Bankless - ROLLUP: Bitcoin ETF Updates | Larry Fink Crypto Pilled | Ethereum Roadmap | Airdrops Incoming

Episode Date: January 19, 2024

Bankless Weekly Rollup 3rd Week of January, 2024 ----- 🏹 USE PODCAST24 FOR 10% OFF https://bankless.cc/Citizen2024  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:   🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE ⁠https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2  ⁠ 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle  🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo   🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/Toku    ------ TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 Start 03:40 Markets https://twitter.com/growthepie_eth/status/1746883438689341938  07:07 Celsius Cancer Over? https://x.com/0xBoboShanti/status/1747697507361071198?s=20  https://x.com/0xBoboShanti/status/1747697530362560741?s=20  10:34 2023 Developer Report https://www.developerreport.com/developer-report  14:21 First week of the BTC ETF! How’d it do?? https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1747591085189128329?s=20  https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1747958701162397745?s=20  https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1747981648686108887?s=20  https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1747635270722183608?s=20  https://twitter.com/EricBalchunas/status/1747385703971860617  https://twitter.com/jseyff/status/1746611833098616880?s=46  21:09 Franklin Templeton To The Moon https://twitter.com/FTI_US/status/1747703202664112232  23:03 Vanguards Refusal https://www.theblock.co/post/272049/vanguard-wont-offer-spot-bitcoin-etfs-says-high-volatility-is-bad-for-generating-long-term-returns  https://twitter.com/ChainLinkGod/status/1745522402430259354  https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1745830835750654108?s=20  25:59 Jaime Dimon's Take https://youtu.be/eneB3s9bCdI?si=QkCYvCBgVTfOhSPL&t=144  https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/17/jamie-dimon-says-hes-done-talking-about-bitcoin-i-dont-care.html  28:11 Larry Fink Takes https://x.com/Cryptik1E/status/1745776244745289934?s=20  https://twitter.com/AP_Abacus/status/1745806545890234869  https://twitter.com/econoar/status/1746209199758180753?s=20  35:41 Davids Take  https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1747024019021300092?s=20  40:13 Blobs Live On Goerli https://x.com/parithosh_j/status/1747564353467936817?s=20  42:27 Whats Next After Dencun? https://x.com/JimmyRagosa/status/1747628330604523568?s=20  https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/191kke6/comment/kh7ekx3/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3  46:30 Socket Exploit $3.3M Stolen https://x.com/SocketDotTech/status/1747349422730813525?s=20  https://x.com/RevokeCash/status/1747352408022245790?s=20  49:25 SEC Grilled During Coinbase Hearing https://www.theblock.co/post/273221/judge-grills-the-sec-with-pointed-questions-as-coinbase-hearing-begins  https://x.com/BanklessHQ/status/1747728558896676926?s=20  https://twitter.com/jchervinsky/status/1747702461656174984?s=46&t=2ZINVXJQKx6xO_6Wiiu_2g  53:10 Trumps Take on CBDCs https://twitter.com/watcherguru/status/1747845161638302087?s=46&t=2ZINVXJQKx6xO_6Wiiu_2g  54:02 Solana's New Saga Phone! https://twitter.com/solanamobile/status/1747302707273089133?s=20  55:15 Meme Of The Week https://twitter.com/FTI_US/status/1747713266107724191?s=20  ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Have you seen the CNBC, like, people this week, like all the anchors? They are so bullish Bitcoin. And like all of these other trash, like Jamie Diamond comes on, Gary Gensler comes on. And they're like, no, that's actually not how Bitcoin works. Like they correct them. And it's like so great. CNBC has completely 180 pivoted on crypto. And why?

It's because they have an asset to sell. Bankless Nation, it is the third week of January and it's time for your weekly roll-up. David, we got so much to cover. What are we starting with? The Bitcoin ETF one week later, was it a flop or was it a smashing success? We've got the numbers to report back to you on that one. Also, we have a good banker, bad banker episode. We've got Larry Fink getting crypto-pilled.

He wants tokenization. We'll talk about that. And on the bad banker side, we have Jamie Diamond. And he reveals the secret risk to Bitcoin that only Jamie Diamond knows. Tantalizing. What could that be? What else we got, David? After that, we got some updates about the Ethereum roadmap.

The blobs are coming. The blobs are coming. And we also got some airdrops to discuss as well. We're going to laugh about the SEC for a little bit. And we're also going to talk about the Solanophone, part deuce as well. You know where I want to start? Yeah, I'm ready, man. And you know where I want to start us today is actually theirdrop piece, okay? Because it's kind of air drop season. I don't know if you noticed. And Jupiter, which is the biggest decks on Salon and just announced the date of their JUP token launch. That is upcoming. You know what that date is, David? Tell me. Last day of January. January 31st. What day is it?

It is the 18th. That is in 10 days. Yeah. So that's going to happen. I mean, this is just like airdrop season. And a lot of this is happening in different layer two ecosystems and on salon and other places. And I just wanted to shout out an opportunity for bankless citizens. That opportunity is to go quest for some air drops.

And you do that with a bankless citizenship. So once you get a bankless citizenship, you have access to a tool. that we have developed, it's called the AirDrop Hunter. And what the AirDrop Hunter tries to do is predict these airdrops in advance. And the things that you might need to do, the ways to explore these chains and protocols and apps, so that you might qualify for anirdrop. And guess what, David? You know what was on there?

The Jupiter Exchange, it was on the AirDrop Hunter. It's been on there for a long, long time. We have this cool little thing in there where you can see how many other citizens are hunting aerodrops. 673 citizens have hunted the Jupiter air drop up to the point that the date of the irdrop was announced, which is not typical of an air drop. I could only assume that if they have announced the air drop, the snapshot has been taken. So congrats to the 673 citizens that have hunted the Jupiter AirDrop. I know like air drop hunting, we try and make it precise. There's like farming and then there's what we do, which is hunting, which is the actual steps,

the ways to increase your on-chain footprint, the diversity and variety of things that you can do, which is also simultaneously learning how to use crypto. So that's actually a nice synergy that we have with the AirDrop Hunter, where you get to increase your on-chain footprint. You get to hopefully hunt some airdrops. But also, there are also just walkthroughs for, like they're demos for apps. It's fun. It's fun to do stuff on chain. It's supposed to be fun. And crypto pays you to learn about crypto, guys. It's that season again. Anyway, there's a 10% off code if you want to become a bankless citizen and go access the AirDrop Hunter. It's not just about Jupiter. It's about what next?

