Bankless - ROLLUP: $2B Polymarket Bet | Election Pump? | Ethereum Optimism | Trump 'WLFI' Launch

Episode Date: October 18, 2024

With 17 days to the election, Trump launched WLFI token sales, while Kamala’s positive crypto comments sparked reactions. Polymarket shows Trump at 62%—can that be real? In Ethereum, despite price drops, Fuel launched a high-performance L2, and Paradigm introduced its own with Reth at the core. Meanwhile, Saylor plans a Bitcoin Bank, and Kraken is rolling out wrapped Bitcoin. ------ 🎮B3 | THE FUTURE OF ONCHAIN GAMING https://bankless.cc/b3  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2    ⁠ 🦄UNISWAP | BROWSER EXTENSION https://bankless.cc/uniswap  🪄MAGIC EDEN | HOME OF WEB3 https://bankless.cc/MagicEden  🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle    🤖0G | MAKING THE IMPOSSIBLE, INEVITABLE https://bankless.cc/0G  ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/80?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 4:17 Markets, L2 Update, & Blobs https://farside.co.uk/?p=1518  https://x.com/Evan_ss6/status/1846592303143776269  https://x.com/growthepie_eth/status/1845076141054345464  https://x.com/ryansadams/status/1845111043250393569  https://x.com/sassal0x/status/1846458384842916143  https://dune.com/hildobby/blobs  https://x.com/litocoen/status/1846455792461140222  https://imgur.com/a/hGxZIyT  https://x.com/pythianism/status/1846502438624231605  https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1845944946991276494  21:52 What’s going on on Polymarket?  https://polymarket.com/event/presidential-election-winner-2024?tid=1729178339570  https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1846660964105453836  https://x.com/fewture/status/1846667819200795038  https://x.com/adamscochran/status/1846677802583838768  https://x.com/divine_economy/status/1846677795423785150  https://www.natesilver.net/p/whats-behind-trumps-surge-in-prediction  https://x.com/fozzydiablo/status/1846369866091319743  https://x.com/fozzydiablo/status/1846647506446246089  https://x.com/hosseeb/status/1846395633806331914  31:12 Let’s check in on Trump and Kamala - 17 Days until election  First Trump - kicked off World Liberty Financial token sale https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1845179557852377508  https://x.com/tier10k/status/1846641132731552018  https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1845926256292122767  34:43 Then Harris - said something about crypto - appreciates the help of crypto in broadening access to wealth  https://kamalaharris.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/FMfcgzQXJZxzLGgcKmSNQSXCRKXShwxJ.pdf  https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1845920172638605768  https://x.com/Matt_Hougan/status/1845832802316751251  https://x.com/BanklessHQ/status/1846552111217045904  https://elections2024.thehill.com/massachusetts/massachusetts-senate-warren-deaton/  https://polymarket.com/event/massachusetts-us-senate-election-winner?tid=1729152612507  46:16 Galaxy researched released their Crypto policy scorecard  https://x.com/intangiblecoins/status/1845845163588907486  51:29 Kraken with a big release…Wrapped BTC - KBTC https://www.coindesk.com/business/2024/10/17/crypto-exchange-kraken-launches-wrapped-bitcoin-token-kbtc/  52:17 Fuel mainnet is live!  https://x.com/fuel_network/status/1846536888003313786  53:54 Paradigm is launching a new L2, Odyssey https://x.com/gakonst/status/1844757392061542781  https://x.com/danrobinson/status/1844759810421805069  55:49 Conduit introduced Conduit G2  https://x.com/conduitxyz/status/1846567345864536468  57:41 Michael Saylor wants to turn Microstrategy into a Bitcoin bank https://x.com/isoandso/status/1844772434991325287  59:15 Italy will raise capital gain tax on Bitcoin from 26% to 42%  https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/italy-stiffens-terms-digital-services-tax-2025-budget-2024-10-16  1:00:41 Bankless Summit is coming!  https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1846722706919838081  1:02:34 Meme of the Week, David’s Fight & Kyle Samani Drama https://x.com/Jesseeckel/status/1845491020492124361  https://x.com/sgoldfed/status/1846183598832959617  1:06:29 Closing & Disclaimers  ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures 

Trump token stuff, his defy token is out. How is it going? Kamala also said something about crypto. Is that a pivot? Or is it just really weird? Also, the election odds. Also doing something weird. Why are crypto prediction markets giving Trump such a massive lead? Or are they being manipulated? Bankless Station is the third week of October's time for the bankless weekly roll-up. David, since our last roll-up, you got punched in the face. You punched a man in the face. Lots of things happened. We're going to talk about that maybe towards the end. But, okay, how you're feeling, dude? How are you feeling on the week? What are you fighting? I'm feeling great. The week has been awesome. It's a fun

week in crypto. If you're talking about the context of like being post-fight, like my head still hurts. Not as much as the other guy? Maybe? How's what you doing? I'm assuming not as much as the other guy. All right. Well, that's the mark of a champion fighter. We'll talk to David

more about the fight at the end of this episode. But first, David, we are 17 days until the election. So we've got to check in our candidates. Donald Trump kicked off his WLFI token sales. Remember that DFI protocol? Well, he kicked off the pre-launch. He sold some tokens. How'd that go? We'll check in. And on the other side, Kamala Harris said something about crypto.

Was it positive? Was it negative? Was it weird? Yeah, that was kind of weird, definitely. Yeah, it was kind of weird. And then also, speaking of Trump and Kamala, the polymarket has completely diverged on these two candidates, giving Trump a 62% odd to Cummel is 37% where just a week ago, it was neck and neck. So what's going on over in the world of Polly Market and do other polls, do other predictions line up with that?

Meanwhile, in Ethereum land, while ETH price is kind of in the basement, the community is starting to get kind of spicy. Seeing a lot of confidence out there, a lot of ratioing of alternative communities out there. And meanwhile, new tech is also shipping fuel is launching their high performance layer two's. paradigm is introducing their high-performance layer two's, and then Conduit has taken all of its change, of which it supports, to also become high-performance layer two. So a lot of scaling coming around in the different corners of the Ethereum ecosystem. In the Bitcoin world, we're going to talk about Sailor. He's getting ready to launch a Bitcoin bank. What actually is that? And Cracken with a wrapped Bitcoin product. We'll talk about

all of that. And David, speaking of basements, we got a fun kind of basement, not the price is down kind of base. from our friends and sponsors over at B3. This is a Layer 3 gaming ecosystem, and you can find more about it at Basement.FunFun. David, what is this? Think of the OP stack, but for games. The base chain, and this is basement is coming out of the core base team

before they then they pivoted into building basement. Because the base chain pretty fast, but still not fast enough to build on-chain games, and so this is what Basement is building, a layer three ecosystem that's optimized for games. I think like right now the games are kind of like what you would find on, I remember playing on AddictingGames.com or miniclip.com back in like the early thousands. Think like games like that, except there is a big on-chain element for them.

