Bankless - ROLLUP: Circle IPO Hits $20B | Stablecoin Summer Is On | Trump Wallet Chaos | EF Deploys Special For

Episode Date: June 6, 2025

This week, Ryan and David unpack Circle’s explosive $20B IPO—crypto’s second biggest—and what it signals about Wall Street’s newfound love for stablecoins. They break down the confusing Trump wallet drama, where even Trump’s own sons deny involvement, and explore why Pump.fun’s rumored $4B token raise has the industry split. Ethereum enters “wartime mode” as the Foundation lays off staff and spins up a lean new R&D force called Protocol. Plus, Ray Dalio says “a bit of Bitcoin,” Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill adds $2.4T to the deficit, and SBF is headed to Netflix. ------ 📣BANKLESS & FRAX MEETUP | PERMISSIONLESS 2O25 https://lu.ma/uf9mmcoa ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🌐SELF | PROVE YOUR SELF https://bankless.cc/Self 🟠BINANCE | THE WORLDS #1 CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/binance ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 0:41 Circle IPO https://x.com/circle/status/1930624298760143333 https://www.theblock.co/post/356602/circle-seeks-7-2-billion-valuation-in-upsized-ipo https://x.com/ruiixyz/status/1930386144216396176 https://x.com/EconomyApp/status/1930657679418241238 https://x.com/jerallaire/status/1930595978215637360 https://x.com/EffortCapital/status/1930621939279679542 9:34 Markets 12:23 Trump BBB https://x.com/alifarhat79/status/1930265604105150647 https://x.com/alifarhat79/status/1930256218108383338 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1930452348234805665 https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/1930659468536144062 https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1/text https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1929954109689606359 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1929993372586152364 23:53 Pump.fun is getting ready for a token https://blockworks.co/news/pumpdotfun-token-sale https://x.com/nextfckingthing/status/1929871539018576257 https://dune.com/tiagocryptonary/pump-fun-analytics https://x.com/lmrankhan/status/1928163796691845133 https://x.com/VannaCharmer/status/1930318687333986639 32:00 Ethereum Foundation announced another big change! https://x.com/TimBeiko/status/1929620145984753843 https://x.com/econoar/status/1930361688047661495 https://blog.ethereum.org/2025/06/04/ef-treasury-policy https://x.com/centauridoteth/status/1929896351447372191 https://x.com/ViktorBunin/status/1929945974316662804 44:43 Strategy found a new way how to raise more money for Bitcoin https://x.com/saylor/status/1929635975367475403 https://x.com/DylanLeClair_/status/1929661889963086170 49:01 Trump team launched a crypto wallet - or did they? https://x.com/BitcoinMagazine/status/1929943367892283828 https://x.com/EricTrump/status/1929966635445576103 https://x.com/0xLeoInRio/status/1929955682037731340 https://x.com/molly0xFFF/status/1930351820288741708 https://x.com/Ronxyz00/status/1929884476328276036 https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1930015280094429381 57:50 SBF is heading to Netflix! https://x.com/netflix/status/1928153876475097117 1:00:26 Bankless is looking for talent! https://x.com/i/jobs/1929890683927638133 https://x.com/i/jobs/1929889475783520481 1:01:38 Closing & Disclaimer 1:02:01 Moment of Zen https://x.com/l3olanza/status/1930320045139173881 ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

There it is. Huge congratulations to Circle for being crypto's second biggest IPO. Coinbase is the first. They didn't technically have an IPO, but details. So we have our second big United States company going public. And trading, Ryan. First, Circle shares were sold in the IPO at $31. $31 the day before.

Do you know what Circle is trading at right now about one hour into trading? Okay. I saw something about this, but it's significantly up, right? So, I don't know, has it doubled? It has more than doubled. I'm looking at it right now. It's trading at $88.50. It also hit a peak high of $103, which is just crazy.

So almost a tripling out of the gate, a tripling out of the gate of the evaluation of Circle. I can't load this chart. It's like it's breaking the charts, David. That's right. It's from the charge token. Just type in CRCL. That's the ticker of the Circle Internet Group, Inc. Apparently that's a company name.

trading on the NASDAQ. Wow. Just green line straight up. Big green line. Yeah, well, you're going for a weekly candle. And let me tell you, it hasn't been trading for a week. I'll do the, how do I do? Shorter time rate.

Click the W and go under one minute. There you go. 20 billion dollars is the valuation that Circle is trading at. That's crazy. People were initially pricing it at around six, six or seven billion dollars, currently trading. I mean, we're just, we're one and a half hours into trading. So, you know, who knows.

But it's coming in it. $20 billion. They got to feel smart for like rejecting the ripple offer, rejecting any coin base offers, and the $6 to $9 billion range just going with his IPO. It's like I'm a lot more shareholder value here. Yeah. Well, so far, this, they still have like lockups and all that kind of stuff. So things still need to play out.

But yeah, they're coming in at a juicy, juicy valuation, which, I mean, this sets the tone. This sets the tone out. A lot of people are saying, oh, this is now going to be the starting gun for a variety of further crypto IPOs. I think people are looking at Crackin. There are other companies that people are looking at. Everyone's talking about bank lists going public at a multibillion dollar valuation. You know what they are probably talking about after our episode last week.

They're probably using the word stable coin summer to describe this price action. I told you it was going to be stable coin summer. And you said, how can people make money on stable coins? The answer was right in front of us this entire time. They just had to buy stocks. Yeah, I'm seeing people's screenshots of their IPO purchase requests in Robin Hood and other venues. And they only got like one third of it filled, one half of it failed. But if you got any amount of circle stock in the IPO buy, you are up like 2x.

So congratulations. Are you surprised that there's this investor appetite for this? Like this is surprising to me. It is a little bit surprising to me. And I'm like of two minds about this. Circle is just the only good, meaningful way of getting stable coin exposure for Tradfi. That is the only valid conduit for stablecoin exposure. But we've been telling them they could buy ETH.

ETH is a stablecoin platform? Most stable coins are on EF, yeah, that's right. Heath is not available on the NASDAQ though, and apparently that matters. And so, yeah, if you are bullish stable coins and you would like to have exposure to stable coins, you know, Circle is now trading on the NASDAQ, on, excuse me, on the NYSE. And so that's a way to do that. And so maybe you can read into this $20 billion valuation, this 3x higher valuation than what people predicted, because Wall Street is just super bullish stable coins, which we know they are. And that's what's happening.

The other half of the story is like the story of Circle Economics, which I don't know if that totally is defensible at a $20 billion valuation because their income, their profit was like $130 something million. over the last year. So how is $130 million of income justifying a $20 billion valuation? And they still have that Coinbase deal where they split like almost half of the revenue or something or third revenue with Coinbase. Yeah. And so I don't know if the market's disconnected from morality. Maybe Circle has plans to clean this up and make the better economics. But I mean, I know when you compare this to Tether, which I would love to see Tether go public, but that's never going to happen.

