Bankless - ROLLUP: BTC $1T Market Cap | More ETH ETF Filings | $STRK Airdrop Pushback?

Episode Date: February 16, 2024

3rd Week of February 2024 ------ 📣SUI | Register for Sui Basecamp https://bankless.cc/sui-basecamp   ------ 🎧Listen On Your Favorite Podcast Player:  https://bankless.cc/Podcast   ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2   ⁠   🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo     🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/toku     🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle     💸 CRYPTO TAX CALCULATOR | USE CODE BANK30 https://bankless.cc/CTC   ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum    ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 3:45 Markets 4:10 Quiet Bull Market https://twitter.com/trustlessstate/status/1756699544195080551  7:55 ETFs sucking up 10x more BTC than miners can produce https://farside.co.uk/?p=997  11:20 All BTC spot ETF together now hold more than 1% of all BTC that will ever exist  https://x.com/HODL15Capital/status/1757528626252136608  https://www.fidelity.ca/en/investments/solutions-portfolios/all-in-one/  16:02 Anthony Pompliano shilling BTC on wall street again!  https://x.com/APompliano/status/1757030179489157575   17:44 Gary G https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ/status/1757818869127737586   https://x.com/robustus/status/1757830024739135994  19:28 The last time BTC was at $50,000: https://twitter.com/MitchellHODL/status/1757093864173609023  21:40 Franklin Templeton spot ETH ETF  https://twitter.com/JSeyff/status/1757142599016616334  22:40 Franklin and Templeton’s Sandy Kaul https://youtu.be/HuOH7ZBJ2P4?si=4lFtWcoaoHLrnQIW  23:10 L2 Growth https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary 23:58 LRT growth https://warpcast.com/sassal.eth/0x2cca1544  https://defillama.com/protocols/Liquid%20restaking/Ethereum  24:10 Vance FanCam https://x.com/pythianism/status/1757792341837168927  https://x.com/pythianism/status/1757417847301738676  30:18 Starknet Token $STRK https://twitter.com/Starknet/status/1757685565669925215   https://tokeninsight.com/en/coins/starknet/tokenomics   https://provisions.starknet.io.   33:55 Positive: https://x.com/TimBeiko/status/1757788002863255899   https://x.com/DCbuild3r/status/1757757332853756073  https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1757762433781752205  Bankless Nation: d0wnlore  36:00 Negative:  https://x.com/LefterisJP/status/1757900583632032160  Bankless Nation: Dartanian.eth   https://imgur.com/19poxsT  Bankless Nation: Traunstein https://imgur.com/Z3XA9Wg  39:24 Backlash regarding tokens unlock for investors and team  https://x.com/Loopifyyy/status/1757755030055112883  https://docs.starknet.io/documentation/architecture_and_concepts/Economics-of-Starknet/  41:50 Starknet is listening: https://x.com/Dogetoshi/status/1757829203091681667  Check out our episode with Eli and Diego: Starknet Token Launch Is Here! ($STRK) https://youtu.be/-IYxwKFsTE4  47:30 ETH Since this week, anyone can deploy mainnet rollups on Conduit! https://twitter.com/conduitxyz/status/1757812032756224399  48:25 GoFundMe refused processing fundraising for Roman Storm’s legal defense!  https://twitter.com/FreeAlexeyRoman/status/1757873646440186039  51:44 Donate: https://wewantjusticedao.org/donate  51:55 Regulation / TradFi / Misc 3 Observation about being a crypto native in the U.S.  https://x.com/BanklessHQ/status/1757200445762830388  54:20 Here are 5 things you are asked when you file taxes in the US  https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1757816696381809020  56:30 Did you know that the US can yoink funds directly from your bank account without court order? https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1757843329725690296  1:00:36 Sam Altman seeks $7T for a new AI chip project  https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/09/openai-ceo-sam-altman-reportedly-seeking-trillions-of-dollars-for-ai-chip-project.html  https://x.com/sama/status/1755294743565930726  Nvidia also surpassed Amazon’s market cap ( $1.75T) this week https://www.reuters.com/technology/nvidia-market-cap-threatens-alphabet-after-overtaking-amazon-2024-02-13/  1:01:58 Lyn Alden https://twitter.com/LynAldenContact/status/1757431098655621474  1:02:55 Lyft Woopsies https://vxtwitter. com/dee_bosa/status/1757526078166306915  1:04:14 Closing & Disclaimers 1:04:46 Moment of Zen New Coinbase Ad - How’s it feel to be a penny https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MP7IhO5cJ14  ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures  

Ryan, as we get into the market section, we're going to talk about some numbers that are very exciting, some Bitcoin price numbers, some percentage up on the week numbers that are very exciting. But I want to take this moment before we get into the market section to remind and hopefully broadcast to everyone listening that we want. Bankless Nation, happy third week of February, 2024. We are in the bull market. David, what time is it? It's a Friday Bankless Weekly rollup where we cover all of the news in Crypto. which is getting easier and easier these days because the news just gets better and better. How are you doing, my man? I'm doing great, man. Did you watch the Super Bowl over the weekend?

No. Okay. Well, there are no crypto commercials. Maybe you'll be happy to know or unhappy to know. I'm not sure. I'm indifferent on that one. I think very squarely, the part we're in in the market is the normies have not yet come. But the crypto natives are waking up.

And those that were in crypto last cycle are starting to look at their price charts and be like, oh, that crypto that I kept, it's going up and they're starting to pay attention. I think that's where we are in the market this week. This conversation has been going around. I have gotten text messages from two friends who were also decently early last cycle, definitely ahead of retail last cycle. And they have texting me again. So I have some people texting me, but these are the people who are smart and ahead of the curve.

They were just like checked out over the last few years. They just checked out. Yeah, they never went full crypto. They never, they have normal tradfied, normal people jobs, but, you know, dabbling crypto when crypto's hot. Well, David, we got a lot to talk about in the market section. Bitcoin hit $1 trillion in market cap and 50K on the week. It's above that, I think, at the time of recording. And so we got to talk about the Bitcoin ETFs, GBDC selling.

What might be behind some of these moves? What else we got? Another filing for the ETH ETF out of our friends from Franklin Templeton. We'll talk about that. And of course, some of the biggest news of the week's Darknet token is finally here. So we're going to unpack all of that, the good, the bag, the ugly of one of the most anticipated token drops that are out there. And also, did you hear about Sam Altlin raising $7 trillion? I have never heard of anyone raising with a tea on it for this new AI chip project.

So that'll be at the towards the end of the podcast. David, I also want to throw some hot takes your way about what it's like to be a crypto native in the U.S. these days. I'm starting at Geoblox from a lot of things, and I ain't happy about it. Yeah, I know you're not. You're going to get a little dad talk from you, aren't we? Yeah, a little dad talk. A little dad rant, I think. David, before we begin, we got a shout out our friends and sponsors here.

