Bankless - ROLLUP: Are Record Inflows Good For ETH? | New Crypto & AI Czar | Record Liquidations | Where To Next?

Episode Date: December 13, 2024

This week on the Weekly Rollup: Bitcoin briefly plunged to $93K amidst $1.1B in crypto liquidations, marking the largest single-day event since 2021, with $815M wiped from long positions alone. Meanwhile, Ethereum ETFs hit a record inflow day of $428M, and Layer 2 solutions like Mantle are driving the ecosystem forward with nearly 1M ETH bridged to Base. On the regulatory front, the crypto world sees both challenges and opportunities as Trump appoints David Sacks as Crypto Czar while Microsoft shareholders reject Bitcoin on their balance sheet. With bullish predictions, such as Bitcoin reaching $250K, and major milestones like 1B unique crypto addresses, the crypto market continues its rollercoaster of volatility and growth. ------ 📣 DYDX | UNLIMITED ERA  https://bankless.cc/dydx-unlimited  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2    ⁠ 🦄UNISWAP | BUG BOUNTY PROGRAM https://bankless.cc/Uniswap-Bug-Bounty  🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle    🐧 CARTESI | LINUX-POWERED ROLLUPS https://bankless.cc/CartesiSimple  📈 iYield: YOUR FINANCIAL PICTURE, SIMPLIFIED https://bankless.cc/iYield  🔒  SAFE | INTRODUCING SAFENET https://bankless.cc/SAFE  ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/113?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 00:00:00 Trump On Bitcoin Reserve https://x.com/tftc21/status/1866895723410673988?s=46&t=2ZINVXJQKx6xO_6Wiiu_2g  00:03:43 MARKET https://x.com/QuintenFrancois/status/1866445089909653545  https://x.com/DegenerateNews/status/1866957840805409049  00:13:47 L2 Update https://x.com/jessepollak/status/1867047990843916334  https://dune.com/eekeyguy_eth/eth-supply-tracker  00:16:40 Bitcoin Reserve https://x.com/InvestorAsh/status/1866221541400219847  https://x.com/el33th4xor/status/1866255029033943551  00:27:06 Donald Trump appointed David Sacks as a Crypto and AI czar https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/113603133222686186  https://x.com/BitcoinNewsCom/status/1864857461481422934.  https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/1865199683087245405  00:32:26 CFTC Chair Rumors https://x.com/emiliemc/status/1866686542649102586?s=46&t=2ZINVXJQKx6xO_6Wiiu_2g  00:34:08 SEC - Crenshaw https://x.com/eleanorterrett/status/1866981517932822540?s=46&t=2ZINVXJQKx6xO_6Wiiu_2g  https://x.com/brian_armstrong/status/1865913522670260680   https://x.com/masonlynaugh/status/1866877145902948483  00:39:52 Should Ethereum Pump The Gas https://x.com/dankrad/status/1863412876901306599  https://x.com/dankrad/status/1867078641118789787  https://x.com/drakefjustin/status/1865894859468427  00:44:44 MOVE Token https://x.com/movementfdn/status/1866093209719579011   00:46:00 Magic Eden https://x.com/MagicEden/status/1866483682367693227  https://mefoundation.com/  https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/magic-eden  00:46:37 Pudgy Airdrop https://x.com/pudgypenguins/status/1864851993094664602  https://nftpricefloor.com/pudgy-penguins  00:51:38 EtherRocks https://x.com/etherrock/status/1865480491773640830?s=46&t=2ZINVXJQKx6xO_6Wiiu_2g  00:53:30 Quantum Computing https://x.com/InvestorAsh/status/1866221541400219847  https://x.com/caprioleio/status/1866355221670302170  https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/29/futures6.html  https://x.com/el33th4xor/status/1866255029033943551  00:59:36 Stablecoin News https://x.com/jerallaire/status/1866733181728366593  https://defillama.com/stablecoins  https://x.com/aave/status/1866127138820112562  https://x.com/defiignas/status/1866831563272712393  01:05:16 Meme Of The Week https://x.com/sherlock_hodles/status/1866557875671187912  ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠ 

So David, did you see this? Donald Trump was asked by Jim Kramer about crypto this week. Should we just play the clip? Yeah, absolutely. You're embracing crypto. Very different from the previous administration. Strategic petroleum reserve-like for crypto? Yeah, I think so. We're going to do something great with crypto because we don't want China or anybody else.

Not just China, but others are embracing it and we want to be the head. We're going to be ahead of AI. We're going to be way ahead of AI. And we've got to produce tremendous amounts of electricity. You know that it's unbelievable. when you think that we need more than twice what we already have. If you think that's pretty for a specific industry, but we'll be able to do it. We have Lee Zeldon in charge of the environment.

He's going to be given us very strong approvals, I think, and he's going to make sure everything's good and clean and proper, but he's going to give us very fast approvals. Donald Trump saying he will be doing something great. Whole sense. It's for him. Donald Trump, I don't even know if he knows what accelerationism is, but he's embodying it. He's leaning. It's just full.

It's turn it up to 11. Yeah. It's an accelerationist kind of like what are the accelerationist type? AI energy and crypto. Boom. All three. We're going to be great. We're going to exceed China.

That's his message today. I will admit, it is pretty refreshing. Wow. Okay. Well, we are in the second week of December. It's time for the bankless weekly roll-up. In the world of politics, crypto and AI has gotten a czar. Who is he?

And will he be all in on crypto? I figure that out. You have heard him on this podcast before. We have clips some of his content before. Also, liquidation Thursday, right after we finished recording the weekly roll-up last Thursday, crypto prices tanked. Record liquidations in crypto as leverage washes out of the market. But we're back.

We're back on the menu. The D-Gens are gambling. We're not stopping here. Ethereum is getting record ETF flows. So we're talking about that, painting some pretty big numbers. And then also is the Ethereum Layer 1. finally getting a scaling upgrade. There are some murmurings in the EF camp and then the L1 capacity world.

We're going to talk about that. A bunch of tokens launches this week. Move, M.E., Magic Eden, N Pengu, and Micro Strategy. It's expected to enter the QQQ and how will that change crypto's market structure. These are the subjects, but there's like 20 more that we're going to get into as well throughout this episode. But first, before we get to all of those, a message from our friends and sponsors over at DYDX, which is introducing its whole new era unlimited, D-Y-D-X unlimited,

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Measure today. We'll see. We'll check back in next week and see what it is at next week. Bankless.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com. So you can position your USC and receive yield and do other things that DYDX offers. I was pretty bullish when we talked to Antonio on Twitter. a couple weeks ago on D-YDX Unlimited, particularly this like permissionless perps. Like, imagine AI agents creating a permissionless perps.

Oh, no. I'm not sure I'm ready for that. Oh, you're ready for it. Let's talk about the market price this week. We got Bitcoin and another week, not an all-time high. Can't say that. But we are above 100K, aren't we, David? What are the numbers on the week?

Even with the nuking that we all experienced last week, Bitcoin is up 0.2 percent. On the week. Point two. Not two. Not two. Point two. We are green on the week. All right.