Can you imagine? Jesus. I mean, for crypto natives, we. We've always looked at sort of the income statement of Circle versus something like Tether. And as you said, I mean, Circle, it's got all of these additional costs here and it has to do this revenue share. It amounts to a net income of 156 million, even though they have how many, you know, billions in stable coins out there. 60 billion. Not only is Tether like double that size in terms of the amount, triple, in terms of the amount of stable coins issued.

It's also, I don't know, like five, six billion a year in terms of profit. is just like a cash cow incredible. Really, the number of employees it has, it's like one of the most profitable companies in existence these days. And of course, it'll never go public in the U.S. markets. But you can imagine if it did. Yeah.

But nonetheless, this is just a monumental event for the crypto industry. Like I said, it's the second big United States company to go public. The first IPO, Coinbase floated chairs, which is like a different mechanism, they actually did, they circled actually did an I.

IPEO. Jeremy Alleyer tweeted out, I'm incredibly proud and thrilled to share that Circle is now a public company listed on the NYSE under CRCL. 12 years ago, we set out to build a company that could help remake the global economic system by reimagining and rebuilding it from the ground up natively on the internet. So you also just have to sit back and reflect that this is just yet another huge milestone for the crypto industry. So congratulations to Jeremy Aller and all of the Circle team. Yeah. And I wonder if this will trade like based on the genius bill and that going through Congress. if that will be reflected in the market price and this is a good way to educate Wall Street on that. What's this take that you included here? Yeah, this is from David at Blockworks, Blockworks Research, I think. Blockworks Advisory. Yeah, he says,

with Circle going public today, one thing that the entire world is underway on is Coinbase's venture portfolio, specifically because he's calling out that there's a bunch of coin-based investments that would not ever go liquid with a token, but instead will go liquid on the NASDAQ or the NYSE. And so he thinks that this is also a starting bell for like a valuation of a lot of Coinbase's venture portfolio and generally venture capital.

More companies, more crypto companies going public on public markets who is always going to be good for VC. And he says that I wouldn't be surprised if Coinbase Ventures non-token portfolio is valued at $10 billion in two to three years now that the market is likely valuing it at zero today. I think the stock market, the traditional market does not understand. the value of Coinbase ventures as a part of Coinbase equity. Well, I knew you follow Coinbase stock on a daily basis. Yeah. So, hey, was this up on the Circle IPO down? Kind of not really.

I mean, we're also dumping right now. I just got the notification that Bitcoin is below $103,000. That's unacceptable. So goodbye, James Wynn. You're out of here for the fourth time. Coin is down. It was up. I don't know if it's trading at any sort of relevancy to circle right now.

We got a lot more to talk about on the weekly roll up today, guys. Tariffs are back. Also, a tax bill deficits are causing some tension in this Elon and Trump relationship. Okay? I don't know if that chapter is coming to a close. We'll talk about that. And also, how Ray Dalio thinks you should position your portfolio as a result of these tax deficits. We'll talk about that.

Ryan's going to bring you the very sophisticated macro takes. I, in contrast, have some macro memes for you. For all of you all, if you guys prefer that. You guys prefer that. You guys talk about the meme. We're going to talk about the memes. We're going to talk about the memes. I got some memes to show you.

Pump Fund wants to raise a billion dollars at a four billion dollar valuation. But the real news here is that a token is confirmed. And I think an airdrop also confirmed. Gotta be. You can't have a token without an air drop in these times. Yeah. At least what Pump Fund needs to have an air drop. And then also the Ethereum Foundation rolls out a new Special Forces team called Protocol

along with some strategic restructuring. and also new information about their treasury policies. So we are now getting treasury policies from the EF, which is appreciated. Yeah, and we've got to talk about this too. Trump. Did the Trump team launch a crypto wallet that Trump knows absolutely nothing about? This was the weirdest story of the week. Which part of the Trump teams in the Trump universe is launching what product?

We don't really know anymore. We got to figure this out. We'll get to the bottom of it on this roll up. David, there's a meetup coming up that you wanted the Bankless Nation to hear about. This is beers with bank lists and frax. When is this happening and where? Yeah, so if anyone is coming to permissionless, any bankless listener that is coming to permissionless, we're doing a meet up with phrax.

That is in Brooklyn. I like how you said that. Farax? Yeah. It's only emphasis on the FR. That's good. Yeah. Yeah.

This is happening at Telea beer company, great beer company. So we just rented out the place. We're going to have free beers for all you listeners out there who want to come and get free beers. And so there is a link in the show notes to register for the event. vent if you are a bankless citizen or a fracas union member, you get priority access. And I will see you all at permissionless. Awesome. Tell me about markets, David. What's Bitcoin on the week? You said dumpage earlier. And I'm kind of scared to look at this chart, but I'm going to.

I think I'm going to go actually update my numbers. Looking at Bitcoin right now, $103,000, $150, down 3.2% on the week. Ether. Ryan. What? Ryan, what did you do last week? What? I believe you called for $3,000. dollar ether last week. Yep. We are looking at 2,567. Just a little bit outside. We are down 3.4% on the week.

This is just, I got cocky, all right? You were glowing me up. You were telling me about five week streak. Every week I've been back, ETH has been up. You're supposed to be the cool-headed one. I was super cool-headed, and then I just got overly excited. And in the moment, I blurted out 3K. I wasn't planning to do that.

It just came out. and now look at us. You tried to manifest a little too hard. Yeah. You know, I'm going to be much more humble on roll-ups going forward, okay? And I'm not making a price call this week. It's kind of sad to see what, like, what's causing this dumpage, David? I don't know.

I mean, dumpage. We're at $103,000. So is that dumpage? I don't really know. Circles up, though. Like, I mean, are they selling their Bitcoin and ether and they're buying circle stock? Is that literally what's happening here? Everyone is dumping their assets to buy to pump circle up to $20 billion.

dollars. We got a total crypto market cap of 3.35 trillion down like 1% from last week. But also we got a mover of the week. Oh, actually, I wouldn't call this a mover. We have a crypto token launch. We have these all the time. Yeah. We talk about them.

We celebrate them when they're in the trad markets, but we get them all the time. LaGrange, which is a ZK co-processor startup. Coming in at a whopping $1.25 billion dollar valuation, they just launched their token. It's for a ZK co-processer. which is an extremely hard thing to like describe in a sentence. Yeah. Yeah, ZK. Cope processor.

I can barely say it. Like, so explain that one. Like, and I thought infra was dead, right? This is sort of niche. This is deep, deep tech infra. Ethereum infra and it's already $1.2 billion? Yeah. A coprocessor is like, you know how blockchains all redo their own computation and all the

nodes do all their own computation. This is kind of like not that, the opposite of that, where you just have one person do the ZK computation and then you can just show your work around. And I think it's like more generalized rather than like we talk about this for enshrining the layer one as a ZK roll up. And that's how Ethereum world scale. And I think this is like similar to that, but more generalized. Okay. But you know, 20% float. So, you know, 80% still locked. But coming in at a 1.25 billion dollar valuation. So congratulations to Lagrange and Lagrange investors. LaGrange. Negrange, I believe. LaGrange. I don't know. Tell me about these memes though.

