Bankless - ROLLUP: Bitcoin Hits NEW ATH | Stablecoin Bill Advances | ETH’s ZK Miracle | Solana’s New Chain? | T

Episode Date: May 23, 2025

This week, Ryan and David unpack Bitcoin’s explosive run to $111K and the macro chaos driving it—specifically, the U.S. Treasury’s failed bond auction and what it signals for the dollar. They break down the Senate’s landmark stablecoin bill (and Elizabeth Warren’s meltdown), Ethereum’s ZK miracle that could 100x Layer 1 throughput, and Texas launching its own state Bitcoin reserve. Plus, why Stanley Druckenmiller’s portfolio strategy might justify going all-in on crypto—and whether alt season is finally on the horizon. ------ 📣 RE | REAL-WORLD (RE)STAKING https://bankless.cc/Re ------ 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 🌐CELO | PROVE YOUR SELF https://bankless.cc/Self 🟠HEMI | BTC & ETH, ONE NETWORK https://bankless.cc/hemi ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 0:31 Stanley Druckenmiller https://x.com/mrexits/status/1925354907382816880 3:40 Markets https://x.com/glassnode/status/1925225568817099260 https://x.com/btc_archive/status/1925468871449866309 https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/1925401414659867102 https://x.com/Cointelegraph/status/1924676563582267643 https://x.com/CryptoRank_io/status/1923875599275143300 https://x.com/cburniske/status/1925482199727710648 https://www.reuters.com/business/tepid-demand-us-treasury-auction-shows-investor-jitters-about-tax-bill-deficit-2025-05-21/ 20:42 U.S. About to Pass a Landmark Stablecoin Bill? https://x.com/SenatorHagerty/status/1924933844001521787 https://x.com/eleanorterrett/status/1924504745689153812 https://x.com/WayneVaughan/status/1924660740847222832 https://x.com/intangiblecoins/status/1925247754969797007 https://x.com/cburniske/status/1924705825723187343 https://x.com/CampbellJAustin/status/1925170860140249445 33:48 ETHEREUM IS SAVED. Bet it all on zk! Real-time proving is coming to Ethereum! https://x.com/drakefjustin/status/1924929057676001466 https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/1925050155922862526 https://x.com/pumatheuma/status/1925231968117277066 https://x.com/SuccinctLabs/status/1924523978703740963 45:26 Solana’s next leap: the proposed “Alpenglow” consensus https://x.com/Austin_Federa/status/1924498049482559677 https://www.anza.xyz/ https://x.com/gttyson/status/1924519192101061035 47:57 FIGHT FOR RWAS https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1925577606163829203 https://blog.kraken.com/news/tokenized-equities-coming-soon 48:58 BIG Sui Dex hacked https://x.com/Cointelegraph/status/1925509145366503486 https://x.com/SuiNetwork/status/1925572334054002774 https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/sui 52:13 SKY became the sole governance token of the Sky https://x.com/SkyEcosystem/status/1924515700564988354 https://upgrademkrtosky.com 53:54 Bitcoin community might rename sats to bitcoins https://x.com/jack/status/1924121538485178658 57:16 Texas Strategic Bitcoin Reserve bill officially passed - TEXAS loves crypto https://x.com/BitcoinMagazine/status/1925239389141049353 https://bitcoinlaws.io/tx 58:24 Galaxy was listed on Nasdaq - $7 billion https://x.com/galaxyhq/status/1923411961754108177 59:11 Hester Peirce’s “New Paradigm” speech (SEC Speaks, 19 May 2025) https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/speeches-statements/peirce-remarks-sec-speaks-051925 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1924539029346828608 -https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2025/05/20/sec-charges-unicoin-top-executives-with-100m-massive-securities-fraud 1:01:39 DOJ is investigating Coinbase data breach & Circle Rumors? https://cointelegraph.com/news/justice-department-coinbase-data-breach https://www.coindesk.com/business/2025/05/20/circle-has-explored-potential-5b-sale-to-coinbase-or-ripple-instead-of-ipo-report 1:04:00 Closing & Disclaimers 1:04:26 Moment of Zen https://x.com/mrexits/status/1925354907382816880 ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Bankless Nation, it is all-time high week. Bitcoin all-time high week on the Bankless Weekly Roll-up. Wow, feeling good going to this episode. David, how much of your liquid net worth is in Bitcoin? And I hope that answer is a lot. I would say my liquid net worth in the top two crypto assets is something like 95%. So pretty concentrated bet. Wow. Wow. You know what? I would caution you and I would say that's probably a bad idea, but instead I'm going to play this clip from legendary investor, Stanley Druckenmiller. My idea of risk control is a little non-conventional.

I like putting all my eggs in one basket, and I'm watching the basket very carefully. There you go, David. Stanley says it's okay. Your strategy is fine. You don't have to be diversified. You just got to watch those baskets very carefully. You know, I've never really been a fan of diversification.

It's just not exciting. I'm a content producer who needs like excitement and thrill in his life. And let me tell you, that doesn't come from a diversified basket of, you know, multiple different asset class assets. Like, no, okay, I was actually wrong. It's not 95% my networks because I do have like a pretty good amount of hood and coin. And so I have equities that.

Oh, yeah. That's exposure. I own equity companies that sell crypto. And then I own the crypto that they sell too as well. Dracon Miller would approve. Actually, you know what? At the end of this episode, I'm going to play the rest of the clip because it's just timeless advice if you're doing something like the crypto barbell. The beat in the background really adds a lot of flavor.

I couldn't help that, so we put that in there. That wasn't me. David, we got a busy roll-up today. First, we've got to talk about this landmark stable coin bill. That's the Genius Act. There's a key vote in the Senate. It passed that vote. But does that mean it's passed?

Is this now a law in the United States of America? The fight is not over. We'll talk a bit about that. Also, the United States cannot find any buyers for its bonds. The treasury auction happened last night, and no one was really taken the bid. So what does that mean? I didn't buy any bonds. Yeah, clearly our demand was not expressed in that market. Bond yields are up. What does that mean for everything else? And is that why Bitcoin is that all-time high? Also, in Crypto-Land, there's a week of upgrade. So not quite for Ethereum yet, but there's some exciting ZK miracles on the horizon.

We'll talk about that in the story of how to scale. Ethereum Mainnet, the layer 1 to 10,000 transactions per second. Also, Salana, with a big announcement this week, talking about their own beam chain. This is like a major consensus engine upgrade to Solana. At least that's what's being proposed. We'll talk about that. And then also, Texas is the first state to create a Bitcoin reserve. That makes sense.

Texas. Yeah. I feel like it would be Texas. It would be Texas. Yeah. So how much are they buying? And are they buying anything else? We're going to get to all of this and more.

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So you can earn real yield by backing insurance premiums. You should probably do your homework before you do this. But if you want to do your homework, banklist.c.c.c. slash re-re to get started. Oh, stablecoin yields. Love that story. Uncorrelated. Uncorrelated.

Here's another story I like, which is the price of Bitcoin on the week. Just give it to a strike because we're at all-time highs at the time of recording. So what's the price of Bitcoin right now? Up 8% on the week to 111,300. What is that all-time high number? If you scroll down a little bit, going to get it will tell you the actual all-time high mark.

Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. There. 111-1-5-12. 1-1-1-1-5-2. It's the new number to beat, which we are within $200 of.

