Ryan Sean Adams (1:49)

Also, David, I want to give you a around the world tour of how crypto is exporting freedom and how nation states and governments and banks are reacting. We've got UK doing things and Canada doing things. Also a revolution in Nepal that was partially crypto driven and what's going on in West Africa. It's kind of cool to peer around the world and see how crypto is affecting things.

David Hoffman (2:10)

Affecting is the word destabilizing the right word.

Ryan Sean Adams (2:15)

Depends on your perspective, I guess. Maybe some things needed to be destabilized, David, unbundled. Maybe some freedom needed to go back to the people.

David Hoffman (2:24)

Before we get into all of that, a message from our friends and sponsors over at Zero G. Zero G means zero gravity. They are an AI dedicated chain that exists end to end to be decentralized and truly verifiable for an AI operating system. Ryan, I think you're a believer that there will be another AI crypto hype cycle in the future, right?

Ryan Sean Adams (2:45)

Yeah, I do. I think the first one didn't make much sense. The second one will probably make a lot more sense.

David Hoffman (2:52)

Oh, do you mean the first one that was like January of this last year and it was like the AI agent meta? You know I actually count that as like the third. Oh, I think there were, there were two smaller bubbles that didn't really bubble up into like capturing the entire crypto zeitgeist. That was the first one that did, but that was really like the third one. Anyways, I, I think we're in agreement that this was going to be a reoccurring theme anyways. Zero G is, it's a layer one built with a sub second finality meant to be a platform to host actual AI. 107 billion parameter model is actually fully on chain. With Zero G it's just like massively scalable. So you can put, you can put AI on the blockchain. They're partnered with giants like Alibaba, Google Chainlink and Optimism. And if you are serious about building in the world of crypto and AI, check out 0G AI very simple URL. There's a link in the show notes so you can get started. Bankless CC0G AI T David, let's start.

Ryan Sean Adams (3:48)

With crypto prices now in the market section. Then we'll get to what old Powell was doing on the week. So what is bitcoin telling us this week?

David Hoffman (3:55)

Bitcoin's happy. $17,600 up almost 3% on the week, so still below all time highs. But man, $117,000 is like a very strong bitcoin price eth still just below its all time highs. $4,620 up 4.3% on the week. And then also Ryan, a new all time high in total crypto market cap.

Ryan Sean Adams (4:19)

Wow.

David Hoffman (4:20)

So down market tokens got a bump. So $4.213 trillion is the new all time high.

Ryan Sean Adams (4:27)

I wasn't expecting you to be going to the numbers of a all time high crypto market cap. That's pretty cool.

David Hoffman (4:33)

Yeah, yeah, I Got a question for you Ryan.

Ryan Sean Adams (4:36)

Sure.

David Hoffman (4:37)

What do you think about the four year cycle?

Ryan Sean Adams (4:39)

I am, let's see. I think it's a liquidity cycle, I think it's a liquidity cycle and I think that the liquidity cycle has possibly extended. And if you look at the liquidity cycle, global macro liquidity cycle. Listen to me, I'm sounding like Arthur Hayes. Huh. A little bit. Um, if you look at that this time around, it looks like it could be extended though we are probably on the later part of the global liquidity cycle. But I think it stretches into 2025, 2026 and so pretty much I'm a believer in these cycles. I just think this one might be more like a five year cycle. Why, what do you think?

David Hoffman (5:18)

So if we went back in time and we, I pretty sure I, I explicitly said this on at least a few rolls, maybe you did too, that like if the four year cycle plays out late, 2025 will be the frothy blow off top hyper mania part, part of the cycle.

Ryan Sean Adams (5:32)

That's right.

David Hoffman (5:33)

Does not feel like that at all obviously right now I, I, I, I don't think so. If you go look at the bitcoin price, there's always the phase according to the four year cycles. If you could just look at the patterns, there's the phase in which bitcoin kind of just like marches up and at the end of the the year like typically the third of four years, you look back on that year like oh, bitcoin is up 300% and then the blow off top happens. Yep, we are in the longest extended linear price increase in Bitcoin's history. Bitcoin has been going up for over almost three years now. Just modestly, not, not too fast, not too slow, but it's been going up for three years in a row. Bitcoin has never gone up for three years in a row from trough to peak without a blow off top. So this is the longest, most mellow price increase that we've ever seen in bitcoin, which I think is great. I think that's fantastic. I think that's very healthy. I think that's very mature. Vol is down, price is up. There's seemingly a sustained bid under Bitcoin Eth isn't there yet. It's got some lag because we had some, you know, inter intra market jitters in Eth, but it's continuing in that same trend like a year behind bitcoin. So I think the four year cycle we can start, we can start to wave Goodbye to it.

Ryan Sean Adams (6:54)

Oh, you think, you think it's over? Like the, there are no more four year cycles. We're just on some other, you know, like some other track.

David Hoffman (7:02)

Yeah, I think we never go down the boom bust cycles of crypto is kind of what I'm saying.

Ryan Sean Adams (7:08)

I wouldn't go that far. My personal take is we still get boom bust, but they're less violent, more modern, less volatile. One explainer for why we're a little bit less volatile in these institutional grade assets in particular, Bitcoin is just what we were talking to James Seyfert about, which is the institutional capital coming into ETFs is a little bit more disciplined than the retail capital. For instance, if you're an RIA, RIAs are the largest holders of Bitcoin ETFs. For instance, you might have a mandate that says 5% of your portfolio is in Bitcoin. Right. And on a monthly basis, if Bitcoin goes up and that becomes 7%, then you sell the 2% and you readjust it back to 5%. Or if Bitcoin goes down, you know, it becomes 3% of your portfolio, you sell other stocks and other assets and you make it 5% again. Yeah, yeah. It's these kind of algorithmic sort of disciplines that I'm not sure that retail is thinking about so much, but institutional capital tends to follow.

David Hoffman (8:06)

Speaking of discipline, the other thing that's not present right now in this boom bust cycle or the lack of the boom bust cycle is over leveraging on credit. Credit usage in the market is modest, so there's just not a lot of leverage in the system right now.

Ryan Sean Adams (8:22)

Yeah, not as much as there could be. We got some room, we got some room to run. That's what we're saying.

David Hoffman (8:25)

We can wind this thing up even more.

Ryan Sean Adams (8:28)

Well, speaking of that, we got the first Fed rate cuts in almost a year. So the last time they did this.

David Hoffman (8:34)

So credit is even cheaper. Let's, let's do this.

Ryan Sean Adams (8:38)

Thanks, Powell. December 2024 was the last time they did it. They cut it on 25 basis points. So it's pretty much as prediction markets predicted. You want to look at the Fed fund rates over the 10 year time horizon, we'll go even longer. So remember, we've been up in the 5 range all the way from 2023 and then it sort of started to drop in the end of 2024, and then we've been hovering at this like 4, 4.25% range. And now we're down another 25 basis. Points. So it's not the 50 basis point cut that I think maybe some were hoping for, but it is pretty much what markets expected and markets are optimistic on that. Like, have you looked at stocks today?