Oh yeah. I got I got some memes for you. Okay, so you know the big beautiful bill that's going through Congress? I do know that. And actually, okay, big beautiful bill. It's always in quotes whenever I read it. This is the tax bill that's going in Congress, okay? I thought they were quoting Donald Trump, who's calling it the big beautiful bill. Do you know that's literally the name of the bill, David?

Yeah, it's literally the name of the bill. They're calling it. You knew this. Yes. Yeah. I had no idea. It's literally a congressional bill. It's called One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

That's the name of it. Yeah. And so this is going through Congress. It's kind of like, I guess, Donald Trump, it's Donald Trump's budget. It's like a big, big deal. It's his proposed budget. The bill is a meme in itself, like the title of the bill. It's just like, what are we doing here?

We could unpack like all of the details of the bill, but that's the beautiful thing about memes. Is that actually means just really distill a lot of information here? Okay. So this is the Better Call Saul Mill meme where he's just like presenting a board to people. And the board says, we cut spending by. by increasing spending and it's Donald Trump's face

and then if you go to the next meme if you would and is Donald Trump showing documents to this interviewer this happened I think in the Trump 1.0 yeah confused interviewer he's like I have a plan to cut spending

and then he shows the papers to the interviewer and the paper says we're going to increase spending and the interviewers is super confused and then here's Elon Musk so this is when this becomes drama in the White House

so yeah this is the train running into a school bus meme and the school bus represents money that the Doge has saved the government, and then the train just ramming through that thing. It's Trump's big beautiful bill. So apparently the Trump's BBB is going to add something like $2 trillion of budget deficit. Oh, you have the numbers?

I have the numbers. I did the research for this section. You've got the memes. You've done the research. I've got the memes. But the memes are better. I don't even think I need to explain any details. It's literally what's happening.

But, okay, does this also imply some kind of tension? in the Trump-Elon relationship? The Trump-E-Lon relationship has totally broken up. Okay, should we play this? This is Donald Trump. Elon is out. Bessent is in. I'm going to play this clip.

It's Donald Trump. He said the most beautiful things about me. And he hasn't said bad about me personally, but I'm sure that'll be next. He's talking about Elon. I'm very disappointed in Elon. I've helped Elon a lot. I'm very disappointed.

I'm very disappointed. Yeah. And he did do a lot for Elon. He got into the Tesla. He shilled Tesla. He did that whole. everything's computer meme. Oh, brother. Elon did a lot for Trump too, though.

Okay. And in fact, he was... Did he know? Oh, he did. That's true. That's true. Yeah, he did do a lot. He got an elected. He was taking credit for getting Trump elected, basically. In another tweet that I saw recently this morning, also getting Republicans both the House and the Senate. Yeah, this is true. I did see this tweet from Elon Musk about the big, beautiful bill. He's saying about the bill, I'm sorry, but I just can't stand it anymore. This massive, outrageous, pork-filled congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination.

Shame on those who voted for it. You know you did wrong. You know it. Wow. Wow. Wow. Holy shit. Let's get a little spicy out there.

Wow. Yeah. Anyway, so my big takeaway here is that other than the Elon Trump drama, which is always hilarious, is that even despite Elon Musk, who is an insanely good operator, no one can argue that. He has made massive companies. He has a process engineer. He knows how to do process and organization.

Elon Musk went toe to toe with government bureaucracy, tried to cut spending, tried to lean up the government, and lost big time. Like, did not actually save any money. If Elon Musk cannot get the government to lean up and be more efficient and save money, no one can. And without that, like, all Trump is doing is like, okay, you know what, F it, two trillion dollars more deficit. it. And then meanwhile, I'm also going to issue a Bitcoin ETF with one of my companies. So, Bitcoiners are always right. Bitcoiners are always right. That's another thing we should talk about. That is what he's doing. There's so much he could say about Doge. I mean, of course, Elon Musk was, he was doing the cuts in the executive branch,

right, the existing government operations. And the big cost of the future are really entitlement programs, aren't they? It's like that's, you know, so he wasn't even tackling the things that needed to be cut. This big beautiful bill, you are right, it would add $2.4 trillion to the deficit over 10 years' time. Because this bill has both tax cuts, right, which decreases U.S. revenue, and it also has spending cuts as well. And so if you kind of like add this together, it amounts to a $2.4 trillion deficit. The odds of it, so it passed through the House already like the last week of May, and the odds of it getting past the Senate, they're saying, about 50-50.

There's four Republicans in the Senate who might flip over, not get it approved, but Trump wants it. And he's like, get it on my desk. I want to sign this thing. By the 4th of July, this is the biggest tax cut and spending cut in history. It's a big beautiful bill, right? So, I mean, like, did anyone seriously think any government from either party, Democrats or Republicans, was going to reverse the deficit problem that we have?

Like, was there ever any hope of that? Was anyone ever serious about that? I was hopeful. Yeah, I thought they started off this administration pretty serious about that. And I was optimistic. It's like, okay, we're doing the pain thing, which if we're ever going to get back on track and have like fiscal responsibility, it's going to take pain. And like, that sucks. But I guess we're doing it.

And I can't really complaining because it's a responsible thing. And I was on board with that. And turns out, no. It wasn't. It never was. Yeah, I didn't think it would. Like, I was not as hopeful as you were, David. I was super bearish.

I know that they were talking about it, right? But they wanted to appear like they were doing not actually go through the pain. Did you see Ray Dalio's post about this? So he's coming out with a book. And he explains it this way. So he compares it to a household. And the U.S. right now this year, revenue to the household is $5 trillion. That's what the U.S. makes in tax revenue, okay?

Expenses, the stuff is spending, $7 trillion. So if you take – and plus, the U.S. as a household has a lot of debt. out there, about $30 trillion of debt or six times its revenue. And for actual households in the U.S. So you're a U.S. citizen with a household, you are about 230K in debt. That's your portion of the $30 trillion of U.S. debt. Yes, you are a household. $230,000 of debt? Yes, that's yours. Because I'm a United States citizen? Yes. That's right. Wow. Yeah. And so the annual interest on that debt is about one trillion, of course. And some of the debt comes due, right? Because it's debt, it's got a term. About $9 trillion comes due in the next little bit. Okay. And the hope of the U.S.

government from a fiscal position is hoping that creditors or others will just like relend to them, relend, renew the terms, keep doing it. Which they have so far. So Dalia says, he just sums it up. He's like, this is the current condition. That's it, David. 230K and debt. And, you know, what do you think he says? What do you think his portfolio prescription is for all of this? Knowing Dahlio, the way you know it. Not bonds. Yes. The whatever the, not bonds. He doesn't say Bitcoin. Did he say Bitcoin? Yeah. Okay. So, yes, he did. I mean, he said Bitcoin before, so it's not the first time. Can I give you his quote? I would have ever expected him to go straight to gold. I know, but I've been reading Dallio. He's been talking

about this for years. We've both been talking about it for, like, we've been talking about stuff for, yeah. He's good. Sure. So, uh, This is what he says. I suggest diversifying well in asset classes and countries that have strong income statements. I don't know where you find those. And ballot sheets and not having great internal political and external geopolitical conflicts. Again, I don't know where you find those. Sorry, Dalio.

