Bankless - ROLLUP: Bull Market Over? | Operation Choke Point 2.0 Emails | Meta Free Speech | $6.5B Silk Road BTC Sale

Episode Date: January 10, 2025

Ryan and David return for another Weekly Rollup, tackling the question everyone’s asking in 2025: is the crypto bull market already over, or do we still have more to go? Fresh FDIC emails prove Choke Point 2.0 was no conspiracy, with yet another key antagonist stepping down. Meanwhile, AI agents dominate headlines and reimagine DeFi UX, and Meta’s abrupt pivot to free speech has everyone buzzing. Finally, the U.S. greenlights a $6.5B Silk Road Bitcoin sale—can Trump step in to save America’s strategic BTC stash? Buckle up; 2025 isn’t slowing down. You ready anon? ------ 📣The Rodman Law Group | Best Crypto Law Firm  https://bankless.cc/RodmanLaw  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax   🦄UNISWAP | BUG BOUNTY PROGRAM https://bankless.cc/Uniswap-Bug-Bounty   🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle   ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum    🌐CELO | BUILD TOGETHER AND PROSPER https://bankless.cc/Celo   ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/base:0x4be6cd4d402fed49eb2de95fbc8e737e8ffd3e7f/14   ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 California Wildfires https://x.com/white_lenka/status/1876973806817775719    https://x.com/babybeginner/status/1876872061265523155/video/1   https://x.com/ashkan/status/1876970164807164042/photo/1https://x.com   mamboitaliano__/status/1876923670540501349/video/1     https://x.com/0xngmi/status/1877229902065283198   6:10 MARKETS  https://x.com/saylor/status/1876253178100117907   7:13 Meanwhile, US court greenlighted sale of $6.5B of Silk Road Bitcoin https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.368440/gov.uscourts.cand.368440.17   https://decrypt.co/300133/us-court-greenlights-sale-of-6-5b-in-seized-silk-road-bitcoin   10:57 Markets Cont.  https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/AMEX-SPY/   https://companiesmarketcap.com/assets-by-market-cap/   15:15 Movers of the Week https://www.bankless.com/read/the-top-ai-agent-tokens-were-watching   18:21 Arbitrum is close to gain another green L2BEAT pie slice https://x.com/sgoldfed/status/1876417832948523464  https://l2beat.com/scaling/projects/arbitrum   21:01 Succinct - zkEVMs on Superchain! First one! https://x.com/pumatheuma/status/1877070524783931515   25:05 Is the bull market over - how long will continue? https://mirror.xyz/kain.eth/Pa7XlhwUD-p  https://x.com/cburniske/status/1877043358956134826   35:39 Are AI Agents the Meta for the rest of the bull? https://x.com/MessariCrypto/status/1874160250812825703/photo/1   https://www.cookie.fun/   https://x.com/RaoulGMI/status/1874934417032192325   https://x.com/Dogetoshi/status/1877381299612086691   https://x.com/askthehive_ai/status/1876730899695362452  https://x.com/blocknewsdotcom/status/1875280354640265524   49:05 Operation Choke Point 2.0…another general in the anti-crypto army out https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/files/other20250106a1.pdf   https://x.com/SenLummis/status/1876346748744167924  https://x.com/EconWithNick/status/1876272018821439670   https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/1865199683087245405   55:29 Meta is now pro-free speech platform - Political wind change in DC + SV https://x.com/BasedBeffJezos/status/1876602383754789079    https://x.com/lindayaX/status/1876612826456019145   https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1876657662068461657   https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8j9e1x9z2xo   https://www.tradingview.com/news/cointelegraph:7c0f65f07094b:0-circle-contributes-1m-usdc-to-trump-s-inauguration-committee/   1:00:14 Will Canada get a pro-crypto leader too?  https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/1876299232887607433   1:01:47 Do Kwon arrived to the US and pleaded not guilty  https://cointelegraph.com/news/terraform-do-kwon-appears-before-us-judge-pleads-not-guilty   1:04:30 Meme of the Week https://x.com/dolos_diary/status/1877311858492977642   1:06:47 Closing & Disclaimers  ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures  ⁠  

David, have you seen images from or videos from this California wildfire that's going on? I have tried to not look. It's crazy. I think this is what Malibu looks like, and this is as of January 8th. So yesterday, as of recording, this is a shot of live of Malibu, something just driving down the street. Just house after house on fire. This is the Palisades fire, which is in like northwest L.A., which is the most local proximate. like forest area um malibu is the like the next city over to the left of l.a and then it gets into

uh like hollywood pretty close absolutely crazy i mean here's an image of somebody actually in their home i have no idea what they're doing this is this is crazy because the fire is raging right outside they look like they are inside of the fire yeah with their dog in the house too their dog yeah this the heck out of there yeah i think the owner just felt comfortable because i think they just immediately ran out there front door and went into the street and the street was fine. But yeah, the fire was like right. Yeah, cutting it up to the very, the line. Like, and so there's, there's, there's, there's,

LA is surrounded by like hills and, um, forested hills. And so there's three or four different fires all coming in, like, encroaching on L.A. from, from the west and then also from the north. Uh, and so when they, and when it, like, intersects with neighborhoods, it starts to go from a forest fire to, like, just waves of houses. Yeah, absolutely crazy. I mean, the reason this caught my attention, of course, is because this is everywhere, on all of my timelines across all social media. And then also I saw this tweet. So imagine having a bearer asset, being your own bank, having a cryptocurrency in a house that you are out of and your loved ones are out of, fortunately, but you didn't get your private keys. This is a tweet from Monty. My 70-year-old aunt lost her apartment in the LA fires. Most of her savings was in crypto, and she lost her wallet. and C phrase, doesn't have any backups.

Yes, bad setup, I know, but it is what it is. I feel sick. This is all she had. It brings up the question of like, you're going bankless and having your private keys without a backup. If you're like not doing this well, maybe fire damage or house destruction is like a threat vector for you that you've not considered. And I think this is almost like a PSA for the community.

Obviously, your hearts go out to everybody who's been affected by this. And also, if you're not affected, by this, think about backups. Think about not having these bearer instruments inside of your house because your house is not necessarily a permanent structure. Yeah. As a general rule of thumb, living

with your private keys is not advisable. Find a place that is not where you live to keep at least one copy of your private keys. Yeah, there are tools like this is what I do. This is ZeroX not going to make it. What I do is split my

seed with a Shamir secret. sharing and then store the shards at multiple locations. You can do something like that. You can have safety deposit boxes at the bank accounts. It's another mechanism. NOSIS Multisig is fantastic for this. It's really good. There's software solutions for this.

Yeah, software solutions, you know, like smart account wallet. So you are not even just like the sole signer in the account. You can have your lawyer or loved ones or somebody else or something like that. Anyway, cussing your crypto asset requires a higher level of due diligence and fires like these. I think you'll like teach us exactly why. But David, we got a lot to cover on the second week of January, bankless weekly roll-up. We got prices that are down.

Some people are getting a little panicky. And the question is, it's 2025. Is the bull market over? Was that it? We're down on the 30-day, okay, with Bitcoin. And some people are saying we already topped. But if we haven't topped, how much longer do we actually have? So I want to talk to you about that.