David Hoffman (9:23)

Yeah, they were like jittery yesterday right after the news, but this morning stonks are green. Or at least the stonks that I pay attention to, which is like the finance tech sector.

Ryan Sean Adams (9:32)

Yeah.

David Hoffman (9:33)

But yeah, market. Market pretty happy right now.

Ryan Sean Adams (9:36)

Okay, so they're happy. And then we also have some other Fed rate cuts that people predict are coming. So of course we just got our.

David Hoffman (9:43)

Just the. The 0.25% that we got cut yesterday. There is going to be another 25 bips in October or at least is what Polymarket is predicting with an 80% probability.

Ryan Sean Adams (9:55)

Yeah.

David Hoffman (9:55)

That we're going to get another 25 bips cut on October 29th and another 25 bips cut on December 10th. So it's not just about getting 25 bips now, it's about the trend of we're gonna get 75 bips cut by the end of the year is what the poly market people are predicting.

Ryan Sean Adams (10:14)

So of course this probably means good things for our risk on assets, good for crypto assets. I got a bitcoin baby. Bitcoin bull take and an eth bull take. Which one you want? David? You can only pick one for the tweets.

David Hoffman (10:28)

Wait, if I pick one, I don't get the other?

Ryan Sean Adams (10:31)

Yeah, sorry, this is, you know, scarcity. I pick eth Eth. This is Joseph Shalom. Of course you know Sbet. He said the Fed's rate cut marks the start of an easing cycle with another 50 bips. That's what you said. Expected this year, momentum for growth assets will only get stronger. Ethereum is the productive yield bearing digital asset prime to capture this momentum. Yeah, there you go. Joseph is bullish on this.

David Hoffman (10:56)

Yeah. Wait, I don't get the bitcoin one.

Ryan Sean Adams (10:58)

I'm not going to show you the bitcoin one because you picked the eth one. So we only get one this episode. David, I actually want to turn you to. Sorry, man, sorry. It's bullish for bitcoin too.

David Hoffman (11:08)

Okay. We will put it in the show notes.

Ryan Sean Adams (11:11)

You really want to see this? It's not that great of a take. Okay, so here's the bigger picture here, which is somewhat interesting. And this came out shortly before the rate cut news. This is a take from Arthur Hayes, my favorite. With Fed board member Mirin now confirmed the Main street media is preparing the world for the Fed's third mandate, which is essentially yield curve control. Lfg Bitcoin to a million. Okay, what do you think? What do you think this means?

David Hoffman (11:41)

Yield curve control is kind of like price controls. That means that they're going to just in this circumstance that yields are higher than what they want it to be. They will just mint treasuries out of thin air to dampen yields or something like that. Uh, but why.

Ryan Sean Adams (11:59)

So there's a few things that Arthur is saying. One is he's saying the mainstream main mainstream media is preparing the world for the Fed's third mandate. Okay. When he's saying mainstream media is preparing the world, he's referring to articles like this. So this is a summary by Bloomberg AI talking about the Fed Fed Reserve's dual mandate becoming a third mandate. Okay, we'll talk about that. Anyway, there was all of these articles that made reference to a speech from Stephen Mirren gave in front of Congress saying the Fed didn't just have two mandates. The two traditional mandates, of course, are low inflation and unemployment, maximizing, you know, full employment. Right. That's the dual mandate of the Fed. Those are the things that they're supposed to do. Well, Main street media is what Arthur is saying is preparing the world for the third mandate in writing articles like this and the third mandate in a speech. Steve Moran, who is on the FOMC. Mirin. Yeah. Excuse me. He's one of the 12 FOMC governors that decide what rates actually are. And he's newly appointed. He's been appointed by Trump in August. So he took over from someone who resigned. So he's new, he's a Trump pick. And you know, as you've said before on, on these episodes, who's Trump going to pick? He's going to, you pick the, you know, most rated people he can. Yeah. Rating rate cut, that is.

Sponsor/Ad Voice (13:22)

Steve, by the way, there was general.

David Hoffman (13:24)

Unanimous support of the 0.25 bips cut that the Fed just gave. Except for one guy.

Ryan Sean Adams (13:30)

Yeah.

David Hoffman (13:31)

Who wanted a whole 0.5% bips cut. Didn't get it. But it was radio bank rate cut. Steve Mirren.

Ryan Sean Adams (13:39)

Yeah, exactly, exactly. All right.

David Hoffman (13:41)

So appointed by Trump.

Ryan Sean Adams (13:43)

Yeah. So Steve Mirren in front of Congress, he gave a speech and he said in addition to the inflation and full employment mandates of the Fed, there's actually a third that's incredibly important. He said it's this moderate long term interest rates are within the Fed's charter. That is the third mandate. So the Fed actually has to make sure that interest rates are Moderate to low. So they're in control of interest rates. The reason for this is, of course, interest rates are the rate that the federal government has to pay on its own debt. And, and that amount has exceeded the amount that we spend on national defense every year that the U.S. spends on national defense. So out of, you know, 4 to 5% rate, that's much more costly than if it's at a 2 to 3% rate. So this is Steve Mirren saying, effectively not. It's part of our mandate to actually make sure that this rate is low. What that is, is that's yield curve control. That's the type of thing that we were doing in the 1940s. That is currency debasement. Effectively, that's where we do the bank of Japan thing, where we try to control the interest rates and we, you know, adjust the money supply accordingly. So that's the bigger picture of like what's happening with the Fed and how the conversation is turning. Yeah. And of course, Arthur Hayes links this to the price of Bitcoin. Where there's yield curve control, where there's the Fed duty to do this, then all commodity scarce store value type assets must go up.

David Hoffman (15:11)

My uninformed reaction to this is two mandates which kind of represent opposite polls. Kind of like a dipole mandate is all you have to do is walk the line between those two things. And like, yeah, you have to balance. Like, you have to pick where on that line you want to be, but you just pick a point on the line. A third mandate I think is overly chaotic, like a binary star system stable, a trinary star system eventually ejects one of the stars. That's right. And I'm worried that having a third mandate, it makes it fundamentally at odds with being able to balance, harmonize between all of these things. And I'm like, under this, if this is a at all a correct pattern to match to, one of these things just gets ejected. And that's gotta be inflation. Because if you're gonna inflation, it's gotta be inflation. Inflation's leaving and we're gonna have full employment and yield curve, curve curve control.

Sponsor/Ad Voice (16:06)

You can't do all three.

David Hoffman (16:07)

You have to pick two.