Underweighting debt assets like bonds. Basically, you know, he said bonds or shit. Sell bonds. And overweight and gold and, wait for it. And a bit of Bitcoin. A bit of Bitcoin. What do you think he means by that? Do you think over or under 1%?

It's a bit, you know? So that's up for you to define. I mean, for some people listening, that might mean 50% plus. Just a little bit of your portfolio. Just a little bit. Are we talking like Michael Saylor or above or below Michael Saylor's level of Bitcoin? Come on, though. This is notable.

I mean, we've been doing this podcast for how long. And now Dallios, we've always been wondering, hey, you're in the gold train. Why are you not on the digital commodity train? There is with Bitcoin. Yeah. I remember in the 20-21 cycle, we talked. about Dahlio a lot because that's when United States did the helicopter money and all that

kind of stuff and we were just Ray Dahlio, say Bitcoin, just say Bitcoin and he was like, gold. And we're like, no. And then we would say, but he actually means crypto assets. He doesn't just mean gold and sure enough we were right. We just had to wait for it. All right, coming up next on the opposite

side of Ray Dahlio and macro, we're going to talk about pump funds getting ready to launch a token. And then Ethereum is in front of Congress this week. So what was said in front of Congress and who was representing. And also the SEC giving clarity on staking, eat staking. What's the downstream of all of that? But first, before we get there, we're going to talk about Uniswap, our sponsor. It's a browser wall. It's a mobile wall. It's the best place to do

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Apps validate your proofs instantly on-chain, like on cello or off-chain. Audited by ZK security, the self-app is live on. iOS and Play Store. Visit self.xyZ and follow self protocol on X. Pumpfund wants to raise $1 billion via a token sale, which would include a public sale. So pump fund doing an ICO for a token at a $4 billion valuation. So they want to raise $1 billion. They want to grow a $1 billion treasury and launch their token at a $4 billion. And this is an ICO, you said?

There are still, we're still looking for more details. I think what's happening is that they are just like talking to VCs, talking to potential investors, trying to find a $1 million of capital. Or is it going to be, is there going to be some sort of a public sale, you think? I'm from what I'm reading, what I've heard and also what is, you know, reported on by blockwords, again, is also talking to what they said, two sources with knowledgeable, knowledge of the matter said that there is looking to be a public sale and an air drop. There's a Twitter account who tweeted out, Pump Fund launching PumpToken. In the next two weeks, airdrop for users confirmed as well.

And then one person says, like, are you larping or give me sources? And then this Twitter person says, nope, source close to the team confirmed seed investors already no. And so if they are looking to raise $1 billion, they're going around to investors in the space and showing like terms and talking about terms. And so that's how this would ultimately get to some news reporting agency like Blockworks. And so loose confirmation of an airdrop, loose confirmation of a $4 billion valuation public sale.

What do you think about $4 billion for Pump Fund? What do you think about that? I was going to ask you the same question, David. And Ashley, okay, let me give you some more comps here first. And then I'll get your answer in mind. But let's compare it to Circle. Okay? They were hitting the bell earlier.

So the app pumped off fund has already generated $700 million in cumulative revenue. Cumulative Revenue. on a very small team. So you've got to imagine the vast bulk of that is actually profit. And we said earlier, what's annualized Circle doing these days? 150. 150 million? All right. Versus, let's call it, you know, 600 million in, you know, annual profit for Pump Fun. Okay. Circle, what did we say? 20 billion? Pump fun, four billion dollars. Which is the better deal, David? Which would you rather buy today? Pump fun or circle? When you put it like that, wow, pump fun.

It was like really cheap. I don't know what the... So the revenue for Pump Fund has come down. They made a lot of their money with like... I think their peak revenue was around the Trump meme coin launch because that's when all meme coins was like went absolutely gangbusters. Looking at more recent timeframes of revenue, Pump Fund has made $6.5 million of revenue over the last 30 days.

And that annualizes out to $78 million if this dune board that we're looking at is accurate. So $78 million of... It's less than circle. Well, say, let's say, they have like $8 million of costs. Very slim team. Maybe it's less. Maybe it's more. Eight million dollars.

They're making $70 million a year. Sure. So durability of the revenue is a question, isn't it? Yeah. For $4 billion valuation at $70 million of revenue annualized, there's a gap there. Well, it depends what you think, right? So like, hmm, what's the moat?

You know what Pump Fund kind of reminds me of, to be honest? I'm not sure, so I am not convinced of the durability of meme coins. It's certainly durable this cycle. And I think they will persist. Don't get me wrong. Meme coins will always be a thing. But you have, I sort of think of Pump Fun is almost like the OpenC of last cycle, right? You had NFTs, OpenC was dominant, looked unstoppable. What happened? Well, NFTs went down. You had other competitors like Blur, launch, do things a little bit differently, you know, suck up some of that liquidity. And also the NFT market collapsed, right? And so the dynamics around meme coins in crypto, you're taking some bets on the future here. And there's so much disruption that could happen in terms of like the market dynamics or new entrance. It's really hard to think about like that versus buying a circle. Not that we're seriously considering these two things, I suppose. But I just have questions about the durability of this lead and the durability of the space.

I think the comparison of Pump Fund to OpenC in 2021 is one that many people are making. And this is a, so we have a bullish tweet and a not bullish tweet. Vanna Charmer Mossie, he was on chopping block recently, great episode. He made that point of just like,

this is more of a flash in the pan. This is more of a one-time meta. I'm not totally convinced. I think there's two ends of the spectrum here. There is 2021 OpenC, which like raised at a $13 billion valuation at the absolute top. And they, I don't think they could even be valued at like half a billion right now. And so there's that end of the spectrum.

The other end of the spectrum is like, this is actually 2013 Coinbase. Actually, meme coins do have incredible durability across time. You know, Dogecoin has been around for a long time. Mem coins were not, you know, created by Pump Fund. Memcoins have been around. Pump Fund has really like captured it. And so it's actually much closer to 2013 Coinbase in which meme coins are here forever. And there are meaningful attempts at dethroning pump fund.

There's believe. There's virtuals. They haven't been successful yet. They've had some success. Yeah. I wouldn't say not success. And so there's actually going to be always a consistent interest in funding pump fund competitors because of the durability of meme coins. And so that's the bullish end of the spectrum.

I'm somewhere in the middle. I think $4 billion is kind of rich. I don't think the $4 billion token is going to make any investor at $4 billion dollar valuation. You're not going to like 10x that. You're not going to get rich off of that? How do you get to $50 billion from that? How do you get to $100 billion on that? So this is the bullish tweet.

