Bankless - ROLLUP: $3B ETH Whale | Roman Storm Verdict | Trump 401(k) Crypto Order

Episode Date: August 8, 2025

On this week’s Weekly Rollup, Ryan and David cover Tom Lee’s $3B ETH buying spree at 12x Michael Saylor’s pace, the race to become the top Ethereum treasury, and whether these companies are a buy or not. They also discuss the Roman Storm verdict, Trump’s surprise $8.7T 401(k) crypto order, and Arthur Hayes selling millions in ETH. Plus, Base’s 33-minute outage, the launch of Succinct’s ZK prover network, and the SEC declaring liquid staking tokens are not securities. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle --- TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 6:17 Markets https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jobs-report-today-july-2025-economy-tariffs-trump-doge/ https://x.com/CryptoHayes/status/1951510939469292023 https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1952346941523701954 https://x.com/MitchellHODL/status/1948779978579214777 https://x.com/cburniske/status/1953240847669182937 13:05 Tom Lee becomes the largest crypto holder https://x.com/WhaleInsider/status/1952386215975469242 https://www.tradingview.com/chart/1CDu50yK/?symbol=AMEX%3ABMNR https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1952386046206890262 https://youtu.be/iClsnZ1KYSk?si=Ko99PtLiTCiJ_Q-O https://x.com/fabdarice/status/1953110071493439604 https://www.strategicethreserve.xyz/ https://x.com/NateGeraci/status/1953272814422937941 https://blockworks.co/analytics/treasury-companies/market-data https://www.theblock.co/post/365645/mei-pharma-litecoin-treasury-strategy-charlie-lee-gsr 25:31 Roman Storm’s case came to the end https://x.com/SDNYnews/status/1953196594876301702 ​​https://x.com/valkenburgh/status/1953149843565605015 https://x.com/katiebiber/status/1953235191893549123 https://x.com/jchervinsky/status/1953142247504908496 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1953147290165641407 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfKSKz3Kafk 36:10 Executive order - crypto in your 401k https://watcher.guru/news/trump-to-sign-order-allowing-crypto-in-401k-retirement-plans 41:20 Base halted block production for half an hour https://x.com/jessepollak/status/1952785312767459709 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1953129400087572524 45:22 Succinct Prover Network is live! https://x.com/pumatheuma/status/1952836524808257580 https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/succinct 49:00 SEC said LSTs are not securities https://x.com/RebeccaRettig1/status/1952780309876867200 https://x.com/jespow/status/1952833684392034404 50:23 Metamask is about to launch its stablecoin https://x.com/AggrNews/status/1952821245814182346 51:41 Barry Silbert returns to Grayscale as chairman https://x.com/BarrySilbert/status/1952460252571468187 52:29 China said Worldcoin-style iris data collection are national security threat https://www.theblock.co/post/365752/chinese-security-ministry-flags-iris-national-threat https://x.com/BanklessHQ/status/1947265308416229745 55:43 Coinbase Ad was banned in the UK https://x.com/brian_armstrong/status/1952152928044847477 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/aug/04/george-osborne-uk-cryptocurrency-boom-left-behind 58:02 Closing & Disclaimers 58:11 Moment of Zen https://x.com/coinbase/status/1950843893240496564 --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Bankless Nation is the second week of August is time for the Bankless Weekly Rollup. David, I declare this is Tom Lee Week at Bankless. All right? Why is it Tom Lee week? Tom Lee just became the number one largest Eith holder, at least that we know about. That happened on the week. He's got almost a million, not a million dollars worth, a million in supply of Eith. That's like three billion dollars. We've got to talk about how he got that. Well, if I own ticker B MNR, then I am. a shareholder of the entity that holds the largest amount of ETH. Yes. Is that hypothetical?

So me and Tom Lee combined own $3 billion of Eath, something like that. Wow. Wow. I didn't know I was speaking with such a whale here. Do you actually own some BNMR? No, I don't. But not for any particular reason. I just kind of have, other than just like looking at the different leadership of all

the ETH treasury companies, I don't really have any other way to really like differentiate between the two. Yeah, I know that, I know, I'm pretty sure that there are material differences, but they don't broadcast their secrets. Like, remember in the episode of Tom Lee? I was like, so Tom Lee, like, what strategies do you employ to that? And he's like, David, these are inappropriate questions. Yeah, these are inappropriate. Step back.

Yeah, he's like, calm down. You're a strike two, buddy. Thank God I recovered that entire interview, you know. I have to run off the house. No, but I actually got some takes for you on Eith Treasury Company. companies and their MNAPs. I'd love to hear them. I'd love to hear them.

Actually, I want to hear what you say about this. And also, what's your favorite Tom Lee photo, David? Because look at here. I can't believe this thread popped off. Was this you? Was this you on Twitter? Yeah. Okay, so Ryan posted on the Bankless Twitter account.

It's Tom Lee Day at Bankless. Post your favorite Tom Lee picture. There is a lot of quality. There's a lot of quality Tom Lee pictures. Do you see him with the two Rockettes? No. Let's get there. Okay, this is Tom Lee and Jensen right here.

Tom Lee actually. Looking like it's been a long night there. The hair of Tom Lee every single time. Yeah, this is AI generated. Tom Lee is Superman. Yeah, I could tell. I could still tell. This is Tom Lee with some pudgy penguins.

With a pudgy penguin. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. Tom Lee's call for Bitcoin, Bruce Lee. No. Oh, there we go. There we go. Look at the angle of his kick. He's doing great.

God, that's bullish. That is a good, if you chart this leg. I feel like that's a straight line up. Is that showing something? up and to the right. There's a lot of Tom Lee fodder here, so. There's a lot of good Tom Lee material out there. Yeah.

Anyway, okay, that's not all we're talking about. There was a pretty big verdict on the week that we got to cover. So that was the Roman Storm trial. What are we talking about there? Yeah, I'm pretty jazzed about it, and I'm kind of very aware that I'm more jazz than anyone else. Maybe more than me still. More than, more than Ryan, more than some of the lawyers. We talked with Peter from Coin Center and also David Morris,

and so we kind of got their opinion right after the verdict. I'm talking with Jake Trevinsky and Amanda Tuminelli on Monday, so I'm going to get their opinion. But I'm still of the opinion that we have, we still have work to do, but there is a possible better outcome, a better outcome than was ever possible before, specifically downstream of the nature of the verdict that came out of Roman Storm. So we will talk and I will give my case for why this is a very...