How many are there? How many do we have? How many do we have? How many do we have? But different opportunities you can pursue and all of the quests that accompany it. So go check that out in the bankless show notes or bankless.com slash join. Again, the code is podcast 24 if you want a 10% off discount. All right, David, let's talk about markets today. And thanks to Cracken for these glorious charts. We're looking at Bitcoin. What's Bitcoin showing us? Bitcoin shown us down because it was a sell-the-news event. Surprise. The Bitcoin ETF.

Yeah. So selling the news, down 10%. Start of the week at 46,380. Double-digit sell? Yeah, yeah, double digits. Yeah, down to where we are. At $42,000. Yeah.

I mean, it's not like the Bitcoin ETF was a secret. I think people knew about it. I mean, his price performance has been pretty crazy. So, yeah, it was a sell-the-news event. And I think some people are like, bruh, what's going on? ETF was supposed to be bullish. A, that's not how markets work.

But also, the point about the ETF is bullish over time. Like, hold on. It's ages like wine. You don't get your bullishness like right now, okay? Sometimes you have to wait for your bullishness. And by the way, it's not an event. It's flows. We got a lot of that bullishness since the summer of this year.

Anyway, but like some people will look at these charts and just assume that the Bitcoin ETF was not successful. We'll talk about that in detail later, but like it was kind of successful. Let's talk about eth though before we get there. Ethe on the week. What are we looking at? Down 5%. Sort of the week at 2,600.

Currently at 2480, down 5%. Which means the ETH BTC ratio is up 6%. We are almost up to 0.06, which I would still consider low. But in recent terms, the ETH ratio has been recovering, especially this week. Yeah, I think we're getting some of that, again, pent up ETH. Yeah, now people are just going to do the whole like, oh, now ETH ETF, and then they're going to sell the news. on the ETH ETF in like May. We talked about that a little bit last week while you're out,

you know, slaying horror cruxes, David, with Anthony Sassano. And yeah, he agrees too, like ETHETF next. Crypto market cap, what are we at on the week? Same, $1.73 billion. I want that two. I want a two. Yeah, two would be a rice net. When's last time we hit two, by the way? When was that?

Oh, God. Can we look at that? Can we look at that? Yeah, last time we were at two. We haven't been at two. since February of 2022. Yeah, Taraluna.

Yep. That's right. Around that time. No, no, no. We hit it in March as well. And then... 22? Yeah, it's Tarulah.

I'm calling it. The first time we hit two trillion, by the way, was April 2021. So, like, that was kind of the top of the top-ish of the bull market, right? Top of the Ethereum bull market. Yeah, that was like, yeah, the top of ultrasound money. The early bull market. Ultrasound money meme has been down only since like April in 2021. Let's get to you Layer 2 metrics with the Layer 2 update.

Brought to you by Mantle, which is a new and upcoming Layer 2 that we are enjoyers of. What's Layer 2 being showing us on total locked value on Layer 2? Did we get another all-time high? I saw earlier this week at $22.22 billion. So that was an enjoyable number. It's at 21.8 right now. But yes, all-time highs. Ish.

You know, the last couple weeks has been all-time high. Look at this from Grow the Pie. New all-time high for TVL across layer two's, a gigantic $3 billion increase. I guess this was the all-time high. This was from January 15th. Oh, so that did happen. Okay.

And by the way, 58% of this in Arbitrum. Arbitrum is kind of just gargantuan. One of the things that's been really determining the Eth market lately is this whole Ecclesias shenanigans. Ecclesias cancer, I should say. Celsius was like dumping hundreds of thousands of ETH onto the market. At the same time, Saylor was buying a bunch of Bitcoin, which is why the ETH-BTC ratio has just been absolutely decimated. So I saw this interesting tweet thread from

Zero X, Bobo Shanti, thank you so much, who put a tweet together saying, with over 40 hours of research gone on investigating the Celsius balance sheet, I'll explain why I believe that it is wrong that the remaining 584,000 ether that Celsius has is going to be sold. Wait, wait, wait, wait, so hold on. The facts are they have 500,000. ETH still, and people are worried that they might continue to dump on us, that additional 500,000 ETH? $584,1.4 billion are in their wallets. I don't want that.

And so far in 2024, they've transferred 92,000 ETH at Coinbase and Falcon X, which if you read the tweet thread, they'll explain what that is. It is a good thorough tweet thread. We don't have enough time to cover it here, but we will skip to the conclusions where they think, based on legal filings and on-chain analysis from Arkham, They say 536,000 ether will be distributed in kind for unsecured claims. It's like bankruptcy claims we're talking about. Bankruptcy claims, yes.

In kind means they're not selling it. They're just like here's the ETH rather than here's the dollars, which they would have to sell for. 62,000 ETH will be distributed in kind for convenience claims. And 26,000 ETH has been like we already sent to Coinbase and PayPal to process the custody claims distribution. TLDR is extremely unlikely that Celsius has much more, if any, ETH available. to sell. If you want the analysis, the details, the investigation from this Twitter account, there's a link in the show notes, so you can go unpack that. But yeah, 584,000 ETH, going to be distributed around, but apparently not sold, which is good news. I can keep you updated too, David. I still have

some Celsius, you know, ETH. Oh, yeah. Let me know when you get that. Yeah. It doesn't feel even close. They just keep sending me emails about, like, don't be fished. Like, you know, be careful. And, like, legal things are proceeding and all of that. So I think a question here, though, David, is if they are doing in-kind, like, they're sending ETH back to basically the claimants, whether the claimants, like people like me, maybe, will go sell this Eth or not or whether they'll hold it. I mean, like, I know what I'm going to do. I ain't going to be selling no Eith, okay?

If I get ETH from Celsius, you stake your ETH at times like this. You don't sell. At least that's my take. But I don't know if everyone feels that way. Yeah, I don't know if it's really an important question because, like, who are the these creditors and why are they meaningfully different from the average eath holder? Like maybe they have some taxes or debts that they have to cover and they've just had locked up capital. So yeah, some amount of capital lockup will result and some amount of selling.

But I don't, I guess it's going to be overall marginal. The only difference is they are unlike average eath holders in that, like one, they're just the subset set of like retail and probably like, I don't want to say like less sophisticated retail. I'm putting myself in that bucket, okay? They're not on chain. Yeah. They're less on chain than many eth holders. And the second thing is they've just, it's been frozen.

It's been frozen for a very long time for them. Other eat holders have not had frozen eats. So we'll have to see. Maybe there's a little bit left. David, do you catch this? The 2023 Electric Capital Developer Report. They do this every year. So let me just give you the highlights, though.

Developers overall are down. Okay. But here's the sunny skies. The most valuable segment of development. are those that have a two plus tenure. They contribute the most code. That is still growing. So that's good news. But bad news for the U.S. Okay. The U.S. is losing developer share in crypto. So now 72% of developers are now outside North America. So sorry, Canada, Mexico, America. The U.S. just lost 14% of developer share since 2018. And it's now only 26% of developers. And you can really see who's picking up the slack here. It's South Asia.