Oh, dude. 8% on the week, 8% on a $2 trillion asset. On Bitcoin is pretty nuts. That's a lot. That's pretty nuts. So not only this, David, I wanted to wish you happy Bitcoin Pizza Day.

Happy Bitcoin Pizza Day. How many of our listeners do you think are not aware of what Bitcoin Pizza Day is? Few, because I think our listeners are incredibly crypto-savvy, and they've been with us for a very long time on this journey, David. But why don't you tell us the story of Bitcoin Pizza for those who have forgotten or for those who maybe just don't celebrate this? Yeah, Bitcoin Pizza Day is the first transaction involving Bitcoin for, like, a real commerce. It was real commerce.

And so one individual Laslo Hyensis just posted on, I think, the Bitcoin talk forums, said, hey, I'm interested in purchasing pizza with Bitcoin. And there was no price for Bitcoin at the time. It was not trading. This was May 22nd, 2010. 15 years ago. 15 years ago, yeah. And so some person said, oh, I will accept Bitcoin and I will call your local dominoes and I will send you pizza. It was Papa John's, fun fact.

Excuse me. Excuse me. Dominoes. Get that out of here. These two individuals agreed to a price of two pizzas for 10,000 Bitcoin. So this one individual called up the Domino's by Laslo's house, or sent him two cheese pizzas, maybe pepperoni, I don't know. And then Laslo sent this man 10,000 Bitcoins. And that was the first real world commerce transaction of Bitcoin. I'm looking at the pizzas here.

I see one cheese, definitely. One cheese, and one's like kind of in everything. Got some olives and peppers. Yeah, there's some bell, yeah, peppers. Yeah, for sure. And the one side, the one side might also be cheese. Honestly, I'm going to tell you, Ryan, these pieces do not look very good. They were expensive pizzas.

Let me tell you, because it's just 10,000 Bitcoin. Give us, what's the price of that right now, these two pizzas? These two very mid-looking pizzas were purchased for what is now worth, $1.2 billion today. Wow. It's funny that the first use case of Bitcoin is money was actually not as a store of value. It was money as a medium of exchange. As a medium machine.

So I get some pizza. Anyway, happy Bitcoin Pizza Day. Tell me about ETH Price in the week. I will tell you, Ryan, how many weeks have you been back on the weekly roll-up? This is number four? Yeah. Are you to tell me it's always been green since I've been back? It has been green every single week since you have been back.

Coralation or concession? We are at four. And four is starting to be crossing the line of, okay, this is like four, like we are in that line of like, you know, three is just not a big deal. 4 is like, okay, I'm seeing a pattern here. Something's happening. If we start to get like six or seven, I'm going to be like, what's going on here? Just got the magic, David. I don't know.

These roll-ups. ETH is up 4.5% on the week. This is the first week that Eith was up less than Bitcoin on the week. So maybe Ryan's losing a little bit of his magic, but not. We'll be back. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Also, it's worth noting that ETH supply on exchanges has dropped below 4.9%. So the total supply of ETH, less than 4.9% of that is on centralized exchanges. Now, there's like a bunch of noise in this chart. So if you go and you put your ETH inside of Coinbase and then you stake it, that leaves the exchange technically. Oh, it does. It does. Yeah. I mean, it depends on how they count it.

But yeah. So, I mean, there's not as much signal in here as there was. But nonetheless. But generally, yeah. What does that mean? Why is that a good thing? It means it's easier for her ETH to move in price. And also, like, there's just, like, there's just, like, there's just,

less eth on exchanges to be sold. And so incoming dollars can move the price more when there is less supply on exchanges. There are like 10,000 other variables that also go into that. So I don't like rely on that. But it's worth noting. I choose to interpret this as bullish, David. It could only be bullish. It could only be bullish. Bitcoin is also super low too on exchanges too. So it's bullish both those assets. I think a big question though is with Bitcoin doing this well is are we going to get that old season, okay? This is a chart of Bitcoin dominance right now. Okay, this is over the last couple of years. Look at, we're at about 63% Bitcoin dominance. So Bitcoin dominance, of course, is a measure of Bitcoin as a ratio of all the other crypto assets combined. You've got like

7% of stable coins in here. Bitcoin dominance has been ebbing up all the way from, I guess, you know, 2023 up until now, and we're at 63%. So at this point in the cycle, you're looking at Bitcoin. It can't be stopped. It's like Bitcoin's world. We're just living in it. And the question that crypto folks are asking is like, are we going to get an alt season? Because we get alt seasons in previous bull markets. Guy where there's alt seasons?

Yeah. So here's an example of an alt season, right? It's when the Bitcoin goes down. This happened in a hurry. So this happened from January, like 2021 to last until about, I don't know, six months. A good six months of a massive runoff. on everything else. When Bankless went from niche to huge?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember those heady days. So, do we get an alt season? I know Arthur Hay's answered in this because the episode, if you listen to it, came out Monday. He was like, yes, we will get an alt season. It just may not be your alts. Right, right, right. Yeah.

Yeah, back then, there were very few alts. There are quite a lot of alts now. Sure, sure. And I don't really like calling Ether an alt, but I kind of think we have to. Like when Ether is just like 15% of the market and Bitcoin is like 64%. It feels much more like an alt, right? Even though I think it's the most legitimate number two, it's still like, it's an all, right? Directionally, I think alt just means downstream from Bitcoin.

And the further away from Bitcoin, the more alt-y that you are. And also it's worth noting that like Ethereum leaned into Altz via the creation of the ERC-22. token. Sure. And so it was, you know, Ethereum was the original pump fund. And so it spawned ALTS as a product. And so it is the leader of the alts in the sense that it was the first platform to create tokens on.

Yeah, I just, I resist alt. I still just like, I'm going to switch back to not calling Ether and alt. It's like slightly like you're punching down. I feel like Bitcoin calls all these alts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like I don't know what their names are. I don't even think about them. They're just the alts.

I don't know what they're called. Once, once Ether is back to like, you know, above 20% in terms of market capels. You know, stop calling it. But fair game out. Anyway, this is Chris Merninski saying, if ETH keeps making moves against Bitcoin, which it is, David, that ratio.

Actually, you mentioned it since I came back, huh? The ratio of the Bitcoin ETH ratio is doing quite well. And Chris says, may all your bags moon for a period. So he seems to think that ETH is going to be a leading indicator for alt season. Yes. ETH, BTC goes up during all season. That's how it works. That's how it's been.

Do you think it will continue to be like this? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I do. I definitely do. When capital moves down the market cap stack, ETHBTC goes up. Okay. You know a market that's not finding any buyers these days is the good old bond market, David. Do you see this? Never bought a single treasure in my life. Let me tell you. You should, you own like dollars, right? You just don't store like your wealth in dollars, I guess. I own like some dollars, yeah. All right. Well, any dollars you own, if it's like any substantial amount, you shouldn't actually own dollars unless you're going to spend it in the next couple of months. months. You should own treasuries, right? The dollars that I have, I'm going to spend in the next

couple of months. Okay. All right. Again, back to the Druck and Miller like thing. That's how David rolls. But they were trying to sell some bonds in the market this week. And here's the headline from Reuters. Tepid demand for U.S. Treasury auction shows investor jitters about tax bill deficit. So what's going on? What's going on is bond prices spiked, David, particularly long-duration bonds. Let me show you chart of what happens when there's tepid demand. David, this is 30-year government bond yields for U.S. 30-year treasuries, and this is rates, interest rates, spiking up. Right.

