Bankless - ROLLUP: $4 Trillion Market Cap | GENIUS Act | ETH ETF Mania

Starting point is 00:00:03 Bankless Nation, it is the fourth week of July. The final week of July is time for the bankless weekly rollups. David, we got all-time high on the total crypto market cap. Do you know that? I just saw this while I was preparing the agenda. Yeah, yeah, yeah, 4.001 trillion dollars. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, for $4 trillion. It's incredible. Also, the genius bill was signed last Friday. The question is, what's next? I think this is a big, big, big deal. And what do you do if you're the White House of your Donald Trump. Well, first, you got to throw a party with all the stable

Starting point is 00:00:37 coin bros. And he did that. We have some clips from, from those shenanigans. Also, the big question, what's going to happen next after the genius bill? What next issuers are we going to see? Yeah. What does this actually do? What does this unlock? How are the Tradfly players going to make their moves after all this is unlocked? Speaking of making moves, Polymarket is making moves into the United States, they buy an onshore exchange that makes them, US compliant. We're going to talk about that. Shane Complain on at CNBC talking all about it. And then the ETH, the big story

Starting point is 00:01:09 of the week. If you were on C.T., this was the news of the week, was the ETH ETH-EFTF inflows, God candles. The ETH Treasury companies are soaking up ETH, but so are the ETHs. The ETHETF, ETH, A, the Black Rock ETF is not the third

Starting point is 00:01:25 fastest ever ETF to hit $1 billion. We're going to go look at a chart and spoiler. It's just a vertical line. So we're going to talk about that. More ETH treasury companies got announced this week. We're talking about that. And lastly, an update, Roman Storm's lawyers are asking for a mistrial after, will you believe this? The government put up a witness who's stolen funds probably didn't even use tornado cash, David.

Starting point is 00:01:46 What are they doing over there? Witnesses that didn't use tornado cash? What's the point? What's the point of that? All of this would be almost like hilarious if a man's life wasn't at stake. So there's some big stakes here in the Roman Storm trial. We'll update you on all of that and more. I got to let you know, though, David is, he would be even higher.

Starting point is 00:02:03 energy given ETH price point on the week. But my man's got a cold. I'm a little sick. I'm a little sick. So if you're saying that in the voice. I'm here. You're here and you're bullish, right? I'm still, I'm here and I'm bullish, right? Well, in your most bullish way, can you give us the Bitcoin price in the week? Bitcoin price on the week, up half a percent on the week. We are currently clocking in it $19,000 Bitcoin. $19,000 Bitcoin. No, no new all-time highs on the seven days, unfortunately. Unfortunately. How about Eith on the week? No all-time high yet either, right? We still got 40% until the Eth all-time high.

Starting point is 00:02:40 But nonetheless, pretty happy week for ETH holders, 9.5%. We're going to round up to 10%. Yes. Around up to $10% on the week. So Eth up to $3,720 this week. Pretty good week. That's been a really good run. David, I want to play this clip for you.

Starting point is 00:02:55 I just enjoy Jim Kramer sometimes. Let me tell you what Jim Kramer says about Bikwini. Own some as a hedge against the 37. $10,8 trillion. They want to own a debt. They want to own it for their kids. And you know who else feels that way? Me, I don't want that debt.

Starting point is 00:03:13 My kids, I'm worried about my kids. For everybody, kids, 30-true? Yeah, we all do. We all do. So many different ways. Why don't you buy some Bitcoin? I just enjoy that exchange. He's just like, it's somewhat awkward.

Starting point is 00:03:27 He's just like, turns to the other anchors. He's like, you worried about your kids? You worried about your kids with all that debt? Why don't you buy some Bitcoin? Why don't you buy some ETH? I love how that's so simple. It's just like, do it for the kids. Do it for the kids.

Starting point is 00:03:39 Buy ether for the kids. Do it for your kids. This is the hidden genius of Jim Kramer. We've been talking about ultrasound money. And this guy comes out and he's just like, buy, buy the kids. Yeah, Shill and Eith for the kids. That's what we got to be doing. How about the ratio in the week?

Starting point is 00:03:53 Are we greenish or? Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, Bitcoin up half a percent on the week. Ether up 9.5% on the week. So, you know, you add those, you do the math. I'm not a math genius, but I think that means that the ETH BTC ratio is up 9% on the week. That's kind of how that works. All right.

Starting point is 00:04:07 And you said it in the intro, but we are above $4 trillion, right? We got an all-time high. We're actually slightly below it right now. But yeah, right now. We're at $4 trillion. We're rounding up to $4 trillion. That's the highest. That's the highest it's ever been.

Starting point is 00:04:20 $4 trillion. The highest has ever been that has been this week. That's correct. And I guess our previous all-time high, what was that? When is that, was that in December? That was December, 24. That was the previous total crypto market cap all-time high. And then before that...

Starting point is 00:04:33 The launch of the Trump meme coin. Yeah. Before that, we had 2021. $2.8 trillion was the top of the 2021 bull run. Where do you think we go on the top here? Six. Six. That is so bearish.

Starting point is 00:04:51 Six trillion. That is bearish. That is David Cole. Barish. I'm not going to accept that answer. Sixth or I have a cold. Do you want to ask me? Ask me.

Starting point is 00:05:01 I don't think I do. move on. 10 trillion. 10 trillion. This cycle. In time of like 18 months. Yeah. Or however long it takes.

Starting point is 00:05:10 I mean, could maybe six months. I was on a tradfi content producer, Amit. I was on a stream last night educating about ETH because his audience was pretty large. They were like almost 2,000 people watching the stream. He was like, all my listeners were asking about ETH. And so I went on for an hour and talked about ETH. And then of course, they asked me. me, he asked me the price predictions. Don't tell me you gave him something stupid like 7K.

Starting point is 00:05:37 I said 7K. Oh my God. By, by the end of this year, by the end of, I didn't say that was a top. I said it was the end of year price prediction. I said 7K. Bank station, we got to help me out here. Let's get David a bit more bullish. She's forgotten what Eith can do in a bull run, in a secular bull run. And, uh, you know, it's maybe it's the cold speaking, but I feel like you could, you could pump those numbers up, buddy. I, in addition to, that I also talked about the F word. Because not in the near term, but like, he asked, like, do you think Ether will ever F word Bitcoin?

Starting point is 00:06:14 Yeah. And, you know, I didn't give a time frame on that because I've been burned by that in the past. I don't want to be, I don't want to give out that level of specificity. But I said, the Ethereum is shooting for the number one spot. And it's doing it with all of the research and all the innovation, all the investment that the Ethereum Foundation has. put it into Ethereum. So the purpose of Ethereum is to become the number one spot. And it's,

Starting point is 00:06:36 and it's got the chops to do it. And time is on Ethereum's side. Bitcoin actually does not have time because time actually decays Bitcoin. It actually falls apart every time, quantum in the security budget. But Ethereum, Ethereum has time on its side. And so I gave my bullish, yes, eventually if it takes number one spot, take. Well, further into this episode, I'm actually going to invoke the F word, but not quite yet. Okay. And we'll put that into context First, you got to tell me about some of these coins pumping on the week. Yeah, we got some movers of the week. Athena, the big mover of the week.

Starting point is 00:07:08 This was definitely downstream of the Athena treasury company that went live. There's a little nuances on that one, because I don't know if it's specifically stacking ENA, the token. They are a little bit, right? But for buyback to kind of stabilize things, it's a thing, right? It's a thing. So Athena pumped 28% in the week. Pengu, the meme coin of the Pugui Penguins ecosystem, pumps 25%.

Starting point is 00:07:29 That price action is incredible. it's a very large green candle. And then Uniswap. Not often do you see Uniswap as a mover of the week, but up 13% on the world. Why? Did they add a fee switch? God, I wish.

Starting point is 00:07:40 Why isn't the Unoswap in the year of our Lord, 2025? Why is the fee switch not on? Dow, help us out. Dow. Somebody just, Paradime, Andresin, just turn it on. Yeah, it's time.

