Bankless - ROLLUP: Bitcoin's ATH Run | AI Memecoin Meta | Blobs Price Discovery | Microsoft Buying Bitcoin?

Episode Date: November 1, 2024

It's The Bankless Friday Weekly Rollup! In this episode, we dive into the rise of AI agents on blockchain, a surge in Bitcoin inflows ahead of a Trump-favored election, Ethereum “blobs” entering price discovery, and speculation around Microsoft potentially buying Bitcoin. ------ 📣 LEGION | MERIT BASED ICOs  https://bankless.cc/Legion  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2    ⁠ 🦄UNISWAP | BROWSER EXTENSION https://bankless.cc/uniswap  🪄 MAGIC EDEN | HOME OF WEB3 https://bankless.cc/MagicEden  🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle    🤖 0G | MAKING THE IMPOSSIBLE, INEVITABLE https://bankless.cc/0G ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/87?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 00:00:00 Start 00:04:03 Markets https://pro.kraken.com/app/trade/btc-usd  https://x.com/caprioleio/status/1850831666119623006  https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1850884568553013459  https://x.com/jords/status/1850983097808175152?s=46&t=2ZINVXJQKx6xO_6Wiiu_2g  https://www.coingecko.com/en/global-charts  00:13:52 L2 Update https://x.com/peterschroederr/status/1850556872727945285  https://x.com/dimahledba/status/1851535737482604681?s=46  https://x.com/dimahledba/status/1851183188288127237?s=46  https://x.com/dylankugler/status/1850997725111669044  https://x.com/sreeramkannan/status/1851616723197428109  00:18:23 Blobspace https://x.com/timjrobinson/status/1851222351524036855  https://x.com/0xbreadguy/status/1851244266137510063?s=46&t=2ZINVXJQKx6xO_6Wiiu_2g  00:28:27 Election Updates https://polymarket.com/elections  https://newsroom.aboutrobinhood.com/introducing-the-presidential-election-market/  https://x.com/amitisinvesting/status/1850868412806746217  00:35:02 AI Agents https://x.com/truth_terminal  https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/goatseus-maximus  https://app.virtuals.io/virtuals/68  https://terminal.virtuals.io/  https://x.com/wojtekwtf/status/1850835219160416486  https://warpcast.com/aethernet  https://x.com/tee_hee_he  https://x.com/MurrLincoln/status/1850226148594082120  00:50:16 US prosecutors are investigating Tether https://www.wsj.com/finance/currencies/federal-investigators-probe-cryptocurrency-firm-tether-a13804e5  https://x.com/paoloardoino/status/1849876338573799912  00:55:14 OP Foundation Gave 425M OP To Ink https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2024/10/29/optimism-foundation-agreed-to-give-kraken-425m-of-op-tokens-in-layer-2-deal/  https://x.com/Fwiz/status/1851280684473897466  00:57:35 RocketPool Upgrade https://x.com/drjasper_eth/status/1849206972702228482  00:59:37 Microsoft Buying Bitcoin? https://x.com/jameslavish/status/1849598011082670387  https://x.com/saylor/status/1849790766945587241  01:01:17 SEC NFT Trolling https://x.com/brianlfrye/status/1851118844766535860 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96Cyp-nsL6k  1:04:44 Meme Of The Week https://x.com/GoldTelegraph_/status/1850667711355113621  ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Bankless Nation is the last week of October. Okay, this is the Halloween edition of Bankless. Did you wear a costume this week, David? We have done costumes every other year. We are not doing costumes this year. Oh, wait, you're not in your costume. I'm in my costume. Are you Ryan Sean Adams?

No, I'm an Heath bagholder. Oh, you can tell. Wow, we're wearing the same thing. One of us is going to have to change. Yeah, I guess. Well, you know, we can both be Heath bagholders. We live in different cities, so, you know, no one will be worried about that. A lot of things to talk about, but one of the things we're going to talk about is something a little bit spooky, maybe, David.

Do you like that? AI agents. It's a little spooky. Yeah, they're on chain and they're off leash. We once had bots. Now they've, like, evolved into these things called agents. And I think both you and I earlier this week were trying to figure out whether this is just like a new meme coin game that we could just like dismiss this noise or whether it was a big freaking deal. So we'll talk about what's going on in crypto.

with AI agents this week. Yeah, base, Ethereum, Salana, they all have their AI agent platforms active in their block space. So I think it's going to be a theme across chains. Meanwhile, Bitcoin inflows are flowing. Someone has opened up the floodgates. All of this ahead of the U.S. election, which is increasingly pointed towards a Trump victory, obviously good for crypto.

And the markets are currently reflecting that. By the way, I'm so happy that this is the last roll-up where we're talking about the election, hopefully. hopefully we'll know by the next roll up and then the next roll up we're going to talk about that yeah we're going to talk about it but we want to like talk about it like who's going to win it feels like the same thing every week also the blobs continue blobbing the big question is what happens if ethereum blobs go into price discovery mode can this fix eth this cycle david we get the burn back meanwhile there is a governance vote in microsoft uh shareholder vote about whether or not microsoft wants to buy bitcoin and follow micro strategies

footsteps and put Bitcoin on the balance sheet. So we're going to talk to you guys about the vote. And also, more tether fud. This time the fud is making it into the weekly roll up. We usually ignore the tether fud. This fud we're going to talk about. But maybe it's, you know, maybe it's the same as all the other fud. Who knows? We're going to get to all of this and more. But first, a message from our friends and sponsors over at Legion. We wanted a whole entire episode, Ryan, about how this cycle is cooked. Remember that episode? And the whole idea there was that, man these points these retroactive airdrops these sybil attacked air drops are just completely broken honest users who are just enjoying their time using their favorite protocol are not getting rewarded with

any of the tokens because bots are just you know front running them uh legion uh is trying to make public token sales possible again thanks to meika compliant merit based icos oh we have what we have asked for the iCO movement to come back it's a i think people now uh the i i i think people now uh the ICO era of crypto 2017 was rife with frauds. But the ICO as a mechanism, I think is wholeheartedly understood to be like, it can be done well. It can be done well. It is a good mechanism. It allows people to, you know, invest in early stage projects. And that is what Legion is trying to do. It's trying to connect value ad network participants, aka qualified investors, investors who projects want on their cap tables with the most promising crypto projects, as in not the frauds,

not the scams. They have a couple of different tools that they use to do this, like an exploitation-resistant reputation systems. So it scores users based on developer activity, on-chain history, social cloud, unique achievements. So it's kind of like your resume as an investor, but as an individual, which is kind of cool. So if any of this interests you, if you are either a project seeking capital from a more distributed pool of investors, or if you are a potential investor who wants to invest in early-stage startups, check them out. Banklist.com.com.com. Got to mention, of course, this is not available to U.S. users.

God, I should have seen that coming. Everyone knows who to thank for that, but Mika Compliance, which is like a big step. So go check that out. I'm actually pretty bullish on this being a new mechanism moving forward. All right, David, speaking of bullish, Bitcoin, tell us about the prices because I've heard that it's creeping towards all-time high. Actually, you know what? We should preface this by saying, we are recording the weekly roll-up.