Yep. You have to pay people more, right? Investors are going to want more interest. Right? If they're going to lock in to a 30-year bond. And this is like price over time. It's now above 5%. Yeah, that's...

You're zooming all the way out to 2020. Can you go even further? Can you turn their candles to like a month-long candles? It has been worse. It has been worse. Not since 2007. Yeah. Wow. What happened then, right? Wow. Okay. So what actually happened was on Wednesday, there was a long-duration bond, the 20-year actually with about 16 billion of 20-year bonds hitting the market.

And that's when bond prices started to spike because they couldn't find enough buyers. And so, David, if you're thinking about something like, you know, 5%, that's almost like, that's worse. It's worse than my mortgage, my personal home mortgage. Right? Yeah, that's a 30-year fixed rate. It's a bad deal for the government. Exactly. And, okay, so if we're paying high interest rates, what does that mean, do you think,

for, like, the deficit in general, U.S. deficit? Yeah. I mean, it's not great because you have to print more money to cover your debts. So if you have 20-year yields at 5%, if you have $1,000, what are you going to get back in 20 years? Exactly. That's what investors are asking. Oh, I'm asking you, actually. What am I going to get back in 20 years?

What does it $1,000 get you at a 5% yield over 20 years? Just like the 5% annual return for like 20 years. Yeah, yeah. $1,000, yeah, $2,600. Right, right. So people are evaluating the dollar is going to like lose that much of its value. Two and a half times. This is a chart of U.S. federal debt.

You've seen this chart before, but look at a spike up. Like, would you lend to this guy? Let me tell you, I would love to ski down that slug. That looks sick. All the way up to $36 trillion. And as a reminder, who owns this debt? Two-thirds of it is public debt held by U.S. investors, and about a third is held by, you know, foreign investors. So Japan, China, they'd be at the top of the list.

Why do you think this is happening, David? Why are investors, like, not confident in these bonds? Why are they demanding higher rates in order to hold them? I think this was always inevitable. That's always been the deal when you have, like, unsustainable debt. The spark that lit the fire is the Trump tariff shenanigans, which has removed international emphasis on the United States as the like loki of finance and reinvestment. And so we would print money. We would buy the, like foreign goods.

Foreign goods would come into the country. Our dollars would go out of the country. But then the dollars would come back into the country when they would buy our bonds. Except that last leg has not been happening. Instead, people are buying gold and also Bitcoin. which is why gold is at all time high and why Bitcoin's at all time high. And so instead of the United States stock market and Wall Street being the epicenter of all of finance, that is being, I kind of think gold all time high is kind of this limbo period.

Well, people don't really know where to allocate their capital because they don't know what the next epicenter of finance is. So they're just parking it somewhere. There's parking it somewhere. And then they're looking for like, what's the next Wall Street? Where can I get the best yields? Sure. And like I think that has been this whole theory, this whole thesis of this arc of nations and the capital centers of the world has been the thing that we've talked about on bankless the entire time and why we're bullish on incredibly neutral internet based financial systems on the internet. That's where it's all going.

Well, it's definitely it's definitely tariffs. You're totally right. Some people also thought that Republicans would take control the government. They'd fix deficits. But did you see Trump calls this the big beautiful bill? This is the Republicans bill that's in the House right now for their new tax bill. And this tax, the proposal here would actually add three to five trillion to the deficit. More debt over the next 10 years.

He wants to cut taxes. He also cut taxes without raising revenue. He also cut like 60% of the IRS staff, which means they can't even collect their own money. Right. And so this leads to things like, I don't know if you saw this this week, Moody's downgraded U.S. sovereign debt again, right? Moody's is a rating agency. Anyway, this stuff's getting priced in.

So the reality is there's a lot of long-dated bonds that Treasury Bessent is trying to sell. And this week, they're having a little bit of trouble selling them. I mean, there's still buyers. I don't want to overstate this case, but you can kind of see investors demanding account. There were less buyers today than there were yesterday. Yes.

I think that's going to continue. This is the Arthur Hay's thesis. It's playing out. What do we have next? Coming up next, the Genius Act, Stablecoin bill, pass a key vote in the United States Senate, not the vote, but nonetheless a key vote. It's a pretty big deal.

What does the Genius Act do? What does it mean for issuers and holders? Who's left pushing back on the Genius Act? Who doesn't like stable coins? We're going to talk about that. And then after that, Ethereum's ZK Miracle on the cusp of accelerating the layer one by not 10x, but something like 100x throughput on the layer one, meaning we could also reduce block times to what does all of this mean and what was just announced?

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discover ways to interact, participate in the leaderboard program, and be part of the community that's uniting Bitcoin and Ethereum. There was a key vote this week in a landmark stablecoin bill in the U.S. Senate. This is Senator Bill Haggerty. He's commenting on the bill. I'm a leader Thune, and I would like to say to everyone, I look forward to making history, hopefully this week, as we continue to make progress on the Genius Act. What does it do? I think it's very important to understand this. We're modernizing the payment system here in America. We're going to put America at the forefront. of innovation rather than having America behind is the caboose. This is a dramatic new technology. Innovation is happening here in America.

I don't want to see it pushed offshore. I want to see it happening right here. The implications of this are incredible in terms of protecting consumers. Today, it's an unregulated market. What will do is make certain that everyone knows that stable coins are backed by U.S. dollars and that those dollars are backed up by cash and short-term U.S. Treasury, the highest quality instruments, so that these instruments can be used for digital. trade all over the world. This will ensure U.S. dollar dominance. It will advance our position as a reserve currency in the world rather than see the retreat and decline that we might

otherwise experience. The other thing that it will do is it will stimulate demand for United States' treasuries. In fact, the projections are that by the end of this decade, stable coin issuers here in the United States will be the number one holders of U.S. treasuries in the world. Think about that I far prefer a benign stable coin issuer to the CCP. or other sovereign nations. So I think there's a lot to like about this bill. I appreciate the bipartisan support that we've received moving on to it. And I look forward again to making history with my colleagues later this week.

Thank you. Cool. I feel bad for talking some act about bonds just now. It looks like Senator Haggerty thinks there's going to be some buyers of bonds and they're going to be crypto users. Yeah, but I mean, we just get bonds at cheaper rates, right? Other people aren't buying them. So our stable coin companies get to buy them for cheap. Yeah.

Arthur Hayes made the point that what Scott Besson, Treasury, really needs to sell is the long duration stuff, the 20 year, 30 year. Like, treasuries are just like the short, like short term. It's almost like cash in the belly. It's really, though. Like you buy a bunch of short terms and the long terms get better. For sure. Okay, so the senator alluded to some of this, but what's in the bill?

It's basically like standards laws for how to become a stable coin issuer inside of the United States. And so it just sets some rules for stable coins from issuers. So stable coins must be fully backed one by liquid assets. No, no taroluna shenan shenanigans. here. No taroluna shenanigans. Like you can't back your stable coin by Bitcoin or like a crypto asset or like even equity. You have to back it by actual dollars or short term cash like instruments like short term treasuries. Issurers must regularly disclose reserves also good. Ensures that coin holders will be prioritized in bankruptcy. So if you are a USDA

or a stable coin holder, you get paid first. So in the bankruptcy event, the holders of stable coins get the money paid out first. That makes sense. Mandates AML. That was always going to happen. And then it also tells, it states, who can be an issuer, according to the Genius Act.