Starting point is 00:07:54 I'm still holding this goddamn bad. Well, some good news for your alt-coin bags as well. Google searches for altcoins just hit a four-year high according to Lark Davis. So you got that going for us and Google search. Does anyone use Google anymore though? I want to see some chat GPT numbers. That's what I want to say. Yeah, when Google, the altcoin term is in Google at all-time high. I'm like that doesn't make me feel great. Yeah, who searches for altcoins? I feel like I bet you do that. Yeah, I don't know. I bet you if you typed in the XRP search room for Google, it would be also very high. I don't want to do that, David. I don't want to do that. I can't look at

Starting point is 00:08:30 XRP price on the week anymore. It hurts too bad. There's just an XRP market and we're just living in it. It's pretty much true. Some numbers I can look at on a weekly basis and I will look at this week are the Eith ETF flows. You mentioned a God candle in ETH ETF flows and you were not lying. If they did, it would be God's ice. No, I got a candle here. I got a candle in the agenda. Yeah, we can see candles. Okay, so this is Matt Hogan and the stat for you. So between July 2024 and now, ETH inflows, ETF inflows, were about $4.2 billion. An entire last year, $4.2 billion.

Starting point is 00:09:06 Just in this month, July 2025, we exceeded that amount. That's so stupid. That's a God candle. Oh, my God. Now? Okay? So let me show it to you. Well, this is kind of how it looks on the Eric Balchunist charts.

Starting point is 00:09:22 That's the vertical chart that I was talking about. Yeah. This is ETH in green. What's interesting here is so I bit in orange. right? So this is Bitcoin. This is just the Black Rock, Eth A numbers, which is like 80% of all inflows into Ethereum. It's got the dominant position of Black Rock as well. You can see what, what did a Bitcoin ETFs do? They went vertical pretty much from day one. They were just shot right up. It was great to one. Like a SpaceX rocket, right? Not coming down. And what about

Starting point is 00:09:54 Ethereum? Ether ETSs were slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, slow. It's been slow over the last year. It's kind of up and down, up and down. And then suddenly this month, it goes from like $5 billion in ETHA deposits to $10 billion in like four days. It's doing what the Bitcoin chart is doing just with like a one year delay, at least so far. I mean, that's pretty impressive, right? And we also got a, this is where I'm going to use that for it, we got a flipping. Okay. And daily inflows. So for the last five days, Ethereum ETF daily inflows have exceeded Bitcoin daily inflows by like a whole lot every single day. A whole lot. So that happened as well. Yeah. So the total ETF rankings, Bitcoin, $54 billion in Bitcoin ETFs, ETH coming in at $8.7 billion in ETFs.

Starting point is 00:10:43 And since, since Solana's on there, technically it has an ETF, won $105 million in Solana ETF deposits. That's the current ranking, the current horse race. I mean, it does seem. that if eth just even catches up to its to its market cap size and proportion to Bitcoin's got some growing to do, right? That's what, at least like $15 billion or so, something like that. And then maybe it exceeds that. So we'll have to see. Some more institutional purchasing of ether on the week was this, David, we've got another ETH treasury company that is this website is so aesthetic. Yeah, it's called the Ethereum machine. No, sorry, the ether machine, because it's all about ETH the asset. And what's this? Who's

Starting point is 00:11:26 behind it. How much we talk in? Yeah, this is a good friend, Andrew Keyes. We had him on the podcast so long ago, and we're going to record with him tomorrow on Friday. That little episode will be out on Monday. That episode will add roughly $10 to $50 billion on top of cap. Looking forward to that one. So it's all about ether, the productive asset. This is also something, Ryan, since you called me an Heath Bear a second ago, this is also something I talked about on the stream last night, again, with the kind of like Trad 5 retail audience. Ether of the asset has a particularly strong resonance with crypto acquisition companies

Starting point is 00:12:04 in comparison to Bitcoin, simply because Bitcoin is inert. It's just an inert asset. And that's its narrative, 21 million hard cap units. That's how it works. But ETH is productive. And so when these ETH acquisition companies come online and they take on debt, they take on debt that have to pay off like 2 to 4 to 5% in order to take on the debt, that's their debt payments.

Starting point is 00:12:26 Well, they can pay that off using the yield that they get from the ether that they purchase. And so there is this automatic repayment mechanism that ether, the asset, specifically enables for his acquisition companies. And this is exactly the narrative that Andrew Keys is leaning into with the ether machine. He wants to make ether, the ether that the ether machine acquires, as productive as possible in order to scale out how much access to debt, access to credit that he can finance. and he's leveraging that. And so, like, literally the number one thing

Starting point is 00:12:58 that they say on the website, we exist to make ether productive. And, you know, the best part about this is that he's, there's seven different ways to make ether productive, right? You know, and one of the biggest ones is that he's just going to take ether and he's going to inject it into defy. He's going to go get yield on Avey. He's going to go stake it on Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:13:16 Whatever ways in defy that ether can become productive, he will use. And I think, like, companies like this that are doing defy operations to get yield on their ether, they're just going to inject a whole bunch of TVL onto Ethereum DeFi, which is just going to give the whole ecosystem a boost. So there's a really just sexy flywheel going on here

Starting point is 00:13:36 between ether of the asset, being productive, putting it into defy, and then having that go onto Wall Street, having Andrew Keyes go onto Wall Street, and then pitch this operation that he's doing to the boomers, so they can FOMO in to our bags. It's going to be great. Yeah, he was on Wall Street, too.

Starting point is 00:13:51 Do you see him on CNBC? They asked him, Okay, after you gave kind of similar pitch that you just gave, basically, they said, so, Andrew, do you own any Bitcoin? This was his response. So you're an Ethereum guy. Do you own Bitcoin? I'm not, I do not own Bitcoin. None. I'd rather have an iPhone than a landline. Ooh. Wow. Did you see what Andrew said after that? No, I heard him say, he went, ooh. So right after that, he goes, burn. A sick burn. I think that's what the kids call a sick burn. Oh, you said that. Oh, my God.

Starting point is 00:14:24 That's so funny. Okay. Yeah, so it's, Andrew Key is there. Just talking about, you know, the apps and the economy that you could build on top of this productive asset called ETH. So a few other stats. This was to be the largest ETH treasury to date. Was to be? Well, I got an update for you.

Starting point is 00:14:41 Okay. So it was to be. 400,000 Eith. Okay. That would be top of the charts. Last I saw the ETH reserve, last we were looking at the last week, Lubin and Tom Lee, they were having around 300,000. thousand ETH in terms of supply. This would be 400,000 from Andrew Keyes. So they're coming in, jumping in at the number one spot. But that was the plan.

Starting point is 00:15:01 That was the plan. Yeah, everybody's got a plan until Tom Lee enters and buy some more ETH. Okay. Well, first of all, I got to, I got to tell you what the ticker is. And it's a nice clean ticker. It's ETHM. All right. So it's not a former Bitcoin mining thing. It's, you know, not a sports thing. It's just straight ETHM, which I sort of like. I think that matters, actually. I know. Like versus Sharp Link gaming. Granted Joseph Lubin has done a great job because whenever I... Strategic bet on Eath.

Starting point is 00:15:29 Yeah. When I think S-Bet, I think strategic bet on Eath, yeah. But then, like, Tom Lee's like Bitmine. I think the branding actually matters here. Yeah, a little bit. Maybe. I don't know.

Starting point is 00:15:39 Who knows? You know what does matter, though, is when you buy in size. And that's what Tom Lee did. So breaking, as of today, the time of recording, Bitmine immersion, BMNR added another 266,000. ETH to its balance sheet. Bring its total, you ready for this?

Starting point is 00:15:56 New number one slot, 56,000 ether on the balance sheet. 566. Number one? That's number one by a healthy margin here. Okay, that's $2 billion. And if I were to run some math for you, remember we got into a little bit of the math last week, right?

Starting point is 00:16:12 Tom Lee said he wants to buy 5% of all Eath. We're about one month in to the Tom Lee purchase engine. He's 10% of the way there. He's got another 90% of the way go. it's a way to go. If he's going to hit, if he's going to hit that 5%. Right now, Michael Saylor owns 2.9% of Bitcoin. So Tom Lee is planning to almost 2x, two sailors worth of Eith in proportion to, your Bitcoin in proportion to the amount that micro strategy owns.