Having a little conference over at Suey. What is Suey Base Camp, David? Suey Base Camp. It's the inaugural global conference for the Suey chain. Suey is one of the newer layer ones on the scene. Proof of Steak, Delegated Proof of Steak blockchain using the move environment, which is, I think, the environment that was developed by Facebook. So I think a lot of people, a lot of devs out there are familiar with.

With it, this is during Paris blockchain week, April 10th to 11th in Paris. So if you like tinkering or exploring newer layer one ecosystems, the Suey Basecamp would like to invite you to go. There is a link in the show notes and a code also in the show notes for 20% off of a pass to Suey Basecamp in Paris. That's Suey-Hifeng-Bankless hyphen 20 for 20% off that standard pass. It's kind of interesting, I think, because Suey is one of the change that is exploring the parallelized virtual machine landscape, which has been a major theme this year. Yeah, parallelization is definitely just one of the big research and development topics with a lot of chains coming on layer twos and layer ones like Suey, of course, a big sector, I think, for the focus this year. Ryan, as we get into the market

section, we're going to talk about some numbers that are very exciting, some Bitcoin price numbers, some percentage up on the weak numbers that are very exciting. But I want to take this moment before we get into the market section to remind and hopefully broadcast to everyone listening that we want quiet all-time highs. So I think everyone needs to be very excited internally with your other crypto friends. But when you talk about the Bitcoin all-time highs in line at Starbucks with your crypto friend, make sure no one can hear you because we are trying to extend this period as long as possible before people come in. So I'm asking the industry on behalf of bankless, we want quiet all-time highs.

And there is a clip that I have that I would like to show that I think represents where we are in the market. This is a clip from Animal House. Have you seen Animal House right? I have not seen that movie. It's like a movie from like the 70s. Yeah, I've not seen it. What? Okay. Animal House is a fantastic movie.

This is, I mean, the clip is from the song Shout from the Isley Brothers famous song. Everyone should know this song. But really, it's appropriate, the most appropriate with Animal House because we are all animals for people who don't know. It's about a fraternity that's about to get kicked off the campus for being too rowdy. Right. And they're doing their last party that is about to get them kicked off. And so here is a scene in using the shout song. And in shout, there's this part of the song where everyone's like the song goes a little bit softer now, a little bit quiet.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right before things get loud. Can we play that? Yeah, let's play that. So quiet all-time highs is what I guess we should be thinking of when we're listening. I'm calling it for quiet all-time highs. Okay. Okay, so this is where we are now.

We're all partying, having a good time. This is where we need to be. This is where we need to be. We're a little quieter. This is the next two months of our lives. A little bit quieter now. Just like this? Just like whispered about all-time highs.

And then this is what happens next. It's really soft It's really soft Really soft And then we get to get left Okay I'm just This is how this needs to go

We first we get quiet We get quiet for the next two three four months And then we get loud Like towards the end of this year I'm calling That's my call to action To the entire industry

Yeah And then and then it's just a generosity But we're gonna get like You can't hold that back All right Does it ever actually get crazy Do they just start screaming Do we get to the kind of the euphoria of the bull market in this clip?

In the rest of the movie, yeah, you see the guys of the fraternity just take over an entire town during a parade. But yeah, you guys have seen a watch Animal House if you have seen it. So I guess like don't send the bankless episodes to your friends. Don't tell anybody. Don't text you. Don't talk about crypto. Just be like, oh, I hadn't noticed. Is it all time high?

Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. Just keep this quiet. Just for David. Keep it quiet. This is for your mental health, right? Is that why you want? Or is this good for everybody?

This is good for everyone. The longer that we can drag out of the cycle and keep away the just exploding all-time high blow-off tops, we're trying to avoid the blow-off tops. And this is what we're doing. We're practicing. I don't know. Like, I like the idea. It's like we've won a game before.

That's fine. I like the idea. I just, I don't think markets will, like, honor your request here. Okay? because like markets we like they they are they are animals yeah i mean like especially our markets all right and and so let's talk about bitcoin on the week um we've teed this up a lot but uh where are we where do we start and where are we now we started the week at 45 000 200 we are

currently at 52 000 300 we grew up 16 on the week i remember ryan remember like maybe about a year ago you were you were i think we were talking about like man Remember when there were like double digit days? Yeah. Either up or down. Yep. But there was like a solid like four months. It was just like, oh, Bitcoin's up 2%.

Bitcoin's down, 3%. It was just crabbing around. It's just crabbing around. Up 16%. Wow. Say it again. Say it again. Up 16% on, quietly.

Up 16% on the week. A very modest, humble 16%. We could be loud here. This is a podcast for crypto natives. You don't yet have the normies coming back in. Yeah, we need to set in the expectations, though. Okay, so this is a cycle, would you say cycle, all-time high in terms of price? By that, I mean, the highest it's been since, what, 2021?

Yes, we are threatening price discovery. We still got $19,000 more, $17,000 more until we hit the famous all-time high price of $69,420. But, like, there's not much, like, space between 50K and 69K. Look, I'm almost surprised more, like, mainstream hasn't jumped. on this because another number was hit, not just the 50K number. We're not quite at Bitcoin all-time, all-time highs, right, in terms of price. But like another milestone number, Bitcoin is worth over a trillion dollars at the time. Total Bitcoin's. That's a lot. That is huge. All the people who said Bitcoin was, crypto is dead, not coming back, San Bankman Fried killed it, whatever they

say during the intervening cycle, I mean, one trillion. Surprise. Bitcoin's not dead. The most like predictable surprise. ever, I would say. But let's talk about the mechanics of what's going on because I actually think the Bitcoin ETF flows have been a big contributor. So the Bitcoin ETF wasn't just a narrative, wasn't just to sell the news type of event. We're actually seeing some flows. Can we talk about that? Because I think that is part of the reason why price is increasing in double digits this week. Ever since the launch of the Bitcoin ETFs, there has been like a Benjamin buttoning between the gray scale outflows and the ETF inflows,

where the ETF inflows actually started pretty strong, but then the gray scale outflows just dominated everything. And ever since then, the gray scale outflows to Coinbase, just to selling in general, has been down only, and we are seeing just a resurgence in momentum of inflows into the Bitcoin ETF. So just on February 12th, this is one day, BlackRock I shares, $374 million,

Fidelity FBTC, $150 million, bitwise, $40 million, and then the gray scale loss of $95 million. Meanwhile, what was mined was $51 million. So that $51 million was introduced, $95 million was flowed out of gray scale, but then BlackRock had $375, Fidelity had $150, and Bitwise had $40. Just like, we are just tilting balance of power into the Bitcoin ETFs. Also, another way to put what you just. said the ETFs are sucking up 10x more Bitcoin than the miners can produce at this point in the market. And lately this week, it has been accelerating. One thing that I'm worried that's

happening, Ryan, because it's going to kill my quiet plans, is as Bitcoin prices go up, more marketing happens. Like, this is like the age-old truth of like, what's the best Bitcoin marketing there is? Price. As Bitcoin price goes up, demand goes up. This is what a bull market is. This is why crypto price action is so reflexive. As demand goes up, interest goes up. If interest goes up and we have the largest pipes to buying Bitcoin that we've ever had before, the Bitcoin ETF, inflows into the Bitcoin ETF also go up. So it's like reflexive.