Called flat. Start of the week, 101,400. Ending the week, 101,600. Actually, it's up $100 since I brought December. It's a neighbor up point four. Actually, this feels really good because on Thursday, as you mentioned, we got a massive liquidation. This was a sell-off.

Some people were saying it was over, David. At that point in time. Not me. First cyclers. Not me. I think it's a lot of the, you know, people that are looking in on. crypto. We're like, huh, see, I told you, he hit 100K and then it's going to drop down to 20. You got scammed.

Bitcoin always crashes, idiots. Anyway, that's a pretty steep candle here. Look at this. Did we go from 102K to all the way down to 92? To 92. And then we wicked back up. Yeah. That's like a 10K drop. Do you remember April May, May of 2021, after ETH ran from 1,000 to 4,000, Bitcoin did

something similar? Yeah. Liquidity just dropped out of the market. And ETH crashed from like 4,000. $100, down to like $2,300. And liquidity just ran away from the market. The floor just fell out of the entire market. Now, was that the fair price for ether? Was that a justified crash? Well, in the narrow timeframes, yes, liquidity couldn't enter the market that fast. In the zoomed out timeframes, no, because ether just went back up to $4,000, took it half a year to do

that. But just reminder, liquidity can just flee this market so fast. And this is why we can go and drop, this is a small drop in the grand scheme of things, but it's just a reminder that how fast liquidity can change in this market and you can make very big movements very, very quickly, which is why so many people got liquidated. Yeah, it's healthy too. I mean, this kind of thing needs to happen. We're kind of like cleaning up all the scraps here. It's like, I guess I was expecting after that kind of a liquidation, a 10K drop in Bitcoin

price and the rest of the market, of course, followed suit. I was expecting a longer duration. The fact that we are fully recovered now, David, tell. tells you that we are in a bull market. We are bullish. A mega bull market. That kind of liquidation doesn't tend to recover so quickly. But give us the stats on the liquidation.

Look this chart we're looking at. What's this? 1.1 billion dollars in liquidations across centralized exchanges. That's the largest daily crypto liquidation since December of 2021, which is when the market started to turn. 815 million dollar liquidations came from long positions. 280 million came from short positions, which I don't know how. Who's shorting this?

I don't know. I don't know. Anyone would short crypto, I do not know. And with that market turbulence behind us, people are still very bullish, not just crypto people, but also Tom Lee. Tom Lee went on CNBC earlier this week, predicting $250,000 Bitcoin. Let's go ahead and listen to Tom Lee. How much of what we're seeing, maybe even a little bit today, is there's been such a regulatory overhang on a lot of these names under the current administration. Now you have a new FTC.

chairperson. Is that playing a role in any respect to this because Dan I've put out a note today said Christmas comes early with the new head of the FTC protect? It's probably the best way to sort of measure this is what Bitcoin's doing because Bitcoin faced enormous regulatory burdens over the last few years and now we have a White House that's embracing digital assets, a new SEC chairman, FTC chairman, a new Commerce Secretary. I think these are actually being viewed as pro-business reviving animal spirits, but I think a good proxy is watching Bitcoin. Now I'm going to have to pin you to a target again on Bitcoin, because, I mean, you've been among the most optimistic and outspoken about it for years, to be quite honest. So here we are above 100,000.

What's a legit target for 2025 for Bitcoin? We think it's going to follow a similar happening cycle that we've seen in the past that would imply something around 250,000. thousand for Bitcoin in 2025. And on top of that, we have a Trump put because Bitcoin is potentially a strategic reserve asset for the... There it is. 250K is his base target plus the Trump put on top of that. I got to say, Tom Lee has totally called this in the back half, the last half, part of the

year. We had him on in August. You remember this was right after that kind of the yen like trade kind of dip where the stock market like plunged and everyone was talking about recession worries and all of these things. And he was like, not a recession. We're still in a bull market. You're going to see higher highs in NASDAQ, S&P, and then also, also, and most especially crypto. So Tom's been right on in kind of the last quarter of this year. On the other side of that, though, is the Microsoft board. You'll recall, David, we're talking about the last couple of weeks. They had the opportunity to vote shareholders,

that is, of Microsoft, on whether to add Bitcoin to their balance sheet. So obviously they did it, right? Why wouldn't they do it? They told what was the vote? Well, they put it on the balance sheet, right? Big company, a lot of cash reserves. What are you going to do with all that cash? Like, would you buy back your shares? Or you do what Michael Saylor's doing. It's working for him.

That vote got turned downed and not just by a little bit. Only less than 1% of Microsoft shareholders actually voted yes on that one. So is it too early in this market cycle to say have fun staying poor? I mean, they don't have to buy Bitcoin. Like Microsoft shareholders are doing okay this cycle. Have fun, staying poor, Microsoft shareholders. Wow, wow, I don't know. I mean, they don't have to buy Bitcoin.

It's just like, in fact, I think it's kind of silly sometimes for, like, you know, big balance sheet corporations to kind of, like, they should be investing in their business. Well, what are they doing with it instead? Dividends. Right now, all I. Give me dividends. I'm a, I don't know. I'm a dividend maxee.

Give it back to shareholders. If you don't have anything to do with it, like, don't try to run a, you know, a fund or something like that, keeping cash. Don't do a Michael Saylor? Yeah. I don't know if that's old school or what that is, but tell me about Heath Price. David. ETH price.

3,925 is where we started up 1% to 3,942. Eith price during the Bigwick went from like 3,900 down to 3,500. It has since bounced back. But it recovered slightly more than Bitcoin did. Still below that $4,000 mark. So we did get across $4,000 last week, which is pretty cool. Which is also going to record. It's like something like $4,813 or $50.

But like I'm going to it's real all time high will happen like around 4,900. That's like true all time high that counts. But it's really $5,000 is the number to beat. I think we could be all time high, ETH in December. Oh, I totally agree for sure. That's totally within reason. All time high December. All time.

All time highs. Yeah. Eth could paint a thousand dollar like weekly candle for sure. It's all discovery. Like when we're getting this 4K range and above, you could just see it just wants to punch through. It wants to punch through. So Ryan, right after the. weekly roll up, I hop on a flight back to the Patagonia to go walk around some mountains.

I'm out. No cell service, no Wi-Fi for like eight days, nine days. So you can't check price? Which is an entire weekly candle of price action. You don't have like Starlink or something? You can just like dial in and check the picture prices? Not. Not backpacking.

No, no, no, no. So we'll see. We'll see what happens when I get back. But I'm going to be like, it's just going to be one price when I leave and a completely different price when I get back. Yeah. So I mean. You're going to do the weekly roll with.

dazzle next week so I will be out yeah so are you saying like I guess there's a history of David goes out and good things happen for crypto things have happened correct things have happened but like it's all been regulatory stuff and like there's no like more regulatory person to acts like we've already asked to ask to them all yeah but it's it's it's about time for the market to you know figure out how bullish this space is it's just like it's building it's still building yeah one thing you can see that's building are these eth inflows man oh my god it has been crazy look Total net inflows now. Last week, I remember it was just above a billion.