Starting point is 00:16:42 So that's a lot. And he's not going to be able to always buy it at these prices, is he? I mean, if he doesn't, you've got to get it below the all-time high. He got it. It's a rate. It's a race. I mean, that's pretty, like you were talking about, last time you were talking about, it's got to be the race to a billion ether, or sorry, a million ether, right? Million ether.

Starting point is 00:17:00 We're 50% of the way there on that race, too. We're just like a month or two in. You know what? New race. 10 million ether. You race 10 million ether. It's minus 5% of the way there. Keep going, Tom Lee.

Starting point is 00:17:14 You're doing great. I think they'll get diminishing returns. It gets harder and harder to like, you know, like buy with Fiat as the price goes up, right? I mean, and you're, and your heady 7K levels. Oh my God. But wake me up at 10 million ether. The bitmine immersion technology is up 10%. That was announced today, right? The acquisition that you talked about. Just this morning. On Thursday for on Thursday, which is today. 9.5% bitmine technology. No, yes. That's what the stock price jumped today. Yeah. And you know what? When Tom Lee is schmoozing with people like Kathy Lee, who's also purchasing Bitmine and this guy, you recognize this guy? Yeah, that's. Jason has Jensen from InVidia. Dude, Tom Lee's such a funny-looking guy, man. That's part of the appeal, man.

Starting point is 00:17:59 Just the hair is working for him. Yeah, something's doing it for me. Yeah, you like this? I'm into it. All right, you ready to revise your price predictions now? Okay, so I am a holder of S-Bet, Ryan. I don't know if you are. I'm a holder of S-Bet.

Starting point is 00:18:16 And S-Bet is down 40% on the week after it peaked out at $40. And like, I know that, like, Joseph Lubin is just dumping on me because he's going to issue shares to raise funds to go buy more eth. And it's like a mixed feeling that I have of just like, okay, so I'm holding the stock and I'm adding to the premium and Joseph Lubin's going to sell this. And he's able to sell it because people like me are buying, but he's dumping on me, but it's okay because he's going to go buy more ether. And then when he announces it, it's going to go back up. It's just like a weird, weird thing for you. You ready for this? Okay, make sure you just still owns some

Starting point is 00:18:52 Eath, man. And he's dumping on you in order to buy your other banks. Cannot fail. Actually, comes to the question. These are some questions from the bankless nation that our Discord, our private discord for bankless citizens, they've been asking about the Treasury. I want to raise them these questions because, you know,

Starting point is 00:19:11 like when somebody starts saying things like cannot fail, that was satire, by the way, okay, don't clip me, clip Lords. like at some point this is going to go in a direction where it's over pumped and that was the first question that came out of bankless discord.

Starting point is 00:19:26 Is the hype around Heath Treasury plays indicative of a bubble? What do you think, David? A bubble seems like such a binary thing. So is it a bubble or not? Like it's bubbleish. It's definitely frothy. It's definitely like, you know, you know, the euthanasia roller coaster.

Starting point is 00:19:44 Like we have one good thing and then like crypto has a pattern of taking one thing to its logical conclusion, which is incredibly distorted. I definitely see that that's what's happening. Like, light coin treasury acquisition companies, like, come on. Like, let's be here. Yeah, come on. Yeah. And so, like, this is a message that I sent inside of the, our bankless team discord, just kind of like about my thoughts on it, just to like kind of give everyone's a heads up of where I am with this meta, this bubbling meta. Like, at the end of the day, yes, this is a true unlock. Like, treasury vehicles are,

Starting point is 00:20:17 net new thing, both for Tradfai and crypto. There's a real primitive here that is valuable that Michael Saylor has pioneered and now we are trying to copy. And so I don't want to discount that. When we look at some of the deals of the ETH treasury companies or the Bitcoin treasury companies, they are pulling forward demand. And so we are borrowing from the future to have demand today. So it's kind of a shot in the arm. It's a little bit of a shot in the arm. And in the process, reflexively creating net new demand that you wouldn't otherwise have. Definitely that. And that is both, you know, there's a double-edged sword. So we're reflexively, you know, causing marketing to happen, you know, that price is the best marketing. So we're buying it. We're bringing in net new buyers via

Starting point is 00:21:00 that shot in the arm. And, you know, maybe that shot in the arm is especially what Ether needed to, like, get it out of its like REV meta from the Heath Concerners and into the, Heath as a global reserve asset meta that the East Treasury companies are like taking it. So maybe we're elevating ether into a better market. It needed to happen. We're not even an all-time high yet, right? Yeah. And so, like, that's kind of how I'm thinking about this.

Starting point is 00:21:22 It's a temporary, it's a one-time shot in the arm that we don't know how, like, how large that shot in the arm is. Maybe it's very large. Like, maybe, maybe, like, this, like, race for a crypto reserve assets is very large, and maybe it keeps on going. This is something that, here's my cautionary tale, is that there is a, there is opportunity for GIFT in these treasury companies. It doesn't matter if it's a Bitcoin treasury company, an ETH treasury company, a light coin treasury company.

Starting point is 00:21:47 But I think as you go down the market cap, the likelihood of it being pretty grifty goes up, or the surface area for grift goes up. And I'm going to harken back to the days of the yield companies, Celsius, BlockFi, Gemini, Earn, which no one really wants to be lumped in with Celsius. But Celsius was cheating. It was a Ponzi scheme that was cheating, and it was truly grifty. And Celsius was so bad that they pulled in their competitors to kind of, get into the mud with them.

Starting point is 00:22:14 And so BlockFi really, in order to be competitive, had to do some things that didn't really want to do. And that got Zach Prince in trouble with BlockFi. But like, were they really bad to begin with? Not really. And then there's Gemini Earn who was involved with just in the yield arena, but they didn't lose any customer funds at the end of the day. And so these were the same three businesses.

Starting point is 00:22:35 One was a full out scam. One was above board, but kind of got sucked into the mud. And then one was totally fine, but it was just in the same environment. And it's really about the leadership, in my opinion. It's going to be the leadership of these respective each treasury companies or crypto treasury companies that determines whether this thing is the final outcome of each individual company.

Starting point is 00:22:57 That's kind of my analysis on these things. Yeah, my take is, I see that analogy for sure in terms of things that go out of hand, have gotten out of hand. But just to be clear, this is nothing like Celsius. You know what I mean? There are assets there. You know, what you really have to, to worry about is the MNAV premium on all of these treasuries. And there could come a time

Starting point is 00:23:18 where that actually dips below one. And that would cause some unwind. And you don't know who's making bets and leverage and things in the background. Like, we didn't know that Three Hours Capital was doing all this shit in the background on top of the GPDC like Nav plays, right? And so you don't know until you get into like bearish territory and that could unwind in a hurry and cause some chaos. I guess my take around bubble territory is I'm like yellow. All right. right. It's not green. It's not red yet. It's not even orange. It's yellow moving to orange. What I do think that could happen is an after boom into into ether though. You were talking about the, sorry, into defy, rather. You were talking about the productive capital uses. All right. This is

Starting point is 00:24:00 Hugh Karp, Nexus Mutual. ETH treasury companies reaching out as they plan to deploy into ETH staking and DFI and want to do it safely. Pretty bullish for DFI generally. I think that's something to get ahead of, but I think all of that will happen. Like we'll see DFI do a run. before this whole thing is over. So I still feel like we've quote unquote got some time, but you can see things are moving that direction a little bit more. How in the world did Bitmine and Tom Lee just stack another, what, $250,000 worth of Eath, another billion dollars, a cool billion dollars,

Starting point is 00:24:32 without moving the market? You said we're up 9% on the week. I mean, shouldn't we be up like 29% on the week with these kind of purchases, which sort of makes you wonder, like, what the source of this, actually is. You know, is this OTC going in the background? This is some speculation here. Did Justin Sun sell his ETH stack to Bitmine OTC, right? I don't, Justin Sun did some unwinding this week. I don't think that's necessarily the case, but I guess I could totally believe it. It is interesting, right? There's some stuff going on behind the scenes, OTC sales. There are some net

Starting point is 00:25:06 sellers of Eath or else you wouldn't have, you know, Tom Lee being able to purchase a billion worth of ETH without this massively affecting prices. It's only affected prices a little bit. So that's also interesting as well. Yeah, well, eliminating cell pressure is the same thing as adding buy pressure. Sbet absorbed however much the Ethereum Foundation just sold to them. So yeah, we didn't get S bet buying ETH because they bought it from the Ethereum Foundation who would have otherwise sold it.