And this is going to kill my quiet plans. But I think as Bitcoin excitement and exuberance goes back to retail, as your friends start texting you, like flows into the Bitcoin ETF is just going to only accelerate. Okay. So, you know, during the last two years, about every couple of weeks, we would mention Michael Saylor's dollar cost averaging with micro strategy into Bitcoin. Do you remember, David, all of the times we mentioned that on the roll-up? Okay. Like 20 times. Well, so what just happened from January 11th, the launch of this

new crop of ETFs until now is the cumulative assets under management, the cumulative Bitcoin these ETFs have purchased is now more than all that micro-strategy has purchased over the past, I don't know, five or so years. So they, the Bitcoin ETFs now own over 1% of all Bitcoin supply in existence and have gone in flippant Michael Saylor's dollar cost averaging. So that's another sense of like the magnitude of this. I don't know. It kind of is a sense of the magnitude of how much goddamn Bitcoin Michael Sailor has.

It takes three, it takes three Bitcoin ETFs to get higher than the micro strategies supply of Bitcoin. You have to add Black Rock Fidelity and Bitwise together to be like I will be I will be impressed finally when only it only takes one Bitcoin ETF to be Michael Saylor. Okay. So like this is all a piece of it. There are real inflows happening with the Bitcoin ETFs. This new product that has launched. There's also been a shift in the narrative this cycle.

So David, this is not something we saw in the 2020, 2021 bull cycle. This time, Tradify is talking about. crypto. And I want to show one thing, and then we'll get to CNBC, which is like one of Tradfai's main, I would say, media companies that a lot of traditional investors look at. But one thing I wanted to show you is look at this. These are some fidelity ETFs, right? So one of the kings of Tradify, what, five, six trillion in assets under management fidelity. You know what they're doing? It's not just the Bitcoin ETF, but look at these other ETFs. This is called the Fidelity, all in one, conservative ETF fund. You know that 6040, 60% fixed income if you're conservative bonds,

4% stocks, right? Okay. Look what they slipped into the all-in-one conservative ETF fund. One percent crypto now. Okay, so it's no longer 60-40. It's now 5940 and 1% and that 1% is Bitcoin. Yes, we took it out of bonds and we allocated it to crypto. That's that's their conservative fund. So even if it, traditional investors are not buying Bitcoin. They're just doing the, yeah, I'll just go in the, you know, 60-40 thing. Now they get one percent of Bitcoin in their 60-40 plan. And then if you get all the way, you want the full like gas peddled in the metal, you know, 401K with fidelity, then it's composed of 97% equity, 3% crypto. Okay, so crypto is just sneaking its way into

the balanced ETFs that are out there for people who just want to bid and walk it. way and not think about it. So crypto, the bid of crypto is being, uh, innervated into like all of these different ETFs. Yeah. I mean, these are things that, that, you know, most Americans will find their 401ks and they just kind of click it, set it and forget it, right? I'll just do the, you know, the conservative package or the growth package or whatever. And they're buying, uh, crypto. They're buying Bitcoin behind the scenes. I don't even think I factored this in to like what could happen on the back of a Bitcoin ETF, but there you have it. Um, normal Americans buying crypto without even knowing it, which is pretty crazy. And look at how the narrative has switched.

Well, one thing, this is from CNBC. Do you remember that this will give you flashbacks, I think, to 2020, 2021, our friend Anthony Pompeiano once again on CNBC Schilling, talking about Bitcoin. I haven't heard about Anthony Pompeiano in a while. And all of a sudden he shows up on CNBC, blast from the past. Here it is. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, the verdict's in, right? Wall Street doesn't just like Bitcoin. They love Bitcoin. If you think of these assets, there's been over 5,500 ETF launches in history. Never have we had a fund get to $3 billion in AUM in the first 30 days. BlackRock and Fidelity both just did it.

So two for the first time in history. And then if you look at Bitwise and 21 shares, Ark, they're both going to hit a billion dollars this year or this week. And so now you have four funds that are going to hit a billion dollars of inflows. But the most interesting part of this is the inflows, these funds are doing $500 million a day of net inflows. But there's only 900 Bitcoin that is actually coming into the daily incoming supply. And so when you look at that, that's like $40 to $45 million. There's 12.5x more demand for Bitcoin than what's being produced on a daily basis. How much of this you think?

That is, yeah, Anthony back. And he does that very well. Does what he does best. Yeah. Yeah. So CNBC is talking up crypto in any way. Actually, they had the first. They're ruining my plans.

Yeah, they're talking about it a lot, David. So it might be ruining your plans. However, here's another clip from CNBC this week. maybe some water being doused on the excitement over Bitcoin with none other than our friend, Gary Gensler from the SEC. So they actually brought Gary on one of the CNBC episodes. And one of the co-hosts, his name's Joe, I believe, goes back and forth with Gary Gensler. He's been based for a while.

It's great. But like I want you to, what I saw in this video was just the utter disbelief, Gary Gensler. The resistance. The resistance. And, like, he's trying to reason with, like, Tradify, basically. They've switched bullish on Bitcoin, and he just cannot understand it. So let's play the clip here. Since it's decentralized and you can't have a profligate central bank.

It's not that decentralized. I know. I know. But really, it's not a decentralized and everything. Because look how finance tends towards centralization since antiquity. So what do we have? We have a handful of three to six core. so-called cryptic exchanges.

I understand that the asset itself, the way that, you know, the, that's how the accounting ledger. Right. That's how the ledger and... Now, how many times do you have people on this show that say, I want to invest in something because how the books and records are kept? He just can't believe it. It's just an accounting letter.

He can't believe it's just an accounting letter. Everyone has and can't be double counted. It's almost immutable. That's why people think it has. So you trust it more than an Oracle Day. database or you tried that more than a lot of the others that was the the big those old years in the central bank that it enables the the fiscal authorities to spend money to the tune it's just a Oracle database David I got to say it I watched the rest of this

interview and Joe was just firing back at Gensler the entire time so um you wouldn't have seen any of this in 2020 and 2021 this is No, CNBC and other people have gotten educated. Yeah. Yeah. They're doing great. But there is a group of people, Gary Gensler and friends who just cannot believe Tradfai is sort of like buying in on the crypto hike. Dan McCartle put it this way.

