Bankless - Ethereum's Strategy to Win Over Wall Street | Joe Lubin & Danny Ryan

Episode Date: July 8, 2025

Recorded live at the Permissionless IV conference, this conversation dives into Ethereum’s strategy to win over Wall Street. Danny Ryan discusses how Etherealize is advising financial institutions to leverage Ethereum’s decentralization, resilience, and credible neutrality, while Joe Lubin explains why ConsenSys is taking a direct approach by accumulating ETH on Sharplink Gaming’s balance sheet, similar to MicroStrategy with Bitcoin. Together, they unpack Ethereum’s strengths, institutional adoption strategies, and what it will take for Ethereum to become the foundation of the next-generation financial system. ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🟠 BINANCE | THE WORLDS #1 CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/binance ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 3:11 Ethereum's Evolution & Challenges 7:54 Regulatory Tensions & SEC Scrutiny 11:02 Ethereum's Resilience Against Regulation 14:47 Bridging TradFi & Decentralization 16:06 Institutional Adoption of Ethereum 17:19 Ethereum's Path Forward 21:51 Building for the Future 23:40 The Call for Problem Solving 24:41 Ethereum's Leadership Dynamics 33:25 Taking Ethereum to Wall Street 35:17 The Future of SBET & Ether ------ RESOURCES Joe Lubin https://x.com/ethereumjoseph Danny Ryan https://x.com/dannyryan Permissionless IV https://blockworks.co/event/permissionless ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

On the podcast today, we're talking to Danny Ryan from Ethereumize and Joseph Lubin from Consensus, who also recently has joined Sharpling Gaming to take Heath into a treasury vehicle on Wall Street. Both of these individuals are doing their own strategy to bring Heath into the light in Wall Street. Danny Ryan and Ethereumize are consulting. They are advising Wall Street companies, working with Wall Street companies to teach them how to work on Ethereum, how to use Ethereum and leverage Ethereum's utility to further their businesses and also preach about ether the asset and how it belongs in Wall Street. And Joseph Lubin is doing the same thing

with a different strategy, with a different direction, just doing it himself by putting ETH on the Sharp Link Gaming balance sheet, just like micro strategy is doing with Bitcoin. This conversation was recorded recently at a permissionless panel that I moderated. And so we are giving it to you here straight on the bankless podcast fee

because I felt like it was a pretty good conversation. It was a modern take, one of the most modern takes about the strategy that each of these two individuals are using to bring ETH into the mainstream and some of the narratives that they use to do so. So let's go here from Danny and Joe right now here on the podcast. In the wild west of Defi, stability and innovation are everything, which is why you should check out Frax Finance.

The protocol revolutionizing stable coins, defy, and Rolex. The core of Frax Finance is FRAXUSD, which is backed by BlackRock's institutional biddle fund. FRAX designed FRAXUSD for besting class yields across DFI, T-bills, and carry trade returns all in one. Just head to Frax.com, then stake it to earn some of the best yields in Defi. Want even more? Bridge your FraxUSD over to the Fraxtal Layer 2 for the same yield plus Fractyl points

and explore Fractyl's diverse layer 2 ecosystem with protocols like Curve, convex, and more, all rewarding early adopters. Frax isn't just a protocol. It's a digital nation, powered by the FXS token and governed by its global community. Acquire FXS through Frax.com or your go-to decks, stake it and help shape Frax Nation's future. Ready to join the forefront of Defi, visit Frax.com now to start earning with FraxUSD and staked fraxUSD. And for bankless listeners, you can use Frax.com slash R slash bankless when bridging to

Fraxel for exclusive fractal perks and boosted rewards. Uniswap is your gateway to a more efficient defy experience. With Uniswap swapping and bridging across 13 chains is simple, fast, and cost effective helping you move value wherever, whenever, whenever. Thanks to deep liquidity on the Uniswap protocol, you'll enjoy minimal price impact on every trade. And now Uniswop v3. takes it even further. Swappers benefit from gas savings on multi-hop swaps and each trading pairs, while liquidity providers can create new pools at 99% lower costs. The best part, you don't have to do anything extra. Each trade is automatically routed through Uniswap X, V2, V3, and V4, so you get the most efficient swap without even thinking about it. Whether you're swapping,