Now it's almost $2 billion in total Ethereum ETF inflows. No, I think, if I remember correctly, last week we were saying it was the fourth, I think, and we were saying we are going to break above a billion. Okay, we're just under a billion. The next day it painted 0.43 billion in one single day, $430 million in inflows the next day. And now we are about to cross two billion. So we've added basically a billion dollars of inflows in seven days. That's crazy, crazy.

And you can see this on the charts here. See this green line here? This is when we started to get into positive inflow territory. It looks like the inverse burn. It looks like the inverse burn. Do you know, it's actually a fun fact. How much do you think ETH is inside, percentage of total supply is inside of ETS right now? Uh, one to two percent.

It's higher, David. Uh, we are three percent, I want to say. Three percent? Three percent? Okay. Okay. Oh, no, two point seven eight percent. Okay.

All right. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. And like a lot of it has happened in the last month. Almost one micro strategy's worth of, uh, strategy. He's been there. Uh, it's just looking good. How about the ratio?

Ration. Um, I will say it has neither shown strength nor weakness. It has shown flatness since we started the month. But historically, December has been a very good month, so we'll see what the rest of this month has in store. Total crypto market cap, we are almost at $4 trillion, $3.85 trillion, which is just nuts. We'll be at $4 trillion this year.

Before you know it. Yeah, next week is within reason. Also, layer two update brought to you by Mantle, a layer two that we know and love. Jesse from Bay says, count down to 1 million ETH bridge to base. We are at 994,000 ether in the base bridge contracts. And Mateus from Grow the Pie put out the suite that I liked today, three years ago,

the median transaction costs on Layer 2s like Arbitrum OP MayNet were between $2 and $5. Now they are between $0.001, so one-tenth of a penny and five pennies, 99% cheaper. Long way. We've come a long way since 2021. Still a lot of juice left to squeeze. I think that's a pretty good story for Ether. It's getting locked up in Layer 2. right so you got like about 3% maybe 4% of each supply in layer 2s you got another 3 or 4%

inside of um uh ets theorem ets that's a pretty good story i think for the cycle well you have a fees dropping on layer 2s um so you know some some tail wins there certainly and then movers of the last two weeks we usually do movers of the week we're doing movers of the last two-day period uh we have some pretty impressive numbers avee is up an incredible amount i couldn't believe it when i saw $3666. That's up something like 60% in two weeks. Is that all time highs? No,

all time high is like something like $600. Really? Okay. But it got there in the peak of defy summer. Oh, so Avey up 40% on the week, up 83% in two weeks. Alvay is up 83% in two weeks.

Well, I mean, it's just hitting numbers. That is a defy index. I mean, it's hitting record numbers in terms of like loan value. Also, you know, the World Liberty Finance, you know, Trump and team. Yeah.

Buy an office. They're buying a ton of ETH. They're buying a little bit of Bitcoin. They're buying AVE and they're buying Link right now. They're buying the AVE token? Yeah, dude. Well, they're building on AVEA. So why wouldn't they?

D-Y-D-X is up 28% in one week and up 50% in two weeks. That's probably triggered by the hyper-liquid air drop in meta, the hyper-liquid new token. Brand-new token is up to $18 billion when it launched at something like $4 or $5 billion last week. That's been an incredible breakout story. Aerodrome on base up 22% in seven days, up 66% in 14 days. Athena is up to a dollar coming up to 56% increase in two week period. And then uniswap at $18 up 42% over two weeks. Defy tokens catching bids.

Again, consistently, consistently getting bids. I got to be honest, this collection of tokens here makes a lot more sense to me than what we were talking about the previous two weeks of like XRP being. up, you know, like 80%, like this is just, there's some fundamentals back here. Like all of these protocols are doing something, right? And doing something big. So this is like defy renaissance. All of these have cash flows to them. Every single one. Yeah. It's amazing. So suffice it to say, things are going pretty well right now in crypto land. It is a full on bull market and everyone's very excited. Now, we might be in a crypto bubble of sorts, right? Like we live and breathe this stuff.

we talk about where like permables have been since we entered this space, there is another section of the world that is not in this crypto bubble at all. I ran across this clip. This is a news anchor on MSNBC in the context of Trump kind of pivoting super pro crypto talking about a Bitcoin reserve. This is the type of conversation that's going on on MSNBC. I'm just going to play the news anchor here. And in the new Congress, a Senate Republican I want you to please pay attention to this. I know you want to tune out, but please don't.

They plan to propose a bill that would sell off some of the Federal Reserve's gold to buy Bitcoin. Watch this. I just want to pause it here because that's not even correct. That's not what Lummis is proposing. Senator Lumis is proposing. Remember we had her on the podcast. She's not talking about selling any gold, okay? She's talking about, you know, adjusting gold, the fair market value of gold and balance sheet,

essentially to its fair market value instead of its bulls. value. So we're not talking about selling any gold. Anyway, that's flat out incorrect, but let's continue playing. Have we got here it is the United States will assemble one million Bitcoin five and can be used for debt. Well, Cynthia Lemmas, you can take that bill and sit down with me any night of the week. And I would love to go through every word, every paragraph, every page. But I'd first like to know how much the crypto industry has given you because for fact's sake you cannot pay debt down with bitcoin if bitcoin crosses the $100,000 mark like it did last week that means it would cost the

government at least $100 billion and former SEC official john reeds on 16 minutes last night to sound the alarm about just how dangerous this industry is listen to this david crypto is a scourge. It's not something that you want in your society. It has no utility. It's just pure speculation. Remember, there's no balance sheet to crypto. There's no financial statements. Every single crime you can conceive up is easier to do that because of crypto, especially ransomware, human sex trafficking, sanctions evasion, money laundering. All the bad things. North Korea is financing their weapons program. Think of anything bad. Let's associate Bitcoin with every. everything bad. Wow. You know what I thought with the, well, I was like listening to that whole thing? What's that? This is such a great marketing tool for Bitcoin. Yeah. Like it's so bullish. It is so bullish. It's just everywhere. Once you cross 100K, even those that are kind of like triggered by the Bitcoin Reserve and 100K price point, they start talking about it too. And attention feeds into like crypto like

nothing else. Do you know actually who that was John Reed? John Reed. No, tell me. Yeah. So he said that was a 60 minutes interview on on Sunday that aired and you know Brad the Ripple CEO was on there this guy was on there John Reed is the as an SEC prosecutor so he's like one of the ones who was going after crypto so you could kind of see the the furvary through which they pursued actually I'm going to play some clip because then they had some guests on MSNBC and let me just play this for you crime you can think of is exponentially easier because of crypto here to discuss Zeeke fox investigative reporter for Bloomberg Business Week and Bloomberg News. He is the author of Number Go Up inside Crypto's wild rise and staggering fall.

Dan Nathan's still with us. I don't even want to say this would be the biggest bailout to crypto ever because they don't need a bailout. They're not in trouble. This would be the biggest bonus boon right there before our eyes transferring billions of dollars to an industry we know almost nothing about. There's his puff in our back. I mean, it's wild. People are mad right now about the health insurance industry's profits. There's $100 billion. That's a couple of years of the entire industry's profits that would be spent buying Bitcoins from people who are. Yes. And it is kind of a bailout.