He, that's Gary Gensler, just can't imagine that anyone might want to have a stake in a money financial system that isn't run by big banks in the government. It drives him nuts. I think it does. And here maybe we'll end the section with this, David, is the last time Bitcoin was at 50K. Greater than 50% of the supply was held by lettuce hands. Tara Luna was running a Ponzi. Remember that? FDX was selling paper Bitcoin, not even real Bitcoin.

They're just minting it. GPDC premium buyers were getting wrecked. Precipice of the fastest rate hike in history. Oh, you remember that? Last time, 50K Powell was just beginning to kind of ratchet it up. The Super Bowl crypto ads kind of marked the top, didn't it? Including FTX's ads. The difference between Bitcoin at 50K today.

70% of the supply held by diamond hands. The poster means people have just been through the last two-year gauntlet of all of the bearish news. Passive Wall Street bid. We just talked about that. Nine weeks away from the having. So that's happening later in April. Rate cuts coming later this year, probably.

No Super Bowl ads. The noise is quiet. The fluff is gone. Now we ride. Yeah. That's nice. These are some good words. One thing that we miss or haven't talked about is

the whole idea of the Bitcoin ETF aging like fine wine. There's this whole like shelling point around six months post an ETF before many institutions even begin looking at it. As in, it needs to be six months old before they will even like sell it to their customers. And then there's also this like line that gets crossed about, I can't remember what the term is, but like there's three different like marketable financial projects by Tradfai. One is just like you market it. You can sell upon request of the customer. And this is where like the Bitcoin, I think this is where like most institutions will consider the Bitcoin ETF, other than the big ones who have the ETFs. But then there is a line that gets crossed where the Bitcoin ETF will

enter in like a marketable, sellable financial asset. And we're not there yet. So all of this like ETF excitement is before the Bitcoin ETF is even at a level of maturity to be at par with like other financial tools inside of Wall Street. So like, we still have like a lot of juice left to squeeze out of this whole ETF thing. Well, David, for a guy that doesn't hold any Bitcoin, which I know you are, you sound awfully excited about Bitcoin this week. Can we turn to your favorite subject maybe and our favorite subject? All of the things I'm saying about Bitcoin are just future things about ETH. He means them even more so for ETH.

Yeah. Yeah, so Bitcoin is halfway through. It's like BTCETF like ARC. And ETH isn't even at its like starting line yet. Like we have this is, and so all of this has like upside for Eath. Okay, so Eth started the week, $2,430 up 16.5%, 1 more percent than Bitcoin, to $2,830 where we are right now. So very good week from Eth this week. And it also got Franklin Templeton to join the Spot ETH ETH ETF race.

What? That filed, filed this week, joining Black Rock Fidelity Arc 21 shares, Grayscale, Vanek, Invesco, Galaxy, and hash decks. We've all submitted spot ETH ETF applications. We're just running the same playback, right? We're running the same play back. But yeah, so with a lot more upside for ETH, we'll talk about the differences in the market structure and what that means. We did a show with Sandy about from Franklin Tumbledin about crypto.

I asked her about like, okay, it win the ETH ETF inevitably gets approved, whether that's this year or next year, inevitably this year. How do you think that that plays into the market dynamics? I will let that be a tease. You know what was a big, like, surprised me. Sandy is actually more bullish on Ether than she has Bitcoin. That was the T's. That was the T's.

Sorry. I didn't even spoil the T's. Okay. But the main difference between the ETH market structure and the Bitcoin market structure is ETH has its own endogenous catalyst, its own endogenous reasons to stuck it up and place at places. We are seeing this in layer two's. where layer 2 TVL has hit all-time highs, $25.5 billion, up 12% in the last seven days.

And even when you denominate in ETH, it's up from $7 million to $9.5 million in the last two months. Arbitrum is up 10% in TVL, optimism up 14%, Manta up 12%, base up 8%, and Mantle, for which this section in the layer 2B is brought to you by, because we love Mantle, who will stake your Eth on its own native layer 2, is up 27%.

no surprise, they're up 27% in TVL. LRTs is another entirely new sector, which has sucked up $3.5 billion of ETHs to put it into Eigerlayer. Etherfi coming in at $1.2 billion, followed by Puffer at $8.5 million. I got some takes from Vance Spencer. I will dub this next section,

the Vance fan cam, because he's been just bullposting, and I love it. His first take of the week, I'm going to go with, it feels obvious, but worth stating, the best predictor of ETH ETH ETH-F flows are the BTC ETF flows.

I think everyone was very disappointed in two weeks ago about the weakness in the Bitcoin ETF and really what just happened was that everyone in crypto Twitter was just way too short term about the PROL's perspective. Turns out they're massively bullish. This information about how strong the ETFs are going to impact ETH is now percolating,

permeating through the market. TradFi will simply get up to the plate the second time and swing even harder knowing Bayesian prior are positive. That's the first tree. So one other thing I'll add to this is I think a lot of people, for a lot of people in Tradfai, there's still like regulatory risk with Ether because the SEC has not really said whether it's like they have, but then Gary Gensler pretend they didn't, that whether Ether is a security

or not. And so I think like it was never really in question whether Bitcoin was a security, is always kind of deemed a commodity. Once Ether is in an ETF form, it's over. Like, all of that regulatory risk for a tradfai will be completely boiled off. And so they have not previously partaken in purchasing ether, I think, because it's deemed to be regulatory risky. And all of that could go away overnight when the Ethereum ETF is approved. The next Vance take is he's quote retweeting Michael Ippolito who's saying, Wonder what happens to ETH after the market realizes that an ETF means $500 million of daily inflows. And Vance adds on an asset that's a third of this.

size of Bitcoin with significantly more supply sinks, staking, defy, NFTs, and significantly less as a total percentage supply left on the exchanges. Of course, this is the endogenous side of things I was talking about. There's a lot more things to do with your ETH, which means that ETH is much more sensitive to price action, to positive price action, especially because that's the time of the season. And so this is why, Ryan, ETH has a lot left juice to squeeze because hasn't even started to squeeze a juice of his own ETF narratives. But don't tell anybody, right, David? Don't tell anyone.

Don't tell anyone. Yeah. Sometimes I need to remind myself. I need to take my own advice. The rest of the markets, we cross two trillion dollars in total crypto market cap this week. Congrats to all of us. There are some big movers of the week.

