← The Wolf Of All Streets
The Wolf Of All Streets
Ethereum & Solana Soar While Bitcoin Dominance Falls Below 60% | CryptoTownHall
00:58:46
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- [00:01]
Ryan
They famously say that third time's a charm. It took me six to get on stage today. Six. Six tries.
- [00:12]
Dave
I guess X gets busier when markets get frothier, I guess.
- [00:17]
Ryan
What an epic panel today. Got a lot of friends out here. It's awesome to always have this incredible group. I don't take for granted that we get to chat with 10 of the most brilliant people on a rotating basis in our space every single day. It's absolutely EP. Really, really awesome. So thank you.
- [00:33]
Mateo
My Internet IQ came in at 56. Just.
- [00:36]
Ryan
Dude, I. I was. Yeah. Mine said. I don't like to say the word, but it literally called me a. I'll call it redact. A redact. I think I did that thing. The. What he's talking about is where you put your name in this thing, and according to your Twitter account, it tells you your iq. And then they probably hack you, steal your keys, and take all your money just so that you can play a stupid game. But I played it anyways. Uh, and it showed me at, like, a 61 IQ or something. But the thing that gave me solace, my wife actually did it, of course, because she was like. Had like, a 125. And she was like, see, you're actually half as smart as me. But I entered Mario because I was like, listen, if I'm. If I'm a 60, Mario's like a 12. And he was, like, four points below me, so it was amazing.
- [01:21]
Dave
What game are you talking about?
- [01:22]
Ryan
So there's something that was going around on Twitter, which you should never click, and I did. And she. She did it on my behalf. She entered me. But you. It's like one of these stupid things where you enter anyone's Twitter name and it tells you their IQ based on their Twitter account. It's like throwing darts. But mine happened to land on the word that I don't say because it's inappropriate. We used to say it all the time in the 1980s, by the way. We called each other that all the time. But you can't do that anymore. It's not. Okay, so here we are.
- [01:48]
Tom
We might be able to say it again, but if you enter your name in twice, it actually changes your iq, because I did it, and it just changed my iq like, multiple times.
- [01:55]
Dion
Times.
- [01:55]
Tom
So I don't know how to reliable.
- [01:57]
Gary
It's just a random number generator.
- [01:58]
Ryan
Yeah, whatever. Whatever. Ryan, I'm dumb, okay? I'm going to use as an excuse for everything moving forward. Like, it's not my fault. I'm. I'm dumber. Than Forrest Gump. He did well, though.
- [02:14]
Dave
So. So. So you're one of those people who googled yourself, like as soon as someone told you that you could do that.
- [02:19]
Ryan
No, I just. My wife entered it, said, look. And I said, well, that's bad. And so of course I tweeted it because, like, I'm very self deprecating. So I just tweeted, nailed it with a screenshot of my low iq.
- [02:33]
Gary
If you want a fun one, you need to ask ChatGPT. What are some things that you've noticed about me that I probably don't know about myself? That's a fascinating.
- [02:42]
Dave
Oh, I did that today. But I said, what are some things that I don't want to admit? And then it let rip on me. It told me a lot of stuff. It was like, actually, you're kind of like this. And I was like, no, I'm not. Shut up. It's totally right.
- [02:54]
Ryan
It's totally right.
- [02:55]
Dave
Back on the IQ thing, I did mine, I put it in. I got the lowest score I've ever seen, which is 55. And I was like, actually, I'm in Mensa, so I don't know how accurate that is.
- [03:06]
Ryan
I can't even luck because Mensa, I'm literally dumb. Jesus. It says it. Go ahead.
- [03:12]
James
I was going to say you're in luck because we're entering low IQ season. So this is advantageous for you in every way and your wife. So she has you to thank for the upcoming success you'll achieve.
- [03:28]
Ryan
Should we talk about crypto or should we talk about random memes and how stupid I am? Let's do crypto. So I think that we have a topic here. Ethan Soul soar. Bitcoin dominance below 60%. I have a feeling that might have just. Okay, it's still there. But bitcoin dominance, when I just checked, was bouncing pretty hard. And bitcoin was up to 122, but it's fading by a couple hundred bucks here. I think we just kind of have a massive bullish trend going on right now. And I don't know if that means we're running into a bunch of all time highs here. I mean, bitcoin every. We're talking about eth and salana, but bitcoin is a hair's breath from an all time high. ETH less than 200 bucks from an all time high. You know, Salana, not near the all time high, but looking to break out. I mean, it's happening across the board.
- [04:14]
Dave
Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on your Time scale, obviously, you know, I'll be excited when chainlink is at an all time high and still half. It's still 50% below. Which you know, considering all the excitement about all and all the narratives, I mean of all the alts that's, I think that one has the strongest narrative. You know, you had Sergey on, you know, a couple weeks ago to describe it and it's still 50% below its all time high, which. So you know, if you, if you want to get to that, if that is is the relevant metric, you know, it is what it is. But that said, it's been doing very well over the last couple of weeks for damn sure.
- [04:51]
Ryan
Quickly. I just want to know.
- [04:52]
Mateo
And that's measured in dollar terms, not bitcoin terms, right?
- [04:56]
Ryan
Yes. Long way to go in bitcoin terms for effectively any altcoin to, to break out.
- [05:01]
Dave
Oh, in bitcoin terms it's not even. Yeah. The chart, it look, it almost looks like it's not rallying. So you know, it's like if you want to be depressed, if that's what you, if that's what your holdings are.
- [05:13]
Ryan
Yeah. Every, every time I type in a ticker versus Bitcoin pair, it just says hfsb.
- [05:18]
Gary
Right.
- [05:19]
Ryan
So instead of whatever the ticker is. Did you know that if you enter Doge, by the way, on Trading View, I saw this today on Chris Franks's screen that the dog dances out onto your Trading View. Didn't work for me, but it worked for him live on my show. I'd never seen that. Crazy.
- [05:32]
Dave
No, never caught that either. That's interesting.
