Bankless - ROLLUP: BTC ATH & ETH Near ATH | Stripe & Circle L1s | Monero 51% Attack

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

On this week’s Weekly Rollup, ETH flirts with ATH while BTC tags a new one, PPI spooks then fades? Ryan and david dig into a $1B ETH ETF day, Tom Lee’s 1M ETH treasury, and the ETH/BTC setup. Also, Stripe and Circle launch L1s, Coinbase routes Aerodrome in-app, Uniswap’s Wyoming DUNA and fee switch path, Monero’s 51% attack, plus quick hits on Do Kwon and bank pushback on the Genius Act. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle --- TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 4:01 PPI Volatility & Markets https://x.com/fundstrat/status/1955995766742192612 https://x.com/fundstrat/status/1955992342453772783 https://polymarket.com/event/fed-decision-in-september?tid=1755177801833 https://x.com/DegenerateNews/status/1955763404733603857 https://companiesmarketcap.com/assets-by-market-cap/ https://x.com/CoinMarketCap/status/1955457154686849099 https://x.com/nilesh_rohilla/status/1954190478712164631 https://www.theblock.co/post/366734/standard-chartered-analysts-raise-ethereum-year-end-price-target https://farside.co.uk/eth/ https://x.com/NateGeraci/status/1955100618088972649 https://decrypt.co/334366/harvard-116-million-blackrock-bitcoin-etf https://x.com/BitcoinPierre/status/1955433791805329825 https://x.com/BitcoinPierre/status/1955493635119780321 https://x.com/brian_armstrong/status/1955980017315295514 https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/13/crypto-exchange-bullish-more-than-doubles-in-nyse-debut-after-pricing-ipo-above-expected-range.html https://x.com/hosseeb/status/1955815228245205461 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1954876419261010119 https://x.com/tedpillows/status/1955283896049807480? https://www.strategicethreserve.xyz/ https://x.com/CryptoGucci/status/1955339759917646012 https://www.bankless.com/read/ethzilla-shares-surge-after-peter-thiel-takes-7-5-stake https://x.com/MikeIppolito_/status/1955606885442179298 https://x.com/JasonYanowitz/status/1956001519095947593 https://x.com/StoryProtocol/status/1954885593286238460 https://x.com/JasonYanowitz/status/1954890658155545074 https://x.com/EricTrump/status/1955653873730720202 https://x.com/EricTrump/status/1955324074684518557 37:07 Stablecoin big boys launching their own L1s https://x.com/circle/status/1955246636223135976 https://x.com/adamscochran/status/1955257074318823568 https://x.com/jgarzik/status/1955270849595937091 https://x.com/jgarzik/status/1955270849595937091 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1955011330777497987: https://x.com/chuk_xyz/status/1955064401490280721 https://x.com/100y_eth/status/1955081750683766805 https://x.com/CampbellJAustin/status/1955240962038349995 https://x.com/cherdougie/status/1955383195609993270 47:36 Banks demand the exclusion for yield-bearing stablecoins in the GENIUS https://x.com/jchervinsky/status/1955763041594958175 https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/08/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-guarantees-fair-banking-for-all-americans/ 52:22 Scott Bessent - Strategic Bitcoin Reserve update…it’s not great https://x.com/watcherguru/status/1955987518509154717 54:01 ETH, Coinbase, & Uniswap https://x.com/AerodromeFi/status/1953853358575587631 https://x.com/wagmiAlexander/status/1955101747082309745 https://x.com/brian_armstrong/status/1955268909294068192 https://www.theblock.co/data/crypto-markets/public-companies/coinbase-total-volume https://www.theblock.co/post/366257/uniswap-foundation-eyes-protocol-fee-switch-with-propose https://gov.uniswap.org/t/foundation-feedback-group-ffg-thread/25549/10 https://x.com/SenLummis/status/1954950030306968055 https://x.com/unichain/status/1955978120269312280 58:54 Do Kwon pleaded guilty https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/do-kwon-pleads-guilty-us-fraud-charges-40-billion-crypto-collapse-2025-08-12/ 1:00:48 Monero getting 51% attacked - now controls over 51% of Monero hashrate https://x.com/caffeinateduser/status/1954999609039917448 https://x.com/PixOnChain/status/1955738903895531893 1:05:30 Closing & Disclaimers --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Bankless Nation, it is the second week of August. It's time for the bankless weekly roll up. We got Eith. Just teasing us on that all-time high, David. It's not quite hit it yet. Just ripping through numbers, but not breaking all-time high. Well, because Eith was like $2,000 less two weeks ago. It's like $1,000 a week for two weeks.

But we're so close. Just teasing it. Also, Bitcoin did hit an all-time high, stealing some of the glory. And then Tom Lee is the first to $1 million in Eith in his ETH. ETH treasury vehicle, okay? ETH treasuries are just buying a ton of ETH. I think that accounts for a lot of the growth. We'll talk about that.

What else we got? We got some bad PPI numbers this morning, the morning of August 14th. I, Ryan, am of the mind that all of these speed bumps that we come from like the economy, any sort of like, I don't know, war. These are all just speed bumps that, you know, the market's just going up. The economy's strong. Markets strong. And so like, yeah, we're going to have some speed bumps along the way.

and that's what we got with the PPI numbers. We're going to talk about what those PPI numbers are and why everyone's a little bit skitterish as of this morning. And what is old, Ryan is new again. We are back into the world of the private intranet blockchains. Both Stripe and Circle launched new layer ones or announced layer ones this week. Arc and tempo, respectively.

Good for crypto? Bad for crypto? We're going to give our takes about that. Also, Minero was 51% attacked. All right, the famed 51% attack. We're seeing it in the wild. and banks are angry. They're lashing out against the Genius Act

because I think they're losing their monopoly power. Maybe that's why they're crying about it. When banks are angry, I'm happy. That's good for us. That's the whole bankless thing, right? Coinbase, adding a Dex to a Coinbase app, and that's doing numbers. We've got all that and more.

But David, before we get in, you know what? I want you to shill me on why I should only listen to the bankless podcast on the bankless premium feed. I do that right now, by the way. I'm a premium feed subscriber, and I want you to tell me why I'm doing this again. Remind me. We put out three episodes on the premium RSS feed this week.

One with Uma Roy from Sucinct. One with DFI, Dave from Kapp. And then the third with Preston Van Loon, who is an Ethereum core developer. Uma, they just launched the main net of Sucinct. And so we talked about that. It talked about the Prued token. And I just asked everything that I wanted to know about that. Uma was here in the studio with me.

So that was a live from New York episode. Dave from Cap Money startup on MegaEath and also the Ethereum Layer 1. I think it's a pretty cool startup. And so I asked him about that. And then press in just kind of gave us the download on the future of the Ethereum protocol where we are with EIPs. Fusaka is coming next, then Glamsterdam, and then some future of work that starts with the letter H after that.

And then also come we kind of talked about like core dev morale, burnout, the shakeup of the EF and how that's impacted core dev development. So these are like more niche episodes, a little researchy, a little bit more in the trenches, more directional about what you want to learn. So if you want to learn about ZK, you got to subscribe to the premium feed to listen to Uma. If you want to learn more about Ethereum protocol development, you got to subscribe to the bankless premium fees.

You can go here for Preston. If you want new apps on DeFi apps on the Ethereum Layer 1 inside of this new meta defy apps, you got to subscribe to the bankless premium feed so you can go listen to Dave. And, you know, there's people that pay thousands and dollars of research out there. Or you could just listen to the bankless premium feed for $22 a month. So there's a link in the show notes.