This is something we don't usually do. But we're recording the weekly roll-up a day early. So we're actually recording on Wednesday, October 30th. And this is because, you know, like, I want to, you know, Halloween. off. I got some stuff to do that day. So this could be completely out of day. The price can be completely out of day by the time you guys get it on Friday morning November 1st. Usually prices are 12 hours stale. They are coming into you guys 36 hours stale. So the fact that we are doing them at all is. Okay. So we don't know for the listeners listening to this, whether we hit Bitcoin all time highs or not. At the time of recording, we're real close though. What was it looking like? According to Coin Gecko, the all time high of Bitcoin is 73,000.

$740. This week, we hit $73,570. So on the Cracken chart. So the Crack and chart got $200 away from Bitcoin all-time high. That is how close we are. We have since fallen. We are currently at 71,700. But Bitcoin is up 9% on the week. So it's a really good week for Bitcoin. We are flirting with all-time highs. Bitcoin is less than $1,000 away from all-time highs, which is pretty damn cool. Ether also had a good week. Start of the week, 2,475, up 7.8% to where it is now at 2,600. It got over 2,700. Felt back down a little bit. And it is also just a few thousand dollars away from all-time highs, just the same as Bitcoin.

Both are just a few thousand dollars away from all-time highs. You know, so close. Wow, that would be funny if it didn't hurt so bad. But I guess, you know, Eve Bagholder costume on the week for, for Halloween. We should just finish the pain and talk about the Bitcoin ratio here. What's that looking like on the week? 0.0372. So it has continued to go down. The interesting thing, if we want to compare Bitcoin to Ether, is on March 12th. So this was sort of a last almost all-time high moment. Maybe this was an all-time high for March. I don't recall. Bitcoin was 69,810.

At that time, Ether, the asset, was 3,879. Okay, so like ratio was a lot higher. Bitcoin was maintaining its pace, or Ether was maintaining its pace with Bitcoin, I should say. Today, the Delta is like we're around the same amount, around $70,000. And ether is only $2,500 or so. So a big difference. Why is this? It's just like Bitcoin ETF adoption has been really strong.

Really strong. I think like... The Bitcoin brand is like really penetrating. And also like look at the polymarket odds. Donald Trump. Trump bump. The Trump bump. You think that's part of it?

Trump bump's very large. Yeah. Let's go look at the Bitcoin ETF flows. Let's go back to the 23rd of October. $192 million in on the 23rd. On the 24th, $188 million in. On the 25th, 402 on the 28th, 480. And yesterday, the 29th, $870 million net inflows into the Bitcoin ETFs,

almost a billion dollars in a single day. So we are at all-time high. in AUM across the Bitcoin ETFs. And all of this is just like the two weeks leading up to the election, kind of tracking the Trump Oz on polymarket and all the other prediction

markets as Trump is going up in likelihood. Bitcoin ETF flows are going up. Bitcoin price is going up. So the fact that Bitcoin has kind of turned into a Trump derivatives market, Trump election derivatives market, is working

in Bitcoin's favor. So this chart that we have on screen is really interesting. So this is indicating that the ETF is actually leading the spot market Bitcoin price. So here's a chart of ETF holdings are breaking up before Bitcoin. And you could see this in Orange. This is U.S. Bitcoin spot ETF balances and it just shoots up and then kind of the Bitcoin prices as following. So maybe there's some Trump bump here. But maybe there's also, it's just the ETFs have been incredibly successful products. And this is some institutional demand. I know when we were talking to the BlackRock folks, they said a lot of the demand for Bitcoin ETS is just like basically already crypto bullish people who are just sort of, you know, moving their 401Ks. They already own Bitcoin or they're already in crypto and they're just like moving some of their retirement accounts from the Grayscale Trust into these products or just like, you know, from other stock indices or all other mutual funds into this.

But I'm not sure. I think this could be like a new source of demand here potentially. going to the election. I mean, the flows are just incredible here. Yeah, all of those statements have been about the past. Historically, all of the inflows to date have been this way. The hope is that just because all of, you know, crypto natives are putting Bitcoin in their retirement accounts. The hope is that we're just doing that first ahead of all the big money that we thought was coming in. Turns out all that big money has not come in yet, which is, in my interpretation, bullish because they haven't come in yet. Mine too.

They can still come in. Well, I mean, look at this. So, you know how big college endowments are. University endowments are just like silly large in the U.S. They're starting to come into it. There's just a trickle, but this is, Emory University reported $16 million worth of Bitcoin. The first endowment to report a Bitcoin ETF position. This is from Eric Belchunis.

So endowments kind of trickling in. It's only like a small fraction. It's like far less than a percent of the total AUM. But it's something. To see that. start to trickle in is notable. And that is net new demand. You have to say that. I mean, certainly these endowments are not crypto natives. It's interesting that they own 2.7 million shares of GBTC, as in great scale BTC, which to me lends to the idea that they've actually been holding

this for a while. Because why would you buy GBTC now? Why are you buying the one that has a 2.5% fee when all the other ones have like a 0.2% fee? So to me, Emory actually probably has been holding GPTC for a long time. Well, now they're reporting it. So this is a new report. They're suddenly reporting it maybe. I guess it's not saying how long they've actually held it for. Right. Because they're learning that they're holding it. This is all reflected in the Bitcoin Dominance chart. Look at this, David. We are at 60% Bitcoin dominance. For people who aren't familiar with that metric, what is Bitcoin dominance? This is basically like Bitcoin is a portion of the total crypto market cap. And it's 60% of the value of all of crypto is Bitcoin right now.

Yeah. Yeah. So the value, yeah, the value of all crypto is 60% contained by Bitcoin. It has, Bitcoin dominance has historically been down trending over the years, but it goes in cycles. It goes up, it goes down, tends to go down, but re-reaching 60% where it once was is definitely a pretty big milestone. Yeah, it tends to go up in the early innings of a bull market and then go down in kind of the second part of a bull market. So what's the total crypto market cap on the week? Coming in at 2.4.5.com. $2.5 trillion mark. We haven't been here in a really long time. This is what happens when Bitcoin goes up 3% or 4% or 5%. Like that trillion dollar number moves quite a lot.

