Bankless - ROLLUP: Bitcoin All-Time-High, Is ETH Next?

Episode Date: July 11, 2025

This week, Ryan and David celebrate Bitcoin's new all-time highs as Ethereum sentiment explodes. ETH treasury firms are racing to stockpile billions, Fidelity is framing ETH as a store-of-value, and mainstream media is finally paying attention. So why isn't the price moving faster? They unpack the $8.6 billion Bitcoin whale awakening, Pump's $4 billion ICO, and crypto's "what color is the dress" moment with Zelensky's suit. Plus, Hyperliquid beats Solana at its own game, Robinhood pushes tokenized stocks, and prediction markets face a credibility crisis. Also, is ETH gearing up for a vertical breakout or just stuck in a bullish echo chamber? ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🟠BINANCE | THE WORLDS #1 CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/binance ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 1:46 Markets https://thequantuminsider.com/2025/07/08/did-quantum-fears-prompt-a-bitcoin-whale-to-make-an-8-billion-move/ https://x.com/Pentosh1/status/1942578558498427027 https://x.com/l3olanza/status/1943010575623074228 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1943306201007034471 https://x.com/sassal0x/status/1943155217500897660 https://x.com/cryptomanran/status/1942854141308723597 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1943014863359398166 https://x.com/SharpLinkGaming/status/1942320301414457777 https://x.com/Jrag0x/status/1942631804038443405 https://x.com/BitDigital_BTBT/status/1942954089647833552 https://www.strategicethreserve.xyz/ https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1942911577037963452 https://x.com/fabdarice/status/1943205144436629554 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1942742550982373816 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1943097344427245908 https://x.com/smyyguy/status/1942974829537165788 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1942676961681170592 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1942628566610358756 https://x.com/SolanaFloor/status/1942955685534167471 https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1942963302109524450 https://farside.co.uk/sol/ https://x.com/solidintel_x/status/1943280583808798761 29:58 Pump.fun’s ICO will kick off this weekend! https://x.com/pumpdotfun/status/1942947267436056740 https://x.com/whosknave/status/1942956245331370390 https://x.com/a1lon9/status/1942948097237172509 https://x.com/a1lon9/status/1942948099854328150 https://blockworks.co/analytics/solana/solana-launchpads/solana-launchpad-volume/ 37:51 What happened with Polymarket and the bet over Zelenky’s outfit? https://imgur.com/a/2vfr3Hy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dgAzRF96m4 https://x.com/BanklessHQ/status/1942592467120832784 https://polymarket.com/event/will-zelenskyy-wear-a-suit-before-july?tid=1751599304475 https://x.com/dieworkwear/status/1941013198465114263 https://x.com/Atlantislq/status/1940428544594563581 https://dune.com/queries/1096172/1874464 47:33 Phantom added Hyperliquid perps into its wallet https://x.com/phantom/status/1942628993636917311 The choice of Hyperliquid was surprising! https://x.com/DefiSolar/status/1942657673994068081 https://dune.com/uwusanauwu/perps https://x.com/pumatheuma/status/1942669033771536640 51:24 Tornado Cash win! https://x.com/valkenburgh/status/1942262643546292443 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1941876192476275098 https://freeromanstorm.com/ 54:52 Foundations are making moves https://x.com/solana/status/1942945696061313306 https://x.com/monad_xyz/status/1942933687978365289 57:24 Jack Dorsey introduced a decentralized messaging without internet https://x.com/DocumentingBTC/status/1942351534009807179 58:43 Is Robinhood might be in trouble in the EU over its tokenized stocks? https://www.theblock.co/post/361534/robinhood-engaged-with-regulators-over-tokenized-stocks https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1943009436546560432 1:04:21 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Bankless Nation is the second week of July. It is time for the Bankless Weekly Rollup. We got Bitcoin all-time highs, David. We made it. We did it. It's been what? Eight weeks since an all-time high, something like this? About that, yeah.

And we were just watching it go higher and higher and higher. So as I am speaking in a sentence, there is yet another Bitcoin all-time high, different from the first all-time high that started when you started that sentence just a moment ago. That's the way we like it. Also, David, there's a big sentiment shift. I'm feeling in Ether, the asset this week, okay? We've got ETH Treasury companies taking center stage, a bunch of big announcements.

Heath on mainstream finance on a daily basis, getting that Bloomberg, getting that CNBC. But the question is, is this going to translate into a big price move? Okay. We got a price move on the week, but was it big enough? Not big, not as big as it should be, I think. So we're going to talk about that too. The word that we're looking for is idiosyncratic, and that is not yet what we have. It's what we all want, an idiosyncratic move in E.

We don't have it yet. It's going up. It's going to the right direction. Not quite there yet. We're going to also talk about the pump ICU that is starting this week on Saturday. The pump ICU will open up on exchanges. Apparently the private sale for the pump ICU is completely sold out. And so the public sale to just investors on exchanges opens up on Saturday.

We're going to talk about at $4 billion is Ryan a buyer or a non-buyer of the pump token. We are going to give a deal. detailed analysis of exactly what Ryan's going to do. And then also, crypto gets its, what color is the dress moment with the Zelensky suit? We're going to talk about that. And then also Jack Dorsey invents a new way to send Bitcoin. David, let's start with prices. Bitcoin all-time high week. Okay, this could be a new all-time high by the time bankless listeners are listening to this. But what do we got at the time of recording? Oh, man, we haven't had an all-time high in about two minutes and 15 seconds. We are currently coming in

at $113,000, $562 for a Bitcoin. The new all-time high happened about, yeah, three minutes ago, $13,820. $820. That's pretty good. We're up like $3,000 in the last, like, hour or so. Yeah, it was good. It's good to break that, you know,

100K to 110K range that we've been like range bound, bound like in for a long time. We finally broke through that. Also, this weekend, which is kind of interesting. It was all over crypto Twitter. The Bitcoin Whale woke up and moved some assets, all right? I saw this on, I think it was a day after the Fourth of July, right?

We had a long weekend here in the United States of America. And I think this was on Saturday. This started to happen, which was a really early address, Bitcoin address. I think we're talking like circa 2010. 2011. 2011. 2011. Okay.

So super early address. A lot of the funds in the, address through Bitcoin mining, I believe, $8 billion on the move, an address that hasn't moved in what, like 13 years, something like that. Imagine hoddling Bitcoin for 13 years, up to $8.6 billion. $8.6 billion. And, of course, when this amount moves with one of those early addresses, like everybody takes notice, there are a lot of rumors about this.

Some people were saying, oh, well, maybe the whale was worried about, you had some quantum fears. And of course, like, early Bitcoin addresses are susceptible to a quantum attack in a way that- They're most at-risk. Yeah, the newer ones would. And so maybe they're just moving for that. Other people were saying somebody maybe got out of jail, you know, like they've been in the clink for like a decade. Do you mean Ross Oldbrook? I have no. Yes, possibly. Yeah. Yeah, people were talking about like, oh, well, Rosk is out of jail. And three months later, 80,000 Bitcoin moved from 2011 when the Silk Road was operational. Interesting. It was pretty, I, I mean, like, there's no evidence.