They're just chilling Bitcoin for 15 years. It hasn't delivered on any of its promises. It's as old as Uber. It's old as WhatsApp, but nobody's really using it for anything. No one's using it for anything. They've given Trump a lot of money. They've got him talking about coming in and having the government spend huge money to pump the price up even further. Yeah, it's really wild. This is just another side of the world I never see. I don't watch cable news at all. This is the discussion that's happening.

They just gave the best marketing bit to Bitcoin. Like, I'm sorry. Like, okay, probably the woke lefties are watching this and they're like, okay, I'm fearful of Bitcoin now. But then, like, if the average person watched that, they were like, oh, the government's going to pump Bitcoin. I'm going to go and buy Bitcoin. Thank you.

Like, I'm listening to that and they are just telling the world, like, not with the right tone, but like, yo, the government's going to buy Bitcoin and isn't that terrible? And I'm like, the government's going to buy Bitcoin. I'm going to buy Bitcoin. Well, it's just interesting because I think it's because Trump is supporting it that they have to be on the other side of that, right? Because this is, you know, MSNBC. And so they have to do that. But this is a narrative that that's also going on. It just sounds like, I believe me, I know what cope sounds like, okay?

I'm an eath holder, okay? That probably sounds like what it was like to listen to Bankless when Solana was pumping so goddamn high. All right. Well, you know what the interesting thing about all of this, all this discussion is anybody who's listening to that and has stocks will likely have purchased, will likely be a net purchaser of Bitcoin in the future because micro strategy this month is very likely to enter the NASDAQ indacy. A lot of the people who own mutual funds, of course, they're invested in the NASDAQ, they're invested in the S&P 500. If Micro Strategy enters the NASDAQ, then they'll essentially own Bitcoin. Microstrategy is a holding company for Bitcoin, so they'll own Bitcoin without even

knowing it. I find that ironic. Also, BlackRock this week. People have been asking BlackRock all the time, hey, what percent of crypto should I hold? Like, what's the reasonable range as a percentage of my portfolio? They finally came out and gave us a number. And that number is not 1%. It's 2%, which is a lot coming from...

A doubling. That's a doubling. A lot coming from BlackRock, right? So, you know, four years ago, BlackRock was saying like 0%. And then it was get off zero. Now it's 2%. All right. That's a wrap on the market section. Coming up next, Trump has appointed the crypto czar. We're going to introduce you to David Sacks if you don't listen to the All-N podcast.

Also, a new name for the CFTC chair that would be pretty bullish for crypto. if you are a longtime bankless listener, you have heard this man before. And a reconfirmation vote for SEC Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw is up in the air. Will she be reconfirmed? Will she be confirmed? We do not like her. She was Gary Gensler's right-hand lady, so we're going to bring up this conversation and more. But first, a message to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible,

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hack, the commitment to security and transparency is rock solid. Now Uniswap Labs is taking an extra step to make V4 as secure as possible with a $15.5 million bug bounty. Head to the link in the show notes to dive in and participate in the Uniswap v4 bug bounty. All the details from eligibility and scope to the rewards are there. Okay, let's set the scene here. We've got Trump, of course, new administration. We've mentioned some of the cabinet positions in previous weeks. And just overall context here, David, is this is a 180 on crypto that we're seeing. It's like whiplash. I think you called this in our conversation with the bitwise guys earlier this week. It's like a whiplash, but in a good way. because the previous administration was so hostile.

10 out of 10. 10. In ways we didn't know what was actually going on, they were hostile. And the opposite is happening. The new administration in the executive branch. 10 out of 10 favorable. Yeah, it's like a pro-crypto army on the other side. Some people will look at this like the MSNBC host previously and say that this is bad.

This is an example of, you know, corruption or something like this. we are unapologetically pro-crypto. So like for us, crypto is a freedom technology. This is clearly good. We needed to pivot in the other direction in the United States. Now, I do think it's important that we continue to preserve the decentralization values of crypto and not become kind of a banking cartel. But this is definitely the step that we need.

So all of that is context. We're going to talk about a few more of the executive types of positions. But the first is this, the crypto czar, David, can you? can you give us some context? What happened this week with that position? Yeah, so it was the position itself was announced. TPD on what ASAR position is. I think it's more symbolic in this present moment. But it's probably something along the lines of like Trump's chief advisor. We'll talk about that here in a sec. Crypto and AI, call it like Texar, Frontier Texar. They combined it, right? They combined it. Yeah. And you also heard Trump talk about

crypto and AI in the same breath when we opened up this podcast. We just, it's accelerationist. So call David Sacks the Tsar of accelerationist technologies in the United States. It's going to be something adjacent to deregulation. We know that if you listen to the All-N podcast, basically all of them are fans of deregulation. If you don't know David Sacks, he is a member of the PayPal Mafia. He also founded Yammer, sold it to Microsoft in 2012. He's a general entrepreneur, venture capitalist, co-hosts of the All-N podcast,

which is definitely one of the most dominant podcasts that are out there. Big fan of Elon Musk, big fan of Peter Thiel, definitely in the inner circle of right-wing tech Silicon Valley types. He also commented on Operation ChokePoint, so he is aware of Operation ChokePoint. He's got exposure to crypto. So his VC fund craft invested into BitGo and BitWise. And then also I think he has personal investment into multi-coin capital, so he has a lot of Solana exposure. Or maybe it's through Kraft one of those two things. He also launched an AI-powered work chat app called GLEU.

He says to support a freer ecosystem, empowering AI companies to grow, strongly against AI models displaying any sort of censorship. So open-source AI, open-AI, and advocated for the integration of AI technology into warfare and national security tools. So it depends on how you feel about that. And so, big question, what is ASAR and what does ASAR do anyways? Do you have any clarity on this for me, Ryan? Because I do not know.

Yeah. A czar. I mean, that's a good question. It's certainly not a role that's like, you know, in the Constitution or in any legislation anywhere, right? So, as you said, it's unclear how much power this position actually holds. There was an article this week from Bloomberg. And according to Bloomberg, the designation is a special government employee. Okay.

So this is like a part-time role. It doesn't require him to divest of his assets. It's not like a public servant in that way. or he doesn't even have to publicly disclose his assets. So that's interesting from a conflict of interest perspective. And there's also, it's a part-time job, okay? So there's a maximum number of working days per year that a special government employee is supposed to spend, and that's 130 working days a year.

So David Sachs is going to be still full-time on craft. So it is an actual employed position. There's like a contract and a signature that has to go down. And it's a real position, not just a title. It depends, I guess, how Trump sort of uses it, right? And what that role is. But I would have to think it's going to play a coordinator type role inside of the Trump administration, right? An interface with AI, an interface with crypto. It's interesting that Trump seems to favor these kind of media personalities as well. I mean, like David Sacks has the megaphone on the All In podcast. So if there's any shenanigans, any anti-crypto shenanigans going on in government, he not only says it, in a kind of official crypto czar type way and tries to sort of defang it, but he'll also have the all-in platform, you know, the podcast platform to be a megaphone for that too. So, I mean, all in all.