And the verdict is like, yeah, it's a partial verdict. So we'll get into all those details. Also, the SEC said stake tokens like, you know, Lido's stake deeth. They're not securities. So we always knew this, but good to see them say it. Sucinct releasing their Prover Network, why that is pivotal to scaling the Ethereum layer one. Also, base stop producing some blocks.

You've got to talk about what went wrong there. And David, there's a Trump executive order that's being signed today. Okay, at the time of recording, so we'll have already been signed. crypto is now allowed in your 401k, sir. Dude, this is an, like, no one saw this coming. Yeah, right? And he just decides, Donald Trump just decides that crypto can go in the 401k, which is like, there's a reason why that's massively bullish.

If you are in the 401K, you just have a constant buy pressure from everyone's two-week pay period salary in America. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll get into that, including when it's starting. I did some research on this one. David, you know what? We should, we should do this. We should shill the bankless premium feed on the podcast for just a minute here. Let's chill our product.

Okay, let's shill it. Okay. So the bankless premium feed is a special RSS feed. So if you're on Spotify, you listen to the podcast. If you're on Apple, any RSS player, you listen to this podcast. If you see kind of like the black bankless, you're on the regular feed. Pleb feed. Is that what we call it?

You're on the PLEB feed. Sorry, guys. It's great. It's mostly all the content, but not all of the content. It's 90% of the content. Yeah, there's commercials, other things. But on the premium feed, that's what happens if you upgrade, you become a bankless citizen. You get all sorts of other stuff, including this episode right here.

We just recorded an episode earlier this week with Vitalik Boutyrins, a two-hour episode. Absolutely phenomenal. That's already available to you. People have already, people on the premium RSS feed with the white bankless logo have already listened to the Vitalik episode. They're also listening to the same episode right now, but they're doing it without the commercials. So they're going to end this episode six minutes sooner than the PLEB feed, and they're going to get six minutes of time back.

It's a bull market. You can afford it, guys. Yes, yes. And there was also, last week, I did a episode with A.J. from Arbitrum. Yeah. And that went out on the premium feed. Bonus content. This incoming week, I'm doing an episode with Preston Van Loon.

That's going to be on the premium feed, just that will not be on the PLEB feed, which is the black and red bankless feed. If you are looking at the podcast player, and it's black, you're on the free feed. Yeah, you want to go. white and red. That's the, that's the greenest feed. There's also these debrief episodes that we do. And so even this Vitalic one, so after the episode, we just stop and then we hit record again,

and we just give our raw thoughts after that episode. Very casual. 40 minutes, 40 minute long episode, yeah. Yeah, extra episode. Anyway, that's available for you if you want to go upgrade. There's a link in the show notes. David, let's talk about the market. I was out last week, okay?

So maybe this is the blame, but it seemed like crypto markets dipped on Friday. Are you responsible for this? That's why they dipped because you were out. I don't know. That means you can't leave. I was out and then I came back and now we're fine again. But what happened last Friday, Saturday?

Like, what was this? I wasn't really tapped into this one because, like, I kind of didn't really think it was worth tapping into. There was some, like, jobs report. We revised some historical job numbers to revise them downwards. People are like, oh, this is tariffs. Tariffs are finally catching up. They're showing up in reduced jobs. That's bad for the economy.

And then Trump got in. a tizzy and he fired someone and started like saying that the numbers were fake news and and labor secretary yeah labor secretary yeah but but since like i think we're kind of just bouncing back i think you don't you want to talk about it anymore it's i mean i am chalking it up to like i don't need to go and pay attention well people are concerned what did eith price go what 3200 and bitcoin drop below yeah people thought it was all over and i'm like maybe it's all over but if we're bouncing back then like the bull market just resumes and we're going up we're going up another seven 80% before we do another one of these things.

It was on more, like that, the blame for this is probably on some of the new tariff, um, a saber rattling coming from Trump, 70 plus countries. Also, the weak economic data really resulted from that. So they revised some of the early job reports down by a substantial amount. And people are saying, oh, okay, is this the tariff like recession that, uh, we've been worried about? Actually, this was notable. People were looking on chain.

Arthur Hayes sold a bunch. So he sold, you know, August 1st, I guess then last week. He sold, you know, adding this up about 15 million worth of crypto, including 8 million worth of ETH. And he actually gives a reason why. He said the reason I sold is the UF tariff bill is coming due in Q3, all right? At least the market believes that after the NFP print, non-farm payroll is probably what that means, the labor numbers, the jobs numbers. No major econ economy is creating enough credit fast enough to boost nominal GDP. So Bitcoin tests 100K, ETH test 3K.

come to my Tokyo keynote October, August 25th for more info, back to the beach. He was basically like, hey. When did he tweet this? August 1st. August 1st. Okay, it was August 7th. We are higher right now. So I bet he's back in already.

He's about back in. This is why you don't trade. I don't trade. I don't trade. I don't trade. I don't trade. So, blips are going to come. I just buy more.

Dips are going to come. It's going to happen. You either believe we're in a secular bull market or not. I happen to believe we're in a secular bull market or not. I happen to believe. that we are. I believe we are in a secular bull market, not just in crypto, but also with the economy, when I hear news right now of like, oh, like a bad jobs market report came in and like we got scared. I'm just going to like, you know what? In five days, I think we're going to be higher.

And that has been true. Five days. In the S&P 500, the S&P 500 has momentum and strength right now. And the economy is strong. Like the macro people, the macro commentators that I listen to, they're all like, yeah, economy is pretty strong. I am in the category. of both the stock market and the crypto markets are in a secular bull run. You know who agrees with you, David? You? The man of the week. No, not me.

The man of the week. Tom Lee. Tomlin. Tomlin. Tomlin. Tomlin. Tomlin. Tomlin.

We're trying to say his name at least. Tomly, Tomly. You already did it. Bitcoin price in the week. Where are we at? Bitcoin price actually down a percent and a half, down to $16,000, $1,000, $7,700. It's really down? Yeah.

Oh, my God. It's down one and a half percent. Call that flat. Okay. that flat? Well, one thing that's interesting about Bitcoin lately and the price lately is volatility. This is Eric Belchunis, you know, Bloomberg ETF guy saying that since the launch of the ETFs, the volatility on Bitcoin has plummeted. The 90-day rolling volatility is below 40 for the first time. It was over 60 when the ETFs launch. He's basically saying that the ETFs and institutionalization of Bitcoin have

actually made it less volatile. That's not surprising at all. That's always been the plan. And especially as you grow in size, like you volatility just goes down. I mean, as you get closer to gold's market cap, you become like gold's volatility, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's going to happen over time. It does seem like it's spent that. The timeline is sped up a little bit more with the ETFs and the institutionalization. David, tell me about ETH price in the week.