There's only speculation, but it's a pretty good bit of speculation. There was also other people were saying someone got hacked, quite obviously. Other people were saying this is the U.S. government buying, okay? So the U.S. But look, man, it's River Mill, right? Somebody was saying like, okay, this is the U.S. government going OTC, and this is Trump, setting up his strategic Bitcoin Reserve and fighting an early whale and just making a nice OTC purchase.

He's getting ready to announce it. I'm recycling rumors. That one did not happen. That one did not happen. Of course. It wasn't that one. The interesting thing about this, I always find, is this is free advertising for Bitcoin all the time and for crypto all the time. Because, like, it's so mind-boggling to think about $8.6 billion just, like, moving in an instant.

And so we all get to see. We all get to see. So it's free advertising for Bitcoin. Also, it's just like, we need some privacy, don't we? Wow. Everybody can see it. Every single transaction on chain. And, you know, maybe this is a-

bit. And then when you realize that we are legitimately trying to get all of society on chain and we still haven't like rid the world of authoritarianism, then you're like, oh, yeah, no, we need privacy. Yeah, so lots of things. But we have no idea why this Bitcoin is on the move. It'll probably be unresolved for forever, maybe, or maybe someday we'll find out. The Bitcoiner who moved that, it's not going to raise his hand. It was me, and here's why I did it. That will not happen. All right. Enough about Bitcoin. Tell me about Eith Price, David, because we got talk about ETH for a little bit on today's episode. It was a big week. Yeah, ETH price is also on the move $2,820, a recent high of $2,830. But ETH BTC is up on the week as

well. We're up up up about 7 or 8%. So even when Bitcoin gets all time high, ETHBTC is up about 7 or 8% on the week this week. And since ETH was up in dollar terms and up in Bitcoin terms, you know what that's called, Ryan? Oh, what's that called? It's called a Ryan-Shon-Adams Week, my friend. When they're both green, it's called a Ryan Week. Oh, my God. I appreciate you glowing me up.

You know, I'll take credit for this one, too. I'll take credit for every week that ETH is green. Somebody else's got to take credit for the red week, so it's not going to be made. Hang on. I'm going to contest you a little bit for the credit because while Eith was pumping, I was actually climbing. I was on a wall. You were climbing, but you were climbing. What were you?

So what have you been climbing lately, by the way? Yeah. So my big climb got canceled just due to weather, unfortunately. First time that's ever happened to me, but he's always destined. So I'm just climbing a bunch of smaller things rather than like a double overnight, like two overnights. I'm doing just like day climbs. This is a hike.

This is like a trail run in the middle of two climbs. So yesterday I went to Italy and did a valley climb. So stayed low to the ground. Tomorrow I go actually do a summit. So it's a bigger climb. So if there's a bigger pump tomorrow, I'm taking more of the credit. I'm taking more credit. I feel like that's right.

And this is you on a like a morning run through what looks like a sound of music style like landscape somewhere in France. It's absolutely beautiful. And I think you take this running from the bear. And you're talking about the bear market, right? You're just running. Well, no.

I'm running from the bears, meaning bearish people. I'm running away from bearish people. And then people are like, I don't, I didn't see any bears. I'm like, okay, you didn't get it. Maybe it's a bad joke. Yeah, the Eve bears are really getting run out of town these days.

I feel like there's a massive sentiment shift in ether right now. I don't know if you've noticed it, but this is... Oh, definitely. Okay, this is accounts... I don't know how, but just like all the Ethereum communities is like, all right, we are bullish now, and that's, and it's just time. It's just time to be bullish.

It's time to be bullish. I think it is absolutely time to be bullish. I think the eth community is really awoken up to that. Like, more on that later. I want to get some of your commentary on that, and I'll give you some of mine, but this is an account that this is a trader account, Pantashi. Do you know this guy? I don't know him, really, but...

Yeah, I know the account, yeah. He doesn't usually. tweet, Eth, you know, bullish sentiment. And now he is tweeting ETH bullish sentiment.

So even when kind of traders, Bitcoin maxi types, start getting bullish on ETH, then you know something is happening. Right. When, yeah, because I feel like the ETH community

is kind of like misaligned with traders and traders are generally misaligned with like Ethereum just because like the Ethereum is just like, no, don't trade, just hold. Yeah.

But then when traders are like, okay, ETH looks actually kind of bullish. You know it's true because that's like the last asset that doesn't, that they'll say it's bullish. That's right, right? So once every four years,

kind of all of these things align, right? And so maybe we're getting into an aligned territory. This is a, look at this chart. Okay, now this is from, this is pure ETH maxi, hopium, I think. But the context for this chart is- Irrational ETH maxi, I'll call it.

Yes. The context for this chart, though, does have some history to it. And ETH has a history of ripping straight up. Once it decides to go, lots of people will be left behind. Are you one of them? Are you one of them, bankless listener? Okay, so these are the big rips in the past, right?

We had a 2016 kind of big rip-up. We had the 2016 ICO boom. And then of course we had, yeah, 2017 ICO boom. And then, of course, we had Defy Summer 2020. And you could see a massive amount of price movement in a consolidated period of time. Okay. And if you keep drawing the square, David, we can have a massive move. This is a chart.

If you just move the square. This is a chart move. Yeah, all the way to 100K. ETH, okay? It might not be as explosive as that, but there's a point. Yeah, there's not going to 100K, I'm sorry. When we have big price moves, it moves in a hurry and there's not much time. So you have to be positioned before Eith moves.

Do you think that'll carry into this cycle? Yeah. You know, at some point, how long has Eith bitch has been flat? It's been flat for so long. It's been flat for like a third of his life. Yeah. And so at some point, you know, at some point it's due. Yeah.

It's due for a pump. One other metric you might be interested in is the ETF flows. So yesterday, ETHETF flows were 211 million inbound net inflows. Bitcoin was $215 million. So that's only a $4 million difference on daily inflows, which is very bullish. Which is when Bitcoin is eight times larger than Eth at $4 million, does not matter. Yeah, it's fantastic. Now, some people are saying that all of this sentiment shift, and we do have a price up this week,

but what was it, like a 5, 6% price increase? It was not idiosyncratic. It was following the market. Yeah. And so this is ran. Cryptoman ran, you know, ran, right? And he said this. And this was, to be fair, before a little bit of the action on the upside this week,

but he said this, I'm genuinely concerned about Eith. The sentiment on my timeline is euphoric, but the price isn't moving. at all. Heath Bulls are celebrating 2,600. Of course, now it's 2,800 at the time of recording,

but still, not an idiosyncratic pump. He said, if it doesn't actually start moving soon, the next move could be down.

Why do you think there's a disconnect right now between the bullish sentiment, which is verging on euphoric. I mean,

I don't think I've heard the eth community this excited in a long time. But it's really it's sentiment first. Usually you have

price first and then sentiment follows price. and now we have sentiment first, what's up with that? It is pretty peculiar. I don't think I've ever remembered something like this happening quite this way before. You do have to point towards all of the East Treasury companies that have come online. Tom Lee was the unexpected white swan of East evangelism to Wall Street.