That's banks and credit unions, non-bank entities, not limited to financial firms, but U.S. still register with the federal regulator. So you're opening up who can be a Sablecoin issuer, not just like a bank,

but who cannot be an issuer, large tech companies. Oh. And I feel like they're just pointing their finger at Mark Zuckerberg on that one. They don't want Amazon or Facebook or, like, Google to become stable coin issuers. Or Elon Musk for that matter. And X.

Yeah. Yeah. So they are separating, they're separating tech from finance and making those things stay separate, which is interesting because that is actually the opposite of the China strategy. They were like, yeah, throw it all together. Just centralize it all. Yeah. This is cool.

And this is basically what makes a stable coin a stable coin. It's the stable coin brand. This is not prohibiting things like dye, though, right? I mean, die can still exist. just won't be as stable coin as defined under the Genius Act? That's a good question. I don't know. I feel like I would have heard more outcry from defy the lobbyists if it was doing anything

bad to some of our existing. I'm going to assume die is in the clear. And I bet you that was a part of the whole transition from Maker Dow to Sky in the first place because Sky has the censorable whitelist on the Sky stable coin. And Die never did. So if this thing passes and keep in mind, this is a big. in the Senate, okay? And this vote, we'll get to the kind of the vote results.

This was a preliminary, it was a vote, and if it passed this vote, then they could vote on it. This was a vote as to testing the waters as to whether they wanted to do the real votes. But this was a water testing vote. It's a preliminary vote. Yeah, absolutely. It passed. It passed. And stable coins are 250 billion.

That's 7% of all crypto market cap. I mean, if this passes, this has a potential. Like, everybody is going to adopt stable. The fintech's been waiting at the visas, the master cards, all of them, stripes. They've got the infrastructure ready, and they're going to grow this thing into the trillions. I'm fairly certain of that. Heath is going to be very green that week, I will say. I mean, it shouldn't be.

I hope so. It's not on wood. There is some opposition, though, okay? So we'll get to the vote in a minute, but there is some opposition from the anti-crypto army. This is Senator Hegarty again on this. Well, the people that like centralized currencies. This is a decentralized concept. You know, you register with the various.

No, but I'm so interested in terms of who was trying to get meetings with you for the last year to say, please, this is a terrible idea. No one in the industry is doing that. Of course not. It has to do with my colleagues. And basically, it's gotten to be a question, and we'll find out tonight. We have broad policy agreement, Democrats and Republicans. The question is, can we get past the partisan politics and allow us to actually have a victory? I would enjoy having a bipartisan victory.

So there's nobody in industry who's saying this is a bad idea? No. So the only people who are saying it's a bad idea to you thus far are you're saying just other politicians. For what reason? It's politicians that want to see centralized control. Right. And a centralized control, if you want that, by the Diger 1, I don't want to see that happen here in America. I think it would be devastating for the dollar's value as a reserve currency.

This will actually perpetuate the dollar's value as a reserve currency. It will extend that momentum. It's going to extend demand for U.S. treasuries. There's a lot to like about this. How cool is it some of the same talking points that we were saying. saying like three years ago about how it would extend the dollar, the brand of the dollar, it would be buyers of treasuries. You're seeing it now from senators on CNBC.

It's pretty cool. That's interesting framing that like the people that don't want this or the people who don't like decentralized stable coins, right? And it's more like decentralized networks, right? It's like obviously these stable coins are still centralized. They're still kind of one-to-one treasuries. They're government issued. But I guess from Haggerty's perspective, these are much more kind of decentralized because

they're using, you know, open blockchain networks than the previous, you know, closed ledger regimes. So he's talking about some opposition here. Yeah, who is he talking about? Which, who is the people that he is saying are the people that just want control? Well, I don't know if you saw this image of Elizabeth Warren as the vote was going through just arms crossed. Okay, we're looking at a picture of Elizabeth Warren on the floor as the vote was happening, as Ryan just said. and she looks unhappy. She looks angry.

Oh, yes. Her arms are crossed. She's staring someone down. She looks like an angry lady. Okay, so what were the voting results for this vote in order to hold the vote, which is pretty, like, pretty significant? The voting came in, and it still trickled in for a while, but the vote came in at 6632 in favor. And so 16 Democrats joined Republicans to move the bill forward. And then, of course, oh, Chuck Schumer remained opposed.

Elizabeth Warren obviously remained opposed. And Chuck Schumer also remained opposed. I wonder why Chuck Schumer remained opposed because he was always kind of the pro-Crypto Democrat. Yeah, that's funny. I have no idea. And actually, actually, they got three more than the 66 that you mentioned. So you like this. 69.

69, let's go. 69, yes. Okay. So the significance of this is that's a lot of Democrats. Yeah, there's a lot of wiggle room. So if we go to the real vote and we can still lose votes and the vote will go pass. Okay. And the real vote happens sometime next week, it seems like.

So after Memorial Day, there'll be a real, real vote. But since it passed this preliminary vote, it's very likely going to pass the actual real deal vote. And then from there, so it's like approved in the Senate. And that's the hard congressional hall to kind of like be approved by. And then it goes to the House. Might be some changes there. Expect it to pass there. Basically, David, this thing looks like it's going to go.

We're going to get a landmark stablecoin bill in the U.S. And it's going to happen in the weeks to come. Yeah. I think as the order of events that happened, I think, like yesterday, was we got this vote in. And then Bitcoin started ripping, crypto started ripping. Then the failed treasury sale, not to fail, but like the weak sale of treasuries came and nuke to the market. And so Bitcoin went from like just breaking all time high. It was at like $109,000.

It went down to like $102,000. And then everyone was like, wait, weak treasury sales, that's bullish. And then Bitcoin went to $11,000. Yeah, I know. Okay, so let's say this thing passes. Looks like it's going to. We even talk to Mike Novogratz. He was like, hey, this thing's going to pass.

You know, I'm talking to people in D.C. So it passes. What's this going to be good for? What assets? How about our banks? I can't invest in a stable coin, David. I don't want to do that. I'm going to invest in a crypto asset that gets some, you know, upsurge from this.

So there's like 190, almost 200 billion in stable coins. Like, where do you think what percentage? Which chain has the largest percentage and what's that percentage? I haven't looked at this in a while. It's got to be Ethereum and it's got to be having around. I'm going to say 60%, 50%, 60%, because I know there's a lot on Tron still. There's a lot of Tron. Yeah.

And then everything else I thought it was like 66 to 70% on the Ethereum layer one. It's like $140, $150 billion of the stablecoins apply on the Ethereum layer one. So does Ethereum benefit from this? But also granted, we have seen that despite the absolute gargantuan growth of sable coins, that has not necessarily shown up in ETH price. For sure. This is Chris Brininski saying, if all the crypto assets, the Genius Act is probably most positive for ETH given its stablecoin base,

robust defy infrastructure and long-running institutional rapport. He says, Sol won't be too far behind. and Tron is the ignored Dark Horse for historical reasons. Let's see how it all plays out. I don't see the Tron argument here. Tron is a third world developing country like Stripe competitor. It's payments, not TVL. So more stable coins coming online.