Starting point is 00:25:34 So in the grand scheme of things, it actually nets out equivalently. Like, Justin Sun, if Justin Sun unwound his Eith and gave it to Tom Lee, Justin Sun was eventually going to sell that Heath for one reason or another, and now he's not, because now it's in an ETH treasury acquisition company that his goal is to hoard as much ETH as possible. So I feel better about Tom Lee having Justin Sun's Eith than Justin Sun having Justin Sun's Eth. Hypothetically. All that's rumor, I don't even, it's probably not the case,

Starting point is 00:26:01 but substitute Justin's son for somebody, some other OTC seller and you get kind of a similar outcome. But buyer beware on these treasury entities, some more news that maybe the end is getting a little closer. This is Salana Bull, Joe McCann. You just launched a liquid fund. Oh, sorry, he just launched a Salana Treasury, $1.5 billion is what he plans to raise. So notable hedge fund manager, Joe McCann. Notable? Definitely notable this week. Certainly notable. David, we got a lot more to talk about, including the Trump party, the crypto party at the White House, as genius became law. Trump also met with Paulo, the founder of Tether. I think it's got to be the first time. That was a fun encounter.

Starting point is 00:26:41 That's right. Also, Polymarket, now available in the U.S. We'll talk about how that is. And a little bit later, you're going to tell us how Ethereum is shipping bigger blocks without a hard fork. How do you make that happen? But before we get to all of that, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including our friends over at Uniswap is the best place to do defy. They've got a mobile wallet. They've got a browser wallet. Of course, they have an exchange. Go check them out. Ethereum's layer two universe is exploding with choices. But if you're looking for the best place to park and move your tokens, make your next stop unichain. First, liquidity. Unichane hosts the most liquid uniswap v4 deployment on any layer two, giving you deeper pools for flagship pairs like ETHUSDC. More liquidity means better prices, less slippage, and smoother swaps, exactly what traders crave. The numbers back it up. Unichane leads all layer twos in total value locked for uniswap v4. And it's not just deep. It's fast and fully transparent. Purpose built to be the home base for defy and cross-chain liquidity. When it comes to costs, Unichane is a no-brainer. Transaction fees come in about 95% cheaper than Ethereum

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Starting point is 00:29:56 Last Friday, the genius bill was signed into law. This is a bunch of guys, a bunch of members of Congress, I should say, watching. And a few bankers podcast guests. Yeah, I see you here. Yeah. Bill Haggerty. Uh-huh. Yeah, there's Bill. Good old Bill. There's something funny about just eight dudes surrounding Trump

Starting point is 00:30:15 looking over a piece of favor. He signs a bill. Yeah. That was it. So, uh, Genius Bill signed into law, of course. So last Thursday, the House approved genius. It was a 308 to 122 vote. 308 said yes. Not even close, man. That is a, wow, blowout. And after it was signed, they had a party at the White House. They called it a ceremony with a whole bunch of the stable coin folks. Actually, maybe I'll play some clips. This is sort of a clip reaction with some of the names who attended there. My name is Michael Meebuk. I'm the CEO at MasterCard.

Starting point is 00:30:48 And we just witnessed the signing of the genius bill. This is really the beginning of a financial revolution here in America. With the passing of this, we've got crypto stable coins now that can be built right here in America to make every payment fast, cheap, and more global. It enables us to upgrade the financial system, make it fair, more. accessible. The president was able to achieve one of the most important changes in the legal framework in the United States to allow the creation and the safely usage of stable coins. This is going to meet fantastic benefits for individuals and businesses around. Looking forward to the great results for crypto and for the U.S. This is a great day for crypto. This is a great day for the U.S.

Starting point is 00:31:29 dollar. And it's a great day for America. This is foundational legislation, foundational regulation that is going to unlock the power of the internet in rebuilding the financial system. Not only that, but it positions the U.S. as the global leader in this new digital assets industry, which I think is incredibly important. Wow, they just posted a glaze video out of the White House main account. Yeah, that was out of the White House Twitter account. Wow. Okay, that's pretty incredible.

Starting point is 00:32:01 And Trump, I get the sense that this is the actual, the first time maybe Donald Trump met Paulo from Tether, but he called him out by name as part of the ceremony. Here he is. Paolo Ardino of Tether. Palo. Palo, thank you, Palo. How far has Tether come on his journey? Yeah, look at Donald Trump shaking hands with Paulo here, and you get the sense that, wow, you know, I wonder if Paulo just whispered to him, you know, do you know how many treasuries I own? He's, Tether has more treasuries than the majority of G20 countries. Dude, do you think

Starting point is 00:32:37 Paulo is like, Trump, I'm your daddy? Not quite at that level. Not very many people have leverage over Trump because he's just like a big figure, but Paulo, Paulo's got leverage. It's kind of crazy that an individual

Starting point is 00:32:55 of a corporate interest has that amount of treasuries. Hi, I own 160 billion dollars of treasuries. You better be nice. This is Scott Bessent talking about the genius bill. Of course, the Treasury Secretary. Blockchain technologies will power the next generation of payments and the U.S. dollars coming on chain.

Starting point is 00:33:17 Thanks to President Trump, Trump's leadership. We got the Genius Act will help cement the U.S. as the dollar as the global reserve currency for generations to come. That's really the message. There's a win-win for the U.S. year and also for crypto, we get the dollar as the reserve currency for generations to come. You know, my family members actually brought this up to me. They're like, oh, the genius bill signed.

Starting point is 00:33:39 Like, what do you think? You know, so I think this has gotten some mainstream attention. Not a lot. You don't get a lot of bills. Okay, so you have three kids and a wife. Which family member? Oh, no, no, extended family members. It was like, actually, my father-in-law, and he mentioned it.

Starting point is 00:33:51 He never talks to me about crypto. And he's like, oh, genius bill. They passed. Tell me about that. So I told me those family members are asking you about the genius bill? And are I asking you about, like, XRP or Cardano? Oh, no, other family members are doing that. That's like, you know, the text messages you get like after 10 p.m.

Starting point is 00:34:06 All right. But what I'm saying is it's pretty notable. It's national news. When Congress passes a bill with bipartisan support, that's national news, and they did it on crypto. There's also worth talking about what Tether's plans are now that this bill has been signed. And so when we had Paulo on the podcast, we asked him a little bit about this. And he wasn't, I'm not going to call him cagey, but he's being patient with the tether plans post the genius bill. I don't think he's in any rush.

Starting point is 00:34:31 And the reason why he's not in any rush is because Tether has three years to comply with a genius bill. And there's two different ways to comply, as I understand it, Ryan. Maybe you can fact check me. But there is becoming a, there's being a foreign issuer, which Tether is going to be. So they're going to comply as a foreign issuer with an existing USDT, right? You know, they might go down that path. Yes, the foreign, the current USDT, as we all know it and use it, is going to register as a foreign issuer. And then Tether is going to spin up a U.S. centric coin, a new, a new, new token that's going to comply with the onshore compliance. And why he's going to spin up a

Starting point is 00:35:09 second coin rather than just like make tether onshore. I'm not sure if we totally know one of the I think he wants to keep his options open quite honestly. You know, you have the domestic one. It might not make sense for UST to fully register actually, which would mean it would be effectively banned from US exchanges. But he might be fine with that. That actually might be there. I mean, like, is Heather on Coinbase anyways? I mean, a little bit, right? But like, not in size. Not in size.