I don't think anyone really saw Tom Lee coming, and he's a very credible figure. And that's after Joseph Lubin and Sharple-Link Gaming, and now there's like three, four, five more that are all coming online. Oh, yeah. And so, yeah, sentiment can kind of get ahead of price here, but also that makes sense with what treasury companies do. Like, treasury companies have this expectation of buying more ETH than what they currently hold.

And so there's all of these vehicles that are now, is their number one job to go out and source as much ETH as possible, and all of them pumped this week. And so maybe the price didn't show up in the ETH price. It did it a little bit, like $2 to $300 price increase. But all of the ETH Treasury companies are up between, 15 and 50%. Oh, that's true.

Espet is up 50% this week. Oh, that's true. Did you ever buy any SBT? We don't actually talk about what we buy. Did you ever buy any ESBet? I'm not going to say I didn't, David. How's that? I bought ESPet when all of crypto Twitter was like grave dancing on it

because it did this crazy move up to $35, $50, and then it crashed down to like $7 or $8. And all of crypto Twitter, the anti-Eath people. or like, there's crime. Instead, this treasury will never work. And then turns out there was no crime. And there was just like the cohort of people who are gleefully grave dancing on something eth-related.

I'm like, you know what? I'm going to buy. And that's what I bought. And I'm up 80%. I'm up 80% right now. That's funny. I bet there's a lot of eth believers, long-term youth investors who are actually like,

you know what, screw it. I have enough Eath, but maybe I'm going to do some of these treasury stocks. And they're probably up like, you know, 2x, 3x, 4x on those treasury stocks. And maybe that accounts for some of those. But I also, you want another bullish take on the sentiment move before price? I'll give it to you. Okay.

I think it's signal because I think this is holders and long-term investors who are just saying what you said a little bit earlier. Enough is enough. Price has got to go up. We are bullish. And to see that on crypto Twitter, to see sentiment first before price, I think that's a signal. Because often you get kind of like a price moves and traders, you know, kind of action.

and they're pumping after the fact and they want to keep the momentum. But to see kind of the build and sentiment before we get a good price move, it feels more foundational. It feels just a bit more fundamental here. And I think could be a good sign. I think all of this is going to be determined

by the ETH price over the next like two weeks because if there's no move, then it was just hopium. That's right. And we were all just passing Hoping around. But if it did move, then we're all going to pat ourselves on the back and be geniuses. and also that will inspire momentum for the next move because there is a positive feedback loop

of seven ETH treasury companies go online. ETH pumps by $500. All of those treasury companies pump by like 3X. They have more premium to issue more assets so they can buy more ETH. And so we are in a very critical point right now, I would say, with the ETH market where there needs to get some momentum

under these ETH treasury vehicles so that the appreciation of Heath can show up in the equity so they can start the flywheel. And it has to happen pretty soon. The thing that is new that we have never seen across any cycles is so much mainstream attention on ether of the asset. So this is a clip.

This is Joe Lubin on CNBC. You can see him. He's like on the hot seat. Most of the time you've seen Bitcoin folks be like on CNBC and Bloomberg. It's in this traditional finance. We've got Vlad from Robin Hood talking about tokenization. So he's a credible figure on traditional finance.

You mentioned Tom Lee. You got Joe Lubin in rotation. You and I, David, just did an episode with the East Treasury Company Bit Digital and the CEO he's been making the rounds. So that is something new this cycle. And you were talking about the Heath Treasury companies right now. There does seem to be some kind of a race for acquiring as much ETH as possible, maybe a race to $1 billion.

So we have, of course, let me filter. You can find all this at the Strategic Heath Reserve, by the way. And let me filter by Treasuries. Website. Dot, xyz. Yeah, dot XYZ. So we got Sharp Link. That's Joe Lubin, S-Bet. They're number one.

They've got almost 600 million ETH right now. Then we've got Bit Digital, number two. That's the CEO, David and I just interviewed. That episode's going to be out next week. They've got close to 300 million in terms of ETH. And followed by this company, BTCS, they've got about $40 million of ETH. but just this week they announced a plan to purchase 225 more, million more, I should say.

And we also have Tom Lee, who's not yet on this chart, but we know is coming soon with a $250 million buy, and some kind of a promise to be like the biggest of all of them. So he's doing that. And then there was this fifth company that announced this week. The ticker for this company is Game, okay, and they announced an intent to purchase $100 million. worth of Eith. And interesting, this is a gaming company of some sort. I haven't looked into the detail.

But you know, the Fortnite streamer, Twitch streamer Ninja, he's somehow involved in this. So, like, all of this just happened in a very short period of time. And I think that's all feeding into sentiment right now. Yeah. It does feel frothy when, like, unrelated Twitch streamers are doing ETH treasury companies. I'm like, oh, I would like that to be a little bit more closer to, I prefer Joe Lubin, I feel like it's not frothy if eth is not at all time high. My God, I mean, if this is frothy, if we're frothy in the 2000s, we got to get to like at least 5K to like do something to like make me excited anyway. So the Ethereum network issues about $6.5 million of ETH at present prices that 2,330 ether a day. Joseph Lubin has stated that he intends on buying tens of millions of

dollars of ETH per day. So just Joseph Lubin alone is sucking up all net new issuance, and that's just the one treasury company, and there's like five more to follow on top of that. So like at some point, like, it has to actually show up in the ETH price. How much? Like what the magnitude is remains to be seen, but like it's got it, something's got to give.

I'm also excited about the way it's being pitched, by the way. I know you've been hiking the mountains this week, but did you catch this report that Fidelity put out? No, I did not actually. Okay. So basically, the title this report is blockchains as emerging economies. And this is again... I like that title.

I love that title. You will absolutely love this report. Actually, I totally think you should read it or at least put it in chat, GBT. Remember when we had Haseeb on? I think it was the first time we ever had Haseeb on, and he had just released this article like, blockchains or cities. And then it was a good episode. And at the very end, we were like, Haseeb, we think they're countries.

Yeah. And have for a long time. I mean, I was actually going down memory lane, David. Do you remember this episode? A bankless nation, episode number 17. Core bankless, yeah. Yeah, basically that the way to think of layer one networks and blockchains is as emerging economies. The way to think of their money is as a currency, particularly a store of value currency.

Guess what? That's exactly what this fidelity report says. Look at some of these charts, right? In the same way that, you know, blockchains can incorporate a GDP-like framework to illustrate how their economic activity has developed. Yeah, they can. They compare, you know, like nations. Exactly to Ethereum.

They talk in terms of GDP. Look at this one. The following sections will also demonstrate that ether can serve as a medium of exchange and store of value. Okay? The way they couch it and the way they're pitching it is like they totally understand it. They totally get it. It's kind of how we've thought about them for a long time.

And now it's seeping into the Fidelity Reports, which is fantastic. In fact, this is Ryan Watkins, okay? I'm not sure if he's a fan of bankless, maybe like not so much. But he said this. We've had him on the show. Yeah, okay. He said, listening to people show the new ETH Treasury on CNBC, legit sounds like I'm listening to a bankless podcast in 2021.

I don't know if you met that as a compliment. When ETH was all time high, market dominance was all time high, fantastic. That's great. Yeah. So the narratives are getting through here too. And yeah, it's basically the narrative of ETH as a store of value asset. Now, Tom Lee is saying a bit more. he's saying like stable coin, you're bullish stable coins.

