Bankless - ROLLUP: 2025 Crypto Meta & Predictions | ETH Roadmap Updates | DEX's Hit All Time High | Vitalik Adopts Moo Deng?

Episode Date: January 3, 2025

This week’s rollup kicks off our 5th year with exciting updates! We dive into our top 10 predictions for 2025, from AI-driven crypto market surges to ETH hitting $15K. DeFi faces new challenges with the IRS’s rule to KYC all “DeFi brokers” by 2027, while Ethereum’s “blobs” dominate as the top ETH burners. DEX volumes soared to record highs in December, and Do Kwon’s extradition to the U.S. moves forward. On a lighter note, Vitalik Buterin adopted a memecoin-inspired pygmy hippo! 🚀 Don’t miss our market updates and insights on what’s next for Ethereum this year. ------ 📣The Rodman Law Group | Best Crypto Law Firm  https://bankless.cc/RodmanLaw ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙 FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax  🦄UNISWAP | BUG BOUNTY PROGRAM https://bankless.cc/Uniswap-Bug-Bounty  🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle  ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  🌐 CELO | BUILD TOGETHER AND PROSPER https://bankless.cc/Celo  ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/base:0x4be6cd4d402fed49eb2de95fbc8e737e8ffd3e7f/6?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 00:00 Welcome To 2025 04:42 MARKETS https://farside.co.uk/?p=1518  05:55 ETF Flows https://x.com/Cointelegraph/status/1874342291114008989  https://x.com/nategeraci/status/1872415447276257654  10:07 Movers Of The Week https://imgur.com/poIQakM  https://x.com/_kaitoai/status/1874830476189565343  12:40 L2 Update https://imgur.com/EC5mjnT  https://imgur.com/BsK26dr  https://x.com/smyyguy/status/1873928354661085362  15:57 Blobs Are Burning https://imgur.com/BsK26dr https://x.com/smyyguy/status/1873928354661085362  17:13 Record DEX Volume https://defillama.com/dexs  21:11 10 Predictions for 2025 https://x.com/pythianism/status/1869522809212543204  https://x.com/EffortCapital/status/1873192369891533193  https://www.coinbase.com/en-sg/institutional/research-insights/research/market-intelligence/2025-crypto-market-outlook  https://x.com/MikeIppolito_/status/1870938936144761211  https://x.com/galaxyhq/status/1874843463293849712  https://x.com/stacy_muur/status/1871130706157486540?s=46&t=dAxCjT2P_GIrJMvMgWIpfA  https://x.com/shaughnessy119/status/1867675171487986086?s=46  https://x.com/cryptopunk7213/status/1874101935353041056?s=46  https://avc.xyz/what-will-happen-in-2025-1  https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1874173947731992810  38:28 New IRS KYC Rules https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2762  https://gordonlaw.com/learn/1099-da-revised-draft/  https://x.com/lex_node/status/1872649212804104254  https://www.galaxy.com/insights/research/irs-broker-rule-proposal-puts-defi-in-tough-spot/  https://x.com/TheCryptoCPA/status/1872714549243023830  https://x.com/fund_defi/status/1872694713108545576  https://x.com/KMSmithDC/status/1872869271660818887  https://x.com/jchervinsky/status/1873029020478292346  https://x.com/jchervinsky/status/1873746395137773816  47:30 Ethereum Expectations In 2025 https://tim.mirror.xyz/CuRtFjkujKBqVsdvCGvthiPIYaZyzNc5sWIaExw2UpE  50:37 Microstrategy Accelerates https://x.com/BitcoinNewsCom/status/1871333716511097151  51:37 Do Kwon’s Extradition https://www.theblock.co/post/332477/montenegro-justice-minister-signs-do-kwons-extradition-to-us  53:05 Vitalik Adopts Moo Deng https://x.com/KhaokheowZoo/status/1872151683700248587  ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠  

Bankless Nation, welcome to the first bankless weekly roll-up of the year of our Lord. 2025, David, we're here. We made it. It's been a long time since I've seen you, man. I think this is in our four years of doing this episode, entering the fifth year or this podcast, and the fifth year of doing this podcast, I think the last two weeks have probably been the longest that we haven't even interacted over Zoom virtually anywhere. I think we sent each other four or five messages in Discord over. the last three weeks. I've been in Argentina and the holiday break, win straight into the New Year's

break. This is the longest that we have ever just been chill. I feel like that's good for our mental health. Really good. It's been really good. How are you? I took kind of a screen break. So I kind of like disconnected. And then I just like today, I kind of redownloaded, you know, fired up the OS again. And I got up to speed on crypto and we're here to bring up to us. You got to take a break a break. You got to take a break from time to time. All right? Because like, yeah, it felt really nice. It felt very grounded.

I felt more human again. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think that we just spend so much time looking at charts on screens, like absorbing information. And it felt good just to be like normal. Yes. And just to be still.

That was the most normal I have ever felt since getting to keep crypto. Three weeks. While I was out, I put a one minute long time constraint on Twitter on my phone. And one minute is just long enough if somebody sends you a tweet. you can open up Twitter and look at the tweet. But then one minute later, if you start scrolling, one minute later, okay, your time's up. Time's up.

You're done for the day. And that was really nice. So if you go to my Twitter feed right now, there's just seven retweets over the last three weeks and zero tweets. It's very sparse. Which is the first time I've ever done that. I can't believe you're allowed to do that, apparently. You can get off screens for a little bit in crypto. But now we're back.

Yeah. Now we're taking the pain so you don't have to be on Twitter all the time, bankless listener. We got a really busy week, actually. We're going to start with the curated list of our 10 favorite predictions for 2025 because everyone wants to know what's going to happen this year. We've got 10 fantastic things to look forward to. What else we got?

The crypto AI sector did not get the memo of the holiday break season. Many tokens are up 3x from their pre-Christmas prices. which is extremely recent. This is like 10 days ago. So that's pretty nuts. And then also some less fun news. The IRS is about to force all defy brokers to K.C their users, which, as we know, doesn't make any sense in the crypto world.

So we're going to talk about this. Who is actually viewed as a defy broker and what might they need to do? Also, Blobs became the top ETH burners, which is pretty impressive over a seven-day time period. Dexes hit their record highs in December. Doe Kwan is about to be sent back to the U.S. into U.S. hands and Vitalik Boutrin adopted Moudang, you know, the cute little hippo. What a headline. That's Vitalik's now.