Some of the logic it might be on-chain. You can farm XP points, experience points, which are, of course, tokens on-chain. Each one of these games might have their own token as well. Just a collection of on-chain gaming activities that you can find. on their website. They're kind of a distributor of all these different games that you can go fun, and hopefully they're addicting. And so you can find them at baseman. fun today, start collecting some XP. They've already partnered with notable gaming brands, such as parallel, Mighty Bear Games, Nifty Island, and already have thousands and thousands of players. And so since it's on chain,

you already know, you're going to earn some tokens. You can check them out at banklist.c-c-c-c-c-slaug-B-3. David, there's a Mood-Dang game that I've been one to play. Yeah, you like that one. So I did get there. And I do like the idea that when you collect coins, in the game that those coins can become coins in your wallet. That is, that's interesting. But they don't like, it's not like the play to earn type of like advertising. This is like an appeal to normies thing. It's kind of like fun first. Yeah, they've taken advantage of some like wallet abstraction tech. So you don't need a wallet to go there. They will just spin up a wallet in the back end. Okay. Let's check in on October, shall we? Okay, we're 18 days in to the month.

This is supposed to be a glorious month for crypto prices. How are we doing? Let's check in on our friend Bitcoin. What's the price in the week? On this week, up 11%. Wow. Started the week at $59,000, currently clocking in at $67,300. So a very solid week on the week. We also basically the last week they roll up, and we just painted the floor.

So that was the low. And so we're kind of measuring from trough to peak right now. Yeah. But we could peak even higher. We could keep on even higher. I mean like post-fight, right? That's why the market's bullish post-that-cane versus... David fight.

It's only one reason. We are up in October though. It actually has, like, October has actually delivered. So it started the month at 63K on Bitcoin. How about Eith? Has it been October for Eith? I want even more uptoberness for basically all these assets.

I think we are at current starting prices. The first thing that happened in October was we dumped. We have now returned to October 1st levels. Why did we dump that hard? What happened? Why did we dump that hard? I'll have to go back to listen to the first roll-up of the month

to actually find out like look at these red candles here was this. Anyways, Eth up 9% on... This is like war stuff. Do you remember? This is Middle East.

Oh yeah, war stuff. Right. Oh, God. The third war of the recent era. Yeah, okay. Anyways, this week, Eth is up 9% on the week, start of the week, $2,3,350 ending the week, $2,610 where we currently are. Flows looking pretty flat, David.

But actually, you know, like... No, in flows. In flows. In flows. Yeah, inflows, more inflows than outflows, I guess, on the week. That's right. That's right. Eth still has a lot to chip away.

It's like net out flows. We've got a big hole to climb out of. You like, what is this? 500 million? Still net outfloss. Flows. So I'll be happy when that gets to zero. But he's just like, we're chipping away at it.

How about the ratio? We chipping away on the ratio? We have been flat on the ratio since October 3rd. 038739 flat ratio. Not down, though. Knock down. Now, the first step to going up is to stop going down, and we've done that. What do you mean? Do you want to see down? This has been down over the last two years. Let me show you the ratio over time. This is Evan SS6, who is actually, like, I think, an Heath Bull on Twitter anyways.

Yeah, he's a youth bull. He says, kudos to anyone who could still bull post when this has been a straight line down for two years. You have more conviction than me. We haven't had two consecutive weekly green candles since May 2023, and he's showing a chart of the Eith Bitcoin ratio, the ratio we were just talking about, David. It's been in this descending channel here over the past two years, and we haven't had two consecutive weekly green candles since May 2023. Kind of bad. Bullish. Bullish. Bullish. Like at some point, the ratio gets so low that like a basic, like, unopinionated mean reversion becomes the status quo. And like, we're kind of getting there. Sentiment's kind of bad out there on ETH still, although, David, we'll talk about this more.

I feel good. I feel fine. I feel like things are turning around, right? I think things are turning around, but we'll have to see. How about crypto market cap as a whole? 2.4. We're almost at that 2.5 watermark, which is totally arbitrary, but I'm still paying attention to it.

So $2.4.1 trillion in the week. Well, if we want to get bullish, let's flip over to the layer two, some good things happening in L2Land. Of course, this layer two update brought to you by our friends over at Mantle, which is a fantastic layer two. You should definitely check out. Um, okay, where should we maybe start this? I think this was a fantastic tweet from the grow the, the pie folks. They put out fantastic L2 analytics. And I think this really, this data point pushes back against this narrative that L2s are parasitic for ether the asset and for Ethereum. And here's what I mean. They tweet this. Layer twos have more value locked in Ethan and stables. There is 11 billion dollars worth of eth on layer twos right now. This is split between, like, like arbitrarum base, OPM main net, and like on down to the other layer twos.

What I think this shows is that's $11 billion worth of ETH being consumed in these layer twos as a monetary unit. What you and I would say is like ETH as money. Others would call this kind of like, you know, store of value or, you know, being used as economic bandwidth or collateral. So I think there's an untold story here of ETH actually being used as money in these layer two economies and that being a source of demand. The market doesn't see that right now as clearly. They're looking very much at ETH from a, you know, like from a fees perspective and they're seeing

fee revenue drop on ether. I think they're not paying as much attention to this story, which is ETH emerging as a monetary unit inside of these L2 economies. What are your thoughts on this? Yeah, I think the bare perspective here is that there used to be all of this ETH, this mass. massive amounts of ETH, how much, like $10 billion, $11 billion of ETH, that used to be on the Ethereum Layer 1. And now it's not on the Ethereum Layer 1. Now it went elsewhere. And so the Ethereum Layer 1 is like being left behind, right? It's not capturing the fees. It's not capturing anything. And a lot of people just don't see the perspective of money. Like maybe we need to find a different word for people that don't like the money word. Like high quality liquid asset is apparently a term

used in Tradfi. That kind of means the same thing that we're saying when we say eth is money. is like the high quality liquid asset of these layer twos and these layer twos are using them. But also it's like this tweet is positioning eth versus stable coins. In my mind it's like eth and stable coins. Like these things are making each other much more liquid. The more stable coins on Ethereum there are,

the more liquid eth is and vice versa. Just I want more. I just want more total value put on all of these chains. Yeah, I do think these layer two economies are still in their infancy too. There's a lot of cool things happening there. There's another story in L2Land, I think, is interesting. This is a tweet from Anthony Sassano.

Blobs, almost at Target, going to be interesting to see what happens when blobs enter a period of sustained price discovery and then he posts a Dune Analytics dashboard here. Can you explain this? A lot of people don't understand what this tweet means, what the context is, like what even blobs are. Can you explain what Anthony is saying,

what the significance is? So every 12 seconds, we produce an Ethereum layer one block. In one block, there are, there's three blobs. There's space for three blobs. Layer twos can use one of these blobs to post their data for all of the recent transactions, the proof of the transactions, into Ethereum layer one blob space. So every 12 seconds, we have space for three layer twos to do this.