Heath is the stable coin platform. Therefore, you should be bullish Eith. This is kind of another report that came out this week from Electro Capital, which says as much. Also says ETH is a store of value asset, reserve asset, but they make the case for, you know, ETH as a store of value and a place for stable coins tokenization. Anyway, this flood of reports, the flood of ETH treasuries, feels like it's all happening at once.

And all of this has contributed to the massive sentiment. change. Beautiful. Yeah. It does feel like 2021, which feels really good, actually. That was like my favorite time. So as you know, since I've come back, David, I've been more the, like, the reckless bull.

I'm just like, I'm kind of doing what a lot of people are doing right now, which is like, I'm deciding to be bullish. Why? You're leaning over your skis. Not leaving too far. I didn't say that. But when you want to go fast down on a mountain, you lean over your skis. And you're leaning over your skis.

That's a way to frame it, I would say. I'm just, look, what I'm saying is, like, all of the elements are there. Like, my take is, like, all of the elements are there for ETH to be worth way more. And we just haven't captured the narrative for people to realize that. Anyway, I came back. I decided to be Blue Money Gospel bullish, right? Since I've come back, it feels like you are bullish Eith. But you're also more, if I'm a reckless bull right now, you're more of a cautionary-type bull.

Yeah, I'm leaning back on my skis. Okay, so you wrote this blog post this week, it called The Two Sides of Eith. And just give us your take, because I think you're wrestling. There's two wolves inside of David Hoffman. You know, one is the Eith bull, maxi bull, and the other is kind of someone who's concerned about the Ethereum roadmap, at least to some degree. And tell me what you were getting across in this article that you published. Yeah.

So what I'm, my concern is that we have a lot of great narratives with Ethereum. And narratives do couple to fundamentals and. in some degree. And like you see Tom Lee going on CNBC and talking about all of the great reasons that ETH is valuable. You see Fidelity doing it now. And so like if you want to paint

a very bullish narrative for ETHER, it's easy. It's easy to do that. And we are watching that happen in real time. That's what all these ETH treasury companies are doing, which is great. Telling the ETH story. Always, Ethereum always needs to have its story told.

It's one of the more complicated stories ever. What I am concerned about is that, We can use narrative and storytelling to, like, paper over cracks. And, you know, cracks will never be perfectly filled. Every blockchain has its foundations that have cracks in them. Like, Bitcoin has its security budget. But it just papers that over with the $21 million hard cap, you know? And that works very well.

Don't look over here. Don't worry about quantity. Don't worry about security budget. Yeah. Yeah. Like, don't look at the stake-rated QOS centralization of Solana. Like, you know, the chain goes fast, you know, decentralized, NASDAQ. And so it's very easy to paper over problems or incomplete parts components of the Ethereum fundamentals. Okay. And what I'm trying to say is let's not forget those and let's

still be where are problems on our chest like we always do, talk about them, focus on them, talk about how to fix them because when we do fix them, then ETH can be even more bullish. And so like, I'm in pursuit of like kind of taking the hard path of just trying to just take all of the pain now so that we never have to have any of the three, four years downwards price action that Heath has had in the last four years ever again. And we have to do that by like taking the medicine,

building the foundation right? Because if you build the foundation right, then you just give so much more ammo to people like Tom Lee and Joseph Lubin. So I'm kind of just advocating to like not paper over our problems and still prioritize them and emphasize them, and it's okay to talk about them. That's impossible to disagree with.

That's a complete agree from my perspective. What are those things that you see as kind of the problem now in Ethereum that need to be worked on? And yeah, like, what would you name? I think the big thing is just the layer two value capture question. And there's no real way to, like, we can't go back. We're not undoing layer two's, right? but we can heavily encourage and research and push towards base of native roll-ups

is like one possible solution. But there's need to be a stronger supply chain of like Ethereum's layer two roadmap and the value capture of East. And there's no, we can't tariff the layer two's that's nonsensical. That's not going to work. What we can do is we can build out standards for like native roll-ups or base roll-ups that use more layer one resources so that when somebody buys and sends, a billion dollars of stable coins that actually does have a meaningful value flow into

ether the asset. Whereas today, now, if you just buy and send $10 billion of USC on base, ETH gets like less than one penny of value capture from that transaction. Yeah. Look, I get that. And it also seems like very much that ETH has bent the roadmap in that direction anyway. I mean, there is massive work on a base and native roll-ups. There's a lot to do. There's a lot to do. Did you catch the Justin Drake? ETHCC who was talking about how we get to 10,000 TPS, right? There's massive improvements that have gone on with ZK proving technology, real-time ZK proving technology, and there's a credible path in the next five years

to get to 10,000 TPS. Not to say that that work still doesn't need to be done. It absolutely does. But like, there is definitely a shift towards prioritizing, scaling the L1, prioritizing basic native roll-ups, and prioritizing interoperability. but I totally get the take that like, job's not finished, right? And like if we lose sight of that,

then we won't be able to sustain this momentum beyond kind of the narrative pump. That said, to me, I do feel like ETH doesn't need a reason to pump at this point. It's got a lot of catch-up to do for Bitcoin. And I think it has that. I also think a lot of the Eith Bulls in the space

have some PTSD from the last four years as well. I definitely think I've got some of that. Yeah, you've been hurt. too many times. Yeah. Yeah. So I totally get it. I think you'll feel a lot better

at 5K of David. I think you're right. Yeah. Let's talk about some other things too because Eid does have some competitors nipping at its heels here. Solana, the ETF, saw 75 million in inflows in the first week.

So remember we were kind of watching that. Respectable. Yeah, it's pretty respectful. So here they are on the chart, 75 million. Eric Baltzuna says, it's all much smaller than Bitcoin or Eith, but there's a lot of green numbers and that's good.

So 33 million in a day, that was their biggest day. For context, I think Ethan Bitcoin had a 200 million plus day on the same day. So just like much smaller, but there's only one of them right now. And also, I don't know if you saw this, Bit mining is converting its holdings to a sole treasury and raising up to 300 million to support a Solana facing focus strategy. All the Bitcoin miners companies are abandoning Bitcoin mining to buy, shit coins, according to a bit,

shit coins from the frame reverence of big dollars. Yeah. That's so funny, dude. I know. I know. So that is happening too. So a lot of things going on, David. But what do we got coming up?

Coming up next, we're going to talk about the pump token. Everyone comes to bank lists to get Ryan and Davis take on the pump token. We've got all the details. We're going to talk about what we think about the $4 billion dollar valuation. But just like Ethereum, pump also has its competitors that are nipping at its heels.

And so bonk is the new pump, question mark? So we're going to talk about the bonk metrics that have come to. This is Ryan's favorite subject. You can see it in his face. All the bonk metrics that are interfering in pumps. Please tell me. In Pumps Market. And then we're also going to talk about the Zelensky suit drama and what it teaches us about

prediction market. So we're going to get to all of that and more right after we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Like Uniswap, it's a browser wallet. It's a mobile wallet. It's the best place to do defy. Let's go here from Uniswap right now. Uniswap is your gateway to a more efficient defy experience. With Uniswap swapping and bridging across 13 chains,

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over 275 million users trust Binance for everything crypto. Download finance today and get started in minutes. Binance is not available in certain countries. including the United States. Check its terms for more information. Pump Fun is launching the ticker pump token through an ICO beginning on July 12th. That is this Saturday. On their announcement tweet, they tweeted out, Our Plan is to Kill Facebook, TikTok, and Twitch on Solana. So what are the details? One trillion tokens.