Vitalik owns that, I guess. Vitalik doesn't own that. He's supporting him. Before we get into all that news and more message from our friends and sponsors and our lawyers, the Rodman Law Group, our bankless lawyers, want you to know that they are the best damn lawyers in crypto. And I believe this sentence wholeheartedly, best damn lawyers. Dave Rodman and Rodman Law are crypto-native lawyers.

I was hanging out with Dave Rodman at DevCon in Bangkok walking around the venue while he was rocking the tornado cash t-shirt, which I think is pretty damn based. Rodman Law has been helping out bank lists for all of our lawyer needs. If you are a startup or even an individual who's operating heavily in this space, you kind of need a lawyer. You definitely do. Preemptively, even preemptively. having Dave Rodman just a phone call away, a telegram message away, when we need him. For example, when Justin Sun sends us a C-Sycindicist for writing a bearer statement about Tron, it was really nice to have Rodman Law.

They know about crypto. They are in the trenches with crypto. They know how to be pragmatic, which is what many lawyers in crypto don't know how to be about pragmatic in crypto. And so they are offering you a free consultation with Rodman Law, banklist. dot cc slash rodman law to schedule a free consultation with the best damn lawyers in crypto they really are best am lawyers in crypto go establish a relationship with rodman law group even if you don't think you need a crypto lawyer you actually do need a crypto lawyer this is you need a crypto lawyer you need a crypto lawyer yes exactly all right david let's get into markets this week and the price of bitcoin so what did it do

over the holiday break uh where are we on the week we are up 1.3 percent on the week, starting the week, 95,500, ending the week, 96,800. So flatty up, flatty with an up bias. Ether, doing something similar, a little bit more green than Bitcoin this week, started the week at $3,33, up $3.8% on the week to $3,450. Still, either kind of slammed down from where it got above $4,000, which makes everyone feel good. Now we're at the bottom end at the 3,000 range, trying to get our head over 3,500. Okay, let's look at the one month on Ether. Look at this. Do you remember this?

It was early December and we were above 4K and I was thinking December for the holidays. I thought Santa Claus would leave us some all-time highs in the stocking. I thought we'd be closing it on 5K about right now and then just like none of that materialized.

So here's to 2025. Maybe this course corrects in 2025 because the ETH ETH ETH FLOs have been pretty hot lately. Large. Maybe they are front running some of the price appreciation that we hope to see in ETH.

Tell us about those flows. Yeah, so on the December 31st alone, ether, the ETHs drove 57 Bitcoin into the ETS and 10,710 Ether, which is $5.3 million of net inflows into Bitcoin, and Ether had $36 million of net flows into the ether ETS. That's on December 31st.

Overall, December was a huge win for the ether ETHs, just really outpacing Bitcoin, really punching way above his weight. And we're finally really getting into some very positive numbers on the ETH ETFs. Coming in at $2.6 billion in total net inflows, it was just pretty damn crazy. That's good to see.

I mean, all of that happened. I think like it started, I mean, we were negative for most of November, weren't we? And then it kind of turned. turned around toward the end of that month and now it's positive. Quickly turned around. And now we are way more positive than we've ever been negative. It really, it really, the momentum changed to it really, really fast.

It feels nice going to the year. Speaking of ETF, so Bitwise did this cool thing. Bitwise filed for a Bitcoin Standard corporate ETF, Bitcoin Standard Corporation's ETF. And really, the incentive here is to incent the stocks of companies that have adopted the Bitcoin standard. So they're creating an ETF, an indecacy that's full of, of these companies.

Look at these companies here. All the companies that own, in order to get into this club, get into this ETF, you have to have on your corporate treasury the Bitcoin standard, which they define as holding a thousand Bitcoin or more. So what's $1,000 Bitcoin times the price of Bitcoin, you know, $100 million or more worth of Bitcoin on the treasury? If you have that on your corporate treasury, then you get into this club of the, the Bitcoin Standard Corporation ETF that Bitwise is going to roll out.

Yeah. Interesting. I guess the investment piece this year. What exposure are you getting? You're getting exposure to companies that put Bitcoin on the balance sheet. But the companies could be anything. It could be a tech company. It could be a bank. It's weird. It's like, it's like, it's kind of getting exposure to like, you know, companies led by laser eyes. Yeah. Laserized. It's kind of that, right? It's like managers. Well, I don't know. Maybe there's, you know, you know, the theory that if you're, you know, the CEO of the company, the co-founder of the company starts like lifting. Like, you're doing squats and, like, bench presses and stuff. They get, like, gym fit.

Then, like, that's bullish. Or, like, bald is bullish, right? And, like, people have run correlations with this. Maybe it's something like that. Like, you have laser eyes. You can see the future. I don't hate it. You're stacking Bitcoin.

Anyway, this club right now is composed of, you could see, it's about, it would be about 22 companies right now with micro strategy at the top. No one can touch the micro strategy. 444,000 Bitcoin, okay? And then assortment of other companies that, you know, Coinbase, of course, has some Bitcoin on Treasury. But other companies like Tesla, you might recognize Galaxy Digital, of course. Some of these are crypto companies, some art. Similar scientific?

I don't know who they are. But again, it's like this whole own Bitcoin and your corporate treasury kind of incentive, meme plus an investment thesis. Kind of neat. Interesting. I will love to see how this tracks over the year and how Bitcoin, Pips, company leaders compared to non-Bitcoin-filled company leaders, because I guess that's the signal that we're going to give from that. As usual, I'd just rather own Bitcoin than these companies.

Yeah, right. Exactly. To each their own. Where are we out on the ratio, David? Ratio is we are kind of still in no man's land. We are higher than the lows. We are not higher than the recent highs. We are at 0.055. So we're still kind of waiting for some action on the ratio. Really no signal here. Total crypto market cap. We are above 3.5.5. $3.57 trillion dollars still looking at that $4 trillion number. Yeah, that was nice hitting that $4 trillion briefly. Okay, tell me about the, well, no, almost, almost. 3.9, yeah, pretty close.