Ryan Sean Adams (16:09)

It's probably the case, David. It's probably a, you know, central bank trilemma, if you will. And you gotta pick, you gotta pick two of the three. We've got some Solana dats that have come in pretty hot on the week. So what's going on here?

David Hoffman (16:24)

Multicoin has completed the purchase of 7 million Solana. So Multicoin has spun up a DAT. They somehow amassed like $1.5 billion in cash to buy Solana. And then they did it and they bought 7 million Solana. And so now this Ford. Ford is the ticker. This. Why is it called Forward Forward Industries is the company. And so they have just a absolute ton of Solana on the balance sheet. Right. Right now the M Nav is clocking in at 1.85. So not only do they have a bunch of SOL on the balance sheet, but they have M Nav to now leverage to go Buy More. And so this thing has just like rocketed in size up very, very quickly.

Ryan Sean Adams (17:06)

It's impressive how much they spent basically right out of the gate. Right. I mean, he wasn't dollar cost averaging in. They were just like buying everything.

David Hoffman (17:13)

He was smashing market buy.

Ryan Sean Adams (17:15)

Yeah, you could see Solana in the purple in some of these charts. Actually, you can't really see it in some of these charts. Like the trading volume by asset. Solana stocks, treasury stocks are just like not on the radar at all, but they're doing fairly well from an aggregate market cap perspective. You can see it in purple down here. What is this? We're at about $4.6 billion worth of SOL inside of DATs right now. And that wasn't the only one, David. Also, Pantera Capital put together a Solana DAT called Helios. So this is a 500 million dat. It could be up to a 1.25 billion dat. And Dan Moorhead from Pantera was on CNBC, Bloomberg, wherever he could go, talking this up, of course, doing the thing. I was a little confused by the name because I thought Mert might be associated with this.

David Hoffman (18:03)

Helios is like the infura of Solana. It's like the RPC messaging transaction.

Ryan Sean Adams (18:09)

Yeah, Validator for Solana.

David Hoffman (18:11)

So like. Yeah, exactly. Which is like. It's like Merce Company. So, like. Yeah, I feel like they should have.

Ryan Sean Adams (18:16)

Yeah, they should have talked to him about like, hey, yeah, I don't know. Anyway, so it's basically the teams have assembled here. Dan Moorhead is on Team Soul at this point in the cycle, it seems like. And then you also have Kyle Samani from Multicoin. And you also have Galaxy. What's that? Are you serious? You also have Galaxy, who Mike Novarat is making appearances because they're involved in the. In the Ford. So that. That's kind of them against some of the other KOLs and Tradfi thought leaders.

David Hoffman (18:51)

Yeah, the pieces are on the table. There are people are making moves and we will see how the game unfolds. All right, coming up next, we're going to talk about all of the ETFs that are about to come online. There's going to be an ETF waterfall coming. All of our tokens are about to become ETFs because of this new announcement, this new thing that got approved called generic listing Standards by the sec. We're going to talk about what that actually means and is base launching a token. The network that doesn't have a token is now getting a token, or at least they are looking into it, I should say. And then Google exploring, they're exploring a network token and also Google is adopting crypto for AI agent payments. Not Stripe, not Web2. They're using crypto, so that's pretty cool. We're going to talk about that and more. But first we're going to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, like Uniswap. It's a browser wallet, it's a mobile wallet, it's a. It's a blockchain that goes super fast. It's the best place to do defi. We're going to hear from them right now.

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David Hoffman (19:52)

Liquidity.

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David Hoffman (21:08)

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David Hoffman (21:27)

3.

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David Hoffman (22:23)

For ETFs okay, what does this mean? Right. Previously for the Bitcoin and the ETH etf, you had to go through this very meticulous process where you would file an S1, the SEC would review it, they would give you a comment period that go back and forth. You had to like jump through all of these hurdles. Basically a very, very permissioned gate kept process, bureaucratic process allowed Gary Gensler to have a lot of control.

Ryan Sean Adams (22:44)

The SEC took a long time, David. It took like a year.

David Hoffman (22:47)

Took a long time. Very expensive, you might have gotten sued. You know all that kind of stuff that's gone. That's changing. The SEC has approved changes that allows certain exchanges, NASDAQ, NYSE mainly, but others too to listen, trade commodity based ETFs, including those based on crypto assets, without needing a separate Product by product SEC approval under section 19B. 19B is like where all the bureaucracy comes in. Okay, so how does this impact ETFs? What does it mean? What does it mean? We're going to get a faster path for crypto and commodity ETFs. So like I said before this, every ETF had to be vetted case by case under listing rule filings, public comments, that would take months. This generic standards has shortened that timeline. There's more predictable rules. So there's just clear criteria about creating an etf. Either the asset already has some level of surveillance and futures history or is tied to an existing ETF with sufficient exposure. If you just check a certain number of boxes, you just got a green light for an etf. More crypto assets are going to become eligible. Previously, only Bitcoin Ethereum had really cleared the hurdles for spot based ETFs so far. Now that the, this generic listing standards is here, these rules have opened the doors for many, many, many more coins to be just approved. Things like Dogecoin, my favorite Litecoin, Polka dot Avalanche, Chainlink. Stellar. Like all of these things are potential candidates for getting an etf. It's just going to be a lower cost and much less complexity for issuers. And then as investors we're all going to have much more choice. And so we're kind of just like opening up the doors of what could be. And we're also throwing it to the market rather than to the regulators to be able to approve and list ETFs.

Ryan Sean Adams (24:37)

It's kind of cool. Yeah, this, this listing process is going to get a whole lot faster. And so the, the criteria are you have to be a commodity, so you still can't be a security. All right, so there's still that. And I know there's still some ambiguity of what's a commodity, what's a security, but some proof of that is if there's a future contract, there's a future contract in operation for six months, then you're kind of eligible to be on this fast track. So if it's a security asset, it still can't be an etf. But where I think about this is it's almost like an ERC20 for TradFi, where it just gives tradfi kind of a token wrapper for our crypto assets. Right, that they can easily, fairly easily spin up. And this is going to give them a process for spinning them up. So man, we're going to see so much here. Like, here's a list of all of the possibilities we might see. You mentioned like a number of them. I also think we're going to have. We had James Seyffert on the episode from Bloomberg. He's kind of an ETF specialist and been covering this from, from day one. He's most excited about these, these blended ETF assets. Right. Things that track, you know, the top 10 crypto assets and indices of some type or even you. You could imagine like a, a 2x long eth or a 2x long, you know, leverage shib. Yeah, you probably. Yeah, yeah, sign me up. So it's great. I mean, I guess it's great for investor choice, which is something that, you know, we're advocates of. And this will get more assets to market faster and then the market can just decide what it wants to buy and like what it doesn't. So there's not kind of the gatekeepers in, in the way.