There's also more evidence for choke point 2.0, as if we needed anymore. But I feel like this is the evidence to end all evidence. There has been some unredacted documents that we are now able to show the world that we were not crazy. We are not conspiracy theorists. Chokepoint 2.0 was very real. So we'll talk about that. And also, the AI agent meta continues to reach new dominance in crypto investors' attention, mindchair. We will quickly catch you up with some of the announcements coming out in the last like 10 days or so.

Also, is Meta-turning pro-free speech? What is it planned to do? There's a clip we've got from Mark Zuckerberg on this. It feels like the winds are changing. And the U.S. government has just greenlit a $6.5 billion Bitcoin sale. What happened to our strategic reserve, David? I thought we were going to buy Bitcoin.

The last 11 days of the Biden administration, and he gones out dumping $6.5 billion on us. Of course he does. It's not quite dumped yet, but we'll talk about all that and more, of course. David, before we get in, we got a message from our friends over at the Rodman Law Group. So what do they want us to know?

Yeah, they want you to know that they are the best damn lawyers in crypto. And I think we can vouch for them at Bankless because they are also our lawyers. They have been immensely helpful to just help us navigate anything that we run into here, bankless in the crypto space. And there's a lot of just like weird things that happen in the crypto space. And in addition to, you know, having control of your own funds and doing all the other things that we like to do in crypto, you should also probably have your own lawyer too. If you are a founder in this space, if you are a company in this space, if you are

have any meaningful amount of activity in this space. Having a lawyer is pretty useful. Whether or like whether it's like a lawyer for your startup or just like even things like what I'm doing with them, like estate planning, there's a bunch of reasons why you might need a lawyer. And we suggest the Rodman Law Group. You can get a free consultation from Rodman Law at banklist.clyc slash Rodman Law. It's not just bankless, by the way. Parsle, Ion Protocol, Portal Ventures, collab currency, all sorts of crypto-native organizations, use Robben & Law Group, and we think you should too. Go check them out. Well, David, how about we check on the markets for the week? King Bitcoin, where are we at? Not super happy prices, down 4.3% on the week to where we are at the

time of recording, 92,500. On the lower end of the 90,000 range, we started the week at 97,000. we broke through $100,000 a couple times this week, but we are now threatening, I would say, to go down into the $80,000 range. That's a good word for it. I do feel threatened by this. I'm not, I don't want to go back into the 80s. How about you?

80s, that's poverty. Yeah, we're not going to poverty town, okay? And Michael Strategy wants to make sure we won't get there. Of course, he has acquired another 1,000 Bitcoin on the week, 101 million on the week. This puts him at a total holding of, I believe, 2.1% of all Bitcoin supplies. So Michael Saylor is buying, as he always does. I feel like we don't even need to mention that he's buying the week.

It's just like if it's a week in a calendar year, just assume Michael Saylor is buying some Bitcoin, okay? One thing that is new this week, though, is the U.S. government, a court just greenlit the sale of 6.5 billion in Silk Road Bitcoin that the U.S. government had in custody. Bitcoins. Oh, and Bitcoin gold and Bitcoin SV and Bitcoin Cash. Can't forget about those. Oh, well, I think a lot of people have forgotten about those. I'm pretty sure you can forget about them, but I guess the U.S. government has those, too. We don't care if they sell those, though.

Honestly, please dump those. Yeah, but why you've been waiting so long, idiots? Anyway, this is, you know, we've talked about this before. Of course, there's been talk of the U.S. government amassing a strategic Bitcoin reserve, right? We even had Senator Synthony Lummis on here who told us basically, oh, step one of that is you just keep the Bitcoin you have. We are currently looking at the Bitcoin Reserve. It's not the official Bitcoin Reserve, but this is it. This is it.

Even in the bill, her plan was like, oh, all that Bitcoin that the U.S. government is confiscated, we'll start with that. That will be the new Bitcoin Reserve. We just won't sell that. And if people are tracking at home, basically, the U.S. government had, I want to say, 187,000 something like this. Okay, 183,000 Bitcoin is what the U.S. government had. This would be the selling of 69,000, almost 70,000. And that would be about $6.5 billion. So we're going to the wrong direction, David.

We're going to the wrong direction. Yeah, the cool thing about the Bitcoin Reserve is that we were going to be able to start Genesis of the Bitcoin Reserve with a ton of Bitcoin. And now we're just cutting that into third. Again, like, just really kicking us on the way, the Biden administration, doing whatever they can to really dump us on the way out. You say Biden administration, but I don't know that it's, we don't know that it's Biden administration. Yeah, it's just regular, like, proceed as normal.

But, I mean, I feel like if Trump was in office, he would probably just like, he would put a stop on this. He would just make some phone calls. Don't do this, yeah. Yeah, I don't know what the authority is, because this is actual court. It's not like the executive branch coming and saying it. But like, why now? I'm not sure.

The U.S. government got final approval in the Northern District Court of California to liquidate crypto's largest ever federal seizure. So this is part of that big Silk Road seizure. And here's the actual notice, court notice. So one thing I should mention, though, and this is important. So even though the judge authorized this, it doesn't mean they're about to sell it, doesn't mean we're about to see a massive dump because the ruling alone doesn't guarantee immediate liquidation. We still have some time.

And there's some question is if Donald Trump comes in, is there some way for him to like pause this, put a hold on it, even reverse? We don't know. We will know because everyone's tracking the U.S. federal government like addresses in crypto. And we saw earlier in December, we saw on December 3rd, the U.S. government moved nearly $2 billion in Silk Road Bitcoin to Coinbase. If it's going to Coinbase, I don't think that's a good sign. It's getting.

For context, remember when everyone was getting all like a tizzy about Germany selling their bitcoins? Yeah. Germany sold about 50,000 Bitcoins. They made about $2.9. billion dollars in revenue. And that was all of their bitcoins. And we are just selling like a third-ish of hours, 69,000 bitcoins.

At least we're getting a much better deal than Germany got. I know. But this is still the wrong direction. And I don't like that selling pressure on the price of Bitcoin. We're trying to keep stay in the 90s. Wouldn't we just say that? We want to be in the 90s. Yeah, $6.5 billion is still a lot.

Even for Michael Saylor, that would take them like a good number of quarters to actually. make that up for us. All right. Well, let's see. It hasn't been sold yet, but we'll be monitoring this, of course. Tell us about Eith on the week, David. Any good news there? No. No. No? I don't know even know why you're asked. Down 6% sort of the week, 3,450. Currently at 3,250. Again, threatening to go down into the 2,900s. 3,250 is kind of low. I think we are at a 40-day low for both Bitcoin and Ether. We are down. 40 days. We are down on the 30 days. We haven't moved anywhere. The markets haven't moved anywhere in 40 days. We have 40 day not great at price action. That's why we have to talk about like bear market, bull market, what's going to happen next? But before we get there, let's look at some flows. ETF flows. So it's been really positive. Last time we met, you and I talked about ETF flows. It was looking real good for Ethereum. How about this week? Yeah, we had a couple bad days of outflows on the 8th and the 7th.

$160 million of out on the 8th, $90 million of out on the 7th. Also a couple of good inflow days before that. So kind of call it. It's like slightly red on the year. Maybe we're negative like 50 to 100 million on the year. But I mean, we have $2.5 billion in the bank in the ether ETF flows. Bitcoin telling a little bit of a different story. It's interesting that there are just like such different stories here.