You didn't hit $4 trillion. So we got that to look forward to. I'm sure it's coming anytime, maybe in January. All right, tell me about some movers of the week that I missed over the holidays. This is brought to you by our friends over at Uniswap with a weekly reminder. or go get the uniswap wallet. It just pops out in your browser. It's a fantastic extension. Okay, who, what were the tokens that you were looking at on the on the week? The two big movers of the week. And these are the top two movers. Usually I go to coin gecko sort

by seven day and kind of like pick out a collection of the quality tokens that aren't like flukes. But these are actually the number one and number two seven day movers of the week. Coming at number one, AI 16Z up a hundred and fifty percent on the week. Wow. $1.2 billion market cap, followed by Virtuals up 60% on the week at a $4.6 billion market cap. AI16Z is the token associated with the Eliza framework, which is really kind of bleeding the charge and producing AI agents. But Virtual's has got this AI agent launch pad to make it super easy to launch your AI agent. This is where AIXBT comes, comes from.

This one's on base. AI 16Z is on Solana. And so just it was the last 10 days. In addition to the 10 days before that and the 10 days before that was driven by AI token movement. It's super impressive. And this at a time when the rest of the crypto market was kind of flat, flatish down. Over Christmas. Imagine how infuriating that is in which like the biggest movers of the week of the meta is

happening when you're in the holidays. And I am just gone. I am not paying attention. Hey, AI. I found out about these tokens like yesterday. These? No, you knew about these. Come on.

I knew about them. But I didn't know that they had moved to 3X their prices since like December 20. second. It's super impressive. And this is maybe gets into a prediction that we'll talk about. What, what are AI agents and this whole narrative going to do in 2025? But did you listen to that episode we did with Jensen while you were out from Virtual's Predicle? Did you hear how he described virtual basically as like a digital state for AI agents, right? When I heard that line, I was like, oh, Ryan, that nerd snipe the hell out of Ryan. Yeah, it was over. Yeah, like he knew exactly what to say to me to get me to like, you know, like be a uber bullish on this. I should have bought more though.

But anyway, there's always more time, right? David, right? Yeah, this is the biggest opportunity cost. Instead of researching tokens in the trenches, we just do podcasts and we forget to buy. Yeah, well, you know, sometimes we buy. AI Mindshare, nearly to 60% of all Mindshare. This is according to Kydo AI, which tracks kind of different narratives. So completely dwarfing meme coins at this point in time.

It's a very hot narrative. Getting into the Layer 2's, our Layer 2 update, brought to you by Frax. Crypto's decentralized central bank, which is now a fractal layer two. I've always enjoyed the fractal ecosystem. Okay, so starting to look at 2025, the roll-up horse race and base has crossed $15 billion in TVL, up 10% on the week, zeroing in on Arbitrum at its whopping $18.6 billion. So $3.5 billion behind Arbitrum. So base, of course, I think many people have said bases will inevitably become the number one roll-up by TVL. We are looking at. not that far away.

Especially when things like virtuals itself adds three, four billion dollars of TV. Is it token on base? Not all of the token is on base, but a lot of it is. And so I think base is really getting the AI meta tailwinds here. Base usage as well is just a chart that is up into the right, just steadily increasing the daily activity on base. It's just a straight line. Base usage also has just been up into the right for such a long,

amount of time just consistently up. It's not really ever dipping. But I think we've done something like a 3x, 4X of activity on base since the middle of last year. And so this chart is only looking to increase. You can also see that spike of AI activity the end of December and also to right now. I think that this layer 2B.com, you go there and you look at the roll-ups, right? Go to the roll-ups tabs. You look at them.

This is kind of the roll-up horse race. And this is sort of the starting line. beginning 2025 and the two big KPIs to take a look at are total value locked which is you know all the assets on the chain which is some you know almost like the mass of the chain right how big it is how trusted it is that number matters and then also the uops which is basically user operations per second this is kind of like tPS transaction throughput but also sort of measures kind of like the complexity of a transaction as well. So it's a bit more of an accurate. So it's basically how many transactions are going through, how much throughput is there on this chain. These are kind of

the two big metrics to take a look at for all of these. Arbitrum still hang on its number one slot in terms of total value locked. But it's also, you know, like base, as you mentioned, is catching up to it. It's also being dwarfed right now, at least the past day in terms of U-OPS. So user operations on Arbitium was 15 on base 155. Okay? All aspects happening on base. Yeah. And then you got third OPEMainet, fourth ZK Sync era, fifth, blast, six, Starknet, seventh

Linnea, eighth, scrawl, ninth world chain, and then 10th Zircuit. I think that this is going to be one of the most interesting kind of leaderboards to watch because it almost feels like up to this point, getting to 2025, has just been like the pregame, right? just now with the starting line of, okay, we have the tech, we have some traction, everything's beta, and now it's going to go, and it's going to be incredibly competitive for the rest of this bull cycle. What is it?

Main Net beta. They've all been in main net beta. Yeah, exactly. Always in main net beta. Tell me about blobs, David, because it's been chewing some resources here. Top 10, top Eith burner, the top Eith burner in the last seven days have been Blobs ahead of Uniswap, which is nuts because, you know, at the end of the day, what do blockchains do the best? They trade tokens.

But now the Ethereum blockchain, what does it do best? It burns blobs. So over the last seven days, 490 Eth has been burned due to blobs over 480 ETH burned from Uniswap. Dan Smith from Blockworks Research says blob fees hit a share of REV, that's real economic value, hit a record high over the weekend, making up 9.9% of Ethereum's daily real economic value. base purchased 40% of the blob is followed by Tyco at 15% and World Chain at 11%. So base, a huge blob burner. Interesting.

This is kind of cool because this is a prediction that a lot of people in Ethereum have made that one day blob fees would actually dwarf all other like fees generated on top of Ethereum. Which is what the roll-up-centric roadmap is. Yeah, blob fees are essentially layer two is roll-ups consuming Ethereum block space. That's what blobs are. So now they're big consumers. And it's great to see that thesis play out.

Another thesis that's been great to see play out is Dex volumes. And David, they just hit record highs in December. Not record highs for this cycle. Record highs, period. They've never been higher. Monthly trading volumes soared to over 462 billion highest ever for Dex volumes. The leaders in decentralized exchanges for the last month in December where uniswap with number one, 106 billion.

billion. Pancake swap, 96 billion. Finance Smart chain. Yeah, Biden and SmartChamp. People forget about buying a smart chain, but it's always done numbers. It's big in the east. And then Radium on Solano with 58 billion. So that's where we end December of some record high dex volumes. I bet we'll exceed those records this month and the month after.

You do have to give a tip of the hat to the AI agent meta because of how damn bankless it is. bankless by default. So Dex volumes are going to get tailwinds because of AI agents. TVL on chain is going to get a tailwinds from the AI agent meta. And centralized exchanges are going to really lag because in the same way that we saw this happen in Defi Summer and NFT mania is like this is you, you get benefits. You get premiums by being on chain. 100%.