on-ramping, off-ramping, or bridging Uniswop's web app and wallet gives you the tools to unlock DeFi's full potential on Ethereum, base, Arbitrum Unichain, and more. Use Uniswap's web app and wallet for a more efficient way to use defy. Good morning, everyone. Last day of permissionless. I just heard that everyone here owns Eath, which is just a great foundation. We have two people here who have more or less seen at all. Danny Ryan helped ship the merge and really put a lot of the weight of Ethereum on his shoulders in doing so, took a sabbatical right after that and then came back into the conversation. So I'm looking forward to pick his brain about what that phase was like. and also Joseph Lubin, founder of Consensus,

and has also just been through the thick of it, the ups and the ups and then the ups again with Ethereum and now is launching, has launched Espet, the Ethereum version of Micro Strategy. So we're going to get some pretty interesting perspectives to talk about where Ethereum currently is, its arc on its own journey, and where it's going to go next.

Danny, I'll start with you. Like I said, put the weight of Ethereum on your shoulders, help ship the merge. Thank you for that. Well done. And then took a break and then came back. So with that break, that truncated experience that you had with Ethereum, and then when you came back,

what was kind of like your first impressions about the state of Ethereum, the state of operations around Ethereum and its overall direction? Because you were able to come back with a refresh perspective. So what was some of the first thoughts that you had? I guess first of all, the context of the break is maybe relevant. I left for concerted three months last year. And I stepped away on Friday. and on Sunday, the SEC served me.

And so I spent a lot of my break dealing with the government, the government at the time. What was the motivation for the serve? Very unclear, some sort of investigation around the things that I've worked on, building open source protocols. But that ended up getting dropped.

The political tides changed. The EF went through some growth growing pains, some shift in leadership. And so a lot of things happened in that time between me taking some time off mid last year and today. And I think it was really, the way I think about it is I entered at the EF beginning of 2018. I had been trying to find my entry into the Ethereum ecosystem

for about a year and a half at that point. Ayam Yaguchi also became the executive director of the foundation at roughly the same time. During that phase of really 2018 until some point, you know, last year, it was all about the maturation of the protocol, but more importantly, the decentralization. And what I mean more than just the word decentralization

is the resilience of that protocol and the entire ecosystem around it. And I do think that we achieved that. We achieved an incredibly resilient ecosystem from the protocol itself, the dozens of teams working on the protocol, the hundreds of companies, thousands, tens of thousands of individuals collaborating on this thing. Nobody owns it. Nobody can turn it off, et cetera, et cetera.

And I think we achieved that. At the same time, the world grew up around us, right? there's sharks at every layer, fierce competition, and rapidly evolving regulatory regime, a world where people are hungry to adopt these systems, but there's a ton to do to kind of learn about the tradeoffs of these systems. And so I think the Ethereum ecosystem, at that juncture of about mid-last year,

as the regulatory regime was beginning to change, as we're coming up for air with this incredibly resilient technology, the shift was into focus, right? Okay, we have a resilient thing, especially from the protocol layer. How do we refine it? How do we kick it over the edge?

And how do we actually get the world to adopt this thing? From my perspective, like, and most of the banks and institutions that I talk to, Ethereum's by and large miles ahead in terms of the metrics that people really care about.

But it's not, you know, it's not just, it doesn't just happen by default that people adopt the right thing, that people adopt the most secure thing, that people adopt the most resilient thing. So a shift in leadership of the EF, a shift in tone in all core devs in terms of prioritization and shipping, and a shift in the layers of the ecosystem from there. You know, me joining up with the back and starting a theorize and focusing on onboarding the world, you know, the ETH Treasury vehicles, all, like, it's all kind of coming together. and it does seem like across the board,

the Ethereum ecosystem, which is an incredibly resilient machine, is focused heavily on delivering. To answer your question about the subpoena, feels like we're on a totally different timeline now. That's crazy. And thank God for that. But it seemed that Chair Gensler was given a mandate,

probably by Elizabeth Warren, to kill, slow or co-opt? the Ethereum technology and is specifically more focused on Ethereum because Ethereum represented rigorous decentralization and real disintermediation and the banking industry prefers to win a rig game government, especially the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. They prefer big government and granular control of everything. And so Kerr Gensler took his mandate very seriously and we were tracking the situation carefully for a number of years, mostly because they were asking us to produce an enormous number of documents

and, you know, just scrutinizing everything that we were doing. And it appears that they had decided to secretly reclassify Ether as a security, where they had proclaimed that it was a commodity in the past, and the CFTC kept saying that it was a commodity. And so with the secret reclassification, they were, A, trying to pin it on, essentially people who were responsible for the merge. So we, they're trying to pin it on us as promoters and, and EIP writers and builders of the merge.

