Bankless - ROLLUP: BTC Shatters $100K, What's Next? | The Debanking Debacle | New SEC Chairman | Biggest Airdrop... Ever?

Episode Date: December 6, 2024

Bitcoin hit $100K! To kick off the show we dive into the wild ride that brought us here—from Satoshi’s first block to retail mania today. NYC Mayor Eric Adams says, “I told you so,” after his Bitcoin paycheck gamble pays off. We unpack Marc Andreessen’s revelations on Joe Rogan about political debanking and welcome a new SEC chairman with a pro-crypto agenda, BYE GARY. Plus, Hyperliquid’s massive airdrop, XRP flipping Solana, and Alex Mashinsky pleading guilty—it’s a packed week for crypto! ------ 📣 AMBIRE | SIGN UP! https://www.ambire.com/legends ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2  ⁠  🦄UNISWAP | BUG BOUNTY PROGRAM https://bankless.cc/Uniswap-Bug-Bounty  🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle    🐧 CARTESI | LINUX-POWERED ROLLUPS https://bankless.cc/CartesiSimple  📈 iYield: YOUR FINANCIAL PICTURE, SIMPLIFIED https://bankless.cc/iYield  🔒  SAFE | INTRODUCING SAFENET https://bankless.cc/SAFE ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/108?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E  ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 00:00:00 Lets Set The Tone 00:05:27 BTC $100K! https://x.com/ETHbyDre/status/1864550741287030979  https://x.com/BitcoinMagazine/status/1864655677467042013  00:08:40 A Trip Down Memory Lane 00:15:02 Powell - BTC Is Digital Gold https://x.com/BanklessHQ/status/1864392544018166186  00:19:23 ETH Price Analysis 00:22:50 Total Mkt Cap https://x.com/crypto_condom/status/1862658827163758660  00:24:19 The Rise Of Ripple (XRP) https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1863702614304518363  https://x.com/WazzCrypto/status/1863306452481253555  00:28:07 Solana ETF? https://x.com/jseyff/status/1864060463916462244?s=46&t=2ZINVXJQKx6xO_6Wiiu_2g  00:32:52 Mainstream Debanking https://x.com/pmarca/status/1862635456204341739?s=46&t=2ZINVXJQKx6xO_6Wiiu_2g  https://x.com/davidmarcus/status/1862654506774810641  https://x.com/brian_armstrong/status/1861890800268775923?s=46&t=drckgcJoSMSnm7TfPCH-dw  00:42:23 New SEC Chairman https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/113595807734621827  https://x.com/HesterPeirce/status/1864428440893735331  00:45:42 Crypto Czar https://www.theblock.co/post/328594/ex-cftc-chair-chris-giancarlo-in-running-to-become-first-crypto-czar-says-crypto-considerable-priority-for-trump  00:48:54 Hyperliquid Airdrop Was Huge https://hyperfnd.medium.com/hype-genesis-1830a4dc2e3f  00:50:36 Hawk Tua Coin https://x.com/WazzCrypto/status/1864433268319293811  00:55:06 Fluid Launch https://gov.instadapp.io/t/rebranding-and-growth-plan-for-fluid-protocol/985  00:56:56 RTFKT Shut Down https://x.com/RTFKT/status/1863621178532773928  00:58:26 Alex Mashinsky Pleads Guilty https://www.reuters.com/technology/celsius-founder-alex-mashinsky-intends-plead-guilty-two-fraud-counts-2024-12-03/  01:00:12 Releases https://x.com/colton_art/status/1864705965016129740  https://x.com/crecimientoar/status/1862557162427310102  01:03:47 Meme Of The Week https://x.com/scrypto_/status/1864603976282591549?s=46  ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠

Bankless Nation is the first week of December. Ladies and gentlemen, we have 100K Bitcoin. We hit it this week, David. Wow, $100,000. Where were you when Bitcoin crossed $1,000? Do you remember? Where was I? Oh, my God.

I mean, still living at my house, like with my family. I don't remember the moment. Really? Is there a moment that you recall? I remember my friend, my Bitcoin-pilled friend, talking to me and my other friend about Bitcoin. And it was the first friend that I had that talked to me about Bitcoin. And he was just stoked that Bitcoin had crossed $1,000.

And it was the first moment. I was like, okay, like, maybe I should actually like meaningfully look into this. Where's that Bitcoin friend now? He's in a band Portland. How's he doing? Yeah? Is he still in the scene? He's still in crypto?

He was always, he was ever like a crypto native. He was just like a bitcoiner guy who just like was killed about Bitcoin from a very early age. Well, here's so hoping your friend held that Bitcoin. And for all the way, Bitcoin holder. 100 times higher. You know what? In the first moment, I had my first friend pill me on Bitcoin.

We got to start with this clip. I think Eric Adams here, this is the mayor of New York City, and I think Eric Adams basically sums up how all of us are feeling. This is Eric Adams. The guy who in 2022 took his first paychecks as a mayor

of New York City in Bitcoin, denominated in Bitcoin. Here's his reflections on Bitcoin hitting 100K this week. He is standing in front of a podium in front of a crowd of people, a crowd of reporters for content. Set the scene.

It's cool. Look at the background. It says investing in our children, creating career pathways for 15,000 students. Not a press conference about Bitcoin. Safest Subway in 14 years. Here he is. Let's just play the clip. Here you guys.

We should not be afraid of Bitcoin. Remember y'all laughed at me when I first got my Bitcoin? Who's laughing now? Go look at my Bitcoin now. You're all mocking. You're taking your first three paychecks in Bitcoin? What's wrong with you? Now you wish you would have done it.

You know, and so I am happy. And so I am happy. This is laughing now. This is setting the tone of everyone who's going home for Christmas in two weeks. Who's laughing now? Your family's going to love you, ladies and gentlemen. Just remember to bring. Fucking, excuse my language, the shit-eating grin that he has is plastered on his face.

At the time. Go on. It's how we're all feeling. All right. So we got to start there. It's time for the bankless week. We roll up. We got 100K Bitcoin.

We'll talk about the timeline, David. I want to bring you through history. Yeah, let's do it. We're going to start the Bitcoin pizza and work our way up just to celebrate this momentous week. It's another all-time high week, of course, at Bitcoin. Not just Bitcoin, though. Also, stable coins catching an all-time high. Also, XRP, Ripple, flipping into number three slot.

Not on my bingo card, this bull market. But yet, here we are. A lot of salon of bulls disappointing because it took number three spot. We'll talk about that. What else we got? Mark and Dresen appeared on Joe Rogan to talk about things that we very much know about in the cryptospace, things that are not new to us at all, like the lived experience that we've had for the last two years about founders being debanked. And it was shocking to me. And I think Mark that like Joe Rogan had no prior knowledge of this. And as a result of this episode, it just rang around the Joe Rogan community, which is very large. And now it has become common knowledge. It went from like esoteric, crypto corner conspiracy theory to common knowledge about the debanking of tech and crypto. And that's just the news that now the rest of the industry, the rest of the world knows about the debanking of crypto.