Layer twos don't need to post a blob every single slot. They can just choose to use blobs as they see. fit, but it's one of the bandwidth. It's a component of bandwidth on the Ethereum Layer 1. We have Layer 1 block space where you can do actual like normal execution transactions or you can post Blobs to blob space and there's space for three blobs. And blob space, David, is like a fast lane for Layer 2 specifically. Yeah, because the data that's being posted to blobs is aggregate of hundreds, thousands of user transactions on the respective layer 2s that are consuming blob space. Right now we have been under.

target as in there has been like maybe an average of 2.7 blobs consumed per Ethereum block, but that number is approaching three. And once that number hits the target, it's kind of like an EIP-1559 mechanism. Once we start being three or above, all of a sudden we start to induce blob fees. And so it starts to cost more money. Right now, blobs are free. They're not being charged to the layer two for anything. This is part of the component of just like, oh, layer two's are parasitic to Ethereum, because they're not paying any fees. Once they hit the three number,

then the blobs will actually start to cost money. And then layer twos will start paying for blob space. I think people are starting to get bullish about this, as in like, yo, like we're going to start to capture, like we have two fee revenues, right? We have layer one execution fees. That's EIP 1559,

and then we have blob space fees. And so everyone's like, ooh, we're getting price action. We're going to get some fees coming in for layer twos. I think like, whoa, guys, yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, we want to scale blobs very far. Like, we want to see price discovery when there are 256 blobs per block, not three. And so it's too soon to get excited about blob fee capture because we want, we need like 100x more capacity than what we currently have. So I think it's still too soon to start like being excited for fee capture because we have scale.

we need a hundred times more scale and we get that with a hundred times more blobs. One thing I'll add to that though is I think that's not the only reason that people are bullish. It's not just from like because of fee capture that comes with blob space contention. I think they're also bullish

that this blob space filled up so quickly. I mean this is a tweet saying L2 blob demand is starting to reach the target. I didn't really expect this until like 2025. The fact that this has happened so quickly really shows the induced demand in the layer two ecosystem and all of that picking up. One interesting question that falls out of this is, okay, how many transactions per second can we support with the existing like

proto-dank charting blob space that we have on Ethereum? There was a series of blog post that seems like Vitalik is writing on the Ethereum roadmap. One of them this morning that was published actually answers this question. So apparently with the current amount of blob space that we have, if you're just considering ERC20 transaction, if everything was, kind of on a layer two roll-up, and they used Ethereum for data availability, so we're not talking about volidiums or anything else. About 174 transactions per second is what we can support throughout the entire roll-up economy. So, I mean, it's still quite shy of Vitalik's North Star like Target, which is like 100,000 transactions per second across the L2 roll-up ecosystem.

Now, with PeerDAS, which is kind of the next upgrade and expansion of Ethereum, blob space, we can get close to a thousand TPS in terms of, you like, roll up. But again, the target is- A PIRDAS gives us a count a blob target of 8 to 16. So going from 3 to 8 to 16. Yeah, exactly. So now we're in this stage, and we said this when Proto-Danktorting was like introduced of just continuous expansion of blob space.

Since we have our first batch, our first blob space stimulus, and then PIRDAS will be a next one. There's also things we can do on the layer one, right, to increase, like, you know, gas limits and capacity for more blob space. So I think now we're in a stage of, like, incremental progress on expanding the blob space. And I guess to your point, David, we better do it because the L2 demand is here. And we don't want to, you know, like, take the foot off the gas pedal in the Ethereum community. And a lot of the layer twos are saying, like, yeah, we would enjoy consuming more blobs. And we haven't even entered the era of based roll-ups, which I think is coming. And also base roll-ups are incredibly blob consumptive. They need more blobs than the average roll-up.

They're very blobs. I didn't know that, really. Yeah. Yeah. Base rolls want, they want more blobs. Hungry for blobs. That's right. And I think base roll-ups, I think people are starting to, like, figure this out. They're slowly starting, everything's starting to point towards the based roll-up future. But like, so much of everything that, like, people are figuring out how to fud Ethereum and from the different ways that they can fund Ethereum, like, base roll-ups is, like, there's really an elegant solution to all of them. And when they start to, like, really come online and gain adoption, like, we need more blobs for them. Oh, you and I are very bullish on based roll-ups. If you don't know what based roll-ups are or what we're talking about right now, we will have a series

of episode. Don't worry. We've got a podcast for you. Stay tuned for that. Okay, what are the odds that our friend over at Black Rock, Larry Fink, knows what a blob is, David. What do you think? Over under on that. He has, he has heard the words blobs before. You think he's heard the word blobs? Yeah, I think he's heard the word blobs. Yeah. Really? So, okay, well, that would surprise me. But, you know, like, you know, he's CEO of Black Rock. He's like a pretty smart guy from all reports here. So he had some comments on not just Bitcoin, but also Ethereum on the week. And I got to say, the wider context of this is I don't think Black Rock could. be any more bullish on crypto as like an asset class.

And like this also came through. And we were talking to some BlackRock crypto folks at the permissionless conference last week. It's just like very clear to me that they are kind of going all in to this asset class. So there was a Q3 earnings call for BlackRock where Larry, Larry Fink was kind of reporting out to analysts. And he just gave the stats of like their I shares, Bitcoin, like ETFs, just kind of promoting that.

And he said this. We believe Bitcoin is an asset class in itself is an alternative to other commodities like gold. And I think the application of this form of investment will be greatly expanded to the role of Ethereum as block chain can grow dramatically. On presidents, Kamala versus Trump, he said this. I'm not sure if either president or other candidate would make a difference. I do believe the utilization of digital assets is going to become more and more of a reality worldwide. So he's saying, hey, regardless of who's elected, you know, this, you can't stop this train, as Lynn Alden might say, right? These crypto assets are going to be a big deal.

Yeah, I've heard that take actually more and more. That was one of the themes of permissionals is actually the election outcome doesn't really matter nearly as much as the Senate outcome. Because the Senate outcome, if we can flip that to being more pro-crypto, then we can finally get some crypto legislation in. And that's going to be the thing that moves the needle a lot. but that being said we had a very green week in crypto prices the same week that Trump has pulled ahead in the polls

and the Kamala campaign seems to be on their heels so who knows all right coming up next more Trump token stuff his defy token is out how is it going he's currently in the middle of the sale how is that sale doing Kamala also said something about crypto

is that a pivot or is it just really weird and then also the election odds also doing something weird. Why are crypto prediction markets giving Trump such a massive lead? Or are they being manipulated? So we're going to talk about all these stories and more. But first, I'm going to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially Cracken and their new Cracked BTC. If you want to use a new Bitcoin, check out Cracked BTC. It's not actually called Cracked BTC, but I think they should call it Cracked BTC, but I think they should

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So Donald Trump has pulled a head on prediction markets like polymarkets. So Trump is now at 62% at the time of recording his odds of winning the presidential election. Kamala Harris at 38%. This is kind of crazy because this has been trading like neck and neck for quite some time here. Ever since Kamala got actually named as a candidate, it's been basically within 3%. Yeah, I mean, look at these numbers. Like, you know, you know, Kamala ahead, then Trump ahead, 50, 50, 50. And then suddenly this divergence.

So the question. The question. Divergence, yeah. Yeah, and this is getting tweeted all around. Like, Polymarket is mainstream at this point in time. It's on mainstream news, like Twitter. The app is getting downloaded more than any other news organization's app. It's in the news category.