Latin America, Eastern Europe, Western Africa, Southern Europe, they grew developer share by 20%. I am like cheering that on, okay? U.S., if you're going to be stupid and mean to developers, guess what? They're going to go outside of your borders and they're going to build the cool stuff there. Like, I mean, you're lost. That's what's going to happen. I mean, I hate this because it's a self-inflicted wound to the U.S., but it is a good, I'm glad that this is internationalizing, particularly in some of these emerging economies.

I think that's bullish for crypto. Yeah, and then Elizabeth Warren is like, good. I didn't want them anyways. Yeah, but here's the thing, man. Like these countries, people in other regions will think up use cases that the West doesn't even think of. They don't have a problem with it because they're, you know, their visa card works or something like this. So, I mean, bullish crypto because I think we'll get some more diversity in use cases. David, what do we have coming up next?

Coming up next, we're going to unpack the metrics of the spot Bitcoin ETF one week later. We're going to talk to Larry Fink and hear what he's excited about. Wait, he's coming on? We're talking to Larry Fink? Right now. Yeah, right after this. And then Ethereum blobs have hit the test net and they're coming for us. So stay tuned. We're going to get to all this and more. But first, I'm going to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially Crackin, the place we get these charts at the beginning of the show. And the place that you should use to get on chain this bull market summer. Yeah. Go ahead and click the link in the show notes to get started with Crack. Bull market summer. I love it. Cracken knows crypto. Cracken's been in the crypto game for over a decade. And as one is the largest and most trusted exchanges in the industry, Cracken is on the journey with all of us to see what crypto can be. Human history is a story of progress.

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You can learn more about how Toku can help you streamline your token management and get started for free. visit Toku at Toku.com slash bankless or click the link in the description below. One week of Bitcoin ETF trading. How did it do? Did it flop or did it rocket? Eric Buckchunis says. Latest, day three in the books of the total rolling net flows. Net flows is both buying and selling is 782 million as the newborn nine that he calls with the nine Bitcoin ETF. Oh, I like that. Eric's a good meamer. He really is. They have more than offset the GBT gouch. which is now up to $1.2 billion offset from the NAV to discount. Okay, so the nines, $2 billion in AUM, and $4.5 billion in volume organic is fabulous for the first three days and a solid percent premium too.

So overall, what this means is that there has been a lot of outflows from the grayscale Bitcoin trust over $108 billion and net new inflows of $2 billion. A skeptic put out this tweet saying, is this me or is this really underwhelming? Only $800 million of inflows into the BTC ETFs so far. And Eric Falchunis' response to this skeptic saying, this is a flop, right? And he goes, I think it's not a flop. These numbers are highly unusual for a new launch. Most ETFs get less than $1 to $2 million in the first week.

These are all 20 to 500 times that. And so Eric Falchunis, who again, is more or less the expert on ETFs is saying this is a categorical win, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. There are four leaders of the nine. There are four leaders here. I shares, which is BlackRock, coming in at $710 million. Fidelity coming in at $524 million, followed by Bitwise, the crypto-native ETF company

that we know and love, $305 million, followed by Kathy Woods, Arc, 21 shares at $227 million. So we always know that it was always going to represent some sort of distribution. You know, power law. Nature has power law. But this is really close, Ryan. Like Black Rock Fidelity Bitwise, 700, 500, 525, 300. Like really close neck and neck race, I'd say. Yeah, we got a gold, silver bronze and they're all within striking distance of each other.

It's pretty impressive. You know, like, so the question of, are we happy about these inflows, total net inflows? The answer to that question has got to be yes. And that's what Balchunis is saying. But also, I think, like, Grayscale needed. It's healthy for it to have that outflow. Remember, all of that was stuck inside of the grayscale container for like years to like disastrous effect in 2022, as we talked about so much. Now it's being unlocked.

Even the outflows are healthy. Like, I mean, that's how we kind of get a stable base and our feedback under us with these ETF markets. Well, also the grayscale ETF charges 1.5% fee yearly. And the Black Rock, I think, charges 0.25%. I think Bitwise charges... Wait, they still do? Does Grayscale still charge that much? Or have they been...

Yes, they lowered their price from 2% to 1.5%. Whereas all of the others are in the like 0.2 to 0.25, maybe 0.3 range. Okay. I think Bitwise is the lowest at 0.2. Why is Griscale keeping their fee at 1.5%? I think they are just betting that there's going to be just a lot of dormant, GPDC holders who don't check their brokerages, don't know, don't care. It's probably a good calculated bet, honestly.

They are charging like five to ten times as much, and so they're not going to lose too much. So yeah, they're just freaking in the fees on that one. Another tweet from Eric Bautunis was talking about the volumes. So what is volumes, buying and selling of the underlying to make sure that the ETF actually trades that par. He goes, another way to put the Bitcoin ETF flows in an ETF context, besides showing their numbers relative to past new launches, which is the more frequent thing that we've been doing recently, is showing how they stack up to all ETFs in the past one week of flows. So comparing

the Bitcoin ETFs to other general ETFs like the QQQ, the NASDAQ. So he says, even after four days, two of them are in the top five of all ETFs in volume. That's a big deal. That's a big seeking deal. And three of them are in the top 10 up there with the studs, V-O-O-O-Q-Q-Q-Q-E. at all. Volume, apparently, is like a health metric for ETFs. Yeah. And we have three Bitcoin ETFs in the top 10 of all ETFs. All ETFs. That's kind of, that's like hair on end crazy, I'd say. Yeah. No, that's, it's definitely a good sign. KQQQ is NASDAQ, right? What, do you know what the V is? What did I say? No, you said that. You nailed it. I just, I don't know my ETFs, David. I don't know what the Voo is. I don't know what the IVV is. I assume these are very

important ETFs and Belchunis is probably like shaking his fist on us. Very trad and serious. Vanguard S&P 500 ETF dividend. That is a boomer name right there. You said earlier Eric Baltunis is a good mamer. Here's a actual meme, a mid-curve meme where Eric has the person in the middle saying, bruh, how come number go down? I thought these ETFs were supposed to pump. It's been, I've been inside the house and online for the past 72 hours straight. Moon. Eh. And then left and right, we have people saying,

some people probably sold the news after 80% run up, no biggie. My tweet this week was, everyone has to have patience. The Bitcoin ETF will age like wine. It's not about the event. It's about the flows. It's about the flows. Aging like wine. You know, another theme of this event,

and I think the rest of today's episode is, Dave, the bankers are shilling our bags now. Can you believe it? Wall Street is like, Unholy alliance. Choo-choo is on board, okay? Fees, baby. This is the Fidelity homepage last week.