People are looking down the risk spectrum on the total crypto market cap. Beam, taking the number one spot in movers of the week this week. Crypto gaming sector up 60%. Say a paralyzed EVM layer one chain up 50% stacks. Bitcoin, DFI. sector up 45%. This can also be corroborated by a lot of the Bitcoin deals that we're seeing at Bankless Ventures. Lots of Bitcoin deals. Lots of Bitcoin Layer 2 deals. And then immutable crypto gaming again, up 40% on the week. So lots of different categories are up getting some

bids. That was only one part of the bullish news this week. The other part we're going to get into when we come back talking about the Stark tokenirdrop, the community response, the nuances you might have missed and what we think about all this. All this and more. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including our number one recommended destination to go buy your Bitcoin, buy your Eith, get onboarded into crypto. That is Cracken. Go create an account. Cracken knows crypto. Cracken's been in the crypto game for over a decade. And as one is the largest and most trusted exchanges in the industry, Cracken is on the journey with all of us to see what crypto can be. Human history is a story

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And get a 30% discount with code Bank 30. Click the link in the show notes for more information. All right, David, tell me about the Starknet token. So that was a provision this week. I think that's the term that you're using. Some other people might call that an airdrop. Yeah, I'm not using the provision. I'm using it. It was an air drop.

It was an air drop. So it was air dropped. Actually, so it's not available yet. It's not air dropped. It's not actually airdropped. It's incoming. Stucknet just told everyone what the eligibility criteria was and kind of like the addresses that are eligible.

So get into it. what went on? 900 million stark tokens will be air dropped to 1.3 million addresses. There is a total supply of 10 billion stark tokens. So that is 9%. 750 million were just allocated, which was the news that happened on Wednesday of this week. So 750 million of the 900 million that will be dropped has been allocated. It's currently trading Ryan on a pre-market price at $1.8 on Avo right now.

so like some pre-market speculation. So that's cocking in at $18 billion, which puts it shoulder to shoulder with Avalanche. And maybe a little bit higher than Avalanche. Avalanche and optimism are the two below it. So I think number 17 or 18 in total crypto market cap by fully diluted valuation. So who is eligible?

They said 1.3 million addresses. StarkNet and Stark X users. Stark X, that is the D-Y-D-XV-2 chain. That was when it was a layer two on Ethereum. immutable, the gaming chain, rhinophy, and also so rare. So if you were users of these for a specific criteria, then you've got the drop. If you staked with Ethereum, if you staked Ethereum and pre-merge,

either with Lido, Rocket Pool, Valiating Pools, or as a solo staker, you got a token drop. One of the things that was borked in thisirdrop was that they got bad data. And so they are working to update the data. A lot of Ethereum staker said, oh, I staked before the merge, but the website's showing me a zero, what's up.

Bad data, they're going to fix it, is going to be updated, and then you'll see your tokens. And then there was a lot of, dropped to Starknet devs. This was a overall, I'm getting into some of the vibe checks here. This is overall a developer-weighted token drop

over users, and that has caused some consternation with the users, but we'll get into that. What does the token do, of course? You can pay for network fees with it. It's also used it with governance Of course, you can also, in the near-term future, stake the Stark tokens to actually run and maintain the Starknet chain.

And so the day of claiming is going to be February 20th at 7 a.m. Eastern time and will be open for four months. So you have four months to make sure you find all of your addresses and claim your tokens. And you can check whether you are eligible. There is a link in the show notes. Be very, very cautious for scams. It's provisions. Dot starknet.io. There's a link in the show notes below.

We will also get this into the bankless claimables as soon as as possible. Oh, David, look at this. I got a geoblock on the Starknet website. So I guess because I am logging in from America. Yeah. But you need to log in from your preferred country of choice later. Yeah. So like all air drops, there are opinions when an air drop kind of happens, right?

There's a community reaction. And you gave kind of a TLDR. This is almost like users got a little less than what they were hoping for, I would say. Maybe a lot more than a little. Okay. And then the devs got maybe more than they were hoping for, but I don't know if devs came out

and we're very excited about us. Anyway, give us the positive takes first and then maybe some of the negative takes and we'll see if we can distill this. First, I just want to call and show Tim Bako's tweet here, thrilled to see Protocol Guild, EIP authors, Stakers and Devs represent such a large part

of the Starknet provisions. And so of the 9% these populations were treated pretty well, especially eth-stakers, that's pretty new. I think this is the first of its kind, especially pre-merge East Stakers. And then when we talked to Ellie and Diego on our podcast with them,

they said, like, well, why did you air it up to East-Sakers? And they said, well, we need people to maintain our network, too. And they're already maintaining the Ethereum network, so they're very aligned. And so that rationale just makes a ton of sense to me. Protocol Guild, of course, are the people, the open-source developers

who have built so much of the software that Starkness stands upon, EIP authors overall just like went out of the way to reward people who this entire Ethereum ecosystem is standing on top of the shoulders of. And that includes anyone who's at using the EVM as well, which is alternative layer ones. So that was Tim Beko. DC Builder says, thank you Starkware and Starknet. Appreciate you for all the support you have given me when I was just getting started on my journey as a research engineer with a grant to create a Starknet section and for now being a user of Starknet. I made a tweet talking about the alignment.

between, this is more of a facetia stroke, just the alignment between the air drop and Ethereum Stakers. There's backstory here about calling Starknet the most aligned Ethereum layer two. If you want to hear about that backstory, listen to the episode that we did with Ellie and Diego. Yeah, and I would add from the bankless community on the positive side, there is, we spent up a channel to actually give some feedback and critiques, anyway, takes on the Starknet AirDrop. And a bankless citizen downlaw said, on a positive note, even if most people,

People don't claim it. I think giving allocation to GitHub users, it's really the devs. Known to contribute to open source way back was a good move. But I don't think most people in the space would appreciate that outside of the devs. And so a lot of the tweets that we just talked about on the positive side were from devs, like DeVos, DC Builder, all of these people are very much in the dev camp. So maybe we should talk about the negative side of this too and some of the negative reactions. Where do you want to start? Yeah. So this is also a dev and I think this is kind of emblematic of some of the choices that Starknet made with his token drop. This is Lefteris, who says, I was wondering why the StarkDrop was so low for my GitHub. It seems that the

Starknet AirDrop allocation chose to only count Ethereum development contributions from 2018 onwards, which for me, who contributed mostly in 2014 to 2017, that's when my core development was. Well, that was unfortunate for me. And I think this just shows that, like, Starknet tried to be really granular with their token distribution, and as a result of that granularity left some people out. So this is a dev saying like, oh, I'm a deaf and I also kind of was excluded from this. Let's get into some of the users. Here is d'artanian.eath from the Bankless Nation Discord, who actually started to reflect some of the resentment, the criticisms that I saw on crypto Twitter. But on crypto Twitter, it's really hard to get signal, which I appreciate everyone in the bankless Discord for giving the feedback.