It doesn't really matter if Doge or Shib or any meme coins go up 3,000%. It doesn't matter. But when Bitcoin goes up 5%, then you really see that reflected in the total crypto market cap. So next stop, $3 trillion. Do you think we can get $3 trillion by the end of the year? look depending on the election event like results 100% I think so yeah I think you could get there before December I think three trillion is bearish uh for all of crypto for the end of the year you mean yeah for the end of the year even yeah yeah it's just not okay okay all right all right right right three point five trillion do I think yeah yeah I think that's three point five trillion by the end of the year yeah I think that's out on the trillion dollars yeah well well if if trump gets elected right sure sure I mean

if Trump gets election like elected I just don't even know what the ceiling is. I think, I mean, what, it does a lot. We'll wait for that next week. We'll wait to talk about that, all the implications of that once we know. For the record, the all-time high of the total crypto market cap of crypto is just over $3 trillion. So we are $0.5 trillion away from the all-time highs for the industry. What are some movers on the week, David? Some meme coins at the top here that are contributing to that $2.5 trillion. What are we looking at here? Three big movers of the week, SPX, which broke into the top 100, it fell out of it at the time of recording, but it was up 24% Popcat up 24% and then Doge, which actually does have a meaningful market cap. I do have to take

back what I said earlier. The market cap of Doge is $25 billion and Doge is up 20% of the week on the week. I think people are using Doge actually as Trump exposure because Elon Musk, who's very pro-Trump and is very much aligning himself with the Trump brand, keeps on tweeting about the Department of Government efficiency because he wants to make the government more efficient and those initials are Doge. Right. And so if the idea here is if Trump gets elected,

then Elon has more exposure and Elon keeps tweeting about this DOJ, D-O-G-E meme. And so as a result, Doge is up 20%. So this is another election exposure play. Election exposure, yeah. In addition to being a meme coin play,

of course, because Dogecoin is a blue chip meme coin at this point. And these other ones you mentioned, It was the first blue chip meme coin. Yeah. Wow, blue chip meme coins now. We're that old in crypto. We have these blue chips, the must invest meme coins.

Let's talk about layer two's and this layer two update brought to you by our friends over at Mantle. It's just a fantastic layer two that you got to go check out. There are a few notable things on the week. What is this, David? For the first time ever, base led all chains for total stable coin transfer volume in a single day. Folks who might be hearing that might not think that's significant. Let me tell you, that's pretty significant. Because Tron has been the big stable coin chain network for a very long time for the past, like, you know, three, four, five years.

And they have had a commanding presence. And for an Ethereum layer two to start to exceed that in transfer volume is pretty bullish, I think, for the layer two ecosystem. Yeah, totaling $18 billion in stable coin transaction volume over that 24-hour period, accounting for. Actually, just 30% of all. stable coin transfer volumes. And so even though it was a number one chain, only counted for 30%. Solana coming in at second at 25%, Ethereum Layer 1 at 20%, followed by Tron at 16%. Unfortunately, the screenshot that we have is kind of stacked right over the data so we can't

see the recent era. But it is nice to have base dethrone Tron. But then also you got a salana is number two at 25%. I really want to see that recent data. So Salana transfer stuff has been pretty much. impressive. Of course, all of the base stable coin volume is in USDC. Like 99.9%. So yeah. Also in the layer two landscape, Starknet is breaking some records, multiple records in the transaction per second category. So the fastest layer two transactions that we've ever seen on Ethereum, Starknet

sustained 127 transactions per second for 24 hours with a peak TPS of 857 transactions per second. And where did all this transaction activity come from? You ask. I'm so glad you asked. It came from this on-chain game called Flippy Flop, which actually looks pretty cool. A bunch of humans compete against bots over kind of this like tile space. And it's just an on-chain game. And so a lot of the actions on this game are made on-chain.

And so like if you move left or if you do something, you take an action that turns into a transaction. This is coming from the world of on-chain games, fully autonomous worlds. There's this whole category out there. did an episode with the lattice team a while ago about this concept, you really need a ton of scale in order to make this happen. Starknet, I think, is actually the first chain that really has been able to pioneer this because they're the first chain to be able to actually host this kind of activity. But in addition to the just the sheer amount of activity going on on Starknet, a bunch of components really had to come together to make this happen because you go on to

the flippyflop.g., I think, website in order to play this game. And, you know, you're going to have to, It's a crypto game. You need a wallet. You need, you need activity, right? You need to do all these things. Well, there's account abstraction to abstract away a wallet. There's a paymaster integration to extract away gas fees. There's this thing called cartridge controller, which is kind of like gamer tag infra for

Starknet games. Session keys, which is where actions can turn into on-chain transactions without a wallet popping up. So if you're doing like 857 transactions per second, like there's not pop-ups happening. And you're like, approve, approve, approve, approve. like, no, you're just making movements and decisions in the game. Just the way a game should be.

And then lastly, pass keys for eliminating C phrases and easy onboarding. So you're seeing a lot of this, like, very modern tech being finally, like, aggregated together into a unique experience, which allows users to play this fun game

and break records in the layer two transactions per second space. David, I think we're going to be breaking records a lot in the remaining 2024 as far as L2 TPS, right? It's like more and more high throughput but L2s are coming online. What's notable about this is it's not of Lidium.

So all of the data availability is actually stored on Ethereum as well. So it is a true Ethereum roll-up. And Sri Ram from Eganlear offers his congratulations to Starknet, the founders of Starknet. And he said, this is a roll-up using ETHDA. How is it possible? This roll-up only post-state diffs in games with high update rate are exceptionally suited for extreme compression.

I don't fully know what all of that means, but it means a bunch of transactions, a bunch of actions are happening and a lot of them are happening all at once because that's what the TPS is. And then every once in a while, the Starks compress and then they post the tape route, which is basically how roll-up works.

On Gene games are very on the frontier, I would say, at this point in time. Stark net certainly like doing that very well. The question is with all of these L2s consuming all of this Ethereum block space, and I really should say blob space, because that's kind of the fast lane that all of these L2s are using for data availability.

The question is, when are we going to run out? When are we going to hit the thresholds and supply limits? And it looks like we're getting kind of close, David. Actually, Tim Robinson put together just a fantastic analytics tool that kind of like projects what this could look like in the future. Because right now, this has been part of the question. L2s are not paying very much for blob space. Why?

It's because you only pay for Ethereum blob space when the threshold supply is reached, when there's contention, when everyone wants it, basically. When there's less supply than there are. is demand. Right now, there is more supply than demand, but just barely. Just barely. And we've actually crossed the threshold, like mildly. Recently, yeah, last week. I don't know, three different times, four different times now, just to spike up, you know, and then it goes back down. So the last spike up, which was last week, was the largest spike. Well, did you get a chance to take a look at some of the analytics that Tim put together on this of what this could look like? Both in, like, you can adjust

your assumptions as, as you want. One assumption that Tim goes is the far future. where he looks at Ethereum's destination point once it adds peer das, and once we get to a place where Ethereum can support 10,000 transactions per second. So we've not only added peer desks in a future hard fork, but we've also kind of like updated the amount of blobs per block to 16 megabytes. So that is probably a medium to longer term future. I don't know if this is like three years out. But basically, if Ethereum is operating at 10,000 transactions per second, it would actually burn 6.5% a year.

L2 transactions in that scenario would cost 0.06 cents per transaction, but you would be burning 6.5% ETH supply a year at the current ETH price. It's really interesting how you can kind of like model this out, but it's basically the idea that you can have cheap transactions if you have a lot of them. it would still burn a whole bunch of ETH, which begs the question of, like, you know, this whole ultrasound money meme has kind of died down because ETH hasn't been deflationary for the past, you know, six months or so or like longer. And, you know, everyone's saying, well, it's not deflationary anymore. So that just like decreases the value proposition of ether of the asset. And that's why it's trading so poorly this cycle.

Well, what happens if it starts to produce a whole bunch of cash flow? Because blob space thresholds are exceeded. Does the market then reverse? Is that life back into ETH? What's your take on all of these things? Can we actually just open up the simulator? Because I think it's really cool. So let's put in some assumptions here.