Remember when everyone back in like four years ago was like issuing one billion tokens? And I was like, all right, you guys are really playing into the unit bias thing pretty hard. Well, Punks coming in hot with one trillion tokens. Of course. Of course. 24% of the tokens are reserved for the community and ecosystem initiatives. 20% is going to the team. 2.4% ecosystem fund, 2% for foundation and 13% for existing investors. 3% for live streaming, which I think it might be streaming incentives. I thought I seeos were-al-a-legal. Which I'm assuming is quite a lot of the chunk of the $700 million raise that they raised from private investors.

and they're also looking to raise even more from the public ICO, which is the thing that I just talked about. $4 billion at the ICO price, all that got filled up, and that's $700 raised by private investors. All tokens sold will be fully unlocked in 72 hours. I think you could just ask questions. So if you see the pump token trading on Tuesday,

I believe that's how that works. How can you buy into the pump ICU if you are so interested? If you have an account with buy-bit, Koocoin, BitGet, M-C, Krakin, or gate. all of these have partnered with Pump Fund to do their ICO because you need to be KYC'd because I could only assume, I doubt American United States citizens

are going to be allowed into this ICO for probably regulation reasons. And yeah, be ready at 2 p.m. on Saturday, UTC. I don't know what time zone that is. Figure that out. And those are the details. Ryan, what's the biggest thing that comes to your head when you see all this?

Yeah, I guess my first thought is this video itself, the promo video, is absolutely hilarious. It's exactly what it feels like to look at Pump. Dot Fun, at least for me. And I can see the appeal to some people, for sure. Another thing that comes to mind is ICOs again. Like, I don't think any company would dare to do this

under the Gensler regime. So the fact that we're doing this maybe means something, I think there's still this, like, what is the pump token? Does it have utility? Is it a pseudo equity? Is it... 25% of the Pump Fund revenue.

will go to buy and burn the token. And that is a good thing, right? Yeah, that's a good thing. It adds value and adds utility and adds of revenue share to something. It's not just a meme coin, basically, right? It's not a meme coin. But like where to it? It's a long to the meme coins.

Where does it fit in the whole, like we still don't have clarity from the SEC as to where it fits. So, I mean, I guess that's good that they're doing this. I mean, ICOs are better than not having ICOs. I like ICOs. I really like ICOs. Yeah, I guess the big question for me is like... This sale mechanism I'm actually quite happy with

because people are going back and forth, $4 billion, overvalued, undervalued, and there's no consensus, which means I think it's fairly priced. Yeah, so are you a buyer of $4 billion of pump? Will I be buying it? No, because I'm lazy. Do I think it will go up?

Yes, I think there will be some initial volatility because the seed investors are getting unlocked. So, like, people, investors are unlocked in day one. And there is a lot of people who have made a lot of money. And so there needs to be a pretty solid amount of buying pressure to counteract all of the seed investors who are exiting. Yeah. And so there's going to be a lot of volatility inside of like the first day. But yeah, I bet you, I would bet it ends the week higher than $4 billion.

I'm not a buyer just because it's not my thing. But like, it's not your thing. Yeah, it's just not my thing. But that's fine. What do you think of this? So this is one of the founders saying, now we're aiming to kill legacy social media platforms with Pomp, right? This is obviously hyperbolic,

but do you think there's an element of this is a disruption to Twitch and to Twitter and to Instagram, as they were saying, the initial tweet? Yeah, so he, in his second tweet, Elan says, users today are slaves to the algorithm throttled against monetization and subject to censorship. Buy Pump. and you'll become a part of creating this reality.

I just skipped a bunch of the middle ground, but he was like, yeah, buy pump as like a way to, like, if you, buying pump is a way to, like, signal, like, you're opting out of this system and you're going to opt into new rules. And my mind is like, okay, if you're going to try and kill TikTok, Facebook, like, Twitch, all of these things, like, you're going to replace them with pump. Is that a different algorithm that we would?

Is that better? Is that a new? Not clearly better to me, but it is different. Not clearly better to me. I'm happy that there's more choice. There's going to be content that's going to be funny and interesting and engaging on the pump streaming platform. Is it allowing people to break free from the shackles of Web 2 algorithms? I don't know that that's what it's going to do.

Yeah, it's definitely a different algorithm. The question is like, net is this good for society or not? Or does this kind of like, you know, foster the continuation of like nihilism, whatever? You know, I definitely could make the argument that it's just, you know, creating shackles and a new. type of algorithm. But it is different. It's like the existing platforms are not running the token

meme coin price play that Pump is running right now. So it's novel. I think we might have skipped a step in this conversation which is actually talking about what Pump Fund wants to do for those who haven't been privy to it.

They are looking to build a direct Twitch competitor, a streaming platform where your stream is a Pump token. And so there's a chart that goes to the stream and a lot of the money that they've raised are raising like $700 billion, or $700 million, is likely going to go to like paying streamers to stream on the platform.

This is a normal thing that you do in the Web 2 streaming world. So getting big streamers. Streamers like Ninja, the guy that just launched the E. Treasury Company, to come stream on pump and bring their fan base on pump. And so they need a lot of marketing dollars for that because they're trying, they're shooting for home runs. And so got to give them props for being ambitious. And so they're just trying to make a streaming platform,

predator and so that's what they need all the money for. I think that's pretty valid. And like again, I think that there's going to be very hilarious and viral moments that come out of the pump streaming platform that would have never come out on Twitch and I'm looking forward to seeing those. The just positioning that they're trying to take down all of Web 2 with a tokenized streaming platform doesn't, I don't, I'm not on that boat. The other question is, well, how big is the moat for pump, right? And can it be unseated? There have been some attempts, but actually like just this week, there was maybe the most successful attempt yet. Bunk. Fund captured 62% of Salauna launchpad revenue,

the entire market for these launch pad type things. We've never seen pump funds market dominance in token launch pads this small by comparison. And this is just a very short snapshot in time. Like overall, pump dominance has been just gargantuan. But it has been compressed over the last, what candles are these? Like one day candles? It has been compressed by, Bonk more than it's ever been compressed by anyone before.

So tell me about bonk because I haven't really been paying attention to this. So bonk is a meme coin. I know this. It's a longstanding Solana meme coin, you know, with some legitimacy. I don't know if it's that same bonk. Okay. I assumed it was, but you tell me. And then now they're launching a launch pad basically.

Yeah. I mean, this launch pad has been around for a while. I don't, why it's resurging right now. I don't know. I'm on the website. and it looks like a pump fun clone. I mean, there's our knowledge on meme coin launch pads, David. So let's turn to the Zelensky suit.

Okay. I know a little bit more about this one. Now, you compare this in the intro to the blue and gold dress. And I think there's a lot of people who maybe don't know what you're talking about, but you're talking about this image, right? Yeah. Yeah, what color is that dress? Okay, so this dress is gold quite clearly when I look at this dress.