So we're going to talk about the reflections of all of this news processing through the internet. Also, we now know the new name of the SEC chairman, who is he and what can we expect from him? Hyperliquid dropped their token. And it's become one of the largest air drops ever. and then the Celsius founder, our best friend Alex Michenski, who agrees with us that banks are not your friend. He's got the T-shirt. He got the T-shirt. That's what he said.

He has pled guilty. He needs shortly to be sentenced. We're going to catch up on Alex Monski. All of that and more, but first a message from our friends over at Ambuyer wallet. Ambuyer is the first hybrid account abstraction wallet. They host both smart wallets and existing EOA accounts, just to give you a little bit more tools for the tool belt. They currently have a browser extension that's in. closed beta, but they're launching this gamified testing campaign for the browser extension called

Ambyer Legends. It's a pretty slick looking game. It's an on-chain quest game in which you pick a soulbound NFT character that evolves as you play. So every on-chain action on Ethereum-based optimism, Arbitron Scroll with your Ambire wallet earns you XP. And what does XP do to characters, it lets your character grow, but also gives you future rewards. This is just available for the Am buyer extensions beta testers, which you can sign up to become at bankless.comc-c-c-c-slash-Iambire hymn-legens. There is a link in the show notes to get access to that. Who doesn't like XP, David?

Dude, gamified on-chain experience? Hell yeah. Yeah, and smart account abstraction wallets are the way to go. So, like, this isn't a taste of the future as well. I want to beat this penguin with a sword over here. You seen this guy? That's got to be your character. I'm assuming you only get to pick one.

Yeah, that's me right there. Let's talk about Bitcoin. Okay, because it's Bitcoin's week. It's Bitcoin week. Hit 100K. Let's look at it on the Cracken Pro charts here. Here it is. Green candles marching all the way, up to 100K and past 100K.

What was the all-time high on the week? The new Bitcoin all-time high, $103,000, $6.79. Starting the week at $94,900, up 6%. Currently at $101,000. God, that 100 handle is kind of crazy. Can you believe that, dude? Like, okay, so... It just violently burst through it just last night with no reason whatsoever other than

it's time to buy Bitcoin. Everyone was talking about 100K Bitcoin, of course, because that's the milestone. Do you know, also, the same day, it passed $2 trillion in terms of market cap? $100K and $2 trillion? Yeah, that's another number. Two trillion. Think of how much, like, it takes to move a multi-trillion dollar market 10% in a week. That's what Bitcoin went and did.

What a crazy week this is bad. There's a pretty cool moment of Isaac Miller who made this kind of classic 2013 video watching, like just camera pointing at the TV screen, the computer screen, watching Bitcoin cross $100. And he just did it again 11 years later, doing the same thing to like, trying to copy himself 11 years later. Let's go watch this clip of Isaac replaying, recreating this moment, but now at $100,000, superimposed over his $100 Bitcoin crossing.

Right here, watching history be made. Bitcoin is up to $100,000. That's an all-time high and it's continuing to rise. I've seen it twice today. Went up to $100,000. And this is the highest of it's been. It's ridiculous. Look at, we had last trade $100,000 for $100,000 a piece.

$11. He's just amazing to me. Just look at this graph. You see this graph? That's the last three hours. Give me a second. I'll switch it up. This guy,

this guy looks the exact same. He did not age at all, bro. That's what happens when you are in Bitcoin below $100. He's still living in the same place too. It feels like maybe he could upgrade his living circumstances with like, no, no, never sell,

never sell. Never sell. Only hold. He's still living like a pauper, like stacking like, like millions hundreds of millions of dollars in bitcoin who knows oh my god that's crazy this is just erupted in my timeline congratulations a lot of i told you so a lot of celebrations from the bitcoin community not one to miss out on the action was uh donald trump of course on truth social

yeah he says congratulations bitcoiners one hundred thousand dollars you're welcome together we will make america you're welcome i love how trump just gets here like six months ago and he's just like, here you go, I gave you a $100,000 Bitcoin. He's not wrong. Okay. It was going to happen no matter what. But like, if Kamala was president, $100,000 might not have come until like, you know, 2026 or 2027.

Who knows? Yeah. He definitely helped in the last stretch year. But like, yeah, I wouldn't say he's been around for the whole ride. Anyway, Donald Trump, very exciting. You know what we should do? I kind of want to take a moment to zoom out on the cracking charts. and talk about how far we've come.

Do you think you can do that, Ryan? Can you zoom out that far? No, you're going to have to go out to longer than a day. You're going to go to one month candles. One month candles. I've never done this. Okay. Thanks to Cracken Pro for these glorious charts.

Here we go. One month candles. All right. I've never gone back this far. Ryan's never, Ryan didn't know that one month candles were a thing. Okay, but like it actually starts in October 2013. And that's when the Cracken charts

you know like a pro chart start that's when that's when it crosses $100 for the first time is that the birth of crackin somewhere around that timeline you know 2012 2013 that's a lot of data that they I want to I want to actually take you before that though okay so we have Genesis 2009 to 2010 of course bitcoin was launched in 2009 by this mysterious figure Satoshi Nakamoto the very first real world purchase happened in May 2010 okay at the time that was a purchase of 10,000 Bitcoin for two pizzas. World-posed expensive pizzas. Yes.

So at that point, though, one Bitcoin was valued at 0.004 cents for one Bitcoin. And it was also the moment, the instantiation of value, of a market value of Bitcoin. It was pizza. Just so legendary there. So there's Bitcoin pizza guy who just like imagine, imagine that transaction. Anyway, that was the very first. That was the Genesis. We have this early growth phase.

In February 2011, Bitcoin reached parity with the dollar, became a staple coin for a brief moment, at $1. Okay, so one Bitcoin equals $1. That happened in 2011. And then we had this kind of early growth mania. This is when Bitcoin first came on my radar, David. I don't know about you, but you were talking about Bitcoin crossing $1,000 for the first time. Well, that happened in December 2013 for the very first time.

And, you know, like that was an epic moment. And I recall it coming back on my radar right after that when it fell back down. Remember the Mount Gox thing and Bitcoin was back down into the hundreds. In 2014, it was around $200. Right. Okay. So my story earlier was when it was crossing $1,000 was after it crossed $1,000 the second time. So this line was in, it was the resurgence back to $1,000.

That's when my story was told. So you weren't paying attention. I wasn't paying attention. Okay. I start paying attention, like a little bit, but like really it was 2014. It was like a Thanksgiving. Remember, I told you I was like, you know, on some prednisone steroids? Righteous, like introduction to crypto stories.

It's actually kind of a shame that's never been articulated on the podcast. Yeah. The fact that there's drugs involved. Prescription drugs, guys. The stock got carried away, all right? It was for an illness that I had, all right? Let's not get too crazy. But I really saw the light on that drug trip.