It's been about eight months now and I hope you're starting to see the vision for where pump is headed. They're going after platforms like Twitch and TikTok. It's the only matter of time before creators realize they can monetize far more effectively on pump. That's the take year. That's interesting. Placing Pump Fun shoulder to shoulder with Twitch and TikTok, I think is interesting as a content platform where it's actually content first more than token first. I think that's really interesting. The problem though is just like how much do you get from that if you're a creator?

I mean, there is something extractive from your community about meme coins or there certainly can be and oftentimes the incentives lead towards shortcuts, extraction, people feeling burnt. everyone wants to buy the meme coin so that it goes up, right? But when it goes down, it sucks. No one wants to collect the meme coin. And they hate you. And they hate you.

Yeah. If you're a creator, you launch something, it goes up, you're amazing. It goes down. You're hated. You are hated. Get off the internet. They hate you.

Like, it's just very volatile. Ryan, what do you think the aggregate market cap of all pump fun meme coins is? Like if you add the market cap of all them, add them together? Just the pump fun one.

It's not all the crypto in coins. Yeah, exactly. That's right. I would get the ones like five billion, something like this. Yeah, pretty close. 4.5 billion. Four point five billion. Same as the market cap of the platform.

Yeah. That's interesting. I don't know what that tells me. That's interesting. I also don't know what it tells me. I think BNB, somebody was, I posed this question to Twitter, B&B is actually like far worse in the sense that the valuation of BNB is massive. B&B and the finance chain thing.

Binance chain, yeah. The aggregate value of finance chain. you know, people call this a casino. Binance chain is a casino. The value of all aggregate tokens on Binance is like one-tenth the value of BNB itself. But granted, Binance Exchange buys and burns BNB, and so you're actually investing in finance revenues too, so maybe it's not a very good comparison. Real hard to compare Circle and B&B and Pump.

Yeah, let's compare Circle and Pump Fund shoulder to shoulder. Let's throw in a, you know, a bank like J.P. Morgan compare that to you. Well, let's talk about the Ethereum Foundation update this week. So a protocol special forces team. All right. So some people saw this tweet from the Ethereum Foundation announcing protocol. And they were like, what? Like, what is protocol?

Announced protocol. What is protocol? Protocol, I think, is just the name of a very slimmed down research and development team that has been categorized into three swim lanes, three lanes. You know the verge, urge, splurge, all. those are gone. There are now just three. They're still there.

We just don't talk about them. They're still there. But like this is not what we're talking about. It's not more presenting it. Sure. What they are now is first track, scale the layer one, led by Tim Bako and Onscar. Second track, scale blobs led by Alex Stokes and Francesco De Amato. And third track, Improve, UX, led by Barnaby and Josh Rudolph.

And then, Donkrad is the person orchestrating all of these things. So he's kind of like the head of these three independent teams. Each team is only two people. And then Donkrat is the guy at the top. And this is the Ethereum development team. This is the people dictating the next steps of the protocol. Love it. And the EF wrote in the blog post,

the process of shipping protocol is messy, asking us to respond proactively to demands that are hard to articulate and even harder to fulfill. This moment may be Ethereum special at deploying not only our technology, but our values at planetary scale. And this announcement also came with a reduction in staff. And so there were layoffs from the Ethereum Foundation. Tim Baker wrote, as a part of this reorientation, we have also revisited our team structures.

We'll be doubling down on some areas and reducing efforts in others. This resulted in us deciding to part ways with some EFers whose skill sets no longer matched our priorities. So, okay, remember when I'm going to invoke, he who must not be named by the Ethereum community, that person is. There's so many of them. Who are you about to say? There's so many. Call somebody. That's one of them he asked.

When we had him on the show, we were like, okay, Kyle, like, what do you think we need? Like, what does Ethereum need to do? And he goes, yeah, Ethereum needs to go into war mode. Like, there needs to be fires. Didn't he say fire people? It needs to be fire people. Yeah. A wartime CEO needs to come in and he said, like, people need to get fired.

Well, didn't he also say fire italic somewhere else? Or am I misremembering that? Did he? I'd have to go back and rewatch. Anyways, I'm seeing Donkrad being elevated to a, position a very strong leadership, people being fired, laid off, and the organization being restructured to be able to, as Tim said, ship code, ship technology at a planetary scale. It's good.

I think this is good. This is like, you know, to me, this is Tamash coming in. This is absolutely Tamash. Yeah. So is it Tamash. He's bringing organizational, executional firepower a thing that the EF, for all of its great things, and there are many great things about the EF. As a piece it was missing, to be honest, not executing on things, particularly the roadmap,

not having clear timelines, communication, and he's just putting names accountable and leaders accountable for specific deliverables. And these deliverables are exactly where Ethereum needs to go. And the technology is there. If Ethereum could just execute on this roadmap, like, things are going to go very well from here. Yes. And there's still a big if, but I'm starting to see mounting confidence here. Right?

Like this is a good sign to me. Scale L1, scale the blobs, improve UX. These are all the things that, and now we have a team that's executing on it. It's called protocol. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes I do these kind of high-touch episodes that require like multiple guests being stitched together.

And so I'm doing Ryan interviews with each of these teams for like 20, 25 minutes each, going to stitch them together. Hopefully Donkrad gets back to me on Telegram and says, yes, I'm down to be the co-host because I'm going to get Donkrat as the co-host because he's the guy. And so I'm just,

trying to make that episode happen. So bear with me. I think that would be great. That would be a fantastic episode. Not the only news. Yeah. Coming out of the EF. So the EF has also released a new treasury policy. So we're finally getting some clarity about the EF's treasury. Because it has some ETH in its treasury. It has some ETH in its treasury. Yes. The big line, I think, we intend to reduce our annual OPEX roughly, literally over the next five years, ending at a long term 5%. So the EF wants to spend just 5% of its treasury every single year, down from 15% where it is now. In addition to that, the EF will seek to earn acceptable returns on treasury assets. So they're going to invest, make their assets more productive. They both have stable coins and ETH as well. They're going

to invest in a manner consistent with Ethereum's underlying principles. And also quarterly reports will be a thing. So we're going to get quarterly reports. With going back to that investing their eth topic. They want to support nascent defy protocols to help develop privacy features, and they're going to allocate, deposit their ether into defy protocols in order to get a yield, but primarily emphasize what they are calling defy punk protocols. So what's defy punk? I'm so glad you asked. Defy apps that prioritize security, uh, being open source, financial self-sovereignty. I think we would call that banklessness. Uh, tech solutions over trust based solutions. So no multi-sigs, no reliance on legal coercion as recourse, active deployment of cryptographic tools to protect civil liberties,

not sure what that means, and then also privacy. So the EF is trying to make their capital productive by also leveraging what they are calling defy punk, defy apps, which I think we would have always called these defy apps, but the word defy has kind of been diluted that they needed to remake. Yeah, you got to call it. OG, Dvye, yeah. That makes sense, right? Defy punk is just DeFi 1.0. We're just calling everything DFI this these days. Hyperlink, that's D5, sure, right? Yeah, that makes sense. I would say, just a refresher, how much, how much ETH does the EF hold? Like, I'm just recalling this from memory.