It'll be the first podcast coming from inside the White House. This was, you know, I think I was, I'm not surprised by this choice. I would say it feels very, very Trump. And, you know, David Sachs has been a huge Trump supporter of the entire time. He has been beating the drums about Trump from a very early part of the All-In podcast. It's a reward for loyalty as well. Right? It is, yeah, it is compensation in a way.

In a different corner of the White House, CFTC chair rumors. So former CFTC Commissioner Brian Quintends, who left the CFTC to join A16C crypto to work on policy over there, is now emerging as a top pick for the CFTC. The chair at this time. The chair. He went from commissioner to private sector to chair. So maybe. Maybe, maybe. That's the room.

Potentially going to chair. So a little bit of a revolving door there. Reportedly has been advising the Trump transition team on crypto policy, current boss Mark Andresen and David Sacks run in the same like conservative venture capital of Silicon Valley circles. Emily Choi from Coinbase says, super bullish on the future of digital assets in the U.S. if Brian Quintendt heads up the CFTC. I'll say if Brian Quintends sits on the chair of the CFTC, that's like if Hester Per said on the chair of the SEC.

100%. That's how you should think about this. Brian Quintenz is just like fantastic. He understands crypto from the ground up. We've had an opportunity to meet him. We've had an opportunity to talk to him on the podcast. He was at permissionless. He was on a panel with him at permissionless.

It's just on a panel with him. I mean, like, you talk about the, again, the whiplash we're talking about, the pro-crypto army being instantiated. Imagine you have all of these places. And by the way, in the new administration, it could come to pass that the CFTC actually has more authority over crypto, yeah. Then the SEC under Gensler was trying to get, right? So this could be a very important role.

But either way, SEC and CFTC with Paul Atkins covered it last year, fantastically. Last week, yeah. If Ryan Quintends, yeah, last week, if Brian Quintends gets this one, I don't know, pick one. I don't care. How can it get any more? We're winning either way.

I know. Okay. And so actually, maybe the cherry on top for this week is there's actually a vote going on. So do you remember Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw, David? Does that name ring a bell? I know the name, the only time I put a face to, a name and a voice to a name was when she was testifying along the other side of the other SEC chairs and she was basically just like Gary Gensler mini.

Yeah. It was a mini me Gary Gensler basically and she's been against the Bitcoin ETF. She was on the side of like even when Gary voted yes for Bitcoin ETF. She was a no. She's been very anti-crypto. In addition to her, there was another anti-crypto commissioner, Jamie Eliza Ranga. And Jamie has decided to resign actually due to some family health. issues. So that person's gone. Caroline Crenshaw was going to be renominated for her position. So she goes in front

of Congress to be voted in again, renominated. And she's kind of like the last standing anti-crypto SEC commissioner. My God, the Gensler Army has really fallen apart, hasn't it? Anyway, this was scheduled. A vote for her renomination was scheduled for December 11th. So that would have been Wednesday of this week. And it's been postponed. It's actually been deferred. The vote itself has been deferred. There has been an outcry from the crypto community to deny her vote. And a lot of the, you know, like a lot of Republicans are sympathetic to this.

A lot of the politicians who want to get some check marks in the pro-crypto column would also presumably vote no to this. This is Brian Armstrong. Caroline Crenshaw, he says, was a failure as an SEC commissioner and should be voted out. She tried to block the Bitcoin ETFs and was worse than Gensler on some issue. which I didn't think was possible. The Senate Banking Committee should take note. The crypto community is watching the vote. I'm told it will be factored into the stand with crypto scorecards for politicians.

Wow, that is Brian Armstrong wielding the political stick on the back of some major crypto wins this election cycle and sort of like saying, hey, politicians, you vote for Caroline Crenshaw. There will be consequences. We will remember. You really got to hand it to, I think, is one. of the least appreciated galvanizers of the pro-crypto army, which is Elizabeth Warren, the leader of the anti-crypto army. I think without that one meme of that blue picture of Elizabeth Warren is here to recruit an anti-crypto army, did the most, some of the biggest ROI for crypto that I've ever seen.

Maybe she was a pro-crypto plant the whole time. Elizabeth Warren, number one pro-crypto advocate. Well done for your work, Elizabeth Warren. All right, coming up next, is there a growing consensus around increasing the Ethereum L1 capacity? More and more proponents are starting to voice their opinions. Not everyone is convinced, but some pretty key stakeholders have voiced their opinions on Twitter. We're going to go through some of them.

Also, a bunch of tokens launched this week, Move Magic Eden, Pudgy Penguins. And then this is, Ryan's going to take this one. Quantum Computer Breakthrough this week could spell trouble for crypto down the road. Is Bitcoin going to zero? Yes, it's going to zero. Those are Ryan's words, not mine. He's going to explain them to you. No, is a question.

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Make sure your vote ready by staking your CTSI before the votes open. Dan Krad Feist, one of the core contributors to Ethereum says on Twitter, I think it's time we increased the gas limit. That means increasing the layer one scale. He says if you run a validator, you can contribute to this. Every block acts as a vote on whether to increase it. If more than 50% of the stake agrees to an increase, the gas limit will increase. I just set my validators to vote for up to 60 million gas. So a little bit of context.

This is actually how Ethereum has worked since the dawn of time. Previously, miners, now today validators, would just signal what they think the gas size of a block ought to be. The current size of a block is 30 million, but miners, now validators, can actually vote this up individually. So this is kind of a validator-run consensus of Ethereum is how big should the blocks be. there has just been long, sticky consensus at 30 million. Dankrida is saying that he has just set his validators for a doubling of up to 60 million, but not yet. He had to follow that up saying quick write-up to explain what's happening about the gas limit raise.

That first tweet that I just read was December 1st. The tweet that I'm reading right now is from today, December 12th. There has never been an increase in the gas since the merge. However, before the merge, it was an established practice that miners would not use this power arbitrarily, but typically only after CoreDev's signal to be okay to change. Recently, some of us have started signaling that we think it is time for an increase in the gas. Unfortunately, that has hit a bit of a speed bump as CoreDev's discovered that raising it over

40 million was not actually safe to a constant that needs to be changed in the client's first. I'm calling this kind of like a one-off anomaly construction of a client. Just needs to get that fixed first. However, Bankroll continues. I think there is a lot of messaging agreeing that $36 million is a good first step, so not over 40 million, but it's up to 36 million, again, from 30 million. And clients are releasing updates to make this the default, so validators don't have to manually use command line of flags to

vote for this. I think it is likely that some big pools will join us in the next few weeks, and we will see this increase. Justin Drake also tweeting out on December 8th, configuring my validator for a 36 million gas limit. Staking operators control the limit. Ethereum has held a 30 million limit for 3.5 years, a 20% bump to 36 million safely. greases wheels. You can see gas limits at pump the gas.org. And then he goes on to ask when gigagas and talks about snarked execution clients

are the key to scaling gas, 10x, 100x, 1000x, and then a few more details on that. So there's growing consensus that we can very quickly, today basically, get 20% more capacity on the Ethereum layer one, which I think is really just a gateway drug to get it to 60, which is where

Dinkrad wanted it in the first place. And then we'll probably let the network stabilize a little bit. Some people will fall off the network. They will learn how to get back onto the network. They will get faster internet. They will just tinker with things. Optimizations will be had. And then 60 will become the new norm. And then we can do this again and again and again safely. So I am very appreciative of these conversations. I'm happy that Justin and Dengrad are putting these messages out there. What do you think about all this, Ryan? Yeah. I mean, I guess the context is, right, when you increase the block size from 30 to 60,

you're just increasing the amount of transactions and throughput that Ethereum can sort of sustain. And it's like the question is like, why why not 100 then? Why 60, right? And the reason is because like the more you increase, the increase in kind of the capacity it requires for staking, in particular on the bandwidth side of things, right, which is the real constraint. Bandwidth and state growth, yeah. Yeah, bandwidth and state growth in particular like bandwidth, right? So for other networks, it requires like data center level connections like one to 10 gigabits per second, right? And Ethereum is supposed to be consumer grade hardware, consumer grade internet.