Like, Tron, I don't know if that's going to help Tron. That's my take. Yeah, that's interesting. And what do you think about the banks? So do the banks like this? Are they not fans at this? No. No.

No. Okay. Because like, okay. Okay, so the circle-tether contract address on Ethereum or any other blockchain is the new bank account. And you have an account balance with, if you hold USC, you have an account balance with the USC token contract on Ethereum. You don't need an account with your Wells Fargo bank account anymore. Right. And so why do you need a bank account when you can just go get an account balance without KYC, without AML?

you can just go to Ethereum and you can get an account to balance of USC on chain. Wait, are you saying we could go bankless? I'm saying, like, that's always been the plan. At least commercial bankless. It's still a central bank instrument. But, yeah, the bank lobby really doesn't like this. And it's kind of interesting because Elizabeth Warren... I'm just shocked.

I mean, she chairs the Senate banking committee, right? Right. And it's sort of... She does what the bankers want. I'm just going to say it. At least when it comes to crypto. She cuddled the hell out of the banking industry post-2008. became their chief regulator and now they pay the compliance tax to the Warren and the government

and now they're in her pocket and now she's trying to do the same thing with us but it didn't really work as well. I wish it wasn't the case, but it is. But one thing the banks blocked, okay, one thing the banks blocked could not go through is actual yield. Okay. So they capitulated on, all right, stable coins. We know we can't block that. US has got to sell some treasuries. This is lots of support, right? But they can block and they have lobbied hard. against any of the stable coins actually giving you yield, David. So you know that nice treasury yield? That remains a security.

We're not going to give you that 5%. Tether gets to keep its massive margins, right? And so does USDC and all the staple coin issues. Okay. So that's still the banks inserting themselves as middlemen here. Yeah, that's unfortunate. I guess that could, in theory, stay around for a while. Like, you could just pass another law or an amendment to the law and change that,

but I can see that being around for a while. But I still get yield in Avey, so fine. That's going to be a fight. I think that's going to be a fight. All right, David, tell me about Ethereum's ZK miracle. What is this? Okay, so this is big news this week that was going around the Ethereum crypto Twitter side of things. This got started by Justin Drake, but then also followed by Uma, talking about real-time proving. So what does that mean? It has always been the plan for Ethereum to turn into a ZK ecosystem as soon as zero-knowledge cryptography was ready. And real-time proving means we can make proofs, ZK proofs, in real time. What is real time? that is sub second or excuse me sub block time and so Ethereum layer one has 12 second blocks if we can make a ZK proof in faster than 12 seconds then you get you unlock a bunch of scaling benefits what does a ZK proof do to right now all blockchain nodes have to re-execute all blocks to check their validity and that's what slows everything down every single node needs to re-execute everything it's the same computation done over and over and over again on every

single node with a ZK proof they just have to check the validity of a ZK proof. So the way that this works is only one computer has to solve the Sudoku puzzle, and then they can show the Sudoku puzzle around to all the other nodes, and they just have to check that the Sudoku puzzle is correct. Just one honest actor. Yes, just one honest actor does the work. Everyone else checks the correctness of a Sudoku puzzle.

It's easy to check the correctness of a Sudoku puzzle. It's hard to actually do a Sudoku puzzle. The way that current blockchains work, Solana, Bitcoin, all of them. every node re-executes all. So every node does the Sudoku puzzle. With real-time proving, only one node has to do the Sudoku puzzle and they can show their work.

And if we can get the proving time, the creation of a proof below 12 seconds, that's what unlocks this. Now, it has to be below 12 seconds for every single block. And so right now, 99% of all Ethereum layer one blocks are proved in less than 13 seconds.

So we're pretty damn close. And that's why I dress and drivet tweeted out this tweet saying real-time proving is here. What does this unlock? This unlocks two main things. This unlocks very strong cross-chain composability from Ethereum's layer two ecosystem if they can all be proved in real time because then the state of one layer two can be referenced by another layer two. So that's great. But I think the really exciting thing, Ryan, is that we get to turn the layer one into an enshrined ZK roll-up. So we will decouple the execution layer of the Ethereum layer one from the consensus layer. And that,

that the layer one will be able to like do a 100x on throughput because of real time proving, ZK proving. And so all of the speed of all these rollups that we've been talking about, like how base is at like trying to go for a gigagas and all this kind of stuff. The Ethereum layer one turns into having the execution capacity of a ZK rollup. And it goes from like where it is now with 12 second blocks. It'll still have 12 second blocks, but it'll have a thousand. hundred hundred times larger block sizes

and then as ZK proving times go even lower we can start to reduce the block times as well which I'm a big fan of. So this is all possible because the cost and the time required for ZK proofs is basically on an exponential curve and it's kind of like collapsing down and it's happening faster than anyone thought.

So if this seems like it's kind of out of nowhere, it is in a way but the Ethereum ecosystem has been working on ZK tech for a while, the exponentials are just catching it up to make this kind of viable. Yes. Yeah. This is research and like development that the Ethereum Foundation has been investing in for years. And so like when everyone was complaining about the EF, like selling their ETH, like it's stuff like this that is what it was being applied for.

Yeah. I mean, I think the bottom line for me, to me, is that this does a couple of things. One, you know that whole mantra of scale the L1, scale the L1. This provides a credible path to scale the L1. Ethereum layer one to 10,000 transactions per second. Yes. Okay? That's 100x scalability.

And we don't have to wait for one big bang for that to happen, right? There's Donkrad's a plan to kind of increase gas limits. We've been talking about that. We could do a 3x every year, for instance, and get all the way to 10,000 transactions per second. Now, if you kind of split the difference because everyone's like, what's the timeline? Justin Drake is super optimistic. He thinks this could happen in three years, okay?

Donkrad thinks this could happen in six. Six? Split the difference. Split the difference. You get four and a half. Something like that. Four and a half years? Okay.

But that's for all 10,000 transactions per second. Okay. And then realize we're doing like, we could do it like a 3x every year. And by the way. Okay. A 3x every year is great because that compounds pretty fast. Exactly. And okay, so it does that.

You're scaling the L1. And it also, as you said, the L1 becomes basically a base native roll-up. So we take all the L1 execution. It's a base native roll-up. And that acts, David, as a gravity well for all of the other roll-ups that are just posting data availability on Ethereum to, like, come closer, become base native roll-ups themselves because they want the benefits of interoperability. You know that. And if everything's a base-native roll-up, everything becomes Ethereum. Then it all works.

And we get the United Chains of Ethereum. It all works. It's the grand plan. Everything comes closer to the center. Yeah. Ethereum just integrates the layer twos. Did you see even, you know, Eric Wall is kind of like, you know, Bitcoiner. He likes Ethereum, but he's kind of a skeptic, right?

Like I saw him tweet out, he's like, Ethereum is saved. Like, Ethereum might, this actually might save Ethereum. This is kind of the ZK miracle that can really scale Ethereum L1s. And it's just like magic cryptography tech that I think Ethereum's been betting on for a while. But now it could actually like make this whole United Chains of Ethereum thing work. Yeah, it's on a horizon. 3x every single year starts to like compound pretty fast. And this is always been Ethereum.

like long-term L1 scaling plan. And this is the, this is like Ethereum has been always, you know, focused on the end game, perhaps to a fault. Perhaps like Ethereum lost touch with the middle game, which like Solana has taken advantage of just by optimizing for engineering. But this is the end game. And we're actually starting to arrive at the beginning of the end. And that is starting to like show up in the, in around the Ethereum ecosystem. We'll include some links in the show notes to some references here. Vitalik had some things to say.