You're so right. I actually didn't make that connection. But what you're saying is AI agents, they're not going to open up a Coinbase account or crack an account. They can't. Well, they can't, right? I mean, not really. And so they're just going to use

the on-chain, decentralized exchange resources. And so everything that benefits AI agents and that upsurge, that'll all accrue to defy. That's right. That's right. All right. Coming up next, our favorite predictions for 2025, we've gone around the Twitter sphere

and the blog sphere, so you don't have to and collected the 10 best predictions that we think are also true in 2025, or at least worth noting. and then later, Ethereum's getting a full year of upgrades, what's on tap for the incoming Ethereum upgrades and the ones that come after that. So we're going to get to all of this and more.

But first, a message from our fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Uniswap, the place where AI agents love to trade, on chain, on whatever chain you're on, actually, whether it's on Ethereum Layer 1 or base or Arbitron. But it's also got a mobile wallet, a browser wallet for all you humans out there that are listening to this as well.

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the commitment to security and transparency is rock solid. Now Uniswap Labs is taking an extra step to make V4 as secure as possible, with a 15. and a half million dollar bug bounty. Head to the link in the show notes to dive in and participate in the Uniswap V4 bug bounty. All the details from eligibility and scope to the rewards are there. The Arbitrum portal is your one-stop hub to entering the Ethereum ecosystem. With over 800 apps, Arbitrum offers something for everyone. Dive into the epicenter of Defy, where advanced trading, lending, and staking platforms

are redefining how we interact with money. Explore Arbitrum's rapidly growing gaming hub from immersed role-playing games, fast-paced fantasy MMOs to casual luck battle mobile games. Move assets effortlessly between chains and access the ecosystem with ease via Arbitrum's expansive network of bridges and onrifts. Step into Arbitrum's flourishing NFT and creators base where artists, collectors, and social converge and support your favorite streamers all on chain. Find new and trending apps and learn how to earn rewards across the Arbitrum ecosystem with limited time campaigns from your favorite projects.

Empower your future with Arbitrum. visit portal.arbitrum.io to find out what's next on your web free journey. 10 predictions for 2025. All right, we curated these from many of the thought leaders around crypto because every sort of thought leader puts out their list of predictions. And we took the best we thought from many of them. So why don't we get into the first one here, David? So you picked this one.

Vance Spencer Framework. What's the prediction? Van Spencer predicts that the SPX, which is just an index on the S&P 500, goes to 7,500. Where is it right now, Ryan? 5,800? You know, it's funny. I have to look this up, but it's something around there.

It's something at 5,800 that range. So, I mean, going up to 7,500, that would be a pretty big increase as far as stocks go. In the stock market, in the stock market, followed by AI delivers on his promises. And since the AI delivers on his promises line is being paired with the SPX to 5,500, I'm guessing he means that that's like AI in the traditional, you know, FinTech equities. space. This is something that is happening this cycle, Ryan, that is unique to all crypto bull markets that have come prior is this bull market, the crypto AI bull market is happening in parallel to an AI bull market happening in the real world. And so the AI bull market is coming into crypto.

Now there's like these two parallel bull markets happening. Yeah, I think Vance is basically saying that it's a bullish year for stocks and primarily led by the Mag 7, right, is all of these AI stocks will continue to overperform. All right, that's number one. Number two, this is Dee from Block So stable coin market cap hits 500 billion. It is currently, a reminder, at 210 billion. That's the take here. Either Stripe or Robin Hood launched their own stable coins as a pairing take, and Walmart or Amazon begin accepting stable coins for payments.

Stable coins, 500 billion. That feels pretty safe to me. What do you think? Oh, that's big. It's more than a doubling. And doubling something that's already at 210 billion. in is a big doubling more than doubling. So, like, that's a pretty bullish prediction. I don't, I don't, I'm not disagreeing with it. I'm not saying I don't think that's a free space at all.

Yeah, I guess that's, maybe that seems aggressive, but I don't know, man, given the yields that we're seeing in DFI these days, given kind of, you know, what I expect to be, a favorable legislation. We could even get a stable coin bill in 2025. You know, all the fintechs are going to front run that. the effort... If we do hit it, it's going to be a buzzer beater at the end of the year. Yeah, you think so? I mean, like, think of all the fintechs. They got to get in this. Like, Stripe just acquired that, you know, defy. Yeah, that could take a while. That could take a year to really get rolling here. Yeah, that's true. Anyway, I'm very bullish on the stable coin market cap. I'm just from 500 billion. This is like a big goal. That's big goal.

That's the prediction. Coming in at three, this is an official prediction from Coinbase. The next administration's projected deficit spending, if it materializes, should translate into greater risk buying, crypto buying, as more dollars circulate in the economy. So the Coinbase is making the prediction that the fiscal policy of the next administration is actually going to overwhelm any amount of Federal Reserve action, which is, I think, what Linaldon predicted when we had her on the podcast not terribly long ago. Yeah, okay. So this is, it's funny, this is much more formal prediction in, you know, like phrasing. So it takes a second to interpret it because it's aimed at institutions, I guess. Deficit spending.

So Congress, the executive branch, the U.S. government is going to continue to overspend, right? That's not going to change under Trump. And that should translate into greater risk taking as more dollars circulate. So more liquidity. So more risk taking. So basically the prediction is risk on assets for 2020. and then crypto goes up. Government spending money, we're going to get some inflation,

crypto and risk on assets are going up. It feels pretty reasonable too. All right, let me give you number four. And by the way, Mike Ippolito had about 27. Great predictions. One of my favorite list of the year, but this was one of them. The U.S. will reemerge as the dominant global hub of crypto. He adds, founders will move back in open offices in New York.

U.S. conferences will be larger than their Asian counterparts. Great for permission to sign? Yeah. So I guess, you know, everyone comes back to America for crypto on the back of the Trump win, the victory. What do you think? Yeah, I think that's right. I think we've already seen indications of a lot of companies coming back home to the United States or coming to the United States for the first time. Coming in at number five, this one's from Galaxy Digital.

Five NASDAQ 100 companies and five nation states will announce that they have added Bitcoin to their balance sheets or sovereign wealth funds. Ooh, nice. Okay, so this is five new nation states? Five new nation states. It matters a lot who those nation states actually are. Definitely. It's one thing I would say. Yes, yeah.