- [05:35]
Ryan
Yeah. All right, so, but let's talk about the market here. Obviously we've got, we talk about it every day, but we've got incredible tailwinds here on basically every single front. This is one of those times when I think you can turn your brain off and just understand that there's fundamental reasons that things are going up and that everything is performing so well. It's nice to see it happening in an August where, you know, usually we're in the doldrums is the worst month historically, I think for bitcoin and even in bull markets we've had some very, very rough August. So I guess the question then remains how we forecast the coming months. I saw that James was up here, Butterfield. I think he left Tom. I would love your actually shot at that one. I mean, how are you kind of handicapping the rest of the year? Yeah.
- [06:24]
Tom
So I think folks are still underestimating how much money is left in these digital asset Treasuries. And it seems kind of like so obvious, but just looking yesterday for example, at eth, how much dry powder each one of these individual entities who could still purchase Ethereum from issued equities they have, and there's $27 billion with a B worth of dry powder. That's 5% of Ethereum total supply, or a third of all Ethereum that's outstanding on centralized exchanges right now. And price is set at the margin. So you can imagine as these folks start issuing equity and purchasing Ethereum, there's going to be some pretty powerful price movements coming. And Scott, I'm sure you've seen this. We've chatted privately about it, but we see pitch decks for these digital asset Treasuries still every day. And it's not just Ethereum anymore, it's Solana and all these other Altcoins. I mean you've seen Story and BNB and all these other ones coming and it's supported by folks like Pantera who are raising funds to invest in these DATs. Now, long term, maybe that's not great, but in the short term, three, six months, you have this ridiculous amount of capital coming into namely Ethereum, but also Solana and a few others. And that's really what we've been missing the last three years is we've just been PVP trading against each other and now we're finally activating the traditional markets for all these other assets like Sailor activated Bitcoin for the traditional markets. And I think you're just going to see we talked about Altcoin season not coming. I mean this is how you activate Altcoin season and anything that can have a digital asset treasury and brings on more flows.
- [08:02]
Ryan
Yeah, I'm looking at an article right now that ran, I think yesterday, 8% of Ethereum supply now sitting in ETFs or company reserves. So to add to the fuel of what you just said, 8% is already effectively in these assets that are largely held by people who have no intention of flipping it around and selling it. James, I see your backup. I would love to ask you the same question.
- [08:27]
Ron
Yes, it's just been an incredible couple of weeks for Ethereum. Well, month or two actually for Ethereum. I think since May we've seen $9 billion of inflows and in July alone we saw $5.5 billion of inflows. So that's just put that in perspective. Last year, that's more than the whole of last year. And then this week we've already seen $1.6 billion of inflows. There's an incredible appetite and just relatively Bitcoin's only seen month to date where it's seen 400 million of outflows. So relatively people are massively favoring Ethereum at the moment. And last yesterday, sorry, it was Monday, it was the largest in daily inflows on record. So it's just huge appetite for that. I don't see a huge amount of appetite of evidence to say it's bleeding out into other altcoins yet. There's a little bit flowing into XRP and Solana, but I just think that's more of the hype of the ETF launches. But all the other altcoins we're not seeing that and Ethereum. So yeah, Ethereum is just massively on a relative price to other altcoins is massively outperforming too. And I just think it's because speaks to our clients. It's a combination of factors. It's the genius act, it's the stablecoin act, the SEC action, various treasury companies now buying it. There's a whole I think range of political, economic and corporate support for the asset, which is really encouraging. I've been wrong on Ethereum for the last two years, but I feel like now it's starting to come good.
- [10:18]
Ryan
If you were wrong, we were wrong together because we did it often on YouTube and I was talking to Chris Inks about this today. He, you, myself, Matt Hogan, people I very regularly had all the time on my show, maybe even you, Tom. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but we were all like ETH should catch a bid at some point, like this is crazy and kind of remained there. And listen, you're at the all time high now, so who cares? You can be wrong for a year and then be right on eth. A month. It takes a month, right? The thing moves so fast. Go ahead, Don.
- [10:51]
Tom
Yeah, and this, this sort of all happened at once. Like we talked about all these narratives like ETH being a traditional finance attract an asset that's attractive for traditional finance. ETH having most of the activity, ETH having most of the stablecoin volumes, like all the things all suddenly clicked at once and obviously these digital asset treasuries have a huge hand in that but they're being sold because of all the things we just talked about. So I think it's just really finally an inflection and realization point and folks like the dunk on ETH and say, oh, we don't Even have the all time highs that you had back in 2021 and you've had the opportunity to buy ETH all the way from 900 all the way, it was just a few weeks ago at 1800 and get 3, 4, 5, 14 in April. I mean, yeah, you've had plenty of opportunity for upside as long as you were patiently accumulating. So, you know, I don't think the story's changed at all. And if anything, it's more exciting now.
- [11:43]
Ryan
I mean, is it just the Tom Lee effect though? Like he created a narrative, he stepped out in front of it and then all of a sudden all these things that we've been saying that never matter when price is bad matter to everybody because you're in a bull market and price is going up. I mean, to me that's really what this is. It just needed someone other than Vitalik Buterin to become the face of Ethereum. I really think that Amateo, yeah, I.
- [12:10]
James
Would just second that that like Ethereum really needed a sailor composite that could drive the market, get everyone hyped and get people to see consistent inflows coming in. And as we always say, there's no better marketing than price going up. And so seeing that there was all this inflows. But I think that was, it's coupled with what Dave was saying, which was a lot of people were questioning the eth, whether it had a design flaw, whether it was just to be left behind and whether it would get smoked by competitors. And I think what the stablecoin legislation has done, the rise of where user traction has been with base continuing to dominate, even though some of that value doesn't accrue back to eth, ETH itself has really stood its ground. And this is kind of what I was saying months ago, which was it's going to have its place and it's going to find its place in the market. It's so established and there's so much innovation that's been built upon it. I just think that people were not giving that enough credit and people were all expecting that money from all L2s had to flow back to ETH to make it work. And I just don't think that's true. I think that it's been an innovation layer for a really long time and, and now that value is starting to be sort of aggressively bought up and realized very quickly during the hype of it. So I mean, who knows, it might be six months until everyone's in the doldrums around ETH again. But as of right now it's playing catch up pretty quick here.
- [13:50]
Ryan
Well it's interesting because I don't understand a lot of things because my IQ is only like 64 but last time we had Ethereum transactions at this level and we're near an all time high. It would cost like $180 to mint a two dollar NFT and now you can go send a million bucks for 80 cents or something. So I don't know what the mechanics are, how they change that but it seems that if you're going to move value and it's still extremely cheap on the layer one it's going to take a lot of shine off the layer twos and a lot of the competition because yes, that still matters to someone who's doing microtransactions and I don't want to minimize that. But if you're BlackRock and you're sending around $100 million if you don't care if you pay 8 bucks or 80 cents.
- [14:30]
Dave
Yeah I think that, that you know I like to play a little bit of contrarian here. I mean, you know the clip of me saying ETH could go to, you know, well I got, I had the billions, trillions wrong but whatever but, but ETH could effectively, it's high is probably eight times from where it is today. It's got a lot of, a lot of traction, you know, on X. But the, there's risk in that it's an if then else if Ether is the winning layer one for the major addressable market of moving value within the financial system where you call the, we tend to in crypto call the, this RWA or whatever but effectively if it is the winner then it has, still has significant potential, you know, effectively in line with Bitcoin reaching digital gold status. The difference is I think Bitcoin reaching digital gold status is, I mean I think the risk reward there is enormously high. I mean I think it's over 50% to be a 10x which is just an insane risk adjusted return. I think Ether has enormous competition in the end and what we're seeing over the last month, I mean getting that excited over one month of price action, I mean what's the old expression? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I mean this is liquidity. This is Tom Lee and a bunch of other companies saying let's go out there and buy it. They push the price up, it starts moving price then becomes reflexive. ETFs exist and people are like oh wow, this thing could Be huge. They don't know what they're buying. You know, urethra, as you used to joke about it and boom. Now does that mean that it, that this rally won't. Will. Will peter out at the all time high? Of course not to easily double off the all time high on this rally. I mean I'm not, I'm not bearish.
- [16:21]
Ryan
I mean bitcoin just did that, right? I keep saying like it's very exciting to see Ethereum near an all time high for anybody who has been holding it. But this is just getting back to 2021, this is the equivalent.
- [16:31]
Dave
So be aware if my point is if ether gets to be a $1 trillion asset, it's going to get a lot and you're going to get a lot of people saying why? You know, where's that? Where's the value? Now obviously on cue with this rally, we've now seen Joe Lubin and others saying, oh well, it's going to replace Bitcoin. And you get into that and there are plenty of people on this panel, I'm staring at the icons who probably when they hear that their eyes roll and it's like, okay, look, you know, something that has supply, that's controlled by an oligopoly, especially post this last merge where the, where staking can now be, you know, significantly larger holders is not the same thing as bitcoin. It just isn't. And for those who think that it is, I really don't have, you know, other than psychiatric help, I don't really know what else to say. So. Yeah, Adam, I knew you well.
- [17:25]
Scott
I love. It's true.
- [17:26]
Ryan
I mean, I don't know, we've been talking about this for months now. It's like, yeah, nothing's really changed with Ethereum. Nobody's still using the network. The L2s don't pay the L1. Right.
- [17:35]
Dave
So nothing's really changed except price matters though, people.
- [17:38]
Ryan
But price matters?
- [17:40]
Dave
Supply and demand. First year economics, bro.
- [17:43]
Ryan
And, and, and literally like I, I was, I was just on vacation talking to Normie friends and they don't know anything about eth at all.
- [17:50]
Dave
Right.
- [17:51]
Ryan
But they heard, oh, Tom Lee's involved. Ooh, right. It was like, I don't know, the Cathie Wood of last cycle. Like my friends said the same. They, everybody gets his research, they see him, they listen. Yeah, I mean it literally is that simple. I mean in my opinion it is.
- [18:07]
Dave
Self referential and it will work. I mean it's just like, you know, people ask me, look, I'm Not, I do own some eth. I mean I'm not obviously, you know, I'm in the space, I understand it, I, you know, whatever. But it is what it is and you know, someone asked me this morning in a dm, you know why, you know, you know what my thoughts were? My thoughts are simple. It's that ether is, you know, has the potential to, you know, probably 8x from here if it becomes the winner, clear winner. But that is a long way out and a lot of, a lot of. There's a lot to happen and most likely there will be multiple L1s purpose built. I mean the, the Circle news yesterday is really bad for ETH value prop, really bad. It undercuts, it's like, it's like, you know, someone took an ax to it and it doesn't, no one cares about it in the price because trading is all momentum based and supply demand.
- [19:01]
Ryan
Dave, let's not take for granted that everybody knows what you're talking about. Just really quickly Circle announced they're going to create their own layer one called ark. And so the assumption is that obviously they're going to push a lot of the USDC transaction volume to that chain which would potentially minimize the usage of that stablecoin on other chains.
- [19:18]
Dave
I mean, look, will it win? Who knows? I mean I see William giving the thumbs down because, well, we know, you know, William is as close to an East Maxi as we have here. But the truth is that it is not good news because Tom Lee, if anyone who wants to remember, why did he say he was forming an E Treasury company? He said, now I personally took an issue with it, but he said it's because of stablecoins. Well great. So if the largest stablecoin issuer is going to have their own L1 and if not abandon ETH, you know, use it for, maybe for finality. I mean, possibly, I mean we're not sure, but it's not good for the ETH value proposition which would rely upon ETH being staying really, really cheap and therefore not returning value to token holders.
- [20:03]
Ryan
Dave, I don't know if you saw people were literally posting on the timeline yesterday that it was bullish that they were using evm but, but somehow bullish also for Ethereum. It's like how is this bullish for Ethereum when it's not connected in any way at all? Maybe I'm missing something.
- [20:19]
Dave
But you're not missing anything. As I've said many times, you know, the crypto Twitter or Crypto X or whatever the hell we call ourselves now there are so many quote, analysts who literally have no capacity to analyze anything. They, they, it's like all the people in the XRP army who cheer every time Ripple Labs does anything, despite the fact that, that they own no equity in Ripple Labs. And what Ripple Labs is announcing has literally nothing to do with xrp, the token. And this, it's this, this notion. I mean look, there are people in the equity markets equally stupid. Let, let's understand. We've seen multiple times that, you know things that look like Microsoft when Microsoft has news, other tickers go up. I mean people buy the wrong stock. I mean there's all sorts of stupid shit. But let's, let's, let's be clear. What is good for, you know, for an ecosystem is not necessarily good for the token if it doesn't influence supply demand in the token. But people haven't gotten to that point yet. Right now it's just, this is new, let's buy it. It's moving up and I think it's as simple as that. Anyway, that's my contrarian take.
- [21:20]
Ryan
Yeah, Ryan, then Tomer.
- [21:24]
Gary
Two quick thoughts. So when I hear that USDC is going to be highlighting its own Layer one, my immediate thought is well, I'll just use USDT more often than. And then my second thought is well, the EVM does bolster the Ethereum.
- [21:43]
Ryan
Community.
- [21:44]
Gary
Mainly because of the cost or the cross chain ability. So you have things like Layer zero and Wormhole and these other projects that put a lot of infrastructure in place for moving assets freely between EVM systems. So if the Circle layer one is going to be evm, it does open it up to the Ethereum family of chains so you can get a lot of cross chain play and it does make the ecosystem as a whole stronger. But I just don't get why Circle would dilute themselves with a layer one. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but I mean maybe they'll do really well with it and make a lot of money.
- [22:22]
Mateo
Well, my question slash comment was going to be in relation to what you finished your question on, which is it just seems these layer ones that these stablecoin issuers are launching is basically to give themselves clear access to the rails that they're going to be using without any noise, without any fear of update risk or like they'll keep running the version that they're in charge of and their main goal is to run stablecoin on it. So that's where they see the opportunity and better to run your own instance than to run Some decentralized instance that's maybe decentralized and maybe not and may have bugs and may have upgrade challenges and all these other things and, and so everyone's forking off if you will, to, to run their own, to run their own chain and that's not, and that's not good for any pre existing chain in particular especially since stablecoins is so far really the, the sustainable killer app. It's not NFTs, it's not ICOs, it's not utility tokens, it's not anything else, it's just stablecoins. And so everyone can have their own. Like this comes back down to blockchain technology only worked for Bitcoin. Like everybody else is running their own database and they may be running it in a blockchain format for. For the sake of what's required for it to be a stablecoin but when there's one permissioned leader in charge of the whole thing, it's a database.
- [23:48]
Ryan
Yeah Tom, once again I want you to come up as well. What I'll say is kind of as I was unpacking this, I actually wrote a newsletter about it this morning. I don't think this is necessarily good for crypto but if you're a major institution or a company and you actually decide to use stablecoins as payments, imagine sending somebody 500 grand for a payment for a service on ETH and you accidentally send USDT or USDC or send it to a wrong address. There's no customer service line at the Ethereum foundation to help you. So Circle, I think clearly sees an opportunity where institutions want centralization, they want customer service, they want to know that if there's a mistake it'll be fixed and it makes a hell of a lot of sense for them there. I don't think that's great for crypto or decentralization per se, but think about that side of it. You know, you got some 65 year old woman in accounting who's trying to pay people with stablecoins. Go ahead Tom.
- [24:45]
Tom
Yeah, a lot there to unpack. So I think the first thing I'll just take umbrage with is I'm not sure Bitcoin is at more distributed distributed than Ethereum as Dave cited there. Just looking at non zero balances. Ethereum has 110 million, Bitcoin has 55 million unique holders because obviously you could have multiple addresses that.
- [25:10]
Dave
Let's be clear Tom, when I say distributed I'm talking about control over the network, issuance, etc and the validation proof of that, that's what I'm talking about. Talking about, I'm not talking about distributed in terms of holders among the masses.
- [25:25]
Tom
I'm not sure what you mean there because Sailor controls about what, 6% of Bitcoin now? I mean you have the old Satoshi coins, 5%, you have a number of other large holders. I'm not sure that it's any more concentrated than Ethereum is, but I guess we call it maybe a tie. I wouldn't say it's.
- [25:40]
Dave
Yeah, once again, not talking about the asset, talking about the network, talking about nodes and validators, you know, proof of work versus proof of stake. I mean it's a much deeper conversation, but it's not, it's not a statistical thing. And you know, it's like if you ask the question, can you what would it take to break the supply cap on Bitcoin versus what would it take to have new Ethereum issuance? And just answer that question. And if the answer is it's easier to break the supply cap on Bitcoin, then I'm wrong.
- [26:12]
Tom
Yeah, not sure that's true either with large mining pools and a few other things there. I mean the t. The, the amount of eth you hold is directly correlated to how much say you have the network. So that, that is important there. But anyway, potato. So the other part though is the usdc. Yeah, totally agree. If this were to be long term sustainable, that would probably be bearish. Ethereum, but I don't think it is. I mean the reason that people actually use Ethereum and why USDC has been tied to Ethereum is the overall settlement, assurances and guarantees and security of the network. And USDC has the enormous joint venture with Coinbase which has led their distribution to date. And Coinbase has base and that's where a lot of USDC is distributed and through the Coinbase platform which has deep ties to Ethereum. So I think this is sort of a last gasp kind of effort to justify the valuation multiples for Circle. Personally don't really think it's viable long term.
- [27:09]
Dave
Yeah, I think I would love to dig in with that on you, Tom. You know, Scott has probably said at some point in the next month or so, probably when I get back from vacation, I'm gonna start doing long form podcasts. I think that is an interesting topic because I'm not sure I agree with you. In fact, I think I disagree with you. But it is definitely something that needs to be dug into because the only way to justify Circle's valuation with within, you know, Basically five times of this is if they're going to become a dominant player in the infrastructure of stable coins writ large, not just a big stablecoin owner. Right. And so that, that is, that is an alpha point. I mean, if you look, people bought into Circle at, you know, at ridiculous, you know, normal metrics of price times, revenue, etc. On the theory it's going to get as big as tether. But why, when everybody in the world can announce in their own stablecoin. So their only path to. I mean, maybe this is what, maybe this is your point, I don't know. But their only path to being valued, you know, actually more than where they are today, is to be the infrastructure player in addition to one of the biggest issuers. And I assume you agree with that.
- [28:21]
Ryan
Agreed.
- [28:21]
Tom
I think they're enormously overvalued today and this is sort of a last gasp effort to try to backfill into that valuation given currently Coinbase makes more money.
- [28:30]
Ryan
Off USDC and Coinbase. I don't know if you saw this, but this was actually news. Today, Coinbase revives stablecoin bootstrap fund to boost USDC and DeFi. So they're actively still increasing the ways that they're using and exposing to usdc. I also thought Coinbase unlocks millions of assets for Dex trading to everybody, which is really, really interesting as an aside. But Coinbase is not going to let us take away their market share in the amount of money that they're making on it, I would imagine. Or not. Quietly. Mateo.
- [29:07]
James
Yeah, I just wanted to add to this. I don't know if you guys saw, but Circle is not the only one doing this. Stripe also announced that they're developing their own Layer one blockchain. Theirs is going to be a bit more compatible with eth. So I don't know exactly, since they framed it up as a layer one, not a layer two. But there's obviously a trend developing here whether that's an IP grab for them to develop their own Rails. I do think that this spurs more Ethereum competition Long tail, but you know, we'll see how fast they're able to spin up these blockchains and the kind of traction they get versus traditional crypto Rails. But I think, yeah, go ahead.
- [29:49]
Ryan
I was not even there, just their own blockchains, but some of them, there's kind of this mixed approach on how people are approaching stablecoins. Right. You have like, I think, you know, Western Union just said they're exploring one. We know that bank of America is Exploring their own. A lot of these institutions are going to just create their own private walled gardens and others may adopt uscc. So there's kind of just battle for the way this will even be adopted.
- [30:13]
James
No, it's fine. Exactly. And there's clearly whether that's a walled garden. The ability to control, maybe the ability to implement callbacks on transactions and have customer service like Dave was talking about, which is part of these blockchains. We don't know how centralized they're going to be or how decentralized they're going to be and what kind of different utility and actual fundamental changes that they'll make that improvement, improve the user experience. But without a doubt, this is a trend I don't think a lot of people saw coming. Just like with the way that, that bitcoin's been adopted by Banks and BlackRock and now stablecoins kind of coming with these big companies developing their own L1s. I think there's a lot of people who are like, not like this. This is not what I was hoping for. We were hoping for mass adoption of the native to tech, but I think that there's plenty to still lean in here and say that crypto's leading the way. It's just coming about in different. Different innovations that people were probably anticipating.
- [31:22]
Ryan
Since we have Ron here, I want to get our daily dose of what the hell's happening in Washington just as a pivot there.
- [31:30]
Scott
Yeah, I guess it's a little quieter in D.C. right now. Most Congress out session in scenes. Regulators are kind of on a listing tour right now. I think they're in at least secs at San Francisco this week or something. So it's a little quieter. So I didn't have too many updates to share with folks here. I mean, behind the scenes right now, just for folks awareness. It's. There's a. We talked a lot about the genius bill and the upsides there in the markets afterwards. The next thing to look at is the market structure bill and that's sitting in the Senate. It passed the House or a version passed the House. And so the question is it looks like the Senate's going to do their own version and we're going to probably see around mid September what that version looks like, you know, potential winners and losers in that current text. And then they're pretty confident they can move it in the end of fall. So all that of course, is going to be subject to political discourse. There's a lot of it going on. But for right now, it's kind of Quiet. The drafters are working on the new legislation so we're having a lot of those calls right now. But I would say buckle up for more September for some updates from more of a DC but it's going to move really quickly, so get ready. And at least right now prospects are pretty high for market structure. So I'm getting excited.
- [32:37]
Ryan
Hey Ron, what's the rumor on Boheins? Where did he go?
- [32:41]
Scott
I don't wanna. I've heard a couple things. I don't want to spoil any announcements, but from the rumors I'm hearing it's a, it's a pretty large company that many folks are familiar with because he did stress it's a private sector job. So some folks think he's back into politics. But uh, if.
- [32:57]
Ryan
No way. Yeah, dude, he had the greatest trade, like the, the single greatest political career in history became effective. I like, I like the guy a lot. So this is not a criticism, it's a compliment. He came out of absolute nowhere like it wasn't, you know, everyone was who's behind when he came up. He basically made himself famous in five to six months as the crypto guy in Capitol Hill and then immediately monetized it and didn't have to deal with any political bullshit. I mean he dealt with a little.
- [33:23]
Scott
Bit of the B.S. i guess became the genius actor.
- [33:25]
Ryan
Six months, man.
- [33:27]
Scott
Yeah, but I mean he actually ran for Congress, North Carolina, he lost that race. But like, yeah, there was. I mean that's where I first met him was when he was running for that race. But yeah, there was always thoughts of him maybe going back into politics since there's an open North Carolina Senate seat and a bunch of other seats probably opening up. But it looks like it's private sector, it's crypto again. I don't want to get ahead of it if the rumor. Rumors I'm hearing are true. But it's a. The rumor I'm hearing it's pretty large company that everyone knows very well. So we will see what happens. And I don't.
- [33:54]
Ryan
CEO of BlackRock O. Hines. You heard it here first. Larry Fink is retiring. And what do we know about his replacement?
- [34:03]
Scott
Not too much. You know, again, I think there's also a lot of questions kind of what happens next because David Sacks is technically done as well in his advisory role. So it's kind of, you know, at least right now all the action goes back to the Senate. And we've seen as well, Trump gets personally involved in this stuff for better, for worse. But in this, in the Genius case. He actually got across the finish line through his dealmaking. So Trump is definitely going to make a reappearance when the market structure starts boiling up in the fall. So I think that's where kind of the eyes are, is kind of seeing what Trump does. But there's a lot of folks that BO had underneath him as well and they're really solid.
- [34:37]
Ryan
So does that mean that we're not going to have this like the Digital Asset Committee presence in the White House anymore? If they're all timing out already? It was, I don't think I realized it was only meant to be like a six month thing at least for them.
- [34:51]
Scott
Yeah. Just for the figureheads, it's more of a six month thing at least in both could have gone for a long time, but sacks more six months. And that was more of his charter, I believe. But no, they got a whole set of staff actually underneath them. I know plenty of them actually. They're really solid folks from like agencies as well. So overall I'm not concerned at all. But the White House losing focus here. And again, the President cares. So when he cares, everyone in the White House cares. But they got a good staff and they're going to be really busy pretty soon.
- [35:21]
Ryan
Yeah. And I mean, we don't even track the Trump family headlines on crypto anymore, but there seems to be one every week. I mean, huge mining moves. World Liberty Financial, this some sort of treasury company. I mean, he has not only like a fundamental interest in it, but a very strong financial interest in it. Right. So it's not going anywhere.
- [35:40]
Dave
Yeah.
- [35:40]
Scott
The last thing I'll just say is that, you know, we are inching every day closer to November 2026. And that's when especially kind of around when 202026 starts, that's when the partisanship gets really bad. And that's usually when legislation grinds to a halt, even if one party has all three branches here, or at least both the Congress as well, the presidency. So the window is pretty narrow to get a bipartisan bill like market structure done. And that's why they're going to be pushing really hard in the fall. Because if it does get more and more delayed due to other priorities or Democrats trying to link more this to Trump enriching himself, that could delay things because they need 60 votes in the Senate and it's delayed in 2026, the odds of that bill getting signed to law go down dramatically. So this is going to be a big push. But get ready, it's going to be really exciting. But Right now it's pretty low and a lot of it's happening behind the scenes.
- [36:31]
Ryan
Lol. Yeah, I mean this has been the craziest August ever for news, I guess, just not on Capitol Hill. We've shifted from government to back to treasury companies and all the things happening on Wall street, but there's never a dull moment here. Dave, any other topics we need to hit? I know there's going to be a sponsor coming up soon, but is there anything else?
- [36:51]
Dave
The last point from a market's point of view is look at volatility in the traditional markets and it is, it matters. Whenever the VIX starts getting this low, it doesn't get this low and V bounce straight back up. So don't you know, this isn't a panic point, but this is all systems go for risk assets for a period of time and it correlates with August and we will see what our actual direction is going to be in risk assets as we move into the fall. I think that it is. It's important for people to be aware that all of this is happening in crypto as we're at the top of the most recent bitcoin range as Ethereum we've already discussed, you know, I. It feels like the Bitcoin range of 120, you know, this 122 level, which I honestly I can't understand why that matters. But it feels like it's one of those things where if it can get through it, resistance will become support, et cetera to the next one. But it's all within a backdrop. I hate to be maglownish on this, but it's all within a backdrop of very low volatility and a clear risk on environment and that is definitely helping the altcoin season and frankly I would expect it to continue through to September until we start people get back from vacation and we start seeing real news.
- [38:04]
Ryan
Gary?
- [38:07]
Brock
Yeah, just back to the circle thing and then building a stable coin. I don't think it cost a lot of money, right, or time to build a stable coin. To me this would be their way of locking in the user, making it easier. They're going to build rails to lock in the player. Like once you get adoption, you want to keep them right retention.
- [38:28]
Dave
So I think that's what these tools.
- [38:30]
Brock
Am I correct though that it is not really a big lift to launch a stable coin? It doesn't seem like genius, Brock, you.
- [38:38]
Ryan
Just jumped on stage. You know a little something about that. Well, yeah, I mean Brock, why wouldn't they, right?
- [38:45]
Brock
Hello everyone. Grant Good to see everybody. Always grateful to be here. Yes, stable coins. No, it's not difficult to build a stable coin. It's not difficult to build a, a coin. You know, some things are hard, but no, that's not difficult at all. The difficult part is getting any traction. The difficulty is getting exchange integrations, wallet integrations, payment integrations, and people actually trusting and wanting to use your thing at scale. Only a couple of people have ever been able to pull that off in our, our industry's history. I mean the algorithmic ones obviously Terra Luna is long gone after its terror terrorizing of the market maker D things. You have some in the algorithmic area in terms of an asset backed RWA type of stablecoin Allah usdt of which I started and then circle of which my old firm, Blockchain Capital, we were in the early investors that, you know, liquidity begets liquidity. You know, it's, it's almost like Highlander. And there can be only one. What usually you have happen in marketplace businesses where liquidity begets liquidity is you have a dominant player that's number one, you have a, a distant but significant number two, and then everybody else shares the third position and, and very hard usually. And then there's normally not room for number four, five, six, seven. But that's, that's generally market structure, not just for stable coins, but any of these kind of, you know, marketplace type like products.
- [40:22]
Ryan
Yeah, that interesting insight, Gary. I think that confirms exactly what you're saying. And we know why they're doing that. Brock, we got you here actually, and I know you. We have Plank, it looks like came up. Who's behind that Plank account?
- [40:40]
Dion
Hey, my name is Dion. I'm the CEO of Plank Network. Thank you for having me.
- [40:44]
Ryan
Of course. And Brock, you're involved in this as well, correct?
- [40:48]
Brock
Yes, at DNA. We're investors and advising the project.
- [40:54]
Ryan
Get Scott up here.
- [40:55]
Dave
Where is he?
- [40:56]
Ryan
Man doesn't like me anymore. We've got almost the same.
- [41:00]
Brock
Generally I do the public speaking for a reason. Scott's busy working, but funny how that.
- [41:07]
Ryan
Funny, funny how that works. I mean you just, you know, flip over the M and change the E to an A. And Scott and I are the same person, so it's, it's easy. You know, we got Scott Walker. All right, well, let's do.
- [41:16]
Brock
By the way, I did propose a show for Scott to do some content. It would be like crypto cocktail hour. You know, basically having entrepreneurs come pitch him on the back of his yacht in Puerto Rico drinking rum. And then if he doesn't like it. He makes you walk the plank and I'm like, I love it. Show there. There's something there because we make.
- [41:43]
Ryan
He's actually exceptional. Yeah, I know you joke like that. You obviously do the public facing appearances and I made that joke. But he's actually exceptionally smart and an incredible speaker and guest. I love.
- [41:53]
Brock
You know. Yeah, I think that, you know, I, I getting Scott to want to do media is hard, but I pitched him on the idea of a crypto cocktail hour on his yacht because it shows Puerto Rico, you know, drinking, drinking rum, talking deals, and then, you know, you know, if, if you don't like someone and you think they're a scammer, it's a, A slightly different exit than what we do. When you walk out the door at crypto nights.
- [42:16]
Ryan
Yeah, you need to do that. Wait, did you say walk the plank? Is that funny that we have. No, it's perfect. Intended. Intended pun. All right, so listen, let's, let's talk more about Plank and break down what you do. Obviously, Layer zero designed specifically for AI native decentralized services. That's probably confusing for most people. So can you break down in layman's terms diem what that means?
- [42:40]
Dion
Yeah, so that's Plank zero that we're talking about. So our Web three stack consists of a next generation. Yeah. Modular infrastructure stack which is centered around Plank zero and Plank one, where Plank zero is a layer zero protocol for launching heavy high performance compute AI chains, but also high performance compute deep in protocols. And the whole blank zero, the whole layer zero protocol itself basically makes compute completely interoperable inside the ecosystem. And that is currently quite a big problem. Compute providers want to move wherever the demand is. We saw it with liquidity a long time ago. That's why bridges came on. That's why interoperability came into life. And we see right now that compute is really isolated inside ecosystems where not always, not every day, not every hour is there demand for the amount of compute that is sitting inside that ecosystem. And with the different tech stacks and the different agents that are being used to onboard this compute into these ecosystems, it is not always that easy to move it quickly towards another ecosystem. Again, we solved with liquidity as well. So blank0 is here to make compute high performance compute completely interoperable and make. Make sure that compute providers don't even have to worry about the whole protocol itself. Make sure that compute is sent within seconds towards another layer one or another application inside the ecosystem.
- [44:07]
Ryan
Well, forgive me because we joked earlier that when I put My IQ thing in to the Twitter thing, it said I was a 64, so I'm very dumb. So in layman's terms, basically your layer zero is plumbing for other people to build things and the layer one is your purpose built for AI chain, it's EVM compatible and can be used for these specific purposes.
- [44:29]
Dion
Yeah, well, yeah, yeah. Our Plank zero through our Layer zero protocol, which is again Plank zero is for other ecosystems to thrive inside our ecosystem and to make compute interoperable. And then you have plank one, which is our compute native layer one blockchain that currently only holds enterprise grade GPUs, around $40 million currently and which powers our AI cloud and our AI studio, which are, which is our AI cloud computing infrastructure that we offer in mostly in web two because most high performance compute and AI useful AI applications are unfortunately still being built in web two. And Planck one powers that AI computing infrastructure. Yes, yes.
- [45:12]
Ryan
I just want to ask Brock, obviously I think you mentioned DNA lead investors here. You guys don't take that casually. So what kind of was the spark for you and what made you decide to get behind this?
- [45:24]
Brock
Yeah, so we've been very active in the AI side of decentralization. Not everyone and we're big fans of the team and we think that what they're doing is novel in its approach and you know, here to support it. But this is one of the main areas that we're focused on. I think we've deployed roughly $50 million, you know, call it year to date in AI compute. And so, you know, we're excited to be here today to be able to, to share that with all those that are listening to this spaces and, and support one of our portfolio companies.
- [46:02]
Ryan
Perfect. So Jim, what do you want people to know about this? You know, obviously we have this large audience here. Is this for the builders? Is this for your average retail? How are people going to be using these?
- [46:14]
Dion
Yeah, so what I'm trying to do here is collect stakers. So we have been on a private testnet, specifically an enterprise grade testnet and a retail grade testnet for quite a while. What we want to do at first is try to collect like edge computing, like devices a little bit more closer to where the data is established. So for instance, you know, your computer at home, your PC with a GPU in it, and we saw that it didn't really work out. Our vision was three years ago, let's collect all these devices and let's try to utilize the idle computing resources inside of these devices. And we saw quickly my Co founder, worked at Google Cloud. So he saw very quickly, okay, this is not really working out how we want it to work out. Let me explain a little bit. The compute resources currently sitting at people in their gaming PC are not reliable and the quality is not correct as of now with the current state of technology to really monetize it and to offer it to huge Web2 clients on a cloud computing platform. So what we instead did is we thought, okay, let's put this technology that we already developed to collect this computing power on the bookshelf for now and let's wait until the state of the technology globally is going to improve so that we can also onboard retail grade GPUs eventually. Instead we launched our enterprise grade testnet where we only allowed compute for example DNA fund from DeepenX, capital from other enterprise grade GPU operators and we only allowed that compute on our network and we were able to make $1 million in revenue in less than three months on our cloud computing platform. So you need to engage the community somehow because we promised everybody to onboard their retail grade GPUs onto the network and to earn from the AI boom that we are currently experiencing. So instead we developed collateral staking where community members can basically first enter a liquid staking pool where they get LPLank tokens so they get like a first yield there from that dynamic staking pool and then they can use restake or rebase those LPLank tokens into a collateral staking pool to support enterprise grade GPU operators inside our network. So what that means is people don't have to put their GPU that they're using in their gaming PC which they spent a lot of money on onto a network and try to get some emissions and basically utilize their device in these networks and instead purchase tokens or earn them in some way via an airdrop or just purchase them on the exchange and actually contribute to a enterprise grade GPU pool that are being opened up at TGE on our network. So basically people can earn from H100 H2 hundreds. Those are, those are device that are worth 20 to 30 thousand dollars per piece. So now they can earn from real yield generating GPU device. And that is what we're trying to, yeah, trying to, to tell the world in the coming weeks upon until our TGE to to participate in these enterprise grade cost taking pools.
- [49:33]
Ryan
So then I guess tell us a bit more about the token.
- [49:37]
Dion
Yeah, so the token has a couple functions. So we are of course in layer 1 and a layer 0. So the compute payments can be done in Plank. But we see so far that most of the payments that are being done is in usdt, USDC or mostly actually via credit card because you know, we are essentially a utility token which goes up and down. We're not a stable token that you were just talking about. It doesn't have a stable value. So we see that most of the people are actually paying for their GPU compute, for their inferencing, for their training, for their container execution in USD. And we use that 95% of that revenue to create a buyback flow of blank so that we keep the buy pressure on the charts. So that is one of the first utilities of the token. Then we have of course validator incentives on our layer 0. So validators earn plank for securing plank chains on the layer zero protocol. We have the collateral staking which users without GPUs can stake tokens with operators to share rewards. We have the original GPU node incentives of course GPU operators earn Plank as well. Security bonding, ecosystem grants, L1 orchestrations. We have a lot of, of token utilities because we're not only cloud computing infrastructure, but we're also a layer one and we're also a layer zero. So there are quite some interesting utilities of the token. But going into all of them, we're going to be busy here for like 20 minutes.