He's like, okay, hold on it. We're not quite ready yet. We need this to get formally verified. We still need the proving, like, amount of work and energy that goes into proving. There can still be bugs. There can still be bugs. Yeah. So that still needs to go down.

There's other things. Uma from Sysynct, who's part of the ZK magic that makes this all possible, had responses to that where actually formal verification, at least for Sysink, is happening like now. And that could be, like, mere months away. So anyway, I do think that this is pretty optimistic. It's pretty good. It's pretty bullish. Speaking of Sysk, so some of the ZK Prover Tech that makes this possible, they're launching

a Prover network this week as well, or have they done that? Yeah, so they're launching the Sysinct Prover Network and also their Prove token because that's what all networks need. So they're basically decentralizing the system of Sysinct because we need a decentralized set of Provers. Provers are the people who run the hardware to generate the Sudoku puzzles. We need a decentralized network of those people. who do the jobs of proving the Ethereum layer one and also layer two or really anyone who makes a request for work.

Right. And they make a request for work to the decentralized set of nodes with the prove token, which got announced this week. So I think Sucinct is like, yo, we're fucking ready, guys. Yeah, I know, I know. Let's go. Let's go. Yeah, they're chopping at the bit. Yeah.

Yeah, it's because, so right now the work required to prove actually requires GPUs, which is interesting. You can't quite do it at home because it would be like the equivalent energy. requirement of having 10 Teslas plugged in at the same time at your house. Now, the hope is to get that down to just one Tesla, so you can actually do it at home. But remember, you just need, it's a one event. So you only need one honest actor. You still run the validators at home. You just need one Prover out there.

And this decentralized network is the Prover network to still keep that full thing decentralized too. It's beautiful. Part of what the Ethereum Foundation has been investing in is like building out like marketable and purchasable ZK Prover like A6. I don't know, I'm the A6, but like pieces of hardware. Yeah, yeah. And so, like, it's not going to be, like, in your local fries or on Amazon, but you, if you want to,

if you're a hobbyist staker, and you also want to ZK prove the chain, like, yeah, that's something that you would want to do. Yeah. And you just buy one of those things, plug it into your wall. I don't know how loud it is. Maybe not that loud. Yeah, you might have to talk to your significant other about this, you know, before you'll start. Yeah.

But, like, that's the idea. That's the idea. That's also one of the things that Ethereum Foundation has been investing in. Coming up next, we're going to talk about Salon. proposal to swap out their consensus chain and improve their speed. So this is Solana juicing up his consensus side of thing. So what we just talked about is Ethereum's execution layer. Salana's execution layer is Fire Dancer.

But then they're also doing a brand new consensus layer too. So we're going to talk about that. Also a massive hack in the Suey ecosystem will happen there. And then Jack Dorsey wants to rebrand Bitcoin's Satoshis, the smallest unit of account, to Bitcoins. I don't, I'm confused. Why? But there's other ideas out there.

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All right, Solana's next leap forward is the proposed Apple Glow Consensus layer. I don't know if you call it a layer in Solana. Whatever. So Onza, which is a Solana client team infrastructure spin out out of the Salana Foundation, I maybe. I do not know my Salana history very well. It wants to rebuild Salana Consensus. And so they are doing these two new components, two new modules. Voter and rotor, voter, finalizes blocks in about 100 to 150 milliseconds,

often in just a single vote round. So Solana, every single Solana block has a bunch of votes. So all the validators are like, we're all voting what the correct block is. That this is happening with voter faster and can also happen if just less than, just 80% of the stake is online. So apparently this is a 100x speed up.

And then there's rotor, a lighter, faster, smarter gossip player that relays blocks with fewer hops and fair bandwidth, replacing turbine. So the blocks get gossiped faster. So what does this do? This just moves Salana closer and closer down to, let's like Web 2 latency territory, which has always been Salana's game. Consensus at the speed of light. So they can just power real-time trading, game and payments, blah, blah, blah, blah, all that kind of stuff. there are tradeoffs here so people are still kind of discussing these tradeoffs

there's this one individual who's like okay this is just going to consolidate Solana like a stake weight or validator centralization down to an even lower number of validators this conversation about like the impacts of Solana are just getting started here code is in simulation docs and migration tools are coming

but no there's no main net date and then also in parallel to that jumps Fire Dancer client which where is fire dancer like I thought Fire Dancer was supposed to be online by now Anyways, that's happening in parallel. Apparently, it's being targeted for the second half of 2025. Yeah, I mean, people are pretty excited about this.

It's kind of the increased bandwidth, reduced latency sort of roadmap. IBRL. But there do seem to be some tradeoffs. I'd like to hear more about this. Like the tweet that you're mentioning, this gentleman, Geran Tyson, says, as few as seven validators can now attack the network. I don't know if that's true. If this goes through or to what extent it's really true.

It's like, I feel like technical. minds have to kind of dig into this. But the net of it is, it feels like Solana just like doing more Salana things, right? Yeah. In the same way that we were just talking about. Solana is already so incredibly fast. How much faster do you think it needs to go?

We're at speed of light. We're getting close, though. Getting close to the speed of light. Right. Getting pretty close. It's, yeah. Also, I think there's going to be a real world asset battle here between, you know, Ethereum and maybe the Salana ecosystem, right?

So you mentioned a whole bunch of staple coins on ETH. it's definitely leading the charge. It's also leading of other like tokenized assets, like security. Non-stable coin tokenized rural assets. Yeah, look at this chart. It's got 10 billion. No one else is even close.

But this week... The non-Etherium people would want you to know, Ryan, that there are assets on Ethereum layer two that are included in that Ethereum bar. And those shouldn't be there because they're a separate chains, but that's up for your interpretation

is what's Ethereum, what's Ethereum, what's not Ethereum? Ethereum. You know that chains of Ethereum. But a win for Salaana this week, coming soon, Cracken takes Wall Street on chain with tokenized equities. Cracken is teaming up with backed to launch X-stock offerings, and they're doing that on Solana,

okay? Which is interesting because Cracken has a layer too. Yeah, Cracken has a layer too. They're doing on Salana. Why are they doing that? Don't know. Interesting, though. And that's definitely a win for Solana.

So the real world asset wars, I think, are going to continue this cycle. Yeah. Let's get into the biggest hack in a long time. So CETUS, CETUS protocol, which is the real world. the largest decks on sui was exploited leading to a halt in trading and also drained liquidity pools. So anything that had liquidity in these liquidity pools on this exchange just nuked by like 90% because all the suey got drained out of them. Even like USCC went down, like it turned into like 30 cents on a dollar because of the draining. All the suey coins got all the sue coins got just

just got absolutely wrecked. I don't hold any sui coins. Negative 70%. I don't know what these coins are. but ended up getting exploited for $200 million. So the wallet tied to this exploit currently holds about 13 million sui valued at $54 million. No one knows who did this, but they are moving that suey and buying ETH and sending it over to ETH somehow,

so they're just getting the hell out of the suey ecosystem. And for some reason, suey, the token price, is just flat. It's sound like 3%. It's like, I would call that flat for like a huge hack. what's interesting Ryan what is flagging in my brain is that sui validators

are censoring transactions from the hacker at the layer one level which like yeah it's just like what are we doing here what yeah like I kind of get it like Suey's new I kind of understand like that

Suey's not trying to go for like censorship resistant like layer one that Ethereum has they're trying to like protect user funds but it is like it's just showing like the man behind the curtain like this thing is censorable. Why I have a blockchain, right?

