Bankless - ROLLUP: Crazy Markets Week | Prediction Markets Bad? | Zora Release | More Gensler Ls | Trump’s DeFi Sons

Starting point is 00:00:03 Bagla Station has been quite the week. Crypto sentiment is pivoting very bearish this week. Price drops, liquidations. You're not bearish, David? I'm not bearish. But this is some pretty dark days it felt like on Sunday and Monday earlier this week. We haven't seen this kind of activity since 2022. What do we got on the weekly roll up today?

Starting point is 00:00:23 We're going to cover what the hell happened in the markets over the weekend. And also what's happened since then? Are we out of the woods or are we just getting started? Is the bull market over? or is there more to be fearful of or what's going on what the hell's going on there's a lot of different takes out there both good indicators and bad indicators we'll talk about them both but then we're also going to talk about prediction markets because we've talked about prediction markets every single week in the week they're all up for a long time now and now it has been too good

Starting point is 00:00:48 in the prediction markets land so some of the bears are coming out to raise their heads including elizabeth warren is one of them and so we'll talk about that as well got some good news on the week not just bad news in markets gonzler's taking some more ls on the week his budget is getting That's the worst hell you can take. Yeah. Also, we got some big releases on Zora to talk about. And Trump's kids, including Donald Trump Jr. and Eric, are discovering their true passion. It's actually for defy.

Starting point is 00:01:14 They call it their true love this week. What is going on with that? Yeah. And discovering a brand new hashtag. Do you see their hashtag that they created? I did not, actually. It was something like defiant? Be, hashtag be defiant.

Starting point is 00:01:29 Be defiant. Be defiant. Be defiant. All right. That's the hashtag that they're creating for DFI. Thanks for the meeting. Thanks, guys. Nailed it.

Starting point is 00:01:38 All right. As we get into the markets, we're first want to talk about our friends and sponsors over at Macha. If you were emergency trading on Sunday night because you needed to backstop your loans, I hope that you went to Masha because they were the ones who were going to give you the most ether or the most collateral of whatever you're buying because that's what they do. They are an optimizer of all the many different routes of liquidity and liquidity pools that could possibly happen on a theory.

Starting point is 00:02:02 And there's billions of permutations. Masha scans and optimizes through all of them to make sure that you get the most profit on your trades, even when times are dire and gases at 700 of which it did spike to. And so Mata combines a user-friendly app with a very serious, powerful on-chain engine to make sure that you get the best price on your trade. There is a link in the show notes. Hopefully you don't need to make emergency trades. But whenever I do make emergency trades, I do it with Masha. Nice to know with crypto, nice to know in DFI.

Starting point is 00:02:30 Like the exchange doesn't go down. You know, the South Korean exchange on, this is Monday morning or Sunday, just like stopped. Just trigger the breaker, stop. You can't sell your positions. They intentionally stopped it. Yeah, that's what they do. What the hell watcher? You know, 24-7 never stops.

Starting point is 00:02:47 I guess that means the liquidations also get stopped, though, too. Yeah, that's true. All right, Dave. Let's talk about this bloody Sunday and into Monday. We're going to do this in two parts, I think. So first, let's talk about what happened on Sunday and Monday, and we're going to look at some chart gore. And then let's talk about what happens since that time up until the time of recording. So, David, I got some charts for you.

Starting point is 00:03:06 Ready? Hide your eyes. Avert your eyes. Oh, wait. No, it's going up. It's going up. Yeah. Okay.

Starting point is 00:03:11 So this first chart we don't typically look at on the bank this weekly roll up. Because you only look at it when really bad things are happening. Okay? So the chart is going up. And that's because the market is panic. This is the VIX chart. And the spikes are basically panic, volatility in the market, extreme kind of like fear. type scenarios. And you see the spike. This happened on Sunday and into Monday. This is as large

Starting point is 00:03:37 as the spikes on 2020, COVID, right, March 2020, and then back to 2008, financial recession. So it was on that level, that order of magnitude with respect to how fearful the market was earlier this week. And we could look at the crypto charts too here, David. Look at these spikes down. This is Bitcoin, thanks to cracking charts. This is Bitcoin, spike down. We haven't seen one of these red candles in a very long time. This is Ether. Look at this. Yeah, that's bad.

Starting point is 00:04:05 I can't. Ether on Saturday, Sunday, which is going down all weekend, as people were, we'll talk about this, as people were unwinding, the carry trade that we'll talk about. And then Ether goes from like 3,400,

Starting point is 00:04:16 down to 3,000, down to 2,800. And I'm like, oh, it's one of those times where it's just like, you know, bearish, really bearish pullback. Prices are dipping. Red candles are everywhere. But I've seen this before.

Starting point is 00:04:27 Like, I'm a veteran. I know what this looks like. So I just like tweet out. It's a pullback. I'll see you like wake me up at 1900. Like I'm not going to bother until I see 1900. And I shit you not, 45 minutes later, it had taps 1900. I'm like, whoa, that's, I got there really fast.

Starting point is 00:04:42 Were you excited about this? Or were you just like watching the trucks? It was just like, oh, man. Somebody is getting carded out. Somebody, like people are getting liquidated left and right. When I mean, I don't remember the last spike like this. I mean, probably 2020. FTX.

Starting point is 00:04:58 But we kind of. that was so insular to crypto. We sort of knew what was going on. This is like some unseen enemy. The last time there was an exogenous market event that caused the liquidations in crypto was COVID. Was the COVID crash. Okay. So we were all trying to unpack this on Monday to figure out what actually happened on Monday and into Tuesday.