And then you can kind of like stake using it, right? So that's really the tradeoff space. But the big point is we haven't adjusted anything in three and a half years. Bandwidth has gotten better. You know, hardware has improved, according to Moore's law. And on a more routine basis, maybe we just increase the gas fee gradually. and preserve the staking requirements for validators. So that's kind of the conversation, what's going on.

Definitely something that I'm going to be keeping an eye on. I think there's like path dependency here where if we just jumped from 30 million to 60 million, that would be pretty aggressive and that would cause a lot of people to fall off the network. But if you like ease your way into 60 million, you can get there sustainably, reliably, securely. And you can end up in the same spot, but with a more resilient network along the way. So I'm a fan of this incremental improvements towards a high-agism. I'm sort of a fan of some way to just, like, not program it, but have it regularly scheduled.

So we don't have to always have this, like, kind of community debate every year or something like that, right? And that's sort of what Dan Krad proposed, but it's going to take some time to get there. All right, getting into some token drops. The Movement Foundation has launched the Movement Mainnet and Move token. This is a layer two on Ethereum using the Move programming language. So this is a move coming into the scene. Again, Move is this very well-respected, sought, after programming language coming out of the Facebook Dia Libram project,

which has spawned many of these people who are building the move languages, chains like Aptos. There's another one. Sui, Sui, Aptos, Sui, and now Move, being the layer two on Ethereum. So Move is the gas fee token. So ETH is not the gas fee token. It's also the staking token and governor's token. Dropped to a $1.6 billion market cap with a $7 billion totally diluted valuation.

10 billion total supply the tokens. Two billion of them are circulating. 10% of the total tokens was the initial move drop with 40% going into staking rewards, ecosystem initiatives, liquidity providing, and then also some early contributors and backers. And then the foundation. There is a claims.movement network.xyZ to go see if you can claim your token if you're eligible, otherwise just use the bankless claimables app. That's why we build it for you.

Snapshot was taken on November 23rd, 2024. So there is a link in the trying to see to find out all that information. Also, Magic Eden dropped M.E. A little different of a token drop. I've never seen this before. One billion supply came in at a $4.7 billion valuation, but the claim will be available across Bitcoin, Solana, and multiple EVM chains, the Ethereum main net base optimism, arbitram.

Allocation fully unlocked at TGE. And M.E is an SPL token, but the token is a very very important. across eight different chains, including Bitcoin. I don't know how they do that. Solana and some EVM chains. You have until February 1st, 2025 to claim. Those were two of the big token notices on the week. But there was also this one, David, the Pudgy Penguins token.

And it caused a little bit of a stir. So Pengu, the official coin of Pudgy Penguins, launching in 2024, hasn't launched yet, right? But that's happening in December, I guess. We're running out of time in 2024. for what is the story of Pangu from the Pudgy Penguins NFTU is the ERC 20 token that goes along with the Puggy Penguins NFT. So if you have a Puggy Penguin NFT, that is your claim on the token, along with Little Pudgies and Pudgy Rods.

So makes sense. Tokens go to the NFT holders. But interestingly, like the Magic Eden token, but still slightly different. This token is being launched on Solana, which is interesting because the Penguins are NFTs on Ethereum, but the token is being launched on Solana. In the tweet thread that goes out, it says that they are looking to reach out to

alternative broader communities because they already have the Ethereum community with their NFT. Why not just capture the Salana community with the token? So therefore, it launched it on Salana for distribution. I tweeted out, this tweet that caused a bunch of consternation in the Ethereum space saying massive L for Ethereum scale the layer one. My reasoning here was that, well, Solana has this community that is not the Ethereum community because Salana scaled the layer one. And so Puggy Penguins went to go to that community, launch their token because that community exists because Salana scaled the layer one. So this is my call to action for the Ethereum community, why I'm interested in the whole pump the gas thing,

because there wouldn't be as much distribution elsewhere if Ethereum had scaled its layer one. Now, I went and I asked to verify this take with Luca Nets. I just went to DMs with him on Twitter and asked him like, hey, like, can you just give me the spark notes about why you guys launch the token on Solana. And he goes, I think it starts and stops with gas fees. They're going to launch on abstract, which is the chain that they're going to build on. But they just don't want to rush it. Is that a ZK chain? That's a ZK Singh chain. Yeah, hyperchain. And they didn't want to launch on another layer two because they're building abstract. Eith Mainet, not feasible for the millions of people that want that he wants to come into

crypto. And so because Solana has the cheap fees and the alternative community, that's not Ethereum, they decided to launch on Solana. So that was kind of the analysis behind there. That tweet, the Athenian community really did not like that tweet from me. They thought it kind of lacked nuance, which, yeah, it kind of does. So I'll admit that. But directionally, I stand by it. You said this tweet was lazy and lacked nuance, though, David. That's what you said.

But I didn't say it was wrong. I said it was so many ways of scaling the L1. And the majority of them I do not agree with for the much needed elaboration, Dengrad, going back to Dengrad. So I think like the reason some people, took issue with your tweet was basically, you know, scaling the L1 is not enough capacity for all of the world. It'll never be enough.

It'll never be enough, right? So it's not necessarily going to solve this, right? It's almost like some people saw this as an orthogonal thing, which is basically like, yeah, we should scale the L1, but like realize that scaling the L1 and becoming Solana, let's say, in a monolithic chain was never a path. And I don't think that's what you're saying here, but that's why it didn't capture the nuance.

One of the general question I have for you, though, is why do Pudgy Penguins need a coin? Just wondering. Don't ask questions. Okay. Don't ask questions. I just like, okay. Sir, it's token season. Look, man, Luca is an incredible shipper.

He's really turned that project around. Killing it. Pudgy Penguins, I think, are NFT floor all-time highs now. Wow. And this is, look at this turnaround, David. 26, Eth. Yeah, if you bought Pudgy Penguins below two ether in the bear market, you're up a 10x in

ether terms. It's because of his leadership. I mean, they actually executed and delivered. God, I think Pudgies might turn into the biggest bag fumble I'll ever have.