If someone were to make me guess, I would say, it's like, it's pretty low compared to other foundations as a percentage of supply, right? Something like 1%. It might even be less than 1%. Now, that amounts to a lot of money because ETH is just so massive in terms of size, but it's not very much as a portion of total ETH supply. Yeah. Yeah.

If this Google search is correct, the, Foundation's total treasury is about $970 million, $790 million in crypto, and $180 million in non-crypto assets. I'm guessing that's dollars. Yeah. So less than a billion dollars. Yeah, less than a billion dollars. They really have to make it last.

I guess, you know, it's good, though, for them to, like, roll out these policies. Quarterly reports is going to be really nice. I have a conspiracy theory for you. I would like to challenge all other Layer 1 foundations to issue quarterly reports about their financials. Maybe they will because I have a little bit of. of a conspiracy theory for you. Yeah.

I think part of the reason the EF is doing more of this, transparency. I mean, there's lots of reasons, cultural change, all of these things. It's all good. They realized they woke up from their slumber, all of these things. Part of it, I think is the SEC is no longer on their throat. Oh, I definitely think that's true. So they can actually add more leadership and more coordination of the space, including things like quarterly reports.

In the past, if they did a quarterly report, you know Gary Gensler would point at that, bring it into a court case and say, He was already snooping around trying to say that ether the asset was a security, that the EF is kind of like a centralized corporation. And if they had a quarterly report of some kind, he would bring that. That would be a miscellar in court. You'd use it against them. I think this is part of the reason we're seeing more leadership.

I think you're absolutely correct. There's also a story of like Vitalik is just not an operator. He's just not an executive. That's true. And so it's a little bit of both. You definitely see Tamash fingerprints on this. But also on this one. Sha'e. This is Shao Wei. So if we're going to tip hats to

Tomash, we also have to tip hats to Shaoey. Amazing. Let's tip a hat to Vitalik here. Actually, this is him commenting on Ethereum Layer 1 scalability. How fast should we see a lot of these changes to the L1 that have been talked about in the last couple of months? Yeah, okay. So my view is like generally, I think we should scale L1 by about 10x over the next year in a bit based on delayed...

Why the in a bit? Why not? Here. Be more ambitious here. No, here would be great. It's great just to see this reprioritization and this like can do attitude of scaling the layer one. Just permeate around the Ethereum culture.

I've been pushing for this for a while now. Like I went back and forth like last year. I was like, yeah, we need to scale the way I want. No, the path that we were on. It took me a while to like get dug into this. Now you have conviction around scaling now on. I've been pushing different parts of the Ethereum community for the last like, I don't know, two, three months.

I was in the Daily Gway Discord, like fighting with them. They were like, no, we can't do this. Like the engineers, you don't know anything, David, that the engineers don't know. And then you see the engineers start saying, yeah, we're going to scale the layer one. I'm like, thank you. It's just an attitude thing. It's just an attitude. We can do things.

We can just do things. There's also, there is also, there are some tradeoffs with scaling too much. But I feel like the Ethereum researchers know they got the get out of jail free card now, which is ZK tech is really catching up. And so that's going to allow massive. scale here. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. There was a conversation in the bankless discord from Centauri, one of our bankless citizens, who said, to get a 10N's X increase in a year, we need to pressure larger operators to change the gas limit on their nodes, which brings us to this tweet from Victor Bunin, who is a

protocol specialist at Coinbase. And he says, hey, so Coinbase is once again one of the first large operators to signal the increasing gas limit. People used to bully us to go faster, but guess it's now is our turn to bully others. So he tags Lido, P to P, Figma, That's good. Chorus and say, yo, guys, it is time to increase the layer one gas to 60 million. Right now is at 36 million. Let's get it up to 60 million gas on the layer one. So there are people from LIDA who are listening.

There are people from P2P who are listening. Pump the gas. Pump the gas. You are requested to pump the gas. Let's do it. All right. We got a lot more coming up. David Saylor, Michael Sailor found a way to raise more money to buy more Bitcoin.

I'm shocked. Yes, he did. Which couch cushion did he look under this time? Yeah, who knows? Did the Trump team launch a lot? crypto wallet. Some say yes. Some say no. Maybe we'll find an answer. How is that up for debate? Also, David, SBF, his story. It's headed to Netflix. We're going to talk about who's playing SBF's role and also Caroline's role, of course, all that and more. But before we do,

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your checking account and defy wallet finally spoke the same language. That's mantle banking. An all-in-one fiat and crypto account. It lets you save, spend, and invest all from one dashboard. Swipe for coffee, stake ME3 yield, or even use virtual cards for payments through Apple Pay. So it feels Web 2 simple, yet stays Web 3 sovereign. For allocators, meet Mantle Index 4, the S&P 500 of crypto. A tokenized institutional grade fund, ceded with $400 million from the Mantle Treasury and balance across Bitcoin Ether, Seoul, and yield-enhancedables. One asset, broad exposure, pure defy composability. The momentum is real. M-Eath faults, FBTc bridges, and a $2.4 billion community treasury are all powering the next phase of on-chain finance. Mantle brings real-world

access, yield, and utility to digital assets. Ready for the next era of on-chain finance that actually belongs in 2025? Explore Mantle at mantle.xy-Z or follow Mantle underscore official. Mantle, bridging tradfi and defy so you don't have to. Tweet from Michael Saylor. Strategy today announced the launch of a stride. That's a ticker symbol STRD, a new perpetual preferred stock offering available to institutional investors. All right, I thought, I thought Michael Saylor already had a stock offering, and that was called Microstrategy, MSTR. Now he's got STRD that he's releasing. What's going on? Explain this. Yeah, it turns out he also has STRF, which has already been trading for a while. So we were trying to understand what's going on

here. So micro strategy, MSTR, is the common stock. And you know how, you know how like Pendle, kind of unwraps tokens and allows you to express different, different ways of having exposure. You're trying to explain complicated equity stuff to me in defy crypto language. Yeah. It's a little bit like that. So if you are maximally bullish Bitcoin and you would like to express that bullishness with MSTR, with micro strategy, you would buy MSCR. You would buy the common stock. Sure. STRF is a 10% like coupon, a Series A perpetual strife preferred equity. So it's, it's this thing that exists in this like no man's land.

between equity and a bond, a corporate bond. But it's preferred. So if common stockholders get wiped out because something real bad happens, the preferred equity owners are able to get paid out first. Yes. Yes, exactly. And so you as a STRF preferred strife, preferred equity owner, you get paid a 10% coupon, 10% like dividend yield, a fixed 10% cumulatively.