Let me tell you. Okay. And then we go to David's era. So if you remember like 2015, 2016, it was blockchain, not Bitcoin, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then we got the first, the 2017, bull market, Bitcoin, January, 2017, surpassed its previous all-time high, trading at $1,000. So that was when you were like, oh, you're paying attention at that point time. Okay. So we, in that bull market, we got, we peaked about a year later at December 2017. Do you remember when Bitcoin hit 20K at that point in time? That was a crazy run.

I remember seeing my roommate at the time looking at his phone and I had just told him to buy ether at like $600, $700 and both Bitcoin and ether were peaking. And I remember seeing my roommate like dancing. It's just extreme euphoria. And I have this, my first ever moment of like, hmm, this doesn't feel right. Oh, really? And that moment was the top. Okay. And it was the first moment.

I was like, wait a second. What's going on here? It was my first like gut instinct of. like maybe you should sell the top. You were playing, you were dabbling around in that time in like Iota. Yeah, I was all this like garbage tokens. Yeah, exactly. Oh, you had dubbed Iota by that time.

Yeah. I was rotating around whatever coins. Ether, if I recall, peaked in like January, February, you know, 2018. So just a couple months later. A couple weeks later. Oh my God. Then we had that devastating correction. Of course, bare market.

Bitcoin. That's when I learned to become numb. I don't know about you. 20K down to 3K during. that time for bitcoin and then again everyone said it was uh dead this is by the way december 2020 during that bear market when uh micro strategy started buying a little bit just a little bit at first michael sailer PayPal uh micro strategy that kind of thing was was happening and then uh we got in 2021 the bull market back on the menu this is post covid we could flash forward past the covid

crash and all of this some signs of life in in january 2021 Bitcoin hit 40K. The stimmy era. Stimmy era. Do you remember that? Institutional adoption, inflation, a lot of the economic lessons that we've all learned over the last like four years.

Some people listening to Bankless will probably remember. This is post the Bankless podcast. You probably remember us covering all of this during that time. November 2021, Bitcoin peaked at 69K. That was around the all-time high for that bull market. Nice number right there, right? Then, of course, we had FDX, Crypto Winter. You guys know that story, 2022.

And now here we are, David. Fast forward to 100K Bitcoin. What a journey has been all along, hasn't it? Yeah. Time is so weird in this industry. Looking at these last candles, especially the, we're looking at one-month candles, once again. The candle currently being formed in December is, you know, we still have 25 more days of December. The November candle is absolutely gargantuan.

Going from 70,000. to like $95,000, $25,000 in a single month is insane. Absolutely. But of course, Donald Trump, thank you. Thank you for the handle. Let's go back to his tweet. It's like, you're welcome. You're welcome, he says.

Okay, so actually, this is interesting too. New to this cycle, central bankers are weighing in on Bitcoin. This is Fed Chair Jerome Powell talking about Bitcoin saying it's just like gold. Let's play this clip. or in the Federal Reserve itself, in terms of the system, what do you think of that idea? I don't think that's how people think about it. I mean, it's so, you know, people use Bitcoin as a speculative asset, right? It's like gold. It's just like gold only. It's virtual. It's digital. People are not using it as a form of payment or as a store of value. It's highly volatile.

It's not a competitor for the dollar. It's really a competitor for gold. You know, it's, that's really how I think of it. So this is the chair of the most powerful central bank in the world, now weighing it on Bitcoin, saying it's basically a digital gold. Do you catch that? I mean, he's right that people aren't using it as a medium of exchange. Totally right. But he also said, if I'm hearing it correctly, that they're not using it as a store of value.

He said they're using it like gold, which is interesting because gold, people use gold as a store of value. What is that? Yeah. Anyway, so he acknowledged, both acknowledging that it's a digital gold, but also kind of brushing it the side, right? Because of course the dollar is king in Powell's world. But just the fact that central bankers are weighing in on this, that is a product of this cycle. Weighing in on it and being directionally correct, like kind of informed about Bitcoin

and not being just like giving dog shit takes like we've heard over the last like five, six years you know, like five years ago it would have been it's just drug money. No one's using it. Why are you even asking? I refuse to answer it to be that kind of. It wouldn't even come up in an interview like this in a serious way. This is Jerome Powell. the head of the Federal Reserve. And when he is directionally correct about Bitcoin, man, it's, is, Bitcoin has come a long way. Like, it is extremely legitimized in mainstream society. Yeah.

All right. So now we're on the March 2 million, David. You think we'll get there? I mean, it was 13 years ago that Bitcoin was at $100. Today is at $100,000. And, excuse me, 11 years ago. In 11 years, 100 million? What?

No, we don't do that. What? Come on. Doesn't it work like that? I mean, another 10x. People have said the first 100,000 is the hardest, right? But also now we're in diminishing returns. We're on the kind of the tail end of the S curve. I do think we will see $1 million at some point, whether that's this cycle or the next decade.

I'm like not sure. Maybe it takes longer. It's crazy that like Bitcoin is both $100,000 and $1 million. The fact that you can just say one Bitcoin is 0.1. million dollars is kind of crazy. So getting so close to a million dollars, being able to be measured by million dollars, it's like, I feel like there's a magnet there. Yeah.

Just like, F it. Just like, it's easier to think about. So let's just, let's just get it to a million. Yeah, that's right. One Bitcoin is a million dollars. Right, right, Eith. Goals for you. Come on.

You can get there too. Let's go check in on the little brother. Speaking of ETH. Okay, well, okay, so Bitcoin started the week, 94,900, up 6.3%. Ether started the week, 3,560, up. 11% on the week. That's one more percent than Bitcoin. No, no, no. It's almost double the percent. Wait, wait. Bitcoin is, Bitcoin is up 6.3%. Oh, I thought you said 10%. Okay. No, no. ETH is up 11, 11, almost double up. Yeah. So, Ether ending the week at 3,920. Maybe Ryan, we might see

$4,000 this year. Can you imagine this year? We got 25, we got 25 days for ETH to crack $4,000 in 2024. Just a reminder, the ETH all-time high is at $4,850-ish dollars. So we are still like $900 off of the all-time high. We had an interweek high of the ETH Bitcoin ratio of 0.04 up from the Davy Jones locker where it was at 0.032 at the end of November. It touched 0.04. Right now due to Bitcoin strength, we are at 0.039. But we have the ratio is. two, three weeks of looking acceptable? Ether's looking strong. It's not, it's looking not weak.

Okay, okay. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself with the strength here, but explain this chart, Mr. T.A. Okay, so this is a meme that's going around with the traders. It's called the giant effing triangle meme. And this has been, Ether has just been trading in triangles for forever. And this is like the largest triangle that Ether has ever traded in. The point of the triangle starts.

I hate this triangle. I hate it. It's okay if I hate it? It's the trap of the triangle. But the thing is, it's obviously not going to break down. Crypto doesn't break down. It's not going to the bottom of that triangle. Okay.