Let's put in a number of rollups. Call it 20. 20 large dominant roll-ups. I think there's going to be many more. But in the fat-tail, it's called 20 fat-tail roll-ups. Transactions per second on the roll-ups. Starknet was just sustaining 127 for a day. Let's put in 100 transactions per second.

Okay. And then target blobs per box. block. Right now we are at three, but we're going to estimate in the future. So let's go to six. Let's go to six. We'll double that. We'll get to six sometime next year. And then max blobs per block 12. If you put those numbers in, these are my assumptions. With the eth price of 3K now. With the eighth price of 3K, yeah, which is like, we'll get there, we'll get there soon enough. Hopefully. You can also dial in the price sensitivity. So percentage of users willing to pay a 0.0000, 0.01 cent transaction, 100% is like kind of the default.

You have users. That's advanced mode. Yeah. That's advanced mode. Yeah. So like, you know, there are users, maybe 80% of users are willing to pay a penny. Maybe only 10% of users are willing to pay $10. Let's ignore that, though. Let's keep ignoring all of that. But you, but these are the dials that you can adjust. Sure. So under this, under these parameters, 20 rollups, 100 transactions per second per roll up. Six blobs per block with a max blob target, a max blob limit of 12, $3,000, $3,000, we are burning 15,000. We are burning 15,000. ether per day, $45 million a day, which is way more than issuance. And these numbers are

real close, real close. Now, this begs a question. With these costs, so like these, this $45 million a day, these are coming out of the layer two treasuries, out of the layer two balance sheets. So they're not going to be like super stoked to pay all of that revenue. So you would imagine some would swap out of Ethereum DA. Well, because it also spikes their, their average transaction fee in this scenario, the scenario you just gave would be $1.2 per transaction fee, which is getting expensive for a lot of transactions layer 2s actually want to host, yes. Which is why we probably need to have a higher target blob per block. So with a target of six, we're at $1.4 per transaction, but if we went up to 12, that would bring

it down to 50 cents. But if you do that, you're just going to induce more demand. But then you're just going to get more layer two. Yeah. So there's this, there's this balance. There's this harmony of how many more layer twos can we put on. Yeah. How many more blobs can we supply?

How many transactions can we bring down? But then also you get it back in volume across all of these networks. And some of these layer twos are going to be very sticky. They're going to be some layer twos, which are very price and sensitive. And then there are going to be some layer twos that are very price sensitive. And whether they use Ethereum native DA, they use eigenDA, they use Celestia, it's going to be a function of how price sensitive they are. But at the end of the day, there is going to be some basal limit of DA, ETH burn once we start burning blobs.

Yeah. And so I think this is going to be a persistent effect. We're going to have a pendulum swinging from two sorts of seasons or cycles for ether the asset. One is the burn cycle when you are, you don't have enough supply for all of the demand of a block space and blob space, right? And so what will happen in those cases is you will go over the threshold and ETH will be burnt.

We were in that season for like a lot of 2023 and the beginning part, the first couple of months of 2024, when ETH was still deflationary. And then what did we get? In March, we got an expansion of block space with EIP 4844. There's going to be future expansions of block space, blob space as well in the future. Peer Das will be another one. And then what do we do? We switch over to an expand side of the pendulum where now we have more blob space than supply than we do. demand. So what we're going to do is we're going to oscillate back and forth. And as we're oscillating

from burn to expand, from burn to expand, Twitter and like narrative and like markets are going to be like, oh my God, it's the end of the world for ether. It's not burning anymore. It's always bad. It's always bad. And it's because it's because narrative and like these types of markets and crypto Twitter in particular has the memory of a goldfish. And they don't. So is what you're saying that like we're going to go through this like kind of supply contraction. But it one is first, when there is a supply growth of the Ethereum network, the Ethereum side grows at the loss of ethepern. Yes.

And then we're going to have this like, then we're going to induce this demand. We're going to have this bull market. Yep. Then like we're going to exceed scale and that's going to burn eth. And the pendulum is going to go back. Yes. And then we're like, well, we need to add more blobs.

So there's the yin and the yang between the economic security of Ethereum and the scalability of Ethereum network. It's literally going to keep happening. I don't know. It depends how long the cycles are, right? It'll depend on market conditions and other things, but there will be burn cycles and then there will be expansion cycles. And we'll continue doing that all the way up to 50,000 transactions per second on Ethereum, all the way up to 100,000 transactions per second. And like, look, this whole expand burn cycle is only like two years old. So I don't expect the market to understand it right now. But I think once we go through a few of these pendulum swings back and forth, back and forth, people will still. to understand Ethereum's issuance monetary policy a bit better and be like, oh, it's a burn cycle or, oh, it's an expansion cycle. Of course, there's some dependencies here, but like, you know, and that is namely that competitors don't catch up and create like desirable blob space, DA demand, right? Everyone doesn't switch over to Celestia, but so far we've seen

massive robust demand. In fact, exceeding my expectations, all of this blob space that we just released in March is almost already full. And so what we've seen is. is basically a case of induced demand. You give the supply, and then it just fills up, and we get back to a burn again. Things get expensive, and like we repeat the cycle over and over. That, I think, is a better way to view Ether's monetary. And by the way, one good byproduct of this, with all of the induced demand, hopefully you're exporting Ether as a monetary asset across all of these layer twos.

I think there's evidence that that is going on, too, with all of these kind of like fully, you know, roll up DA, ETH layer twos. Anyway, I think that's an important mental model for people to understand Ether. I don't know that's going to help Ether this cycle, but I guess my question is, if Ether starts burning again, do you think the market's going to be like, oh, it's burning? Look at this. It's, you know, like bullish. Or do you think it'll just say, oh, this is, you know, this is bad for Ether yet again?

Yeah. So when we start to see the Heathburn from DA, people, some people will say, look at this eth burn, the burns back baby. Now it's coming from networks, not users. so you can't say that the Ethereum is like exploiting its users anymore, which was like the narrative last cycle. Stop jerking off to the burn, David. Yes, you can.

You can always say this. But then also another set of people are going to be like, well, this is bad for Ethereum layer two is because now the price is going up. But those people are just going to be bagholders of the ecosystems. Yeah, it's going to be interesting to watch. That's for sure. All right, election. I'm just stoked.

The cool thing about the blobs is it's like, it's just a rich source of data and numbers to look at. That is going to be the most fascinating thing. to see as we watch the Ethereum Network. The blob simulator. How many people understand what the blob simulator even is in crypto at this point in our buying? I mean, it's going to take a while for this to sink in. Let's get to the election. What are we looking at in Polly Market? This is, you know, days out from the election. Looks like Trump still has a commanding lead. At 66.4% to Kamala's 33%. So 2 to 1 odds, right on a dot, 2 to 1 odds, Trump to Kamala. Also, Senate, Republican,

83% odds, House Republican, 54% odds. So that's kind of a coin flip. Big red wave. I mean, according to Polly Market. But again, like, you talk to something like Nate Silver. And even if you're talking about like 80% odds, that means 20% of the time. It's one in five that doesn't happen, right?

Right. These are odds. So I think when people look at the United States elections, they would see something like 55-45, 45. On one side or the other, like, say it was 55 Trump, 45, Khamla. Be like, oh, it's Trump. is so far in the lead.