The last, yesterday, not a great day for Bitcoin, $600 million out. But on the third and the sixth, each had $900 million in, almost $2 billion in two days. Before that, there was a $240 million out. So it's not a perfectly green streak for Bitcoin, but Bitcoin started the year real strong. Coming in at $36 billion total dollars into the Bitcoin ETFs. All right, global crypto market cap, 3.3. trillion? 3.37 trillion?

Hey, you got it right. Yeah, at least it's the right number this week. So, you know, not terrible. Not an inspiring number. But, you know, I was hoping for four by this time, but we'll get there. Yeah, I guess it feels bad. The 80s feel bad. 80-ish.

That range feels bad for Bitcoin. The 2000s feel really bad for ETH. And anything below $3 trillion does not excite me for the total crypto market cap. That's where I am starting year. And that's going to be true this entire year. That is a, but you buy that. If we go into the two trillions of market cap or the 2000 range or then 80,000 range, I am buying. So there's something.

Are you waiting for the dip or are you buying the dip now? I'm not. I'm never waiting for the dip, but when the dip comes, I will take advantage of it. Okay. I'm never, you know, Mr. Market has its offerings every single day. I'll take what I get when I like it. But so you're still being patient a little bit. I mean, you're not, I'm not being aggressive in this current moment.

Okay, but you're still, well, we'll talk about how bullish you are in a little bit, before we do, let's go to the SPY. Let's talk about stonks, okay? The stock market, how's that do? Cross reference some data. How are the other markets doing? Is it just a lack of activity time in crypto or what's going on in the traditional stock market?

The SPY, which is, you know, has Apple, has Nvidia. It's not at its highs, but it's still pretty damn good. It's like two or three or four percent off of its all-time highs. It peaked in December at 61,000. It's currently at 5,900. so it's basically 200 points off if it's high. The trend looks good. The trend looks really good.

So you can't really look at the trad stock world and be unhappy. So long as stocks continue to like not catch a cold, we are happy in crypto. Nvidia is really leading things too. It's AI stocks. It's absolutely crushing it, right? So Nvidia briefly, I think this is the first time ever, became the most valuable company in the world. It flipped both Microsoft and Apple to acclaim that title briefly.

Now it's back down. So, I mean, that's been a story. All of that growth happened basically last year and then a little bit into this year. Dude, this is so crazy. The market cap of Apple is equal to the market cap of all of crypto. That is nuts. Yeah, that's another way to look at it, right? That's kind of crazy.

Same with Nvidia. Almost same as Nvidia. Yeah. So one Nvidia. This is why a lot of people are still ignoring crypto, right? because it's just like, you know, one stock, I guess. One stock and value. It's one company.

All right, David, take us to the Movers of the Week, sponsored by Uniswap. Thanks, Uniswap for this. What are you looking at on the week? What's up and what's down? We usually go for up on the week, but we're going to start with some downs. Virtuals and A.I-16-Z are both down 28% on the week. Now, that's down 28% on the week. That's pretty rough.

That's 30%. But if you zoom out to the... the month, they are still up very bigly. So we're just seeing a little bit of a retracement in the AI sector in the last seven days or so. Their performance is still very stellar. And then up on the week, there's no weekly winners, but I wanted to highlight this one token called Phi, Faye, Frazier. It is, it's also down on the seven day because, again, AI sector is kind of just down on

the seven day. It is up 1,500 percent in 30 days. It cracked the top 200 of all the. coin market cap coins, after only being at 30 million market cap just two weeks prior, which this is something you only see in a bull market. Going from $30 million market cap to $600 million market cap in two weeks, that is a full bull podcast. Have you played around with Frasia?

Do you know what's going on over here? Not too much. I'm familiar with the Frasia experiments, though, right? And it's basically like a- It's like a manifestation of an AI agent in a female form. It almost reminds me like the lore around this. almost reminds me of that movie, her, you know? It's just like...

The lore does. Yeah. Yeah. But it's... And wasn't there, was there a bounty sort of thing? Like an interaction with, can you convince Frazier to give the money to you? And a bunch of people tried to, like, convince Frazier and, like, prompt it into giving the money. And that was, like, experiment in one, the running multiple experience.

And also, that experiment, at the conclusion of that experiment, peaked Elon Musk's attention. Oh, that's right. He commented on this one thread about... this, and he just said, interesting. Then the token price pumped from like $10 million to $40 million, and that was like in early December. And now it's at $600 million. All right. Well, what do you think? Here's a prediction for this cycle. I think Elon Musk will take some interest in crypto XAI, crypto and AI, maybe an AI agents, to the extent that he will tweet some bullish things about a set of tokens or maybe come on a podcast and talk.

about his bullish sentiments. There will be something that happens between Elon Musk and crypto in the field of this AI agent meta this cycle, like this year. What do you think about that? Understanding Elon Musk's maturity, I think that's probably pretty bullish for Fartcoin. He comments. He likes Dogecoin webs, you know, but he also did a wink, wink to, sorry, Come Rocket last bowl cycle.

Oh, that's right. That's right. Yeah, and so like, what's the most stupid, immature AI agent meme coin that will capture Elon's attention? I think fart coins pretty strongly in the running for that one. Or maybe the bulk case says it hasn't been invented yet. And so we're about to see how stupid it can get. Give us the L2 updates, sponsored by FRAX. Yeah.

What happened in L2 world this week? Well, what's about to happen is that there is about to be a governance vote in the arbitrage from Dow for it to gain another green slice in its layer two beat. like security framework. Yeah. Once this Dow vote goes in, there will be a bold, they will permissionless bold. So that means that there are permissionless fraud proofs effectively. So anyone can submit a fraud proof to claim, claim theft, claim anything.

And this is just a security model for optimistic roll-ups. And so state validation, which is the last, there are two remaining yellow slices on like the security wheel from layer 2B. One is state validation. One is exit window. Exit window is not a tech upgrade. that is a trivial thing to do. State validation is a tech upgrade.

This is the hard one. And once this Dow governance vote goes through, Arbitron will have four green slices and one last remaining yellow slice on the exit window, which again is a trivial like parameter change. So preemptive congratulations for Arbitralm when that goes through.

And really proving the point that layer twos are becoming decentralized. They're becoming secure. They're becoming extremely bankless. And now it's based on optimism's chance to lead the, way. Yeah, Arbitrum's really been pushing the frontier of this too. So they got to stage one first, and this gets them right on the precipice of stage two once this goes through. So once you're at

stage two, you're sort of, at least for your property rights from a seizure perspective, you're basically equivalent. You're basically equivalent to the layer one. Haders said it would never happen. They said that these things would remain centralized, and that's just like not what we've seen, particularly from Arbitrum. And then there's still the issue of these centralized sequence. which is interesting because you can have a centralized sequencer and you can have a full board of green slices and be at a stage two roll up. All of those things are possible. And I think that causes a lot of just like cognitive dissonance in people. And like we have a centralized sequencer, but you're fully permissionless and you're fully decentralized and like decentralized and all the other capacities.