D'Artagnan says, 502 day-old wallet, 196 transactions, 15,000. in volume, 33 individual NFT mints, 0.07 eth paid in fees, bought one of the first entities on Starknet. Did every Starknet quest possible, interacted with every single unique contract you could have, zero Stark allocation. Oh, wow. Okay. And finished saying, there's many people like me who did this much work and proved other

adapts on Starknet and gave hundreds in transaction fees and also got zero stark net allocation. So that's one bankless citizen in the Discord. another one says, who's Troutstein says, in my opinion, the 0.005Eth criteria is not the problem, but using a specific timestamp was. And so this is one of the big criteria that invalidated many people. And I think this is kind of one of the biggest sources of resentment about the choices in this token drop was that Starknet made a cutoff where you needed to have 0.005th in your wallet on a particular day. Oh, really? Regardless of history,

of prior history. And so if you didn't have ETH in your wallet at one particular day, all previous history was just like disregarded. Anyone who, anybody who just happened to bridge out at this very moment is just filtered out. And he says it introduces an unfair element of randomness, which could easily be avoided by a smoothing function, as in like how much did you have,

Ethan did you have in your wallet over a longer period of time, which kind of makes sense. So like, this is kind of like there's an arms race going on between Sibylers who are just farming, extractively and in a very corrupt fashion. And the token distributors who are trying to figure out how to issue their tokens to the correct people, there's an arms race going on here.

I think the Starknet people tried to do this, but because this is a difficult job, they ended up cutting out a large number of users. And as a result, there's, I mean, there's so many more users than deaths. So as a result of that, there are so many more people who are upset than the people who are appreciative. So like the net crypto-twitter amalgamation of their opinions about the same. Starknet was that it was, on the scale of a zero to one, a zero. Is that a fair scale? I don't, I don't think it's a fair scale, but that's the Twitter scale. It just doesn't mean it's fair.

I mean, but it sort of is with respect to the sentiment. There was also some backlash that I saw regarding like token unlocks for investors and the team. So this is Lopify saying the Starkware launched their token two plus years ago on chain, but it's basically impossible to trade. It still is at the time of recording. It would be possible to trade this and defy, I'm sure, on the 20th. I want to highlight that because you said it kind of fast. The Starknet token was issued years ago and frozen

on Starknet. Yes. So the token was, the token has been a thing. For a long time, it just hasn't moved. You got to see the $10 billion supply right somewhere. And it's distribution to like investors and parties that own it. So like distributed, minted

and distributed years ago, but just not circulating. So the poster goes They count that as the token generation event. The reason token generation event is relevant here is because that's kind of like dictates the vesting schedule for insiders, all of the team, the investors, the VCs, all of those people. Now that means two months after launch, 13% of the token supply will unlock for investors. So after launch, a lot of the supply basically gets unlocked from the insiders.

It's not a good look. That is, the spirit of vesting schedules is that there is, it is, it is, look, during the time of the vesting. So you don't get to have zero liquidity and then liquidity for two months and then everyone like tokens unlock. It's supposed to be trading. Retail is supposed to buy in

or get out before investors have like only two months of lockup. It is not the spirit of vesting at all. I think that's probably true. And this goes to like the, what you should make sure you do if you're looking at like purchasing any token is look at the like a,

actual marketing cap and look at the unlocks, right? Because that is a crucial information. And if you're evaluating the value of one of these things. Yeah. I don't know if we're going to see the end of this conversation. There's 150 million Stark tokens remaining to be distributed. I have been chatting with the Starkware people. I let them into the Discord so they can kind of see some of the feedback from the bankless citizens. So just like a nice place to get signal. So that was appreciated by them. I don't know what choices that they're making, but they understand that they need to make some choices. I think this is me reading between the lines here. So I think there will be, there's more to come. This story. This arc is not over. We will see.

Yeah, I think it's important for people to realize this could be the, this is the first of many possible future provisions of the token or drops of the token. And so mistakes made in the first round can be corrected in the second round. And so it looks like there are some things that could be like Rectify things that could definitely be more smooth, particularly on the user side. At least that's what it looks like from my perspective. I will also say there's like this general crypto Twitter like holding out their hand. Like I deserve this. I'm entitled to tokens.

Give me tokens now sort of thing that I don't personally vibe with. Like let's talk about this. But it's also, it's hard to parse those people away from like the real users. It's hard to tell who's who. But let's talk about like what this also is. I mean, you would never receive this in the tradable. Five World. You never received this like, hey, I was a Facebook user in the very early days in my college campus, right? Did I get any Facebook stock? No, I got zero. There was no provisioning.

There was no air drop, right? And so that is the broader context of all of this. So I don't know what I'm saying here. I'm not saying like everyone should be grateful, but there's an element where we have to like not feel entitled to these things either. And I think that's like important as we're right. It's a double-edged sword. I remember after the union. CUNYSwap AirDrop came out, I wrote this article called Moving the Overton Window of Capital. And it was all about exactly that point. Like, this is kind of setting the expectations for networks in crypto to include their users and upside.

And I think, you know, users and, you know, on the one side users, on the other side, like, exploitative grifter air drop farmers who are just like turning this into an absolute operation with multiple Twitter accounts, like, ringing why they didn't get anything on the, on the, other end of the spectrum. That expectation is good because this is what we want crypto to be. We want to be more inclusive with our capital, more people to be along for the upside. But then there's the people who are taking advantage of that and reducing that the ability to actually allow that to be expressed because they're the exploitative, like, operationalized air drop farmers. Yeah, I agree. And at the day, Starknet is a net good for the ecosystem.

They're building incredible tech, innovative layer to really pushing the front. tier of cryptography. And so you've got to commend the project overall. David, what is coming up next? Coming up next. U.S. listeners, three observations about being a crypto-native inside of the United States. I think that's coming out of Ryan here. Sam Altman wants to raise $5 to $7 trillion to build his AI chip thingy. GoFundMe, de-platformed our ability to send money to Roben Storm's legal defense. And then also a really good day for people who believe in the $1 million plus roll-up thesis, all of this and more. But first, a moment to talk about something. these fantastic sponsors who make the show possible, especially Mantle, a layer two with native staking

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It's no secret that token management gets complicated. Between learning all the legal language and tax obligations in every country that your team is in, token grant management can feel like an obstacle course. But it doesn't have to. That's where Toku's. steps in. Toku provides practical tools to handle token grants, allowing for effective oversight of token distributions and payroll tax compliance for employees, contractors, advisors, and investors. They also handle tax withholdings through their real-time tax calculations that can be done

by Toku or integrated into any payroll EOR providers in any jurisdiction. Toku is a trusted provider of protocol labs, DYDX Foundation, Meena Protocol, and many more. Get started for free and make token compensation simple at Toku.com slash bankless. Pretty cool announcement out of Conduit. They say starting today, anyone can deploy main net roll-ups using Conduit. You can choose a tech stack by selecting a framework. What is a framework that is Arbitrum Orbit, that is an OP stack, choosing your settlement layer, and then you're also your data availability source.

I think all of the choices here are going to grow. So you like different frameworks, right? Like Polygon supernets, ZKC, and Khyper Chains, different settlement layers. Yeah, stay on etho. And then data availability, eigenDA, Celeste, etc. Conduit is just making this really, really easy. And so if you believe in the 1 million roll-up thesis, this would be an example of that coming true.