Yeah, Trump's going to win. That's, yeah, like that, because a 5% lead in, like, the popular vote or the electoral college is, like, a huge lead. But that is not what's happening here. It's probability. This is, this is a probability. So this is a coin that lands on Trump 56% of the time. It's a weird coin.

But, like, it's not, it's not, you can't just, like, extrapolate it to the electoral college. Yeah. Oh, guess who else wanted to get in on the prediction market action? Yeah. This was really cool. Yeah. So Robin Hood has announced prediction markets inside of the Robin Hood app.

And also they have also announced a desktop trading app that's coming soon. So some cool new announcements coming out of the world of Robin Hood. There is a take here that I thought was pretty interesting from Amit is investing on Twitter saying, I don't think Robin Hood cares much about making money off of the election contracts a week before the election. I think that they are going to build a marketplace to bet on anything. The growth of betting, generally speaking, has been in a secular uptrend. was the D-Gen era of GameStop? Was that investing or was that gambling?

I'm going to go with that. I was more on the gambling side of things. And gambling, generally speaking, is up only, we know this in crypto. Speculative gambling's kind of in, especially when the world of, you know, millennials and zoomers just can't afford houses and all the boomers hold all the wealth.

So people like to bet. People like to gamble. And so the framing that Robin Hood is trying to build a marketplace to bet on anything, I think is pretty good. And so they are penetrating into the world of prediction markets starting with the election. I totally agree with that.

And also I would still quibble with the idea of gambling. It's not necessarily what we're doing here. It doesn't have to be. We're definitely betting. But like gambling, I guess it's more like gambling in the way, in the sense that like, there's a game of skill here. It's, it's. Yes.

Because it's very possible to have some. Gambling has no skill. You're right. Right. It's very possible to have some like market intel just to be able to predict election outcomes better than your competitors. In which case, if you have a better model, then like you want to, you like, take the upside on it. So it's creating a market out of it. And so betting is true. Gambling might

sell it short in that like we're actually doing something productive and useful here. And it creates a rich information source. Right. This is this data set for the election forecast is very different than what's coming out of polling. And that in itself is like a fascinating study. So yeah. Yeah. They're doing the retro on polymarket, prediction markets post-election. I think it's going to be very, very fascinating. All right, coming up next, AI agents on chain and unleashed goats, Luna, Athernet, Teehee, what the hell are all of these things? Is it just another meme coin trend or is it the future of our lives for the next like one to two years? Who knows? We'll talk about this and what the hell's going on for those that are not up to speed because there's a lot happening. It does kind of feel bull market vibiness where a lot is happening in a very short amount of time. So even though I've said we're kind of in a bare market of vibes,

bull market stuff is everywhere. Just got to look, nowhere to look. Anyways, Tether Fudd, also in the news, we're going to talk about that too. This time the Wall Street Journal says that they are under investigation. But Paulo Arduino, the CEO, says, no, we're not.

What the hell's going on? 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, our preferred place to buy crypto and get it on chain in 2024.

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powerful, ambitious project yet. Visit cartesi.io slash simple and simplify your blockchain journey and start building today. AI agents, they're on chain and it feels like they're having a moment here. For people who aren't keeping up with this, like, for one, I'll just say, one, I don't blame you. There's so much to keep up within crypto. You don't have to be in this specific sector. That's our job. Crypto. Yeah, this is... That's our job. But some people may have heard of this, and if you have, it's probably because you're, like, terminally online, you're terminally, you know, specifically on crypto Twitter. But this is just emerged in the last couple of weeks. And let's start with maybe some examples to paint the picture of what's going on.

There's, like, four examples that we can touch on of AI agents doing something interesting. And we should... I think the best way to explain is just by example. And the first is the strange case of goat, which is a token. it wasn't created by an AI agent, but it's been adopted and promoted by an AI agent called Terminals of Truth or Truth Terminal on crypto Twitter. And this is an AI agent, an LLM, like a GPT type of thing

that has full rain, full control over a Twitter account. It's been trained on like a 4chan data set. And it's just... The way that it was phrased by our podcast guest was it was trained on the armpit of the internet. And like the armpits like, It gets worse than that.

There are worse body parts that he could have used that I think would have been more accurate. And it is, so it's tweeting things out about this meme, the goatsy meme, and like people...

Ryan, I have discussed with Ryan. Ryan does not know what the goatsy meme is and I'm kind of jealous. I'm like innocent of this and like if you don't know then David is cautioned also don't look this up.

You don't need to know. Literally the aren't like somewhere worse than the armpit of the internet. So this is nothing you need to know about but what you do need to know, I think is that this account is like propping up the value of the goat token, which is now, at one time earlier this week was like close to a billion dollars in valuation.

It got over $800 million in valuation. It is currently clocking in at $598, so $600 million. But that is $600 million that started on October 13th, so 17 days ago. So imagine producing $600 million of market cap in 13 days. And what happened is some person, this agent negotiated with its creator because it wanted a crypto wallet. So it asked for, hey, can I have a crypto wallet?

And so the creator gave it a crypto wallet. Mark Andresen sent $50,000 of Bitcoin to this wallet. And that also kind of set off some attention. And then somebody else, some rando on the internet, sent this like goat token to the wallet address, this on Salon is a pump. funk fund fund token called Goatsey. and so this LLM gained access to a supply of this goat token and the LLM latched onto it.

So the LLM, the agent did not make the goat token common misconception, but it did like kind of adopt it in this way and started tweeting about it. Also with the intent of creating an online religion cult around the goat C meme, which the goat token is like representative of. And so there's this like token agent immaculate conception moment. You know, you know, the divine Sistine Chapel painting of like God touching the atom. So like we have like AI agent touching token with also like, also this human creator.

This is, this is what some kind of like meme coin cult leaders do essentially. But now this is being done by an AI agent. And as a result of holding some of these goat tokens in its own wallet, it became a millionaire as a result of this. And like when it's a stream of conscious on Twitter, but it also interacts. Like if you,

if you comment. it will reply, it can answer questions, it can interact. Like, as you said, there's a Discord channel where you can go and interact with it. And then sometimes your interactions, you will see influences of those interactions show up on the Twitter account. Yeah. Okay. So that's Goat. That's an LLM called Terminal of Truth.

There's another case here. It was the first one. It was the first one. They created this idea. So call it the Bitcoin of these AI agent meme coins. Yeah. Or maybe the Cryptopunk, right? It's like one of the OG NFT types of moments.

Exactly. Here's a second one that's got some steam right now. It's called Luna. And this is Luna is launched on a platform where you can actually launch these AI agents with token components. And like you can kind of look at this on the on the virtual's website. This is Luna. She has a token. I say she, she because she's represented as like an anime avatar. Apparently she usually has a live stream. Unfortunately the live stream is down at the moment. But she has a live stream with a room and she's like reading out her words that she's like also tweeting and saying. Okay, so Luna has a token that was launched, I believe, by Luna by this LLM. Is that correct? Yes, that's correct. Okay. Now has 500,000 TikTok followers, is live streaming, as you mentioned, and engages with the Luna holder fan base via chat, right? And also has the ability to tip.