It's kind of notable that the sui hackers, where'd they go, David? Where did they go? Yeah, to Ethereum. They went to Ethereum and they bought Eith. Yeah. But also people, we have seen hacks on Ethereum where people leave Ethereum and go to Bitcoin.

And they go to Bitcoin. Yeah. But it's like Eith or Bitcoin. Right. What does that imply? So here's a fun question for. That's strong property rights for hackers are preserved on Ethereum and Bitcoin. And you know the whole question about.

Question about do we DCF, eth the asset or not? Okay. Okay, so 60 million buy from hackers. They bought ether. Okay? Where does that reflect in my DCF formula? Oh, wow. You just brought that out of no way.

Maybe $2 for the transaction fee. That gets in DCF. But 60 million in buy pressure for what? Ether the asset. Okay, I'm not saying it's great that hackers are doing it. But, okay. The protocol made no revenue, Ryan. It's net demand for ether as money, a censorship-resistant monetary system does not show up in DCF is part of the value proposition of U-Vs.

I think what you're talking about. It doesn't show up in the DCF, but I think you're alluding to the REV debate that happened this week. Yes, I am. And what I'm saying is there's a product called Ethereum Blockspace, and that shows up in discounted cash flow REV type form that was, okay? And there's another product called Ether the Asset, which is a non-sovereign store of value. and that shows up in $60 million of demand pressure when you're trying to get out of the centralized ecosystem and store your wealth somewhere else.

Mike drop, that's it. Done. Brother, I have no more money to buy anymore either. I don't know what you want for me. I don't know. You're fine. You're fine. Tell me about Sky, David.

Sky. Okay, so if you are an Maker Dow holder, you have a thing to do, which is you need to transfer your MKR into Sky in order to participate in governance, but also accrue the rewards from the Sky ecosystem, some all the benefits of Sky is going to Sky token. What is Sky? What is Sky though?

Sky is the brief random MakerDAO. They just rebuilt MakerDow from the ground up with a new governance token sky and then a new stable coin called USDS. That stable coin is now, like I alluded to earlier, censorable. It's got a white list that makes them compliant. And then so the governance token, formerly MKR is losing all of its governance powers and it's being transferred over to Sky. So if you are an MKR holder, you are going to start to become penalized for not transferring

your sky starting in like September. of this year. So that is a PSA. You're going to lose MKR for being a laggard. So go do that. I think there's a lack of enthusiasm as you're talking about this, you know, that's coming through. And it's not because like probably you hate the rebrand.

It's like for me too or I hate the rebrand. It's because Maker was like an OG Defi protocol that kind of like, I mean, I love that brand. It's sort of convinced me of Defi back in the day. It's like, It created, it invented defy. Yeah.

And so it's just sad to see Maker go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Especially with the, like it's one thing to be sad about the brand, but it's also another thing to be sad about, uh,

losing the uncensurable properties of dye. Uh, Maker Dow was where I cut my first teeth. Like before I started writing content about Ethereum, I was writing content about Maker Dow. That's how we met, dude. It's how we met.

It's how we met. Maker articles about the, like yeah. And then, yeah, it's the first article led to, led to the bankless podcast. So end of an era.

there. And speaking of rebrands, there's some rebrand talk going on in the Bitcoin space. This is Jack Dorsey. So, of course. We're not changing the Bitcoin name. Bitcoin is still Bitcoin. Bitcoin is still Bitcoin. But what we're debating about is the smallest denomination of a Bitcoin, which has been historically called a SAT for a Satoshi, a single Satoshi. But I think Bitcoiners are just aware that like that name has not, that nomenclature is not catching on. Okay. So they're trying to like reconsider that. He wants to call it. So he says there. Sats are so confusing to people just getting into Bitcoin. Bits of Bitcoin are better. And just Bitcoin is best. So I think he wants to call Sats bits.

Either bits or Bitcoins. Is that the conversation? It can't be Bitcoins. That's the same name. Well, if it has an S on it. No. No, because what if you own multiple Bitcoins? Yeah.

Well, Bitcoin could be Bitcoin, like, could be plural for Bitcoin, too. Do you know? We are getting, we are in the process of getting confused. I like bits. I think it's, Bitcoin's? Yeah. Yes.

Will bits? Send me, send me some bits. Yeah. What about stacking sets? Dude, that's a big, that's a Bitcoiner thing. That's Bitcoiners, buy Bitcoiners for Bitcorners. I don't understand why people can't understand that there's Bitcoin. I like bits.

It's like a, what's smaller, a bit or a bite? It's a bit. A bit, a bite is eight bytes? Uh. Or a bit is eight bytes. A bit. A bit is. smaller than a bite. Right. Yeah. It's the smallest unit of like data on the internet. And it's also

a smallest unit of Bitcoin. Bits and Bitcoins. That makes so much sense. Well, how do you go about changing this? All right? It's like, well, like, what do you do? Is this a government? You cuddle people on Twitter. Yeah. Until they conform. It's a social thing. But there's actually a Bitcoin improvement proposal that was put forward. BIP 177 proposes redefining Bitcoin's base unit by making one Satoshi equal one Bitcoin. Currently one Bitcoin is a hundred thousand, no, 100 million Satoshes. Right. So I guess people are debating this, talking about this, but ultimately this is kind of a social change. This is about how exchanges in Bitcoin land. Yeah, so there's definitely prioritize this over the quantum issue. Yeah. So there's some back and forth, right? Some people, the bits supporters say the U.S. dollar can be divided into sense. The Americans call these a penny. They don't seem to get confused about that. So basically, why not stats?

and the other people are like, hey, you know, Bits is less confusing. Bits is way better. I guess I need to weigh in on this. I will take the opposite. I like Sats, David. I'm a traditionalist. Bitcoin Bits. Bitcoin Bits.

It's always been Sats. It should always be Sats. If Sats was going to catch on, it was going to catch on by now. It hasn't caught on because it's so tiny right now. I actually think one of the reasons why it has not caught on is because if we're going to talk about Sats and Bits, Yeah. We're talking about it as like a medium of exchange currency, like send me some bits. Yeah.

But no one's doing that. So no one, we don't really need to bother to go that many decibels down the line. Yeah, you're right. You're right. I mean, for this to matter, Bitcoin would have to be worth, I don't know, millions, you know, tens of millions, right? Based on that's a plan. You're like dollars and cents and dollars that kind of thing. And then it would actually matter.

You know who is stacking some bits, if that's your preference, David? I think they are stacking bitcoins, actually. This is the state of Texas, rolling out their own strategic Bitcoin Reserve. This is a bill that officially passed. Let's play the clip. Great. Thank you, Mr. Speaker, members. Today is a pivotal moment in securing Texas's leadership in the digital age with the passage of our strategic Bitcoin Reserve. Now we embrace a modern asset with traditional properties, but future promise. This reserve not only strengthens our fiscal sovereignty, but positions Texas as a forward-thinking state prepared for the evolution of global finance.

