Bankless - PREMIUM - Preston Van Loon, Uma Roy, DeFi Dave | David's Personal Research

Episode Date: September 13, 2025

🏴 Access all episodes with Citizenship 🏴 https://www.bankless.com/premium —— In this bonus episode of the Bankless podcast, we highlight insights from three guests featured in the Bankless premium feed. Uma Roy from Succinct discusses the Succinct Prover Network's role in enhancing Ethereum's transaction capabilities. Preston Van Loon outlines the upcoming hard forks Fusaka and Glamsterdam, along with essential privacy innovations. DeFi pioneer Dave from CapMoney presents a novel stablecoin model that combines yield-generating strategies with risk mitigation. Join us for a glimpse into the innovative advancements shaping the crypto world! —— TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 1:28 Uma Roy’s Insights on Succinct Prover Network 7:50 Ethereum Roadmap with Preston Van Loon 14:30 DeFi Innovations with DeFi Dave 20:11 Conclusion and Call to Action —— Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Hey, Bankless Nation, we got some extra weekend content for you here on the Bankless free RSS feed. On this episode, you're going to hear a compilation from three different guests from three different episodes that all got released on the Bankless Premium RSS feed. Uma Roy from Sysht, Ethereum CoreDev Preston Banlune, and Defy Dave from Cap Money, a new stablecoin startup that just released a few weeks ago. But you're not going to hear the whole episodes, just five to eight minute sections that we've cut out from each full-length episode, splice them together, just to give you a preview, a taste of what is found, on the bankless premium RSS feed. The premium RSS feed is kind of like where I do a lot of my own just personal research. I have the luxury of when I want to learn something about crypto, I can pull in the right guest to ask them whatever it is I want to know.

And of course, I record these conversations and I put them on the premium RSS feed. So people on the bankless journey can get the same knowledge that I get when I talk to interesting people doing interesting things in crypto. So if you like what you're about to hear and you want to hear more of it, there is a link in the show notes so you can go and get access to the bankless premium feed. where you can hear all of these bonus episodes and, of course, all the normal bankless episodes that you get on the free feed,

but you also get them ad free. So let's go here from Uma Roy from succinct, Preston from Ethereum, and Dify Day from Cap, in that order right now. There's a blog that you guys released. I want to read a line from the blog saying the succinct Prover Network is a decentralized marketplace connecting applications needing proofs

with a global network of Provers. I think this is like a demand side and the supply side. Who compete on cost and performance, creating the infrastructure backbone that processes billions of proofs every single day. Can you talk about that supply and demand side? So you have the demand side of people who just need proofs, and then you have the supply side of the people creating the proofs. Who are the people that need proofs?

And then how does that actually go through the succinct network and get actually processed by the supply side? Yeah. So we've talked a lot about SP1, which is kind of like the core technology that's like the tech platform that enables all this stuff. And then there's a succinct network, which is how people actually like use something like SP1.

So yeah, to talk about who the users are, I would say that right now there's three major buckets or categories. One is the ZK roll-ups and L-2s. So these are people like the optimisms, the bases, the arbitrams of the world. Vitalik, I don't know if you saw the Vitalik tweet where he was like, guys, ZK needs to be a top priority, even above stage two.

So yeah, basically every roll-up will be a ZK roll-up. They're huge consumers of proofs, and they get a lot of benefits. benefits from it, like, instant, or close to instant finality instead of waiting seven days, et cetera, et cetera. Right. And cheaper transactions, right? So it's just a margin, it benefits their margins.

I would say it helps, like, instead of having capital locked, by making capital locked up for a shorter amount of time, it helps, like, make the cost of interop a lot cheaper. Okay. The other big consumer that I think is really, really exciting, especially given Ethereum's resurgence, I saw you guys have that all time. accounta, is Ethereum the L1 itself. Right.

So, like, especially as Ethereum, I think, has gone all in being this, like, institutional chain, asset issuance on the L1. They're like, we really need to scale the L1. But they still want to keep it decentralized and verifiable. And so the way they're going to kind of like square that circle and scale it while still keeping it verifiable is this concept of real-time proving, where you can prove Ethereum blocks in less than 12 seconds, and then people all around the world can verify those proofs instead of having to

re-execute transaction. And this has always been on the Ethereum roadmap. This has been, like, the theoretical endgame. Now we are actually starting to get to the point where, like, you can actually see that endgame on the horizon, especially with the productization and launch of platforms like succinct. Yeah, exactly. It's just proving that the ZK Tech is actually here and ready and being a dog. Yeah, yeah. And like, you can do this today. I mean, yeah, I think like Justin and all those people had thought this would be like five, 10 years out. And then I think we all kind of like surprise them with how fast it came. And then they're like, oh, that's awesome. okay, let's like actually make this a lot more concrete now that we have like concrete proof points and evidence that we can take this to market ASAP.