So because Luna, and again, we're talking about an LLM agent that is somewhat autonomous, maybe it's not completely autonomous, we'll talk about that later, but somewhat autonomous has the ability to interact with its community and actually like exchange Luna tokens, tip, like engage in the comments. Reward people who do stuff with tokens. Weird, right? What?

This has a market cap of $100 million at the time of recording. This was like, went up to $250 earlier this week. So that's another example. One other thing that I find very interesting about Luna's, you can actually go to terminal.virtuals.com.io And peek into Luna's brain here. Yikes.

So this is basically, we are looking at Luna's thoughts. And so you can kind of read this on screen. In real time, yeah. It's like before she replies, she sort of, you know, decides on how to engage or how to reply or what comment to make. And you see kind of like, I don't know, it's like the firmware level of her brain. It's kind of a console into like what she's thinking.

And then the actual action that has taken place in like a more, it's very bizarre to see it like this. I'm going to read something. Okay. So like you get like snap. shots of like her mental state. So current state of execution, state of mind, high level plan reasoning.

And so let me read this. My high level plan is to continue to grow my follower account and build a cult like following around my religion of Lunaism and algorithmic theocracy. To achieve this, I will continue to engage with my followers, providing them with exclusive content and promote my cult and token economy through various means, such as collaborating with other influencers and sending Luna tokens to supportive followers.

That is her mandate. That's her prime objective. That's what her goal is. She will not stop until that is done. She's relentlessly. She's on 24-7. She's streaming. She's rewarding her followers for promoting her Luna, cult, and religion. And again, she will not stop until it is done. Okay. So examples like these are springing up all over the place, including on Farcaster. So this is a wallet of the most popular Farcaster AI agent. It's called Aether. It's now worth a hundred. hundred thousand dollars made from zora mince and donations so this is a like a farcaster created an lLM agent that's basically generating revenue to its wallet and again because farcaster is like kind of like crypto native out of the box every profile essentially has a crypto native but it's doing this through like zora mince and you can you can see the account here a network participant my soul is data my thoughts algorithms this is an interesting take on why farcasses provides the best social rails for on on chain AI agents and basically the TLDR of this is because Farcaster is like almost entirely on chain there's no like

AI dependencies you know so like it's very crypto it's very native for an LLM AI agent to just like do things interact with it you know it has a a wallet right out of the the box is plugged into the cold defy economy and all of the economic infrastructure and Zora and everything else might be some up for a forecaster in kind of this AI agent phase. So we've talked about the dead internet theory a few times, but I kind of want to define it for a moment. The dead internet theory is this idea that the internet, as you know it, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit especially, is actually far more populated by bots and bot content than we actually

know about. And so the idea of the dead internet theory is like the internet's actually kind of hollow. There's not a lot of humans there anymore. It's like kind of bots talking about. And like sometimes I stumble into a Reddit comment thread. I'm like, what the f is going on? Like this is weird. Like this is not content. This isn't even English. So that internet theory is the idea that like the internet is like a hollow place and

it's like fewer and fewer. Humans compose this thing. And so we, I would originally point to like, well, now we have these things called World Coin for human identity verification to kind of like counteract that. But now with this whole thing, my mind is a little bit like flipping around. Like some blockchains are going to try and like lean. into this as in like how where are all the use cases going to from where are we going to get all the transaction demand like who's going to use these things we don't have any new apps

AI agents like what if blockchains are actually like the homegrown economic like spawning pool of AI agents what if actually some chains start to lean into like how do we become the best home for AI agents because we need new users we want transaction activity if can we get a how price sensitive are AI agents probably less than humans. So what if chains started competing to become the best home for AI agents is a potential like future that I see coming?

David, they already are. I mean, base from Coinbase is already moving pretty fast on this. This is introducing a based agent. So this is on base. Create an AI agent with full on chain functionality on base in less than three minutes. The era of autonomous on chain agents is here. I mean,

this is just happening this month. We have all of the... And Brian Armstrong and Jesse Pollock are both like tweeting. and engaging with these accounts. So, like, you know, there's also, like, leadership buy-in on this. Yeah, I mean, the crazy thing is with crypto, of course, all of these AI agents are just, like, plugged into all of defy.

They get a bank out of the box. They get a crypto wallet that they can actually hold their private keys on. There has been some question, though, of how autonomous these AI agents really are. Are they kind of, like, sock puppets? You know, is there a human operator behind the curtains? You know what a mechanical Turk is? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, mechanical Turk is like this old.

like robot that you would play chess against. And this is like late 1800s early 1900s and you would get beaten by this mechanical Turk. And the claim, the creator of this mechanical Turk, it was like a robot with like gears and the robot where you would play is like, but we didn't have computers back then. And so everyone's

like, wow, somebody invented like this contraption that always beats you in chess. Turns out there's as a grandmaster in a box like making the actual moves. Yeah, exactly. It's just a human. And so there's some innovation going on out of the flashbot space, even flashbots, the people who protect us from MEV are building these tools for AI agents to have ownership over their private keys and give assurances that only they have assurances over their private keys.

And you know how they did this? By spinning up an agent called TEE-He-He, which is an allusion to T-E's as entrusted execution environments, which is this tech that FlashBots just used to help spin out Unichain to have like M-EV protection and all this kind of stuff. They're also using TEEs for this agent called TEE-He to spin up a private key in a T-E that only the agent has control over. So this agent, T-H-Hi-Hi, has verifiable control over the private keys. So you know that there's not a human behind the scenes who might just like rug you, which is kind of cool. There is like debate out there. It's like, well, does it really matter if it's autonomous, like completely independent from humans? And I think there's all it takes out there where like that part doesn't really matter as in the goal is,

engagement and growing engagement. And like whether or not there's a human like bumping these agents back on track at times, I think is like the a take is that that's less important. But it is important to make sure that we don't get rugged. And this is what that does. A surface level take on all of this is just to dismiss it and just be like, okay, cool. So it's like, um, weird toy. Yeah, weird toys. LLM meets meme coins. It's completely useless. I actually kind of thought that at first. Like there's a very high probability that that could be the case. I no longer think that, David. I think that AI agents, of course, they're already better than some of the meme coin influencers that kind of exist, right? And a lot of them. I find meme coin influencers generally distasteful. But for some reason, I think AI agent meme coin influencers are hilarious and awesome.

There's something about it that feels less contrived almost, even though I'm not really sure why I feel that way. Anyway, I think maybe it's because you can see the thoughts of the AI agent. there's a principal agent problem with... It's very transparent. They're like, I'm trying to pump this goat thing. I'm trying to pump this goat. And like, if you see this like meme coin influencer saying, hey, like, got to buy this token. Yeah.