It could definitely see that happening. All right, this is number six, Delphi Digital. This is a long one. I like this one. I like this one a lot. So the base prediction is crypto splits into two major verticals and everything else gets sidelines. So two major verticals and everything else gets sidelined. What are these two verticals?

The first is Web3 Natives, and these are defined as traders that are deeply embedded in the crypto market. These are people that possess a nuanced understanding of crypto's unique characteristics and engage in high-risk trading, including meme coins, AI agents, and pre-sales. The elements reminiscent of the Wild West. So these Web3 Natives, Wild West, that's the first major vertical. Bull market froth traders. Yeah, okay.

We've always had that. Okay, let me go on. In bull markets, yeah. All right. And then the second major vertical this year. is regular investors. These are institutional and retail investors. They often differ in their risk management approaches and generally adhere to a more fundamental investment and trading strategy via crypto as an alternative to the growth, to the stock market. Okay, these are the two major

verticals. And then they also point out the prediction continues. There will be a number of people who are sidelined. The sideline people are early stage defy, real world assets, and deep-in protocols that don't secure leading positions in their segments, or at least on their chain. So there's always going to be sideline investors. But they're basically saying there's going to be kind of these DGen frontier crypto natives that are trading almost like. They're following the hot ball of money. Yeah. And that's the growth stuff, right? That's the next big thing, the next wave, whether it materializes fully or not. And then there's going to be a new class, I guess, of regular investors, but fundamentals types of investors. So it's DGens and it's

fundamentals is one way to phrase this. Highly passive. And then if you're not in the hotball of money, which they're saying, early stage G5 real world assets deepen, then you're getting left behind. Your pie is not going to grow this year. Do you have to pick? You think you have to pick either be a Web3 native or a regular investor? Can you just split your portfolio? I've always like to-

Oh, no, you definitely split your portfolio. So you know my strategy. Take 10% of my net worth. Gamble to hell with it. When I make wins, you put it into the long-term super passive side. Yeah, you do both. Yeah, do both. Not just one.

you don't have to pick one lane here. Coming in also from Delphi Digital, this is Tommy from Delphi. He says agent-driven transactions will make up 10% of all on-chain transactions by end of year 2025. And also a follow-up prediction. There will be a wave of buy-in by San Francisco traditional AI developers into crypto AI due to tokens, which afford them the ability to break out of Web2 AI labs and raise capital and community overnight, which has always been the power of tokens, permissionless capital formation outside of the system.

And so the predictions that tokens create a gravitational pull for AI talent out of San Francisco, out of Silicon Valley, and into the wild west of crypto. Yeah, I think these are pretty solid predictions. That first one, that AI agents transactions will make up 10% of all on-chain transactions by end of year. How much do you think we are right now? Do you know the latest on that? It's probably less than 1%, right?

It's got to be, even though it's starting to increase. AI agents have just only been a thing for the last couple of months. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, you're right. It's got to be less than 1%. All right. This is prediction number 8 from EJAS, which is our resident AI expert doing the weekly AI roll up, yeah.

AI roll up with us. So EJAS says this. An AI agent platform will enter the top 10 crypto by market cap right now to get in that club, that's the plus 35 billion club to make it its top 10. So in AI agent platforms, after it's banger week last week, hitting an all-time high is currently at 4.4 billion dollar market cap. Wow. EJazz is looking for like almost a 10x on that. Not specifically on virtuals, but that is that is, virtual is in the lead at the highest market cap. Okay. What are the 35 billion? What are the big AI agent platforms? Let me see if I can name them given my I did a

roll up where you're out, David and I learned a lot. So there's, they're so informative. There's virtuals. There's AI16Z in that platform, right? There's also, what, what am I missing? Those are the two big ones. There are actually quite a lot. There's a pretty big long tail as well.

And so I think there's a lot incoming. There's My Shells, which is an AI agent platform. There's kind of going to be one per chain. There's one on the crypto.com chain that I'm forgetting the name of. But I think these things are turning from like kind of a premium service, which is where virtual started, into kind of a commodity because a lot of people are competing to become. These are this is being called the layer one trade of this cycle, which is AI agent platforms. Yeah, I think that's a good take.

And I could totally see that coming true. Let's get to number nine. This actually was mine from Fred Wilson from Unusquare Ventures. He puts out a list every year, and I've read these for like 10 years. It's usually pretty interesting. I just pulled off one from his list. TikTok turns all videos into meme coins that can be traded on decentralized exchanges all over the world. TikTok, actual TikTok, the TikTok does this?

Yeah, the TikTok. That's what he said. Okay, but hold on. I think you could say, just leave the prediction as is and say it's TikTok actually, right? Or you could just substitute another large social media entity kind of doing this. And I think like- makes the most sense. This feels like a, it almost feels, felt to me like it was a 2021 prediction.

You know what I mean? Like the end of 2021, going to 2022, NFTs are huge. And people would start making these types of predictions. That was not the time because I think we had massive regulatory overhang at that time. It's like, are NFTs, well, the guy in charge of securities says they are. His name's Gary Gensler. And so now that he's gone, now that we have really cheap transaction fees, just all across crypto, you can almost see that we have like the fertile ground for this prediction

actually happening. So I present that to you. What do you think? No, I can see that. Yeah. I think it kind of remains to be seen how clear this guys are, regulatoryly speaking. Are they, are people really going to take the maximum freedom that people are saying that we have with the Trump administration?

Who's going to go first and start to do really bold stuff? TBD on when that happens and how far they go. All right, Ryan, this next one is also yours. So I'm going to need you, David, to me. All right, cool. Well, since we didn't have an ETH price prediction on the list, you got to give an ETH price prediction. David, I've been seeing a lot of ETH price predictions from kind of the large institutions.