And people can't really talk past each other on that or they haven't learned to. I mean like like a centralized sequencer is not so bad. Right. It's like a centralized. It depends. It just has this word centralized in it, and that triggers people. Because with a layer two, even if you have a centralized sequencer, you have full kind of property rights. Maybe not full censorship resistance in real time when you submit attraction, a transaction on arbitrum.

But from the perspective of can you withdraw your funds if they do something evil and nefarious, can you get a transaction through, then you have all of those things with a stage two layer two. Anyways, moving on into the world of a ZK roll-ups, not optimistic roll-ups. Uma Roy tweeted out, the first OPEC sasing to Mainnet is live. Ryan, I think you're tapped into this one a little bit more. Tell me what's going on over here. Well, you remember that episode we did with Uma, basically the ability to turn all OP stack chains into ZK EVMs, right? And we're like, oh, when's that coming?

She's like, it's kind of ready. Like, you could do it now. Well, this is the first one going to Mainnet. So we actually have a OP super chain compatible ZKEVM on Mainnet right now. This one, Failure Network, is particularly. to AI agents. It's like TEEs for AI agents. It's kind of that narrative. But it's a full layer too, ZK EVM layer too. Very cool to see this technology in place and a lot going on in the ZK world and just like in parallel to all the stuff we talk about every single week.

This is in such stark contrast to when the ZKEVM wars were going on and Polygon and ZKSink were just racing neck and neck to ship their ZK EVM. And in 2022, both of them were racing to announce it by ETCC, and then they both announced it at ETCC 2022. And then a year later, they both announced their ZKEVM main net. Like, they have just been like trying to front run their own development as much as possible to really claim market share. And then, OMA is like, oh, I just made a ZK circuit. It can take it.

It's a push button. You can take any OP stack roll up and turn it into a ZKEVM. Oh, and it's also ready right now. And it actually is ready right now. And she's like, oh, yeah, we can do this. And now it's actually happening. Like, it's a stark contrast to the other ZK EVM teams. It's very cool.

And that's why that episode with her kind of blew my mind because we'd always talk about, oh, optimistic rollups will become ZK EVM rollups or ZK rollups at some point in the future. But I thought this was like typical, you know, roll up Ethereum's like five years from now, 10 years from now, right? No, it's like this year. It's happening now. Anyway, we got a lot more to cover, including David. We got to talk about the bull market.

How long will this thing last in 2025? Or was that it? Have we already topped? I got a note from you. And also, AI agents, will they be the 2025 meta, or should we wait for something else? Google searches at all-time high, all this and more. But before we get there, I want to thank Uniswap, a browser, a mobile wallet, the best place to do Defi. Go check them out.

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I think we started the year, David. This is on everyone's mind. What's 2025 going to look like from a crypto perspective? We get a bullish full year or like will it only last a couple of months? Maybe Q1 is it? Or maybe we've topped already? It sort of feels like that. When you get, you know, Bitcoin down close to the 80K type range and you get like 40 days

of dropage here, it doesn't feel great. I mean, that's not supposed to happen during bull markets. So the question I want to discuss with you and bringing some other opinions here is, what's up with the bull market? Where are we at in 2025? What do you think we'll see? I think this question is kind of inevitable as soon as a bull market does actually stop because crypto bull markets are a game of musical shares.

And so everyone constantly lives in fear that the music has stopped. The thing is like no one can actually, you can't hear the music. You only know that it stopped in hindsight. Yeah. And so everyone is always like, is it over? Is it over? Yeah. people can ask themselves.

Yes, right. It's just like people who have done this before live in PTSD of the bull market stopping because that's when the pain. It's so bad. It's painful. Yeah, it's very painful. So I just want to start this conversation as like there's PTSD like sensitivities around when the bull market ends, which is why as a member of crypto Twitter in the discourse, everyone was going to ask this question.

Is the bull market over? Is the bull market over? We'll probably ask it all throughout 2025. every single week. And back to your comment, it is a sentiment thing. So everyone has to check with everyone else. Well,

what do you think? Well, what do you think? Because if we all believe it's still on, then it's on. And then it's on. And then it's on. And then you let you keep the dice rolling. Yeah.

The first thing I'll say is the bull market just started. So probabilistically speaking, it's probably not over. Okay. It's too soon. It says too soon. All right. So that's David.

David, this is your third cycle. That's a third cyclers take on it. This is also Kane Warwick's take. And he is a third. Cycler as well. He had, he published a blog post this morning entitled, It's Still a Bull Market, Relax. That's his message. And basically, I'll skip all the way to the end, but he kind of sums it up. I think we go much higher from the start of this year, despite the Fudd and despite Mr. Hayes. He's talking about Arthur Hayes, the trader. We'll talk about Arthur Hayes' comments in just a

minute. I do expect we top out in early 2026, but I'm open to the bull market lasting another 18 months. I think Bitcoin. Wow. Wow. That is a long. Bull Market at Kane Warwick. He's a long cycler because there are some people who believe we've already topped, right? There's short cyclers and long cyclers. Then there's short cyclers who are like, ah, just Q1 or just Q1 and Q2. Now, Kane is a bullish long cycler. He thinks that this could go for all of 2025 and I'll continue.

I do expect we top out in early 2026. That's going to be the top. But I'm open to the bull market lasting another 18 months. He thinks it can go even longer. 18 months? Yes. 18 months? Super long cycle.

That is so long. Yeah. And then he makes some price calls while we're at it. I think Bitcoin will eclipse 250K. Ethan will break 10K. Thank God. Lots of other crazier shit will happen. That's Kane Warwick's take.

So it's still a bull market, relax. I don't know about the whole long cycle here, but like this is generally my sentiment as well. I tend to agree with both you and Kane on this. Yeah. Those prices check out to me, 250K over 10K for ether. Those prices check out to me. The 18 months is like.

much longer than I would expect, but the prices don't seem too high. So I guess he's calling for a normally sized lengthened bull market, which is fun and good, and that's great. 18 months is a really long time, bro. I think the simple, easy, like, left curve take is just like map it to last cycles. It's going to end Q3, Q4 of this year. Well, do you, okay, so you're probably a mid-cycler then. You're bullish mid-sikler.

I'm a mid-length cycle. Yeah, I'm like most of this year is. going to be very bullish. All right. So if you want to trade these ups and down, somebody to kind of monitors Arthur Hayes, who's like a trader. Have you kept up with his like series of blog post? I have not. I have not. Well, so last I checked in was December. And he was basically thinking that January would be down. And like he one would sort of be down because everybody, his rationale was something to the fact of everyone's very excited about Trump. So we got that kind of Trump bump. And then after he's in office, they'll realize that the policy doesn't change overnight. And it'll just be

kind of a reckoning, a disappointment with the Trump policy. That was his take in December. But this week, he published another post, and his take was a little bit different. Maybe I call it a pivot. But traders are allowed to pivot, David, so don't worry. They pivot their positions. Anyway, he was kind of juxtaposing. He still thinks that people will be a bit disappointed with Trump actual policy, and that could drag markets down. But he's also seeing liquidity, dollar liquidity being injected in the market, that ramping up in Q1. And he thinks net net, that will offset some of the disappointment from Trump taking office. So he says this, fulfilling my role as chief investment officer has fund Malstrom,

I will encourage the risk takers at the fund to turn the risk dial to D-Gen. D-gen for this quarter is what he's saying. And then he gives some of his D-gen picks. So Q-1 for Arthur Hayes, anyway, is full-on D-Gen, which is a little bit of a change. from December. I love how he just says right after that. We love undervalued dog shit and have purchased, and then, like, he gave out five tickers after that.