So big day for in the conduit and roll believers. I mean, it's kind of cool. They're making it as easy. Like in the early days, you could just spin up a server, just kind of like that with a server as a service type platform. And now you could just spin up a chain. Like you'd be able to spin up a server on the internet. Yeah.

Very cool. Monolith people in disbelief. Moving on. GoFundMe refusing to process fundraising donations for Roman Storm's legal defense. This is what I would call oof and bad. Ryan, I want to walk us to this one? Yeah, you remember when GoFundMe, like, debanked the trucker protesters in Canada, right? So a bunch of funds were raised and it just basically cut them off, right?

And some of the Canadian banking banks followed suit as well. Well, something similar is happening with Roman Storm. So he's the tornado cash developer who is raising full. funds for his legal defense. So bankless actually donated $10,000 as part of this. And we did it through GoFundMe. The reason we love banks. The reason we did it for GoFundMe was like the other way was sending ETH. There wasn't a way to do USDC. And we just didn't want to sell it. It was fairly easy. And then also part of me thought it would be an interesting test to see if GoFundMe would actually de-platform Roman Storm. I didn't think they would do it though.

So I was surprised to learn as of today. GoFundMe has basically refunded everybody who contributed. And they have the bank, the platform, the Roman Storm Legal Defense Fund, which is super interesting because, like, I mean, they've had controversial funds in the past. FBI director, Andrew McCabe, raised 500K on GoFundMe. You know, this guy, Michael Cohen, you remember him, Trump's like lawyer. He raised 300K. This was in 2023 for legal defense.

defense. Why Roman Storm, huh? Like, why? And the fact that... Why? Because it's the Department of Defense. It's, I mean, it's like, I guess so. I guess FinCen, I don't know, maybe he's extra controversial. The good news here is, of course, we could still get funds to Roman by route of crypto. I suggest, Ryan, that we take the $10,000 of Fiat Boomer banking bucks, turn them into crypto, and then send them, he sent even more to him via crypto, because they debunked. banked him. There you go. We should boost it. So why don't we just do 15K now? We'll add an extra 5K on this. 15K in crypto. 15K. Real crypto prescine. Just so long as David, any of the, any that we send him, we go, we buy that back real quick. Okay. I don't want, I don't want more Fiat.

We'll send him Fiat. This is what's crazy, though. This is what's crazy to me is that, like, we are really moving to a world where if you're not using crypto, you could be debanked at any time if your opinion is unpopular. I mean, what we're talking about is, you know, Roman Storm, his civil liberty of having a free and fair court case, right? It's until proven guilty and being able to fund that. If they freeze your ability to actually pay for a lawyer, then they've removed that civil liberty, don't they? That's what's so insidious about the- At the banking layer, yeah, exactly.

And one of the reasons why I think we feel so strongly about this is like, it's a slippery slope. If Roman Storm wins because we funded his court case, then the buck stops here and all civil liberties will be preserved. If he loses, there will be another future incremental progress towards any sort of like silencing or political dissent or any sort of freedom to be in America, which already feels like it's slowly incrementally encroaching on us. It is. And if you want to help support that cause as well, it will include a link in the show notes where you can donate to this through Justice Dow, which is purely by route of

crypto, cannot de-platform you in the same way. David, this is part of a wider thing. I just want to talk to you about, about observations. I've got three observations from crypto. Is it my dad talk? Let me get comfy. Get ready. Get ready for a dad talk. I just want to ask, like, bankless listener, if you are based in the U.S., if you're not based in the U.S., you might not know what I'm talking about, but if you're based in the U.S., are you noticing the increasingly geofense, geofencing of defy websites, restaking platforms of airdrops we just saw earlier in the episode, is happening to you. This was not the case in 2020, 2021. Now, I don't know what's going on, but it seems like so many Defi experiences are just geoblocked for

American users. And it's so crazy to me that crypto-natives have to like pretend they are citizens of other countries. A lot of crypto-natives are trying to get around this by using VPNs, right? And so you literally have to, not David, not I, but like you literally have to pretend that you are what from South Africa or from the UK or like from France. or something like this. I'm sure you're familiar with people who do that, David. You have to change your digital passport in order to actually access what?

Defi? Air drops? It's absolutely crazy that the US is like blocking its citizens from air drops. I mean, what? Is free money scary? And they're not making it illegal, but they are creating with a chilling effect, essentially, by taking all of like a crack-in,

Coinbase, multiple projects to court calling every token of security. They're creating this chilling effect where the industry has basically just had to geo-fence, geoblock American customers. And it's an absolute tragedy. On this darknet website, it says due to regulatory constraints and or an uncertain regulatory environment, they don't even have the proper citation as to why they can't do it. They're just scared.

Right. And you can't blame these projects for this. I mean, they just don't want to end up on the, on the, wrong side of a SEC bully court case, right? And so what's going on here? I mean, this is like the country in the 90s fully rolled out, fully supported the internet. Imagine if we geo-fence the American population in the 90s from the early internet protocols. That's what we're doing with crypto. And it's got to be like the dumbest timeline. It's such a cell phone for the US to do this. But they know about crypto, David. Another thing that I was noticing this week is this is the

1040 tax returns. So 160 Americans have to go fill this out in the next few months to file their taxes by like April, you know, the date of taxes. Mine's so excited. He did it early. Well, I was still in the process of doing it, to be fair. I'm not, I'm not that much of a go-getter, but like, you know, I take special attention when it comes to taxes because it very much affects like your investing returns. I always have. I've always been very detailed. So here are the five things that they ask 160 Americans when they file their taxes. The five things on the first page of a 1040 form. They ask for your name. They ask for your address. They want your social security number. Making sense so far. Your marriage status, because that factors into what deductibles you can take off.

And the fifth thing they ask is, do you own crypto? All right. Look at this. Digital assets. At any time during 2023, did you receive any crypto, sell any crypto, otherwise dispose of a digital asset. And you put that chain history together and it's like all of your ownership. And the answer is yes or no. Yes or no. And that is one of the first five things they ask you. So it's not like the U.S. doesn't know about crypto or it's too ignorant or is like passing sloppy laws. Like they're very much paying attention to what is going on in crypto and that the tax authorities certainly are. What happens in the IRS or like Rube Goldberg machine? Like what category do you get passed into if you hit yes. Like what happens next? Oh, I'm sure they're flagging you somewhere in Gary Gensler's

Oracle database for like, oh, this is interesting. Here's a citizen that has purchased to own some crypto. I don't know what happens after that, but like... I feel infringed upon. It's very important to IRS. And like, again, this is, I would say, the United States apparatus calls crypto a Ponzi, calls it like, you know, fake banking, just stupid. It's a fad. It's going to go away. Well, if it's a fad, if it's Beanie Babies, why are they asking about it on the first page of your tax forms? Because it's taxable Beanie Babies. Crazy, right? The third thing I want to talk to you about, and I learned that this week that the U.S. banking system can actually do this.