Starting point is 00:35:37 And it's almost, you kind of wonder if it's actually a bug for USDT to be like formerly registered, recognized by the United States. Maybe the holders of tether don't, don't fully want that. Maybe that's more of a bug than a feature for them. So maybe he's just playing, playing his options here. Yeah. But it does mean that in order to be a foreign issuers, he's going to have to move away. from Bitcoin, gold, and corporate bonds backing tether.

Starting point is 00:36:04 And this is the existing tether. And so he has to move all the reserves towards T-bills and cash-like instruments. Yeah, he might not want to do that either, right? He already bought the Bitcoin at like $20,000. He's already bought gold at like 40% cheaper than current prices. So he's already in a huge profit. So I don't think he's too bummed about that.

Starting point is 00:36:24 You know, one of the other things I like about this is, you know, people outside of crypto, they say things like, oh, crypto has no use cases. I mean, look at it. It's just, and they ignore it completely store of value, Bitcoin number go up because that's just Ponzi tech. So they ignore that and they're like, it has no use cases. Stable coins are an incredible use case. This is easily a 10 to 20x better system than, like, I was trying to do a wire last week from one bank to another. I'm so sorry. One of my banks to another. My God, it took days. At one point the wire. Yeah, it took days. I don't know how many people I talked to on the phone to do this. literally at one point the wire got lost.

Starting point is 00:37:01 One of my, it's absurd. It got lost. The notion of getting a wire loss is of insanity. I really don't understand how wires work, but very clearly, I know when I move USD, U.S.

Starting point is 00:37:13 D.C. or stable coin from one address to another, I could see the settlement on chain. And it happens instantly, 24 hours a day. It's easy. We don't need a whole back office, multiple phone calls to all these people

Starting point is 00:37:25 to actually move funds around. This is a 10x improvement already. And that's just moving funds domestically. You're trying to get funds to somewhere else in the world. It's like impossible. Like the banking system kind of sucks. I mean, this is the reason we started this podcast, but it's actually true. It does suck.

Starting point is 00:37:42 And stable coins are a 10x improvement at least on that. Whenever I hire a guide, guys are always, is a pain in the butt to send money to. Because they are mountain guide. Yeah, to climb. So it's always in a foreign country. It's usually in Europe or Argentina or something. Sending the money, there's a huge pain in the ass. And I don't really want to be like the crypto guy before I meet them,

Starting point is 00:38:03 but then I go hang out with them for like three days in a row. And you have to talk to them about your life because you're spending three days with them. So you ask me what I do. And then I talk about crypto. And so I just teach about them crypto because they're stuck with me for three days. But then I always say, okay, I'm going to tip you with crypto. You always tip your guide. But I get them to download Coinbase or Cracken or whatever continent they're in.

Starting point is 00:38:23 And then I get them to send me their U.S. Tether address. And then I send them tether and they're like, whoa, that was instant. And like, I didn't even have to give you any information and like all that stuff. This is great. Yeah. And I think I pill them every single time about at least accepting crypto as an option for payments. Stable coins are great for payments. They sure are.

Starting point is 00:38:45 Polymarket, David, is now available, going to be soon available to U.S. users for the very first time. So I don't have to use a VPN. This is Shane. Coplin basically saying, this pays the way for us to welcome American traders again. I've waited a long time to say this. Polymarket is coming home. David, how is he doing this?

Starting point is 00:39:06 How is Polymarket coming home? Yeah. So they just acquired an exchange. So they acquired QCX, which had just received its CFTC license just weeks before the deal. And so this other company gets a CFTC license and then Polymarket buys it. And that was probably, the deal was probably in the work. prior to that. And so they just, they basically bought the registration. And so now that they, using that exchange, they now have the compliance that they need to service U.S. customers. When this goes

Starting point is 00:39:39 live, uncertain, I'm assuming it's not happening like immediately. No, it's not. You got to join a wait list in order to do this. So there's a place you can join in the U.S. on a wait list and they'll notify you when it's ready. But yeah, this is a CFTC approved. Actually, Shane went on CNBC. And explain this to... Dude, eat people on CNBC. We've just, like, dominated CNBC conversations over the last, like, 20 weeks. Let's hear. You've been operating.

Starting point is 00:40:06 We talk about Polly Market as if everybody can use it. But the truth is that most folks couldn't because you had to be out, you had to be in Europe. For trading. I mean, I think the way you guys talk about PollyMorgate's kind of like become the Bloomberg terminal for reality almost. And it's awesome. I'm humble that every time I tune in a Squawk box, you're like, well, Polly Market. And, you know, I was watching Eric Alck. Adam's episode and the first thing he said is like, well, the

Starting point is 00:40:29 polymarket for this. And I was just like, you know, I'm from New York. I went to high school right here. And the mayor talking about our site is just incredible. But yeah, I mean, look, there's a ton of latent demand for people who want to participate in the markets, not just look at it. So for us, you know, where we

Starting point is 00:40:45 sit, it was like a must have. And so what happens now? So obviously, I think people were pretty surprised. It was like a big acquisition. And the simple The simple way to put it is it's kind of the perfect asset. So it's an exchange and a clearinghouse. And, you know, that lets us go and serve brokerages and FCMs, as well as retail and institutions,

Starting point is 00:41:09 which is really important. They all know and love Pollymarket. When I get to meet these people, they say, oh, my God, Polymarket's amazing, but I wish we could trade on Pollymarket. And, you know, ask and you shall receive, right? So how much does this compete? It's pretty great. I mean, his whole story arc, that's bullish. Yeah, Shane's Story arc. Like a year ago, he was being. investigated by the FBI. I mean, they busted into his house. Now a year later, he's on CNBC announcing an acquisition coming home to the United States. I feel like this type of thing also, if I were to put my money long term, maybe there's a polymarket for this. Is polymarket going to go public?

Starting point is 00:41:45 Doing this kind of CNBC roadshow tour is part of the way you kind of build an audience for that. I don't know what's in Shane's mind. We haven't talked to him about this, but that could actually be a possibility for Polymarket to go public. I mean, this is an entrepreneur with some pretty big ambitions, I would say. Yeah, I'm sure Shane has some PTSD from getting raided. And as a founder, I think, like, going, being a public company on the public stock market is like, raid insurance. Like, the next, the next administration that comes in. You can't raid the founder of a public company.

Starting point is 00:42:21 Like, that's ridiculous. You're exactly right. Or somebody that's on CNBC, mainstream media all the time. In fact, actually, Andrew asked him that. question and about him getting rated. This is what he said. Did you freak out that morning? Yeah. Yeah. Like that's kind of a crazy. Yeah. I mean, you know, I think you got to make lemonade out of lemons. So that day was very crazy, but it was also an inflection in a milestone. Do you freak out that day? Yeah. He said he paused. He's like, you know, it's okay to say that

Starting point is 00:42:54 you freaked out, bro. It's traumatic. I'm sure that was traumatic. Um, side. No, David, do you remember this? He wasn't the only guy that got rated. The only crypto person that got rated. Actually, Jesse Powell, the founder of Cracken, got FBI rated around the same time, maybe a little earlier, actually. And he was also vindicated. So the FBI has dropped all charges against Jesse Powell. This is sort of a weird thing. It wasn't related to Jesse's activities at Cracken or Crypto. It was allegations centering around a nonprofit that he was part of. He was part at the board and there were allegations of hacking and cyberstocking that Jesse did. And so they raided his house basically.

Starting point is 00:43:33 And they took dozens of electronic devices. For me, this was actually in 2023, but you know, similar timing-ish. They stole laptops, cell phones, all of these things. And now Jesse, all charges were dropped against Jesse as well. You know, I don't really care what excuse the FBI says that they have when they raided Jesse from Cracken and they rated Polymarket, these anti- Democratic, I don't know if actually, no, excuse me, Shane was just neutral. Polymarket just reported on the truth, which I think was offensive to the Democrats.