Yeah, it was white and gold. Yeah, white and gold. Yeah, that's what I see. Yeah, that's what I see, too. Apparently some people see black and blue. They see black and blue, okay. And this is like a viral thing that happened like a decade ago or something. It was like everyone was like, what color is this dress?

And there was like the black and blue people and there's the white and gold people. Okay. When you look at this picture of Vladimir Zelensky, is that a suit? And there are further pictures. You can keep on scrolling down. I can keep on scrolling. Okay. The first one, second one.

Okay. It's all black. It's definitely, there's some sort of a suit type of jacket here. He has a lapel. There's a lapels there. There's a collared shirt. Some cat. You know, I think it could pass as like a casual designer type suit.

It sort of depends on what you mean by suit, man. I'm not in the fashion industry. That's a fantastic point, Ryan. It really does depend on what you mean by suit. Why does this matter? Why are we talking about this week? Because the polymarket for this, which had a number of millions of dollars on riding on this,

because this wasn't really just, you know, gamblers, gambling on whether, like, Zelensky will wear a suit. This is indicative of, like, because why won't Zelensky wear a suit? Because he's at war. And so that's what he said. They were betting on whether he would wear a suit or not, right? That was the pawn market. Well, he wear a suit. Well, Zelensky wear a suit before July is the bet. Yeah, is the bet. And so if the, if the war ended before July, then you would see Zelensky wearing a suit in theory. This is like how some people have thought. And so it's, it's, It's a proxy market for other larger, more geopolitical things. It's also a proxy market of like, okay, will Zelensky bend the knee to Donald Trump? Because he was made fun of. And so it's not just like, let's roll the dice and see if he's going to wear a suit.

It's a proxy for a bunch of other things. But he wore this in the month of June. He wore this. And now there's some dispute as to whether it's a suit or not. Yes. And so it settled in the, no, he did not wear a suit. So according to Polymarket, which this went into dispute. And so it was initially, I think it was actually initially saying,

yes, he did wear a suit. Yeah. One issue with his story was that Zelensky has worn this suit before and a previous polymarket betting market also already settled no in the past. And so there's already been precedent for this suit is settled as no. A further hiccup is on this polymarket event. There was one of the conditions was credible news sources would report that Zelensky was wearing a suit, which did happen. And so like seven or eight or nine different news companies.

That was the criteria. They listed some criteria. Credible news sources. Yes. And it's still settled to know. Why did it settle to know? Because when polymarket markets go in, are in contention, and they go into dispute, they go into the UMA, the court. It's like a court, UMA, universal market access.

UMA, which has a UMA token, right? Very old project, yeah, which has its own token. And if you are a token holder, then you are the Oracle, basically. You get to vote in the Oracle, and so it's ultimately like governance by UMA Oracle. And this backs all polymarket markets, right? UMA protocol. And 99% of the time it never goes to UMA because they just settle normally without, you know, fair and orderly. This one did not.

It went to the UMA Oracle and they said, no, it's not a suit. Why did they say that? maybe because the market before this had already settled no and it was the same suit and so they wanted to keep it continuous. If you are on the yes, that is a suit, you are very upset. People have been critiquing

UMA token holders as being corrupt. I haven't seen any evidence. Subject to bribes. Subtribes maybe. The protocols corrupt. Yeah. Ultimately, my big takeaway for this, here's my big conclusion, Ryan.

Yeah. Polymarket and prediction markets generally are set up to collapse in a Schrodinger sense. And so if something has to collapse, like one or two outcomes needs to happen. Yeah. And in this universe, it's entirely possible that the position does not collapse.

Actually, the position stays open. And why was Zelensky wearing this suit? Well, because he was trying to actually split the difference because he wanted to, like, wear a suity enough thing to, like, appease Donald Trump, but still appear that he is a suit. military leader who is at war, which is exactly what he did, which is why there is now a polymarket dispute, which is like, did he wear a suit or did he not? Which means Zelensky did his

job of confusing everyone. It's like, okay, he kind of wore a suit, but he also kind of didn't. And now there's like millions of dollars on the line about who wore the suit or if it was a suit or not. Isn't this just a whole or a flaw in prediction markets? Like, number one, like, couldn't you just argue that you can't have a prediction market with a binary outcome that collapses. If we don't even have social consensus on what a suit, what is, like at the very beginning, when you showed me that, I'm like, well, it depends on your definition of a suit. And I don't know. There's not a standard definition of a suit. It's like, it's a fashion, you know, statement. Is this art beautiful? Is this person beautiful? It's all subjective, right?

You can't really make, maybe it's the way that the question was asked or the way the market was defined. That's the problem here. I would agree. And yeah, so like, like, I think it's really just a quirk of prediction markets that they are expected to collapse and sometimes they don't have to necessarily collapse. And yeah, the way that you phrase the question is very important. How you said the criteria is very important. I don't think Polymark is at fault at all. I don't really know what's going on behind the scenes at OMA.

It's not the token holders on that distributed, but no one really knows. Again, people are claiming corruption. I don't really think there's any evidence for that. I think it's kind of like buyer. Like you have to be careful of what markets you bet on. And like, there's another element of this, too, which I've always wondered, right? So let's say Zelensky wanted to bet in this market, okay? So, like, Zelensky could bet anonymously in this market.

He could bet on, yes, I'm going to wear a suit. Zelensky's going to wear a suit. And then the next day, he could put on a suit and wear it. Like, he has some level of control over the outcome of this market. And there's lots of markets like that, right? I don't understand how that even works in a prediction market sense, right? If there's a... I think that's a part of the game.

I don't think that is within the rules. So you just like, you just basically know that if you're betting on a market, that there is somebody influential who could just like decide to, you know, change the outcome of what happens and win money as a result of that. They are not perfectly orderly because like they're predicting the future, right? Like it's not going to be perfectly orderly every single time. There you go. Buy or beware.

If you look at prediction markets, Dave, we've got a lot more coming up. Phantom Wallet, adding hyperliquid. Perps. People are saying this is a loss for Solana. It definitely seems like a win for hyperliquid. So we'll talk about that. Also, you want a case, a court case, against Janet Yellen and the U.S. Treasury. Did I want to hear about that? The government just gave up. They lost. Which counts. I feel like you won by default then. Also, Commissioner Hester Purr, she's raising an eyebrow on these things that people have been calling tokenized stocks. We'll talk about all that and more. But before we do, we want to thank

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No extra apps, no confusing interfaces, and no compromises on speed control and performance. 100 markets, 40x leverage powered by Hyperliquid. Hyperliquid, Ryan, has, I know, I'm going to guess, you have not bridged to hyperliquid. I have not bridged to hyperliquid, though. It is pretty cool. It's very exciting to see like perps in a, you know, more open finance type way. The bridging to hyperliquid has always been probably the big bottleneck for getting to hyperliquid because I got to go to Arbitrum and then you got to bridge over. And apparently it's not very easy.