So there's a theorem L1, there's L2s, and then there's these like verifiable exchanges. I think like, you know, the Clubs thing has been super popular, on-chain order books, especially with like hyperliquid. And a lot of builders are kind of building ZK versions of that where you have a verifiable on-chain order book for perps or spot or whatever. and ZK proving the execution of those. So that's the supply side. And I think one thing... And those are just the categories of the customers that you're seeing today,

but in truth, anyone can be a customer. Those are just the themes that you're identifying. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, those are really broad themes. Like, roll-ups, I mean, there's, like, a lot of roll-ups on Ethereum. Like, there's, like, the Robin Hoods, like, you know, the Crackens base. There's also Arb Mainnet.

There's also, like, the more crypto-native stuff. So that's, like, a very big category. Right. And the exchange stuff is obviously, I mean, that's the hugest PMF application in crypto. Yeah. So yeah, those are the big themes. I think one thing I want to highlight that I would love to convince people of is like, I think a lot of people think, oh, where's like the demand for ZK?

Or even in crypto infra in general, it's like, oh, we've built all this infra, but where's the demand? And actually, if you run the numbers, like the demand is super real and also very, very large. So for example, even if you do like some back of the envelope math and I was like doing it with my team, like a few days ago, we're like, okay, if 30 minutes roll-ups today, I think can do like 400 TPS. With Fusaka, which is like the next upgrade, they're basically 10xing that to 4,000 TPS. If you imagine each transaction,

today the average transaction on base costs like one to two cents. Imagine one-tenth of that, like one-tenth of a cent goes for, to pay for proving. Seems reasonable. If you multiply out those numbers, like 4,000 TPS, one-t of a cent per transaction times, you know, 24 hours in a day through 65 days in a year, that ends up being like $100 million of proving demand. So, I mean, that's a lot.

Right. And same with the exchange. And we also expect roll-ups to grow in both quantity and scale. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's just today. Like 4,000 TPS is what like Solana does today. And like they're increasing. We're all increasing.

You know, Fusaka's like going to come in November. Like there's going to be hard forks next year too. So that's just the demand today, I think, is actually really big and probably a lot bigger than people expect. So the demand side, I think, is actually very rich, even just within blockchains, within roll-ups, within these applications. To give me, like, another number, Ethereum L1 today, I think, spends, like, $4 to $5 billion in issuance to, like, the validators. Now, if you imagine that proving is going to become as core of a part of the system as, like, validating, And imagine, okay, like, there has been kind of some talk about maybe we should redirect some of these admissions and incentives to the provers. Okay, let's imagine you take 10% of that.

10% of, like, $5 billion is $500 million, which is also a lot of money. So I think these markets, especially on this demand side, are probably a lot bigger than people imagine. And I think even our team, like, we see that where we're always, like, overwhelmed with, like, the EF asking us, like, oh, hey, can you, like, please improve this? like all these roll-ups being like, oh, we want to deploy it. And like, you know, we have to like help these people out. Mm-hmm. So that's been like pretty exciting. Um, on the supply side, um, the people who are generating the proofs are these like

prover entities all across the world. So where did they come from? How did they exist in the first place? Yeah. So it's actually really interesting. And with the network going live, we've, um, we now have a lot more signal on that. Because like for a while. Next up, you're going to hear from Preston Van Loon as.

we talk about the short and medium-term Ethereum roadmap. There are two Ethereum hardforks on the horizon. Fusaka, maybe at the end of this year and Glamsterdam, which will come roughly six months after Fusaka. We go through all the important updates in each of those, and then we also look a little further out after that, which is what you will hear in this bit right here. We've talked about Fusaka.

We've talked about Clamsterdam. There are some other EIPs that are kind of hanging around the air. I know like increasing or decreasing block times is one of them. What are some other just like big namey, IPs that maybe haven't landed in any fork specifically that are still worth elevating. If you're seeing block times is really, or slot times is really, really interesting. I've actually been working on that for a few months. It's kind of cool to see, like, it working, like, it works the same way that the BPO schedule

works. So you can just say, like, we can have a fork and progressively over, like, I like to say six months. So we can just reduce the slot time by one. second every month for six spots. Then we're at six months. So it kind of like ramps up slowly. That's really cool. I think the next like really big things are going to be like three slot finality or single slot finality because not only will you see an impact with the shorter block times, slot times, but finality will become shorter and shorter, which is really important for like L2s.