But when it breaks to the upside of that triangle, because the triangle is so large, the implied move, once it does break through this triangle is the speculation is that it's going to be very large. So this triangle is a wedge between where it peaked out in 2021 at 4,800, and then where it bottomed in 2022 at like 800. Yeah. And then we've been a higher low ever since that $800 in 2022 and a lower high also since then. And so we're converging here and like we're pushing up on this giant effing triangle. And because the triangle is so large, the implied move post-triangle breaking is, you know, theoretically large. I'm just seeing my triangle reading then if I'm reading triangles here is if we punch above around 4K here, then it's just we're in good.

territory. We're an undiscovered country. We get to like do new things. We're no longer constrained by this, this crappy wedge triangle, yeah? It's clear skies above $4,000. And we are one, we are $80 away from that. Well, speaking of Donald Trump, maybe he can take some credit for getting ETH to 10K because World Liberty Financial. Again, this is an entity from like, yeah, the Trump family has been stacking some ether on the week. Okay. So they have purchased a $30 million worth of ether. Also, 10 million. It's actually up since then. He's bought $40 million of ether. What? Okay. And you said he, but of course we're talking about World Liberty Financial, which is like the DFI protocol. Donald Trump specifically is buying $40 million of ether on chain. I mean,

he owns a portion of it, right? So it's not, it's not, it's not him. Anyway, so 40 million in ether, also 10 million in Bitcoin, but disproportionately ether. That's kind of new. I don't recall. Oh, kind of cool. ETHERD during, like, the last bull run, do you? No, not at all. All right, let's check in on the ETF flows just for the last days. The Bitcoin ETF flows looking real good. 28th of November was Thanksgiving, so markets were off.

The 29th, 320 million in, the second of December, $350 million in. The third, $670 million in, the fourth, $556 million in into the Bitcoin ETFs. So billions of dollars flowing in into the Bitcoin. coin ETFs, taking a look at the ether flows. Also, looking very good. $330 million in on the 29th, 24 in on the second, 132 in on the third, and 167 in on the fourth. Very strong numbers. Heath is almost at the cusp of hitting a billion dollars of total inflows. And as a reminder, net inflows, yeah. Net inflows. As a reminder, the depth of the outflows of ETH was negative 600 million. So we are 300 million higher in total inflows than we were ever in the whole.

And I think this is just getting started. We'll probably break a brilliant by the time this time next week. Yeah, it's very bullish. Total crypto market cap is now at $3.8 trillion. We are on track to hit $4 trillion, which I think you said was ambitious, Ryan, by the end of this year. I did say that. Yeah. We are $200 billion away, which is just a measly few percentage points in the Bitcoin world.

That should be easy. You want to call for $5 trillion now, David? Not this year. Maybe next year. And check it in on our layer two updates brought to us by Mantle. Thank you, Mantle. Big numbers out of base, 24-hour volume on base, has hit a new all-time high of $2.3 billion. I definitely assisted in some of that numbers.

I've been trading my base meme coins. You got a billion or so in there? Yeah, at least, yeah. It's all me. And then Movers of the Week. I don't know about you, Ryan, but I was having some deja vu this last week because the big Movers of the Week are some 2017 coins. XRP, Cardano, Iota,

and Cellar Lumens. I forgot about Cellar Lumens, up almost 500% in the last 30 days. XRP up 400% in the last 30 days. This is crazy, dude. Cardano up 250% in the last 30 days. Kind of insane. We talked about this last time,

but it's like, it's like a 2021 retail, just like locked back into the exchange. Muscle memory. They are bought into one coin. They will know. not buy any other coins. They were like, oh, this went up last time. I want this again.

And they bought all the things that, like, people, you know, the crypto natives don't typically buy, right? Yeah, complete curveball. But not only that, but XRP has experienced apparently XRP Phi, Ripple, finance. There's apparently DFI on Ripple. Apparently there's meme coins on Ripple. Calling a D-Fi, the D stands for decentralization, D. Fair enough.

Fair enough. It's something. You can do things on. chain, right? So it's like, you know, CDFI or something like this. I thought this was a funny tweet from Evans, who's one of Bankless's biggest fans. X-RPL-D-Fi is legitimately slick. It's like Jupiter or Pump.Fund or Unoswop or OpenC, all rolled into one app. There's yield-forming meme coins and NFT. Transactions are instant and cost 0.003 cents, and it works with metamast snaps. They increased bandwidth and reduced latency plus

very clean UI, UX. he's taking a jab at Solana he's actually taking a jab at Solana with this one if you couldn't tell but you know interesting the big news here is XRP is now number three

okay so it has flipping Salana there was talk of Solana trying to flip in Ether earlier in the cycle I didn't okay so it was teasing the flipping of Solana because it was within a couple million

billion dollars yeah and then it just rocketed so the market cap of of Ripple is 137 billion $114 billion. So like it flip in Solana and then just started doing laps. Okay. Like kind of crazy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's crazy about these numbers here is like, ether might not be saved, David? Okay, look at this. Look at this column. Fully diluted valuation. All right. So again, this is like all of the XRP that's not in the market, but is in kind of the ripple treasury or somewhere else, right?

It's like whatever, quote unquote locked, not available to the market, but is real supply. If you look at FDV, okay, David, XRP is a 60% pump away from flippinging ether. That's funny. Is it funny? Are you laughing about this? Why does Ripple, how does it move like that? Where does this capital come from?

You were talking about last week. It's Uber driver. It's taxi, it's retail capital. It's just people that are not listing the bank lists, you know? It's the different tribe that are in crypto. I was in a couple like, just like alpha groups like D-Gen trenches telegram groups and like somebody was talking about trying to get onto ripple to buy like the ripple army meme coin and I just he was just like I've

been doing this for like 45 minutes trying to figure this out I just I just close the telegram map I'm like I'm not doing this there's no way I'm touching ripple did you see this from Gwart he goes I asked a ripple holder why they should invest in XRP they said imagine being able to invest in swift to which I said okay why would I want to invest in Swift and they said do you know how Swift works and I said no do you know how Swift works and they said no that's the tweet oh wow that got almost 10,000 likes nice tweak work yeah anyway that's what's going on in the hot crypto coins of the week also Tron up we didn't mention that but that's going crazy too um because why not stable coin supply this is good news for all of us all of our liquidity is at all time highs 186 billion so this had to

happen in order for all of our other coins to go up. Particularly, it's good for defy as well. And this $186 billion is actually already out of date. This is coming in for like two or three days ago. There has already since been multiple billion dollars of Tether and UCC minted on Ethereum, one that just came in this morning just before we started recording another billion dollars at the tether treasury on Ethereum. So I mean, I don't know if you've been looking, Ryan, but the yields in Ethereum, defy are very strong,

anywhere between like 8 and 20 percent. Oh, yeah. And just, you know, follow the money. It is a gravity of- On your stable coins. That's a black hole of liquidity. So we're just sucking in stable coins into Ethereum right now. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Okay. Another news on the week, too, was greyscale, gray-scale salon of trust. Remember, they did this with Bitcoin, then they did this with ether, converting their trust into G-Sole to an ETF. So there's Salana Grayscale Trust filing to convert this into an ETF. A couple weeks ago, we talked about BitWise filing for a Salana ETF.