I've also not bridged over to high liquid because neither of us are traders. The fact that they are now in Phantom wallet, the mobile wallet, on your phone. Super easy. It's a pretty big deal for hyperliquid. Yeah. And one thing that's notable here is that Phantom is integrating hyperliquid, right? So some in the Salana community are saying Phantom could have chosen Jupiter Exchange as the perps provider. It's a Salana native project, $1.4 billion.

Remember that, like, you know, Phantom is kind of like Salon as wallet. It sort of grew up in that space. I know it's multi-chain now, supports Ethereum, supports all sorts of layer twos. But, you know, I think many in Salon. Yeah, okay. So many in Solana. I think so. I think number them. And many in the Salana community

have always thought a Phantom is kind of their chain. The fact that they're going to hyperliquid instead of Jupiter, some of the Salonic community are saying, well, this seems like a loss for Salonat. And I don't think they're wrong about that. But I also think that, of course, this is what Phantom was going to do.

I mean, this is an interesting thing where it sort of puts successful wallets in kind of the super app type category. They are the user aggregator, and they can just pick the best chain of all of the chains to do the functions that their users want to do. And so, like, why should they only do things on one chain and have chain loyalty from this perspective? They're just going to integrate whatever they want.

And they're in a great position here with these, like, app-specific chains that are doing one thing and doing it really well, in that they can kind of direct traffic and their users wherever they want. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's, those are all my takes as well. Phantom has just done an incredible job, slowly building out. the right features in the right time and just adding hyperliquid just makes a ton of sense. This is Zoomer Roy saying this phantom

and hyperliquid integration is bullish for Phantom bullish for Hyperliquid, bearish for Solana was her take on this. So yeah. What do you think of the hype token, by the way? Do you, uh, you a buyer? Um, I could be.

I've thought about it at times. $12 billion or so, 13 billion, throwing off a lot of cash. It's only 12? I feel like it should be higher than that. Yeah, 14.3. So compare it to, like, Robin Hood or something like that. This has got some perps, right?

You know. Well, Robin Hood's at $85 billion. Yeah. So, Robin Hood is very, right? Right. Fully diluted. Maybe I'm a boomer for looking at fully diluted. 40 diluted of $43 billion.

Oh. So, yeah. So half of a salon. Yeah. Some big unlocks coming. Some big unlocked. That's why I've always stopped, like, from doing it. It's just I'm always like the unlocks, look, you know.

But that's probably a dumb take. I just think of Hyperliquid is just like, it's just the next generation version of Bitmex. And BitMex was huge. And why did BitMex get taken down? Well, because it was centralized. And a bunch of other reasons. And so, like, yeah, like Hyperliquid likely has a permanent fixture

in the crypto world just because perps do. But I don't know if I have edge there buying hype. And so, you know, stick to what you know. Yeah. Well, one thing you know is how to beat the U.S. government in your court cases, David, because you had to win this week. All right, this is the official news. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit Court officially ended the legal fight over U.S. Treasury sanctions against Tornado Cash. Of course, there's still the Roman Storm trials that are

happening. I think there may be happening next week, actually, Davis. We'll got to cover that. It's coming right up. But there was also some court battles between whether users actually had the right and ability to use tornado cash. And you were a plaintiff in this case, actually. actually. Give us some details. What is this case? What happened here? Yeah, take us all the way back in time. Right after OFAC put tornado cash contract addresses on the OFAC list, meaning that if you use it, that's a felony, so you can't use it, a bunch of people in the Ethereum ecosystem got dusted. So somebody else sent 0.1Eth outbound to, like, you got dusted, I got dusted, Shaquille O'Neal got dusted. And so technically since we touched the contracts, we were all in violation of the OFAC sanctions list. The contracts touched us in a way, but that's still.

There was no differentiation. But it doesn't really matter because my address is now linked to, like Davidhoffin. That's address was linked to tornado cash. So I had to go and piss me off because when I go and talk to the lawyers, they were like, oh yeah, you just violated OFAC. I'm like, I just did nothing, though. I didn't do anything I said on my hands.

And they said like, yeah, you need to go fill out this form. now. And it's like, I have to go fill out a form. Like, I do this one time a year. When I file my taxes, it's the only time I'm ever compelled to do anything. Now I have to be compelled a second time to do this. Piss me off. Okay. So it was the documents that pissed you off. It wasn't about protecting Americans privacy. It was the fact that I was compelled to do something. Okay. It was they forced me to do something or all, apparently I'm going to be a felon. I'm going to have to go to jail because somebody sent me. Insane, right? Absolutely insane. Violation of my freedoms. Sure. And so, Coin Center reached out to me

and they were like, hey, if you would like to be a plaintiff in this case, we will go sue Janet Yellen. And I am like, fuck yes. Let's do this. And really, that's about as much involvement in this case that I've had. They update me every now and then.

Well, this is the latest update. The latest update. And this is the latest update. There will be no more updates because this is the end. The U.S. government was just like, we dropped the case. Which is an admission that you were right.

You know, so you didn't technically win. You didn't lose, but I think that means you won by default. They gave up. I won by default. So I was right in my crumageness of being compelled to file documents because Tonyo Cash is technology. It is not illegal. You cannot make a smart contract illegal.

And that is the precedent that has been established by this case. Oh, well, well done, David. Huge tip of the hat to all the coin center people for actually doing all of the hard work. I just got dusted. Yeah. And now tornado cash is no longer on the OFAC sanction list, I believe that was removed under the new administration. still a court case to win, which is the Roman Storm court case.

Yes. I think he almost has... It would be such a tragedy. Yeah. If we got access to tornado cash and we set the precedent, that smart contracts cannot be illegal. And Roman Storm still went to jail. That would be a huge tragedy.

Yeah. You can still give to that. By the way, look, man, he almost raised all of his support here. He's at 92%, which is awesome. But you could still donate to that cause and help Roman Storm with his legal defenses there. David, let's pivot the conversation. Some layer ones are making moves. It's kind of a different environment than the environment we grew up with respect to foundation. So this is breaking, bullish, which is a crypto exchange, is going all in on Salana. This is the Salana account

tweeting this. The crypto exchange with $1.4 trillion in trading volume is migrating their core infrastructure to Salana native stable coins to power custody, payments, trading, and settlement. You really get the sense that the Salana Foundation is heavy on the BD side of things, right? They're trying to make deals happen. They're actively engaging. This is something that the Ethereum Foundation doesn't do at all. It's just like not in their DNA, not in their ethos to do. And it's not just Salana. It's like, here's Monad. So this is a layer one that hasn't yet launched. It's going to be like an EVM layer one. It's going to launch. It's coming very soon. It's been coming soon for a while. But yeah, it's coming soon. It's coming soon. David maybe knows. Okay. So

they just, the Monad Foundation, just acquired a stable coin infestine. structure a company called Portal. And this is even more of an escalation. It's not just BD. We're actually doing acquisitions at the foundation level, right? And they're enthrining a stable coin. Not enshrining, but they're going to have like a Monad-flavored stable coin on Monad chain at Block No. 1, I think.

Yeah. I mean, it makes sense in this day on age because you need to have apps on your chain. You can't just have chains in the stage. What does this make you think of, though? This is like kind of operating much more like a company than, you know, the foundations of years past. I think of Salana. Is that a fintech company?