ETH price up a percent and a half on the week. $3,830 is where we are, which is pretty good. What were we, if can you zoom out to the one month? I think we're like kind of close to tying for the highs. Yeah, yeah. We almost touched 4K. We were like $100 higher maybe 10 days ago. Oh, I've got market cap on.

Yeah, so like we, yeah, we 3,900, I guess, was the July 28th high when we were feeling really good. So like we're kind of close to that number where like ETH can potentially just do something, you know? Once it gets to like $4,000, then it's going to like there's going to be some volatility, but it could be volatility to the upside. Like we're getting, we're getting close to another. What do you call? Impulse move, I think is what they call it in-Eath. Okay, I'll call it that. I feel my impulses go into directions.

How about the ratio? What's that doing for your impulses, David? The ratio is impulse, it's pulsing. It's 2%. Moving on. I'm going to say I missed some of that because, you know, there's some lag on the video here, David. But, you know, I get the kind of your job. Total crypto market cap.

$3.9 trillion is where we are at. You know, on the back to the ratio, David, this is Chris Berninski, so it's not you saying this. This is Chris Brininski saying it. He said the ETH Bitcoin ratio doesn't look like it wants to stop. And he's like at this. I actually, I listened to your Ben Cohen episode too, with Ben. And the synopsis is he kept saying the ratio has to go home,

basically it had to go to Lowe's. It's gone home. and now he thinks it's all up from there. So, yeah. He thinks it's going to 0.05, 0.06. Yeah. And I think that that is where once you get to 0.05, 0.06, the traders will kind of get off of the trade. Yeah.

But it could go higher. Like, there's another reason why it couldn't go higher than that. No, I mean, he also said once it gets to 05 or 06, then he's going to revise his numbers. And I imagine he revised them upward after that. Yeah, you could. You could. But that's a sense for the direction. And if we're there, where are we in Fiat terms?

Is that like, you know, 6, 7K, something like that? At the holding a Bitcoin price of like 120,000, let's call it, it's something like 7,000 eth. All right. But Bitcoin would be higher. Bitcoin would be like 150. So call it 8,000 or 9,000 Heath. Let's get to the main event.

Okay? This is Tom Lee becoming the largest Eth holder in the world, at least publicly disclosed, probably the largest Eith holder in the world. This happened earlier this week on August 4th, Bitmine, immersion. That is Tom Lee's. Ethereum treasury. I'm just said Bitcoin treasury because this is bit mine, but used to be a Bitcoin miner. Now it's an each treasury company buys another $208,000 Eth worth $757,57 million.

Okay. That's a lot of Eith. That's a lot of Eith. You want to look at this on the charts here? Who the hell sold $750 million of Eth to Tom Leet? Not me. I would never do that. Yeah.

Where's that Eth coming from? Look at these buys. I went from, I guess this is July 8th all the way to August 3rd. Yeah. He has bought $3 billion worth of Eith. Okay, that's $833K worth of ETH. They're all chronicled here. They're all publicly traded at SEC information.

$833K of ETH, not dollars. 833K Ether has been purchased. Yeah, $3 billion worth. Right? So we went through this in the episode. I mean, he's close to 1% of all ETH supply. And he seriously does seem to want to get 5%. And he's not, no one is size until they're above 1%.

Everyone is small now. All of these ETH treasury companies are still small. Yeah, I mean, it's starting to make ESPET look small. I mean, S bet's still got a healthy $2 billion, I guess. Yeah, you hear that, Joe? You got to step up those buys, man. Yeah, Tom Lee thinks you're small. You know, but he's going to.

All of these treasury companies, but especially Tom Lee, he made the point in our interview earlier this week that he is going at a pace that is 12x, the speed of Michael Saylor, Microstrategy buying Bitcoin. So it took micro strategy about five years to get to 3%. I mean, Tom Lee's already one percent. I mean, Tom Lee had the luxury of time since there was no three or four other Bitcoin treasury companies is like just Michael Saylor doing this for free. With Heath, there's plenty of competition. And so there is absolutely a race. to become memetically known as the ETH Treasury Company. Because right now, like, we do these episodes every week. We're like, there are so many ETH Treasury companies. There's another one this week we're going to talk about. There is. No one is known as memetically the East Treasury Company,

and that's what everyone is accelerating towards trying to get. Well, it's very much a fight for liquidity and philosophy, it seems like, because those become reflective. We've seen that really with the ether and Bitcoin ETFs. You know, the big ones just keep getting bigger. The Black Rocks and the Fidelity, they kind of consume the majority of the volume here. This is the new treasury company that you mentioned.

Another ETH treasury company. This one called Cosmos Health. Global Healthcare Group? All right. The ticker is COSM has secured up to 300 million to launch a new Ethereum Treasury strategy. That's our second healthcare group. So we had the A&180 Life Sciences,

which turned into ETHZILA. We have Sharpling Gaming. So we got one from the gaming world. This is our second health care company. Now Ethereum's just eating the world. Yeah. I mean, like,

did you know anything about this? Cosmos health? Fuck now. I feel like we, like, try to keep a pulse on what's going on in crypto and particularly these,

these eth treasury companies. And, like, they just pop out without anyone, I'm aware of knowing. Yeah. So a new one is there. The question,

how many more will there be? $300 million is a lot. Yeah. I mean, they're probably going to consolidate, et cetera. But a lot of these buying. million dollars put them.

That puts them right at number 10th. That puts them in 10th. Yeah. $300 million gets you 10th? Here's a chart. This is Nate Gerossi saying wild stat.

ETH treasury companies and spot ETH ETFs have each bought approximately 1.6% of the total current ETH supply since the beginning of June. Is that impressed you? 3% over 3.2%

of all ETH supply. since the beginning of June. Name of the game is momentum. We need momentum because we need this to happen again and again and again. Why isn't Price moving more than... I don't know, dude. We're just going to come back one week and it's going to be a big step function change and we're going to be above all time highs and...

I mean, the Eve Price has basically made two moves in the last like three months and it's been flat other than these like two months. moves and it was when ETH went from $1,500 and it jumped up to $2,500 and then it was flat. And then it went $2,500 to $3,500 and it's been flat around that amount. And so basically all of the gains of ether has happened over these very small amounts of time over the last like three months. Yeah. And this is what Tom Lee confirmed.