It's been downloaded. Elon Musk is tweeting this out. Of course, it's like particularly because it's favorable towards Trump. So a question I think we all have is, why is this so different? than the poll-based predictions that are going on. So, David, you know, we had Nate Silver on. We talked about this a little bit, but at that time, Polymarket was like, you know,

trading 50-50 kind of, yeah, it was a coin flip. But now it's really diverged from models like Nate Silver's model. So this is Nate Silver's model. Let me pull this up. Look at this. This is as of kind of the same day. That's 50-50. 50.

50. Okay? And so, like, the question I was asking is like, why is there the divergence between polymarket and like say Nate Silver's model. I got some interesting answers. One, you like get some detail around it's not just polymarket if you're curious, oh, this is just a polymarket thing. It's kind of the crypto's bidding it up. It's not just polymarket actually, David. It's all of the prediction markets pretty much. So Pinnacle has Trump at 60%. Bet 365, 58% bet online 58%. It's not just

crypto bias from using polymarket. Some people said it's because polymarket is a, you know, This is, according to Adam Cochran, a single input crypto product. And I'm asking why a multi-input model would have different outcomes than a single input crypto product. I'm pretty sure that's wrong, David, because I don't think Polymarket is a single input at all. It's just kind of like the entire market. It's the most incredibly diversified input model. Yeah. So when I asked this on Twitter, I got a lot of wrong answer.

I think Adam Cochran is kind of wrong on this. And another take is because prediction markets are some of the most powerful entertainment tools. ever traded for fans to rally around their favorite all-stars with real stakes. This might be actually closer to what I think could be going on. It's basically like, hey, this is like entertainment-based, like, betting. It's not just for kind of like the win. It's not a perfectly efficient market. It's more like my sports team.

I want my sports team to win. You know, I watch the election. Might as well put some money on it. Yeah. Nate Silver actually wrote a blog post about this. I had to unlock. So I've unlocked this for you guys. His explanation is he saw,

says this. Sometimes market sentiment has a mind of its own. That can especially happen when traders are bored and angsty because they're in the doldrums. He continues, as I described in my book for certain types of major events like the Super Bowl, there's so much recreational money that there's often not enough sharp money to take it all off the table. So a single whale with bottomless pockets can feed a market for years. There's more dumb money than smart money. It's basically what he's saying. He goes on. And these are asymmetries in who trades at these markets and the political moods they strike.

And the Trump era, Republicans tend to project confidence while Democrats tend to project anxiety. So this might be a reason. Just like Trump voters are kind of like overconfident or Trump like betters are overconfident. Anyway, a slew of different answers to this, including one, another one that I like is basically think of Nate's model is based on poll data, right? So he's almost like a fund manager, like kind of like making a bet. Whereas like polymarket.

A fund manager of statistics. Yeah, he's like a fund manager, whereas Polymark is like what the market says. And so, you know, Nate could be like, nah, the market's wrong. Here's what the poll says. And you can make a bet on that. But the general market is prediction markets, and it's giving a Trump a sizable lead here. Are there other explanations from this that you've seen? Yeah.

So there is another corner to investigate why polymarket is so divergent. And this is the world of on-chain data. And so this is a tweet that has gone viral in the last like couple days or so from Fazi Diablo, who says, A mysterious trader with four different polymarket accounts, Freddie 999, Princess Caro, Michi, Theophore have all been making substantial bets in favor of Donald Trump winning the election. Freddie 9999 has conducted over 1,600 trades supporting Trump in the past 24 hours,

totally more than $4 million. They have also purchased more than 3 million shares betting that Trump would win the popular vote, and nearly 1.5 million shares that Trump would carry Pennsylvania, a crucial battergown state that was viewed as the most likely tipping point state in this cycle. And so he has also made investments into these contracts endorsing Republican politicians, such as Ambassador Nikki Haley, Florida Governor Ronda Santis. And so all in total, Freddie 999's positions is valued at more than $14 million on the platform, all in favor of Republican candidates.

The second holder, Princess Caro, joined in September with position values, it's $16 million with a current profit of $661 million? Wow. Wow. Doing well. Traded $21 million across 14 different markets. But also, they did these time analysis of when these accounts are making their trades. And there's very clear clustering in time preferences.

So they're all happening in the same time. But also when one of these accounts stops trading, another one of these accounts starts. So, like, Freddie 9, 9, 9, 9, 9.9. will make a bunch of trades, and then they will stop, and then Princess Cara will make a bunch of trades, and they will stop, and they're all happening in the same time of the day. And also, interestingly, they all have either $1 million or $500 million clips of USC being withdrawn from Cracken to send into these accounts.

So very similar behavior coming from these accounts. And all in all, there's something like, I think, $24 million that was come out of Cracken into these accounts to make pro-es Republican candidate bids, especially on the Donald Trump, Conlon Harris market, so much, in fact, Ryan, that people are starting to make arbitrages across the different prediction markets. So all financial markets are linked together. And so even though other prediction markets are following suit, they're all saying the same

things. It's because arbitrage is happening across all. Oh, wow. So polymarkets really like the biggest liquidity book, but other markets are just following that because of our... Exactly. There's so much volume going into the polymarches. market from these buyers, these Republican account buyers, that it's this yonking all of the other

prediction markets with them. And so there's a link in the show notes for this guy who kind of did some investigative journalism on who this trader is. They think it's a Frenchman of all people. And it's definitely in European hours, maybe even later. They found this guy in the polymarket discord and she said, hey, are you this person? And then they got erratic and then deleted their count, which is like, it's weird to get erratic while also holding like $25 million. But say this is true. Like, what's kind of the implication here? So, you know, like some whale is betting on a bunch of Republican candidates, right?

Like, it's a free market. Everybody's able to bet, you know, or not bet. They put skin in the game. If he's right, he wins. If he's wrong, he loses. Like what, but is there some other implication here? Well, I think that's going to be answered as to like where this money came from. Is it, is it one per, is it one DGEN's money?

And they're just like yellow and 24? million on Trump and other Republicans because that's what they believe. Like, okay, maybe. Another conspiracy that I've heard, it's actually a super PAC and they've decided that this is actually the best use of their money to like influence sentiment and positivity towards one side. Haseeb didn't like that take. He says actually being the underdog is bullish.

So if you believe it to this, then if you were like pro demo, if you're pro Kamala, this is what you would do because now all the Kamala supporters like, oh no, like we got to get off our butts and go vote. Right. It really depends on where the money came from. Right. Well, it's interesting. Yeah, because if Trump isn't such a lead, the other way you could read this,

it's like, oh, Trump voters can just stay home. Yeah, just chill. Like, we've got this. So we don't know if somebody's manipulating this. We don't know what side is manipulating it. Or if that's even worth the cost. Anyway, so interesting, I think what's going on with prediction markets. And of course, this is, to me, this is a much richer data set than just like polling data.

because polling data just kind of captures polling. It's like, you know, delayed. And so there's something to this market. You just got to like balance all the signals together and see like what it means. But I guess, David, we'll find out in 17 days what, like, hopefully, hopefully anyway, what really happens with respect to the election. Let's check in on Trump's defy token. So launch this week. Is this just two accredited investors?

I'm like, I'm pretty sure, right? Accredited investor sale. Yeah, that's right. What happened with the WFLI token? This is the World Liberty Financial token, which is kind of like a reskin borrowing, lending platform built on AVE, I believe. So how did the token sale go? Okay, so WLFI tokens being sold at one and a half pennies a pop.