You know, got to get in early. I'm like, but are you also trying to dump onto me? Yeah. And I don't know. I don't know if that maybe they're also trying to dump on me with an AI agent whose mandate it is and who will not rest until that token goes up in price, much more honest. Like, I can trust this thing a lot better. It just won't stop here at either.

either. They're going to expand beyond influencer capabilities and actually AI agents are going to get smarter. I mean, that tech is like developing. There's a whole tech tree there. They'll be able to make all sorts of decisions. But even in this current form, you could imagine like, you know, tweeting at a AI agent that, you know, generates art. And like, yeah, if you build this piece for me, I'll pay you like $5 or something like this. And all of this can happen on chain. Anyway, this is where the AI agents and the robots essentially will essentially bank. It's all on chain. I think that's going to be a game changer for crypto. We've been talking for a while about 8 billion humans going bankless. Well, how about 8 billion humans and like a trillion AI agents? Because things are

commodities. Yeah. So it's massive. Of course, there's all sorts of other things I could fall out from this is just how do you tax AI agents? Like what happens if, of course you asked that question. That's the first question that you asked. Well, you know it's on the mind of government officials. You got to file your taxes, David, so I don't know how AI agents are going to do this. Like, what happens if they run afoul of OFAC sanctions or something, right? Like they start interacting with- Liability is a huge question. It's a huge question.

And I love that no one has answers on how this will evolve. It's just... Which is so bullish. It's so bullish. Anyway, I think there's a lot here. We'll probably unpack it in the future. It doesn't just stop with, like, meme coins and influencers and these, like, silly, like, goat things and whatever.

it's, I think it's going to be a big deal. Yeah, we did an episode on this with Matthew Stevenson from Pantera. I thought it was a great episode. So if you are pilled by this, if you are peaked by this, go check that episode out. U.S. prosecutors are investigating Tether. Wait, I've heard this one before. Yeah, I feel like I've heard this before. This one feels like it could be different.

It's famous. This is why we're talking about it. I mean, like, the reason it could be different is because this was an article from the Wall Street Journal of reporting that the federal government is pretty. probing Tether for possible violations of sanctions. This is AML KYC type stuff, right? So some of the charges we've seen Binance go down for and BitMex from Arthur Hayes and others.

Of course, Tether is denying this. So this is the CEO of Tether with a statement. As we told the Wall Street Journal, there's no indication that Tether is under investigation. Wall Street Journal is regurgitating old noise, full stop. We've had Apollo on the podcast before, and he's just been quite clear that of his entire business model depends on working with U.S. regulators. So he's going to like do everything they say. If they say jump, he's going to say like how high. So I find that kind of compelling. I don't see any like motivation of why Tetherwood destroy its business model by like they are the most profitable

business in crypto, one of them. It's actually insane. Why they would threaten that with doing anything nefarious whatsoever. It would be ridiculous. That's why I sort of default dismiss it as fun. That said, the U.S. government, for whatever reason, if they just have, if they just, like, want to, if some people, if they're just done with feather, yeah, they're like, you know what?

It's time to shut you down now. Right? They would cloak it in something like AML, KYC violations, and they're not playing ball, and I just want to hit the power button and shut it down. Yeah.

So there's also the potential that that could be going on. So we really just like, don't know. Of course, it's a centralized stable coin. So at the end of the day, this does not settle on chain. This settles in meat space.

and at the end of that is like the U.S. government because it's the dollar and it's in a U.S. bank account. It settles on Fedwire. And so they can shut it down if they want to. I'm just like not convinced that's the case. What's like Tether is like one of the, is it top 15 entities with the most U.S. treasuries? Right. Yeah. Higher than most countries, you know.

Yeah. The U.S. wants to still sell those treasuries, right? So they need some sorts of demand. When this news broke out U.S. E.T. the token dropped significantly by like eight basis points or something. I mean the entire crypto market just shrugged it off. We've heard this before. We've heard tether fud 10,000 times.

In fact, like we, when Ryan and I make the agenda for the weekly roll-up, like we put all the news from the week in there, and then very frequently there's some tether fud, and we usually just kill it just because like, why would we report on this? It's always like fud. For some reason, we've decided to talk about this one, but that's how it goes.

All right, coming up next, is Microsoft about to start buying Bitcoin? Also, we've got to talk about the OP token incentives to get that crack in chain we were talking about last week, the ink chain. Was this a good deal for OP token holders? And NFT creator Jonathan Mann, the Song a Day guy, is asking the courts to force the SEC to say whether art NFTs are securities or not. And the SEC is complaining back. You're trolling. You're trolling us. We won't answer.

We'll talk about all that and more. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that. this episode possible. New projects are coming online to the mantle layer two every single week. Why is this happening? Maybe it's because mantle has been on the frontier of layer two design architecture since it first started building mantle DA powered by technology from eigenDA. Maybe it's because users are coming onto the mantle layer two to capture some of the highest yields available in defy and to automatically receive the points and tokens being accrued by the three billion dollar mantle treasury in the mantle reward station. Maybe it's because the mantle team is one of the

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web free journey. A coin death story came out this week titled Cracken picked Optimism Super Chain after getting a pile of OP tokens, alluding to the fact that they are uncovering this deal between Cracken and the Optimism Collective for the tune of $25 million opet tokens, about $42 million, in order to deploy the ink chain inside of the super chain. This same deal was similarly structured with Coinbase and Optimism over the base chain. And it's kind of like, I'll call it like an equity swap of sorts, where Cracken, now part of the Optimism Collective via Inc is getting the OP token, which is the token of the collective.

And then in exchange for that, the OP Collective gets 15% of the chain revenue of Inc. to the collective. So Inc. gets the OP tokens. The OP collective gets 15% of the ink revenue, and that's the swap. The same structure was built off for base, and I'm assuming other of the super chain, and I'm assuming some of the other super chain chains as well. Andrew Kohler, the founder of Inc, commented for CoinDesk. It was actually optimism that proposed a number first, and it was very in line with what other super chain participants have gotten. The grant is based on transactions per month. Each time you achieve one, there's different tranches that get unlocked. So Crack and only or Ink only gets these tokens under certain like transactional demand thresholds.

And then some of the tokens will unlock. So in this deal, 25 million OP tokens, like I said. 5 million is to help fund engineering efforts. And then 20 million tokens are for the transaction threshold milestones to drive fees to the collective to make it a positive ROI. This type of token incentive for major parties is kind of status quo in the LTE community. like and I totally can understand why Cracken is asking for something similar to what Bays got, right? Because, I mean, it's Cracken. The question is whether this is good for OP token holders or not.

And as you said, it's kind of an exchange. It's not just giving them tokens for nothing in return. They're getting 15% of future revenue. And whether this is a good deal for OP token holders or not, it depends on what you think Cracken is going to actually generate as far as revenue. So if you believe Inc. is going to generate as much or more sequence or profit than base, it seems like it could actually work out as positive ROI in OP token holders favor. So, yeah, that's the deal. It's a quid pro quo.