And let me tell you, they're uninspiring to me. People are saying, hey, next year, we could see 7K, Eith, 8K, ETH. That does not excite me at all. In fact, I think people are still, they have a 2024 overhang of, bearishness on ether the asset because it had an okay year but like not a great year it's certainly not a bitcoin year. gloomy tinted glasses pretty much and so I felt like all of those bullish eth predictions were weak I wanted to give my own I think 10k Heath is the absolute base case all right

that's like if I mean if we barely get a bull market I think we're looking at something between 15k and 20k Heath and if people think that like that's like you know I make these predictions every year sort of thing. Yes, I do. Full confession. You've got to be, you only have to be right once. You only have to be right once. Honestly, it's only a matter of time until we see these numbers. So like, why shouldn't it be the 2025 bull cycle is my take? You see blob space heating up, you know, fees revenue, you know, going crazy. The AI meta, all the layer two's heating up. There's a lot of things in place for either this year. And if it fixes a few things narrative-wise, I think it's off to the races. It might even not even, not

even need that fix could just be the institutional buyers and ETFs that propel us to 10k and above. Passive investors. It doesn't take that much. I mean, we just saw this happen with Bitcoin. I mean, it feels like a pretty obvious trade to me. What do you think? Yeah. Yeah, to the day, like I've said, we have still not yet seen a complete bull market with both proof of stake and EIP-1559 and now also blob fee burn. So we still have not seen what how price sensitive ether is to marginal flows incoming to buy. And then the last prediction, this is a bankless signed prediction. I think we have consensus between myself, Ryan, and our AI expert at Bankless EGES. We do the AI roll-ups, which if you're not listening to AI roll-ups, you need to be listening to the AI roll-ups.

If you want to be one of the active traders on the frontier in crypto, it is the meta. Then that is the prediction that we are making here. Crypto AI agents dominates the 2025 meta and then hits $250 billion in market cap, where it is coming in right now at 17.3.3. $3 billion. The prediction here is that is going to $250 billion for AI agents. This is inspired by EJAS, our co-hosts of the AI roll-ups. But I'm co-signing it. Ryan, are you co-signing it?

I think I could co-sign this, right? Again, it's not for sure that this is going to happen, but I feel like this is the best upside prediction that we have going to 20205. Most specific, the most bullish. Yeah, and you know your 10% D-Gen portfolio, you know, that's where I would allocate almost all of that. I would put like 9% on this specific narrative and on that number. Because to go from 17 billion to 250 billion, that's like far more upside.

10% into the 100%. And then you take that and you put that into your fundamentals assets. Whatever you want, your fundamentals. Yeah. The things that are not going to go down 99% and might only go down, you know, 75%. And what this assumes, of course, is that this gets kind of a narrative upsurge, the same narrative upsurge that defy did previous cycle where honestly defy hit similar numbers and it got way ahead of itself it got overinflated it went too high of course and that's basically what i anticipate could happen

with AI agents so this is a huge number to watch and it came from nowhere by the way so it's at 17 billion what was it three months ago like under a hundred billion zero zero something close to that right so incredible and then we have not a prediction but a bonus take about predictions this is i thought this was funny from David Phelps, who tweeted out MFers will write their top predictions for 2025, and then everyone will be like, AI crypto will take off next year. Like, my man, the goal is not to predict what will happen six months ago, which I thought was funny. So he's just saying everyone's extrapolating in their 2025 predictions. The thing that's hot, like right now, recency bias. Exactly. Exactly. So take these predictions with a grain of salt. Probably will be blindsided

by something absolutely crazy that hits us in 2025 and hopefully to the bullish upside. And they were on no one's list. That's usually what happens. That's right. Coming up next, the IRS decides to AMLKYC all defy over the holidays, a little Christmas present from the taxman. And we're getting an RSA PSA on some other weird tax stuff that happens

because you all know RSA is the tax guy in the tank list, right, Ryan? And then also our favorite, Doe Kwan, coming back to the United States. Just not in a good way. Not in a good way, yeah. And then also, Battalick adopted a meme coin hippo. So we'll talk about all this and more, but for some of the moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially Frax, Crypto's decentralized central bank. With over $1.5 billion in TVL, the M.Eath protocol is home to M.Eath, the fourth largest ETH liquid staking token, offering one of the highest APRs among the top 10 LFTs.

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All right, and we're back. We have some drama, some... bad news coming out of the world of taxes in crypto? Ryan, what do we need to know? Because I don't know. Okay. So let me get you up to speed, David. So this is what I kind of have digested as I came back. So over the holidays, the IRS finalized a tax rule requiring all defy brokers. I put that in air quotes to collect user trading information. So what this does, David, is it could be a de facto AML KYC for all defy front ends. And that would start in 2027. So not starting 20, but 2027.

Do you remember all the proposed rule stuff that, like, came out, that the IRS was basically going to do this. And everyone in crypto commented. We had somebody on the podcast to explain this to us. We all commented on the rulemaking. And the IRS received like, I don't know, 40,000 different comments, some of which were AI generated. One of mine was.

And saying how much we didn't like this rule, basically. Do you remember that? That happened sometime last year? Okay. Well, over the holidays, they basically clarify. their interpretation of the rule, it's kind of as bad as we would expect. What they're going to do is require all DFI brokers, which are DFI front ends, to issue 1099s to anybody who uses the platforms. So they didn't just make this up, Gary Gensler style. You know how Gary Gensler, his operating model

was just like, oh, that, you know, I own this. That's a security. This actually came from some legislation. You remember the Biden infrastructure bill that was signed in 2021? Well, it included some language around the expansion of broker reporting requirements that would hit crypto, okay? And it didn't quite clarify what a broker was. It was pretty clear that anybody, any exchange that had custody crypto assets would be defined as a broker and have to issue 1099s. But it's super unclear as to whether it defy would. And that's when, you know, vague legislation, what happens is regulators like the IRS interpret that vague legislation in the way that they, they wish to interpret it, and they put out a rule. And that this is the clarification of that rule, and it's kind of bad news.

They're saying that this rule applies to defy. Does that make sense so far? Yep. I'm tracking. Yeah. So what they're trying to do is get as many people as possible to fill these things out. You see what's on the screen here? They're trying to get people. people to voluntarily fill out a form? Well, okay, so this is a 1099. So anytime you make an exchange, you have some proceeds from a sale of stocks or something, then like the e-trade or the Schwab, they issue you a 1099 for the proceeds of that exchange. So you know, as a taxpayer, like, okay, well, my proceeds were like 5K for the year or something, right?

And IRS gets a copy of that too, and they say, oh, taxpayer, David Hoffman, you know, the Robin Hood says you owe 5K, so we expect to see 5K for you. So they issue it to you as the taxpayer and they issue it to the IRS. You could see from the IRS's vantage point, they basically want more of these things filled out. Because the more of these they have filled. It's seeing like a state. They want X's to fill these things out. They want somebody to fill it out, right?