There's a hundred billion total supply. Again, this token will be non-transferable for 12 months. They have been planning on raising $300 million at a $1.5 billion full. diluted valuation. So big ICO, right? Big ICO selling 20% of the total token supply. The current sale, the time of recording, is clocking in at $12.4 million of sales, which is a lower number than the $300 million target.

Incoming sales is starting to taper off. So overall, it's not like looking great. 12,000 number of individual investors here, or at least individual sales. But unless some whale comes in and starts, like, really, like, pumping up these numbers, we're going to be falling short of the target $300 million raise. Yeah, that's for sure. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, at a $1.5 billion valuation, like, I don't want to invest in that. Okay. So what's next for World Liberty Financial? The first phase is going to launch on Scroll, which is actually interesting. They made checks out as to how Sandy Pang from Scroll became the advisor to World Liberty Financial. They're going to just start with letting users lend and borrow. starting Bitcoin Ether and Stables. Then they integrate with centralized exchanges to have native on-ramps.

And then they will, they say they will fractionalize real-world assets and obtain regulatory licenses for doing so after that. And they also plan to launch a stablecoin debit card. So like actually kind of like leaning into my panel on permissionless with all the defy folks. There's like this whole like re-skinneding of defy like investment category that's going on. Like this is what came from Infinex is doing. This is what World Liberty Financial is doing. Hey, there's defy out there.

Let's just skin it up, make it sexy, smooth it over. Stamp it Trump on it. Stamp Trump and then sell it for $1.5 billion. Well, I mean, that was very ambitious, a very ambitious plan. Let's just say to do that kind of like on an ICO basis. Yeah, I think the reskinning meta is hard to raise at a $1.5 billion dollar valuation on that, especially when you're going for. them like nothing, but I think they were betting on sort of the Trump brand to carry them through.

I sort of wonder if Trump is just like, I'm launching a meme coin. Like how well that would have done? Honestly, like running that a thought experiment, like launching a meme point on Pumpton Fund. Like how much fees does Pumpton Fund give you? I don't know. But like some. And now with this money that he's raised is $12 million, he now he has to go build this thing. Yeah, I know.

With a meme coin, he doesn't have to do anything. Just, you could probably make more than $12 million of fees just on the meme coin. I know. Just like the meta right now or the narrative, like utility is bearish, right? It's like you actually have to do work when there's utility. But just like meme coins, it's just whatever, you know, people will buy. He is a meme. I'm not saying that's what it should be.

Why not just do the meme thing? Everybody doesn't understand it. Anyway, that's Donald Trump. That's what he's doing. Let's move to Kamala Harris. So she said something about crypto this week. what was the message coming from the Kamala Harris campaign, David? Oh, you're going to make me say this.

Kamala released a proposal called the Opportunity Agenda for Black Men that mentions that over 20% of Black Americans own or have in the past owned crypto and that she wants to support a crypto regulatory framework that protects black men who invest and own crypto. Did you have that on your bingo card? No, I didn't. This is from the Kamala Harris.com website. And it's exactly what he said.

It's part of a platform. Vice President Harris will deliver for black men. And they talk about crypto as a subcomponent because 20% of black American men own crypto, according to them. And then they also bring in other things about, you know, like debt forgiveness for black entrepreneurs and also like legalizing recreational marijuana and creating opportunities for black Americans.

So it's not a, like, like a program targeted at crypto users. It's a program targeted as like, oh, these are, like we're losing the black American vote here. Right. Like male American vote. So what do we do? Oh, like, what are some things this cohort likes, right?

Exactly. And they put together these things. And we know that like black men or like all the other populations of the United States, people like crypto. Like it's actually a very strong voter base, including black men. Yes. But also not specifically other people, But since the Kamala administration campaign has decided that black men are like the next most marginal voter that they want to get to vote for them, they're like, okay, let's, what like, yo, what do black men like?

Crypto? All right. All right. We're going to say some things about crypto. Dude, I don't know, man. It feels so, it's weird. Like, that's what we've said many times. It feels so cringe to me.

This is like the fourth thing the Kamala Harris campaign has said about crypto. And it's done in kind of a weird way. Like, first of all, I think this is like a vague promises and nothingness. Like even the statement, ignore kind of the black men thing. But like, we're going to support digital asset regulation so that black men who invest in it and own these assets are protected, right? What does that even mean? I'm actually putting that to bias towards negative. Right?

Like Gary Gensler says he's like always protecting people. That's why he does what he does. I don't want the government to protect me. Yeah. So there's vague nothingness. I want the military to protect me. I don't want the government. to protect me.

There's, there's, instead of actually putting together a policy document, which she had a lot of time to do on this issue, which she puts, like, this is what the campaign produces. So pretty lackluster from that perspective. And the other thing that's kind of like foreign, like, at least to me, is just crypto is open to everybody. Just like, why, if you're trying to target a particular demographic, like, that's okay. This almost reads like, it's an internal memo inside of her campaign. Do you know what I mean?

Like, oh, we're really losing this demographic. so we have to target them. What they could have done differently is they could have just said, like, we are pro-crypto. And if you're like a black male or if you're like any, you know, demographic in the U.S.,

you would benefit from that. So I don't understand why you don't reach the same outcome. You would get more benefits. Exactly. Why just say, like, why not just say, hey, we're going to be pro-cropto and we're going to support crypto assets for men, women,

any gender of any race in the United States. Black men. Like, attention, black men. I get if you're doing that inside your own internal, like, campaign for demographic, but like, why make that your external press release and, like, that to be your message for crypto? I feel like you're really failing the assignment on that. Honestly, kind of amateur hour.

A little weird. Okay, that's Trump. So Trump is doing a defy token. Kamala Harris, you know, like making these types of statements about crypto. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren is actually battling for her seat against a Republican. God, we got all the characters today. Yeah. And what I love about this is she was actually asked a question by a moderator of a debate about her anti-crypto army rhetoric and whether she still stands behind it.

Should we tune into that? It's going to be a long clip. This is actually, okay, so John Deaton is the first person to really go after. Elizabeth Warren could go after her seat. He is a Republican from Massachusetts, extremely pro-Crypto. Like, very much one of us. Oh, you'll hear it. You'll hear it.

The community is, like, kind of rallying behind John Deaton. Definitely an underdog, but it'd be, like, kind of sick if he took out Liz Warren. Okay, so let's go play the clip. You two take a very different view of the cryptocurrency industry. Senator Warren says she wants to build a, quote, anti-crypto army to rein in what she calls crypto's threat to financial stability, consumer protection, climate and national security. You have criticized her and federal authorities for what you claim is overly aggressive regulation of crypto. What's the right balance? One minute. Well, listen, I want everyone to know,

when I found Bitcoin, I thought of my mom, because my mom was on welfare and food stamps, and she couldn't keep a bank account because she couldn't keep the minimum balance, and the bank would hit her with the predatory fees, and we needed that money. And then she had to go to the check cashing stores that you see in the hood. And they would charge her a fee. My mom would beg them, please, can you take less so that we have the money for food? And then when I went to college and I would send her money from college, I used Western Union. And Western Union would take 15%.