So you can go subscribe and get all the other podcasts ad free. It's ad free. It's also our bonus debriefs that we record after episodes. It's early edition episodes as well. So people didn't have to wait for that Vitalic episode. They got it like a week in advance. It's all of these things. You know, there's two types of people in the world, David.

There's people that watch Lord of the Rings, okay? Just like the regular cut, the theater cut. There's people that watch Lord of the Rings extended edition. Okay. That's what the bankless feed is. The premium feed is extended edition banglily. I hope you're one of those people. They're my favorite people.

All right. Let's talk about the dip that we saw as of this morning. The PPI dip. First of all. What does PPI stand for? Okay. So the PPI is the producer price index. All right.

So it's a measure of inflation, but probably not the one you're used to. What's the one that we're all used to? And we talk about constantly. Yeah, CPI. Yeah, CPI. Yeah, right. So PPI is sort of like the wholesale cousin of CPI. All right. It's all about like producers. It's all about wholesalers and their costs of good. Their cost to make things. Whereas, so it discludes things like, you know, rent and, you know, other costs that might affect a regular citizen. It's more if you're running a big business or something, your price of inputs. It's more about goods rather than, yeah. Okay. It's more on the goodsy side. Okay. So the problem with the PPI number and there was a problem was the actual was 3.7%. The measured, the measured, the measured, the measured.

This is the number that we report on. The actual measured number was 3.7%. What was it supposed to be? It was supposed to be 2.9%. Okay, so they thought, analysts thought it was going to be almost a percent less than it came in on. So it's running a lot hotter. And the prior, I guess, metric for this was 2.6%. So a big jump.

So the scare, of course, is this looks like tariffs, you know, having an effect on the producer's side of the economy, on the wholesaler goods. And PPI is kind of a leader. It's generally it's a leading metric for CPI. So it affects PPI first affects CPI some months later. So it's basically an inflation running hot type story. Okay, so the last pattern that I'm going to point to is when we got in the jobs report. And like the jobs report revised itself. What was that two weeks ago?

One week ago, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was our last step. And everyone's like, oh, bearish, you know, tariffs and AI are going to destroy. the economy and then the S&P dumped half a percent. We are up from that moment, 0.3%. The SPY, XPX is almost at all-time highs. And so I'm kind of categorizing it into that. Yeah, there's just like speed bumps in the economy.

But like we're going up. The trend is the same. In two, three days, we're going to not be thinking about this. You know who you sound like, David? Tell me. Our friend of the show, Tom Lee. Tom Lee. I'm sure Raoul Paul, too.

Also friend of the show. But, you know, Sir Tom Lee, okay? He said, today's hot PPI is just a graze. Since late 2022, every dip has been bought. Every dip has been bought, yeah. He repeats that three times, just if you didn't get the first time, every dip has been bought since late 2022. Okay? And so is there any reason to believe that this dip wouldn't also have been bought?

Also, it was the case that, well, PPI was a huge miss. CPI, actually, as of this month anyway, was a small, small beat. So it came in lower than animal. actually expected it. So maybe some sun there. But you don't think this affects anything on our trajectory. Neither does Tom Lee. I think I agree with both of you. Okay. I don't think it affects anything either. So there's three cosines on it. I mean, we'll talk about the etherites in a hot sack, but let me tell you that dip is already mostly gone. Yeah. And also, you know, I was looking at polymarket. The Fed decision is what this could affect because if inflation's burning hot,

then maybe the Fed, you know, isn't as doveish. And everyone expects that the Fed's going to cut rates, come September. Well, you know, it dipped a little bit in terms of probability on on polymarket that the Fed would cut rates, but not that much, actually. That's still kind of consensus that the Fed is going to cut rate. So, you know, the market's pricing that in right now, too. And speaking of prices, tell me about Bitcoin price on the week. We're not at all-time high at the time of recording, but we did hit all-time high. Where are we at right now? We came off of all-time high. The new Bitcoin all-time high, as of yesterday, is $124,500. That's up from the previous all-time high by $1,300 higher.

Previous all-time high, $123,200. Because of this dip, we are currently at $117,700 at the time of recording. So Bitcoin is up just a modest 1% on the week, up 1% on the week. So it lost like 5.5% on the PPI. Yeah, down 5.5% from the top. But we just kind of, the week is flat. We went up 5.5% and down 5.5%. 5.5%. Yeah, but I guess the thing to celebrate is that all-time high. And there was a time,

there were people who screenshoted this on the, you know, the website where it shows the world's largest assets. Bitcoin was actually number five. It slipped down to seven right now, but was number five. That means of all the top assets in the world, things you can buy with your money, gold is number one, and Vidia is number two, Microsoft is number three, Apple was number four, and then Bitcoin was number five. It's pretty cool. It probably regains that in the coming in a week. It's pretty cool.

Yeah, top asset. Actually, I didn't look at either. Ether's in the top 25 now, too. Yeah, we're at number 22. Yeah. We pass MasterCard. We pass Netflix on the week. We passed on mobile.

The Internet of Money is currently priced equivalently to MasterCard. That's so ridiculous. Well, just above MasterCard. Actually, who's the next one we could pass? Walmart? Oh, Visa. There's Visa. you know, three slots up.

Visa hanging in number 19. Ethereum is a super set of what Visa is. It should be more than all of those combined. Well, let's talk about EVE price on the week. All right. Tell me. It's getting closer to that fair valuation of Eith. Yeah, so we're down a little bit.

We're not at all-time highs, but we are up on the week. Are we not? Eith price up. Even during this dip, even with the price of this dip, ETH is up 19% on the week. I think it was up something like 25% on the week. week during its local high of the week. $4,540 at the time of recording.

Teasing us on the all-time high, it touched $4,780, which is just $100 away from the all-time high. So all-time high is close, not yet. Wait, what is Alt-Time High? What's the official bankless number? According to the Coinbase Exchange, $4,8,878, which was in November of 2021. So look at this. I mean, we haven't hung in the, you know,

know, 4,500s and above for very many days. ETH has been in the 4,000 range, not very much. And then 4,500's probably been like, I don't know, seven days, something like that, days, days. A very low number of days. So we are in uncharted territory-esque. We're not quite all-time high, but we're uncharted territory. Now, let me throw some range showers on that, which is this is not the CPI adjusted all-time high, all-time high.

All right. If we take inflation into account, you know what our all-time high number actually is? This is going to make me sad. 5,530. And you know what? It should make you sad, too, because, like, Fiat has really, like, not done well. But no one holds dollars. I'd like to see that compared to, like, well, it's been a four years.

A lot of people still hold a five-year treasury. Yeah, but a lot of people still hold dollars. I mean, if you have, like, cap. You're not holding the same dollars that you're holding from 2021. Hopefully you're not. You're just doing something wrong. I hope you know. Don't do not hold dollars for the long run.

Do not do that. And we do have an all-time high, though, when it comes to market cap all-time high for ETH. You know that? Market-Cap all-time high. ETH market cap just hit at one point $557 billion. Okay, that's the highest it's ever been. And why would that be for people that don't know? Why would market cap be all-time-old-old-old-old-old-old-old.

Because we issue Ether at a going rate of like $1. 3% a year. Well, 1.5 is the max. There's been some burn. If you go back to the merge, it's 0.3% a year. So the issuance rate of eth is 0.3%. Excuse me. Oh my God, it's even lower than that.

Since the merge, which was effectively three years ago, the issuance rate of ether has been 0.13%. That's nothing. That's kind of crazy. That's nothing. Yeah. That's way better CPI than Fiat. And also also it's annualized. It's what point eight or something like that this is just from my like from the last year or so I don't know if you could see that.