Okay. Well, this is the BlackRock homepage. You seen this? Access Bitcoin, I shares. Here's Fidelity. Their homepage. I'm talking about the homepage. They're basically, like, okay, for people who can't see this, the Fidelity-Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund, easier exposure to Bitcoin without buying Bitcoin directly.

Wow, what a fantastic product. Nice and protected and safe Bitcoin. Yeah. It's so legal. I like my Bitcoin. It's super legal. Not self-sovereign and like banked. Don't touch that bald man's exchange.

Touch our exchange. The best kind of Bitcoin. I don't know why that's my fidelity voice, but you know, that's what it is, David. The Fidelity-wise origin Bitcoin Fund. So they're shilling it. They're just very excited about a product to sell. And, you know, someone once told me there's a little bit of capital still on Wall Street. I think they got some money over there, David.

They do have some money. Did you also see the Franklin? Their money is becoming our money. Oh, is it? Yeah, okay. These are the rules. That's what ETFs do. Do you also see the Franklin Templeton account?

Like, I don't know what happened on Twitter to Franklin Templeton. This is like a tradfai of tradf-f-fx, but like they seem to be all in on crypto. What in the world are we looking at? Yeah. So Franklin Templeton, $1.4 trillion asset manager. I saw this tweet right after we got done with a podcast and I thought, oh, God, like the Franklin Templeton Twitter got account. You thought it got hacked.

I thought it got hacked. And then I scroll up and I see that like, oh, announcing our digital assets team has taken over our Twitter account for the next two hours. Nice. And they are just firing just like dank memes after dank memes. Like laser-eyed Ben Franklin, bank Franklin with a hat. Oh my God. The sophistication of these memes, like, I bet you, they listen to bankless. They probably listen to bankless, whoever's on that digital asset team.

Oh, yeah. Shout out. They are. job. They make, I mean, we make some okay memes. They were making some... How did they do this? Franklin Templeton? I didn't know you had this level of crypto meme talent. Like, who are you? You know that everyone in the rest of the company who's dealing with like mortgages and like bonds are like, what the hell is going on with our Twitter Cal? I know there's a meme of the week from Franklin Templeton, but here's the tweet. You are

unsure how to feel about laser-eyed Ben. They just activated the accounts laser eyes too. Just think instead of Ben with hat. With hat. With hat. Yeah. So there is, I think it's a Salana dog token, a dog with hat.

And it's like a doge with a hat. And it just pumped. And now it is part of our culture now. This kid owns some deep crypto bags. Let me tell you on his or her own. I think that's happened. Imagine like the Zoomer intern who works at Franklin Templeton. And he's got like a bag of shit coin.

Samana shit coins. He's just like you firing off tweets off the Franklin Templeton account. I can't imagine that. Wow. Not all the banks are on board, though, David. I got to tell you. I'll call all of these things loosely bank. I don't think Vanguard is like a bank.

Like, that's not what they would call themselves, but they hold a lot of assets. So they have their, yeah, anyway, we'll get into that. Vanguard won't offer spot Bitcoin ETFs. They say the high volatility is bad for generating long-term returns. So they've actually. actively, what's the opposite of supported, boycotted?

Boycotted. Not like a boycott, like banned, you know, not allowed Vanguard users, unlike Fidelity. Like Vanguard is very similar to Fidelity in a lot of ways, which is very crypto forward. But Vanguard has said, basically, it has no plans to offer Bitcoin ETFs or crypto products.

Its high volatility runs counter to our goal of helping investors generate positive real returns over the long term, which is kind of funny because like go look at Bitcoin price over the long term in its entire history. It's only been down three years in all of the other years. Like it's been up only and like massively up. It's been a fantastic asset class. So it has generated positive real returns.

This is chain link God saying Vanguard offered investors the ability to purchase GBDC for years, even as it traded at extreme premiums discounts over NAPs. So that's kind of ironic, right? They won't allow the Bitcoin ETF, but they allow GBDC for years. He goes on. But as soon as GBDC converts into a spot ETF and properly tracks NAV, suddenly high volatility is a blocker and it gets delisted, smells fishy. I don't know why.

Like, I guess that's kind of weird. I guess it smells fishy. I can't think of what the incentive would be. It's just like maybe someone's just kind of folding their arms and saying, I don't like Bitcoin at Vanguard. I don't know what's going on. Yeah, so, okay, say there are two population. If we're talking about, like, from a business ends,

people are going to read this, like, message. Vanguard is no longer accepting purchase of cryptocurrency products, including Bitcoin futures, ETFs. And then you have your customers and, or non-customers, and do any non-customers read that and be like, oh, I'm going to convert to Vanguard. I'm going to put more money in Vanguard because they made this choice. How many of those are there of those types of people

versus the other types of people who are like, oh, Vanguard's not letting me buy crypto. I will either not sign up with them or take my money elsewhere. Like, who's, which one of these is more? The second one, David. The second one is more. People are just going to be like, why can't I get this product? All the other like fidelity has this black mark has it.

Constraining your product offering is never like a rational business case. No, we have like I refuse. I'm like I'm best buy. I refuse to sell iPhones. I'm not going to sell. Like why? And all the Android people were like, yay. No, no, that didn't happen.

It didn't happen. All right, here's another banker who's kind of maybe upset about it a little bit. But this is what we alluded to in the intro, David. Jamie Diamond has a fantastic take on Bitcoin. No one's ever thought of it. This is the risk that Jamie Diamond discovered about Bitcoin that, yeah, this is brand new for all of us. You ready for this? Here's what he says.

Gold really didn't do anything either. Yeah, but gold's limited in the supply. was Bitcoin. And it's been using, so you think so, huh? I do. I think there's a good chance that when Bitcoin, when we get to that 20 million, they go to 42, no, that Satashi's going to come on there, laugh hysterically, go quiet, all Bitcoin's going to be erased. I think, man, how the hell do you know it's going to stop at 21? I've never met one person who told me they know for a fact. They take that as, mathematically, it's not, it can't happen because by, the last one will be mined in 2150, and it, it gets harder and harder every time there's another having. But, but, Jamie,

Looking back over... You guys do what you want and I'll do what I want. As for gold, the six characteristics that make gold valuable for 4,000 years, they're all present in Bitcoin. That's all I'm saying, I love you and I don't want to be a... And I also don't want to be a... Joe, Joe, you may be right.

Yeah. Like, I don't know in gold either, so, okay. So, David, how do you know Satoshi, a Santoshi? How did you pronounce it? Satoshi. Satoshi. How do you know he's not just going to reappear and...

Delete all the Bitcoin. Delete the Bitcoin. He's just going to delete all the bitcoins. And you can hear the frustration in the, in the, like the moderator. Yeah. Mathematically, you can't do that. Oh, by the way. You just don't.