And it made a difference. So when Bitcoin came, I was like, great. You could cut out the predatory banks and the middlemen and the money grams of Western unions. And you could help unbanked people like my mom. But the better question here is for Senator Warren, with illegal immigration bankrupting this state, with inflation pricing regular people out of economy, with a debt crisis where 40% of the people don't have 500 bucks in case of an emergency, with foreign wars taking place, why did this senator wake up one day and say, with all that, I'm going to build an anti-crypto army because crypto is so important to her. That's a question that she needs to answer. Thank you. Senator, one minute. So look, I'm fine. People want to buy and sell crypto. That's great. I just want to make sure that crypto has to follow the same rules.

She's not fine with that. Every bank, every stockbroker, every credit union, and that is some consumer protection laws and some laws to make sure that it's not open for terrorists and drug traffickers and human traffickers in Iran. So that's what I want. But I want to be really clear about what's really at issue here. And that is, who are you going to represent in Washington? There's one candidate standing here who gets 90% of the funding to keep their campaign going from one industry, the crypto industry. One candidate who has said quite openly that his personal worth is 80% tied up in crypto. Look, people of Massachusetts know me. You know, I fight for everybody, fight for working people.

If John Deaton has a chance to go to Washington, his crypto buddies are going to want a return on their investment. He's going to be there to fight for crypto. I am so bullish. The crazy thing about that statement is that, you know who's the biggest financial supporter of Elizabeth Warren? Who's that? Banks, the big banks out there. She has been so favorable to banks and bank incumbents. The clip ends right here.

but I hope that's what John Deaton replied with. Because, like, she's, she, unfortunately, I think she actually did a good job kind of deflecting, counter, like, rebuttling what he said. And she's like, look at this corrupt individual for people who don't care about crypto, for people just, the normal American. And they're like, she just said, like, this guy, of course this guy likes Bitcoin. He's funded by all the crypto bros. And I think that might have, like, actually landed.

But, like, she's paid by the incumbents. Like, she's even worse. Well, so what's interesting, though, is like when she says that if he gets elected, he'll, like, you'll fight for his crypto buddies in D.C., I'm like, that is good. That's what we want. Because what she doesn't understand is this is not like the banking cabal, right? Like, this is about a civil liberty. It's about Americans' right to own non-custodial digital assets. Basically, do you have the right in the United States to go bankless? It's not just like a set of like, like, you know, the coin base and like the crackens, all of these exchanges and like A16Z, right? They are fighting for a right, the ability to buy own hold crypto in a non-custodial way for all Americans. And so like I want John Deaton or any politician in there, like going to D.C. and actually fighting against the banks for our rights. Anyway, that's the discussion that's going on.

She's like pointing at like this crypto cabal, these like very small. group of extremely wealthy insiders that is like promoting John Deaton it's like no there's actually millions of us and it's we the people it's actually the banking ball that is the very small concentrated wealthy group of insiders that's pulling the strings

it's just a complete like reverse uno car that needs to be played here so a couple of things about this like one is probably John Deaton doesn't have a chance here and this is kind of like 22% behind Senator Warren yeah so it's not looking good in the

polls, not in polymarket. So polymarket has like worn it like a 95%. Yeah. It would be a massive upset. It would be a massive upset. And it is true that crypto is spending in a big way in D.C. in these elections. Like so this is an article from Politico. Crypto has quietly become one of the biggest electoral players.

You wouldn't know it from their ads and they go on. And, you know, they're kind of pitching crypto as like, oh, they're coming in here and they're trying to sway election outcomes. And I always go back to the reason is it's because it's existential for us. because it's existential for the crypto industry. You didn't see this in previous elections. It's because Gary Gensler and Operation ChokePoint and the executive branch

and all of the lawmakers actually trying to choke this industry out. That's something that this article doesn't acknowledge. So anyway, mainstream sees that kind of thing. They also seem Trump with a cryptocurrency. I don't know what people in the street actually think about this issue who are not in like crypto holders themselves.

Yeah, I think our headlines haven't looked that great. Like if I'm guessing if I just put myself into the shoes of just the average person and the last time I heard about crypto was SBF and now I'm hearing about the crypto industry buying the elections. I'm like, oh, it's coming back. Like they're going to get us. We got to make sure like got to stamp them down. And like the other headlines that people are reading this week is here's from Newsweek.

Trump tells followers to buy family back to cryptocurrency. Yeah. Not a great headline. Like our headlines aren't amazing right now. I know. I know. It's definitely difficult. We've got to win on the ground game. Back to the presidential in summary, right? The question is, what happens if Kamala Harris wins to crypto in the U.S. and what happens if Trump wins? And this is Alex Thorne commenting on this. He says the bottom line, well, Trump is undoubtedly more favorable for the industry. We're optimistic. He's saying that on behalf of Galaxy research, that we're optimistic that Harris could be more supportive than Biden has been. And he like sources this chart. where he goes through the main issues, you know, and the main government bodies like the SEC, treasury, IRS issues, Bitcoin mining, self-custody, and he scores them. Red, yellow, green.

Green being, of course, good, red being bad. You can see the Biden column here. It's like basically all red. There's like one yellow. And then you go to the other side, you see the Trump column and it's all pretty much green. There's a little bit of yellow, but mostly green. And then in the middle is Harris and Walls. And this is a bit more mixed.

There's some light shade of green, just a little bit, more yellow, a little bit of red. Well, yellow's bad. Yeah. It's not in the middle. It's yellow with, they got a couple neutrals, one green, a lot of yellows, and then one red. Basically, it seems like not from his perspective and from Galaxy's perspective, not as harsh as the Biden administration, more toned down, certainly not as as bullish as Trump advance would be. So that, I guess, is a change in the right direction if this comes to pass.

Kamala, the Kamala campaign being indifferent to crypto is unfortunately of step in the right direction based off of Biden, like, because Biden was just like so bad. If Kamala just doesn't, if she gets elected and just doesn't care about crypto, that's actually still like an improvement. Yeah. And also we'll have to see what the Senate does and the rest of Congress. Coming up next, we got Ethereum with some new roll-up technology. David, I want you to tell us about the new fuel chain and this super performant EVM chain coming out of paradigm and Cracken wrapping up some Bitcoin. What could that mean for the future? Oh, also, this is great, David. They caught the guy who hacked the SEC Twitter on that Bitcoin ETF announcement day. So we'll talk about all of that

and more. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including Mantle, which is an L2, you absolutely have to check out. Here they are. New projects are coming online to the Mantle layer two every single week. Why is that? this happening? Maybe it's because Mantle has been on the frontier of Layer 2 design architecture since it first started building Mantle DA powered by technology from EigenDA. Maybe it's because users are coming onto the mantle layer two to capture some of the highest yields available in Defy and to automatically receive the points and tokens being accrued by the $3 billion mantle treasury in the Mantle reward station. Maybe it's because the Mantle team is one of the most helpful teams to

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Start swapping smarter with Uniswap. All right, so this was great, David. They caught the guy who hacked the SEC Twitter account. Do you remember this? there was like this fake announcement from the SEC Twitter account and it was like, it was a day before the E-T-Fs.