Starting point is 00:44:03 I don't believe what excuse, I don't care about the nonprofit that they said that they rated about. Like, I'm calling shenanigans. It felt like that, you know, we don't know all the facts and circumstances. Certainly in Shane's case, it was that. In Jesse's case, it felt like that. Brian Armstrong even said about Jesse's case, we still need more progress, but obvious moves like this, which is vindicating Jesse, are a good start cleaning up. past lawfare. Man, if that's what that was, lawfare against crypto, which it seems like it was,

Starting point is 00:44:31 I'm very glad to call that era over. Although, we're not done yet. Coming up next, we've got to talk about the prosecution of Roman Storm. And the DOJ brought a witness to the stand, who apparently had nothing to do with tornado cash at all. We'll talk about that. Also, Ethereum blocks getting bigger and Zora getting a little pump on the week. David, you want to compare Zora and Pump, don't you? the actual pump. Maybe there's some competition brewing. We'll get to all that and more. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including FRAX. The decentralized, central bank, it's like Circle, Athena Maker, they all had a baby. Go check them out. In the wild west of Defi, stability and innovation are everything, which is why you should check out

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Starting point is 00:46:48 why over 275 million users trust Binance for everything crypto. Download Binance today and get started in minutes. Binance is not available in certain countries, including the United States. Check its terms for more information. The Ethereum Mainnet just processed its largest block ever, 45 million gas units. That's up from where it was just 12 months ago at 30 million. So Ethereum blocks are 50% larger than where they were just like six to nine months ago.

Starting point is 00:47:15 How did that happen? I'm so glad you asked. Ethereum block sizes can actually get voted up or down by Ethereum. Viteram validators. So this is an in-protocol feature that Ethereum can scale or contract its chain based on a voting of Ethereum validators. And so more Ethereum validators have been voting saying, hey, we're ready for more capacity. Let's give us some more capacity. And when sufficient critical massive validators signal for higher gas sizes, then Ethereum, the protocol, increases the gas size. And so it trends upwards. It doesn't like violently move in any direction. It just kind of slowly trends.

Starting point is 00:47:50 but we just had our first 45 million gas block on the Ethereum layer one. And people are targeting for more. They're asking for 60 million in the near to medium term. I bet we hit 60 million by the end of the year. That's like, what, a 25% jump in in terms of when you're saying block sizes, you're basically talking about transactions per second, right? The amount of transactions. Total throughput. Yeah, so a 25% jump just on that. 50. 50. 30 to 45% is a 55% is a 50%? Oh, 30 to, okay. Okay. Very good. I mean, it was 36 initially, but like it was, it's been 30 million gas for a long time.

Starting point is 00:48:26 And then it jumped to 36 recently. And then it continued going to 45 where we just, it's not holding 45, but we are getting, we're getting 45 million blocks at a time. This is a part of the, the donkrod proposal basically to kind of 3x, uh, TPS on Ethereum layer one every year for the next five years, right? This is part of that process. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:48:49 Yeah. And it's worth noting that there has been a meaningful shift in priorities for Ethereum Protocol Upgrades. This is Pota is tweeting out. He's an Ethereum developer. He says two forks ago, we did not have cheap layer twos. Two forks from now, Ethereum will have perfect parallelization of execution. That's called a block access list, right?

Starting point is 00:49:09 Order of magnitude more gas limit. That's what we're talking about right now. Orders of magnitude more blobs. That's pyrdas. And then better censorship resistance. That's fossil. There are some very big things that are getting shipped to Ethereum that really round out the protocol in a very big way.

Starting point is 00:49:26 And so we're getting parallelization. The Ethereum layer one is going to, it's continuing to scale. And especially with parallelization, I think, like, it's going to be able to fit quite a lot of activity, both meme coin traders and tradfi, you know, treasury acquisition operations, all on a layer one. And that makes me pretty excited. Yeah, for sure. I'm speaking of networks that are not sitting still, uh,

Starting point is 00:49:48 Salana is talking about a large tech upgrade that's incoming. It's called the BAM protocol. And this is Gito introduced us. So Gito, you know, to me, Gito, if you're coming from the Ethereum world, it's a bit like Lido and Lido plus flashbots plus Geph. So it's almost like they do client work. They do MEV protection type work. And they're also a staking protocol. That's where, you know, like most people will know them like Lido. And they are proposing something called BAM, which is a structure. at really trying to fix or take a crack at fixing the MEV problem on Solana. And I very much like you, you know, transactions per second, that's definitely, you know, you need to increase that in order to scale block space, like decentralized transactions per second. It's very important. The other thing that's important actually is minimizing MEV on chain because that's a scale limiter as well. Institutions, users, they're not going to deploy on chain. If they're getting basically raked over the coals, do things that are illegal in TradFai. Like most MEV activities are like illegal to happen and tread by.

Starting point is 00:50:50 Yeah, and it's legal or illegal. It's just like, it's bad practice. You know, I just spent, you know, you cost me a dollar in slippage for this, you know, $10 trade. That sucks. Yeah. Okay. Anyway, some people are, MERT has said that this is the biggest change in

Starting point is 00:51:03 Salon of history, private encrypted mempool, app specific sequencing and verifiable ordering so institutions can build without worrying about MEV. I didn't get into all of the details of this, but as I understand, this is very much inspired by a flashbots. type of design on Ethereum. And this is Gito kind of adopting some of these practices and trying to implement it into a future Solana hard fork. Is that right? That's right. Yeah. Specifically, the builder net from flashbots where they do a lot of expressive rules-based order sequencing, transaction sequencing inside of a TE. And then you get all of these pretty good properties.

Starting point is 00:51:41 Bam stands for Block assembly marketplace, basically like Flashbox, builder net, like I said. And, yeah, I was like this feature specifically is like one of the, in my opinion, going after Solana's weakest link is like the M.AV and order transaction ordering a supply chain. And so I think this is a very, like a very important upgrade for Solana. I agree. David, speaking of Solana, so I ran across this. There's actually a civil case that was recently filed against some of the people we were talking about Gito, also Solana, the Salana Foundation, and also Pump. In fact, the whole thing centers around pump. And this is a, we've seen a lot of court cases before, including civil cases.

Starting point is 00:52:22 This is the first time I've seen a civil case of this type, okay? Which is they are charging, they are alleging that these entities, so pump on the app layer, Solana and Gito, together inspired to create an unlicensed on-chain casino. So they're invoking RICO laws. RICO, the R in RICO. Yeah, that stands for Racket. basically racketeering laws. If you're not familiar with that term either, it means it's when you combine wire fraud and illegal gambling and unlicensed money transmission altogether. That's called

Starting point is 00:52:56 racketeering. It's like casino license type rules. You know stuff the mob was doing before. That's racketeering. And they're alleging that these entities conspired to racketeer. They created conditions for an online casino essentially, a meme coin casino that turns Salon into an unlicensed algorithmic slot machine for meme coins costing the plaintiffs here billions of dollars. And so the way they got to billions is all the fees from pump plus, interestingly enough, the MEV fees in Gito plus the price appreciation of sold the token. They got to like, you know, three billion or so. They're lumping all these things together?

Starting point is 00:53:36 They're lumping it all together, which is interesting. They're saying all of these entities together are creating basically an on-chain casino. know, and they pulled up some quotes, you know. So, of course, you got the Pump Fun founder. Here's a tweet. Greatest Casino. It's all part of the experience. It's a privilege. The Pump. Fund CEO on August 8th, there is a tweet in the complaint here. You also have people like Mert that were quoted here. The Salon of Fee model is a stochastic on purpose to naturally simulate a casino environment. So on the one hand, this looks like it could be a frivolous lawsuit, right? It's just like, oh, here's some money.

Starting point is 00:54:14 You know, here's meme coin casino. We're going to go after the money and see if we can do it. And I think that's probably the base case of what this is. On the other hand, I get worried that this could set a precedent, not for a civil case, but for a DOJ type case, you know, a federal case at some point in time, if the climate in the U.S. changes to something like it was back in 2023, 2024. So it's going to be an interesting case to watch for sure.

Starting point is 00:54:44 Yeah. Okay. When I hear class action lawsuits in crypto, my mind immediately goes to the pool together frivolous lawsuit where somebody just like added, put money in to pool together, lost it, and then sued them for being like an unregistered lottery. Yeah. Which pull together is not a lottery. And that one turned out to be political, right?