Okay. I don't think oh my year goes out to a year. It's kind of annoying. It goes from 30 days to two years and then it's since the merge. But for the last 30 days, which I think is actually pretty related to the year, 0.7% yearly issuance. So since we are in this uncharted territory, we haven't been here for very long. This is where people get to do the fun stuff, and the fun stuff is you get to predict where ETH is going. Where is the ETH price going?

It's way more fun to do that right now than it was like a few months ago. So this is a tweet from, I guess a random trader I saw on Twitter, minimum 10K, bull case, 16 to 20K in the next six to eight months. And he puts up a nice little chart. 16 to 20K? Yeah. Yeah. You don't believe this? It seems so, it seems crazy.

It seems high. It's not crazy. I don't think that's crazy at all. See, this is, you know, some PTSD, David talking. I don't think it's crazy. I think it can totally happen. Now, this is, you know, somebody drawn squares on a chart, and I don't know what you believe about that. I guess.

They look nice. Yeah. So, standard charter, they predicted 7,500 eat. Are you familiar with, like, standard charter predictions? I feel like they're always just like. I know the name, but not, like, much more than that. It's kind of, it always feels to me like it's bellwether predictions. It's just like, I mean, I think this prediction was, I'm going to misquote it, but it's like pretty like sad for Eth, you know, three to six months ago.

And now Eath has got momentum, it's going up. It changes. So it's kind of a bellwether prediction. But the bellwether prediction is 7,500 by the end of the year. Tom Lee is saying, Tom Lee has confirmed that number and he actually thinks it could go much higher. That's my number. I knew. That's why I picked it out for you, David, for the end of year.

So do you have a number on where this could go? Are you not ready to do that yet? Especially when is a bull market, it gets so hard to predict the future because anything could happen. Like the crypto space is like three years of slow motion and then one year of where a decade happens. See, this is great. So asking you this question means we're not in a frothy bull market to me, right? Because I know David in a frothy bull market and you would be like, oh, hell yeah, we're going to 30K and not stopping. This train's not stopping.

Unless maybe you've kind of, you know, mellowed out over the years. Maybe I've learned my lesson, you know? I said the F word a few too many times last cycle, you know? Well, speaking of the F word, there is an F word on Ethereum ETF flows. Oh, it's been EFT for weeks, actually. It's so effed. It's very heft in the best of ways. So we had a, last week, we had a billion dollar day on ETH ETF flows inbound.

I guess I could compare this to Bitcoin, but I think we are like, like, percent higher than the previous all-time high. Yeah. A billion dollars in inflows is a lot. Oh, actually, this was like, this looks like it's double or triple what Bitcoin did on the same day. It's like, incredible. So there's a flipping on that.

Even Eric Balchunis is like, wow, these ETF flows are impressive. Chunky, chunky. Well, especially when you look at the total size of the Ethereum ETFs is $12 billion. And just two days ago from the time of recording, one billion dollars came in. So it went from like, you know, 10 to 11. billion dollars and then we've accumulated billion dollars more since. So there are some explanations for this. This is Nate Jarossi.

He says feels like... What are these explanations? People want ETH. Okay. Well, let me give you the, you know, like an explanation here. It feels like the spot ETHs were severely underestimated simply because Tradfy investors didn't understand ETH. Okay.

So maybe they didn't want ETH because they didn't understand it. Bitcoin had a nice clean narrative of digital gold. ETH takes more time for investors to understand. Now they're hearing backbone of future financial markets. and it's resonating. Okay? So Nate is making the case that just took them along and understand. You know, ETFs came out last summer, took them about a year,

and then suddenly they're like, I understand Eiff, and I'm going to buy it. That's an explanation here for you. The price going up materially really helps with understanding the narrative. Oh, yeah, I understand it way better now. It's above 4K. Oh, the price goes up? That makes total sense. Yeah, so also, I mean, in good news, though, I think the big question,

question, this cycle to me has been the institutional cycle. And what I think is happening, really, in terms of understanding, it's more of a consensus understanding. We already have one institutional asset that's clearly an institutional asset coming from crypto, and that is Bitcoin. Now it looks like with this ETF flows, we'll talk more about the treasuries later, we have a number two, and that is ether. And ether is becoming institutionalized. And how that kind of follows up the chain, you get ETFs, you get treasuries, you got a lot of holding. You get people like endowments like Harvard. Harvard just this week revealed that they had 116 million in Black Rock Bitcoin ETFs. So endowments in the U.S. about a trillion dollars. And now the biggest endowments

in the world in the U.S. are buying crypto asset. This is like their fourth or fifth largest holding at this point. So we are moving up that curve of like institutional adoption. I think that's what people are seeing. They're under allocated to ETH. Is what you're finishing with? Is that your punchline? That's right. I mean, now this is like a year and a half later, two years later from the Bitcoin ETFs and Harvard is revealed. So, I mean, look for that same effect. Give it the time leg and it'll be ether on the balance. I see no reason why that doesn't happen at this point with the Treasury momentum and the ETF momentum.

You know, there is a lot of, I don't know how connected these things are, but there's plenty of academics that are in, not necessarily Harvard, but like Stanford, Princeton, Columbia, that have like, Ethereum academics. The rebel academics, I would say. Rebel academics, yeah. Like Dan Bonae, cryptography, rechiser, Tim Roughgarden from Cornell. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

I don't know what tea leaves people should read there. Omid is Columbia, right? And Austin Campbell, he's also Columbia prof. But where Bitcoin has previously been an offense to establish institutions, Ethereum is like, oh, established institutions can, like, release academic papers about this. Yeah. I'm drawing connection to you.

You got a future professorship, I think, for you, David. So, okay, let's take a look at the ratio, though. How are we doing on the ratio? This one's pretty fun. We are tickling 0.04 on the ETH BTC ratio, which is a good number. Definitely up from the subterranean trenches of 0.018 where the ETH came from. On my eyes, Ryan, are on 0.05, because that is when ETHs. stops being a mean reversion trade and and was more above that. Above that, it's like, okay,

it's continuation, it's momentum. Yeah. And so I think like 0.05 is safe for ETH to reach, like low risk. It was there in December. 0.05, wasn't it? Yeah. Yeah. But also at the same time, I think at 0.05 traders will start to cycle out of the trade. The traders who like bought Eith at 0.02. Sure. And they're like, all right, this is just stupidly low versus Bitcoin. At 0.05, I think that trade starts to become over and it definitely finishes at 0.06 and then beyond 0.06, it's, it's momentum, whatever momentum can carry ETH higher than that, um, is my analysis here. Uh, that puts ETH at $6,000 at 0.05 ETHBTC if Bitcoin stays flat at $120,000. Uh, and so when the ratio starts bouncing like this and bouncing up in this way, you get a lot of, um, Bitcoin maxi cope,

I would say. Dude, the Bitcoin, the story of the week on crypto Twitter is Bitcoin or fear about Ethereum. They hadn't tweeted about Ethereum in years and now so many of these Bitcoiners, these old guard bitcoiners are like, don't pay attention to Ethereum. It's Pierre Richard, famous for this.

Ethereum is a sciop to distract you from Bitcoin, talking about how you can't verify the supply of ETH. I like clockwork. It just happens every single time. The problem with Pierre's tweets specifically or his comments, it's

just feels so much, it feels like it's right out of 2017. Like he hasn't updated the software at all. It's like Ethereum will systematically dilute you out of your ETH. Stakers will vote for more issuance. In the fullness of time, there's infinite ETH. Like none of that is happening. And we have like charts and like years to just like show that that's not the case at all empirically. And so it's just, I feel like they should update the playbook, but that's not happening. Well, yeah. That's what happens when your Eith Fudders have like no context. Pop Quiz Ryan, How much, as a percentage, how much more Bitcoin has been issued versus ETH over the last, since the merge? Since the merge?