I consider... I consider Solana to be a company, yeah. A fintech company with the protocol, would you say? Or do you think the protocol is part of the company and it's all just like fintech? Yeah, blurry lines. Blurry lines. I sort of think the same with Monad as well. Yeah, I think that the grand trend shift, starting from Bitcoin, and Bitcoin

will point to Ethereum be like Ethereum the company. And then Ethereum will look at Salam. Not even close. But comparison to Bitcoin, right? Like, they, they, the Ethereum does grants. You know, Ethereum did a grant to Uniswap. Now Uniswap is a huge institution on Ethereum. So you can see some of the patterns.

There's a spectrum here. There's a spectrum. Yeah, then Ethereum looks at Solana and be like, that's a company. Yeah. And Salon is going to look at Monad and be like, well, that's a company. And I'm on the Ethereum side where I'm, Ethereum's on a company, but everything downstream of Ethereum is definitely a company. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think well put.

Like, my comment is, I didn't know foundations could do that. I guess they're doing that now. So this is pretty – I have to do that in 2025. I guess so if you're new and starting in 2022. This is kind of cool. This is something I'll always appreciate about the Bitcoin ecosystem and Bitcoiners is the lengths that they go to to make sure you can like do niche cases on Bitcoin.

This is Jack Dorsey introducing a decentralized messaging service and Bitcoin transfer service not using cell towers, not using an internet connection, but just using Bluetooth. Okay. This is an open source. app that he built so that if I'm near you, I can send you some Bitcoin via Bluetooth. Now, you're like, how does that work? Because obviously it has to connect to a node and settle on the internet. It does, like peer-to-peer kind of in the background and sync sort of later.

But there's some way to get like some instant confirmation type or some fast confirmation type guarantees if I just want to send you Bluetooth from my phone to yours without an internet connection. Kind of cool, right? Yeah, in the science experiment. kind of way. In an end-of-the-world type way, too. You know, the cell towers are down.

All we got left is Bluetooth. No, I don't think it's a cell tower is down kind of thing. I think it's a authoritarian and government kind of thing. Yeah, I think you said to. Or the government censoring your Bitcoin. Anyway, I love that Bitcoin to do that. It's fantastic. David, we should-

Fantastic ROI on some of those. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We should do a tokenized stock check-in. So did you see this this week? Robin Hood was engaging the regulators over tokenized equity. So regulators in the EU were saying, hey, this whole private shares thing, like open AI, what are you guys doing here? Is this even legal and giving them some grief?

So I guess is that expected? What do you think of this? Kind of makes me bullish Vlad. Makes you bullish Vlad that he's like pushing the envelope? Yeah. That's what it takes. Yeah. There's a tweet that I really like from my friend Austin who works at Dragonfly.

I hope he has it pinned. He treated out something along the lines of, no, he doesn't have a pinned. He tweeted out something on the lines of like all good things on blockchain, so are all slightly illegal. Nice. I like that. Just touching on illegal. Well, this was...

Okay, here's what he says. Most successful crypto products start off as kind of illegal. From Coinbase to Circle to Polymarket to Uniswap to Hyperliquid. If no one thinks the product is a little illegal, it's probably not that interesting. This is only natural. Crypto exists as skirts around incumbent power structures. if the product can succeed within those structures, then it doesn't belong on chain anyway.

Obviously, building in good faith, alongside counsel, is necessary, but respectfully don't ask for permission to build something people want. And I'm like, yeah, vibes, dude. Like, let's go back to like early, early crypto. I largely agree with that, except I would say there's an important access to look at,

which is like whether the product is actually good or not and does what it says it will do, right? And Robin Hood aside, so I had a conversation, I know you couldn't make this one because of your internet, but the podcast getting released with the guy of a tokenized stock company called Denari. This is Gabriel Ott. And his take was basically like, you know, the things floating around in X stocks,

those are just like not good products, okay? They're trading at massive deltas to the actual product that you're buying. So if you buy Apple an X stock format, that price could be totally out of whack with the Apple on an exchange. it's not one for one backed, right? And like if we're going to do the whole tokenized security thing, let's make sure we don't take shortcuts and we do it right. It's kind of like if we're going to do the stable coin thing, let's not do a Tara Luna like debacle that's going to screw everyone over.

Let's do something that actually works, like a make or die or something like circle or tether. And so his take was basically like X-Dox are just, they're just not good products and they're probably a little. legal. And there are ways to do this so you get fully DTC settled. Stocks without KYC, definitely illegal. Well, one thing about some of these instruments, Hester Perst was actually weighing in. And you know, Hester's like, she is a crypto advocate. She knows the technology. She is very rational.

She wants to support free and open capital markets. But even she was raising some eyebrows. And you could tell it. So she published this speech. It's a very short speech by Hester Perth standards. But basically, I'm going to give you the paraphrase because I feel like by now I can speak a little Hester Purse. She's basically saying, like, be careful making these Liechtenstein domiciled SPV stock IOU is your tokenized stock thing. She's basically saying because this is illegal, probably, and could be kind of a bad thing for capital markets and for protecting investors.

And before I bring the hammer down on you guys, you should probably come in and check with us because we really want to make tokenized stocks work for crypto, but some of these instruments are not the way to do it. And she wasn't talking necessarily about X-stocks, but I kind of feel like she also was. Anyway, that's my paraphrase interpretation. And it was pretty much validated by conversation I had with Gabriel Ott that's coming out on Monday all about tokenized stocks and kind of what they are and what they should be. Yeah, I'm pretty excited for that episode. You were telling me it's a pretty good download on how a stock becomes.

a stock and then how a stock becomes a token out on Monday. So yeah, I'm going to listen to that one when that comes out. I think when like tokenized stocks or like pseudo tokenized stocks is probably what these actually are, when they first come, they're just destined to be bad products because we can't have the real thing because like you have to have a workaround. That work around is going to be janky. We are seeing the first generations, generation zero of tokenized stocks right now. They all kind of suck.

and really in order for them to be good, there needs to be a clear path that the SEC needs to make and bless as saying, like, anyone can do this path and you can have a legitimate, compliant token of stock. This is what's so cool about the Gabriel conversation. He's like, we have that, basically. So Robin Hood is actually doing that, apparently, in the year.

Oh, really? He's like, he's like X stocks. I don't know what that is. But Robin Hood is doing it the right way. And by the way, probably by the end of the year, we'll have it done in the right way in the U.S. too. And it'll be regulated. it'll be like one to one back.

End of the year. End of the year, dude, okay? Because, and they have their broker-dealer license with a checkbox for tokenized stocks. And they're like, we're meeting with the SEC. Like, we've shown them demos. They like it. They're going to bless it. Like, this is all going to happen.

I'm just saying, like, right now in the summer, some of these products aren't so great. But it's coming pretty soon. Anyway, that's the episode on Monday, and you got to listen to it. It's a great conversation. Cool. Wow.

I'm so bullish. Robin Hood, token, stocks. Are you serious? Yeah, I know. What a killer product. It's pretty great. We've come a long way, Dave. We've come a long way. All right. Risk and disclaimers, guys, you know, none of this has been financial advice. Cryptos are risky. You lose to what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. Not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.