So the big question of this cycle, is, I asked James Safert, is the Salana ETF going to happen now? He said, yes, dot, dot, eventually we'll know within the next few days if it potentially happens as early as August or if they have to wait till 2025, later into 2025 or into 2026. I could see a Solana ETF,

before 2025. Yeah, so James Safert still thinks they'll follow the process that they've been following, that they won't short-circuit this and get it in Q1. He said theoretically it's possible. A new admin wouldn't follow how things have been done for decades. But I don't think simply because they are more accommodative means they're going to rush

approve approval for these things. So probably toward the end of 2025 and into 2026 is this late. But I mean, the fact that all of these issuers are filing tells you something's cooking. Kind of bullish. Imagine getting like a bunch of ETFs towards the end of 2025, 2026. Might be a sell the top event. It might be like, remember when Ether and Bitcoin got futures, like, right at the top. Yeah.

And that was the top of, like, 2017. You're calling the top already? But it's a year away. That was a whole year away. We have only gotten like three top signals so far. I'm like waiting until I count 300. But that's a problem for our future selves. Coming up next, the crypto debanking became mainstream in a news topic this last week after

Mark Endrieson went on Joe Rogan. So there's a lot to discuss here. Ryan even had his own little tiny role in the story as this Twitter thread of all these crypto founders who got debanked started going viral. Trump also named a pro-crypto chairman of the SEC, who is Paul Atkins, and is it bullish for crypto? All this and more. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Especially Cracken, our preferred place to buy Bitcoin, even when it's above $100,000. If you do not have an account with Cracken, consider clicking the link in the show. It's getting started with Cracken today. Want to know the

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list and follow Safe on X and check out the SafeNet docks. There is a link in the show notes. A story that we are very familiar with have been talking about for a while, the debanking of crypto. It felt like it had a mainstream moment last weekend. It was all because of this clip. This is Mark Andreessen on the Drogan podcast. I think he spells out the problem quite eloquently. Let's just play the clip. Can you give me an example? You know, debanking. This is where a lot of the debanking comes from is these agencies. So debanking is when you as either a person or your company are literally kicked out of the banking system.

Like they did a Kanye. Exactly. Like they did to Kanye. My partner, Ben's father has been debanked. Really? We had an employee who... For what? For having the wrong politics.

For saying unacceptable things. Under current banking regulations, okay, here's a great thing. Under current banking regulations, after all the reforms of the last 20 years, there's now a category called a politically exposed person. PEP. And if you are a PEP, you are required by financial regulators to kick them off of your... to kick them out of your bank. What? But what if you're politically on the left?

That's fine. No. Because they're not politically exposed. So no one on the left gets debanked? I have not heard of a single instance of anybody in the left getting debanked. Can you tell me what the person that you know did, what they said that got them debanked? Oh, well, I mean, David Horwitz is a right wing. You know, he's pro-Trump.

I mean, he's said all kinds of things. You know, he's been very anti-Islamic terrorism. He's been very worried about immigration, all these things. And they debanked him for that. Yeah, they debanked. So you get kicked out of your bank account. you get kicked out of the, you can't do credit card transactions. By the way, you can't run.

How is that legal? Well, exactly. So this is the thing. And so, and then you go on this thing of like, well, there's no, this is where the government and the companies get intertwined. Back to your fascism point, which is there's no, there's a constitutional amendment that says the government can't restrict your speech. But there's no constitutional amendment that says the government can't debank you. Right. And so if they can't do the one thing, they do the other thing.

And then they don't have to debank you. They just have to put pressure on the private company banks to do it. And then the private company banks do it because they're expecting. to. But the government gets to say, we didn't do it. It was the private company that did it. And of course, J.P. Morgan can decide who they want to have as customers. Of course, right? Is there a private company? He goes on. And he talks about 30 different crypto companies within the Andresen Horowitz portfolio that were also debanked and cites some other examples. Crypto becomes like a main character in this story. Yeah. So did you listen to this interview? Yeah. It was great. I thought it was great. I saw it to my lib mother. I love. And she said she would listen to it. So I will roll. report back. Yeah, it was actually a huge chunk of the podcast was actually dedicated to this debanking issue. They kept going back to it. And for the listeners out there, this tweet has 307,000 likes and 60 million views. So that's a large number. Yeah. That is all of Twitter saw this. And you saw that like there was a massive amount of commentary about this. Like a lot of

people were saying that Mark Andreessen was just kind of like being hyperbolic about this. That wasn't really a problem. That's a little bit of my reaction to it. Yeah. He was a little bit hyperbolic. Who's just like, oh, yes. And it's because of political speech. Yes. Which, like, that's a little bit of an embellishment.

Did you do the, did you read the Nick Carter kind of like fact check type thing about like where Andreessen was right and where he was wrong? Like there's a, he wrote a fantastic article about this earlier in the week. He was writing that in response to another individual who fact checked Mark Andreessen. I didn't read Nick Carter's response, but I did read the fact check of Mark Andreessen and thought that it was like unsublished. I was like, Nick Carter's was unsatisfactory. No, no, no, no, I didn't read Nick Carter. The guy who's like this like,

Nick Carter basically spells it out. So it's like, where Mark Andresen was like kind of pushing the limit here was, you know, how many people are debanked due to politics? I mean, that remains kind of unclear, right? Right. Yeah, he also brought into play Elizabeth Warren's kind of, you know, an institution called the CFPB and said that they were partly responsible for this. They don't really do much of.

the debanking, most of the debanking that we feel in crypto, which is where a lot of the evidence is coming from, comes from the FDIC, the Fed, the OCC, and the SEC, doing what Mark actually said, which is kind of like working behind the scenes, sending letters to banks, making it feel like, you know, you can only have less than 15 percent of deposits can be in crypto, making it feel very risky for them. And kind of like through the mechanistic bureaucracy, debanking crypto companies in the background. And that's primarily where I've seen the evidence for it. It's like targeted at industries.