David Hoffman (26:17)

I think my, my favorite takeaway from that episode of James again, it'll come out soon. Uh, he called it this spaghetti cannon. Yeah, so there's gonna be a cannon of spaghetti and it's gonna shoot all the spaghetti at the wall and some things are gonna drop off the wall cause the market just doesn't want it, but some things are gonna stick. Uh, and we kind of just have what we call the ERC 20 version. But in TradFi, which is the ETF, these are all just money Legos. They're just ingredients. Put em in a pot, mix it around, see what the consumers want.

Ryan Sean Adams (26:45)

Yeah, exactly. The bottom line is this is more free markets and that's important. The old process we didn't mention at it had to go through kind of the, you know, the, the five commissioners and chair for approval. Right. And if one of them or two of them said no, it wasn't getting through. And this is much more permissionless. Uh, David, tell me about the base token. Okay. This. They're exploring it. Is this official? What, what act, what exactly did they say?

David Hoffman (27:11)

The first thing that you should know about the base token, Ryan, is that it's early and that they're exploring it. That's what they want you to know. But the existence of a base token was formally incepted by Jesse Pollock at Basecamp. Basecamp is like kind of this retreat for the base ecosystem happening in Detroit. So I think it was like a three, four, five day kind of like festival. Base festival, which I think is pretty cool. I actually appreciate the. In real life Manifestation of, like a network in real life, so all the builders can come together and hang out. And so during a presentation, Jesse Pollock says, we are going to be exploring a network token. And he said, it's still early. They don't have any specifics to share about timing or tokenomics or governance or what the token does or anything at all, really. But they just verbally stated, confirmed that they are beginning to explore a network token. Now, my first reaction here was, okay, Jesse, who is a executive at a Fortune 500 company that is publicly traded at very large, if you say that you are beginning to explore a network token, you have already explored a network token. Your lawyers have already given you the thumbs up that you can say this. But as I listen to him more and we'll play a clip, I kind of think that they are actually closer to being truly on the early stage. It's not just lift service. They are doing it in this way that's like, we're going to do it with the base community. Let's go listen to this clip right now.

Jesse Pollock (28:45)

We're going to be exploring a network token for base and I will be up front with y'.

Ryan Sean Adams (28:55)

All.

Jesse Pollock (28:55)

It's early and I'm a little nervous, like, my heart's racing sitting here on stage. And as we thought about sharing this, like, early exploration, you know, I got all sorts of advice. People telling me, don't share it. You need to keep it close to your chest. You know, it's too early. And I sat back in myself and our team sat back in ourselves and we said, what's the base way to do this? And the base way was we do it in the open. We don't have all the answers, we really don't. But we're going to figure it out and we're going to figure it out together because we think this could be a really, really powerful tool for building the global economy that all of us believe in.

David Hoffman (29:33)

All right, so there you go. I mean, Jesse gave three big, like, guiding commitments, maintaining deep ties to Ethereum, strict regulatory compliance, obviously, and open community collaboration. So don't really know what this looks like going forward. But I think if you're just like a base stakeholder, if you're in the base ecosystem, your voice matters, which is kind of cool. We'll see how, like, unconstrained base actually is with the token and with lawyers from Coinbase, because there's going to be the big topic issue to figure out, which is how do you give the base token away to the base community? How do you use it as a tool to incent adoption. How do you bake in economics into that base token based off of, like, the $70 million a year or whatever, whatever revenue base makes without offending the coin equity holders, of which I am one.

Ryan Sean Adams (30:27)

I think that, that that's partially why they're using this kind of hedging term. Like, we're exploring it. Like, we're doing this in the open. Like, you know, we'll, We'll. We'll figure out what the good ideas are. In case it wasn't clear that they're exploring this, this is Brian Armstrong. To be clear, there are no definitive plans. We're updating our philosophy as of now. We're exploring it. So this is even Brian Armstrong saying, like, hold on, we're just, like, exploring it. Okay? But there is a big question of what would the value of the base token be if it was put out there? And David, you mentioned some of the revenue that base is driving right now on their token just from, like, running the sequencer. It's about 70 million, I believe, annualized.

David Hoffman (31:08)

In terms of million? Annualized?

Ryan Sean Adams (31:10)

Yeah, yeah, 75 million. And of all the L2 gross profit, right, you have Arbitrum, you have ZK Sync, you have all these L2s basis about 70% of that. Okay. And they have 4.4 billion in stablecoins. So it's pretty big. Now, if you took the comps of maybe some peers, like an L2, like an Arbitrum or an Optimism or ZK Sync, and you look at the price to sales ratios that they're trading at, you get, and you took the average of that. If you took a price to sales ratio of 900x for base, which is around the midpoint of those three others, you get the base token being worth between $65 billion and $70 billion. Okay. Just at a similar comp to their. To its peers. All right, which kind of doesn't feel.

David Hoffman (32:00)

Like Coinbase is at.

Ryan Sean Adams (32:02)

Coinbase is around 85 billion. I believe that's coin stock. Okay. Again, who knows if these types of comps will last, but that's what peers are trading at right now. So it is a big question as to, like, will, how do you even parcel out? Does a base token holder actually get some of that revenue that is generated from that L2? If it doesn't, what's the purpose of the token? And then to your point earlier, like, how does this accrue to a coin stockholder? Because Coinbase has a fiduciary duty to coin stockholders as well. I mean, there was talk that the token of base is Coin shares. You go buy it in your brokerage account, it's just coin. So how do they parse this out? How do they parcel this out? What do regulators say about this? These are all TBD questions and I think that's probably why, David, they're exploring it in the open.

David Hoffman (32:59)

Okay, so I just got a little bit of a sticker shock when you gave me the 65 to 75 billion dollars network token valuation. But if I go to Coingecko, Solana is at 136 billion, fully diluted. Dogecoin, which is the next blockchain below. Solana is at 43 billion. So that puts base squarely between Dogecoin and Solana, which I think is completely reasonable.

Ryan Sean Adams (33:23)

Yeah, it's reasonable if you comp it to other crypto, I guess, native assets, but it doesn't seem reasonable at all when you comp it to Coinbase Shares.

David Hoffman (33:32)

To coin the Coinbase shares. Yeah, yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams (33:34)

And when you comp it to the amount of revenue that it's generating. So what does this say? There's some sort of wild premium for being a crypto asset right now, is one interpretation.

David Hoffman (33:42)

Yeah, there always has been. The token premium is real, whether it's a layer one premium or layer two premium or whatever. Yeah. How this gets divided up between the coinshares and the base token holders, I don't know. But you would imagine as a coin holder, if something of like nearly equivalent valuation gets minted off to your left and you don't have any of it, but you had owner technical, legal ownership over it, you'd be kind of pissed.