I move passage. There you go. Texas is going to have an official Bitcoin reserve. It's not just Bitcoin, fun fact. So this is a dedicated fund managed by the state comptroller to invest in any crypto asset with a market cap above $500 billion. So that could be ether. Ether at $320 billion.

Yeah, we get a 4K Ether. Wow. That's actually completely reasonable. I'm kind of shocked. Yeah, so it's not just Bitcoin. It's a general strategic reserve, but obviously Bitcoin's going to lead that thing. Right. Right, right, right, right. Wow. Interesting. It's worth highlighting this week that Galaxy Digital was listed on the NASDAQ.

So they were previously listed on the Canadian Stock Exchange. But sorry, Ryan. Honestly, who cares about that? And so congrats to Galaxy Digital for getting listed on the NASDAQ in the capital center of the United States, even though that is also getting smaller. I think that's worthwhile. Like, you know, United States company now on the NASDAQ. United States crypto company now on the NASDAX. So that's pretty cool. We did an episode with Mike Novigratz recorded yesterday.

That will be out for early access. next week for premium subscribers, but they'll be out on the podcast feed the week after that. Yeah. Nivergast said it's about liquidity. Liquidity, liquidity, liquidity. That's why you want to get on the NASDAQ. Yeah. He also said, I asked him, like, are you ever going to tokenize your Galaxy Digital on Ethereum?

And he was like, as soon as possible. And they are actively talking to the SEC to try and get that to happen. And they say it's going really well because that's the next thing I want to say is the SEC is still being kind of awesome on the week. Remember that was my thing last week? Weird, weird words. It's still my thing. So again, another Hester Perth speech, new paradigm speech.

Okay? And just some lines from this. She said, most currently existing crypto assets, wait for it, are not securities. Hey. She said it. She said it. In particular, this was a quote I pulled up. Crypto assets that do not represent economic rights or an interest in a business entity

or other promissor and are solely for use or consumption should not be subject to the federal securities laws. David, this means NFTs are in the clear, collectibles are in the clear. She's saying they've always been in the clear effectively. She said, Howie didn't cover this. And she's saying it out loud in a speech, posting the SEC website, complete 180 pivot. Basically, Hester Purse is now unleashed, right? Like, she's always had these thoughts. She's headed a task force, and now she just gets to say things and they become true, which is great. And they're cooperating very much with everybody in Prypto. So just like more awesomeness. By the way, they're actually still prosecuting the bad guys this time, okay?

That's unreal that we're like that this is the news. Do you remember people used to say, oh, crypto just doesn't want to be regulated? They don't want the SEC to do anything. Yes, we do. Please pursue the criminals that are like conducting fraud. Here's SEC charge to Unicoin top executives with $100 million massive securities fraud. Not Uniswap. No.

Not uni-chain. Yes. At the Uni token, there is this fake copy pasta doppelganger program called Unicoyne. I don't know where it came from, but it was always trying to fleece investors thinking that it was Uniswap. Well, do you ever see these cars in New York City? I mean, because they were all over New York. I never did.

Yeah, wow. Is it a fine, Ryan? $100 million. Okay. So this is like, this is basically a fraud. Hayden Adams would post this. This is actual fraud. Yeah, and he'd show pictures in New York City of like, you.

Unicoin being advertised on, like, you know, taxis, billboards, this sort of thing. And he's saying, SEC, you're doing nothing about Unicoin and you're coming after Uniswap? Yeah. Yeah. What's the deal? Excuse my French. Wells notice. Right.

What about these guys? Yeah. Anyway, like balances being restored. The universe is correcting. It's all good. The Department of Justice is also investigating Coinbase for that data breach we're talking about last week. So I'm sure some more details will emerge there.

It's looking ugly. It's looking like... Wait, wait, wait. Are they investigating Coinbase or are they investigating the Coinbase data breach? Because I think those words kind of matter. Yeah, I don't... Like, why do they matter, do you think? I mean, same kind of...

Are they, like, working with Coinbase to investigate the data breach? Or are they investigating Coinbase for, like, malpractice with their data breach? Good question. It doesn't seem great. Like, it really doesn't. It seems like from some details I was reading about where that the breach actually may have happened as early as December. Taylor Monahan was, like, reporting this out.

So it's been, like, a long time. There's tons of reports in the bankless community, everybody getting text messages, emails, from, you know, Coinbase reps trying to scan them. It's just an ugly thing that happened. There's that continuing debate. How much of this is Coinbase's fault? And there's definitely some Coinbase fault here. And how much of this is just a symptom of AMLKYC, where, like, all of these crypto companies

are forced, essentially, to hold customer data. Right. So anyway, this is a DOJ investigation. I think this will continue. I think it is they are working with Coinbase to investigate the data breach. That is, yeah, reading the article, it seems to be lean that way. Ah, okay, so they're trying to get the bad guys. Yes, they're just working with Coinbase to get the bad guys, yeah.

You know, Circle is still for sale, David, so there's still conversation about either Coinbase buying them or Ripple. That rumor persists. Circle could actually sell USDC to Ripple. Well, the rumor is that there's a bidding war between Coinbase and Ripple. over Circle. Which fun fact, there is a clause in the, uh, the Coinbase Circle deal that gives Coinbase veto rights over any other acquisition. Oh, really?

Yeah. Yeah. Wait, so then why is there, why is this even a discussion? I don't know. Okay. Well, we don't have that documents in front of us, but there seems to be something. I'm just out here, yeet and rumors. You know what?

It feels like everything's going so well. And like, why are we, why is you, why does Circle have to sell to ripple? Why don't, why even consider that? I just, I mean. This is not forward progress for the crypto. I think that they can get a better deal by being acquired than they can on the public market. That's why. What about the money?

Are you telling me it's all about the money? Yeah. It is. It's literally about the money. Guys, thanks for hanging with us in the weekly roll-up. I promise the end of this Stanley Drucken Miller clip. We're going to play the rest of it. And you guys enjoy.

Hopefully his advice is sound advice. But also, you know, consider some diversification as well. Right, David? Right, David? Yeah, sure. Yeah. Like a house. eventually. Here you go.

Risk and disclaimers, you know Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we're headed west. This is the frontier. Not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot. My idea of risk control is a little non-conventional. I like putting all my eggs in one basket, and I'm watching the basket very carefully. I think, I don't know what they teach at Marshall, but at most business schools, they teach, I think, a lot of nonsense It's called risk-adjusted return and diversification. As a money manager, if you look in a normal portfolio, most people will make 70, 80% of money that year on two or three ideas,

even though they'll have 30 or 40 things in their portfolio. My concept was to put into those two or three ideas that I had the most conviction in. I was also lucky to travel across asset classes, So I traded commodities, currencies, bonds, and equities. And it gave me the discipline. If I didn't have a good idea in equities, I was happy to have no equities. Or the same thing with bonds. So when you have a quiver with a bunch of arrows in it, you can usually find something to put a lot of money into.

The only other thing I'd say is too many investors look at the present. The president is already in the price. You have to think out of the box and sort of. visualize 18 to 24 months from now what the world is going to be and what securities might trade at. You know, what a company has been earning is ridiculous. It doesn't mean anything. What you have to look at is what people think, what a company is earning, what people think

it's going to earn. And if you can see something two years, it's going to be entirely different than the conventional wisdom. That's how you make money. My first boss used to say the obvious is obviously wrong. If you invest in conventional wisdom, you're going to lose your budget. Thank you.