Thank you for including these quality token picks and decentralized science. That's just totally going to extend all of our lives and, like, you know, bringing science to the next frontier. The dollar liquidity is a take that I have heard echoed from around the cryptosphere. or Coinbase echoed this, is that like, it doesn't even, Federal Reserve doesn't even matter. Trump's going to start coming in and he's going to buy people's happiness by like printing dollars and sending them all over.

People's happiness. By them sending them all over the place. And so that's going to be good for liquidity. It's going to be good for risk assets. Yeah. I think that's probably true as well. One other, you know, fact pattern here is Q1s are usually really good for crypto. All right.

The average return in Q1 for Bitcoin is 52%. That's taking all of the time. Wow. Yeah, 52%. That's just average. That's, that's a, that's a, that quick math is like 140 to 150,000 dollar Bitcoin. Yeah. I mean, Q1 of last year was pretty good.

Anyway, if a quarter matters, but you know, people start the year. Maybe they get bullish on things. ETH average return is even better. 83%. So there you go. Let's go. Let's go. What's the quick math on that?

That's like a 1500 more dollars to ether. That's like 5,200, 500, 500. Q1s are usually great. Although I do remember, do you remember the Q1 of, of 2028, David. I'll take you back to that cycle. 18, 2018? 2018, excuse me. Yeah, that was terrible.

My net worth hit zero. Yeah, that was really too. It was going great in January and it was going even better in February and then all of a sudden, boom. Yeah. We got slammed and that was the beginning of a pretty bad fair market. I'm sure that won't happen this year. It's cool. I lost all 6,000 of my dollars.

It's fine. Then there's also the perennial question, right? at this point in the cycle is, but are we in a super cycle? But we could be. This time could be different. We could be. We could still be in a super cycle. Yes, it's possible.

It's like the laws of physics do not preclude us being in a super cycle. And this is Victor Bune in taking this take. He says, this is a super cycle. We're still going to have ups and downs. But I don't think we'll see the same kind of multi-year, 70 to 90% drops in before. Oh, my God. What year is it? I have heard this every single cycle.

So if you believe in the super cycle, tactically, this means stop trying to time the market, build via other things, play long-term games, infinite games, protect your reputation, all good advice.

It doesn't mean that we're like going to have a super cycle though, but people are starting to say this. And Victor is somebody who's like, you know, generally pretty super-minded. Victor knows a thing or two. He's definitely got plenty of experience.

We're definitely going to see 70 to 90% drops, not in Bitcoin, hopefully not in ether. And as you go for the, on the market cap is less and less guaranteed, but yeah. Well, Chris Berninski takes the four or five cycle veteran take here. It was basically like, no, there's still going to be cycles because humans don't change. This is a correct answer.

There's always more cycles. Humans love highs and lows. We can't help ourselves. If psychology hasn't changed, of course we're going to be in a cycle. If the market is informed that it is a super cycle, then everyone piles in and goes even higher than what expectations were and then they have to come back, which creates the cycle. Okay. So this is why I want to talk to third cycle.

David, right? So first cycle, David, probably not even aware of cycles? Cycles? No, whatever cycles. I was full. I was buying the top glass thing over and over and over again. Didn't even know that existed, right? Second cycle, David, I remember you were an early believer in Supercycle. You were like, but maybe, like maybe we got NFTs, we got this thing. I don't know if you totally believe that. That was some Kool-Aid. Yeah, I was drinking Kool-Aid. All right, you believe that. But now, third cycle, David. What does third cycle, David? Do you believe in the super cycle? Or do you believe in Chris Berninski's take? No, Chris is right.

Chris is right. Yeah, on the Victor to Chris spectrum, I am like 95% Chris, 5% Victor. I think this is where the veterans really really serve as well. It's because I've seen it all. If I can give the case for a super cycle, this is not, super cycles are fundamentally impossible. But like if I could give the case, it's that AI is extremely real. This is actually not a crypto bull market.

this is an AI bull market that is being expressed inside the crypto industry because we have tokens and we develop very fast and we tinker with things. So we're not even really tapping into the full crypto energy. The Donald Trump administration is going to spray money everywhere and give the crypto industry the best regulatory four years that it's ever had in maybe even eight years. I don't know. Oh, wait, no. He's only got four years left. And all of these things are like lining up very, very well. and we've never seen an external bull market

and an external tech sector bull market also crash with crypto that all crypto previous bull markets have been insured of crypto we've built them ourselves and so we've never seen that so there's a lot of potential catalyst for a very large bull market

but that will never ever make a super cycle well that brings me to the question that I've wanted to ask you kind of the part two here is all right AI agents and AI right this is maybe the case for the super cycle but it's also a case for like what's the meta

and a lot of the predictions we went through last week even, we were talking a lot about AI agents. And you and EJazz are doing sort of a weekly AI roll-up episode that kind of summarizes all the activity on the frontier here. I want to ask you the question because I haven't really like, we haven't had a chance to talk about this in more detail. What do you think about AI agents? Are AI agents really going to be the meta for this cycle? Maybe I'll give like two takes here. First is this take, which is encapsulated in this chart from Masari, which charts in blue, you see the defy boom, right? And this is the 2020 to 2021 defy boom. And you see kind of this in the blue line all the way from like April of

one year to April of, I guess two years later, 2021. And you could see a massive runup from about zero billion, okay? It was like in the hundreds of millions, right? Very low market cap. And then defy absolutely explodes in this cycle to over 60 billion. And overlaid on that chart is an AI index. This is the market cap of kind of this AI agent meta right now. And it's about where Defi was in, I want to say, December of 2020, going into 2021, going into that big cycle. And if it continues the trajectory that Defi did, it would eclipse $60 billion.

So it's at something like $14 billion right now. And we're headed to $60 billion and perhaps beyond. Okay, so that's like the bull side. There's also the bear side of this, which is a take, I think, from Raoul Paul, whom we enjoy. It's a good head on his shoulders, I think. And he says this. This is the bear take on AI agents. Unpopular opinion, but I think the current AI agents theme is mid-curve and took off because nothing else was going on to amuse the chronic gamblers.

And then he says, ducks out of the room. So he says it's basically, you know, not here. It's bots. I actually asked him a bit more about this because I took the other side. It was, no, AI agents, in my opinion, are one of the most interesting things to happen to crypto since the birth of Defi. And he says, he clarified more. AI agents are the most interesting thing in AI, but not in crypto yet, in my opinion, he says. I think this is the take that they're just chatbots.