And their model is because they know if more people fill it out, they'll get more tax compliance. And they prefer big centralized institutions to kind of fill them out for everybody else because then they don't have to go to every individual citizen. But if they don't, they can just, yeah, if Coinbase doesn't fill out the form, then they can just, you know, take Brian Armstrong to jail. So Brian Armstrong is going to make Coinbase fill out the form. It's way easier. On behalf of all millions of their users. Yeah, it's way easier. And so some people see this and they're like, well, the IRS is coming out to crush crypto.

And maybe there's an element of that. I mean, there's people in the U.S. government that really just don't like crypto. We've seen some of that in Gensler. That's probably true to some extent. But like a more simple explanation is basically seeing like a state. The IRS just wants more of these forms filled out. And so they, yeah, this is how it works. So they'd prefer that uniswap fills it out.

They'd prefer that metamask fills it out. They prefer that like some sort of centralized entity fills it out so they can get more, you know, tax compliance and more people paying. The argument about decentralization and permissionlessness just doesn't, they just don't care. They're like, I don't care about your decentralization fill out the goddamn form. Exactly, right? Exactly. And so who is viewed as a defy broker? It's still kind of unclear.

This is Gabe Shapiro saying it looks like nearly all. all defy web app providers will be covered. Some wallets will as well, right? So you can imagine Metamask swap certainly being covered. You can imagine Uniswap being covered. Probably unlikely that something like EtherScan is covered by this. But what this means in terms of compliance is that for every single person who uses, you know, uniswap, let's say, or a Metamask, uniswap or Metamask on the front end side of things would have to fill out the name and a for each customer, social security type information, right?

It's kind of like an AML KYC type check because they need to know who to send the form to. So they need to know who's actually pressing the buttons and making the trade. So what this does data- For the design of these systems. Of course. It just de facto AML KYC's everything that's like any kind of verb, any kind of action you're trying to make in D5 becomes all AMLKYC. This is the monopoly on violence that the nation state owns running up against the self-sovereignty of decentralized blockchains. Yeah, exactly.

An immovable force runs into an unstoppable object. Right. And it's, again, it's rulemaking. So it's, remember where this came from, some vague kind of legislation and then IRIS is interpreting a certain way. So it could be interpreted differently, but this is how they choose to interpret it, at least for right now. So what do D5 front ends do? well, they can either just accept that they're a broker and kind of comply. So that would mean like all the web front ends that use for defy, they would not just connect

wallet. They would have to like have you sign up, make an account, fill out your information before you click the button and trade, right? Or that's option one. Or they could just block US users. Because this only applies to US taxpayers. What are they going to do? What do you think they're going to do, Ryan?

Right. Are they going to make all of their users give email, password, you know, address, EIN number? It puts them in a bad spot. It depends, right? It puts them in a bad spot. Or they could just abandon all of the front end upgradeability and everything entirely and go full decentralization, right? So you can imagine a world where like Uniswap doesn't actually host the Uniswap front end itself. There's some way that users run this locally or something.

like that, you know, you become more like a broker if you're taking a fee on the actual trade. So maybe if you're not taking a fee on the trade, then maybe you're not a broker. So you could go full throttle, fully decentralized. And what this means for users, of course, is that you have to share your KYC information similar to an exchange. So the rule goes into effect after January 1st, 2027. But the good news is, David. Yeah, 27. The good news is it's two years away.

And the good news is crypto is fighting back. This is the Defy Education Fund. Today's announcement by the Treasury and IRS to finalize their broker rulemaking is another attempt by the outgoing administration to undermine the crypto industry. And basically, TLDR, we're fighting back. This is Kristen Smith from Blockchain Association. We already filed a lawsuit. So they did all this over the holidays, which is kind of cool that crypto is not taking this

lying down. This is Jake Trevinsky. The crypto industry. sued the IRS less than 24 hours after it finalized its anti-Defi broker rule. And basically the crypto industry is saying, you know, according to the administrative procedures, you shouldn't be interpreting and making a rule in this way. It's like you don't have the power to do this and kind of kicking it back to Congress. So, and then also, then also we have kind of the Trump Unocard, which is maybe when Trump

comes into office, he goes and reverses. Yeah. He tries to reverse all of these things. And so we got that going for us as well. Okay. So my main takeaway is I'm going to wait for further news. I think so, probably. It's just kind of, it's just kind of bad that it has, they think it has to be like this because it doesn't have to be like this. This is what I've learned has always been the case with crypto regulation is that it starts basically as bad as possible. And then the crypto community starts rabbling. And we get it. walked back slowly, incrementally, into a more favorable position. It kind of seems to be what this world is like.

Yeah. I think we've got some ability to do that. And we've gotten really good at rabbling. That's right. That's right. David, tell us what we can expect from Ethereum in 2025. I knew you've been tracking kind of the roadmap, the near term for Ethereum. So what's happening?

Yeah. So the EIP mempool of which Ethereum EIPs are getting added to which hard fork is starting to settle as we get closer to Pectra as we move forward in time. So things are, will always be shifting and this is not the final state of things. But there's a little bit of an update here. Petra, which hopefully goes in this year in 2025. Some of the key EIPs that will, are currently going to be in Pectra. Max E. E.B. Max effective balance. This allows for Ethereum validators to have 32 ether or more. And so as you accrue ether, that newly accrued ether is not just a reward to be claimed, but also itself becomes staked. And this can consolidate a bunch of validators

down. So if you're more running, if you have 32, what's 30? Like you say you have 10 validators. You have 320 ether. You're running on your machine. You're actually running 10 validators with max EB that could actually be consolidated down to one validator. This actually reduces a lot of messaging overhead and actually does impact the scalability of the Ethereum layer one because there's less messaging going on. And so people have enjoyed this EIP for. for a variety of reasons, both for just stake or quality of life, but also for some reducing some bandwidth. So that is most likely definitely going in.

Account abstraction for EOA wallets. EOA wallets, that's externally owned accountants. That's most likely what your wallet is. So allowing an EOA wallet to also act like an account-obstracted wallet that's going in. Blob throughput increase from an average of three to an average of six. So doubling blobs in Pectra along. with increasing call data costs. These are the current consensus things

for going into Pectra. Notably, not PIRDAS. And PIRDAS is a massive upgrade, kind of like a 10X upgrade, to blob space. PeerDAS is data availability sampling. It's kind of the next zero to one moment. It's the next order of magnitude moment for a blob space. So we're getting a doubling of blob space in Pectra,

but unfortunately we're not getting PIRDAS in Pectra. We're going to have to wait for Fusaka, which is the next hard fork after PIRDAS. after Pectra to get PyrDAS. So that probably means we won't get PIRDAS in 2025. We will probably get PIRDAS in later 2026, which is slow. The only additional blob space will get is that increase, you said, from, you know... Three to six.