Yeah, exactly. Was it E's or Bitcoin? It was the Bitcoin ETFs, right? Bitcoin. Yeah. And it turned out that the SEC Twitter account was compromised. Of course, there was market activity

based on this tweet. And everyone was like, oh my God, you're like a government agency. How did this actually happen? Well, the FBI tracked the guy who did this. Apparently he lives in Alabama somewhere. This is the tweet. Oh, he lives inside the country.

Yes. All right. So it gets better. The FBI arrests the man behind SEC Twitter account for posting the fake ETF approval. Here were this man's Google searches, okay, just like after, you know, make this hack. After he sim-swapped the SEC, he Googled SEC Gov hack. That was his first Google. Followed by, how can I know for sure if I'm being investigated by the FBI?

Followed by, what are the signs that you were under investigation by law, enforcement or the FBI, even if you have not been contacted by them. These are terrible queries. This guy's not Googling very well. Which caused Doge Toshi on Twitter to say, we have some of the smartest and dumbest people in the world in crypto, and they're often the same. So there you go. A full story there.

All right. Coming out of the world of more serious news, crypto exchange, Cracken launches, wrapped Bitcoin Token K-BTC, available both on Ethereum, Layer 1, and, the OP mainnet. Call it cracked BTC. I'm calling it cracked BTC. I mean, cracking has been one of the biggest

and strongest custody providers of Bitcoin. They are big Bitcoin bulls. It makes sense to wrap it up and put it on optimism and Ethereum. Yeah, it does make sense. And they're partnering

with a whole bunch of blue chip defy apps. So they're getting this cracked Bitcoin far and wide in the DeFi Ethereum ecosystem. Of course, Coinbase launched their wrapped Bitcoin product about a month ago. So this is cracking with a fast follow there, looking to gain some liquidity.

Also in the world of Layer 2's Fuel Network finally launched a supercharged Ethereum Layer 2. Fuel is kind of one of the more differentiated Layer 2s in the Ethereum space. It's a UTXO-based model. So instead of an account model, it's UTXO base. It's got its own virtual machine. They call the Fuel VM. It's also got some native account abstraction, parallelization.

they claim 21,000 transactions per second. It's the Ethereum Layer 1 for DA, and it's aiming for a stage 2 launch. So one of the most sophisticated, robust layer 2 is coming out of the gate. They've been, Fuel has been working on this for a long time. You've already had their kind of like their V1 network that's been up and running. And so congratulations to Fuel. I know David Mihal, who we have used his websites in the past,

like crypto fees, money printers. Info, he's got fuel-pilled and joined that team about a year ago. So fuel has been like nerdsnibing a bunch of devs for a while. It's a really cool project, right? Some OGs in the space. And it's like as stage two, you're talking with respect to decentralization, right, on L2B. So it'll be like the most decentralized layer two that we have. And they've really dialed it up because it's not the EVM, as you said. They've really dialed this up to be like a payment type chain, right?

21,000 transactions per second is absolutely. insane. And so people can download the fuel wallet if they want. There'll be a link in the show notes to that. Also, bankless put together a fuel points program on its AirDrop Hunter. So if you're a bankless citizen, you can go check that out. That's a good onboarding technique to get started with fuel, do some of those quests as well. That wasn't the only layer two that launched something big this week. We got something coming out of paradigm. It's a new layer two called Odyssey. And this has another take on layer 2 tech. What is this, David?

Interesting curveball out of Paradigm these days. Georgios Constantopoulos from Paradigm, the CTO of Paradigm, is now also spinning off to this $20 million raise of this company, Ithaca. Ithaca is a new company that and is producing Odyssey, which is the Rethbase, the client that Georgios has been producing internal to Paradigm, Reth-based OP stack using conduit at the core. And so the CTO of Paradigm is now also the CEO of Ithaca, which produces, excuse me, the, yeah, the CEO of Ithaca, which produces Odyssey, a very juiced layer two. I think this is like Paradigms version of Mega Eith. Paradigms, a very juiced up paradigm with a very strong, a very strong technical lead, Georgios at the helm.

And so this is both a client that I hope becomes a dominant. client of the Ethereum layer one, Reth, yes, while also being one of Ethereum's biggest and fastest layer two's. Yeah. So big, congrats to Giorgio. He's been working on Reth for a very long time. Dan Robinson tweets out, Georgios pioneered the idea of building open source software at a VC firm on the theory

that the best way to help the portfolio is to advance the tech for the whole industry. With Reth and Foundry, his crack team did that and more excited for him to go all in on the effort. Yeah, I think it's pretty cool because all of the, Like all of this is open source, of course. And Reth is a new client. It's a super high-performance EVM chain. That's why you sort of compared it to mega-Eath there,

because that's another high-performance layer two that's just totally dialing up transactions per second. And that's what we have to expect out of this project. So some big layer two tech upgrades. Let's come in on a weekly basis. And another one from Conduit, which we just mentioned in the context of this Odyssey chain. But Conduit, it's like a roll-up as a service provider, and they are launching something called G2. What is this? Yeah, the Conduit G2. So many rollups use conduit to host, maintain, manage,

upgrade their rollups. Zora is one, for example, Avo synthetics uses conduit. Mode network is a conduit chain. Proof of play is a conduit chain. And so if you just want somebody to manage your chain, these are professional chain managers. Again, roll up as a service provider. And so they just built out Conduit G2, which they are presenting as the most powerful sequencer. And so all of conduit chains have the ability to upgrade to Conduit G2, which is offering 1,000x, the compute of Ethereum. That is somewhere in the realm of 50 to 100 megagas. Now, remember Jesse and basses rode to one gigagas? Well, Conduit is providing 100 megagas. And so they're already one-tenth of the way there. I'm pretty sure they leapfrog base here. They claim 10,

higher performance than any other off-the-shelf sequencer. Claiming 4,700 transactions per second, and this is 100% compatible with the OP stack and orbit chains, which is like most of the chains out there. So all of the conduit chains that exist, all the chains I just mentioned, they get to just flip over to this G2 and then they have this massive upgrade.

Really big news coming out of the Ethereum scaling story this week. Yeah, and I think this is just like going to compound. and it's going to be sort of every week these these types of improvement we'll see these types of improvements um david let's switch over to we have been seeing this like every week this is kind of just what like ethereum scaling looks like it just comes from all over the place yeah well ethereum is building out its layer to infrastructure i think uh bitcoin and in particular michael michael sailor is wanting to build out bitcoin in the tradfai system in particular he wants to turn microstrategy

into a bit of a Bitcoin bank. He says this, Bitcoin is the most valuable asset in the world. The endgame for micro strategies to be the leading Bitcoin bank or merchant bank, or you'd call it a Bitcoin finance company. So if we end up with $20 billion of converts, $20 billion of preferred stock, $10 billion of debt and $50 billion of some kind of debt instrument structured, we'll have $100 to $150 billion of Bitcoin. So turning micro strategy into a services-based Bitcoin.

bank company seems to be part of the end game strategy for Michael Saylor. I mean, just because Micro Strategy owns a ton of Bitcoin, I don't think it actually advantages it in any way. I think the only thing that's really happening here is Michael Strategy is using his brand, the brand of Micro Strategy, which I guess works. Yeah. Yeah, no problem with building out a Bitcoin bank for, I think this is part of like, you know, the Bitcoin standard.

safety dean and moose it was never about like building out layer twos or decentralized finance it was just like building bitcoin the asset and then letting a whole bunch of you know centralized custodians other banks like just uh you know start using the bitcoin network as kind of a whale chain so that seems to be what's coming to pass here david there was some interesting news coming out of italy this week italy plans to raise capital gains tax on crypto from 26% to 42% was interesting. Specifically on Bitcoin. Only Bitcoin.