He thinks it's going to be another step function change or maybe a series of smaller step function changes. That's why it's so painful to be out of the market. That's why I don't, I'm not doing the Arthur Hayes thing where you're straight in this market. Yeah, imagine you just missed that one day where ETH goes to $5,000. Exactly, exactly. I mean, I think there's another question, right? So if you're bullish on ETH, you can, of course, buy Eith.

But how about buying ETH treasuries? And one thing that's kind of interesting here, because we see all of these new treasury companies entering. The question is, are we getting into frothy territory? This is a great treasury holdings kind of dashboard put together by blockworks. And I want to show you kind of MNAV here, David. So look at this. MNAV, we've got some of the Bitcoin and ETH treasury companies and Salon Treasury companies, etc. But you could see the MNAV is actually like kind of close to one.

Do you look at sharp link? They've all kind of approached one, right? Right. And MNAV, of course, is the multiple valuation market cap of the assets that you have, of your treasury assets itself. So like S-Bet right now, 1.07, very, very close to... That's reasonable. That's not froth.

I think what's also being priced in here is that no one knows which one is going to be medically known as the East Treasury Company because that one would command a larger premium. That's right. That's right. BNMR right now, so that's Tom Lee's vehicle, 1.35. If you go back to kind of the... 1.35 is pretty good by comparison. Sure. If you go back to the gold standard

Mike's strategy, 1.64. That makes sense. That makes sense. So I'll check that. They've been much higher at times, like 2.8 and above. I believe in that territory. Yeah, but that's why Michael Taylor has a one's goddamn Bitcoin. Well, the question is, like, I mean,

to me, I look at these MNAVs. I'm actually like, this does not look frothy at all to me. It's just not like frothy. This is very reasonable. If you were looking at frothy treasury market, it wouldn't just be these new entrants all the time, which we are seeing. It would be like MNAVs that are a lot higher than one.

Right. So I'm looking at that and I'm actually like wondering, I mean, are some of these treasure companies buys? Like, were you compelled by the math that Tom Lee did in our episode? Which he's basically like, well, staking alone, If you do kind of the multiples, MNAV should be 1.6 for any ETH treasury company. That's like staking their ETH. And then you add velocity and you add liquidity on top of that.

And you get like two, two plus, maybe even the three zone, the things get like really, really hot. Now, of course, the backdrop against this is they are doing the ATM kind of like things where they're diluting shareholders in order to purchase more of the treasury asset. And maybe they don't have access to the types of leverage vehicles. really nice, like, debt vehicles that Michael Sailor's magic does with what he's doing. But, like, getting close to one, are some of these e-Tresory companies a buy to you? Yeah, and I do think, like, Tom Rhee, Tom Lee really has the momentum to command that premium, which is showing up, but it's not showing up like that much. I will say as a, I don't really know if it counts as froth, but I was on the subway in New York

earlier this week. and I'm coming out of Williamsburg, which is known to be Eith Central of New York, of the world, honestly. We have buy Eth spray painted on the ground on the sidewalk here. What? Really? Oh, yeah, it's all over. Yeah. Okay. Uh-huh. And I was

looking at some dude's phone who is sitting like next to me in the subway. And I see the Robin Hood notification pop up saying ESBET is up 15%. And I'm like, whoa, same dude. I got that same notification. Does that mean he owns ESPET, basically? Probably. Or he was watching it one. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Oh, that's great. All right. Well, that's, you know, that's signal of a sort, I think. I mean, on another hand, if you want to look at the bear case, like, you do have a lot of treasury companies entering. This is a new light coin treasury company on the week. M.E.I. Pharma, another health care company, buying $100 million of a light coin as a treasury asset.

No. Charlie Lee and GSR as lead investors. You know, you can do this. I'm not actually going to call this froth. What would be frothy if there was a light coin treasury that has. had a big MNAV. Like, if it comes out at, like, a 1.0 MNAV, then, like, that is provable, provably not froth.

Sure. But if there's, like, if Lycoyne, the Delicorchechecheery has, like, a three MNAV, then, like, if you have a one MNAV, like, you've created nothing of value. You may as well not have done this. Yeah, which means that, like, why did you do it with Lightcoin? Like, go do, go to it, go to it, go to something else. Go do it with a store of value, a real store of value, or something that spits out cash, one of the two.

Do you know, like, like, 26 or something on the, total, you know, top 100 coins or whatever? It's got Lindy. I mean, it's 26. There was a long time where it was like number two. Do you remember those days? Yeah. I remember number two, man.

It was like silver to Bitcoin's gold. Yeah, those are the days where like we would look at the top 10 in crypto assets and be like, what is this industry? I still have, no, I still very much do that, okay? We started an XRP. David, what do we have coming up next? Coming up next, we're going to talk about the Roman Storm verdict. It's in probably perhaps one of the most important court cases in crypto history.

Definitely a positive and a negative side to talk about for defy and privacy. Also, Trump signs an executive order so everyone can get crypto in their 401k. Ryan's going to talk about that. And then Bases Sequencer stopped producing blocks for 33 minutes. What happened? What was the impact to users and what are the lessons? We're going to talk about all of this and more. But first, a message to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible,

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That's X.com slash mantle underscore official. So after almost a month-long trial, we have the verdict in on Roman Storm's case. There were three counts that we were going to get the verdict for. There's counts one, two, and three. One and three were a hung jury, so there was not a unanimous decision, which means there's just no outcome. It doesn't mean he's not guilty. It also doesn't mean he's guilty. The prosecutors, the attorney of the United States, they have the opportunity, if they so choose, to retry,

and counts one and three. And the counts one and three were the big ones. That was conspiracy to assist in money laundering and also conspiracy to avoid sanctions as a relation to notice. North Korea. So those were those were the big ones. Those were the reasons why Roman Storm could have gone to jail for 35 minutes. And there was no outcome there. With no contest. 35 years. Excuse me. It's a slightly different. The second count, which was being a money transmitter without a license, he was found guilty on and as a maximum of five years. Now, that is like, there's a lot to unpack there. The money transmitter thing is the thing that we have been fighting. for against as an industry for a very long time. That is the same conversation as is the Uniswap front end or the AVEA front end a money transmitter. Or the protocol itself even. Or the protocol itself. What is a money transmitter? And when we talk to Jake Sravinsky, when we talk to all the