Yeah. How much more in terms of percent? In percent, yeah. Bitcoin issuance versus Eth issuance. I bet it would be like probably 5 percent to, well, you just gave the number since the merge. Wait, actually, no. So Bitcoin would be maybe, I don't know, 4 percent in total since the merge? Bitcoin is 10x Ethereum's issuance.

So since the merge, ETH has issued 1.13%, Bitcoin has issued 1.3%. So Bitcoin issuance is 10 times higher than ETH issuance. 1.3% annual, though. Annual, annual. Yeah, see, I was doing a cumulative, so both by the number of years, right? Same, same. Same same.

Same. Yeah. Another nice number for you, David, is Brian Armstrong wishes us all a happy financial awareness day. And what does he want to make you aware of that over the last 10 years, gold appreciated 201% the SMP appreciated 207% a lot of investors

aware of that Bitcoin appreciated 49,000% okay that's like that's on Mars man that's way past the moon and Eth

350,000 percent okay over the last 10 years that's like well beyond I mean that's out to the endromeda galaxy okay that doesn't

the number is broken though I'm gonna say that because the ETH 10 years ago was just born so you're buying Yeah. You had heard of it. It was kind of like that was Ethereum's birthday.

If you stretched out Bitcoin all over that kind of the, to its inception, it would be up even more. But still, over the last 10 years, that's incredible. It's just like just notable in the sense of that of a generational change in financial assets. Like that if you, when we create a new asset class that's of a new technology, that is what you would see. Yeah. We got a crypto market cap all-time high, I believe, right now. That's right. That's right.

Yeah. Well, earlier this week, it peaked up 4.28 trillion, currently coming down to 4.1.2 trillion. Tell me about some movers of the week, David. Yeah. Movers of the week, brought to us by Uniswap. Lido, up 45% this week, outperforming ether. Arbitrum up 28% this week. Ryan, on the premium feed, did you listen to my episode with AJ about the Arbitrum Everywhere thesis?

No, I need to catch up on that, actually. That was a good episode. I was pretty compelled by the arbitram everywhere thesis. I'm pretty bullish. I do not own any, but I could. I think that so. I could see myself owning some. I mean, so are investors here recently with the Robin Hood News and all of that.

The question, though, is ETH is performing, what's beta to Eith? Like, what do you buy that's beta to ETH? Is there any asset? Some people would say, there's DeFi assets. Other times people would say it's layer twos. Other people would say there's like ETH memes or NFTs or something like that. Cryptopunks have been plus beta to ETHs. I feel like that's the mystery, though. I don't know that there's one particular asset or asset

class you can just say is like beta to Eith. Yeah, there's really no alternatives. Yeah, there's no. AVE is like close. It's still defied to me. Yeah. And it's defy moments. I don't know if it's beta to eat, but maybe that's close. There's some close things, but it's hard. Aver and crypto punks I think are pretty close. Another mover of the week, though, in the Tradfi markets, actually, CryptoTradfi was shares of bullish sword, okay? So this was an IPO. The bullish exchange went live on the New York Stock Exchange and debuted. Is it up like, was up like 3x from its IPO price?

It's now at 2.5x the IPO price. And bullish is what? It's like an exchange, like a Gemini, like a Coinbase, like a Cramp? Yeah, it's a crypto exchange, which do you know anyone who uses it? I've never met a real live person who uses it. It's never met anyone who uses bullish. But I've also not met a real live holder of XRP. So I don't know.

There's another world that exists out here, okay? I forgot how housed up you are. I saw one time I saw a guy in an ex-rp shirt in a bar, and I was going to approach him and just that I decided not to. You don't want to do that. You don't want to do that. Dude, there was one time I was a climbing Mountain Blanc, and I was in a hut with like 20 other people.

Because that's how, anytime you climb a mountain, you're in a hut, usually, and you're just housed up with a group of people who are also climbing the mountain. And you eventually chat with everyone just because you have to, spend time there. And just talking to this guy, he learned I was in crypto. I learned he was interested in crypto. And he was into XRP. And I was like, no, I'm stuck in this hot with this XRP guy. I'm into real crypto. I'm into real crypto. I'm not into XRP. Oh, my God. I remember, like, I talked to him, we shared stuff and I went elsewhere. And then we reconvened later. And I was like, do I want to talk to crypto about this guy? I'm like, oh, wait, no, he's into

XRP. I don't want to talk about that. Let's talk about Tom Lee, David, and treasuries, okay? I don't want to link this to XRP, all right? Because Tom Lee is doing a noble thing for us right now. He just bought one million eith. This is in a 30-day period of time. Well, he accumulated a total of one million ETH, not net new. He bought more ETH and now that put him over the one-million mark.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I should say, over the last 30 days, he now has one million ETH in purchases for his treasury. Okay, so he won that race. Remember we were like, oh, the race, who's going to be the? the first to ETH, like one million ETH. I thought that race would play out over many months. I thought we were going to have fun with that. And then Tom Lee's like, nope, I got it.

I have 1.2 million Eith. He also, this is 12x faster than Michael Saylor has been acquiring Bitcoin. I guess that puts him over 20% of the way there to his goal, his stated goal of 5% of all ETH. Which is 6 million ether. Yeah, there's also a press release that he, has that Bitmine has announced that it wants to raise $20 billion to buy more ETH. So that would be the remaining Eth at today's market price to get to his 5% about 20 billion more. So this guy is like just buying all the Eth he can find.

Do you think it was like 6% or 5% of all Eith, you think he's like, I'm done? Or do you think he just keeps going? I still have doubts that he can get there. It just doesn't seem like you can continue acquiring that much Eith at these price points. even under 10K, how do you do that? How do you go do that? Yeah, because there's four other ETH Treasury companies that all have a pretty good amount of momentum.

ETHZILA this week, Ryan, one of the newer ones, announced that Peter Thiel has taken a 7.5% stake of ETHZILA, and so therefore the stock pumped 200%. So the MNAV of EZLA is like crazy right now. And you know that that just turns into ETH on the balance sheet later. And then in addition to that, a new one, fundamental global, has filed to raise $5 billion to buy more ETH. And so filed a $5 billion shelf registration with the SEC

that allows them to just sell shares to acquire more ETH. They said that they want to own 10% of the ETH supply, which is just great for them. And you know what, Ryan, I announce here today on the podcast, my intent to own 15% of the ETH supply. And I am in a race with Tom Lee and Fundamental Global to get there. You know, no disrespect, but the difference between a Tom Lee and some of these others who want to, who have the intent as well, is that Tom Lee somehow has access to the capital man. And he's making it happen and hurry.

You're actually doing it. Even faster than S bet. Like, S bet, it's just like overshadowed. They bought almost 80K worth of 80K of ETH this week. Okay? I don't know how much that is. You do the math. It's, you know, many millions of Eath.

And it's just overshadowed by Tom Lee because he's just like, monster buying all this stuff. It's 80K versus like 300k. ETH. Another F word that people are looking at, it's not just an ETH, but it's also treasury volume. So this in blue, David, this is ETH treasury volume compared to Bitcoin treasuries. Oh, wow, that's a lot of blue. Yeah, the treasury stocks, the bitmines of the world are getting massive volume, you know, top, top 10, top 25 stock in terms of volume right there. And then also, if you look at this chart, this is ETH as a percent of the network versus Bitcoin as a percent of the network. And you could see in like this very short.

period of time, we are approaching Bitcoin levels of ETH as a percent of the network held inside Treasury companies. This is happening so fast. Yeah. During my dark days of ETH, when ETH was like down in the hole at like 1700, like I was trying to emphasize. Like, why is Bitcoin where Bitcoin is at like $100,000? And ETH is where it is at $17,000. And like, my answer was like, oh, because Bitcoin as an investment has attracted the likes of Michael Saylor because of the 21 million units. and an eth just hasn't done that. And that's why eth is down in the trenches and Bitcoin is at $100,000.