Have you seen the CNBC like people this week, like all the anchors? They are so bullish Bitcoin. And like all of these other trash like Jamie Diamond comes on, Gary Gensler comes on. And they're like, no, that's actually not how Bitcoin works. Like they correct them. And it's like so great. Like CNBC has. has completely 180 pivoted on crypto.

And why? It's because they have an asset to sell because Black Rock's on board, Fidelity's on board. And so they're doing this kind of like hard interviews now. Love it. Love it.

There are going to be costs with this unholy alliance. Well, I think we'll talk about that in a second. But let's watch this next clip where Larry Fink, it's coming in hot here. And somebody asked him about the ETH ETF, and he kind of gave like a mom answer.

but I think it's the conversation that he started talking about immediately after that I think it's a big reveal. Let's watch this clip. Yeah, this is on the, I guess, crypto-favorable banker's side. Here he goes. Do you now expect other cryptocurrency ETFs, meaning do you think that Gary, and we'll talk to him later, like Ethereum. We'll have to approve an Ethereum ETF. And is that a function of something the SEC has to do, or do you think that all these things have to go to court first? I couldn't respond to that. I see value in having an Ethereum ETF. As I said, these are just stepping stones towards tokenization. And I really do believe this is where we're going to be going.

We have the technology to tokenize today. If you want to talk about, think about this. If you had a tokenized security and you have a tokenized identity, you, Andrew, the moment you buy or sell an instrument is known, it's on a general ledger that is all created together. You want to talk about issues around money, laundry, and all that. This eliminates all corruption by having a tokenized system. Okay, so he immediately pivots the conversation to talking about tokenization.

And this spread like wildfire throughout crypto Twitter. The chain link army was like, that's us, baby. And he doubled down on it in another clip where he's just talking about tokenization the whole entire time. Let's watch the second clip. We believe the next step going forward will be the tokenization of financial assets. And that means every stock, every bond will have its own basically CUSIP. It'll be on one general ledger. Every investor, you and I, will have our own number, our own identification.

We could rid ourselves of all issues around illicit activities about bonds and stocks and digital by having a tokenization. But the most importantly thing, we can customize strategies through tokenization that if it's every individual. Larry Fink wants to tokenize bonds, stocks, and every financial asset that he can. And he's talking about tokenization. He sees the merits of tokenization. And that is the direction that he's taking these conversations. People are asking him about the Bitcoin ETF, the ETH ETF. And Larry Fink is like, well, have you heard about like tokenization? I mean, he's a leader of Black Rock. Yeah. He's, that's where he's steering the ship. That's where it's going. You know, I think Larry Fink is just

telling us exactly what the roadmap is for BlackRock. First, it's the Bitcoin ETF, then it's the theorem ETF, then it's tokenization. Like, he's literally telling us the plan. And you know what I think this means? Like, David, I wouldn't be surprised. I'm not saying it's going to happen this year. I'm not going to say it's going to happen next year. I would not be surprised to see a BlackRock dollar, a BlackRock stable coin, okay? BlackRock tokenized assets. Of course they're going to do that, right? Jamie Diamond already is, by the way, at GP Morgan and is, you know, not public blockchain. And I wouldn't be surprised at some point if we see a black rock chain, you know, like a layer two that, yeah, a private layer two. A private layer two. A private

two that's the back end of the website. I think it'll start private and I think it goes public. Because so freaking cheap to go public. Like if you get security, if you get privacy, right, for kind of what they need, like DA costs are basically nothing. Why not have it audited by the security of Ethereum? Like, I think that is an inevitability too. They probably got to get some regulation right, but I mean... Yeah, if they're going to have a public chain, there will be zero people on that chain that are not fully KYC'd. And he also talked about

identity in that clip. He was like, oh yeah, you have tokenization and you actually also have digital identity, which is a pretty sophisticated take for a banker. Shout out Larry Fink. Talking about identity is, you are pretty far down the crypto rabbit hole. If you're talking about both tokenization and identity like standards, like DIDS, VCs, we've talked about this on

bank lists. But it also scares me. Let it be known. I don't want Larry Fink to be talking about identity on my platforms. I want, I want none of that. Get that away from me. He's going to. They're going to. So, David, do you catch my, my hot take that I gave in the bankless, I did feed? Yeah. I was listening to it while I was driving 80 kilometers an hour over a dirt road in the middle of the Patagonia. Wow, dude. That is badass. That's so cool that we did that. popped a tire short like well because you're so excited listening to it you're like yeah it's just like oh like Ryan's spitting fire right now it's like oh shit my tires flat it was this is on the bankless premium feed so we just put it on a different feed a bankless citizens get that by the way but it was basically like a in like a seven minute take on how I think right now like we have an unholy alliance with the bankers right and that's great I'm glad because they're a counterforce

to the kind of the regulators of the world who just don't believe in private markets I pose, but I'm a bit worried about this alliance because where it leads is possibly AMLKYC. Like, I don't think Larry Think is going to be passionate about Defi. I don't think he's going to be like, yeah, you know, validators running at home, that's a great thing, right? And so I'm a little bit worried about the next phase of this, David, right? Like, will they try to replicate TradFi? I don't mind if that's there as long as you don't get rid of free and open crypto.

And these people, Larry Fank, the bankers, all of them, they have tremendous power in D.C. This is why the ETF got pushed through, right? So they could do some real damage to a free and open crypto if they wanted to and if it's in their incentive to. They don't seem to be doing that now. But like, let's just go eyes wide open into this temporary alliance was the take. Yeah. If they could do whatever they want and they're saying box private layer two, if they make it

public, fine. All of their KYC identity should just stay there. And that is the power of Ethereum. Like, do whatever you want on your own chain. I am concerned that they put their weight behind imposing legal restrictions on United States citizens across public chains more broadly. That is my fear. Like, it would come through in a bill, thou shalt not run validators because they're not

or KICC. Or, like, yeah, if you're a United States citizen, you need to register your did on Ethereum or something like that. You did? Your identity? Your did. Yeah, your identity. You got another take.

Did is decentralized identity. I'll say one more thing about your seven-minute episode because it was just you. You kind of had some like thoughts. You wrote it down, I'm assuming. I think I can tell when Ryan's reading from his notes. Yeah. And since like we weren't discussing, it was like you were like speaking softer. It was like Ryan Sean Adams, the ASMR.

Wait. It was like really sexy. You were like whispering into the microphone. You were like, yeah, speaking really like softly and. breathily into the microphone. Yeah, that's weird. I guess I need practice at this. It was also, I still have this, like, I still have COVID, David. I'm like coughing and like my voice is all off. So I'll say that as well. But I don't know, maybe some people are into it. If so, I'll continue doing it. There's a reason why the bankless premium RSSs downloads are up only. Breathless Ryan takes. That's

fantastic. Breathly Ryan, yeah. Breathy Ryan takes. You should just rebrand it. That's what the premium Maris, that's what it is. Yeah, we have, we have David takes and Ryan, breathy, breathy, wow, I can't believe there's a market for that. David, you have another take, though, on who else benefits from the tokenization from the banks? What does that take? Yeah, so as soon as this clip about Larry Fink tokenizing all of Black Rock's bonds and equities and whatever, everyone was like, they're going to do it on my chain. And there was like a little bit of a false dichotomy, I think, going on between like the, people were like, he's going to tokenize them on Ethereum.

That's where you tokenize stuff. You tokenize stuff on Ethereum. It's just what you do. And then like the chain link army was like, no, that's not how it works. And chain link God put out this tweet, which I thought was pretty good, which my tweet models after, which is they're actually going to have their private chain, which they have complete sovereign control over. They can fork as well. It'll be just like a banker chain. And then they'll use an interop comm layer, messaging layer, like chain link, to send those assets outbound.

and it won't be tokenized on Ethereum, they will just find themselves gravitating towards Ethereum because that's where liquidity is. That's where DeFi is. So that's my take. That's how I think this is going to happen. So private black rock chain, interop, middle layer, and then they can go anywhere.

They could go to Solana if they wanted to. But my claim is they're going to go to DeFi on Ethereum because they'll go to DeFi on Ethereum as a function of what, like, market share defy off an Ethereum has in terms of like liquidity and users and like all that stuff. No, no, you're wrong. They'll go to my chain, my bags, my chain.

That's where they're going to go, David. Your bags are my bags, bro. Oh, are they? Yeah, I know. I think that's another way it could happen, right? I do still think they'll have a side chain layer too, though, at some point, but we'll have to see. Anyway, it's good for crypto assets, at least right now.

And I think we should end with this, another Franklin Templeton tweet to surround out this section. We'll be the bankers on our side. This will be the second of like 30 memes that came out of the Franklin Templeton, a Twitter account. Go for it. Frankly, Templeton says, we are excited about Ethan's ecosystem. Despite the midlife crisis, it recently experienced, we see a bright future with many strong tailwinds to push the Ethereum ecosystem forward. EIP 4844, Alt-D-A, community revitalization and restaking. What? They know these things? Oh my God. What else we got, David? What else we got?

Coming up next, what upgrades come after in addition to EIP 4844? We have Dane Koon around the corner, but we already have the next upgrade gearing up after that. So Lana announces the saga phone number two. And of course, everyone's favorite pastime, the SEC getting grilled during Congress during a Coinbase hearing. We're going to talk about all of this and more.

But first, we're going to check out Mantle, a layer two with staking. You can stake your eth with a layer two now. That's Mantle. Check them out. There's a link in the show notes. We're going to go hear from them right now. Mantle, formerly known as BitDA, is the first Dowled Web3 ecosystem,

all built on top of Mantle's first core product, the Mantle Network, a brand new, high-performance, Ethereum Layer 2 built using the OP stack, but uses Eigenlayers data availability solution instead of the expensive Ethereum Layer 1. Not only does this reduce Mantle network's gas fees by 80%, but it also reduces gas fee volatility, providing a more stable foundation for Mantle's applications. The Mantle treasury is one of the biggest Dow-owned treasuries, which is seeding an ecosystem of projects from all around the Web-free space for Mantle.

Mantle already has sub-communities from around Web3 onboarded, like Game 7 for Web Free Gaming, and Buy Bit for TVL and liquidity and onrance. So if you want to build on the Mantle network, Mantle is offering a grants program that provides milestone-based funding to promising projects that help expand, secure, and decentralize Mantle. If you want to get started working with the first Dow-ledd Layer 2 ecosystem, check out Mantle at mantle.xyz and follow them on Twitter at ZeroX Mantle. Sello is the mobile-first, EVM-compatible, carbon-negative blockchain built for the real world. And now something big is happening. Introducing the Sello Layer 2. It's a game-changing proposal that's going to bring Sello's rapidly growing ecosystem.

home to Ethereum. Vitalik has shared its excitement for the Selo Layer 2 on the Selo Forum, so has Ben Jones from optimism. But why? The Sello Layer 2 will bring huge advantages, like a decentralized sequencer, off-chain data availability, and one block finality. What does all that mean? Rock Solid Security, a trustless bridge to Ethereum, and more real-world use cases for Ethereum without compromise. And real-world adoption is happening. Active addresses on Sello have grown over 500% in the last six months. With the Sello Layer 2, gas fees will stay low and you can even pay for gas, ERC20 tokens. But SELO is a community governed protocol. This means that SELO needs you to weigh in

and make your voice heard. Join the conversation in the Sello Forum. Follow at Sello org on Twitter and visit sello.org to shape the future of Ethereum. Blobes are on goarly. Franklin Templeton, try to keep up. Sentence is that. Try to keep up with this crypto. Blonds are on goarly. So true though. Can you make sense of what I just said for people who haven't been keeping up? Yes. EIP 484. 4-4, aka Proto-Danksharting, which creates blob space on Ethereum so that transaction fees from call data on layer 2's can reduce by 95% and we can have cheaper transactions on layer 2. Did you follow all that? Yes, and Gorley is the test net, right?

And Gorley is the test net. So it's the thing you do before you go to main net. So this means blob space is coming and protodank sharding is coming, yes? Yeah, basically we are on the final hours of Dankoon. You run through, you do your test net upgrades. You know, upgrade test net number one. That was Giorli. Next one will be Holski, I think, Sepolia as well.

Once you hit all the test nets and all the test nets successfully upgrade, successfully have their fork, then we're like, all right, well, there's nothing else to do other than main net. I guess we just do main net. And that's how an Ethereum merge happens. And the theorem fork happens. So if one successful test net is successful, then you move on to the next one. And once they're all successful, then we'll, then we, full set and the full thing. Okay, but then the layer two still need to turn it on. So what,

what has to happen with Optimus and Tyco, scroll, Arbchum, all these things? Yeah, so they need to, instead of using the call data of Ethereum block space, you just need to use blob space. So different layer two is just have to like upgrade for that. So the OP stack, according to Proto, who is Proto Lambda, who's the Proto and Proto Deng Charting, by the way? He's like, he took Dankrat's Deng charting. It was like, but you can do this and we can ship it earlier. And I mean, that's 4844. There's some Ethereum lore for you saying, looking to be ready for optimism, governance voting cycle 19,

which completes an early March, and then hopefully we'll roll out shortly on the layer one, so they'll be ready. Tyco for Maynet, the current plan is to launch with 4844 live already, which means Tyco is going to launch as a network. Scrolls already ready to go. Arbitrum 1 and Nova,

these decisions will be controlled by the on-chain contracts that are automatically already in the hands of the Arbitram Dow. So the Dow needs to vote for it. They will. and it'll be approved 100%. They're all ready to go. Is the bottom line here. And the big question, I think, on some people's mind is always, what's next?

So we have this hard fork, but what about the next hard fork? What about second hard fork? So after Denkun, there's another hard fork that is kind of, it's not scheduled yet, but it is kind of planned out. It's called Pectra. Technically, Denkun isn't even scheduled yet. Thank you. Thank you. You are technically right, David.

The Ethereum Foundation would like you to know. It's not. There's no date. Yeah, there's no date. no idea when it's coming. It'll be March. March. March. No idea when it's coming. The next hard fork, though, after that pectro, what does it include? Verkle trees, David. What are these? Love them. You love verical trees? Your big vercal tree guy? Yeah. Big virkle guy. Well, you should because they're the first step to stateless clients.

And that means lower hardware to run a node. That's fantastic because it increases our ability to maintain decentralization on Ethereum. Also, we get rid of the necessity to grant unlimited approvals. If you are on chain, you know what a pain this is when you have to say, oh, yeah, you have approval to my token balance to do something on an app. There's an off and off call part like EIP that helps to fix that. Also, there's a few other things too. Note operators get the ability to spin up a validator that you're no longer capped with 32 eth, so you can have more than 32th in a single validator. There's inclusionless, which improves censorship persistence. A lot of small things that amount to like a pretty exciting upgrade,

actually. Yeah, it is a pretty good upgrade. Yeah, I like it. Yeah. Verical treats, I want to double click on that one. Oh, do you? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Verkle guy. Yeah. You said in the notes, we have lower hardware requirements to run a node. Well, you can also just like, once you do that, you can just increase the demands on that hardware and be at equilibrium. Do you remember when we were doing EIP-1559 and then we were also doing the merge and everyone's like, it's going to lower gas fees, right? It's going to lower gas fees, right? And we were all like, no, it's actually not going to lower gas fees.

It's going to burn them, but it's not going to lower them. And then the same thing with the merge. We're like, it's going to lower gas fees. And we're like, guys, no, it's not lowering gas fees. Oh, yeah. We'll just fill up the additional valid space you're saying. No, no, there was just no gas. It just wasn't about gas fees.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. There was no increase in bandwidth at all. Virkle trees and the verge as a part of the Ethereum roadmap as a whole is actually reducing can, excuse me, can actually reduce gas fees, it will create room for us to increase the gas limit, potentially allows

her a higher gas limit. So we will actually be able to have reduced gas fees on the layer one once this goes in. And this is, it's moving Ethereum, you know, the whole like Solana meme of Moore's Law, scaling with Moore's Law, this is Ethereum's version

of that. The verge is scaling Ethereum layer one in parallel with Moore's law. And so I don't think people really are like understand that really at all. Yeah. Franklin Templeton, meme that, okay? You don't understand verical trees yet, do you? Your dog with hat was pretty good. Do virkle trees. Do virkle. That's hard mode. Okay, so Vitalik was also championing last week increasing the block size. You see this, David? Yes, which is exactly what we're talking about. So yeah, on Reddit, Vitalik was asked how much gas limit could we safely increase now and also after Virkle? And Vitalik responded, I think doing a modest gas limit, even today is reasonable. The gas limit is basically block size. How much data can

go in a block is basically throughput. The gas limit has not been increased for nearly three years, which is the longest time ever in protocol's history. And so, you know, Moore's Law continues. And Vitalik saying, yo, like we've actually been lagging Moore's Law. We could increase the gas fees if we wanted to. He didn't answer specifically about after the inclusion of Virkle trees, but this is a question that I will ask Mike Noider and Dom when we do our episode on the Ethereum Romeap and we talk about this. You are such a verical tree maxi, David. Any time, any chance you get to talk about verical trees, man.

You are just... Verge me, baby. David, there's just some, you know, a sad exploit this week. Socket and its exchange bungee was exploited for $3.3 million. So socket is kind of like an interoperability protocol, kind of like a bridging type of protocol. It's a bridge aggregator. Yeah. I used it a lot.

Yeah, it's, well, so you've used it maybe directly. And also, there are apps you may have used that may use socket, where you didn't know you were actually using socket under the covers. So talk about the follow out of this and kind of what it caused. Yeah, so there was a route that was incorporated into socket, which is a very normal thing to do. They just incorporate routes. One of them had an exploit in it that was exploited. And so the exploiter was draining people's wallets. and Socket realized it extremely quickly and paused that particular route and just like hit,

hit freeze on it. And only $3.3 million was stolen. Like $3.3 million is $3.3 million. But in the grand scheme of hacks, I would call that a single-digit million dollar hack. From people who allowed Socket to have access to some amount of tokens on their account and didn't revoke that access. And it happened, I don't know, there's a period of time where they didn't realize and didn't pause the contract.

And so people's wallets were drained without them knowing it. Right. So when you make an approval these ASE and Ethereum, I think MetaMask and both Rabi does this. Like you will send like 500 die across the transaction. And then you will approve, you will give allowances for 500 die. If you ever set it to like max, then this exploit could have happened to you. But if you approved 500 and then you sent 500, the allowances are done.

Yeah, let's say if you had a thousand dot in your account and you only sent 500, well, the other 500 would still be approved, right? still be, yes, exactly. So how do you check this, David? How do you figure this out if you've given that approval? Yeah, there's a website called revoke.com, which is pretty useful. Definitely learn how to use that if you're navigating, if you're on chain on Ethereum. But I do believe there is an upgrade. We'll have to check on this. Off and off call in Dankun, or excuse me, in Pectra, the next upgrade after day. Yeah, we're just talking about it. mitigate this. I think it could mitigate this. Also, I think wallet UX really needs to improve.

Like, this is another reminder that we're all alpha testing this. This is not grandma. It's not ready for grandma or your parents yet. All right. So like not when we have UX problems like this. It's just such a pain to have to allow like revoke access. Like I was going through a list of wallets I have yesterday to be like, oh, did I use Saka? I don't know. I was plugging wallets into this interface and it just, it's really messy right now, David. It's hard. And I think we've got a lot steps to approve it. One cool thing is, do you know, Rabby will tell you when there's an exploit as new, there's another crypto wallet. And, yeah, and they'll, and they'll help you, like, they have the revoke.cash kind of like functionality built into their wallet in the browser.

It's stuff like that that's going to make a difference and we really have to improve on it. There's also an update this week from the Coinbase versus SEC case. You know how the SEC was like, hey, Coinbase, everything you list, maybe aside from Bitcoin is a security and you should stop doing that and we're going to bring you to court. Well, that case is, you know, is basically playing out right now. So from the court case, this is the judge asking the SEC lawyer whether the token issuers named in the complaint violated securities law, right? Because that's why the SEC was bringing them to court. Coinbase violated securities law, of course. And so she asked about this, did it violate securities law? And SEC lawyer said, well, not exactly, your honor.

Those tokens named in the complaint are computer code. And the judge responded, I'm smiling, sir, because that's kind of what your friends at the back are saying. And they're wondering why we're here, pointing to, like, Coinbase at the back, wondering why we're actually here. Your friends at the back table. I hope Paul was there just, like, snickering. Yeah, I mean, so she said this. It is a real fear that I have that your arguments, speaking in the SEC, is just sweeping too broadly, labeling collectibles as securities as well. There's another part where the SEC lawyers says that Coinbase says crypto is a $1 trillion asset class. You know, they say, ooh, we don't really know. How do we know this?

I mean, like, we talk about it in the beginning of every show. Like, it is a trillion dollar asset class. Anyway, we disagree that crypto is an asset class. The lawyer says they're not even asset class, David. It is a rounding error in the economy and requires no new laws. The U.S. equity market is $100 trillion. And the global market is $400 trillion. Crypto is a rounding error.

That's what the SEC lawyer said in this court case. Okay? Why is Gary Gensler so obsessed with it? Seriously. I mean, somebody needs to tell these people they don't get to decide. They don't get to decide what a new asset class is. That's like beyond their mandate. No one's asking for that.

I don't know why they think they can actually weigh in here. No one asks your opinion, SEC. Like, they do securities, okay? They don't get to weigh on what's a real asset class and what's not. Jake Schervensky put out a pretty good tweet thread where he says, today's Coinbase hearing revealed a key flaw in the SEC's legal theory. It turns nearly every asset on the planet into a security. Oops.

This is something that I realize, Ryan, after we did our Josh Rosenthal episode, the crypto renaissance where he talked about like, oh, yeah, the money printer was one of these key technologies that birthed Renaissance. And then you and I started like unpacking and like chewing on what that really meant. And like over the next like few weeks, we're like, oh, we have crypto, we have a money printer for financial assets. And then we were like, oh, that's going to scare the shit out of the SEC. Yeah. Because like tokenized long sort of flame in your game, right? Like tokenized dog with hat, tokenized Pokemon cards. And we were going to to just, like, dedos the SEC with financial assets of all types and backgrounds and properties

and upside or commodity-like properties, like, whatever. And so the SEC is going for the broadest possible interpretation, whereas, like, everything is, we control everything. Well, I mean, we said it. But we're just dedossing them. That's, there's too many of our assets for them to regulate. But that's the case, that they're trying to make in the court, that everything is a security. And the judge is like, no, it's not. You can't do that. But it's, it's, it's, it's, It's too cringe of a statement to make for it to like stand up in court. Like no, you don't get to regulate on-chain Pokemon cards, Gary Gensler. That's not what you do.

Do you remember when Richie Torres was grilling Gary Gensler and just feeling about Pokemon cards? Can you tell me whether a Pokemon card is a security? And Gary Gensler couldn't? He was just like dodging the question. He was like facts and circumstances. And then the Pokemon card, that was our meme. That meme came from crypto.

Yeah. And so Richie Torres was like, oh, the crypto people are making fun of Gary Gensler. because he's trying to tokenize Pokemon cards, I'm going to use that, which is the power of memes. Speaking of memes, I don't know how this relates, but Donald Trump, okay? His former Donald Trump says he will never allow the creation of a central bank digital currency.

Let's hear him. Tonight I'm also making another promise to protect Americans from government tyranny as you're a president. I will never allow the creation of a central bank digital currency. You know about me? It's interesting to see, like, the Trump fans cheering for that. Of course, of course they would.

but just like, I didn't know that they cared so deeply about that, but they probably just shared. Yeah, I wonder how many, whether Biden will have a response, where the Democrats will have a response on, like, what their position is. Biden is like, I'm going to give you a CBDC. And all of the Warren is like, yay. Warren, Elizabeth Warren very much wants that. That is her end state. Of course, there's this place in the middle where you have like USDC and like private industry kind of competing. USC is my CBC. That's where I fall. Anyway, tell me about the Salonophone, David. Salonophone number two. Okay, so the first Salonofone, the Sagra phone, which started going for like $5,000 a piece on eBay because of the bongk price appreciation and everyone just kind of started speculating. Because you got an air drop with your phone.

You got an air drop with your phone. But like it didn't justify the cost of the phone, but people started buying these phones anyways just because like there is a limited addition. It turned into an NFT. Like only 20,000 saga phones. And so if you have a saga phone, you're like by definition an early salana user amongst all the other like air drops that are on them. And so they were never going to do another phone. because it kind of flopped. They had like 5,000, 6,000 of these Saga phones sell out out of 20,000, and then the Bunk

token goes up like 10,000 percent, and then they instantly sell out. So they're rolling it back. The Saga Phone Chapter 2 is coming out. And so there is going to be, you can buy one for a deposit of $450,000 designed to cover the full price of the device, expected to ship in the first half of 2025. And then there's just a bunch of like Solana apps embedded on their backpack. Mad Ladds, Tensor, Phantom, Soft, Magic Eden. You think people are hoping for some more airdrops on this?

Like, you know, Bonk V2? I mean my... It's until further notice. Yeah, well, there you go. David, meme of the week. Let's close this episode out. What are we looking at? Of course.

It's a Franklin Templeton meme because they just gave us so much collateral to work with. This is the meme of the car veering off the highway, taking a hard pivot. And it's the 6040 portfolio. If you go straight, you get the nice 6040 portfolio, 60% equity. 40% bonds, or you could take the hard right and you can get 6040 plus Bitcoin. This is Franklin

Templeton taking that hard right. Yeah, the classic 6040. That's the safe way to invest. But now, now Wall Street wants you to own a little bit of Bitcoin too, okay? Stocks, bonds and crypto. That's what the message is. I think explaining memes, Ryan, is probably the most cringe thing that we do on the show. I don't think so. I think we do many other cringe things that I'm sure, I'm sure the commenters would tell us about YouTube. You too. Tell us how cringe we are. Tell us how cringe we are. Again. Thank you. We will totally read those comments. I'm going to end with risk in a minute, but disclosures, but David and I are investors in Scroll and Socket. I'm also an angel investor in Arbitrum. Both Dave and I hold some crypto. You can see all of those disclosures at bankless.com slash disclosures. And of course, crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in. We're on the path west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey.

Thanks a lot.