Ryan Sean Adams (34:07)

Sure. I mean, but they could just mint, you know, give 30%, whatever to the community, I guess, via, via airdrop and call that, you know, marketing. 70% maybe belongs to Coin shareholders and you know, that say worth.

David Hoffman (34:20)

I think they should billion.

Ryan Sean Adams (34:21)

Everyone's happy.

David Hoffman (34:22)

They should, they should do something like that, like 10, 10, 20% to the base community based developers based builders based incentives. And then like 80% is claimable on chain. If you register your brokerage that you hold Coin in to your basic address, it would be the biggest onboarding event of all time.

Ryan Sean Adams (34:44)

Interesting. I mean, that's probably why they're thinking about this creatively because there's a lot of growth marketing mechanisms and reward incentives to do that. That's not the only thing they announced. This is probably the biggest thing they announced at Basecamp. They also announced a base to Solana Bridge that got a lot of Attention. And so this effectively allows you to port BASE tokens into Solana like natively. So they could be used in Solana and. And vice versa.

David Hoffman (35:09)

Mainly. Mainly vice versa. They. They kind of want the Solana tokens to go on to Base.

Ryan Sean Adams (35:14)

Yeah. So that, that brought the question of like, oh, is this a vampire attack? Who's vampire attacking who? Or is this just like trade relations? We're opening up trade relations between the, the chains and kind of an interchange. Like obviously there's.

David Hoffman (35:27)

I think if you build the bridge and you govern the bridge, you get kind of have some control over the flows.

Ryan Sean Adams (35:35)

Okay.

David Hoffman (35:35)

Like you can direction.

Ryan Sean Adams (35:37)

If you, if you're the one building the bridge, that probably means you also want it more, doesn't it? So it seems like BAS probably wants Solana's liquidity. I mean Solana, maybe they benefit from base's defi. But there's just a lot of retail degen. Liquidity going on at Solana that I think that base is looking over and be like, oh, we could use a bridge over here. It'd be great to have some of those assets in our ecosystem.

David Hoffman (36:03)

It'll be. I'll wait to see how Fantom leverages this because they have both Base and Solana in their wallet and they. I'm sure they would love to have a. Just a faster, better bridge to transfer users assets between.

Ryan Sean Adams (36:16)

Yeah, I agree. There is also some progress with the Base app. It has a wait list of a million people, so that's going well. But here is actually one of the most exciting things. This wasn't at Basecamp. This was actually a Google press release that I saw. This is powering AI commerce with new agent payment protocols. AP2.AP2 is a library that Google is incorporating for AI agent payments. Anyway, buried in the press release you could, you could see a link to a GitHub where Google is actually implementing a Coinbase and Ethereum foundation MetaMask standard called X402. And we've discussed this on Bankless before, but what X402 is, it's actually in the original web specification all the way back from the early 90s. It was a payment specification that really never got filled in. It was sort of a, you know, machine to machine type of payment standard that never got filled in. Coinbase developed the standard further, crypto enabled it. What this allows, David, is Google AI agents to actually pay each other via crypto. And you can imagine the use case here. You're in Google Gemini, maybe you query something and you hit some sort of server. But Rather than scraping all the data, that server says no. In order to get this data from me, let's say it's, I don't know, weather data or something. You're going to have to pay me in microtransactions. So Google AI Gemini just says, okay, here's a few cents, pays them in stablecoins, completes that transaction, brings the data back into your Gemini chatbot. I think that's like an architecture that is going to be massive in how the way AI is going to rewrite the entire Internet. These like tiny microtransactions from agents to agents, from agents to other services. And X402 is the standard that does it and Google has adopted it, which is kind of exciting.

David Hoffman (38:10)

We were talking just before we hit record about how some websites that we like, news websites, are just totally broken when we go and log into them. We're talking like mainly Forbes was the one we were talking about, but other ones too. Even some of the crypto native ones like you know, desk, when you log on to them, it's just like there are 13 ads and then my, they interact with my ad blocker so they turn into blank space. But then I'm like, where's the words? Oh yeah, if I just have an embedded wallet that's connected to the same protocol, I don't have to be an agent. But if the website is like, oh, in order to read this article you need to pay me 5 cents on USDC, payable on base. And I, that can just happen in the background and I can just have my wallet be like, yeah, like once every time I visit this website, this website is allowed to take 5 cents from my wallet. Don't even give me a pop up. And then all of a sudden I can be presented a beautiful website, designed how the designers wanted it to be designed, that would just improve Internet UX so much better.

Ryan Sean Adams (39:08)

Or I don't know if you're like me, but I don't even, I barely go to websites anymore. I just, I do a lot more. No, I, I, I do a lot more through the like chat interface. Right? It's basically like I'll, I'll do a query inside of my chat. But the problem is the websites are becoming ad slums because they don't have a revenue model aside from like your eyeballs. And all the eyeballs are going somewhere else. And so this gives like a, a new business model to creators which is just microtransactions, which I think is incredibly important so that we don't get dead Internet Basically where it's just AI creating AI content, you actually have a mechanism for like a revenue model for creators. David Speaking of really interesting revenue models, we have an update on hyperliquid's pick for their stablecoin. Remember the ticker we were talking about last week? Usdh.

David Hoffman (39:56)

Usdh. So who won native markets? The the organization that was the favorite by the validators have secured the USDH ticker that gives them the rights to manage and issue USDH Native markets beat out Paxo, Sky, Athena, Frax, all the other ones just because they their proposal was accepted. So what happens next? The first hyper liquid improvement proposal for USDH will get created and then assumingly approved USCH will launch on Ethereum. So this will be a stablecoin that's around the Ethereum ecosystem and it's the first natively issued hyperliquid stablecoin with a brand new liquidity and yield source. Circle still relevant here because they have 7% of all USD supply on hyperliquid. They're not necessarily losers here because they have also made a deal. They are partnering with hyperliquid to launch native USDC and their Circle bridge all on hyperliquid and so native USCC will be directly issued on the hype EVM. The CCTP V2 bridge that's circles bridge will just be deployed straight on hyper liquid. So they will have native minting on USDC on hyperliquid which just gives better on ramps off and on hyper liquid. It's like probably one of the bigger things that plagues hyperliquid is just like difficulty in on ramping and so that this will help allow Circle to maintain some of that USDC supply that they have on Hyper Liquid which is large.

Ryan Sean Adams (41:25)

Very large worth a lot to them right? We some numbers like worth a hundred to 200 million per year at least and one of their highest growth growth segments. We got more stablecoin news coming up. We've got Tether's Made in America stablecoin. We'll talk about that. Also want to give you some quotes from the most bullish speech we've seen from a regulator chair Paul Atkins. Crypto's time has come. That was the theme of the episode. And then we'll go around the world and talk about UK capital controls, Canada losing some of its bank customers, what's going on with Ghana and how they're using crypto to flee a predatory banking system. And also Nepal, there's like a Internet crypto led revolution that just happened over there and I think it's probably one of the most important things that's not being talked about in mainstream media today. All that and more. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including frax. Some of the best yield in Defi. It's a fantastic Stablecoin like Circle, Athena and Maker all had a baby, came together as frax. Let's go hear from them now.