Starting point is 00:55:06 That was like... Yeah, turned out that person worked for Elizabeth Warren. and it was very frivolous and opportunistic lawyers. So when I see a class action lawsuit, especially in crypto, I'm like, okay, all right, who's trying again? Yeah, I've seen this before. Like, class action lawsuits can become a big payday for lawyers, and then they're advocating, you know, they're representing millions of people who lost billions of dollars.

Starting point is 00:55:33 And then when it's all said and done and say the lawyers win the lawsuit, the average individual gets like a $7 check and the lawyers walk away with like $100 million. For sure. I don't know. I don't know what's going on here. Could be that. It could be that. And I think it should be considered that until proven otherwise.

Starting point is 00:55:52 It's just worrisome. I mean, this kind of lawsuit could be brought against Ethereum, let's say. Right. It could be brought against layer twos, you know, all sorts of things. If, you know, this goes forward, I think, I don't know, could pave the way for some other nasty stuff. David, Coinbase offering perp futures to U.S. citizens for first. Your Bitcoin or your ether, you can get them on perps and Coinbase. That's new.

Starting point is 00:56:16 You ever trade any perps, David? I am an expert perp trader. Are you? I call you Mr. Perp. Yeah, that's right. Everyone knows I'm the world's greatest perp trader. Everyone, they tune into the podcast. They hear about the perp trading.

Starting point is 00:56:30 We finally got them in the U.S. Because all of this has to be CFTC regulated and now it is on Coinbase. Now we get to watch perp volumes on Coinbase compete with hyperliquid perp volumes. And then also when Robin Hood rolls it out, Robin Hood, too, that's going to be interesting to watch. There was more news from Coinbase. PNC Bank and Coinbase announced a partnership. What's going on with this partnership? Okay, so I recently did an episode, Coin versus Hood. It was a very illuminating episode.

Starting point is 00:56:59 And we, on the two guests, really drilled down the strategy that Coinbase is doing, where they are trying to basically be the crypto back end for Tradfite institutions who don't want to do it themselves. And so PNC Bank looks like is one of those. But you could imagine, like, fidelity or anyone who wants to allow their customers to trade crypto, they kind of just whitelist Coinbase and plug into Coinbase in the backend. Looks like that's what's happening here.

Starting point is 00:57:21 And so Coinbase is being the crypto back end for PNC Bank. Is that what's going on? That's what's going on. I feel like every bank is going to, look, first of all, post-Genius Act, they're like, okay, stable coins, crypto is fine. It's fully regulated game on. So now they have to have a strategy. Are they going to build out all of the crypto functionality?

Starting point is 00:57:39 Do they have the teams? These are banks, man. They do not have the teams in place to deploy the custodial technology, the exchange technology of the Coinbase. So what are they going to do? They're going to open it for their customers, but they're going to use entities, crypto-native entities like Coinbase on the back end.

Starting point is 00:57:54 That's great. And the relationship works the other way, too, which is Coinbase gets a good banking partner on their side too. So it gives them a bit more being debanked insurance. I suppose, you know, in the future. I wonder how much TTSD from the last four years is like indicative. Shane, Shane wants to take polymarket public rather than issue a token because he wants insurance.

Starting point is 00:58:15 Brian Armstrong wants as many banking partners as possible because he doesn't want to be to be debaq. I wonder how much, how much. Never again, right? It's got to be a never again type attitude. David, we should update folks on the Roman Storm trial. So it is the second week, the first full week. And it's really been the prosecution.

Starting point is 00:58:34 So far, were you following some of the highlights from this? I was reading it loosely. I think you pay attention to it more than I was, though. Yeah, I did. So the big news on the week, the big thing that kind of blew up, which was very interesting to me, is that we almost got a mistrial. Okay, this is at least what Roman Storm's defense attorneys were calling for. They were saying, all right, this has gone too far. We need a mistrial. On what grounds? Yeah, on the ground. So you remember last week, we talked a little bit about some of the witnesses that the prosecution was, um, will bring to the stand. Well, one was a very sad story of a Katie Lynn. It's in air quotes. It's soon anonymous. I imagine. We made five total deposits totaling roughly $250,000 to a sketchy platform called NTU Capital.

Starting point is 00:59:19 This is called a pig butchering scheme. Okay. Have you heard of that pig butchering scheme? I'm assuming we're not literally talking about pig butchering. No, we're not. Okay. It's a, it's a common scam, scheme. It's called pig butchering. And the idea is you fatten up the pig and then you slaughter them. Okay. So, you know, the pig in this case is the victim. And it's a pretty, you know, traditional scam. And it usually begins in a telegram chat. In this case, it was a WhatsApp chat. Somebody pings you. And they're like, hey, how are you? We just ran across one another. And suddenly, David, they've got this incredible investment opportunity. They kind of get to know you're back and forth. They build trust that way. And eventually the victim sends them funds into this fake opportunity that seems real to them at the time.

Starting point is 01:00:05 And then, of course, they steal all of their money. And at the end, they usually try to manipulate them into investing more before that. And then they end up cutting the victim off and oftentimes just making fun of them after the fact. Like, I stole all your money. See you later. Right. It's kind of sad. What does this have to do with tornado cash?

Starting point is 01:00:25 Exactly. Okay. So, Caitlin. Let me guess. Let me guess. the exploiter, the criminal, use tornado cash. Okay, that's what they were claiming. So they had a sad story from Katie Lynn, a legitimately sad story.

Starting point is 01:00:42 We've heard this so many times. This is not just crypto. This is just like everyday type scam. And what the prosecution was saying is, and then they use some of the funds, some of the proceeds, the hackers and the scammers, through tornado cash. And when Katie Lynn emailed the generic tornadoes, Tornado Cash, you know, email, bounce back, generic thing. She didn't get a reply.

Starting point is 01:01:03 All right. So that was the case. But what they were trying to do is they were trying to tug on the heartstrings of the jurors, right? Look at all the bad things happen. Roman Storm, he enabled all of this, all of these scams, all of these victims, all of these, you know, pig butchering schemes. It's all happening. Okay. But there's only one problem with that, David.

Starting point is 01:01:19 They didn't even use tornado cash in this instance. Wait, what? What? What? What did they use? What was the purpose? then if they didn't was the association the DOJ apparently thought that maybe tornado cash was being used but when it turns out we've got the best super sluice in the business in crypto twitter okay you've got

Starting point is 01:01:41 Taylor Monaghan pulled up oh that's that's that expte people like Taylor Monaghan they went through and they traced it okay and according this very case the $250,000 there's no evidence that any of those funds went to tornado cash there's evidence that some of these funds went to exchanges I won't name them, but there's a few exchanges on the list. They're not on the stand. None of it went to Tornado Cat. So you're telling me, the prosecution brought on this sob story. Yes.

Starting point is 01:02:07 God's a jury to sob as hard as they could. And then they were like, and here's Roman Storm. Yes. Yes. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So they basically were blaming Roman Storm for somebody getting scammed in crypto, right? And you're painting him as the perpetrator here.

Starting point is 01:02:25 Why didn't they go after the... scammer. Great question. Also, there's other parties involved. I mean, you could blame the internet. You could blame the Ethereum blockchain. I do blame the internet. The internet made all this possible. Who can we get the CEO of the internet and hold them responsible for this? I mean, that's basically what's going on in this case. Now, the defense demanded a mistrial, basically. And then the prosecution, last minute, they parachuted in a witness, an expert witness, an IRS agent that said, no, no, no, actually, you know, I do see part of this 9.78Eth of this $250,000 went to tornado cash, is what he tried to say. Yeah, and then under the cross-examination, the expert witness actually admitted that this doesn't prove the hacker actually did the tornado cash. And, you know, experts on crypto Twitter are like, they're doing it wrong. We can see it on chain. We're tracing it in the correct way. None of it went to tornado cash. Even the expert witness says he may have been wrong. But this prevented a mistrial. So that's some of the shenanigans going on right now.