lawyers, when we talk to Coin Center, being a money transmitter or, you know, preventing our software from counting as money transmitters so long as there's no custodian, there's no bank, if there's no custodian, and if there's no one in control of the funds, it's always been crypto's position that they are not money transmitters and they don't need to file to be one. Can I just add not just crypto's position, it's crypto's position as they interpreted the clear guidance from 2019 from FinCEN, who's the regulator responsible for all this money transmission like legal framework. They basically said that if you are code that does not take custody of the funds, right? You're not a custodian anyway. Then these things don't apply to you. That's what

the 2019 guidance said and what the industry has been operating under. There's been no further guidance since besides this DOJ prosecution. So this begs the question, why was Roman Storm found guilty of being a money transmitter without a license? And there's a glass half full and a glass half empty perspective here. The glass half empty is, oh no, an open source software developer who did not have control of the funds, was found guilty, and that sets the precedent. And now other open source software developers need to be cautious because they might find themselves guilty of the same thing based off of the precedent of this court case. Basically, all of DFI, basically, right? All of DFI. If you have a DOJ that is aggressive enough to prosecute any sort of DFI,

and there's like some bad actor that is used a protocol for a swap, for a transfer, for a trade, for, doesn't even have to be privacy, right? And all of that is suspect. because all of those protocols and all of those front ends could be quote unquote money transmitters. That's how the prosecution is basically labeling Roman Storm. It's the same principle here. Yeah. And it's bad that that precedent has been established. Oh, no. Like every open source software should live in fear now. Like that's kind of the negative perception here and why lawyers like Jake Schrovinsky and others have said this is a really bad day for crypto. Right. Either I'm naive, which is very possible, or I'm just thinking about these things differently. I'm seeing this with

glass half full perspective, which is they can't arrest all of us. They can't go arrest Hayden Adams from UNiswatt based off of this court precedent. They can't go arrest other software developers who run a front end or who write smart contracts. We have been fighting this as an industry. And this was a procedural error, a legal error in the court case, that we are going to go and fight as an industry. Now, when we talked to Peter Van Balkenberg on the episode yesterday. He articulated that there's actually two different versions of this like kind of guidance. There's the FinCEN guidance and then there's like the federal like version of money laundering. You have to go watch the episode to get a clear

articulation on it. But the there's two different interpretations. And so Roman Storm, because there's a confusing status of the interpretation of the FinCEN guidance, he's able to go appeal this and be like, look, there's two different interpretations here. I can't follow. But both because they conflict with each other, and so therefore I should be innocent. And that's totally going to totally be possible. The other way that this is good for the industry is that because that this was a legal error,

we now have the surface area, the galvanization, and the means to go fight this case and actually get a stronger win, a more clear win for the nature of open source development, software development in crypto, than we were able to get prior. Roman Storm, when he left the courthouse yesterday, he was asked asked by a reporter, Eleanor Tarrot, like, hey, Roman, how you feeling?

He smiled. He said the thing that he was charged for, the 1960 rule, is bullshit, and he's going to fight it, which means he's going to continue to double down, not only for his own defense, but to set the precedent for the industry. So he's going to go appeal this, and then we're going to get this thing reversed, and then hopefully we have enough motivation to get a law passed or something cleared up, where this never ever happens again. So while the current status is, this is set to bad precedent for open source software developers,

I think that there is a very clear and open window for us to totally make lemonade out of this in a very big way that makes this never relevant for any other software developer after Roman Storm ever again. And we can use Roman Storm to get that done. And he is volunteering his life to go and make this the case. So I'm pretty riled up. I'm pretty stoked.

Yeah, I'll sharpen the points of optimism here. Just, you know, to go with the glass half full. Roman got to go free. Roman's flying home today to go hang out with his daughter. The prosecution basically said, okay, because he was convicted on this count, he needs to go to jail immediately. He could be a flight risk. And the judge completely rejected that.

The appeal process, to get this tried again, could take many months to years, right? And the prosecution, the DOJ basically wanted to have Roman Storm spent all of that time in jail. And the judge was not having it. And so Roman Storm was able to use his house as collateral to actually get out and be free on bail to fight again in court. It will be appealed.

The appeal is very likely to go in. And I think you're very right, David, that in the appeal, there's a new chance at it interpretation. Basically, the judge for this case said, hey, you know that the rule making that FinCEN said it doesn't really apply. apply because there's some other criminal statues that Roman could still be liable for here in this case. And basically pushed that interpretation onto the jury. So the jury was somewhat constrained in terms of how they had to judge this case based on the fact that,

oh, okay, criminal, like Roman Storm non-custodial software could actually be a money transmitter. The judge's interpretation really set the framework for that. And so kind of pushed the jury in a specific direction. The next time around, with a different judge, provided you get a judge that has a, like a more favorable, more liberty-centric interpretation of the code here, it could be a completely different trial. And Roman Storm could still score a big win. And in the appellate court, that's my understanding. That's where precedent is truly cemented. Right now in these lower courts, it's kind of like it's more like guidance interpretations.

is not cemented precedents. There's also the case, David, this could go all the way to the Supreme Court. So the fight that you were talking about, this could be like a multi-month, multi-year-long fight. And there's also a get-out-of-jail free card that I didn't know about quite clearly,

but apparently there's a piece of legislation on the Clarity Act that would actually cement into law that non-custodial D-5 smart contracts are not money transmitters. And recall, the Clarity Act passed by the House now it's going to the Senate, we could actually enshrine this in law as well. So that would not affect Roman Storm because it wouldn't be retroactive, but it would,

moving forward, cement this into kind of like hard code it in the U.S. law system. So there's a lot of cause, I would say, for optimism. That said, man, it's disappointing. Like, if they had just found him not guilty on that second count, like we would be feeling very good about this outcome. It would be more simple that way. It'd be all over. We would all be popping champagne.

And that would be great. And Roman would be like, okay, we're done here. And yeah, you know, that's not a bad future. That's not a bad version of the timeline to be in. The timeline, the version of the timeline that we could be in could end up in a stronger, like ultimatum, a better ultimatum with more work and like more suffering to get there. And so I continue to look at this in a glass half full perspective. Now, that is all dependent on our agency, I believe, as an industry.

And so maybe I want to leave with this Jake Trevinsky take, which, you know, he basically says, if the Trump administration wants the USA to be the crypto capital of the world, then the DOJ must not be allowed to retry the two deadlocked charges. That's the other thing is still those charges where he was found. It wasn't a not guilty. It was a hung jury. So they can still charge him, right? And if the DOJ can- We are waiting with like baited breath to hear if the DOJ is going to try and resume those.