And obviously, Danny turned ether from a mined commodity into a proof of stake security by, by his actions. And so we ended up deciding to pull the trigger. We were trying to hold back. We thought the ETFs were kind of. and there'd be momentum. We didn't want to harm that. But when we saw that a bunch of researchers

were getting subpoenas, that's when we decided to sue the SEC. I don't know if this conversation has ever been, at least to my knowledge, been made public before. Like, obviously, Joe, we knew that you were going on the offensive with the SEC, but I didn't actually know that it was downstream of people high up in the Ethereum Foundation.

The highest up people in the United States that the SEC could access were actually getting subpoenas. And that's what convinced you at consensus. So like, oh, no, we can't just like passively play nice here. We need to go on the offensive to defend people like Danny to be able to ship open source code. Is this, that's what the calculus was? It's like, oh, we actually need to protect people like Danny. We actually reached out to some people.

I don't know if we reached out to you. And we asked if we could share names, but people weren't really comfortable indicating that they'd received subpoenas. But thank you for sharing that. So go a little bit more because one of the sources, the identified sources of Ethereum's malays, which I think we could talk for hours about the potential sources of Ethereum's malays over the last few years. You're saying one of the sources was actually this, we all know that the rampant nature of Gary Gensler and the SEC, that's not an unfamiliar conversation to anyone here. But I think what might be new is like the level of concertedness that the SEC pointed its ire towards Ethereum.

How specific towards Ethereum do you think the SEC was, or do you think it was more about crypto broadly and just Ethereum happened to represent a large share of that? Well, Ethereum is by far the biggest blockchain ecosystem on the planet, and it's the most threatening. So if you can think of Bitcoin as an uncorrelated digital asset, and I'm actually a little concerned that too much Bitcoin will be placed in custodians and ETS,

and Bitcoin treasury companies, and effectively the decentralization of that protocol will be materially harmed. If Bitcoin has to be in a custodian in order to participate in Bitcoin defy, that's a big problem to me. Projects that are not very decentralized that look more like companies than decentralized protocol ecosystems. I think the U.S. government probably feels fairly comfortable that they know where these people are and they can put pressure on them if they feel the need. Ethereum is in a class by itself. So it is a pretty massive ecosystem, very global, rigorously decentralized,

needs to continue to get increasingly, progressively decentralized, needs to be vigilant. about decentralization, but Ethereum is an existential threat to the current system of the world. And it needs to help the current system of the world transform itself and serve people, companies, and communities better.

Yeah. I think certainly in that era, Ethereum is probably the biggest, you know, the biggest fish they could go after. But I think that was like the highest value thing behind the scenes that they were working on from their perspective. But at the,

at the same time, the things that we've been building towards for a decade in terms of decentralization and resilience. Like, it's not, we didn't build these things to ensure the SEC didn't have a good case. But because we focused on decentralization and resilience, the SEC didn't have a good case. You know, like, it is hard to attack. It is hard to point in say this person or this entity is actually in control of this thing. It looks like it, you know, classic security or something like that.

And that's because it is, in fact, decentralized and resilient. You know, so they didn't bring the case because of the shift in regulatory regime, but I don't think they would have won the case. I don't think they had anything. Anyway. I think you're both alluding to this. The thing that I think a lot of people on Ethereum think is special about Ethereum. Danny, you called Ethereum the most threatening.