That's the benefit. So if the board skips a payment because it doesn't make many, make many money, it piles up and you will get paid that payment that you are owed later. Okay. It's at the top of the equity sack. So like you said, if anything, this gets paid out first. It is the most safe, most

defensible. This new thing that he, that micro strategy is issuing is STRD, which is closer. The third thing, the third asset. So he has micro strategy, he has STRF, now he has STRD, not yet trading. Say 10% series, a perpetual stride

preferred. So is junior it also pays 10%. But if micro strategy cannot make a payment and it misses a payment, you do not get that payment. You do not get that payment later, unlike STRF. And so you are at...

And it's also junior to STRS. It's also junior. And so if micro strategy gets wiped out, you also get wiped out because now you won't be getting any more payments. And so this is like, it's a little bit sussing out

the credit worthiness of micro strategy. So I think if something breaks in micro strategy, this thing will get wiped out first. Like this thing will go to zero first, STRF will go to zero last, and then micro strategy just trades like a company. So the reason he's doing it

is so that he can sell this new stride shares, basically, and raise another, what, $250 million or so to go do what? What's he going to do with $250 million? I don't know. You know, buy a few bitcoins here and there. So, yeah, he's got these two additional

credit vehicles that he can sell more in, and if the market perceives him to be credit worthy, the price of these things will go up and he'll be able to sell more. Okay. So for an investor, did I see Dylan LeClair over here on Twitter call these kind of like junk bonds? The stride is kind of like the junk bond version. Yes. The most recent one that he issued, yes. Yeah. It's kind of like it's junior. You're not getting the guaranteed payments. It's like, I don't know. It seems maybe some investors will want this, but it seems the worst of a couple the world's here, right? Because you're not getting into here in T-Pen. He's such a way. He's issuing a

1,000-year USD Bitcoin swap and buying the Bitcoin up front. The balance sheet itself is extremely de-levered. And so he's using whatever capital, whatever dollars he has to pay loans in order to buy Bitcoin up front so he can get it as from it. He can pull forward the future as much as possible and then sell that future into Bitcoin and then assuming that appreciates. It'll be totally fine so long as you don't get over leveraged and so long as number keeps going up, it'll be totally fine. So long as number goes up. I mean, even if number goes down, he's also still fine, but like he made a bad bet or a worse bet. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. Let's talk about Trump. David. I saw a tweet talking about a new crypto wallet that the Trump team launched. I went to the website. This is kind of what you see on the website. All right.

It's like trumpwallet.com. Guys, I don't know if you should go to this or not. Because I don't even know if it's real. I actually thought it might be a official campaign. It is real. Anyway, the news was this came out of crypto media sources, like Bitcoin magazine, etc, that Trump had launched a crypto wallet where you could buy, sell, trade. The Trump token was featured inside of the crypto wallet.

And it was like the Trump version of a crypto wallet in case you're like, you're done with Uniswap and Metamask wallets. and you just like, you wanted your Trump wallet, you know, because you got to hold your crypto in the Trump wallet. So that was the news. And then something funny happened, which was the sons of Donald Trump, Eric and Donald Jr., started denying that this thing was real. They denied affiliation with this whole thing.

And so the launch of the Trump and wallet got community noted saying the Trump organizations have not distanced themselves from this. Right. And so crypto media started reporting on this. Mainstream media started reporting on this. But funny, though, Magic Eden, the, it was originally it was an NFT platform, right? On Solana. Now they're maybe doing more things.

They started doing Bitcoin Ordinals. They bought Slinghot wallet. Yeah. They said that this was real. In fact, they had helped develop this in partnership with Trump. And when press, guys, hey, they're saying it's not real. The sons of Trump are saying this is not real. Magic Eden said, no, it's real.

We really have a deal with the Trump organization. So I left this story here. They said they are partnering with the Trump. meme coin team. Which is, I mean, the same people as Eric and Donald Jr. In Eric's tweet, he says that World Liberty Financial and that group, which he's a part of, has nothing to do with the Trump wallet. And that's not anything to do with any Trump organization.

Okay, but they do have something to do with the Trump meme coin, right? But apparently it has, yeah, apparently this is a Trump meme. This is not a World Liberty Financial wallet. This is a Trump meme coin wallet. But they imply Trump has nothing to do with it. Yeah, they said the Trump organizations have nothing to do with this. that's not quite true. Somebody in the Trump organization has something to do with it and did indeed roll this out.

Magic Eden, which is a legit company, is doubling down on the fact that this is real. And it would be ridiculous for them to, like, launch a Trump wallet without actually being able to claim that to be true. Here's Donald Trump Jr. saying the Trump organization has zero involvement with the product. Eric and I know nothing about it. They know nothing about it. So what is the URL? Do you know what the URL is? I thought it was Trumpwollet.com.

I'm going to Trumpwollet.com, and it is giving me a site cannot be reached right now. So maybe it's down. Maybe it's down. The wrong URL. Anyways, unrelated, but also related, I saw this tweet from Molly White, which I think kind of explains everything. And it is a kind of like an org chart map of all of the different Trump entities and all of their crypto dealings.

Wow. It kind of looks like spaghetti. Yeah. And there's like an unknown associations and there's known associations. and so you got World Liberty Financial, you got the Trump meme coin, you got the Trump NFTs, you got the Melania NFTs.

You have some people who are part of the Melania NFTs plus World Liberty Financial Organization. You have other people who are part of the memes and then like different part of the Trump meme coin. It's just kind of a mess. And so I kind of am not surprised that somebody in Trump's orbit and influence and part of his companies

goes and pioneers a Trump wallet and a different part of the Trump cryptovverse is like unaware of that happening because I think they're all operating under their own initiative and somebody just decided to make a wallet and their other side of the Trump cryptovirce is like I didn't know about that. That must be it, right? The website and the offering said it was the official Trump wallet and the official like, you know, Trump meme coin wallet endorsed by Donald Trump.

They said this explicitly. This is the president of the United States, right? As like a big media empire, world's most powerful man. You wouldn't want to put that out there if you didn't really have some sort of permission there. If you're going to lie about that, you would launch and then rug a meme coin. You wouldn't launch a project that you would invest in. I thought it was. I thought, okay, this is Lazarus Group or something like this.

And like, this is kind of a, you know, they spun up a website. This is not real. They've hacked Magic Eden's account. It's really hard to unbundle what's going on. It says what's interesting about this spaghetti mess here is I do actually think Trump has some legitimate projects here. I keep hearing that the World Liberty Financial team is like a pretty solid team. They're building a treasury of crypto assets. Like they're doing D5 protocol.