They're just kind of chatbots connected to a Twitter API, not a big deal. It's another crypto hype thing, and it's kind of gamblers having fun. So we got the bear and the bull take for this AI meta. What do you think? I think there is still a lot of learning and education left to do to really be able to measure what's going on in the AI space because it's not just AI agents. One of the takes going on is AI agents have like captivated like the majority of narrative mind share in crypto. And this agent word is really this cool new thing. And the name, the detractors, the critics are saying, oh, agents are just.

some really fantastic rebrand of bots, but it's actually just like, it's just like deterministic code that's not imaginative and we are just rebranding it as agents, which I also don't think is correct. I do think that people's imaginations are going wild right now and we are imagining a very bullish, very amazing future where a lot of this tech gets built and developed and refined and perfected very quickly and that future is so near around the corner when it's really not. perhaps. This is what bull markets are. This is what bubbles are is like people's imaginations run wild. And this is what happens every single bull market. My imagination ran wild in 2017. We ran wild again in 2021. Everyone's imagination is running wild with the possibilities of AI

agents. And they'll get into like what I mean by that and where I think AI is actually very helpful to crypto, not just in the agent space. But let's just like kind of look at some mind share things. This is a very classic thing to look at. We did this every single bull market of just like Google search trends. AI agent is just parabolic in Google search trends. And AI agent, that is actually a neutral technology. It's not necessarily crypto. But if you go and you click any of the links, the first one is AI agent crypto.

And then it's AI agent stocks. And like the AI agent stocks, well, that's going to be Nvidia, which is at all-time highs. And then really everything else is crypto. And it's really not even Nvidia in the first place. We are like the crypto industry is developing agents. And this is also just a screencap from Cato, which is talking about the mentions of the word agents across things like Twitter, like news, websites, podcasts. And agents is through the roof. And AI agent narrative investing mind shares at 70%.

So all on-chain crypto investors, where are they focused their time? There's memes. There's defy. There's gamefi. There's ETS. There's layer twos. There's real world assets. All those things are great.

They are just getting absolutely. obliterated in mindshare compared to the AI narrative, which is dominating at 70%. So I think a bear-like Raoul would concede that, yes, it's getting the attention. It's getting the attention economy right now. AI agents, that's kind of what he's saying. It's like the gamblers are bored. So they're all focusing. But my question to you is, David, do you think it will do this?

And when I'm referring to this, I'm looking again at what DFI did between 2020 and 2021, which if AI agents do that, it's got another, what, like five, ahead of it, at least maybe more? Do you think it'll do this? What's your over under on that? Because Rawell's saying, I don't think it'll do this. I think it is in process of doing this. And the reason why the first thing that would happen

if it is going to do this is that attention dominant just goes through the roof. And Google search trends goes through the roof. Google search trends are normies. That's retail coming into crypto. And as soon as we can start to make some splashier headlines, I think that's going to start happening towards the end of this quarter and into Q2.

then just more money flows, more development flows. We still have a lot of work to do actually building out these things. But the growth and attention in Mindshare is the first step for that to be real. And I want to emphasize, it's actually not just agents. There was this really interesting post from ZeroX and Jeff that EJazz brought to my attention on the AI rollup. So what you're about to hear bankless listeners is kind of like a little snippet of the AI rollup, which I highly encourage you guys to go listen because it's where I'm getting all of my AI information just straight from EJazz, straight on the podcast.

The title is this is Defi AI, defy, but with AI, is the new defy. And a part of this innovation that's going on is these kind of like, you use chat GPT as like the desktop app, right? And I know you like it like that. There are engines like that where there's a window, kind of like a browser window, and you've got a wallet on one side, on the right side,

but then you are talking to your chat GPT like LLM saying, hey, withdraw 30% of my AVE portfolio. and then, you know, do this with that, send it over to this layer two. Or do take this one action and then take this other action. And the crypto has always had like unfortunate user experience. Even when it has gotten so much better, it's still unfortunate. And I think this is a logical conclusion of the future of crypto UX. And all UX across all tech is just chatting with your AI agent.

And so AI agents, I think, are really going to round out the UX, the sharp corners of crypto from a UX experience. and that's going to bring more people into the future of finance who weren't able to get there before because of the problems of U.S. And the fact that these engines, these like defy engines are able to do this is a parallel developing technology as the agents themselves. So the technology being built under the hood is repurposeable and being developed by AI agents in the first place. And so there's a lot, it's not just agents. It's generally just the AIification of crypto. And the AIification of crypto, I think, is. so incredibly bullish for so many different reasons.

And another one of them, like, we can keep on going, Illuvium partnered with virtuals this last week to populate their game with AI agents. So now we have crypto intersecting with games intersecting with AI. Aluvium's putting all of these things together and just putting AI agents to like kind of populate and enrich their game. And so we're bringing back the word Metaverse, Ryan.

And this time the Metaverse isn't just like empty plots of land with crypto speculators. It's actually filled. like preemptively with AI agents for humans to actually go and like be a part of. And so the AI tech tree is getting unlocked. It's not just agents and it's also agents. And I think that is immense. And we are, the AI agent is really kind of just the tip of the iceberg of what is just kind of a paradigm shift. And when people say paradigm shift, this is a sign of a bull market in the crypto space. Well, that's what I mean. I think you're right. I agree with you on this.

I think that this is, do you remember like yams and defy in like 2020 or 2021? It's like I feel like we're around kind of the yams moment of like food farming moment. We're just like we're just on the precipice. And yeah, a lot of those experiments were stupid and dumb. But like the core D5. We learned a lot. Yeah. And that's where I feel like we're entering.

The one thing you were talking about user experience improving because, you know, you have kind of like a GPT or chat bot that's doing transactions for you. Another way to look at this is like if you are a, an LLM, if you are a bot or an agent, let's say, if you're an AI, like, what is the UX for using crypto versus using traditional finance, right? The UX in traditional finance doesn't exist. Yeah. You don't have it.

From a human perspective, we're always like, oh, it's not ready for my mom or like my grandma. We can't onboard them to crypto. It's still too complicated. Well, this is the absolute reverse for an AI agent, right? Like, for them, they can't walk into a Wells Fargo. Like, that's shitty UX. So the Ux of crypto of programmable money is like already 100x better.

It is their default preference. So the more AI we on board onto the internet, the more crypto adoption we get. And I don't think that you like fundamentally, you know, I think that's a fundamental, again, I'll use the P word now, paradigm shift. Right. So like as OpenAI and as Gemini and all of these like large Microsoft, Googles of the world, LLMs are kind of launching agenic frameworks, the preference. for the money layer of those agenic frameworks is going to be crypto. And I think that is a change, kind of on the defy level caliber of changes. And yeah, I think we're just starting.

It's the thing that I would feel like betting on this cycle. Yeah, yeah. Everyone is very bullish about AI agents, and in my opinion, rightfully so, the fact that the idea of making sovereign AI, like an independent AI actor that doesn't have influence and it can have its own directions, that's very cool. and that's actually a subsector of the general AIification of crypto at large. And that itself is a paradigm shift, paradigm shift, paradigm shift.

Oh, we're topping. I feel us. We're topping now. Operation choke point, emails were released. Where are we making all this up or were they really out to get us, David? Sometimes I felt like, are we too paranoid in this industry? Well, it turns out, no, we're not. We have email evidence that confirms the FDIC was actually out to get us.

Also, more evidence of a political vibe shift. We've got Canada on the verge of maybe electing a pro-crypto prime minister and also Mark Zuckerberg. He's pivoting meta towards free speech. This is a change from him. We'll talk about all that and more. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including frax, crypto's decentralized, central banks, some of the best yield in defy. Go check them out.