And just like anything, like having proof of stake finality is really important thing for Ethereum. beyond that, the next, like, really big stuff I want to see are some privacy tech, right? Like, to have encrypted mint pools or, like, actually private transactions. Like, we've been talking a lot about tornado cash recently, and it would be nice to have, like, something in protocol that's, enables you to send money anonymously. Like, that's really the whole point. And it's saying being a public ledger has a lot of benefits, but it has the drawbacks of, like, I can, you know, if I connect the wrong dots,

I've just exposed everything I have to everybody. And that's not always desired. So I'll be for some privacy solutions that are built into Ethereum soon. Now, the hard work after Glamsterdam, I don't think has a name. Is that when we would start to think about the reasonable inclusion of shorter slot times?

I think so, right? Some people wanted it in Glamsterdam. We're already working on now. said I've been working it for a couple months. So I expect, and I would probably support that for inclusion for what I was like H star and I was not, I know it was named for it yet, but G, then H, right? So, yeah. In the happy case, how fast do you think slot times could get in H star, including the

over the ramping up? You talked about six seconds. Is that like your happy case? Yeah, I think so. That's like a, that's a two X, right? like we would get twice as many blocks per day and I think that's like feasible for me net

I like to see it go smaller like in my local testing I go down to one second and it doesn't fall apart but that's like that's like on my all computer I think the you know in the next like

let's just say like five years I think it would be it would be reasonable to try to get down to one second um it's fast it is fast I don't know

how possible it would be with a network and like the topology of the way Ethereum works but it would be it would be really cool at least to six seconds and like a three slot

finality you go from finality being every six minutes to now it's like every 18 seconds so that's like a really really huge improvement and it's already a massive order of magnitude upgrade yeah and with the like

when you zoom out and you look at the roll up centric roadmap right where we get scaling from L2s you can go if you want to go really, really fast, or you have a need to go really, really fast. Like, I need to get my transaction in 100 milliseconds. There are networks for that that are within the

Ethereum ecosystem. And when we... Like espresso? Is that espresso? I don't know any specific project, but maybe espresso will go that fast. And then when you get this, like, there's a big unlock that I'm hoping for where

the layer two space becomes homogenous. You have this, like, cross-L2 compatibility, where I can just like, swathe. between things and I'm not having to like an in wallet you X improved so I don't have like adding all these networks I have like a dozen networks on my wallet and like

it dusty even everywhere I just it just feels like one big account that I can swap between things really quickly one big ledger exactly one big global computer global computer and then then you're really close to that sharding vision where we had

the idea where we split Ethereum a bunch of chains and each of them could be like they could be app chains in the sense they prioritize different things that's really what like this homogenous L2 layer is going to be looking like so when we get that like that's the

UX part when we get the homogenous layer there like cross compatibility with those you can transact between any L2 really quickly that's you know you won't need one second box on it there because you can go there and they and the start of that story happens around H-star, which, these are my words,

will happen middle of 2027. If we, if Glamsterdamma happens end of 2026, H-star will happen middle of 2027, which I think free people will feel like a long time from now because we're halfway through 2025, so that's like two years. But also, I don't know, I've been in Ethereum for eight years now. I think you've been in Ethereum nine or nine or maybe even all of them.

At some point, two years is just going to come very fast. Yeah. Two years is not far away. It won't feel like that long. It goes pretty quickly. And at the rate that we're accelerating, right, like two big fours in one year is kind huge. So I mean, it's realistic that, you know, if things go well with Clansfordam, that each star is, like,

well-scoped, inspect and is, like, in final testing in the same year in 2026. So it could be like a Q1, Q2, 27, you know, being optimistic, or maybe faster. I don't know because we're, like I said, we're going on right now. So we want to go fast. We want to go fast. Preston, I love it. This is really cool. It's always an exciting time to be in Ethereum.

All right, that was Preston. Now we're going to hear from Defi, Dave, from Cap Money, which is one of the cooler, I think, Defi app projects that has released in recent memory. It's similar to Athena in a way in which an external yield source flows back into growing the supply of a collateralized table coin. But unlike Athena, the yield opportunity is open-ended. Whereas Athena is just like the basis trade, which is a very good trade, but it's just one single possible trade.

Cap money is an open-ended possibility. It could be anything. And so Defi Dave walks me through how the protocol works and then we dive into the nuances and the details afterwards. So here we go. Let me start with asking the big question. What is cap money? You are part of a startup called Cap. Built on MegaEath, part of the Mega Mafia.