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David Hoffman (43:00)

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David Hoffman (44:12)

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David Hoffman (45:14)

USAT is the ticker. It's a pretty Chad ticker. USAT, that's Tether's version of their USA stablecoin USA with T2 lines in it to get the currency symbol in there. So this isn't unlike how Binance had once upon a time. Binance and then Binance us. This is there's Tether and now there's Tether. You know, us. Us.

Ryan Sean Adams (45:37)

Oh, you mean I had a separate exchange basically just for US customers?

David Hoffman (45:41)

Yeah, exactly. And it was a separate legal entity, which is what this is as well. And so USAT has its own CEO who is named Bo Hines, who is a previous White House crypto advisor who left recently to go do this. So got a little bit of a revolving door. And why do we need USAT when we have USDT is because USDT is not Genius compliant. It's not compliant with the recent Genius act for stablecoins, USAT is. And so it's just Tether's version of a Genius compliant stablecoin. They're keeping the existence of USDT uncompliant, so they have some of the freedoms that they want to have offshore. I think many, many, many countries prefer Tether to be very offshore. And this one is going to be a competitor with like Circle and all the other onshore stable coins.

Ryan Sean Adams (46:32)

Yeah. Also something that we've mentioned before is with usdt, they can have other things in their, in their treasury that backs usdt, aside from gold and Bitcoin treasuries, which they have. Who would want to give that up if you're not them?

David Hoffman (46:45)

Very pricey.

Ryan Sean Adams (46:46)

Yeah. So they're just kind of doing both. It's interesting that you mentioned the revolving door here. Right. So this is bohainz, very like Mr. USA Crypto, very plugged into the White House, of course. And then he comes to tether to kind of run this and you could kind of like question that, like, oh, revolving door, that's not great. At the same time, David, this is how like political systems work. And if crypto isn't doing this than the bank lobby is. Something that has risen on the profile this week is a fight that the banks are waging in D.C. their lobbyist groups against the genius bill Act. So we've talked about this a little bit, which is there is a. The banks consider this a loophole in the genius bill that actually allows exchanges, other protocols to give yield from stablecoins back to the stablecoin owner. Okay. The genius bill tried to shore that up by preventing issuers from giving the yield back to customers. So again, with stablecoins, it's the Fed fund rate, you get the treasury rate, it's about 4% up for grabs in your checking account. The bank takes that. The bank. Banks continue to want to take that. They don't want stablecoin yields to go to actual customers, so they're calling for a redo.

David Hoffman (48:05)

They don't want customers to have money.

Ryan Sean Adams (48:07)

Yes, they don't. They want to keep it. So they're actually going to Congress and they are really, you know, ramping up their lobbying efforts to have Congress.

David Hoffman (48:16)

They're asking for a do over.

Ryan Sean Adams (48:18)

Yeah, they want a do over to pass. They want an amendment to the genius bill that prevents any owner of a stablecoin from actually getting that yield. So it's really heating up and I feel like it's a clash of the titans going on right now. This is. The banking lobby is super strong in D.C. david. They have been forever. There's almost 700 million a year, I believe, spent by the banking, financial services type lobby. And then suddenly crypto over the last two years, it just ramped up. It's a new kid on the block and it has punched way above its weight class. So it's the tiny crypto lobby right now that has made some incredible gains recently that is in favor and I think the Trump administration against the entrenched bank lobby that is still incredibly powerful. And these two forces are fighting it out right now.

David Hoffman (49:08)

I think actually this is the biggest questline issue of crypto right now. This is the most interesting thing, the.

Ryan Sean Adams (49:17)

Most interesting, the fight against the banks.

David Hoffman (49:18)

The fact that the banks were out lobbied by somebody, by us, by the crypto people, I think is very notable. It's also worth realizing that like, okay, the banks haven't really had any adversaries to lobby against. They've just been, they've been just controlling. They've had their monopoly, they've had the control. They own a town. There's no adversary that they have. Crypto shows up on the scene and all of a sudden they do have a huge adversary. And we have been chewing glass for four years. And so yeah, we punch above our weight class, but because it was a matter of survival and the incumbent bank lobbies like, they got, they got flat footed, they got caught flat footed. They, I don't even know if they're good at this. And so yeah, they have the size, they have the money, they can brute force this. But I mean crypto, I, we're modern, we're young, we're hungry, we have upside here. And I think like, yeah, we punch above our weight class because of all of these things that we have.

Ryan Sean Adams (50:16)

Well, we're also on the right side of the population. I mean, what American citizen, when you're like, hey, the banks are taking 4% of your money and crypto actually wants to give you that 4%, whose side are you on? Who's going to be on team bank? Like crypto in this case. Crypto in this case is on the side of the people, which is a big deal. But David, I think these types of crypto versus the banks, types of like fights are just heating up and they're going to go international, they're going to go into the central banks. I caught this tweet from Brian Armstrong. He said this, this is on September 16th, you speaking to Canadians. So this is Canadians Coinbase, you know, Canada users. You said the interest rate for most checkings accounts is 0% in Canada. That makes zero sense. So from today all Canadians can earn 4.1% uncapped rewards on USDC, on Coinbase, and up to 4.5% with Coinbase One. Okay, here is a outside of Canada company CEO saying, hey, you can convert your Canadian dollars into US dollars, which many would say is a advantage in and of itself. It's a better currency outperforms at times Canadian dollars and we'll give you 4.1% on top of that. David, I think if he is successful in this, and there's no reason why he wouldn't be, that is going to drain the checking accounts of Canadian banks. Essentially retail is going to flock to this service. I certainly would if I lived in Canada. And so what do you think the reaction is going to be from the Canadian banks, from, you know, the Central.

David Hoffman (51:57)

Bank of Canada, something like a frantic grasping for straws to retain power and money, Something like that.

Ryan Sean Adams (52:06)

I think it's probably going to come in the form of capital controls. There was actually another story from the uk so moved to Canada, to the uk. So the bank of England already has a plan for this. So the bank of England plans to put a cap on individual stablecoin holdings. So you can only have 10,000 to 20,000 pounds per person. Okay. And this isn't even the threat of a foreign currency like usdc. They're just talking about pound stablecoins. Like hypothetically, I'm not sure how many pound stablecoins exist, but individual citizens couldn't own more than 10 to 20k in pounds per person because basically they think that their banks are under threat if individuals hold more than this. Okay, this is a form of light stablecoin capital controls, isn't it? And then there's the greater question of, well, how do you surveil that? Okay, like, how do you know how much I own? Oh, okay, so you're doing surveillance in the entire blockchain. And what am I not entitled to anything?

David Hoffman (53:05)

Surveillance and capital controls go hand in hand.

Ryan Sean Adams (53:07)

Okay, so that's, that's the UK we talked about Canada. Let's go to Ghana. So West Africa. This is Kofi. He's I believe, a senior data nerd at bas. So he works at base, he's plugged into crypto. He said stablecoins are better than banks in West Africa. Last week, the bank of Ghana announced a 5% fee on dollar cash withdrawals from dollar bank accounts. Okay, so if you have a bank account in Ghana denominated in dollars, you try to withdraw those funds. 5% fee, 5% wealth tax. Right. He said some banks have even stopped allowing dollar cash withdrawals altogether. This is a massive blow for both businesses and regular people. You said the Ghana cdai, I believe, trades like a shitcoin. That's Ghana's local currency. Over the past two years it swung from 11 to the dollar up to 16, back to 10. Now it's sitting at 12. So there's a fee for cash withdrawals. The local Currency in Ghana trades like a shitcoin. So stablecoins are way better. I keep USDC in my self custody wallet. He says when I need to spend I swap stables for CDAI straight into my mobile money account at the real street rate which is far better than what the banks give. Okay, this probably hasn't saturated enough in West Africa in Ghana for authorities to really take notice. Or maybe they're starting to. Don't you think there's going to be some capital controls put on stablecoins and crypto in West Ghana as well as a reaction to this?

David Hoffman (54:35)

Oh, I think it's going to happen across the global south and then it's just going to like move up the market cap of fiat currencies. Do you remember when we did our dollar milkshake episode with Brent? Brent Johnson?

Ryan Sean Adams (54:48)

Yeah, that's right, that's right.

David Hoffman (54:49)

His general thesis is the first there is going to be a sucking of liquidity to the dollar and then eventually into bitcoin as fiats collapse and the existence of stablecoins give fiat currencies and holders of fiat currencies savers of fiat currencies an alternative. And so why would they hold the Ghanaian Ceti cd? And so why would they do that when they can just hold dollars? And so they're going to use stablecoins as the cleanest exit ramp to hold dollars. And this is what we are seeing. This is like the early stages of the dominoes of low quality fiat currencies and they're all going to go on chain onto dollars and get saving savings accounts on Ethereum and when they do.

Ryan Sean Adams (55:37)

Nation state banks are going to crack down, create tighter, more strict capital controls and that's going to push more citizens, global citizens into crypto assets particularly.

David Hoffman (55:48)

They're going to constrict and they're going to control and it will also incent people to get out at the same time.

Ryan Sean Adams (55:56)

Exactly. And I think we saw an example even last week of this going to the, to the far extreme. Have you, have you seen what's going on in Nepal?

David Hoffman (56:05)

I know that they did a governance vote in discord.

Ryan Sean Adams (56:08)

Okay, yes. Okay. There was a revolution in Nepal. I haven't like looked at all of the details here but it's basically a youth movement where the Nepalese government has been authoritarian, very unpopular and they literally forced the Prime Minister of Nepal to resign and they held a discord vote. By the way, this is kind of like young Internet native citizens of Solana.

David Hoffman (56:32)

Was ahead of his time.

Ryan Sean Adams (56:33)

Yeah, they voted for the Prime Minister but what they were doing while this cracked down the government against some of the revolutionaries was happening is revolutionaries. The only sort like money that they could actually use was crypto. This is a quote from one of them. We can't rely on banks. They serve politicians, not the people. Said a 25 year old protester in Nepal, speaking under a pseudonym for fear of arrest. USDT is the only money that moves when everything else is blocked. So they were using VPNs, decentralized wallets, peer to peer apps, stablecoins, cryptocurrencies. That's the way they actually had to move capital during these protests. And it led to an entire revolution, which is wild. Like this is the stuff that's going on outside of the U.S. you know, on crypto rails.

David Hoffman (57:25)

Every time I hear stories like this, I just get reminded about how incredibly prescient the book Sovereign Individual was. All of this was predicted in 1998 whenever that book was written.

Ryan Sean Adams (57:35)

Yeah, I guess it's just getting to the point. I mean I think stablecoins are really shaking things up. Right? Because yeah, it's just exporting the dollar worldwide and that's going to shake up the banking system.

David Hoffman (57:47)

Yeah, yeah. It's like we used the word destabilizing at the beginning of this episode. And like to some degree it is as in it like it's disruptive towards the governments, but also during a revolution, people, individuals still have access to money. And so while it's destabilizing, it's also like still giving some notion of stability because everyone still has their money. And so it's creating change, it's creating change at the top. But everyone has this foundation of like, well, the finance system still works.

Ryan Sean Adams (58:22)

Yeah, well, it's a freedom technology. Right. Individuals can marshal this. And it almost reminds me of like remember 2011 Arab Spring and some of the revolutions that happened by route of like Twitter, people had access to it. Which reminds me a little bit of like what's happening there. Let's go back to the US though and talk about this speech that Paul Atkins, the SEC chair, the anti gensler, gave in Paris this week. So he was speaking to an OECD roundtable. So this is kind of an economics roundtable. David, I pulled out some quotes from this speech. Okay, here's a few. Number one, he said crypto's time has come. He said it is a new day at the sec. He said our policy will no longer be set by ad hoc enforcement actions. We will provide clear, predictable rules of the road so that innovators can thrive in the US, he said. President Trump has tasked me with making America the crypto capital of the world. He said using project Crypto, we're going to enable our markets to move on chain. We're going to allow entrepreneurs to raise capital on chain without endless legal uncertainty. He said. We're going to provide the minimum effective dose of regulation and not overburden entrepreneurs with additional rules. He said. Public blockchains, which are inherently global, offer a chance to modernize the foundations of payments and capital markets.

David Hoffman (59:51)

And we have three more years of him.

Ryan Sean Adams (59:53)

Yes.

David Hoffman (59:53)

Oh, wait, no, we have five more years of him. Because he lasts for six years, right?

Ryan Sean Adams (59:58)

I think so. Unless something happens to.

David Hoffman (60:02)

Five more years. Ryan. Cheers.

Ryan Sean Adams (60:04)

This is in Paris. To an international community, right? US equities markets are like 60 to 70% of global equities. Okay. Like the SEC is the juggernaut when it comes to equities tokenization. So what the US does and what the SEC says will propagate to the rest of the world. And this is the SEC chair saying, we're going to tokenize all of our securities. That's so wild.

David Hoffman (60:27)

That's awesome.

Ryan Sean Adams (60:28)

I just can't believe we've come this far.

David Hoffman (60:30)

Yeah, yeah, it was a big. It's a whiplash, honestly. It makes it kind of hard to believe how bad it was just like 18 months ago and then how good it's got.

Ryan Sean Adams (60:38)

Yeah, I know. Yeah.

David Hoffman (60:39)

Knock on wood. Knock on wood. But still, five more years. All right, we're going to burn through the rest of the news this week. Polymarket has launched the trading of earnings. And so you can trade different companies earnings reports whether you think they're going to beat or miss on earnings, which is, you know, notable because when you buy, when you own a company and they beat earnings, sometimes the price goes down, which is frustrating. But if you want the price to go up, you can trade earnings on polymarket if you think companies are going to beat or miss earning. So, uh, that's pretty cool. That's worth noting. There's this thing happening in the aerodrome universe this week, Ryan. There was a new mechanism for distributing, for issuing and distributing a token. So there's one organization called Syndicate. They made the Degen chain, if you remember, Ryan, they have launched the SIND token. Don't know what it does. It's not the story. The story is that they seeded the aerodrome liquidity pool. So Aerodrome is a like, kind of, kind of like a next generation ammo.

Ryan Sean Adams (61:37)

Right.

David Hoffman (61:37)

They seeded the supply of some supply of the SIND Token s. Y N D into Aerodrome, and they allowed VE arrow token holders, which is kind of same thing as, like, the curve wars, same tokenomics as the curve system. So if you wanted to own some of this token, you, as a ve arrow token holder, would, using your governance rights, point incentives towards the sind token, which would give the sin token its initial liquidity and then, therefore its initial market price. And then as a result of doing that, as a ve arrow holder, you got some of these sin token as rewards. So if you wanted the sin token, you would use your governance powers to point stables, point liquidity towards the SIND token, and then you would get SIND incentives as a result. So this happened like, two days ago? Three days ago. Send is trading at a $1.5 billion valuation with a $700 million market cap. So a 5, 50% float, the thing Ryan floated at $1.5 billion. You know all the IPOs that we're about to talk about in a second on all the crypto IPOs that have happened over the last, like, two months or so, and, like, circle floats at $20 billion, and then three days later, it's, like, at a 6x because it was mispriced. This thing just launched smoothly with no snipers, no sniping bots, no, like, gas wars just smoothly launched at $1.5 billion. I need to know a little bit more about the mechanics here and how this all works. I'm going to talk to the syndicate guys about what happened on a premium feed podcast episode. So congrats to premium subscribers for getting all that alpha. I think it's a pretty cool mechanism. I'm excited to learn more, but the idea of launching a smoothly launching in an orderly and an efficient way, a $1.5 billion token is pretty cool.

Ryan Sean Adams (63:24)

Yeah. It's also Airdrome is on base. Right. So this is available inside of Coinbase.

David Hoffman (63:28)

REIT tokens available on Coinbase already.

Ryan Sean Adams (63:31)

Right. And not Coinbase, the centralized exchange, but inside of the base app, which is just, I guess, one and the same thing, isn't it?

David Hoffman (63:38)

No, it is available on the centralized exchange.

Ryan Sean Adams (63:40)

It's both.

David Hoffman (63:41)

It is not listed. There's not an order book on the centralized exchange. But the centralized exchange, you can buy it as a Coinbase retail customer.

Ryan Sean Adams (63:49)

And then when you're buying it, though, behind the scenes, you're buying it from Aerodrome. Right. You're buying it from Liquidity Pool. Correct. It's DeFi and Cefi. It's all mixed together. Right? It's Defi Mullet. Love it.

David Hoffman (63:58)

Somebody Made this defi mullet forever ago. Wow, they were really smart, really quick.

Ryan Sean Adams (64:02)

Gemini was listed on the NASDAQ this week. So of course, this is a US Exchange. Did pretty well, I believe. So this is the Winklevi. Yeah, it pumped Gemini price of shares at $28. The IPO was oversubscribed by 20x the first day, had a 32% jump. So the market likes crypto stocks, that's for sure. Also speaking of that, there was Trump. Trump's family's American bitcoin just went public on the Nasdaq this week as well. So there's Eric Trump on the Nasdaq. He's, he's cheering for their launch. This was like a bitcoin mining company, bitcoin treasury company, like all combined, about 7 billion market cap. And 20% of this is owned by the Trump brothers.

David Hoffman (64:50)

So how do you feel about Donald, the President's son, ringing the bell for his newly launched company on the Nasdaq? How do you feel about that?

Ryan Sean Adams (64:59)

I think the Trumps have fantastic deal flow right now. Let me just say that.

David Hoffman (65:05)

I will.

Ryan Sean Adams (65:05)

Say not everyone liked it. Right. This is a Virginia Cantor. She's with the Democracy Defenders action groups. That I think probably the obvious. There's no question there's a conflict of interest here. Trump could appoint regulators overseeing crypto and potentially disadvantage other crypto businesses that don't align with his interests. So he could do all which, to.

David Hoffman (65:24)

Be clear, is bullish for this company.

Ryan Sean Adams (65:27)

It's bullish for this company. I'm not sure that bullish for crypto or bullish for America, David. And speaking of which, we end with this. Have you seen the Trump statue? Have you seen this, David?

David Hoffman (65:38)

Oh, my God. We used to make so much better statues 500 years ago.

Ryan Sean Adams (65:45)

All right, so this is a Trump statue.

David Hoffman (65:47)

This is a terrible statue.

Ryan Sean Adams (65:49)

This is Trump in gold holding a ginormous bitcoin facing the Capitol buildings. This is right in DC. This is a 12 foot golden statue. It was unveiled on September 17, 2025. I looked into this. I was like, is that no way this is government funded? Like, no way this is government funded? No, it's not government funded. Okay. Okay.

David Hoffman (66:09)

Yes, thank you.

Ryan Sean Adams (66:10)

So this was a private group of anonymous crypto investors. So there you go with a DGTGST project. It's a pump fun meme coin. And they did this to get attention on their project. So that's what's going on.

David Hoffman (66:26)

This, this is the future. This is what the future looks like.

Ryan Sean Adams (66:30)

There's no official commentary from Trump about it. Although, I mean, you know, maybe if he sees it, he might appreciate it.

David Hoffman (66:35)

Trump statue in gold looking. Like, not bad looking. Yeah, I'm not gonna say good, but, like, he's probably. I'm sure he's plenty fine with it.

Ryan Sean Adams (66:44)

How bad do you think crypto is gonna get wrecked when Democrats and Trump actually.

David Hoffman (66:52)

Depends on which Democrat, I guess we'll see. Potentially high.

Ryan Sean Adams (66:57)

Bankless nation. Gotta end with this. Of course, none of this has been financial advice. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in. But we are headed west. It's the frontier. Not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey.

David Hoffman (67:07)

Thanks a lot.