Oh, really? You had some Pudgy's, right? I had like, I had three or four Pudgies, including two very clean Pudgies, yeah. And when did you miss confidence? Shout out.

It wasn't about Pudgy specifically. It was just getting burned on NFTs. Like all my, all my R blocks were down to zero, like everything that I owned other than my crypto punk was basically at zero. And I was like, all right, well, this was dumb. I just bought JPEGs.

I just got bear market burned. Yeah. And I was like, okay, I wanted to like clean out the wallet because I always rotate my wallets. And so it's just easier just to liquidate them to eat. I mean, this was a turnaround, though. It was a founder-led turnaround. That's what really happened.

So who could have predicted that, right? Dude, it was the next day, bro, that Luca acquired pudgy penguins. I sold my pudgies. The next day, Luca acquires pudgy penguins, and it puts like 3X off the floor. We all have regrets, David. Let's not live in the past.

All right. The future is bullish. Give me a regret of yours to make me feel better. Did you, my regret, let me see my regrets. All of my NFTs are regrets that I have. I could show you some ugliness in my portfolio, okay? And it's still there. I didn't even sell anything and they're still down bad.

I never owned an ether rock, though. Did you own an ether rock? Bro, bro. Okay, so ether rocks are these crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, these crazy NFTs that are literally just rocks. basically making a farce of how NFTs or does JPEG. So if somebody made JPEGs of rocks with like different shades, they're just different shades.

One is kind of gray. One is kind of blue. One's kind of green. But they basically does rocks. And I remember, and these went for, I think the top one went for like something like 50 or 60 million dollars in 2021. It was so dumb.

It was so dumb. It was so dumb. And I saw EtherRox. I looked at EtherRox, the OpenC. I shared it in my Alpha group in 2021, like my friends, my college friends.

And the ether rocks were going for like half an eth to like one and a half eth's. And I'd shared it in the group and I was like, this is absolutely redacted, but that's probably bullish. No one did anything. Including you? No one bought. I did not buy. No one bought. And then shot up to like a week later, one sold for like a hundred million dollars.

Wow. Wow. Wow. Well, so you missed it that time. You also missed it this time, David, because I regret to inform you, either rock number 19 was purchased this week. It's not 2021 for a 235 Eth. That is almost a million dollars. A million dollars.

Okay, so our NFTs back. We got Pugge's. We got Pugts doing well. We got EtherRox selling. Is this a little comeback story, you think? I don't think so. Not yet. Not yet.

Pudgies, absolutely. But Pudges is like the anomaly. Pudgis is like buying Link or Aave or synthetic. You got to have fundamentals this time. Yeah. Maybe. I don't know. But like Cryptopunks are up to a 40th floor when they were once at 100. They're not dead.

So what's happening right now is NFTs are not dead. Pudgy's very much alive. NFTs generally not dead. Well, a lot of it is just like ETH beta exposure. You want me to give you the story of the quantum compute fud? Ryan's going to fud our entire industry. Bitcoin is not going to zero. Let me just say that up front.

He wrote it in the notes. A lot of people were saying this type of thing in kind of like mainstream. But the question is could quantum computing threaten crypto? We've always known this is on the horizon. Why is, why was quantum compute even in the new cycle this week? All right. So this is a tweet from the CEO of Google. He says this, introducing Willow, our new state of the art quantum computing chip

with breakthrough that can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits. This was actually hailed in quantum computing circles as a major breakthrough because of this ability to reduce errors exponentially. And it's not that Willow and the quantum computing at Google is very powerful now. It's not. It's just if they are able to reduce the. errors exponentially, then they can actually scale this technology in a way they previously couldn't. So there are some estimates out there that we could start beginning to break some of the strong

encryption in like the year 2030, 2035, something like this. This may bring those timelines actually closer. This is held by many as a breakthrough technology. So a lot of people are asking the question is, okay, if quantum computing is now right around the corner, could it break are cryptocurrencies, could it break Bitcoin, right? Here's a tweet from Investor Ash. University of Sussex researchers estimate that breaking Bitcoin encryption in one day would need 13 million qubits. Willow right now has 105 qubits, all right?

You need 13 million. We got 105 right now. Not possible today, but theoretically, if you had 124,000 willows, you could break encryption one day, if you had 340 Willows in one year, right? So it's closer than it's been previously, and this breakthrough might have brought it even closer. The real reason that people are scared is like,

if the time to break a wallet is like if it's one year, well, then you can just move your bitcoins on your wallet. And so you'll never catch up to you because you're moving your wallet. Not Satoshi, though. Not Satoshi's wallets. That's right. So that's kind of the thing. So this is the founder of Avalanche who's commenting here.

Emin, he says, there is an issue with Satoshi's one million Bitcoin. Remember this Bitcoin that his mind's been locked? Estimates are he's got about a million of it. So apparently these Satoshi early mine coins use the very old pay-to-public key, P2PK format, which reveals the public key and gives the attacker time to grind for the mother of all cryptography bounties. P2PK isn't used by modern Bitcoin wallets or modern systems, but it was there in the early days of Bitcoin. So as quantum computing gets threatening,

the Bitcoin community might want to look into freezing Satochi's coins or more generally provide a SITDA. Isn't that a hard fork? That's a hard fork, bro. Right. That's a hard fork. You can't hard fork Bitcoin. You cannot hard fork Bitcoin.

But the problem is there's a one million Bitcoin bounty on Bitcoin, which is like, I mean, I don't know, four times, five times the amount that the U.S. government owns. It's like three times as much as Michael Saylor owns available to whoever gets quantum computing to the level to be able to crack this unless Bitcoin does something, unless it hard forks. So the threat is not imminent, by the way. I mean, we're still talking right now five to 10 years away unless something massive actually happens.

But still, it's out there, David. It's the closest has ever been, that's for sure. And I'm not saying it's existential because we all know that Bitcoin has the ability to do things like socially, at least most people. people who kind of study crypto can do this. Like you can hard fork, you can correct this. But Satoshi is not moving his coins anytime soon. So that means there's a one million Bitcoin bounty out there. So what do you think this means? You think this means we'll have like hard fork wars. There'll be like a Bitcoin quantum and like Bitcoin classic in the future.

This has been a long conversation in the Ethereum space as like there's are some inevitable brick walls that Bitcoin runs into. One being the security budget, the other being quantum computing. And Bitcoin is like fine until then. But then once those things arrive, then it's like, then it's already too late. Like you actually have to be proactive against those things. And so yeah, like the idea here with quantum computing is there Bitcoin has a death day. And so people talk about, oh, yeah, Bitcoin is not going to. When you say death day, it's not quite, it's like it has a reckoning, let's say, because it has to decide.

I mean, what Amin suggested was freezing Satoshi's coins. Can you imagine that? Which is what people would say is not Bitcoin. If you are freezing people's coins, then that's something else other than Bitcoin. 21 million in property rights. People were happy to tell him that in the Twitter comments, basically. I saw the first response was, you can't freeze Satoshi's coins. Those are his coins, which I appreciate the sentiment.