Tell me about it. What's its deal? Yes. So Cap, we are a stable coin built on Ethereum, and we are backed by your standard reserve collateral, so UCCC, PYUSD. And we basically use resakers, so re-stakers like etherfi, Renzo, and they basically allocate the collateral to different yield generators. And think of these as market makers, proprietary trading firms, and they generate on yield on behalf of the protocol. So I think the history of stablecoins, and I've been in this industry for eight years, stable coins for five years. We've seen this kind of trend from stable coins from experimentation to now coming to Trapy and Wall Street.

And I think it has gone from, oh, like, let's make the most decentralized stablecoin ever to like, oh, wait, we need to make a stable coin that is, first of all, safe for users and consistently generates yield. And so Cap, we're a team of D5 veterans like, you know, I contributed to FRAX. I was a part of DeNaro Redacted. I've been in this industry for a while. Our founders from Che Dow, who built a stable coin, we have all the beefy finance devs. So we've seen a lot of shit. We've seen, we've seen DPEGs, we've seen bridge hacks. We've seen it all.

And we were like, we need to make a stable coin that actually can scale to millions, if not billions of users. And so with CAP, we crazy thought of this three-prong marketplace on how the whole CAPS system works. And so you have users that mince our stablecoin, CUSD, and they minted like I said, UOSDC, PYUSD, soon, Benji, Biddle, all that fun stuff. We have our operators who are yield generators and these are regulated Wall Street firms. So think IMC trading, Susquehanna Crypto, Amber Group, flow traders, all that. And then we have restakers. And restakers basically guarantee and underwrite the entire protocol. And so how it works is

the operators and restakers, so come to some sort of an agreement off-chain. The operators will go and say like, hey, this is who we are, this is our strategy, this is our reputation. The restakers, they'll go do their due diligence. They'll make sure that, you know, everything's kosher. And then once they feel comfortable, they'll be like, okay, we will delegate our restate capital to you. And that is like, you know, you're locked teeth, your LRTs, all that fun stuff. So they delegate that to the operator and that access collateral for the operator to access

the cap protocol. So then the operator, they have the delegation. They access the protocol. they access the USC, P-Y-U-S-D, all that stuff. And they go out and they do that strategy. So that strategy could be on-chain, off-chain, its own proprietary strategy. We don't know what it is.

Open-ended, open-ended strategy. Open-ended, exactly. And then they go back. They pay back the protocol and the users. They pay premium fees to the restaker. And here's the kicker, David. All the capital that they keep, they make for themselves. So they basically have a way to grow their book at no cost of capital,

which is to any yield generator and operator, that's music to their ears. That's all they want to hear. So they love it for that reason. Restakers love it because it turns out the PMF for restaking is yield. They have a consistent way to generate yield for their restaked capital. And then users love it for two reasons. One, they're 100% protected from downside risk. Because remember, because of the restaker, they delegate to the operator and the operator were to mess up in any way because that does happen. It's the restaker. They get slashed and the capital that gets slashed gets sold into, to whatever the stable collateral is to back the protocol.

The restaker puts up the capital also takes the risk, also gets some reward. Yeah. And then the user, the stable coin holder, which is the user in the system, is protected. Exactly. So instead of the user holding the bag, which we've seen all too often,

it's the restaker taking the risk and getting rewarded for it on behalf of the user. So users are 100% protected from downside risk. And the second reason is I like to call a cap the infinite campus for yield. So instead of just, you know, one strategy, which, you know, many of these stable coins out today, they're really just glorify tokenized hedge funds. Let's be real.

It's like one strategy. They're doing one thing. It's the team deciding it. And that can only scale so much. But with CAP, you have different operators competing to beat the hurdle rate. And maybe some of them are better in a bull market. Some are better in a bear market. Maybe some of them have an opportunity they see for a day, a week, a month, a longer.

It doesn't matter. But they can basically plug. in and out of the system, how they see feet fit, where they see opportunities. And in this method, this cap can scale infinitely greater than any stablecoin before. It's really the first of its kind of stablecoin. We actually wrote about this. And if you go on our blog, and this is actually published in Stanford crypto, Type 3 stablecoins. Cap is the first type 3 stable coin, which is basically what I just described.

Okay, so there was a lot there. Yeah, I think you kind of just did a broad stroke of the whole project. Now I kind of want to go back through and let's zoom in on each of these individual components. Maybe let's just kind of start with that open-ended yield conversation. All right, bankless listeners, I hope you enjoyed the bits of content that you heard just now. While bankless is the number one podcast in crypto,

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