Starting point is 01:03:29 I think Jake Chavinsky had a great take. An update from Roman Storm's trial. He said, DOJ had years to prepare for this. And so far, their cases basically, crypto is bad. Their first witness had literally nothing to do with Roman Storm or tornado cash. DOJ is trying to imprison a defy developer. And this is the best they can do. Well, I'm not in the jury.

Starting point is 01:03:49 And so I have a lot more context and like education about crypto than They're seeing none of this, by the way, right? the jury does. Exactly. But I hope that the jury understands enough that they should be fucking annoyed, that they are there. Like, why are you wasting our time? David, even the witness.

Starting point is 01:04:08 He's guilty or get out of here. Even the witness, okay? She had to like relive all of her trauma, went through this, right? The DOJ told him, and Trinio Cash wasn't even part of that. Right. I'm, like, why is she there? I'm not a lawyer. I'm not Roman Storm's, like, defense counsel.

Starting point is 01:04:24 but like I'm kind of like they can ask for a mistrial but like if it's a mistrial can't they just can't the prosecution just go back and try again but if they lose the case then they can't go back and try again yeah yeah and so I'm I'm a fan of this teetering on the edge between being a mistrial and not a mistrial because if it's so close to being a mistrial then it's likely that he's going to be just like excused yeah we'll see I mean it depends what your jury thinks about this they still have some am on the prosecution side they're trying to say that Roman had control over the front end. He should have taken it down. They're calling expert witnesses from the government who are saying, no, this is how a tornado cash should have worked to prevent any, you know,

Starting point is 01:05:02 money laundering, that sort of thing. So we'll have to see. Meanwhile, Roman Storm is getting debanked all the time. Gusto just canceled his like payroll stuff, right? Like, that's happening in the background. But next up, next week, the defense presents the case. And then closing arguments could be mid next week. And a final verdict could be on the table on Friday. So big week next week. days from the time of recording. Yeah, and I think we're going to be trying to talk to some of the reporters who've been covering this fantastically well at the rage. Shout out the rage. They've been covering the training of cash case very well. There's a link in the show notes, and we'll hopefully be talking to them next. So, David, Zora versus Pump. What do you want to get into here?

Starting point is 01:05:43 It's a pretty strong juxtaposition going on right now between Pump Fund and Zora. and Pump Fund has had a ton of attention ever since the pump token launch. So maybe to recap some of the details, there was a very large ICO for the pump token at $4 billion valuation, sold out within minutes, and then something like a $700 million raise,

Starting point is 01:06:05 both from private VCs and the private sale, and then also on the public sale to end of individuals. $700 million, sold out very quickly. The pump launched at like $5 billion, so an immediate 25% return, got up to $6 billion. things looking pretty good. And since then,

Starting point is 01:06:23 there's just been a lack of communication out of the Pump team. And also since then, there's a new token launcher, token launch pad called Bunk. Bunk. And Bong is taking 60 to 70% of token launch pad volumes. And so Pump is actually,

Starting point is 01:06:40 as of July, the month of July, pump is not the dominant token launch pad volume, based on volume on Solana. Pump, the pump founder, Alon, went on to the live stream with Thread Guy. And it was very watched live stream. I think there was something like 5,000 or 6,000 concurrent live viewers, which kind of gives you an indication about how many people are watching this.

Starting point is 01:07:04 People were asking, like, waiting for clarity out like, okay, what happens next? Because there was a pump airdrop that was promised. We're looking for the pump live streaming future. Overall, there's a lot of the community that we're looking for indication as like, what happens next. a lot of people invested into pump at $4 billion. And there was just a lot of missing communication. I think people felt from the pump team about what happens next.

Starting point is 01:07:27 During the pump live stream, right as Alon said that there was going to be anirdrop, but not in the immediate future. There's going to be an air drop, but not in the immediate future, is when the pump token loses, goes from $4 billion in value to $3 billion in value. Oh, wow. And so there's some frustration on the pump side. of things. And overall, I'll blame that very high expectations that a $4 billion valuation leads to. And so at $4 billion where people gave $700 million to the money to, that's the bar that's set.

Starting point is 01:08:01 Now let's go over to the flip side of things. The Zora. Zora app, Mints are up only, and there's no second best in the Ethereum landscape. I bet you it doesn't actually hold a candle to Salon LaunchPads. So like Solana LaunchPads are just launching much more assets in general. but you got me on to the Zora app once again for like the third time today. Yeah, you were saying last week you were just saying no Zora's not for me. You're saying that.

Starting point is 01:08:26 If you download the Zora app, you can just imagine Normie's having a ton of fun. And it's exactly like Frentech. So when you go on to Zora, you can launch your token and then I bought some Ryan. Ryan bought some of me. I'm at a humble $112,000 market cap. And then I launched a picture.

Starting point is 01:08:46 So I posted a picture. and it's got like a $1,000 market cap, and there's like 36 buyers of it. I've earned $13 from it. It's just fun. Go ahead. It's interesting that you're comparing them, though, because I see Zora's completely different versus Pomp.

Starting point is 01:09:02 I see them as the same, dude. So Alon is all about creators, like tokenizing creators using tokens and running with attention. It's not like wrapped in a social network, right? It's just, or I guess maybe that's what they're doing. They're saying they're trying to disrupt Twitch. They're trying to disrupt Twitch. That's right.

Starting point is 01:09:20 And so they're going after streaming. But Zora is going after like social media. Yeah. But they're both trying to reward creators by having tokens and capturing attention. Now the difference here is the Zora token market cap earlier this week. So Zora started the week coming in at a market cap of just about $38 million. Now that's not fully diluted. Fully diluted was maybe something about, uh,

Starting point is 01:09:46 400 million, so 400 million dollars. It has pumped in the last seven days, 300%. 300%. So it went from a market cap of 34 million up to 175 million. And I think it's just because the expectations are totally different. Like pump has a huge expectations at $4 billion. Now is clocking in below $3 billion. And everyone's kind of written off Zora. All the trench people have like kind of written off Zora.

Starting point is 01:10:14 but the Zora app is so polished and it's so good. It does the same thing. It does the same thing as pump. It's, I've never been a heavy pump user, but I did engage in the friend tech experiment. And it reminds me so much of fun tech was. Have you ever bought a token on Pump Fun?

Starting point is 01:10:30 No, I never done. No, you've not. Yeah, not at all. Not even been tempted. I like, I just don't really care. But like,

Starting point is 01:10:37 I don't know, Zora's kind of fun. Now, I will tell you this. I have no idea what to like post on Zora. I just haven't figured that out. Like, it's, I, like, I know how to tweet on Twitter. I know what Instagram is like. The post on Zora, there's almost like, for me, there's like the pressure of like,

Starting point is 01:10:53 oh, it's got to be good because people, people spend money on this thing. Yeah. So what do you post? I think it's iconic memes. I, like, truly iconic stuff, like viral moments. Like, if we posted a clip of San Bankman Free getting rattled under the focus of Eric Forhees, that would have gone. super vile. It has to be at the time probably, right? It has to capture it as a test. Yes.

Starting point is 01:11:20 It's highly related to attention in my opinion. And yeah, I think you're on to something where like the content form factor that's resonant with Instagram or the content form factor that's resonant with TikTok or Twitter, every medium is its own modality. Yeah. I think that's a correct segment. And so, uh, so like what goes viral on pump or Zora is going to have its, own kind of form factor. And like Zora native creators are going to figure that out. And they're going to be the leading creators on Zora. We'll see what it does.

Starting point is 01:11:55 Wait till they get to it. It's all crypto people there still, right? You need some big, big celebrity type creators to kind of like get this thing off the ground. But maybe that's coming next. We will end it there. Guys, of course, none of this has been financial advice. It never is.

Starting point is 01:12:08 You know crypto is risky. So are meme coins, pump tokens, Zora, treasuries, all the things. We've lost $5,000 on tomorrow this week. There it is. And the disclaimers. We are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone.

Starting point is 01:12:23 But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

Bankless - ROLLUP: $4 Trillion Market Cap | GENIUS Act | ETH ETF Mania

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