And so like as a project, we need to make and focus on Ethereum as an investable asset. And then along comes Tom Lee. And you're like, you know what? Ethereum is the backbone of the global financial system. I'm going to buy all the ether. And look at exactly what happened,

followed right in the footsteps of Bitcoin. And so, you know, Bitcoin is a special snowflake when Bitcoin dominance is like, 70%. But if you look at the decline of Bitcoin dominance that's happening right now, Ryan, versus what happened

during like the Salana meme coin mania and the Trump token, you can see the meme coin mania, it put it, you can see it on the chart of Bitcoin Dominance. It's like, oh yeah, there it is right there. It's that little blip right there.

When ETH pumps, because Tomley's buying it, it's not a blip. It's actually like Bitcoin dominance is materially falling. Oh, yeah. And it's not just a blip. It is an actual event

on the chart. Big moves of capital. It takes a lot to move ETH. It takes a whole lot to move Bitcoin. It also takes a whole lot to move a $500 billion asset. Mm-hmm. And that's what's happening. Yeah.

And so Eith becoming more and more of a special snowflake every single purchase by Tom Lee. Yeah, I agree. It's always like there can be more than one snowflake, as I've said before. There's a lot of snowflake is special. But there is maybe some signs of froth going on in the digital asset treasury space as well. Story Protocol launched its own dat. This is A16Z involved in launching this data.

And of course, they're a large holder of story protocol. Highly incentivized to launch the story protocol data. Yeah. And I guess like why, like you kind of wonder why this is going on. But one way to think about these treasuries is, you know, some of them, at least not the, you know, story's not a store of value type of asset. At least it's like nowhere close to that. It's not like a Bitcoin or ether.

Why would you do this? You know, a pessimistic reason is you want to dump it all in retail, right? Another reason is it's just it's a Tradfai token wrapper, basically, that allows story protocol to access U.S. capital markets and trade inside of brokerages. It's like an ERC 20 only for TradFi. You know, it's like a rapper. And so I think that's like a more optimistic thing. Is it not coming on to into crypto to buy our bags. Let's take our bags to Tradfi. Please buy your bags over here now. Yeah, pretty much. And that might be what, go ahead.

You said that this is froth. Yeah. I'm going to push back on that. Yeah. I'm going to be more moderate. It's only froth if people actually buy it. Yeah, I agree. Because anyone can launch a dat for their shit coin.

But anyone can do that. Yeah, sure. But it's only froth if retail, try to buy retailers, like, let me go buy this. If there's no demand, then there's no froth. I agree there too. So the question is now, Eric Trump is wondering whether people are going to buy the World Liberty Financial token. Because he also has launched a treasury company this week called Alt 5. of Alt 5 is to buy the also Eric Trump launched WLFI Treasury token. Okay, so that's their

treasury play. Alt 5 is the ticker and that will allow you to like have Tradfai exposure into the token WLFI, which is kind of like, what is it? Like defy lending is. Dude, there's no app. I keep going to the World Liberty Financial website every month and I'm like, let me go open up the app. That's coming, David. The app's not launched. The app's coming. So if you want to buy into Donald the Donald Trump grift of World Liberty Financial and just, you know, Donald, please, please take my money. You can buy the World Liberty Financial token. I don't know yet. Or you could go to the stock market and you could buy the nesting doll grift, which is the inflated treasury company where has advisor shares that are minted to the Donald Trump family. And you could buy a,

you could buy the 50 cents on the dollar a version of the World Liberty Financial. So like depends on It depends on your level of how much capital you're going to handle it to Donald Trump. I think that's a pessimistic take. I'm not like I don't necessarily disagree. It could totally be that. There's a lot in the kind of the Trump enterprises that are. Gryft nesting dolls. They're doing all the things.

They got the NFTs. They got the meme coin. They got the, you know, defy. They're doing all the things. Now they have the treasury company. The NFTs, I think, are the least grifty ones. I still have hope that WLFI could be something that they actually attempt within Defi. And I know we haven't seen it yet, but I don't.

Don't discount that that's an actual possibility, all right? It's not zero. The probability of that is not zero. Maybe they build something here. Maybe it's interesting. It does feel like a little bit of the Justin's son playbook in terms of like doing all the things at once. But who knows?

You know, Justin's son is serving up some stable coins in emerging markets and he's, you know, it's helpful to some people. He did something. All right. We got coming up next, circle and stripe. They are launching chains, but they're L1s. They're not L2s. David, we've got to talk about that.

Also, the bank. banks want takebacks on genius. They don't like the bill anymore, it seems like. They want to undo. They want to redo. They want to redo. They're scared Americans might get to keep their interest payments. We'll talk about all that and more. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this possible, including Uniswap. It is a browser wallet. It is a Dex. It is a mobile wallet. It is the best place to do Defi. Go check them out. Ethereum's Layer 2 universe is exploding with choices. But if you're looking for the best place to park and move your tokens, make your next stop Unichain. First, liquidity. Unichain

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seamlessly. That's what Mantle is pioneering with blockchain for banking, a revolutionary new category at the intersection of Tradfai and Web 3. At the heart is you are, the world's first money app built fully on chain. It gives you a Swiss iBan account, blending fiat currencies like the Euro, the Swiss franc, the United States dollar, or the Rimini, with crypto, all in one place. Enjoy real world usability and blockchain's trust and programmability. Transactions post directly to the blockchain, compatible with TradFi Rails and packed with integrated defy futures. U.R transforms Mantle Network into the ultimate platform for on-chain financial services, unifying payments, trading, and assets like the MI4, the M-Eath protocol,

and functions FBTC, backed by developer grants, ecosystem incentives, and top distribution through the UR app, reward stations, and by-bit launch pool. For M&T holders, every economic activity in UR drives value back to you, embodying the entire stack and future. growth of this super app ecosystem. Follow Mantle on X at Mantle underscore official for the latest updates on blockchain for banking. That's X.com slash mantle underscore official. Tradfai stablecoin chaz are launching their own layer one, starting with a circle. The circle has announced ARC.

What is the purpose of ARC is a stablecoin payment, FX capital markets, layer one? You pay for gas on ARC with USC. So there's no ETH because it's layer one. What is the native token of ARC? is USDC is an EVM chain. And there's also opt-in privacy features, so like shielded balances with selective declosures via a V-V-Kee.

And there's also MEV protection, encrypted memples, batch processing, multiprocessors, a bunch of things that reduce MEV. Permission validator set, which is something I know, Ryan, you are just so stoked about. Permission validators will be run

by regulated institutions to better comply with enterprises policies. And because of the permission validator set, there's going to be a low number of validators, which means the chain gets to go super fast. So 3,000 transactions per second, finality under 350 milliseconds using a whopping 20 validators. Wow, 20 validators.

Some analysts view this as an attempt for business diversification. This is the big, I know Rob from Dragonfly was really beating this drum. It's like all these table coin issuers circle tether, they need to become more than just, tokenized money market funds. Yeah. And so they need to become a payment. They need to get into payment.

That's why Tether has invested in their respect, like two startups that are using Tether as the native layer one. This is why Circle's doing the same thing. Yeah. And this is, I mean, to be fair, this looks like a payments network. This looks like early, early visa, right? Only it's a blockchain version of visa, right? It's all permission, but it looks like that.