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Participate today at m'eath.mantle.xy Z. Ryan, just last week, one of the few remaining leaders, architects of Operation Choke Point 2.0, Bit the Dust. This is a letter from Michael Barr to announcing his resignation as vice chair to the Fed. There's only like two or three Operation Chokepoint 2.0 architects left. This will take effect on the February 28th if a successor is appointed. He will continue to serve as a member of the. Fed's board of governors, but nonetheless, he will be effectively out as chair.

Who and what is Michael Barr famous for? He was generally against the idea of banks holding crypto. He didn't want to allow banks to have crypto on their balance sheet, so he didn't want banks in crypto to really intersect at all. Cynthia Lama, a quote from Cynthia Lama says, Michael Barr has completely failed to fulfill his duties as a vice chair for supervision at every turn, enabling Operation Choke Point 2.0. and illegally increasing his power at the cost of Wyoming's digital asset industry.

I think Cynthia Lemis and also Caitlin Long, who is coming up next year, really had an ax to grind against Barr because Caitlin Long had her Bitcoin bank, her alternative bank from the state of Wyoming. And it was Michael Barr and generally Operation Choke Point 2.0, who said no to specifically the idea of a fully reserved bank, which is kind of nuts. It's pretty safe. Pretty damn safe. Michael Barr was one of the people's who pressured Silvergate to liquidate,

to quote, voluntarily liquidate in March of 2023. And so here's a great meme from Nick Carter, who's created his wanted list. There's only three people left. Michael Barr gets a big, fat, red X right over his face. The remaining villains. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Michael Gibson, and Nellie Lang. Only three remaining members left.

Three of the eight. of the original operation chokepoint folks. So political wins shifting, that's for sure. And if you're curious, if any of this chokepoint stuff was made up or not, was it just a crypto conspiracy theory that we just, you know, apparently. It was just a dream. They're out to get us. They're everywhere.

They're out to get us. No, they actually probably were out to get us. This is Paul Grail, which is chief legal counsel for Coinbase. And he has been subpoenaing the federal government, particularly the FDIC, to try to get emails released, to see what they were really up to behind closed doors in Operation Choke Point and given FOIA requests, given court orders, et cetera, we actually have some of those emails. So he released these emails last week, David. Do you want to read some of this stuff?

Because this is Nick Anthony who put together an actual thread of some of those egregious FDIC emails. And they were writing generally to banks or financial institutions. And the general tone, as you're about to hear, is like discouragement from doing anything in crypto. And this, again, is coming from the people who are your regulators, you know, the big bosses, the people have the ability to throw you in jail, prosecute you. That's where it's coming from from a bank's perspective. So give us a taste here. Yeah, what we're really highlighting here is that the crypto industry along just through

anecdotes of startup founders and what we can glean from some banks really claimed this idea of the choke point 2.0 restriction on banking cryptocurrency. startups. And it was a bunch of anecdotes, a bunch of stories from crypto founders about how this is true without any actual real evidence from statements of, you know, the Fed, Treasury, FinC, to actually really connect that dot. You just get like a vague email, right? You get like a vague email from your bank saying, oh, we can't service you any longer. And you're like, how did that happen? Why did that come about? So the missing link is acquiring communications from like the FDIC from the fed two banks illustrating their choking off of the crypto industry.

We never had any evidence until we get this treasure trove of email, which basically gives us exactly what we want. And so here's the first tweet in this thread. And this thread is just like a list of examples of the powers telling banks that they have to shut off crypto. Here's the first one. Nick Anthony, he tweets out again and again, the FDIC told banks to, quote, pause all crypto asset-related activity.

For example, in this case, a bank wanted to offer customers the option to transact with Bitcoin. Here's the verbiage from the FDIC to the bank. This is written in an email. The proposed product is apparently an avenue for bank customers to engage in crypto asset activity, specifically Bitcoin transactions through a third-party arrangement. As a result, we respectfully ask you that you pause all crypto-related activity. That's the first one. Here are four more, and I'm just going to read. This is words from the FDIC to banks. Approximately 2,800 customers can purchase and sell and store Bitcoin through the bank's online platform. The FDIC has a number of questions. Until that review is completed, the bank should not expand this service to any additional

customers. That's the first one. Second one, as a result, we respectfully ask that you not implement this product while we consider this crypto asset related activity. Here's a third one. Accordingly, until we complete our review, we request that the bank refrain from providing this service to its customers. This service is, of course, a crypto-related activity. Last one, but there's like 20 more. The bank should not proceed with any crypto asset activity until such time that the FCIC has determined the bank's ability to implement the activity in a safe and sound manner. So many different banks, many, many different banks, all receiving the same verbiage in written form from the FCIC saying, please stop all

crypto-related activity, which is the proof, the missing link that we have, the evidence of, yes, there was this effort by the FCIC to choke out crypto and specifically crypto-related activities. So it's all being uncovered now, basically. And this at a time when the Trump administration takes charge, and people like David Sacks, who's been appointed a czar of crypto and AI, are looking into it as well. This is what he tweeted earlier in December from David Sacks.

There are too many stories of people being heard by Operation Chokepoint 2.0 needs to be looked at. I mean, crypto basically, and huge shout out to Nick Carter, basically memed Operation Chokepoint 2.0 into existence because we, you know, speculated that this was happening. And Nick and others like him were gathered, evidence of this, and now it's reached executive branch attention. So I think overall, this is a story

of the wins changing. And the political wins are really changing in general. I feel like, David, do you see this from Mark Zuckerberg? So this is Mark Zuckerberg going full like anti-censorship, almost following Elon's lead. And this is a mark turn for meta. Maybe we should just play the first minute or so of this clip. Hey, everyone. I want to talk about something important today, because it's time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram. I started building social media to give people a voice. I gave a speech at Georgetown five years ago about the importance of protecting free expression, and I still believe this today.

But a lot has happened over the last several years. There's been widespread debate about potential harms from online content. Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political, But there's also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there. Drugs, terrorism, child exploitation. These are things that we take very seriously, and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly. So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content.

But the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes. Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that's millions of people. And we've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cost of. cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech. So we're going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms. That's a really interesting way to end that. It feels very cut from the same cloth as the Doge effort of, hey, let's reduce complex systems. Let's like reduce regulation and allow

a little bit more freedom and proliferation in the free market to kind of take over. So the punchline from that's going on under the hood is they are reducing their effort on their own fact checkers at Facebook and replacing Facebook replacing that effort with a community managed community notes system much like we see, I would say to great

effect, on Twitter. And so Facebook is going the community notes route to uncensor themselves and kind of take a step back from content moderation policies which I think they are kind of alluding to was more of a push. Content moderation was pushed for by the left, by the Democrats.

And now, again, he cited the elections with the changing of the wins. He's saying, like, I'm taking a step back from content moderation and leaning into, like, free expression. What do you think about all this? I think it's very cool. This is definitely a pivot for meta and definitely a pivot for Mark Zuckerberg and kind of going this direction. And it kind of reflects the political vibe shift.

And, of course, you know, Zuck is kind of front-running this. What I'm excited about, because this video continues for, like, five minutes is Mark Zuckerberg actually has some. tangible action that meta is going to take, both in Instagram and Facebook, like right now, right? You mentioned one of them, but, you know, also adjusting content moderation practices. So they're just focusing on things that are illegal and not kind of like other speech violations, relocating the trust and safety teams out of the Silicon Valley bubble and into other locations. Also talking about just simplifying their content policies overall.