No, no, no, all crypto. It's crypto, excuse me. Crypto. Yeah, yeah. But specifically on all crypto, right? So, and I think this is an example of a country like targeting crypto specifically. This is something that, you know, Ray Dalio has predicted. This is something that the sovereign individual has predicted that as capital flees fiat,

due to, like, bad government policy, you know, like deficits and just, there's, there's, they're spending too much more than they're taking in capital responds in kind and it tries to flee to safer non-sovereign assets essentially. And so what do governments do? They react by constraining the crypto exit ramps and putting in additional taxes. So this has played out many times in history. It's going to play it again with crypto. So watch for this type of thing. We're very early in this. It's, you know, only, I guess only a 42% capital gains tax, but this window could continue to close in the future. Yeah, and at some point, the book would predict some countries are just, you know, instead of raising the capital gains tax, they raise it to 100% by making it illegal.

You just can't have Bitcoin. Right. And so you need to get your Bitcoin out of the system before you do that. Yeah. While speaking of getting out of the system and going bankless, we got another bankless summit that is coming up. So we just did a conference at permissionless, but the bankless summit, tell us about this. This is on the heels of DevCon that's happening over in Thailand, yes? Yeah, this is the first Bankless Summit ever when we've done one of these before.

I'm pretty excited. Bankless Summit is happening the day after DevCon, as you said, Saturday, November 16th. 12 speakers, zero panels. 12 speakers, zero panels, just straight information. All of these speakers of Bankless Summit, which I've hand-selected, to be because they are the best orators in crypto. They have the best ideas. They're the most passionate. They're just really entertaining to listen to.

I have charged them with the assignment of producing. the most interesting talk possible. Do something interesting is the assignment. And Anthony Sizzano is going to open it up. Justin Drake told me that his talk is painfully bullish. Hansgar and Casper will talk about the ETH monetary policy. Max Resnick is going to talk about making the Ethereum Layer 1. Great again.

Mike Noiter, who's a researcher. He's getting his PhD sometime soon. He always makes really good presentations. Same thing with Matt Cutler from Block Native. Eric Wall is going to be there. Sri Ram, who I know has like way. more ideas and really fascinating ideas than I think he's even able to get out. He's going to speak. And so this is the day after DevCon. So you need to get your ticket. There are not a lot of tickets.

There's like over 10,000 people going to DevCon. There are only 600 Bankless Summit tickets. And we've already sold 200 of them. Do the math. There's 400 tickets left. And so you got to get your ticket. Again, it's the Saturday after DevCon. So it's going to be the last thing you do at DevCon. It's going to be, I think it's going to be one of the most interesting things you can do at Devgon. So you don't want to miss it. It's going to be pretty fun. I also think this summit will be very bullish, ETH or the asset. I know the content that you're planning and what these speakers are planning, so I will be sad to miss that.

But I am enjoying the recent resurgence of Eith bullishness on my Twitter timeline. David, do you catch this meme this week? This is from, I did catch this meme. Jesse Ectel. This is David Hoffman punching Kane Warwick right in the face. I can't believe he, like, that's an actual still shot. It would have been funnier was like a Bitcoin or a Salonan a person. I know because you like your friends.

But like this is. It's technically Eith on Eith violence. Yeah. David punching like and he's labeled Eith, you know, like punching through 20K, uh, each price as, uh, you know, like the sole maxi's crypto Twitter and the alt layer ones are all kind of looking in, uh, you know, like in the background, like in the audience. And yeah, um, yeah, dude, that was a great fight.

That's, that's all I got to say. So you, you and Ben is. commentators. You guys had a lot of fun. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. I have seen, though, it seems like, I don't know if you're seeing this, but the Ethereum community is like fighting back a bit more in the narrative forward. Did you catch this Kyle Samani and Stephen from, like, gold fetter from Arbitrum interaction? This is Stephen at the top saying the genius of Arbitrum, arbitram, it doesn't force another token into your chain design. And then he goes on to say governance is freedom, never give it up. And then Kyle Simani says, LMAO, you literally issued a 100% superfluous. token. And then Stephen goes, Which is a hot take. That's a hot take. That's a hot take. And then Stephen goes, sorry we didn't let you into the series A, bro. I know you're still salty, but it's been years. Might be time to let it go. And then what happens, David? Kyle Simani responds, huh? We never spoke. So he's like declining the fact that he was not

allowed into the arbitrage from series A. He's just saying that, we never spoke. That never happened. And then Stephen Goldfetter says, I know honesty and debates is not your strong point, but dude, you are relentless and I have receipts. Here's one of many. And then here's, he just screenshots a telegram conversation with what it's got to be multi-coin and the Arbitron people. And there's, I'm guessing what is like a multi-coin, like associate partner says, somebody named Mabel says, let us into the, let us know if there is an update on the round. We'd be very keen to participate. And then no response from any Arbitron people. The next day, Kyle Samani comes in. So like the big guns, the GP says, Hey guys, just checking in. We want to roll up our sleeves and help, which like in VC land is like, they're knocking on the door every single day.

It's like, hey guys, like we want in the round. We want in the round. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Plusless in the round. Apparently we're not let into the Arbitrum A round, series A round. This tweet has 1,000 likes on it. Whereas the tweet before,

the Kyle Samani's tweet has like seven. Yeah. It's one of the biggest ratios in crypto Twitter history that I've ever seen. It's gotten kind of spicy out there. And Kyle says, I guess you got me. But it doesn't really change anything in the thread above. Yeah. Okay, so question, question, question.

Yeah. Did Kyle Samani lie or did he forget? I don't know. That's all between Kyle and God, man. I don't know. Did he lie about not remembering that he's getting into one of Ethereum's largest layer two series A round? Did he forget that? or did you lie?

We'll leave that to the listener to decide. It is getting kind of bullish out there on Ethereum. I think the tides have turned. We've got Vitalik posting about the roadmap. This was like the first of like seven ratios between Ethereum community members and Ethereum antagonists out there. I think a lot of the Ethereum community. Yeah, because the Ethereum community is not like militant. No.

Not usually. The salon of people, they're militant. The Ethereum people are just like whatever like we got work to do. do. It's a good side. And so it actually takes a lot to, it's pretty hard to rabble the Ethereum community up, but the Ethereum community feels very rambled at this present moment. Yeah, they feel like it feels like they're done with the shit. So they're going on the attack. Anyway, we'll see what happens next. But of course, got to let you know, crypto is risky. You'd lose what you put in, but we're headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us

in the bankless journey. Thanks a lot. Thank you.