That's what Operation Chokepoint 1.0 was. It was about like, you know, Pot, the adult entertainment industry, a few different sectors that the government didn't like. In Operation 2.0, they were targeting the crypto industry effectively and debanking crypto startups and entrepreneurs. I think Mark was kind of zooming in pretty narrowly and then getting kind of the details and facts technically wrong, but still directionally very. correct, which kind of opened him up to being corrected. But he also did it in a way that, like, is a little bit of a shock factor game. And also, you know, playing a little bit of chess. It's like, yeah, kind of being hyperbolic, kind of just making very bold claims that are directionally correct, although narrowly incorrect. But overall, the net effect of it was just

masterful. Yeah, this is a lot of commentary. So Brian Armstrong says, I can confirm this is true, the debanking of crypto. It was one of the most unethical and un-American things that happened in the Biden administration. My guess is we'll find Elizabeth Warren's fingerprints all over it. Biden himself was probably unaware. Other comments from Jesse Powell, the founder of Cracken, we had no U.S. banking for several years while one U.S. company enjoyed monopoly secured by its heavyweight investors. I think that's a wicked coin base. Yeah, that singular bank was recently assassinated. He's talking about probably Silvergate maybe signature. We barely made it by focusing on Europe. So again, crack in the exchange was like debanking.

according to Jesse Powell. This is Sam from Frax. You know, Sam. He kept quiet about this for almost a year out of fear, but since I'm in good company with all of these people, the Winklevosses came out, you know, Brian Armstrong, et cetera. Last December, Sam says, I got a call from J.P. Morgan saying, we have to close anyone's account that we know

their primary source of income or wealth is from crypto. This is directly from the top from Jamie. He means Jamie Diamond. I'm really sorry. So Sam, like co-founder Frax, was completely debanked as well as a result of his crypto activities. David Marcus, you remember one of the architects of the DM Libra activity? He goes through this long story of how basically the U.S. government killed Libra, killed Diem,

just like made it so that they could not actually, even though they checked all of the boxes from a regulatory perspective, that they received such backlash from the regulators and the banks that they couldn't actually launch the product, kind of killed the product. kind of killed the product, strangled it in the crib, really. So more evidence of this. Anyway, lots of these things coming out in crypto circles, which I think is where Mark's debanking points are the most salient. And I don't think this is really a surprise to anyone listening to this,

but just to reiterate the point of emphasis here, this is news because it's news in mainstream. Like this last week, this story just broke out into mainstream society, and there's a lot more awareness about this. This is no longer crypto people talking about their crypto experiences on crypto podcasts. This is now being digested by the rest of the United States like Newsphere. Melania Trump, she came out in her recent biography saying she and Barron were actually debanked. Did you know that too?

Oh, wow. Yikes. Yeah. So maybe that's more the point about, you know, political. Maybe there was more like political debanking than I thought. Fun fact, story. Bankless actually got it to start from a little bit of debanking as well. So I was debanked. This is before when David and I were talking, doing some work together, but before we officially started the podcast by Bank of America in 2019, they basically just sent a Dear John letter that was just like, hey, your account's too risky.

You have 30 days to withdraw. You have no longer access. See you later. So I went at that time. I was like, what? Like, what's going on? I got an account at a credit union. David, I still use that same small community credit union for banking services for bankless

now. And then in parallel to that, this is a story I actually haven't shared yet publicly. I just shared this on the back of this. I got a letter from the SEC. So I was running a staking services infrastructure company at the time for Cosmos, fun fact. I was planning to get into Ethereum staking all of these things. And I got a discovery nastygram for the SEC on the back of this bank closure that basically it was kind of like a veiled threat.

And when they launched discovery, they want every email, every invoice. every contract. This is like legal fees to respond and collect all of this information. It was me and this other DevOps guy. It was like a two-person tiny company. And I was like, what is going on here? I don't want to mess with this. Close down the staking business. And that's when you and I just started getting to bankless full time. Ironically, running a very loud broadcasting bankless media company talking about all of this stuff. So they effed with the wrong guy. I guess so. I guess so. anyway, just for all the people out there who are like, no, debanking doesn't really happen. I mean, it's happened to me.

It happened to people that we know. It does happen and it was happening. So I'm glad that's reaching kind of the attention of mainstream and the way it should. All right. To round out this political part of the podcast, let's talk about the new SEC chair nomination. Paul Atkins to lead the SEC. This is a tweet from Donald Trump on truth social. I don't know what they call tweets out there.

It says, Paul is a proven leader for common sense. He believes in the promise of robust, innovative capital markets that are responsive to the needs of investors that would provide capital to make our economy the best in the world. He also recognizes that digital assets and other innovations are crucial to making America greater than capital. Digital assets. Before, yeah. Okay.

Okay. So what do we know about Paul? He founded a consulting firm in 2019 advising on financial services in complex regulatory issues and strategy. That firm has clients, including banks, crypto exchanges, and defy platforms. Yeah. He was previously appointed by former president George W. Bush as SEC Commissioner from 2002 and 2008. So he's been in the office before.

And that his overriding philosophy is apparently the free market system. Hester Purse, so it's great to know things about Paul. Hester Purse put out a tweet, said that we have a lot of work to do at the SEC to advance free markets, capital formation, investor choice, and innovation. I'm delighted that Paul Atkins will be returning to lead the effort. having worked for him during his last stint at the agency, I cannot think of a better person for the job. Wow. Wow.

Hester Purse coming from her. You can tell me anything about Paul Atkins, and I'd be, okay, great. But if Hester Purse is giving this statement, I cannot think of a better person for the job, wow, I'm sold. I am sold. That's all I need to know. That feels pretty good. That feels pretty good.

That's all I need to know. This is an interview. There's not much from Paul on crypto, but this is one brief moment where he talked about crypto in an interview. Let's just play the clip. If it's, you know, if it challenges incumbent, and it helps to bring down costs for investors and for people who are trying to raise capital. I mean, that's the reason why we have financial markets.

And to have capital find its way to businesses and people take risks and they may lose all the money by investing in something, but that's their right. You know, they can go buy a lottery ticket and lose all the money. I mean, that's much better than Gary Gensler's gatekeeping sort of style of just like, you know, adults are, you can't invest in certain classes of assets. My guy on this guy is, I think this is a plus one to the, we're going to get a bunch of, uh, ETFs with the process. Yeah. We're not skipping the process with a process. Oh, he had process guys. Free market process guy.

Yeah. Yeah, much less annoying than Gary Gensar. I got to say. Maybe it's been so many years of Gary Gensler is a gnome. But like, this guy did not annoy me at all. Not at all. Jake Trivinsky. I look forward to his office hours.

And he maybe he'll hook on my bank list sometime, which we never got Gary. Oh my God, that would be great. Could you imagine? I love to talk to this man. I'd love to talk to this man. conversation. Jake Trevinsky, it's impossible to express the magnitude of shift. We're likely to see the SEC run by Paul Atkins.

Crypto has literally never existed without the overhang of uncertainty. or hostility from U.S. regulators. Wow. He's right about that. We've literally never seen this. Yeah, good, good comments from Patrick McKenry and others as well. So this feels pretty good. All right. So this is the team beginning to form. So last week we got Treasury. This week we got SEC. The one we're waiting for is the crypto czar. And recall from last week, Chris John Carlo's name is being floated. That's crypto dad, literally crypto dad. Couldn't get any better than that. We'll see what happens. What do we got coming up, David? The hyperliquid drops the best air drop since Uniswap, and it pumps 3x after the drop because no VCs are involved. We're going to check in on this. Hock to a straight to jail. Checking in on the coin launch of Hock to a girl's meme coin. An artifact is shutting down operations, this gargantuan NFT platform from 2021, finally closing up shop. And then Alex Mischinsky pleads guilty to some of the allegations.