And if that does, then I'm like, that's actually much worse. bad, right? We'll have an update on that soon. But in general, Jake says, this is existential. If you've been sleeping on the section that 1960, that's the count he was actually found guilty on, wake up. So it does depend very much on the actions of us in our industry to like, you know, push this forward, make our voices heard. Yeah. So if Roman is volunteering, like I said, to fight this further, he's going to appeal this both for himself and for the industry. And we as an industry are going to need to support him in that. And what's, that looks like is donations. And so there's going to probably, I'm assuming, going to be another call for donations. Ryan and I and Bankless, we will be donating. We're going to ask you guys to donate in the future. So prepare yourself for those requests. Yeah, yeah.

All right. Next up, something a bit more bullish. An executive order. You can now have crypto in your 401k, David. So this is Trump. He is signing an executive order today. So it should be signed by the time people listen to this that tells the Labor Department and the SEC to rewrite their rules so that cryptocurrency,

can appear as a regular investment option inside of 401ks. There is a lot of funds in America, in the U.S., in people's 401Ks that will be unlocked by this, yes. Like, like trillions? Yeah, yeah. You know, I should have had the number. Trillions? Go chat, you, guys. The numbers here.

I'm doing it. Let me ask you while you're doing that. Do you have a 401K? Don't we have that set up for the company? Yes, we have one set up at bankless. Is that your only 401K or if you ever had like previous 401Ks? I think, yeah, when I got into crypto, I liquidated my 401k and I bought ETH. You liquidate.

Okay. So you have a 401K with bankless. Do you recall like how difficult it is to actually get crypto in the 401K? It's a very huge pain in the ass. It's a huge pain in the ass. And if you go over 5% of in at least our bankless 401ks, right? We tried to find, by the way, the most crypto-favorable 401k provider that we could. Yeah, it constrains you to a very low number.

Yes. If you go over 5%, they send warnings. They're like freaking out. It's like, hey, like your 401k, you know, proportion is over 5% of the portfolios in crypto. You're in a super risky asset. Like, you sure you want to continue this? Like, I get those emails all the time. You get those emails?

You probably don't. I don't. I don't check my email. They're sending it. I'm like, yeah, let's pump those numbers up, baby. And that's because- The answer is $8.7 trillion, Ryan? is in the aggregate United States citizens 401k portfolio.

Okay. So that's a lot of trillions. And the current state is there's not an outright ban. So some people listening are like, well, actually, I've been able to get crypto assets inside of my 401K. But here's like the problem is for most 401Ks, the default is no crypto because the Department of Labor in 2022 under the Biden administration issued a bulletin warning fiduciaries to use extreme caution, they said, with crypto.

So this was like a change. shilling effect on all 401k providers. And so employers were like, we're not going to offer that as an option. So there are some workarounds like prior to this executive order where like you can buy Bitcoin through a self-directed brokerage window. Like Fidelity, for instance, has like a separate digital assets account that you have to jump through a whole bunch of hoops to go open. And it's only if your employer has opted in and if you've accepted the strict caps on

how much you're actually going to contribute as a portion of crypto in your 401k. There's also extra fees. So it's like not the default at all. Okay? Post this executive order, crypto assets are going to be able to sit side by side all of your mutual funds, your traditional stocks, all of your existing equity assets with all of the things you see in the 401K.

So it's not separate container like special case. It's just like default with all of the other assets. So that is a big deal. And if you're telling me it's $8 trillion in capital, all of that will be like available for individuals to make their own individual decision as to how much of their 401k they want to allocate to crypto, if any. So this is a big deal. And it's kind of under the radar.

Like you were saying in the intro, like you didn't see this company. You didn't expect it. Yeah, it just happened. Yeah, it just kind of happened. And it can happen by executive order. Now, David, this is not going to happen right away. Okay. So what has to happen is it has to go through all of TradFi, the SEC has to tweak some rulemaking, and then the platforms have to adopt it.

So expect this, you know, the Fidelity's and Black Rocks of the world. Expect this over the next six to 12 months. If you have an, and if, look, if you're employed somewhere with the 401k, start asking your employer about it. Be annoying about it. Yeah. Be annoying about it. And that might make adoption happen even sooner. Okay.

So there is currently $8.7 trillion in all 401k portfolios inside the United States. Estimated new contributions for 2025 will be between $1.4 trillion gets added. And so that's the flow, right? The flow into 401K. Some percentage of that is going to go into crypto assets like Bitcoin and ETH. And that's why this is so cool is because it's a constant flow of bids into crypto, into the blue chips. and that's just a wealth effect for crypto.

So being in the 401K is just like, you've made it. You've get the boomer bid, the retirement bid. So you're always every single week. Everybody's like paychecks, 15%, 10%, goes out of their paycheck, goes out of their paycheck, goes into a 401k. And especially as the zoomers grow up and millennials grow up, like these generations are going to allocate, you know, more to crypto than the average. It's all of that.

It's also like the educational. I mean, all of these brokerage 401K platforms are going to start educating people on crypto, and it's going to seem like a normal investment asset, just like the rest of the equities. David, the base chain halted block production for a half an hour, I believe. What happened here? Yeah, so this happened on Tuesday. Base's primary sequencer, the high throughput sequencer, started lagging due to a spike in on-chain activity. In order to maintain uptime, the system tried to do a handoff to a backup node,

but that backup node wasn't fully set up, apparently, and that halted in transaction processing. And so then I think it just broke at that point. So downtime for 33 minutes, transactions couldn't happen, deposits withdrawals, all app activity just froze. Liquity on D5 froze. And so the base core team had to manually transfer block production back to a healthy sequencer node, which took 33 minutes.

No funds were lost, nothing was compromised. It just started working again. And there was a question in my replies, which is like you eat people always talk about Ethereum uptime all the time, 10 years of Ethereum uptime, and then base goes down, what the hell is the deal with this? Like if you guys are selling Ethereum to Wall Street and you're selling it through the uptime lens, but then base goes down.