Also, might be untenable. Or you could just allow this game to play out and allow the first quantum computers, probably a nation state with, you know, imagine the, the nation state reserve currency wars heat up everyone's stacking bitcoin and the u.s are in a bitcoin inspired arms race for quantum computing yeah can you imagine Donald trump you got to add quantum computing to the acceleration list get that one million in bitcoin is that yeah that's the reserve that's how you fill the reserve that's that's how you pay off the national tent you got to fund quantum computing we should have a synthet um ummus bill to just like fund the quantum computing to go

collect the one million Bitcoin. Is that it? I mean, things get weird. That's right. Of course, it's not just Bitcoin. There are other crypto network that require a quantum computing upgrade, notably Ethereum, which is like, it's sort of in the roadmap. It's, you know, like, that might need to be accelerated. But Theorem doesn't have a problem like doing these types of quantum hardforks. Anything that can hard fork does not have this issue. Very interesting. We'll see how this ends up. You know, again, not an imminent threat. No, Bitcoin's not going to zero, but it is in the water out there somewhere. All right. Three big, stable, coin news this week. First, Circle

and Binance entered a strategic partnership. This is something that I don't think I can ever have seen had CZ ever not to bend to the knee, but he did bend the knee. And so Binance bent the knee. Now Circle and Binance have a strategic partnership over USDC to announce that USC will be extended inside the Binance platform. Wow. I never thought

I would see a day. That's exactly what it is, David. It's bending the knee. It's saying like, hey, we don't want to go to jail. Sure, we'll use your stable coins. U.S. government app Your private CBDC, yeah. So that's first news. USDE, the dollar stable coin from Athena has flipped dye. Wow. So Athena's synthetic dollar USC is now the third largest stable coin behind USDT, tether and USC, after doubling its market cap, currently clocking in at $5.5 billion, which dies sits at $5.2. It has grown quite a lot because demand for leverage is increasing. So does Athena's yield, which is currently at 27%. So the This is definitely bull market growth, which, Ryan, makes me a little nervous. A little nervous. A little nervous. Keeping an eye on that. But nonetheless, it is pretty cool to have a new style of stable coin that's out there doing well.

So congratulations to the Athena team. I'm sure their eyes are on it even more than mine. Coinbase third will restrict the EU citizens access to die due to MECA regulations. So because Dye is not a MECA compliant stable coin, Coinbase will restrict EU citizens access to Dye. interestingly but nonetheless die is replaced in the maker system by USDS which are micro compliant it seems like there's no way for die to be meek a compliant as well they just designed in such a way that it's just like impossible so europeans just don't get access to it but by the way this this is related did you see this floating around the last week or so this is public from scratch US

companies all the US bubbles here versus EU companies that have gotten to 10 billion in market cap with the last 50 years. Look at EU over here, Europe, over here. U.S. just has massive bubbles. You know, Apple and Vita, Microsoft, huge bubbles with companies with huge market caps. EU, just getting absolutely mugged by the United States, tiny little bubbles. It's just regulation, man.

It's just regulation, man. It's just like you can't do Mika. You can't do defy. You can't do all of these things. We've got a taste of it in the U.S. Can't have fun. Can't make money. Speaking of not having fun, the U.K.

Fantastic transition. Is no longer able to access pump.fund. Okay? The UK said, enough of these meme coins. The UK's financial conduct authority, FCA, another three-letter agency, issued a warning about pump.fund, stating that the platform is not authorized

to operate in the country, okay? Added that customers dealing with pump. dot fund won't have access to consumer protections. I feel like we kind of knew that, but as a result, pump. Dot fund is no longer available in the UK. I think they geo-blocked everybody in the UK. Meanwhile, some goddamn whiplash.

Check, checks, do not have to pay taxes on crypto. They held for three years. What the hell? Tax-free, three-year crypto gains? Are you serious? Yeah, that's happening. That is nuts. This is the Czech Republic.

So if you hold your crypto for three years plus, encouraging holding behavior, that's, you know, very bankless aligned of them, you know, good, long-term. hold you don't have to pay capital gains if you sell it after three years it's just awesome there's a tale of two jurisdictions going on right now there's jurisdictions that are super crypto hostile and other jurisdictions that are turning to crypto friendly because they want the the growth and the economics and the jobs and the industry to come to them and those that are you know like open to crypto will do much better those that are closed will not I mean this is how it works congratulations all check listeners of the podcast. I'm very jealous.

You think that could come to the U.S.? No. Definitely not. Definitely not. That would be insane. That would be insane. I mean, I've seen some pretty crazy things doing crypto in this year, so I'm not going to count it out, but that would be kind of crazy. You never know. All right. This is going to be the end of the roll-up, guys. Thanks for sticking with us. We have fun doing these every single week. If you don't mind, please like and subscribe if you are watching this on YouTube.

If you're doing Apple Podcasts, if you don't mind, again, opening up that podcast player and giving us a five-star review. We're Spotify too, right? We made number 10 on the tech charts. That's right. Bankless is the number 10 technology podcast. Let's get it to top five. It's good to top five.

That'd be great. And also just shout out. If you haven't tuned into the AI roll up that I'm doing weekly with EJazz, have you listened to it this week, Ryan? We're on our third. No, it's in my queue. I love them, though. It's fantastic.

It's getting me very bullish on kind of AI. It's like crypto is so, I mean, that is the new frontier. and there's so much going on these days. You need like a dedicated weekly podcast just to keep up on the frontier of AI. Yeah, it's amazing. It feels like early defy just four years later. Yeah, I'm having a ton of fun of that. So definitely, this is your call to action to not miss the AI meta.

The AI meta is the meta to pay attention to for 2025. That is where the hot ball of money is going to go, it is where it currently is. And so I think it's going to attract outside retail capital like all bull markets do. And they are not yet here, but they're definitely coming. And you are ahead of the curve. and that is why we are doing the AI roll-up so you can front-run the opportunity.

What do we always say on bankless? Yeah, every Thursday. Every Thursday. Every Thursday. Comes out Thursday. Yeah, the day before the Friday weekly roll-up, which is just a normal news. All right, meme of the week, meme of the week.

This one, I really chuckled at this one. I don't even know how to, I don't know what this meme is. I've seen it before, but this is a man who is looking at a picture of his younger self. The younger self is saying is titled, first cycle me, and then it's second cycle me,

thinking how stupid I used to be. So second cycle me is looking at a picture of younger self. But then there's third cycle me looking at a picture of second cycle me looking at the first cycle me. Just looking at second cycle me reminded of how stupid I used to be. Which, Ryan, I don't know how you feel, but that is how I feel. Second cycle me was an idiot. Third cycle me is doing great. Second cycle you was an idiot, a complete idiot?

No, no. I was first, I was very, very smart. and then I was done in that order. And you're just like much older and wiser this cycle. That's right. Imagine what you're going to be like, what kind of Zen state are you going to be. You're going to be Eric Voorhees in the fourth cycle because that guy's on like the fifth or sixth cycle, all right? That's how you get to Vorhees level.

We're all just chasing for He's. That's right. All right. Got to end with this. Of course, you guys know crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in. But we're headed west as a frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us in the biggest journey.

Thanks a lot. Thank you.