What is the sentence? All of this and more, but first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. New projects are coming online to the Mantle Layer 2 every single week. Why is this happening? Maybe it's because Mantle has been on the frontier of Layer 2 design architecture since it first started building Mantle DA, powered by technology from EigenDA. Maybe it's because users are coming onto the Mantle Layer 2 to capture some of the highest yields available in Defy and to automatically receive the points and tokens being accrued by the $3 billion dollar Mantle Treasury in the Mantle Reward Station.

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I don't do perps, David. I don't do perps too much. No, no. I was a perps G-gen in like the pre-2020 era, but now I just stick to spot this place. You don't like your volatility like 5 to 10 X. I kind of do. But you can get those with meme coins. And the meme coins have funny pictures that go with them.

It became one of the largest dexes by volume and open interests, and it distributed 310 million hype tokens, positions it as the seventh largest air drop based on Coin Gecko. Wow. With a coming in today, with one billion total supply of hype tokens, so gave away 310 million. 31% kind of insane. Gave away 31% in the airdrop. Sorry for the ambulance. The current FDV of Hyperliquid is clocking. at 12.4 billion dollars. It dropped at the token dropped at three to four dollars. Okay. And it has

gone up only to almost $13. So it has dropped an insane amount of wealth. Again, 30% of his token giving away to the community because there's no VCs. This is a self-bootstraped defy platform that's turning into its own layer one with no VCs in it. And so just a incredible story here. Yeah. Look at people showing some of the results of their airdrop. This one guy is a person, $307,000 in an air drop. That is a nice Christmas gift.

Pretty cool to see that going on. Okay, let's get into Hawk, Tua. Okay, so Haley Welch, otherwise known as the Hawk Tua girl. She's been flirting with the crypto ecosystem for a while. She has like a Mad Ladd's custom PFP, NFT, decided to make a

Hawk meme coin. I don't know that's playing in your ears, Ryan, but that's the hot tour girl saying, uh, my meme coin is live. We're going to spare bankless listeners from playing. You can hear it once, but hearing that over and over again is kind of brutal. Uh, okay, so yeah, how did the launch go? The launch didn't, didn't go so well. All right. I don't really know if this is maliciousness or naivete. I don't know, but 97.5 supply of the token supply. Nice.

47.5% of the token supply was owned by like the deployer wallet or like insiders that's not real is that real and so basically what that what that means when 95% of the token supply is owned by the deployer or relevant entities associated entities is that like when you pay a hundred dollars to buy one of these meme coins you're basically paying who owns the supply 97 and a half dollars. You're like you're just a transfer from one person's pocket to the other. So this token pumped up to $500 million because people were trying to ape in first. And then this wallet, the deployer

wallet and insiders started dumping that token from $500 million down to $60 million, attracting the attention, giving us terrible optics as an industry. We were celebrating 100K Bitcoin, okay? This is not my crypto industry doing this.

This is somebody else. I mean, there's two things that broke out into public mainstream discourse this week. 100K Bitcoin and the Hawk 2O throws Bitcoin. Great. You know CoffeeZilla? Yeah. CoffeeZilla got into the Twitter spaces and started grilling them on this activity. And then that we got, he's the, he's the anti-scammer YouTuber.

Okay, that's right. That's right. Big YouTuber account. And then this Twitter space got retweeted by Dave Portnoy. Can we listen to this clip? It's about a one minute long clip of the Twitter space. This is coffee Zilla. This is, this is CoffeeZilla speaking to Haley and like the team.

Okay, here it is. Good. We're really happy to answer. I have questions. I have questions. I'm raising my hand. Hey, guys. What coffee zilla? Hey, this is one of the most miserable, horrible launches I've ever seen in my life.

Okay, then why the fuck are you on? I've been tracing it on chain for a while. You guys generated over a million dollars in fees while y'all's fans got rug pooled. There was snipers, but there was also insider trading directly linked to y'all's creator account. what are you guys doing? What are you guys doing? Okay. So this is kind of,

I just don't enjoy celebrity meme coins. I've come around to meme coins generally, but celebrity meme coins, I have just never seen one go right. It's just like, it's hard to launch one because you have people coming in so fast

before the token can get distributed. But also it just really looks like this one. Do you think she just got in over her own head? Like, and she, you just didn't understand the mechanics of it. when they're coming into crypto. And they're thinking that things are okay

when they're like not okay. Yeah, I think that this is probably pretty, I would think this would be painful. Like, I saw all sorts of threads even from like legal lawyers, law firms saying, hey, if you got rugged by the Hock Tua, like, meme token, contact us because we're doing a class action lawsuit. Like, no good will come on this.

Are you sure that was, there was a meme account that did that? Are you sure that was a real one? I don't know, actually. Because there was a very believable meme account. Oh, that's hilarious. Yeah. I'm not sure that might have been real. But seriously, though, like what, I mean, you can't do this, right?

You can't. You could, like, there's no rules, dude. You can do. Do we want Gary Gensler back, David? Is it he protect us from this? No, I'm going to go and take Peter Van Valkenberg's approach that he gave at the Bankless Summit, which is private law. If you don't like it, you can sue someone.

And if you feel motivated, to go do that, go do that. Yeah, go do that. This is a private relationship between two people. One is a hawk to a token purchaser and one is a hawk to a token. And guys, guys, let's all remember, you're buying a hawk to a token. Right? What are you expecting to happen here?

Okay, moving on, moving on, moving on, into more defy-related things, more serious topics. Instadap proposes a rebrand and new tokenomics following fluid launch. Fluid is this brand new DFI product on Ethereum from the Instadap team, which is this crazy story of these two kids out of India developing insidap from a very long young age. They're great. Yeah. A crazy story about just like permissionless financial innovation building. They're brothers. Brothers.

Brothers. Yeah. Just like people were giving them congratulations back in like 2020 when they built their first product. And now fluid, which I'm still trying to figure out how to wrap my head around fluid. But it's basically a very capital efficient hybrid. between a lending borrowing system, kind of like Ave or Morpho, mixed with Dex trading fees.

And so they're providing liquidity to dexes, collecting fees, and then also lending out money at the same time. Something about you put $1 in and then you provide like $37 of capital efficiency. I don't get how it works, but everyone's very soaked about it. It's like AVE and Uniswap had a baby.

That's kind of those two things combined. And it has done the crazy numbers. It has just organically, without any token incentives, gotten a lot of TVL, The Instadap token has performed extremely well over the last few months, and there's a rebrand to go into the fluid asset, which will include algorithmic buyback mechanisms. This is just Layer 1, good old-fashioned defy, which I'm always a big fan. It's nice to see some fresh innovation in this space.

Big fans of whatever is coming out of this. So the governance proposal is the rebrand from Instadap Instat token to Fluid, but also this buyback strategy, which effectively is turning. this token into a cash flowing asset. Love it. Right? This is what we were hoping for in Defy. Asset. Let's get more of those.

Yeah. Love it. Very, very cool stuff. Okay. In a different world, NFT world, 2021 massive NFT project artifact, which you might know as the Clone X NFT platform.