And so Circle gets to be the hedge fund that invests in treasuries. And then they also get to compete with Visa, MasterCard, anybody with a payment. network. Reactions from the crypto community, not too positive, as Adam Cochran said. This isn't a layer one, and it's offensive to call it such. I agree. It's a consortium chain, private, pre-approved validators who even have permission to refund transactions via dispute protocols.

So, like, you really have to squint to call this Web3. This is bastardization of blockchain technology. It's not, it's so, so some of these words I feel like are just like, I mean, You call it an L1 because it sort of is. That's like definitional, right? It just validates its own blocks, which is like a bastardization. So I feel like what it is is it's a corporate blockchain. That's all it is.

That's a corporate blockchain. What are you talking about? That's what a bastardization is. But it's not. I mean, we have internets. Like a corporate intranet is not a bastardization of the internet. It's just a corporate intranet and it connects to the internet. Do you know what I mean?

Like it's just. Just a thing that exists that a company is running. You want to put it more neutrally, sure. Yeah, I have some other takes that we can get into on this, but were there any, there are some more negative reactions to, right? Yeah, Victor Bunin from Coinbase says, this just feels like Libra all over again. Jeff Garzik says, I call Ethereum the Grand Central Station of Crypto because interconnection and protocol compatibility is a strength, and also interconnection is a fundamental to the

internet and human electronic experience. I'm building a new island on the internet sounds paradoxical in the year 2025. Yeah. I feel that take. That take makes sense. All right. Before I give my other takes, we should talk about Stripe, too, because they're doing the same thing. There's some convergence here.

So they are also... Now, this wasn't announced by Stripe. It was sort of found out. I believe Fortune saw a jog posting. Yeah. This was leaked. But they are launching an L1, a stable coin L1 as well. So not a layer two, an L1 called Tempo, I believe.

What do we know about it? EVM layer one with no... We don't really know what the stable coin is going to be, but I would imagine why would they use anyone else's stable coin? So I'm going to go ahead and guess that they're also going to release their own stable coin, the Stripe Stablecoin. Yeah. Being developed in partnership with Paradigm, Matt Huang from Paradigm is on the board of Stripe. That's interesting, right? Matt Huang from Paradigm, a crypto guy, Crypto Native, CryptoVC, doing that, like as the CEO of this entire L1 blockchain project.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, we can just assume why Stripe wants to do this. They have distribution. They have flows. So why not control the full payments stack from minting settlement so businesses could just use Stripes interface for stablecoin transactions, bypass Swift? It makes a ton of sense. Between Stripe and Arc, you know, Stripe's tempo chain and arcs from Circle, I'm way more bullish, Stripes, Tempo Chain. I think Circle is in a not an advantageous position here.

Sure, sure. Yeah, I mean, Stripe just has massive distribution. Massive distribution, yeah. There are some positive takes on this. So this is an account saying Stripe Stablecoin Evolution has been impressive to watch. So way back in 2022, they were just doing Fiat. It was all bank stuff. They didn't believe in crypto.

And now look how fast they're moving. 2024. They acquire bridge. That's a stable coin project, by the way, might be part of the Genesis for this for a billion dollars. Then they acquired Privy, which is a Web3 crypto wallet company for $1 billion. And now they're launching an LBFECD project. L1 blockchain. So they are really leveling up, doubling, tripling down on stable coins, and it's a blockchain. So they're getting off zero, right? Like previously, last cycle,

they had nothing. They weren't doing it. They didn't believe in any of it. And now they're going all the way to launching their own layer one blockchain. There are also some negative takes on this, Austin Campbell, we referenced earlier in the episode. If everyone is launching their own L1, I have to hop between, why shouldn't I just use a bank? There's also a take that I somewhat enjoyed, which is like basically, I won't read all of this, but it's basically, Stripe Building Tempo is like watching the final domino fall in what was always going to happen once payment companies realized they were essentially paying protection money to tether and circle

for the privilege of using infra they could own themselves. I would extend that. I would say protection money also to the banking system. So if there's a question of, is this good or bad for crypto, is this good or bad for Ethereum? What about all the other chains, all of that stuff? One party we can say it's objectively bad for it, is the bank. David, okay? Because if you have your own blockchain and your stripe and you have your own

stable coin with your own treasuries, you're not using any of the banking infrastructure at all. No, you're using Ethereum as the backend or excuse me, the EVM as the back end to manage accounts. So there's some debate as to who it's good for, quote unquote, besides Stripe and who in crypto it's good for, but objectively, I don't think anyone can deny that. It's bad for the banking system. Yes, yes, I would agree. So there's a big. question in the Ethereum world. It's just why not build a layer two? Like the whole thesis of Ethereum is that this should be easy to do as a layer two is cheaper to do as a layer two. Why do you think both Circle and Stripe have launched layer ones? Well, I think it's because like they're stable

coins, right? These are real world assets. So I think you kind of have to go back to like what's the purpose of a layer two to begin with. And it's from a user perspective, it's a few things. when I'm importing my assets, my crypto-native assets into a layer two, I carry very much about these things. Can they steal my assets? Can they freeze them? And can they censor my transactions? That's the entire purpose of a layer two. What's interesting for an asset like USDC, Circle can do that no matter what chain I'm on. They could, if I'm holding USDC on Ethereum, they could do all three of those things because it's a real-world asset. And Circle has all of the back doors. So am I really losing anything if I have USDC and I put it on a circle layer one? No,

they could still do that no matter where I am. Now, here's the difference. Will I ever import assets into circles arc layer one? No, I will not. You don't see yourself being a user of arc. Not for assets that I want to keep in a, you know, untrusted way, right? So you're basically, if you're launching your own layer one and you're, you know, a consortium chain or something, you're kind of like, making it disadvantageous for people to bridge assets to you. So you're kind of shutting that door. Because even if I put something like ether, then Circle can do all of those things to my ether.

Why would I do that? I'd rather have it on layer two, or I'd rather have it on Ethereum Layer 1. Even if I put Tether there, now I've got two parties that can steal, censor, take my assets at any point in time, tether and USDC. So I'm like adding more trust assumptions. So I think what this is looking like

is kind of a corporate intranet. which is basically like it connects to Ethereum and the World Ledger and the internet and crypto writ large, right? But it doesn't import assets inside of it so much. It's not going to be a defy chain. It's not going to be a world ledger. So I don't think this is like a threat necessarily to anything in crypto. It's sort of an adjacency.

And to me, it's kind of net good because at least we're off zero, especially in Stripe's case. I mean, Circle could have done this maybe as a layer two. But in Stripe's case, they didn't even have a blockchain and now they're a layer one. And by the way, I do think the path to them is still open to become a layer two at some point in the future if this makes sense. And they want to expand their ambitions.

That's mostly my take is I think a lot of people, there's so much conversation, so much discourse on Twitter about this. And I think it's so premature to really know where these things are going in the future. And I think people think that these things are in more in close proximity to Ethereum, Bitcoin, Solana, Avalanche, all of these other chains than they actually. are, like, tempo, the blockchain, I don't think you're going to see that on Coin Gecko. It's further away from crypto. It's not proximate to us. It's just going to be in the background, right? People want to know. And the only time you're really going to see it is when you're

using Stripe or you're a Stripe user. And, like, there is stablecoin account balances, which not even going to call out a stable coin. Is this going to be a number on your screen? And then the back end Stripe is going to use that to transfer stable coins around. It's actually going to be mostly invisible to almost anyone. Unless Stripe or arc are like, we're an open developer ecosystem. We're making hackathons. Come build defy apps on us. That starts to encroach.