- [51:10]
Ryan
Generally. Then why are you so heavily focused on this intersection between clearly blockchain and AI? I mean Brock obviously alluded to it, I think, but you clearly have a belief that this is going to be the next big marriage here.
- [51:27]
Dion
Yeah, I would not say that just being transparent here. I don't think that the web 3 AI space is completely going to dominate the web 2 AI space. There need to be a lot of big centralized players that need to fall down for that to happen. Although everybody in crypto always thinks that such things are going to happen. With banking, with, you know, I think with banking, with tokenization, it's really interesting. It's getting really interesting. But with other sectors, I just think, yeah, let's be a little bit realistic. But I do think it's a very interesting sector, you know, with, with, with these and with, with. For the privacy and for more cost efficiency. I think the decentralized AI space is really going somewhere. There are just a couple of things that need to be solved that we need to overcome. But yeah, that's, that's of course with every industry that is emerging in the web 2 or sorry, in the web 3 and blockchain space.
- [52:21]
Ryan
Yeah, I don't know if you want to answer this or Brock you want to kick in, but how important is this is decentralization as AI takes over the world?
- [52:29]
Brock
Well, I think it's, I'm, I'm, you know, I operate from a viewpoint of decentralization and what can be decentralized should be decentralized. But all things lead from centralization to decentralization. Even decentralization centralization projects all start centralized. And so my view is, if you think about the future, do you want a future where Microsoft, Amazon, Google, OpenAI X, no offense, love Elon and love this platform and everything about it, but do we want to live in a future where AI is, is owned by big tech, or do we want to live in a future where we the people end up owning part of that ecosystem and benefit from the trillions of dollars of wealth creation? Clearly anybody investing in crypto wants access to those things and part of it is in the shared wealth creation. The problem you have in call it tech in general and traditional tech and capital structure is that by the time these companies go public, you know, all the terminal value of that business has been captured and the public market is the exit liquidity. You know, the beauty of the decentralized architecture is that we the people have the ability to profit and participate from the products we use. And so I'm a philosophical believer in that. So, you know, that's important for us. I think that that's very much the way that this could go, as I believe should go. But we'll see, right? You know, decentralized projects are just a lot harder, but they have a whole different way of marketing and creating incentive, you know, to attract adoption. And there's more things that are going to be done in AI than you know, I can even envision at this point. I we've incubated 43 AI companies, you know, out of my house.
- [54:23]
Ryan
That's crazy.
- [54:24]
Brock
Putting entrepreneur in residence. Like literally I moved the entrepreneurs into my house so we can just churn out companies, you know. And so basically AI is affecting everything, even more so than, than decentralization or blockchain. So I believe that the marriage of these two movements is important, which is why I'm such a big believer and you know, present here today to talk about our overall thesis. But you know, there's still some challenge, right? Building decentralized systems is harder. And so that's why I think start centralized because it's a lot easier to do that in a controlled environment versus when you try to do it in this architecture. But I think we're here and, you know, it's certainly a category where we're heavily investing and keeping our. Our finger on the pulse because it's in our DNA.
- [55:16]
Dion
Yeah. And that's also for us. Quickly, what Brook is saying as well. Like, there are a couple challenges and starting to centralize this. Yeah, yeah. Most of the time, a lot easier. And that's what we're currently. Or what we have been doing for the last year as well. We have been very selective with GPU operators that we let on the platform. We really did great due diligence to, you know, establish ourselves first in the market and then go decentralized. And I think, you know, in the future, the tech will be ready to literally onboard, like even mobile phones with their computing power into AI systems. And that's really where we want to go as well. There are just a couple challenges that need to overcome first on the hardware side, but eventually, that's the beauty of decentralization. We can walk away from the centralized aspect of it. Yeah. Thank you.
- [56:03]
Ryan
So what else may we have missed here? Before I let you go, what else you want everyone to know?
- [56:09]
Dion
Yeah, our TCE comes up in less than 17 to eight weeks from now, so very interesting. We are very looking forward on how the market is behaving in two months from now. So I'm not sure, Scott, what you think of where the market is going. It's actually a question from me to you. That's where I want to end it. Our TGE is in October, but I really am curious about where you think the market is going to be in two months from now.
- [56:39]
Ryan
I generally think things are ramping up. I mean, it's been a better summer than I think most would have anticipated, and we talk about it here a lot. Seems like there's these incredible tailwinds, and all the things that we've wanted are sort of happening, and we're getting them. And I think your timing would probably be impeccable. I have no idea what the future holds, but I think that you're pretty well positioned here, as would anyone who's doing something fundamentally interesting that might be launching in the coming months.
- [57:07]
Dion
Yeah, 100%. You cannot always time the market. But I do also think that we're in a pretty comfortable position in two months from now. But you never know. No one can really lay its finger on it. Right. So thank you for having me. If there are any questions, people can always drop into our Telegram community or our Discord community, or just drop a comment on our Twitter and we will look at it and answer it thoroughly. Thank you for, for having me. Brooke. Thanks for, thanks for coming and, and assisting me here and yeah, cheers.
- [57:39]
Ryan
Brock, any final thoughts?
- [57:41]
Brock
You know, just look forward to seeing everybody where uh, I guess we're, we're, we should all be in. In Japan, uh, in Singapore together for Token. I won't be making it to webex Japan. Are you guys going to be there in whatever the next week and a half?
- [57:55]
Ryan
Most likely we'll get to Singapore, but.
- [57:58]
Brock
Yeah, DNA will be, will be Korean Blockchain week will be Japan webex. But I, I probably won't make it until Token. But let's have some fun and, and do again what we do. But thanks for having Plank on and let's find more fun things do to do together.
- [58:17]
Ryan
Indeed.
- [58:17]
Ron
Thanks.
- [58:17]
Ryan
DM Brock, thank you so much for showing up, man. Always a pleasure to catch up and hopefully we'll do it as you said in person soon. Everybody else check out Plank. Obviously it's Plank Pl A N C K network. You can see them right above on stage. Give them a follow and you can obviously follow up and get more involved if you're interested in what you heard today. Otherwise we will be back tomorrow for another crypto Town hall. Thank you gentlemen. Thank you all our panelists. Thank you for listening. Bye.
- [58:43]
Dion
Thank you.