Three to six. And it's a doubling, which is a doubling. Yeah, but will that be enough? That's the question. Yeah, well, it'll send blob space burn back down to zero for the foreseeable. future. But I mean, what was our, one of our predictions is that AI agents represent 10% of transaction volumes on chains. Well, that's not, it's not eating away at preexisting transactions. That's 10 additional percentage points of transaction volume. So the AI agent meta, I think,

will come with a massive consumption of blob space. Moving into some Bitcoin stuff, micro strategy wants to accelerate. It's 2121 Bitcoin plan. So the news is not that micro strategy bought more Bitcoin, but I'm sure that it will. The news is that micro strategy would like to accelerate its purchasing of Bitcoin. So last year, there was a 21-21 Bitcoin plan where a micro-strategy was going to put in $42 billion through debt instruments and equity to expand its Bitcoin holdings. It's now announced a special meeting for shareholders to vote on speeding up the streamlining and capital raising efforts to make sure that we can put in $42 billion. So Michael Taylor just wanting to front run himself.

So no one else front runs him. So that is going, that's going to be put to a boat. David, I've seen FOMO before it. This is kind of what FOMO looks like, right? It does look like this. It doesn't. Like, Mike Crenelor just self-referentially making himself bullish.

Okay, Montenegro, the Justice Minister, signed Doquan's extradition to the United States. So you guys remember Doquan, previous bankless podcast, you know, a guest. By the way, we have four or five previous. bankless podcast guests that have gone to prison or on their way. That's because we have everyone on the podcast. Yeah. Well, I told my family this over the holidays and they were like, what?

What are you doing over there? Anyway, he's being extradited to the U.S. So Doe Kwan was, of course, the founder of Tara Luna, the collapse. There was some question as to where he'd be prosecuted. So he's being held in Montenegro. There was a fight between a tug of war between South Korea, of which he is an original citizen from. I believe. But then the United States, where he went to school.

got his first job. He went to Stanford. Doquan has Stanford. Yeah, he did. And the U.S. won that tug of war. And so Doquan is coming to the U.S. to get prosecuted. So that's going to happen. I don't know how many years he's up for.

If he was under prosecution in South Korea, the penalty could be between 20 and 40 years. I don't know if that'll be less significant or more in the U.S. I'm sure he's happy to get out of the Montenegrin jail system, which I cannot imagine is, you know, all that great. I don't think the United States trail system is that great either. I bet the South Korea is pretty good as part of the jail go. You said happy.

I don't know if like happy as an adjective I'd use to describe Doquan situation at like at all. I mean, it's got to be pretty pretty shit. I don't think you want to be in the Montenegrin jail system. All right, David. Now we got to get to you the most important news of the week, which is Vitalik Buterin is adopting a hippopotamus, right? Moodang, it's a hippopotamus, right, of some kind? That is right. Moodang, yes, correct.

You're correct, Ryan. Moodang is, in fact, a hippopotamus. But it's like a tiny hippopotamus. It's not, it's, uh, what's this thing is here? I don't think she's tiny hippo. Uh, yeah, she's a regular hippo. Oh, no, she's a pygmy hippo. I didn't know that.

Pigmy hippo. Yeah, tiny hippo. Oh, I thought she was just a baby hippo. No, that's why she's so cute. Well, she might also be a baby pygmy hippo. I'm actually not sure. Someone could fact check us, but. She's becoming just a normal pigmy hippo.

Okay. Anyway, the news here is Vitalik Buterin is sponsoring Moudang with a generous 10,000 TBH. What is TBAH? Thai bot funding for the adoption. Adoption meaning like basically adopting Moudang. Vatalc's not taking Mudang home, right? It's just paying to support Moodang in the Thailand. I don't think he's ready for hippo as a pet.

That's about $300,000 for anyone who is curious. All right. So, you know, thanks to Vitalik for doing that, supporting wildlife and the zoo. The zoo thanked him as well. Vitalik responded, actually. Thanks for the warm welcome to the family and your work for wild animals. I'm happy to be the adoptive father to Mudang as she grows up over the next two years. Father.

And support her with my donation, maybe more, as I set aside 88Eath for Mudang plus friends. So it's not just Mudang, it's also Mudang's friends that are the beneficiaries. Mudang, up 25% on the week to a... a $300 million market cap. What is that? You're talking about a meme coin now, right? Yes. So Vitalik has, he received some proceeds from the Mudang meme coin.

I believe he's like sold all the proceeds as well. Oh, that makes more sense. I think he's, so he's trying to be a little bit more of like an activist, philanthropist, meme coin regent influencer type. I think that's his strategy here is like he knows that he's a subject of meme coin shenanigans. And he's trying to learn how to make that productive. And making an alliance with, oh, you send me meme coin. I donated to charity because I did something, your meme coin goes up. And so that is an alignment of what Vitalik wants, which is capital for charity and an alignment

which what the meme coin community wants, which is Vitalik to acknowledge the existence of their meme coin. It's pretty funny. It's pretty funny. You know, I, so do you know Tyler Cowan, a previous bankless guest? Previous podcast guests. Okay. So he's, He started a new podcast, which I just sent you an episode that I think you should listen to. It's marginal revolution. Okay. So it's his, it's him and another economist, and they just talk about different, like, geeky economist subjects. Okay, so anyway, one subject they were talking about is who should receive the Nobel Prize in economics.

And Tyler Cowan goes, I think Fatalic Bueyteran should receive it. He said, like, the whole economics world has not paid any attention to crypto. And yet here's Vitalik Buren using applied economics and actual mechanism design and creating an entire like economy. Open finance, defy economy. And economists aren't even paying attention. He should be the recipient of a Nobel Prize. The economic system of Ethereum is incredible. It's incredible that it works.

And it works. Yes. And it's doing amazing things. And I'm a big plus one for that. I would love to see it. I don't think we see it in 2025, but I think we'll see it sometime this decade. I think that happens before 2030 is economists start to wake up to this and start to recognize what's going on in crypto. Nothing to do with Mood-Dang, but it does have something to do with Vitalik. David, we'll send him off with this.

This is the end of the roll-up. Thank you guys for being with us in 2025. Of course, you know, crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in. We're headed west. This is the frontier. Not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey.

Thanks a lot.