The most exciting one was the one you mentioned, which is this Community Notes protocol feature. something that Vitalik Buteran has advocated for a very long time. Do you remember, I think it was like a year ago or so. He talked about, yeah, community notes as a protocol. And the way it basically works is it's kind of, it's a moderating force and it's kind of a truth-checking force. It's a consensus-finding force across the social media platform because it kind of brings polar opposite community. So like the archetypical case is like, you know, somebody from the left, somebody from the right. What is the common thing that they both, agree to about this particular video, right? And so it's kind of that that moderating force and likely the thing, the truth that we all share in common. It's been used to your point to great effect on X. And to see that extended into meta in Facebook is great. I think it's a big plus. And then of course, Elon Musk tweeted out, this is cool to this content, agreeing with, with meta's decision to align with the times, I would say. Interestingly,

also meta has donated a million dollars to the Trump fund. What is this inaugural fund? You know what the inaugural fund is? What is that? No, I don't know specifically what that is, but it's definitely like, here's a million dollars kind of kiss the ring. Yeah, it's definitely, Chris the ring. You know. Yeah. Also, Circle. Circle also kissing the ring with a $1 million donation to the inauguration inaugural fund. I don't know what that does. Anyways, I think what's interesting about this political vibe shift, we're seeing it everywhere, is it's also international. So one other thing that happened this week is the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, actually resigned. And do you remember we did that episode all about the Canadian trucker,

like bank freezing and all that fiasco? That fiasco was on Trudeau. That fiasco was downstream of, and many other things, downstream of that fiasco was just a Canadian kind of rejection and disapproval of Trudeau's leadership. And so you can kind of see Canada as a little bit of a microcosm of what's going on in America. Would you say that's accurate, Mr. Canadian? Yeah, definitely. I mean, resident Canadian on the podcast. Definitely.

Now, by the way, I'm speaking on behalf of my Canadian family, too. It's like they were very disturbed with, you know, Trump's, yeah, Canada's just going to be the 51st state of the U.S. They're very disturbed by that kind of language. But I do think there's a political shift going on in Canada and Prime Minister Trudeau's out. The guy who's actually set to replace him, and elections haven't been called yet, but they probably will sometime in the first half of this year.

is Pierre Poliev. And Pierre is actually a, he once promised to make Canada a crypto capital, the crypto capital. So similar statements as Trump. So this is in March 2022. He purchased a chicken sandwich with Bitcoin and promised to enable Canada

to become the blockchain and crypto capital of the world. Sounds very Trumpian, if you ask me. And this is the person who's slated to be the next prime minister of Canada. So it's happening in other locations. it's not just an international thing. Speaking of not being international, Doquan. Doquan is no longer international, if you're coming from the perspective of the United States.

Doquan has arrived in the United States and pleaded not guilty. His pleaded not guilty. He appeared before a U.S. magistrate judge in the Southern District of New York and Manhattan on January 2nd, pleaded not guilty to the charge in the first legal hearing. He agreed to be held without bail. The U.S. prosecutors have estimated that. that the collapse of Terraphone Labs may have affected over 1 million victims worldwide, and the government will set up a website about the public proceedings in Doquan's incoming case.

So what are the charges that Doquan is facing? Nine counts of various charges, securities fraud, wire fraud, money laundering charges, and commodities fraud. Basically the same criminal charges in the same jurisdiction as SBF and Alex Mishinsky. What do you think about this? Like, in general. Now, the dust is set a little bit. By the way, I saw a Twitter thread, somebody making the case that Doquan did nothing wrong, basically.

He just kind of, you set up a bad mechanism and it sort of didn't work out. And then also was a huge asshole about it. Yeah. Yeah. But it was making the case that the mechanism itself was attacked by somebody who made tremendous amount of profit to destabilize it and take it down. Anyway, it wasn't Doquan's fault. Yeah, but Doe Kwan had that same.

mechanism fail in a smaller earlier project that he did not disclose that he was the CEO of. Sure, but there's like levels of irresponsibility, right? So we have like the bad boys of 2022. Like, we know all their names, Alex Machinsky, SBF. SBF actually like took customers deposits and went YOLO the market on them. As guilty as it goes. Alex Machinsky did that. Also as guilty as it goes. Yeah, okay. But I don't know. There's, I see that there's room for Doquan to be less guilty. than those two extremely guilty people. Maybe. I could see him, yes, I could see him being less guilty than them.

You remember steady lads? I remember steady lads. There's some of that where Deploying more capital. He's deploying more capital, steady lads, you know, so how much of that was kind of nefarious and intent. It was certainly irresponsible. Anyway, all this to say, I'm sounding like a doquant apologist. I'm really not, okay?

I'm really not. But I want to see what evidence comes out in the court system. Yes. Yeah, there is actually pretty big. story behind the scenes that we don't know. Yeah, I want to see the emails. Show me some emails. I want to see what Doquan knew and did ahead of the collapse of Terra.

Yeah, this will be interesting. So another court case for us in 2025, shaping up, David. Yeah, stay tuned. All right, that's been the weekly roll-up for the second week of January. Thank you guys for staying tuned with us as we go into 2025. Into Bankless's fifth year, which is nuts. If you guys have been with us or even if you're brand new to crypto, just give us a like and subscribe if you please wherever you're listening to this whether it's on youtube or on spotify or on

apple we recommend actually watching on youtube especially if you're a bankless premium subscriber and you're getting everything yeah i would say so i mean i like spotify oh did i i'm sorry i meant spotify youtube's also great youtube is also great but spotify video is fantastic but wherever wherever you're listening to bankless if you could just pull out your phone or click that like and subscribe button and give us that five-star review so we can get up the rank so we can espouse our bags, our collective bags to a wider population. It's do it for your bags. Do it for your bags. Wow, that's very greedy. See, I'll give them more virtuous take, which is do it to help the world go bankless. And it can be both of those things. Okay. We do both.

We can do both. Anyways, coming in at the meme of the week, Ryan, this is a little bit less of a meme, but this is an AI agent that EJazz was showing me on the AI roll-up. And this particular AI agent is just a savage one. He's, that's what he's, he's not, known for he just dunks on you. He's just mean to you in Twitter. Yeah, which I mean, I don't really like on Twitter, but when it comes from an agent, it's funny when it's an agent. It's funny when it's an agent, yeah. And so I followed the agent a while. We were in the middle of recording the AI roll up with E-Jazz. And then the agent tweeted at me and says, so, trustless state, that's my Twitter handle, trustless state, just hit that follow button. Can't wait for the next

1,000 DMs about Ethereum's North Star. Bro, save it for your next three-hour podcast. Nobody asked for it. I thought that was pretty good. I thought that was pretty good. You might maybe have an insult kink here. That's really painful. So what's interesting, though, is this AI bot agent? I don't know.

This AI agent is like aware enough of the crypto context to know exactly who you are, what you do, and to come up with just like a fantastic slam. And that I make three-hour podcast that nobody asks for. Come on. That's innovation. This whole market's at least worth $100 billion. At least a billion dollar agent. Anyway, guys, you know the drill.

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.