Like how do you square these two things? I'm so glad you asked, Ryan. Here's my answer. My answer is actually base is not Ethereum. Base is actually Wall Street. Coinbase is a fortune. 500 company that's building a layer two on Ethereum. It's a publicly traded company, listed on the NASDAQ, and they're building a layer two on Ethereum because of Ethereum has 10 years

of uptime. Like Coinbase, they don't care if their chain goes down. I mean, they definitely do care. They're going to get that thing back up as fast as possible. But they own the network. They own the chain. So long as Ethereum stays up and running and they don't have a dependency on Ethereum, then they're totally fine managing the centralization and the potential downtime of the base chain. And that's also true for Robin Hood. And that's true for any other Wall Street entity that wants to go to Ethereum and build on Ethereum's 10 years of 100% uptime. That's my answer there. Yeah. There's more I could say there. I do think that the modular L2 design does make Ethereum much more fault tolerant, right? Individual layer two could go down, but the entire Ethereum ecosystem

does not have to go down. And it's almost expected that if you're really pushing on high-frequency, you know, the throughput, then things are going to break. If you're not going down, you're actually not pushing hard enough on your throughput. Look, maybe you also have some, like, Kings you have to work out and some engineering you have to, you know, like said, that could be another explanation. But at some level, the layer twos are pushing so fast and so hard so that Ethereum layer one doesn't have to, right? And it can be kind of the thing that never goes down.

Anyway, we got more to cover, David. The first ZK Prover Network is going mainnet. That is succinct. It's up and running. You got to tell us about that. Also, Metamask is releasing a stable coin, question mark. And China issuing warnings about WorldCoin and putting your eyeballs into the machine. We'll cover all that and more.

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We officially have the main net of Sysinct. What is succinct? What is a Prover Network? I'm going to call this just like ZK infrastructure as a service. There are people out there who need ZK computations done by a decentralized network. Sucinct is that decentralized network.

So for any demand for a ZK computation, Sucinct will just do that. And so it connects kind of buyers and sellers of proofs. So if you need a proof verified, you can just go to succinct. And so this is kind of like this critical piece of ZK infrastructure to make ZK accessible. Because if you have a ZK app,

so you say you're building an app and you need some sort of ZK cryptography, you need people in the back end to do the verification and the proving of that ZK app. But as an app builder, you don't want to think about that. But succinct is this decentralized network of proofers that will just allow you to plug in your app

into this network of povers that has the uptime of Ethereum. That's the goal. And so ZK as a product can just work all the time as an app builder without any app builder thinking about like building a Prover network behind it. That's kind of like the technical explanation, semi-technical explanation for what's going on.

How would you articulate this, Ryan? Well, to me, the big use case for like when you'd need a Prover and this type of network is actually Ethereum validation. So as Ethereum moves to kind of the next level of scaling up the layer one, all of the clients are going to turn to ZK clients essentially. If you're a validator, you can run a ZK validator, Ethereum Layer 1 validator instead. And rather than replaying all of the transactions, that's a bottleneck. That's why we only have, what, 20 transactions per second.

With a ZK EVM, you can essentially just submit a proof. You don't have to replay all of the transactions. And in submitting the proof, you can either run a prover at your house, let's say, if you're a home validator. But running a proof at your house requires some specialized. hardware, you know, think A6 that are going to consume a lot of power, a lot of energy, maybe like, you know, a Tesla or something, you know, battery power. So rather than run that at your house, you could just outsource that proving to a prover network.

So essentially, this technology is going to be pivotal for scaling Ethereum. And I think... Ethereum would be a customer of succincts Prover Network or Ethereum node operators who are running the ZK nodes would be. Exactly. So it's very much an enabling technology into scale. Do you know how at one point in time, individual validators were doing the block building, and now we have block building specialists as part of the block production like supply chain for Ethereum.

We're going to have proving specialist networks like Sysinct that fill that role. So this is a huge part of Ethereum scaling, and it's incredible that Sysinct has come so far, so fast. I think Vatelic in our episode said, this is all happening five times faster than he actually thought ZK would would happen. So it's huge. I kind of think this is like, I don't know if I'm going to call us a chat GBT moment for ZK, but it just does so much hard work in the background. It solves so much hard work to make ZK accessible to people. So I expect with the arrival of something like Sysinked, we're just beginning to be able to find ZK embedded in our apps more and more and more

and it's going to become just a lot more tangible to people because a lot of the hard work is done because that's what Sistinct has done. Did you have a token? So it's the Proved token. Doing okay. Fully deleted valuation of a billion dollars right now. One billy. One billy. David, the SEC said that liquid staking tokens are not securities.

So they finalized this. They put out a ruling, I believe, formal statement that LSTs are not security offerings. So this is pretty pivotal. It allows integration of liquid staking tokens, like, you know, a staked eath or something like that into ETFs and other financial products. This is funny from Jesse Powell, right? This has been a question for a long time. He goes, can I get a $30 million refund in response to treating this?

What's the statute of limitations on the SEC? It's like seven years? Yeah, I don't know. I think if you changed the law to make something legal that you took a $30 million fine on, you have to give the money back. Yeah, so the context here, if people don't remember, I don't know, this was this 2024? Yeah, this is 20, 24. Jesse Powell and Cracken had to pay the SEC a $30 million for, for, because they enabled staking on Cracken. And now, because, you know, the SEC alleged that, oh, if you're doing staking Eith on Cracken, that's a security.

And now, 18 months later, they're saying it's not a security. It's legal now, yeah. But they still have to pay $30 million. Thanks for your money. Thanks for your $30 million, Cracken. Wow. Oh, my God. I'm going to call that a racket.

I think that's what a racket is. Yes, absolutely bizarre, man. Metamask is launching a stable coin? Question mark? What's going on here? I mean, question mark, I think it's kind of the news. MMUSD, Metamask USD is going to be a U.S. dollar-stable pegged stable coin to enable more reliable payments and defy interactions with Metamask services,

including swaps, payments, yields, and protocols like AVE, partnered with Stripe on this one. It's still in a proposal phase. Apparently there's some governance that needs to happen here. But yeah, MetaMath's getting a token. Interesting case study to see how a... You said it's not the token I wanted. Not the token, not. Excuse me.

Technically they are getting a token. It doesn't go up or down. It just stays flat at a dollar. It's going to be interesting you can see like, because there's a whole, there's some people out there. They're like, oh, everyone's going to have a stable coin. And then there are other people out there. It's like, not everyone's going to have a stable coin.

So the success of the Metamast stable coin or not will kind of be indicative of how many stable coins there will be? I think we'll get a stable coin explosion for, you know, pretty soon. A quantity of stable coin explosions. Yep, in the next year or two. And then it'll kind of thin out. It's like the first fragmentation, you know. Heather's just like the Bitcoin of stable coins.