They haven't gotten hacked or exploited or anything. I haven't lost money. That could actually be something. And then you have other areas which is like the Trump meme coin and like whatever that is. And then you have Trump wallet and you have Melania coin, whatever that is. And then there was also, you mentioned it earlier in the episode, Trump Media, which they're the truth. social parent company, I believe, if I'm understanding this correctly, they are rolling out a Bitcoin ETF as well. So they're registering for a Bitcoin ETF, which a Bitcoin ETF product is, you know,

legitimate as well. So what do you make of all this? You know, I'm, you said the World Liberty Financial is legitimate. I'm going to the World Liberty Financial.com place because like, you know, it's supposed to be an app. It's supposed to be like an obvious fork. Yeah. There's just a token sale website. I keep hearing that people telling me that there's like a team, they're kind of like crypto legit. You know, I don't know. I've heard that too. And I was like, okay,

how do I, can I go get yield in this? And turns out you can just buy WLFI. Yeah. Anyways, what do I make of all this? Trump is a franchise. You know, like I feel like there's that there was that guy behind Elvis, like Elvis's promoter who just franchised the F out of

Elvis and sold everything Elvis. branded and made Elvis like a bigillion there. I feel like that's just what's happening and they're just realizing that with crypto, you can do a crypto, you can do a Bitcoin UTIF. You can launch meme coins, you can launch NFTs, you can launch a defy app, just do everything. He's literally doing all the things. Doing a wallet. Yeah, just like make every business possible, put Trump's name on it and sell it.

See what happens. See what happens. And then like, yeah, just like one corner made the wallet before a different corner who also had another idea. Because the other part of this is that Donald Trump Jr. said, like, no, we're making a wallet out of World Liberty Financial. And so, you know, it's competing Trump products. And they're both wallets. And one's coming from the meme coin. One's coming from World Liberty. Yeah, just don't know what's going on. Do you know, so the Clarity Act is, you know, being presented in front of the House these days. And this is the new market structure bill. Right. Yeah. This isn't the new market structure bill. It's the successor to Fit 21. You guys have heard us talk about this, right?

This is defining what's a security and what's a commodity in crypto. We need this bill. And there's congressional hearings going on this week. And it keeps coming up. Maxine Waters, of course, talking about the Trump coin, all of, you know, the Trump's activities in this. It's coming up. And in fact, I don't know if you saw this clip, a CNBC interview clip with Donald Trump Jr. And the interviewer asks him specifically about the meme coin.

This is the clip. To feed into some of the other things, the meme coin. Is that okay for your dad to have a meme coin? I think, listen, of course, when he did that before he was in office, he did these things. The reason we got into crypto, and we're all in on crypto, and we're doing American Bitcoin, and we have World Liberty Finance, and USD-1, was because there was a time, and probably I'd been on this show, where there was a, I could call any single banker in New York City. They'd pick up the phone.

I'd be able to get a loan for whatever real estate project I was doing across the street. Then we got into politics, and all of a sudden, they wouldn't take your call, you couldn't get financing. We were debanked. What I realized and my brother realized, because we were the recipients of every subpoena imaginable, was that, you know what, we were actually just the top of this sort of pyramid scheme that we didn't realize we were a part of, that the financial system was totally undemocratized, because we had a certain balance sheet and whatever we could kind of do whatever we wanted, the regular guy was messed up.

Now we were all of a sudden in the shoes of the regular guy that wouldn't be able to take advantage of the markets. And we said, what's the solution for that? The answer is crypto. End of meme coin. Masterful. Why did you launch a meme coin? Well, let me tell you about this one time we got debanked. He's not wrong about that, though.

We got forced into crypto. Yeah. We needed crypto. And so, never mind. I don't think he said meme coin once in that. Oh, my God. A complete masterpiece. It is funny.

It is funny. David, let's talk about Sam Bankman-Fried, headed to Netflix. What are we getting here, David? Apparently, apparently I get in a one-season series on. on SBF in the fall of FTX, which I am just waiting on the edge of my seat for as a big TV person. It's not a documentary.

This is an actual kind of, I don't know, what you call it. Yeah, I remember like the social network. I think it's something like that where it's like a documentary but with acting and a story. It's a true story of what like happened. Yeah. The altruist is what they're calling with? The altruist.

The altruist. The altruism. That's what they went with. A huge just punch to the face of effective altruism. Yeah. I think that has to have a big overarching story. They're going to name it that. The actors portraying the people, as we know them, Anthony Boyle, but I'm not a movie person.

And then also Julia Garner. And these two individuals, I would say, are pretty. They are beautiful people. And crypto Twitter was not happy about that back. Not avi these choices? They do not resemble the real characters. The contrast between the beauty of these actors. And what we know SBF and Caroline to be was not what people wanted.

Because I think people want to make fun of Sam and Caroline. Yeah, they got hurt pretty bad, didn't they? Yeah, yeah. Look at this one. So here's one, Bella Ramsey, as what others were saying in Jonah Hill. I feel like Jonah Hill as Sam Beckman-Fried is kind of perfect, though. But I love Jonah Hill, is the problem with that. You like him too much?

Yeah. I like him too much. He's too good. Oh, there you go. I mean, it's unfortunate. Like, if you're an upstarting young actor, like, do you really want your first role to be Sam Bankman Fried? I don't know. That could be a fun role to play.

Yeah, I guess. He's such a character. You know what? I hope he goes on a crypto podcast in the series. In the series? Yeah. Do you think the Eric Forre he's Twitter episode will, or last stream will be in there? Which means there could be someone playing you, David.

There could be someone playing me. Oh, no. I'm not, I don't want that. You don't want that. I don't want that. But if you had to pick someone to play you, who would it be? Oh, my doppelganger, which is, what's his face? Toby McGuire.

Oh, Toby McGuire would make a perfect David Hoffman. Yeah, the people have always called me Spider-Man, yeah. Who would I be then? Who is your double-ganger? Joseph Gordon Levitt. That's who I'd want to play me. Yeah, that'd make a good Ryan Charnhammed. He's not as attractive as you, but yeah. Yeah, I can see that. I can see that.

David, we're looking for some talent as we wrap this show up. So we got some jobs. If you're interested in a job, what do we got? We got two very big jobs. These are not entry-level jobs. We are looking for a BD sales lead. So if you are in the BD sales ecosystem of crypto, you know every single company that's in crypto.

You have context. You have a Rolodex. We are looking for you to do sales for bankless, mainly sponsorship sales. And so if you are interested in that, there is a link in the show notes so you can apply. And then we are also looking for a growth manager. So somebody who understands podcasting, understands YouTubeing, clips, distribution, virality. We have a bankless, but also limitless, our second podcast,

which is doing very well, penetrating into AI and Frontier Tech. And we need to step on the gas on that. So if you would like to add fuel on top of a very hot fire, we have a killer podcast AV production team. We have me and Ryan as guests. And we have Joseph Gordon Levitt. And we have access to some of the best guests that are coming on both limitless and bankless. So if you would like to add fuel to that fire, either on sales or on distribution and virality, click the links in the show notes to apply.

Amazing. And because we didn't get a chance to see it, actually, Ethereum was mentioned in Congress today in a congressional hearing. So I feel like we should play that as the moment of Zen. This is Vivek from Ethelize. He's coming on next week, actually. They're dropping some big things. But we'll play that clip after I read this. Of course you know, crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us in the bankless journey. Thanks a lot. BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Fidelity, Deutsche Bank, UBS, and many more are already building on Ethereum because it is the most secure and most decentralized settlement layer in the world. As a result, $140 billion of stable coins, $10 billion of real useful tokenized assets and institutional-grade financial applications live on Ethereum.