But I don't see that happening. Like, these are, why, how are you going to attract an open source developer to build on you when you are a consortium train of 20 permission validators? Yeah, it's going to be a different type of use case. It's not going to be crypto-native long-term store value. That's for sure. David, let's talk about the banks here. They are demanding exclusion for yield-bearing stable coins in the genius

act and they are absolutely throwing a fit over this. I thought it was already excluded. It was, but then they realized that there's a loophole here, David. Okay, so they realized that the exclusions, so, okay, the exclusions only apply to issuers of stable coins. Okay, so Circle itself, the issuer, cannot add yield bearing to the USDC coin, for instance. And by yield bearing, we mean just past the Treasury, you know, 4.1,000. percent off to users, right? So in the current model of stable coins, the issuer gets to keep that.

And that's what the Genius Act lets them do. However, it doesn't preclude exchanges or other parties from giving back some sort of interest or reward to the USDC holder. So you can still hold USDC on Coinbase, you get a 4.8% reward. Yeah, you still can get your 4% reward, like interest, whatever. Or if you even hold it on base, you can still get that. And the banks are just realizing that. that. And they're like, oh, no, like, this Genius Act is now going to take all of our interest. Because in the current model of banking, they basically get to pocket all of that interest. That's why your Wells Fargo account gives you, like, what, 0.15% interest rate or something like that on your, quote-unquote savings account. So they're getting upset about it and they're writing letters, but the bill has already passed.

This is what Jake Chivinsky says about it. Sorry you guys did a bad job negotiating your regulatory boat. Mote, try lobbying better next time. You're saying the banks demand the exclusion for yield-bearing stable coins and the Genius Act. Now they're upset that the language they ask for doesn't screw over stable coin holders hard enough. That's hilarious. Isn't that great? Let me get out my violin. Let me start playing it.

All right. One last thing when it comes to banks. Trump guarantees fair banking to all Americans. So this is, call this analog bankless values. And so this is a fact sheet out of the United States White House saying President Donald Trump guarantees fair banking for all Americans. Today, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order to ensure that federal regulators do not promote policies and practices that allow financial institutions to deny or restrict services based on political beliefs or religious beliefs or lawful business activities ensuring fair access to banking for all Americans. So this is tripling down, quadrupling down on just killing Operation Chokepoint 2.0. And so he's just stating that all individuals, I think, we already had institutions,

but now also all individuals get to have access to banking under all conditions, which is good. That's great. We're discovering credible neutrality in our banking system. And Ethereum and Bitcoin always, we always had that in crypto, but I'm glad the banks are learning about this. All right, coming up next, we have an update on the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve. What are the words coming from Treasury Secretary Scott Pescent about the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve, and it's not often. It's very rare, Ryan, that we actually see an economic attack on a blockchain.

But this week, we got one of those. The first big 51% attack on Manero. I think the last time I heard about a 51% attack was Ethereum Classic. Oh, yeah, wow. But honestly, who cares about Ethereum Classic? People do care about Monero. I care about Monaro. And Monero is getting 51% attacks.

We're going to talk about that. And now Coinbase adds a Dex to the Coinbase app. So you can access any token. on aerodrome in coinbase. We're going to talk about that and more. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible, like FRAX and the FRAX stable coin. It's got some of the best yields in DFI's like Circle.

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Ready to join the forefront of Defy, visit Frax.com now to start earning with FraxUSD and staked FraxUSD. And for bankless listeners, you can use Frax.com slash R slash bankless when bridging to Fraxel for exclusive Fraxel perks and boosted rewards. David, we've got an update on the U.S. Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. It's from Scott Besant. So here's his comments. We've also started a, to get into the 21st century, a Bitcoin strategic reserve. We're not going to be buying that, but we are going to use confiscated assets and continue to build that up.

We're going to stop selling that. I believe that Bitcoin reserve at today's prices is somewhere between 15 and 20 billion. All right. So this seems a little disappointing for some of the Bitcoin Bulls, who was hoping that they were set up a strategic Bitcoin Reserve and just. just start, like, throwing all of the cash. Tea whopping. Tea whopping.

Into Bitcoin. Honestly, and this is what Senator Lummis' bill kind of calls for something like that. She did say that. We'll re-price gold. We'll use that to go buy the Bitcoin. This is Scott Besson saying that's not really what they're going to do. We're not buying any Bitcoin. Unfortunately.

So they are going to set up the strategic Bitcoin Reserve, but that's just going to be for the Bitcoin that they've already seized. So he said that's about $20 billion worth of Bitcoin. This government accumulates Bitcoin with seizure, which actually doesn't make me feel good. Yeah. Because then they're like incentivized to seize. It doesn't feel good. Don't think about it too much.

How can we seize more Bitcoin? That's their buy plan is just to go seize company Bitcoin. I'm not feeling great about this. But anyway, at least it's the step of setting up the strategic Bitcoin Reserve. $20 billion, though. I mean, like what? That's like, I don't know. Tom Lee's going to have more ETH than that in the next few weeks.

It's not very much. Yeah, the government's going to be a weak player. Yeah. All right. What's this Coinbase stuff? So Coinbase launched a Dex on the Coinbase wallet. Is that what's going on? Decks trading.

So they're not launching a Dex because they already have dexes on base, namely Aerodrome. And so you can go to the Coinbase wallet. And I think also the Coinbase app. Yes. Excuse me. This is actually the story. Coinbase, not the Coinbase wallet. The Coinbase app, which is also known as just Coinbase.

You can buy tokens. on Coinbase that connect to any of the tokens in Aerodrome. And so whether or not that token is listed on the Coinbase Exchange, you can access it on Aerodrome. So any token that's on Aerodrome is available on Coinbase, which is pretty damn bullish. If you are in New York State, quell your excitement because it's not for you.

You don't get it for New York State? You don't get it. You're in a financial prison still? But if you own Aerodrome, that is up 25% on the news because now Aerodrome is just hooked into the Coinbase front. So this is following in the footsteps of Morpho app on base hooked into the Coinbase frontend to give Bitcoin back to loans. Now Aerodrome hooked into the Coinbase front end to access tokens. So you would expect that like if you want to launch a meme coin and you want it to be listed on Coinbase and you don't want to risk just not actually getting listed, you would just launch it on base.

This is so cool, man. Get liquidity on Aerodrome and then you could buy it on Coinbase. What's so cool is this is Coinbase in one of the apps. Like Airdrom is basically an AMM, and Coinbase is not building this themselves. They're just tapping into kind of the community of builders on top of base. This is the DeFi mullet that we talked about way back in 2021. Exactly the defy mullet, which is exchanges. And you know how Coinbase has alignment with AeroDrum?

You know why they have alignment, why they're okay with this rather than building their own app? Is it because they're all on base? Are there more reasons? Well, yes. And in addition to that, Coinbase Ventures bought like just a ton of the Aero supply forever ago. Oh, wow. Coinbase's owns Aero tokens. And it's just like, look at the deck.

Dex volumes, like, really, really doing well, really insane. This is Brian Armstrong tweeting about it. Dex trading rolled out to 1%. Oh, it's only to 1% in the Coinbase app. And still, the Dex volumes are popping off. So it's still early. We'll ultimately support every chain our customers want. Love it.

I expect Robin Hood and Robin Hood chain to follow this pattern to a T. This just makes so much sense. Yeah, I agree. David, is the Uniswap fee switch finally on the way? All right? Potentially, Ryan? Some moves this week. Tell me about them.

Potentially. Some precursor moves. It was in addition to many other things out of the Uniswop org, Uniswap structure. The Uniswap Foundation has put forward a proposal to wrap up the Uniswap Dow with a legal structure known as a duna under Wyoming law. What's a Dunah? So glad you asked. It stands for a decentralized, unincorporated nonprofit association. This was legal innovation came out of A16Z from Miles Jennings and a few other people.