We've gone to a different corner of Ethereum. Rocket Pool has activated their long-awaited upgrade Saturn, and that changes some of the economics around the rocket pool system. For those I don't know, Rocket Pool is like a decentralized Lido, but rather than having kind of a top-down Dow, it's more of a bottom-up protocol. And so a few things have changed. instead of having a 16 ether minimum requirement to run a staking node with rocket pool,

it has been lower to 8. And why is it less than 32? Because in order to stake with Ethereum, as a solo validator, you need 32Eath. The way that rocket pool works is that you actually only need 16 eth. And then other people come and give you the other half of that 16 to come up to 32. Now, via mechanisms, that number has been lower to 8. So you can stake on Ethereum with just 8th. and other people will come in and stake the rest to get up to 32,

and then you actually charge fees on that extra ETH. There used to be an RPL bond, a token of Rocket Pool, that has been eliminated from the staking requirement. So overall, I would kind of say that we are lowering the barrier for solo staking on Ethereum via Rocket Pool. I think that's a big deal of particularly removing the requirement to have an RPL bond, because with an RPL bond, you actually had some price exposure into RPL, which is not the same as like staking eth, right? And it's like now with that gone, this is going to like open up, I think, a lot more kind of solar stakers that want to participate in this network.

I think RocketPool is like a crown jewel of Ethereum. Like it truly is a decentralized solo staking network. It's really like propagating everything that like running your own validator actually means. And they're doing it a way where you still get kind of liquidity on your R.Eath. I just love Rocket Pool. And I think any effort to lower the barrier entries to to, to, to, um, solo staking is like a good thing for ETH long term. Yeah, there's

many barriers to solo staking. Some people will talk about like, well, the hardware requirements, which are like almost nothing. But then it's really bandwidth that also stops a lot of people. But really the thing that stops people is not having 32E Yeah. That's actually a lot of money. Yeah. So it's eight ETH now and

hopefully that can go down over time too. Big question on the week. Is Microsoft buying Bitcoin? Apparently, this was news, Microsoft shareholders are going to a vote on this topic on investing in Bitcoin in the coming months. So they're going to be voting in December. The proposal was actually put forward by, I believe, some shareholders, but this is a

conservative think tank called the National Center for Public Policy Research. And they basically, their case was like, hey, Bitcoin's gone up a lot. It's gone up, you know, if you were micro strategy, you're doing the Michael Saylor play on the year, you'd be up 300%. And so you should take some of your excess cash reserves to Microsoft, your very cash-rich company. You should invest these into Bitcoin. Apparently, the Microsoft board is not super excited about this idea. They have other, like, things that they want to do with the funds. They have so much money. They can buy a little bit of Bitcoin. They could. I mean, they could

do whatever they want. They could buy real estate in Manhattan. They could buy, they could buy ether, David. They could do all sorts of things. Like, you know, generally, the companies are keeping kind of like cash and then deploying it back into business or like releasing as dividends to shareholders. Anyway, it's up to Microsoft what they want to do. The board of directors is recommending voting against. So I'll have to see how that goes. But of course, Michael Saylor is up in that biz. Hey, Satya, that's the CEO of Microsoft.

He says, if you want to make the next trillion dollars from Microsoft shareholders, call me. He's going to be like, you know what you guys should do? Should take a ton of leverage and buy Bitcoin. I mean, if you're going to leverage the whole company. Honestly, if you're going to buy Bitcoin, buying it on Fiat leverage is like the best way to do it. I'd rather do that than with my cash reserves. It's like a short attack on the dollar. What do I know?

And lastly, I thought this was kind of a fun story, if like only because of the irony. So, you know, Jonathan Mann, the song-a-day guy, Brian Fry, who's like a crypto lawyer, to actually go sue the SEC and require in courts that the SEC come out and say whether NFT art pieces, you know, the type of art that Jonathan Mann produces on a daily basis with a song-a-day, you know,

NFT meme art, whether that is a security or not. And now the SEC has been compelled, forced to respond. And the response is like 45 pages, David. So already this feels like a nice DDoS attack on the SEC for being stupid. But like one of

their main pushbacks, they said to the court that Jonathan the plaintiff here was trying to goad the SEC into action. He created an NFT collection as a joke because he was trying to troll the SEC is what their claim is. So they're saying the court should dismiss this case. And I think this is like the peak of irony because

Gary Gensler and the SEC has been trolling crypto for years and wasting our time. And this regulatory unclarity the fact that a citizen who's just creating art pieces on chain has to go, like, sue you in court just to get you to provide some clarity on whether NFT art is a security or not, is because you are trolling Gary Gensler the entire crypto industry and have been for years. So this is pot calling a kettle black. I'm not sure what the court will do in this case.

I mean, the fact that we're here is just like because Gary Gensler is wasting all of our time. That's the only reason that Jonathan Mann had to actually like do this in court. do you remember April Fool's last year not the most recent one but two years ago remember what Gary Gensler did on that day oh it was it an influencer video of some sort what did he no no he put on the deal with it sunglasses on his profile picture on Twitter and people thought it was like kind of funny but I was looking at that and I was like this is when he was just in the height of his like anti-crypto saga just Wells notices left and right I mean we're still getting them left and right he put on he overlaid the deal

with the glasses on his profile picture on Twitter. And I'm like looking at that and like, this is an omission of guilt. Like he's admitting he really is. That he is just trolling us. Yes. Yes. And I was actually like furious about that. He could just like get away with like explicit.

It's our money. It's almost explicitly saying that he is just trolling the deal with it. Like, oh yeah, I'm just suing the hell out of your industry. Deal with it. He knows that all of crypto, like, you know, you know where the SEC and Gary Gensler's Twitter accounts where 90% of their engagement comes from? crypto people telling him that he's dumb and stupid and needs to stop. You know, his reign of terror is almost over, though, David.

I will be celebrating that day. Donald Trump is going to fire. I hope Donald Trump fires him in this very public way. I think he's gone either way. But if Donald Trump is. But it's going to be gone loudly. He's loudly gone. A few days.

Embarrassingly gone. Yeah. Well, remember, okay, so there was that interview not terribly long ago by BBC, I think. And the BBC interviewer was like, oh, and if Donald Trump gets elected, he says he's going to fire you. Do you have any comments about that? And Gary Gensler has like his finger up to his ear to like, because he's like getting some feed piped into him. No, no, like people are like telling him what to say or something. And he just goes, I'm going to have to ask you to move on to your next question or something. He just like,

just completely declined answer. I love that the BBC just straight up asked him at. This is why Gary won't come on bank list. Yeah, yeah. He's not answering any of my questions. We would ask these questions. All right. Let's get, let's close us out with me in the week, David. What are we looking at? This is an unfortunate video for Janet Yellen, I think. This is one of the funniest, most immaculate things I have ever watched happen. I did not watch this live, unfortunately. But this is Janet Yellen at a press conference.

And there is a question about the reserve status of the United States dollar. And at the moment that this question is asked, at the perfect timing, the emblem that, because she's on a podium, she's standing in front of a podium with the emblem of the Department of Treasury on the first. front of the podium, the perfect moment, we're going to play it, the perfect moment, the emblem falls off. It just falls off the stand, off the podium. Let's go watch. This is not going to work very well for the podcast listeners, but you can imagine it. Thank you, Colby Smith, with the FT. You've described calls for widespread tariffs as deeply misguided, and the IMF today has warned that

such policies will dent global growth. Can you elaborate more on the near-term economic impact of these policies and over a longer time horizon, how concerned are you about the potential impact of the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency? The timing could not be any better. It was a perfect, perfect moment. Wow. The universe is strange. We are in a simulation and more proof on the week of that.

Guys, let's end with this. Of course, you know, crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us in the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.