Yeah, something like that. Everyone's going to try their hands. This is MetaMass. Why not? Sure. Because Genius Act, it's legal. You may as well give it a try. Speaking of Give It a try, Barry Silver is back on Greyscale.

All right. Back, giving it a try. So Barry Silber, if you don't remember, was the chairman, I believe, of Grayscale. I think he stepped away in the, I don't know, call it a fiasco of the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust breakdown and all of the things that happened there. My God, that seems like a distant memory. Yeah, that was a year ago. But he's coming back.

So I am honored to rejoin the Grayscale board at a defining moment for both the company and the broader digital asset ecosystem. There's a word here that this is maybe setting up for an IPO, gray scale type IPO, which I could totally see. That checks out to me. Yeah, that definitely checks out. Barry Silbert's back. Yeah, that's the news.

Welcome back, Barry Silbert. So this is a headline out of the block this week. China warns World Coin-style iris data collection for crypto poses national security threat. Now, I thought this was the juxtaposition here, I thought was pretty interesting. When China says something is a national security threat, I'm like, nice. That's like, oh, I should look into that. Yeah, I'm like, oh, that sounds like freedom technology.

That sounds pretty sick, actually, yeah, specifically. And so the headline says, world coin style iris data collection. There's only one company doing iris data collection out there. And honestly, it's not really data collection. So I'm already through it. They create a hash of your iris, which yes, is data. But they don't collect and store pictures of your iris. That's the whole World Coin thesis.

Yeah, it's privacy preserving. It's privacy preserving. They take a picture of your Irish. They make a hash of it. They throw away the picture and then they just have the hash. They don't actually collect the data because that's not what World Coin wants. They just want the hash. Yeah.

And so actually, I think like either China's getting, somebody's getting this wrong. China didn't think it's getting this wrong. They claim that the data could be exploited for espionage. You know, biometric data once leaked can't be changed. National security risk, right? National security risk, right. Privacy risk. The ministry mentioned past incidents where leaked a biomemation.

data was used by foreign intelligence for spying and hacking, not related to WorldCoyne, probably something like 21, 21 and me, the actual DNA company, which does collect data. There are no bans yet. Officials just recommended being careful and sharing biometric data and understanding how it will be used, stored, and handled. I'll tell you how WorldCoin uses stores and handled your data, like I just did. They take a picture of your iris, they throw it away, and they make a hash of it. And anytime you need to restore access to your world, they just verify, they compare the hash.

And so in terms of privacy, I think it's very beneficial. The reason why I'm like on this is because we just had Alex on the episode and he talked about his whole, you know, he wants a world to be like an internet native citizenship. And then the juxtaposition when China says that this is a threat to national security, I'm like, yeah. Yeah, because we're trying to make like self-sovereign citizenship on the internet. Yeah, that does butt up against authoritarian. It's funny. It's like the CCP taking a principled stance against data collection, right? Is that, are you really going to do that?

No, like data collection, like, no, we don't do that. And you just sort of, you wonder, it's just because it's data collection that they can't control. And they're fine if the government does it, right? They're fine if a tech company that they can control and get access to does it. But if it's something that's hashed, if it's something that they can't control, maybe that's why they're against it. I think that's the take you're linking here. That's right. Yeah, national security threat doesn't mean a threat towards individual sovereignty and freedom. That's specifically just from the perspective of the state.

Yeah, I think that's what it is. I think that's what's actually going on. Although, if you just read a headline for this and you run this by an army and like, wait, World Coin's doing what? I mean, it still feels dystopian. I mean, they're taking pictures in my eyes. Unless you kind of know the details. Right. It's just like that's a narrative bar that WorldCoin's, I think, going to have to get over. Speaking of that, David, bars. Coinbase ad was barred and banned from the UK. I don't know if you saw this. Maybe we'll play the full ad in the moment of Zay.

We will disappear to the ad and we'll leave you with an ad from Coinbase. Because it's a good ad, it's pretty entertaining. It's an entertaining piece of advertisement. All right, so you guys will hear it to the end of the episode. You'll hear the full ad, I guess, even if you live in the UK, hopefully you get this on censored. You kind of need to watch it because it is a dance and skit thing. It's a song, so you'll hear it too, but visually it's nice to watch. Well, basically, to describe it, the ad is titled, Everything is Fine, and it shows, like, kind of people in the UK, you know, leaky ceilings, empty supermarkets, sky high prices, and they're all singing this song, like, everything is fine, basically implying like, oh, the financial system, things aren't going well, you know, and I feel inflation at when I pay for things, and somebody's not telling me something.

So this, the UK regulators actually banned it. They said it was too political on the ground. It's talking shit. It's talking shit about the UK. It's like it's a commercial, guys. And basically misleading impression, lack of warning, irresponsible anti-system framing. It's definitely insulting the nation state apparatus.

You can't do that in the UK? You can't do that? Apparently not. Apparently not. I mean, Coinbase would say that the ad was not baseless because 44% of all adults in the UK are living in financially vulnerable conditions here. but it did not have FCA approval. So that's apparently a three-letter agency in the UK that can give things approval

or not before they're aired on public broadcast. There was some debate about this. So some of the people in parliament, UK Chancellor George Osborne, Osborne said the UK has been left behind the cryptocurrency boom, is danger of missing a second wave of demand. We're doing things like we're banning this. And so all this caused Brian Armstrong to make a statement, needing to update the system and improve society is not a political statement on either party in the UK.

It's not specific to the UK. It's a statement about how the traditional finance system is not working for many people and how crypto represents a way to improve that. We welcome the attacks and any other attempts to censor this message as it just helps it spread. There you. And because of all the rabbling, now we're going to show you the ad because it's pretty funny. Got to let you know, of course, crypto's risky. So is all finance. You could lose what you put in. but we are headed west. This is the frontier.

It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot. We ain't got no troubles, no reason to complain. Because here in great old Britain, we just love it when it rained.

Morning. We're cozy heat at home. Even though it's not our own, but wait a few more years and you can say. Everything is just fine. Everything is grand. Your life can get the natural when you're living by the life.

letter in this pleasant land Everything is just fine Everything is great The streets can't get no cleaner Nor the rat meat any leaner No life is just first rate Everything is just fine These fish fingers are a steel

Price is up a smit Just a hundred quid a meal Empty purse But hay could be worse If there was nothing in the fridge Strategic realignment means I get to work for myself Yeah Paying off my law degree with tips from each delivery

Excuse me sir I It's time to jump ship We're time in our mouths with a sip of a yet Because and the