And so this allows Uniswap as a Dow to be legally recognized and compliant inside of the United States. States, which gives them the legal comfort to do things that they haven't been able to do before. One of those things might be the fee switch. So if you are a person who's just interested in the story arc of the fee switch, you might be excited because this is a necessary precursor step for the people with their hands over the fee switch to feel legally protected, compliant to turning on that fee switch. Yeah, so this is Senator Lummis. She is, of course, a Wyoming senator saying, congrats to Uniswap for

setting down Rooms in Wyoming. Our state's laws for digital assets are best in class. I commend the Wyoming legislator for its foresight and creating decentralized nonprofit associations. So this is kind of a wrapper that gives the Uniswap foundation itself and the protocol, some legal liability protection, some like kind of a jurisdiction for tax treatment, I would assume. And then also it makes Dow votes actually binding in the U.S. court system.

So that's kind of cool. And Uiswap has been building a lot these days, David. I just noticed this as we were getting into the roll-up. So the Unichane's been cooking in the background, 200 millisecond blocks right now. It's very fast. Live on Unishane using some cool tech like T-EEs. I know you're a big T-E-E-E guy.

I'm a big T-E-E-E guy. Flash blocks on Unishane run the way they were designed to. This is kind of like, remember when Vitalik was describing the Ethereum barbell where he's like, Therium Layer 1, we're going to get to like second block time, okay? But we're not going to get down to the millisecond zone. Leave that for Ethereum layer 2 because they can hyper optimize that

and that's the place to do it because you kind of constrain that, you still keep it to centralize property rights and that seems to be what's playing out with Unichane. Yeah, yeah. I did talk to Preston Van Lund again on the premium feed recently. He named one second blocks

as a possibility for Ethereum. As a real possibility in like you know, 2028, 29. Yeah. It's possible. That's cool. All right.

Moving on into different news, Doe Kwan has pleaded guilty. If you don't know who Do Kwan is, that is the co-founder of Terraform Labs. If you don't know what that is, that is the Labs entity behind. If you don't know what that is, also, God bless you, man.

Yeah. I'm jealous of you. I'm jealous of you. I didn't know what that was. That's Tara Luna. This is the man behind Tara Luna. He pleaded guilty. The stable coin that blew up.

The stable coin that blew up does $80 billion that blew up? That's a lot of billions. Yeah. He pleaded guilty. Guilty in a New York federal court to two felony charges, conspiracy to commit fraud and wire fraud. Initially pleaded not guilty to nine counts of indictments that included securities fraud, commodity fraud, wire fraud,

conspiracy to commit money laundering. We don't know too much of the plea. He agreed to forfeit $19.3 million. Didn't know he had that. And also will pay restitution to victims of the fraud. And so each charge that he pled guilty has pretty significant prism time, up to 25 years total.

I imagine he hasn't get all of that because he pled guilty, he cooperated. Prosecutors have agreed to recommend no more than 12 years if Kwan fully accepts responsibility. Wow. So that was his plea? That was his plea.

So he's like, I'll plead guilty if you can reduce my 25 years to 12 years and I get to go live a life after my jail sentence, basically. Prosecutors have agreed to recommend no more than 12 years. So 12 years is the cap. Maybe they recommend 12 years.

Yeah. Yeah. Sentencing is scheduled. for December 11th. He was arrested in like 22. Yeah, and then he was on the run for a while, right? And then eventually he got to expedited back to the Nognego. Yeah. What a story. And so he's already been in jail. I wonder if

that counts. That's got to grind you down, man. Dude, being Montenegrin jail for two years, that should count as double. Oh my God. Yeah, well, look, it's end of a chapter here with Doe Kwan in the guilty sentence. So we'll keep you updated on what the sentencing actually is. David, Manero, getting 51% attacked. The famed 51% attack of a proof of work network, it's actually happening. Manera, of course, is a privacy chain.

It's been live ever since I've been in crypto for a very long time. It's got a large history. It's like Bitcoin for privacy. And Bitcoin in the sense that it has a lot of the Bitcoin ethos, which is total decentralization, total immutability. Okay. So how did a 51% attack actually happen? Because this is almost like an interesting academic study. Do you know the details here?

Yeah. They acquired the hash rate. How do you attack a proof of work blockchain? You need to acquire at least 51% of Monaro's hash rate. This is an organization, Kubik, that acquired this hash rate. How they did that was with just a bunch of incentives to miners, apparently. So they incentivized miners with a more lucrative model than Minero mining specifically. Cubic distributed Minero at mine into a 50-50 split.

Half was used to buy back and burn cubic tokens. The other half was paid out as extra bonuses to miners in QBOR. cubic tokens. And so I think the feasibility of this is downstream of the value of the cubic token. The system directly increased the effective reward that miners received to 3x compared to directly minarro mining. Wow. And so they basically bribed their way. Bribed their way. Yeah. And then with the pump that ensued, they have kind of the economic war chest to pay for the cost of 51% attacking because 51% attacking cost money. I think it costs like $100,000 a day. But that's nothing. It's not that much. That's not that much. A hundred thousand a day?

that kind of economic security. Now, the reason it costs much less is Monaro's market cap is, you know, small, tiny compared to Bitcoin. So it's hashing, you know, requirement is also small. I think what they're still the top 30 though, or at least they were. Minero was. So it's not. 42 with a market cap of $4.5 billion.

So not small, but yeah. Yeah. But this is a real attack out in the wild of a proof of work network that, you know, let's refresh people on what you can do when you have a 51% of bashing. You can rewrite history on the chain. You can double spend on the chain. You can censor transactions.

You have God mode over the chain. You can't change other people's date. You can't spend other people's coins. Correct. That's the only thing you can't do. You can spend your coins twice. It's pretty bad. And especially, I would think, on a privacy chain, right,

where no one can tell what's going on. Yeah, what's going on. Yeah. I would imagine. So, yeah. A question for you, though, do you think that this is like a shot across the bow for Bitcoin, essentially? Just to look over and see like, like, baby brother chain, proof of work, same kind of mechanism,

much smaller, of course, right? But that type of thing could happen in some future to the Bitcoin network if they're not careful, right? And if they don't have the economic incentives in place. This does show empirically that a 51% attack can happen to a network that size at $4.5 billion. Now, Bitcoin is sized at $2.3 trillion. Yeah. But it's not about the size necessarily, right?

It's about the economic incentives to the miners, which is a totally different story. Yes, that's correct. The reason that market cap matters right now is only because of block rewards. It's only because Bitcoin is continuing to issue new Bitcoin to minors as a reward. but that's being cut every four years effectively. Yeah. So unlike Bitcoin, Manero actually has ongoing inflation. So there's no hard cap of Manero.

There is 0.8%. Oh, so they even had permanent block rewards. Yes. And so despite having permanent block rewards, they just didn't have the economic weight. And so, yeah, so you can say like, well, this won't happen to Bitcoin because it's literally 100 times larger. But when the security budget drop-off happens, that 50% cut, 50% cut, doesn't matter how many times larger. Well, is it, is it 100 times larger in market cap, but what is it in terms of a daily

economic, like, incentive to like own the network, right? So only 100,000 for Monaro. That's a smaller number. Yeah. Yeah. Is it 30x for Bitcoin? I mean, we could run the numbers and check. But anyway, it does feel like it's kind of a, I guess a shot across the bow or just like

kind of a warning signal early. I think that's right. I think that's right. Very early for Bitcoin. Like Bitcoin security budget things are all theoretical. And as we approach them, if you think that we're going there, they become a little bit more actually like not in theory, but actually happening in practice. And this is something like this that's happening in practice. Well, we're going to end the roll up there.

Got to let bankless listeners know, of course, 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 on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.