Did you know, David, that if the feds or a state, so the state of Virginia, we have some taxes do in Virginia because that's where I personally live, did you know they can just yoink funds from your bank account, from any U.S. bank account? they call it a lien, and they can absolutely just yoink funds without going to the court order, without proving anything, just by asking, requesting it. So you have no property rights inside of your bank from the perspective that you have government? I mean, I've kind of always assumed that that's true. I knew that they could freeze things. Like if you're on a watch list or something like this, or you suspected of money laundering.

I didn't know they could just reach in without court order, without any evidence, without any proof, and just yonk your funds out. And the bank would just legally have to let them do it. But it happened to us. Wait, wait. Are they yonking the funds or are they sending a message to the bank saying, hey, yoink this user's funds? Okay.

So let me tell you what happened to us. So the Commonwealth of Virginia, state of Virginia, they basically think that one of our entity companies, Bankless LLC, owns $271. So a very small amount of tax money to the state of Virginia for 2024. So this is kind of a new tax obligation. We have paid it. In fact, we paid it twice, by the way, and we told them we paid it.

We have correspondence back and forth. They were like, oh, well, maybe we didn't receive the first time paid again, so we paid it again. Anyway, we're still in this weird automated cycle where they think that we owe them $271. And so what they did is the state of Virginia wrote one of our bank accounts, so we do still a bank somewhere, David, Mercury. And they said, we have to put a lien on this account for $271. dollars and Mercury was just like, well, sorry, and it's gone. The money is just gone. Again, we've already paid, right? We have evidence kind of proving this. They don't have to present any evidence essentially to the bank or a court system. There's like no due process. They just have to be like,

hey, these guys owe us money and the bank will just cough up the money. So yeah, you're right. There are no property rights in the banking system. And I don't know why I wasn't aware of that. I thought there would be more to the process, like maybe some evidence presented or your faith in the system shattered a little bit. It's just, I'm maybe waking up even more to how little, like, when you have money in a bank account, how little you actually own it from all sorts of angles, David. It's owned with permission. Yeah.

Yeah, it's not even really your property if the government wants to, you know, yonk it away. Anyway, that's the dad talk. And that, what I guess my reflection on this last piece, David, is I don't think the nation states are going to love crypto as a result of this. Okay. So we also have funds in our Ethereum address. You can't write Ethereum. You can't write Vitality and send a letter and just be like, bankless, David and Ryan owe me money. Like, yoink it from the ether address.

It doesn't work like that. The crazy thing is we didn't owe the money. They just want to be clear that. We are totally on top of all of our tax obligations, always have been. But they won't have the ability in a bankless money to go do that. And I don't think they're going to like that. I don't think they're going to appreciate that. So no wonder we have such consternation with respect to the nation state and everything that's going.

No wonder they're trying to geoblock everything. They're just trying to slow it down. Right. You know what I think we should do as a result of this? What, David? We do a podcast. Go bankless. Oh.

Maybe we should take the money out of the account. I mean, I don't think there's that much money in there. And just put it in crypto. Well, you know, we mostly are. The reason we have these types of accounts is just because... We had at least $270 in the account. That's true.

And they could have that. That's fine. They can have that part. David, what else you guys? I love how I'm finding out about stuff about our company live on the podcast. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, we're taking care of this. No need to worry.

All right, moving on to some of the last stories of the week. Open AI CEO, Sam Altman, we all know Sam, seeks as much as $7 trillion for a new AI chip project, which is just an insane amount of money. A lot of money. It's a lot of money. Yeah, he's saying that AI chip limitations are hindering open AI's growth. There's not enough chips in the world. And he says that this project would increase chip building capacity globally.

And he's been talking with investors, including the UAE, to raise between $5 and $7 trillion. So overall, like, Sam McMahon-free just wants to juice chip production. You said Sam Bankman-free, David? Wow. Wow. Sam Altman wants once up $5 to $7 billion

to juice chip production, which I think there's a bunch of different conversations here, but just overall, like the role that chips have in this world is up only, has been up only, continues to be up only, X-AI, chat UBT, this revolution, also with like VR headsets,

the chip, the need for chips in this world are just growing exponentially. NVIDIA, the market cap of NVIDIA passed the entire market cap of the Chinese stock market this week, which is just insane to think about. That's crazy. NVIDIA now, they make 80% of the chip market. So this is also what Sam is responding to. There's like massive consolidation concentration of power. Our friend Lynn Alden weighed in on this.

He said, NVIDIA now is a market cap equal to 4.5 Exxon mobiles. right so like chips are the new oil this is chips versus energy on kind of a chart here so you know but before I got into crypto run and I took all of my boomer investments and put them into

eth you know what I was invested in chips was it NVIDia it was like two X leverage long semiconductor AMD it was the most millennial portfolio which is the better trade

it was an ether I think I lost I think at the time wow Wow. Because the AMD was like $6 at the time and it's like, yeah, it's crazy. Which I consider myself a fantastic investor.

Wow, you are a fantastic investor. That's why we do this show, David. It's just like nothing but great non-financial advice. Heath and semiconductors. It's been great in so far. All right, dude. We don't have a meme in the week this week, but let's talk about some tradfai antics. I cannot believe this happened.

Okay, so here's the headline tweet. Never seen anything like this. Lyft just corrected its earnings press release. says it means ebita, margin expansion. EBDA, do you know what that stands for? Earnings before income T, something, something. Yeah, yeah. It's like a way to like massage some numbers.

It's profit, it's profit, basically. earnings before income taxes, depreciation, amortization. They reported that their EBITA, their profit basically was 500 basis points, 500 basis points. So shares went up 60%. 5%. Yeah, that's a lot, right? Yeah, it's a lot.

On your margin. Shares went up 60%. But apparently, David, this was not the correct amount. They added a zero to this. Typeo to zero? Yes, it was actually not 500 basis points. It was 50 basis points. Oh, my God.

That's an order of magnitude of one. That's kind of reminiscent of Coin Telegraph, Errant Bitcoin ETF approval. If this was malicious and somebody was trading that, they probably made a lot of money. I think this is absolutely crazy that this happened. Couldn't happen in Defy, could it, right? Because all of our earnings are on chain. Because we have no earning reports. We just have tokens.

All right, okay, so that's the weekly roll up. Thanks everyone for walking us through it this week. There is a moment of Zen, which is a Coinbase ad. So we're going to show you an ad for a moment of Zen. It's not ours. It's Coinbase is, but it's definitely worth watching. This is not going to be on the podcast because you kind of need to watch the video. So it's only for the YouTube.

Some disclosures as we end. Both David and I, of course, hold Eith. You can see all of our. disclosures at bankless.com slash disclosures and got to let you know crypto is risky you could lose what you put in but we are headed west it's the frontier not for everyone but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot