many people were convinced that Terra was never going to kind of crash. It was going to change the world. It's going to do everything. And then it happened. And yeah, it was really bad for a little while, but then we came out of that and we've matured past that and no one even talks about terror anymore. And let's use it as an example of what not to do. Right. So yeah, if you look at it from that perspective, I think that you know, while it's really bad, it's not existential. It's not like all of crypto would die. I think crypto would still be fine. Would be a lot of pain. Before we were fine though.
- [61:40]
B
Yeah that I'm, I'm in the camp that that is a short term pain that we would collectively feel as an industry. Maybe, maybe I'm being naive and now it would be a medium term thing too short to medium term. But ultimately like there were, there will be all the other blockchains that update themselves to be a post quantum blockchain. And to me as like somebody I'm who has my, my money in Ether. I'm very glad that Quantum has been on the Ethereum roadmap since day one. And that would inspire at some point in time some investor confidence that these ecosystems can get ahead of the problem and adapt when they need to adapt. Anthony, that's all the news that we have for today. Give me something that you are excited about for 2026. What are you looking forward to this year?
- [62:22]
A
I'm just gonna be like full nerd here and say that I'm looking forward to Glamster Dam, which is the next Ethereum network upgrade. It is going to be the biggest upgrade. Like every upgrade that we do now just seems to be getting bigger and bigger. But Glamsterdam is massive. Like it's, it's like I think going to be almost double the size of Fusaka if everything that is kind of considered for inclusion goes in to that. So I'm, I'm most excited about that on the tech side. But as we discussed at the start on the you know, broader kind of general side of things, I'm excited for crypto to keep maturing. I'm excited for these TRADFI institutions to keep coming in and taking advantage of the technology that we've built and for us to keep obviously upgrading that technology for them as well. And I'm excited to hopefully have a better year asset price wise as well. Like I, I, I think it should, I mean like, I don't know, it feels like it should be a bullish year but I'm always bullish. So take that for, you know, take that with a grain of salt. But yeah, that's, that's what I'm, I'm.
- [63:14]
B
Excited about and I'm excited to watch that all happen with you. Anthony. You and I have been in crypto for so long and I don't see that changing anytime soon. And so I'm sure to ask you your 2026 reflections and 2027 predictions in about a year, but also many, many times in between now and then. Anthony, thank you for coming in and stepping in for Ryan on the Bankless Friday weekly rollup.
- [63:35]
A
Thanks for having me.
- [63:36]
B
Cheers Bankless Nation. You guys know what to do. Crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in, but nonetheless, we are headed west. It's not for everyone, but we are glad us on the Bankless journey. Congrats on 2026. Let's have a good year together.
- [63:48]
A
Cheer.