Oh yeah. That's, or not platform, but just that's their, the NFT kind of started the whole thing. Those reached an all-time high floor price of 24th in 2022. They trade for just 0.3Eth today.

Nike bought artifact for an undisclosed amount. Some speculate like a billion dollars in 2021. In 2021, do you remember this? Three years ago to the day is when it was required. Now, Nike is shutting it all down. They are officially winding down operations in January of 2025, saying the announcement, we are announcing to plan down the wind down of artifact operations.

This was so cool. Do you remember this was during NFT mania when these tokens were launching? This was the peak of an. And then you had a big brand like Nike. It just like basically blessed this, this NFT platform. And they were talking about blending like physical Nike shoes. They did like a few, Fiosius. You remember Fiocious that NFT artist?

They did a collaboration of Nike shoes with Fiosius. It was like peak mania. And now three years later, they're totally shutting it down. End of an era. Yeah. End of an era for. At least it's a pretty good bottom signal for NFTs. NFTs are good time to buy.

Yeah. Ryan. There you go. It's always a good time to buy a Cryptopunk coin. David. I just haven't found the one that's like perfect for me. Okay. That's why. I keep sending them to you. You just ignore them. You haven't sent me to them in a while. I wasn't giving you bad signals. Speaking of Eras ended, David, Alex Mishinsky, one of the crypto criminals from, you know, 2022. So he pled guilty to all fraud charges.

Remember this guy with the T-shirt? Banks are not your friend? All of them. The classic T-shirt of Banks are not your friend. while building a bank. Yeah. So he's still got some of my money. I don't know where that went, but a lot of people in crypto with kind of a similar story.

So in court, Machinsky admitted to giving Celsius customers, quote unquote, false comfort by giving an interview in 2021, in which he said, Celsius has received approval from regulators for its earn program, which it had not.

He's pretending he got approval from regulators, and he failed to disclose that he'd been selling his holdings of sell. Remember the Celsius token the whole time? I know what I did was wrong and I want to do whatever I can to make it right. So he pled guilty to this.

What would be his sentence? So the sentencing happens on April 8th, 2025 but as part of the plea deal... We don't know the sentence. No, but as part of the plea deal, Mishinsky agreed to not appeal any sentence if it was 30 years or less. Oh!

Yeah. So he is pleading his plea deal is a minimum 30 years. Well, Alex Mishinsky... It could be up to 30 years. years and he'd be he couldn't appeal that is the case oh i see oh i see i see but still he's like okay i did it and if i get 30 years then i'm not going to appeal it Alex Michensky is not a young individual no how old do you think he is yeah I mean SBF maybe has a life on the other side of this right yeah SBF will come out at like 50 years old yeah so there you go

shinsk is coming out at end of an era day 65 70 yikes okay two releases uh This one's actually a little bit personal because this is my buddy Colton. Colton is releasing alpha cards. These are physical. I've got a stack of them here. Physical trading cards, much like Magic the Gathering, much like Pokemon. Did you play Magic in Hyatt? Like, were you a Magic the Gathering?

I never really got into magic, but I have gotten into Heartstone. Okay. Same kind of structure. Look how pretty these things are. I'm trying to hold them up to the camera. This one's the Ether's Phoenix. It's one of the legendary cards. It's got 10 attack, 10 health.

It's just really cool Colton is an artist formerly out of the Gitcoin ecosystem and these are all crypto lores and so there's Lenny who is a two-stat card Lenny the Lens Clover

So if you like Lens Ether's Phoenix What else is there? Layer 2 technician What are some of these cards? There is Ryan one of my favorite cards The Bankless Frontier which gives you a one-time shield and gives you a little

resource Looks like me There's Etherscan, there's Merkle Tree emination, there's the GM card. Is this just all crypto lore cards, but as like a magic the gathering? And the art is phenomenal, bro. It's so good. This is like a stocking stuffer, I feel like. Yeah, this is a good stocking sucker.

This is a good stocking sucker. I would love to receive something like this. I'm shilling the hell out of these things because they're not a token. There's their physical deck. And yeah, congrats to my buddy Colton for it. He's tested out these games, like the structure. the balance of the game for like over a year now. It's an actual game.

Yeah, we have a link of me actually playing with him. My first game, I just got some beginners luck, and I just had some of the best draws and just like absolutely demolished him. It was great. But yeah, no, it's a really fun game. So if anyone wants to just check out the art at the very least, there's a link in the show notes.

And who knows, you know, those magic the gathering cards and them were with a lot. That's true. That's true. Also, friends in Argentina, what's happening there? Yeah, Chris, Miento. This is coming out of the Kresi Miento program, which for those people who remember, I was in Argentina for like all of August, building out this like startup incubator ecosystem

for Argentine crypto startups. There is a call to action and call to arms, the Krasemiento GPC accelerator, an early stage crypto accelerator to help bring ambitious Web3 founders to Buenos Aires. Investing $250,000 into your startup for two different safes is a 12-week accelerator program. So if you are in the Latin America region and you just want to hop over to Buenos Aires or if you're around the world and get potentially $250,000 in your startup, there is an application open to founders based anywhere in the world. Application deadline is December 20th. The program starts January 13th in the Aleph hub. Buenos Aires is a lovely city.

And so there's just a lot of potential there. So this is a call to action to any startup that wants to go through this accelerator. There's another link in the show notes. Aren't you going down there? I am going down there. Not into Argentina. I'm going to the Chilean side of Patagonia. But yes, I'm going down there in one week to the day.

You're climbing mountains, right? No, I am walking. I'm doing things. I'm just walking this time. I'm not climbing any mountains. Yeah. But are you walking up something? I'm walking around mountains.

I'm walking in a circle around mountains. All right, yeah. I guess you've already done what you've needed to do to get the Hector, Gary Gensler, Horrocks. And so there's no more mountain climbing necessary. Oh, no, there's mountains. I haven't told you about my mountain plan in 2025. So we'll get to it when it comes.

Guys, let's get to you the meme of the week. David, what are we looking at? Okay, this is the classic, why doesn't our little meme coin trader come down to Thanksgiving meme? But this is a little bit different. This is Christmas is going to be a hell of a different this year, which is the meme coin person in the attic saying, there's my little no-coin or family.

Why don't you guys come up here this time? And that is what happens when Bitcoin Cross. is 100K, just 20 days before Christmas. So this is the question on everyone's mind going to the holidays is, how do you tell your family you were right? How do you tell them that? You just go back up to the top of the clip that we played at the very beginning of the podcast. And you'd be like, you guys are laughing at me when I was get my three paychecks paid in Bitcoin.

Who's laughing now? That's what you do? Who's laughing now? Who's laughing now? I'm sure like that'll be a hit among your family. Can you just have, just be silent about it? Can you just do a humble win? Just, you know, if they ask,

that's up to the listener. All right. Your own discretion, guys. 100K Bitcoin, though. Of course, got to let you know, crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in. But we're 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.