Or maybe that was Joe, or maybe that was both of you, honestly. About just, maybe perhaps to the current status quo, Joe talked about like, well, there's a lot of Bitcoin in ETFs right now. There's a lot of Bitcoin inside of a publicly traded company called Micro Strategy. And I remember, I'm forgetting the guest on bankless, but he's kind of an old Tradfai guy who calls this like Bitcoin jazz hands, whereas like really the sharpness around Bitcoin has really been neutered when it's wrapped up inside of the nation state. And what you're, what I'm hearing you talk about, Danny, is like, oh yeah, the decentralization, the permissionlessness of Ethereum keeps it outside of the reins of control of the big bankers,

the funders of Elizabeth Warren, and that is the thing that is threatening to them. And so, Danny, this is also the same notion that you are taking to Wall Street with your work at Ethereumize. So maybe you can bridge that gap for us. Okay, so it's a bit paradoxical. I think there's a certain portion of like the powers that be

that want business as usual, want control and in the way that they expect and have in the past. but at the same time, I'm a trad-fi guy now. I go and talk to banks and finance institutions. Yeah. And I actually had a meeting with the SEC. It was surreal to go from that to the other side.

But anyway, so I talk to these guys. And the ones, actually large portions of these institutions, they're like, no, no, no, I get it. I get decentralization. We get, they use the word credible neutrality. We get impeccable uptime. We get that nobody can turn it off. Because surprising, you know,

believe or not, their lens to the world is counterparty risk and the reduction or elimination of it. And a decentralized and resilient platform represents that. And so when these institutions that are actually thinking about their business case, they're actually thinking about utilizing this technology, which they went from being terrified to utilize it to eager to utilize it over the past 12 months, you know, they actually all of a sudden care about Ethereum's values, care about the things that we've been ensuring exist for the past decade because they don't want a counterparty.

So I'm happy to talk about all the things that I think Ethereum is special about. I think it's one of the big things that draws so many people into this base that no other ecosystem can really recreate in the way that Ethereum has had. Like the multi-client architecture is possible to recreate, actually technically. on that one, but no one seemed to have really done it. Specification. Yeah, a specification, I think, is also very, maybe we could talk about that.

But I also do want to keep on this notion of the criticisms of the arc of Ethereum to make sure that the Ethereum ecosystem doesn't say complacent. And so, Danny, I want to resume a conversation that we were having earlier, where you came back into the Ethereum ecosystem. And I'm assuming you had some takes about how Ethereum needs to operate itself, some changes in organizational structure or just topologically, at the Ethereum Foundation. And then since, since coming back,

those some changes have happened. We've had two new co-EDs at the EF with Tomosh and Shaouet. There has been some sort of like restructuring of talent at the Ethereum Foundation, amongst other things going on. So if you had like a wish list of things that you wanted to have happen in the Ethereum ecosystem globally, how well have we done what you've hoped that we would have done?

And like what is missing as well. Yeah, I, we've built something incredible. but adoption actually changing the world, but don't get that for free. And I think we have to realize that, identify that, and focus. And focus at, like, this is the critical juncture of, you know, the world either onboards onto a decentralized,

permissionless, you know, stratum for the foundation of the next generation of kind of the Internet in our lives, or we don't, right? And it's ours to lose. And so I've seen, especially of the, the past six months, everyone identifying that, realizing it, saying it out loud and focusing. And you see this, I think of the Ethereum Foundation, shifting gears, Tomash. I mean, Shalway has been deeply rooted in kind of the Ethereum Foundation, Ethereum's values,

and kind of can hold the line there. Whereas Tomash is, Tomash is a force, right? He's built a very successful company. He is, you know, shifting in a high gear. at all points and is an incredible leader to kind of layer into and bring a renewed energy to the EF. Moving into all core devs, I think there's a deep shift into focus. For many years, we had focus on, you know, existential focus on we need to ship the merge. We need to shift out of this proof of work environment and a proof of stake. Then there's been a couple of years of

it's, you know, many different things that were set aside during that era, had to kind of be patched and address. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, you know, it's, you know, and everything, but at this point, you know, we're shifted gears into let's focus, let's focus on scale, let's focus on UX. and as you move into outer layers, the

rest of the ecosystem is getting into focus. So I think that there's been a tone shift, a perspective shift, and we're ready to meet the world as it is. So Ethereum from day one has been building for the future.

We use different narratives, they all amount to roughly the same thing. It's the Internet of Value, World Computer, Web 3, the re-decentralization of the web. It's about building this massive decentralized protocol ecosystem to enable all the things on the Internet and all the things on the web to migrate over, over time, and be built differently and better. And so we've been heads down for nearly 10 years. years building layer after enabling layer. We started out, you know, this ship. I don't think we turned the ship around. I think we've been going in the same direction for a long time. We had one engine and one propeller. We needed more power. So we added a whole bunch more engines and more propellers at layer two that required a little bit of adjustment while the ship was moving forward. And so we're really at our broadband moment. And we've been awakened, I think, and re-energized.

We're seeing Bitcoin and Michael Saylor really land their value proposition in mainstream culture. They've done a great job. We saw Solana figure out a strategy and be very aggressive in trying to. to become relevant and successful. And we're seeing other layer ones still trying to find product market fit. But Ethereum kind of knows what it is. It's the next generation worldwide web. It's the substrate for the next generation more decentralized economy.

And we are now horizontally and vertically scalable. And we can increase that infinitely over time. We are affordable, block spaces, cheap, we're usable. You know, user interfaces are pretty good now. They're going to be amazing when they are aided by AIs so that you can type into your user interface or your wallet, some sort of intent and have a solver network. So I'd solve that for you or satisfy that request for you.

In the United States, it's now legal to be a blockchain company where it secretly was illegal for quite a while and companies like ours spent just a giant amount of money fighting the government. So we are about to see what we need are users and we need applications

to pull in users. And so we need companies and major financial institutions are all just chomping at the bit to get involved. They're figuring out how to put tokens on their balance sheets. They are figuring out

how to issue tokens, issue stable coins. They're figuring out how to use DeFi. So these are some real-world assets. These are some early use cases, but we also need builders, entrepreneurs, coming from the traditional economy

or from Web 2 to start building of buy-in for the community because that's what Web 3 primos enable you to do rather than building in an adversarial relationship with your user as the traditional economy often does and as Web 2 has been doing. The thing I want to say is definitely the Ethereum ecosystem is very good at building infrastructure. Like very good at building core protocol, very good at building L2s, very good at building advanced cryptographic techniques to control and operate and exist in these environments. But what we really need to do today as the regulatory specter has been lifted and the world is actually clamoring to use these things is we need to solve problems.

We need to see what are the problems in existing finance? What are the problems with the internet today? What are the problems? How can we make users' lives better and actually build the products and the protocols on top of this infrastructure for the world? And I think that's going to be the make or break for Ethereum today is we've built incredible infrastructure. We have incredible infrastructure and we need to be solving real problems with it. We need to be solving problems. And we need to be talking to our users, whether they're enterprises or just consumers.

I feel like Ethereum is similar to Google with respect to Google's AI developments and practice. For years, it was just so far ahead of everybody. It had the best and the brightest researchers. It sat on the technology. It didn't want to cannibalize its business. It didn't want to take the risks of being sued because it had a lot to lose. along comes open AI and they don't have anything to lose and they grab a few researchers,

they build something remarkable. They don't care that this hallucinating AI is advising people to leave their wives and things like that. They are disruptors and they did a brilliant job. That woke Google up, just like Solana and Bitcoin woke up Ethereum and Google is now putting out the best technology,

in my opinion, on AI. They got their shit together. Ethereum got it shut together. The Ethereum Foundation is firing on all cylinders now, and there's just organic excitement return to the ecosystem. Imagine if your checking account and defy wallet finally spoke the same language. That's Mantle Banking, an all-in-one fiat and crypto account.

It lets you save, spend, and invest all from one dashboard. Swipe for coffee, stake ME3 yield, or even use virtual cards for payments through Apple Pay. So it feels Web 2 simple, yet stays Web 3 sovereign. For allocators, meet Mantle Index 4. the S&P 500 of crypto. A tokenized institutional grade fund ceded with $400 million from the Mantle treasury

and balance across Bitcoin Ether's soul and yield enhanced stables. One asset, broad exposure, pure defy composability. The momentum is real. ME faults, FBT bridges, and a $2.4 billion community treasury are all powering the next phase of on-chain finance. Mantle brings real-world access,

yield, and utility to digital assets. Ready for the next era of on-chain finance that actually belongs in 2025? Explore Mantle at Mantle.xyz or follow Mantle underscore official. Mantle, bridging tradfi and defy so you don't have to. Binance is the world's number one crypto exchange.

Over 275 million users already trust their world-class security. Binance makes starting crypto as simple as it should be, whether it's learning about crypto on Binance Academy or browsing hundreds of assets and viewing your newly created portfolio in a clear, easy-to-track dashboard. Binance helps you go at your own pace. For hardcore traders, Binance Pro opens up industry-leading services

for trading professionals, with fully bespoke trading products, along with a suite of white-gloved services for VIP and institutional clients. Need support? 24-7 customer service is on hand whenever you need it, and with some of the lowest fees and deep-list liquidity in the market, is no surprise why over 275 million users trust Binance for everything crypto.

Download Binance today and get started in minutes. Binance is not available in certain countries, including the United States. Check its terms for more information. I want to take this opportunity to talk about something that I don't think is frequently discussed when it comes to. to Ethereum's operational leadership. And it's because I think a lot of people respect Vitalik Uterin to the highest degree,

probably one of the most beloved people in the crypto ecosystem, which is a hard, hard title to access. Also the most hated. Also, yeah, well, perhaps by some big pointers, but I'm not going to validate that opinion. And, you know, Vitalik, you know, co-founder of Ethereum and also has the leadership seat of the Ethereum Foundation.

three, but I think Vitalik really kind of commands what the Ethereum Foundation truly does. And really in decentralized ecosystems, nonetheless, like culture is really set from the top. And in some, in 2021 about, you know, give or take maybe 2022, something in the crypto ecosystem kind of flipped from being like research oriented to it was time to become product oriented. And as Danny said, Ethereum really likes to ship infrastructure. And I think in a moment where Ethereum really needed to focus, which is now what we are doing in 2024 and 2025. I think the juxtaposition between what Ethereum needed the most and what Vitalik Buteran likes to do was symbolized when he wrote these six blog posts called possible futures of Ethereum. And then he talked about six different

possible outcomes for Ethereum, where in my mind, in that moment of time, Ethereum needed a leader to say, this is the future that we are going to. Of the six, here's the one that we're going to. Of the six, here's the one that we're going to do, and we are going to straight shot for that. And now, I don't want to, you know, speak badly about Vitalik. He is the reason why crypto has so much of the ethos that it has today, and I think we owe him just lifetimes of debt for how he has stewarded, not just Ethereum, but crypto in general. And also to some degree, he has passed on the leadership to people like Tamash and Choway. But nonetheless, he still occupies the top seat and also loves to not actually take.

take direct control over the rain. So he's in the leadership position without taking on an operational excellence role inside of the Ethereum ecosystem. And in my mind, that's one of the reasons why it has taken so long to turn this big ship around. Danny, that's my take. I'm wondering if I can get your reflections or thoughts or anything you'd like to add. Yeah.

So I, one, Metallic's personality is such that, you know, owning, controlling, manipulating from high level this thing is not what he wants to do. But from a strategic standpoint, I think he recognized early on that that's not how you build towards a resilient infrastructure, a resilient ecosystem. And so he's very purposefully not controlled this thing. And only over the years does he chime in with philosophy, potential direction. And only very rarely does he say, this is definitely what should happen. he still has certainly like very high level of kind of respect in that when he does utilize that component of his voice it is listened to but that's just not where we're going to get out of Vitalik and that's not honestly what we need from Vitalik and one of I joined up with Vecke earlier this year to co-found Ethereumize and one of the things that I wanted to do is just to show that the Ethereum Foundation only does so much they have boundaries as to like what they operate in

what types of things they're going to engage in. And then there's this whole ring of activity that we all should be doing. We all should be accomplishing, you know, whether that's through companies, foundations, grants, et cetera. And, you know, so one of the things that we want to do in a theorize is operate in part of this ring where otherwise there was just kind of a vacuum. Like, yes, let's go show up and onboard Wall Street. Yes, let's go talk to the government, you know, because, but Alex's not going to do that.

That's not what, that's not what very early on he decided. was the ethos of the sphere of control that he nor the foundation should have. And because of that, I think we have a much more resilient thing. But because of that, we also have, I think we had this window of time where there's, there ends up being, you know, the sphere of activity, the Ethereum ecosystem should be engaged in and accomplishing in. But it's kind of this chilling effect. Because of Italic does exist. Because the Ethereum Foundation does exist. There's this whole host of activity where it's like, well, somebody else will probably do it.

It's like, no, we need to step in and make sure this stuff happens. So I don't think I have anything bad to say about Vitalik. I've known him personally for many years. I think he's like literally brilliant and has the strongest moral compass of maybe anyone I've ever met. And we just need to realize the type of person that he is in relation to this, and there's a limit to it. Yeah. So I think the Ethereum Foundation has been appropriate for the different phase. of development of the ecosystem since the start.

There are certainly some peccadillos that you could point at, some periods where things didn't move quite as aggressively or as quickly as we would all like to see. But it's pretty hard to take millennia of top-down command and control and build an architecture to change the way trust were in the system. Vitalik has been the right kind of leader since the start. He, you know, tremendous integrity. He set the tone for the Ethereum Foundation and kind of defined the ethos of the Ethereum ecosystem. By example, he doesn't lead by command and control.

He leads by example and making suggestions and influencing people based on merits. He, Ethereum would not have been successful. if it had a different kind of leader. A theorem would not have been successful if it was a company that took venture capital money. Vitalik was rust into a position where there was just way too much responsibility on the shoulders of a very young individual

and he responded unbelievably well. So we would not be here if we had different kind of leadership and we should note that maybe a year ago, Vitalik and Ayako and people in the EF started to recognize that maybe some things did have to change and maybe they took too long to make those changes, but I think the changes that they made internally and the organic shifts that we've seen in the ecosystem have put us on course, back on course. Both of you guys have your own individual efforts taking Ethereum to

Wall Street, taking it to Tradfied, Danny with Ethereumized and just actually straight up talking to them and Joe with a strategic bet on Ethereum. Esbet had a pretty like rocky, volatile start out of the gate and then that was meant with a bunch of vitriol on Twitter from people who I think are really aligned with

the anti-Etherium crowd. Maybe Joe, you can kind of comment on just like the recent history of, yeah, which one, yeah. Maybe just comment on just like the recent history of ESB and then any plans to be buying more ETH? Yeah. specifically how much? A very large amount.

So putting it into a sort of big picture, we're essentially at the end of a super cycle, an 80-year debt and generational super cycle. The U.S. government is paying about 25% of its budget in interest expenses, more than military expenses. Other countries are in worse shape. The Trump administration came in and recognized that we needed to reformat certain systems in the world,

reformat trade relationships, re-format military relationships. The legislators in the U.S. just decided that austerity was un-American, and so we can't really reduce expenses in government easily. Scott Bessent took that cue and decided that, hey, we're just going to grow our way out of this mess. And what that means to me is that legislators are going to enact laws that enable our industry to have certainty and to flourish. And their government and major corporations are going to be the wind in our sales as our ecosystem comes into mainstream relevance. What we've seen, so that's a sort of backdrop. Michael Saylor did something really brilliant because he recognized that, hey, the value of the U.S. dollar and treasuries are going to harm his business and make it harder for them to be profitable and to survive, really.

And so he needed to find a better capital asset for his balance sheet. Eventually, he settled on Bitcoin, and he's done some really brilliant things. others are following in Bitcoin, in Solana, in Ether and Ethereum. And what is going on right now, in my opinion, is that the U.S. needs to maintain primacy. It needs the U.S. dollar to maintain primacy, but it also needs to weaken the U.S. dollar in order to keep the U.S. dollar strong in a political sense, stable coins present a tremendous answer. So we can U.S. dollarize the entire world pretty inexpensively, the U.S. can replace its lenders with our ecosystem essentially, providers of stable coins, and all of that is going to be built on top of a new kind of

high-powered money. So the U.S. is going to have less trust and less political power in the world in terms of the monetary regime. But what I believe we're seeing is, is a massive race to accumulate high-powered money. And the highest-powered money right now is ether and Bitcoin because they're permissionless and uncensurable. So we are doing our part, and we're going to continually raise money and accumulate ether. We're already fully staked.

We're going to do some restaking and some defy, and we're going to enable people, consumers, and institutions to access the best professional asset managers in the Ethereum ecosystem that we're working with to grow their exposure to ether even more than they can be exposed to it by holding ether alone. That's all the time that we have,

but I want to ask Joe, one very last quick question. Right now, to my understanding, ESBET has half a billion dollars worth of ether in its treasury. Will it have over $1 billion by the end of the year? I hope so I hope much more than that actually Do Danny thank you guys for joining me on stage today

Appreciate it