Starting point is 00:05:18 So what are the reasons? Why did we get this spike down? Why did the VIX a spike in the way that we just talked about? There is definitely a confluence of factors and we'll talk about all of them. The number one that is being ascribed to is the unwinding of the Japanese yen carry trade. And so the Central Bank of Japan has been holding a 0% interest rates for quite a long time. Meanwhile, over the last two years, the United States Federal Reserve has increased interest rates up to 5.5%, which means if you have any money inside of the American economy, you can get a risk-free 5.5% in United States Treasuries.

Starting point is 00:05:53 If you can borrow money from Japan at 0% where their interest rates have been, for the last forever. You can borrow free money from Japan and then you can get 5.5% in the American stock market for free. For free. And so 5.5% is the base when people are buying bonds. Somebody comes into the bond market and then that pushes the marginal person out of the bond market who wants a little bit more risk. So it goes into the equities market. It goes into Navidia stock. It goes into crypto. And so a lot of this, a lot of the market was holding up this leverage, this winding up of leverage as people were juicing this case. trade between Japan and the American economy.

Starting point is 00:06:32 The Japanese Central Bank decides to raise interest rates by 0.25% because of the weakening yen. And they do not want to have the yen inflate because we have seen the pressures that has been put on the American individuals and on global individuals from inflation. Inflation, bad for consumers. So the Japanese central bank doesn't want that. And so they are experiencing inflation in the yen. So they decide to raise interest rates, which squeezes the

Starting point is 00:06:57 ability to run this carry trade. So when it goes up by 0.25%, like the yen actually appreciates, and that's the denominator that everyone has been borrowing from in Japan. And so all of a sudden, when the yen goes up in price, everyone's been borrowing and then shorting the yen, basically. And so not only is your cost of capital going up, but like now you have to repay at a higher loan. And then it's also indicative of like, well, if they keep on raising, like this is going to get squeezed even farther. So people just unwind the trade, which causes mass selling in the American stock market, which hits risk assets specifically the hardest. That's like the number one reason why people are saying that this happened. Yeah, it's crazy that just like a 0.25% raise

Starting point is 00:07:37 causes this cascade of factors. Price is set on the margins. Yeah, it's so levered up. So right now, the Bank of Japan balance sheet is larger than any country's GDP at 127.5% of GDP. Right. And so, like, as you're saying, when you unwind this trade, basically you have to go buy yen, to pay off your loans. And in order to buy that, it's almost a short squeeze on the end. Yeah, you have to,

Starting point is 00:08:02 and you have to sell your other assets. You have to sell your, your treasuries. Like, mostly it's not treasuries. It's like risk-all-on assets because we've been in risk-on seasons. So you sell your crypto,

Starting point is 00:08:11 you sell your NVIDIA stock. So we saw that unwind happen quite rapidly on Sunday and Monday, and the market kind of waking up to this. But that's not the only reason. What else we got? The U.S. economy has also got hit with this, like, not great jobs report.

Starting point is 00:08:26 So 71,000 fewer jobs than what was estimated came in in this jobs report. And also unemployment has been trending upwards. It's at 4.3%. And when unemployment trends, it trends hard. It's like a hard thing to reverse. And so when we notice an upward trend in the jobs report, investors are like rut row. We've been saying this R word, this recession word, for like three years now. And so like people are real sensitive to it.

Starting point is 00:08:53 And we are now starting to finally rear it. head potentially with his jobs report. You get you get that paired with like some other market signals like Warren Buffett selling half of his Apple stock like just dumping all of his Bank of America stock sitting on almost $300 billion in cash. Cash. Everyone watches Warren Buffett. Like we need to see what he's up to. And when Warren Buffett is on cash, like everyone knows it. And so it just adds even more jitters, I would say. Yeah. It's not just that. There's also just like escalation in the Middle East. There was this Hamas leader that was assassinated. inside of Iran, inside of Iran's territory, which is, you know, an affront to Iran.

Starting point is 00:09:32 No one knows who actually did this assassination, but like Iran is like, we're, it's obviously Israel. And so, like, they have been posturing with some very big language towards Israel. That actually didn't come to pass this week, but like, nonetheless, that's what, like, Marcus Dost don't like this level of uncertainty. Just jittery, jittery, right? Jittery left and right. And, like, it's just like a little spark can, like, cause all of this volatility.

Starting point is 00:09:55 So it's 0.25 rays. or it's like an assassination of a political leader. And it's like, it's not like this hasn't happened historically, right? So like the assassination from like Franz Ferdinand in Serbia. Small little spark, you know. Decimated the stock market. So it's not irrational necessarily for the market to behave this way. But go on.

Starting point is 00:10:15 What else we got? Also just Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are now like neck and neck in prediction markets. So polymarket, which has generally always leaned towards Trump ahead of other prediction markets is now putting Donald Trump and Kamala Harris at a 50-50 split. Predict it, I think even has Kamala in the lead. And Trump has been known to be the pro-markets candidate. And so the market, especially the crypto market, might have started to unprice in a Trump victory. Started like, okay, maybe we got a little bit of risking that too.

Starting point is 00:10:45 Let's under one. Yeah, exactly. Let's unwind that from well. All in all, like, it's probably the end-carry trade that's impacting the markets the most. But overall, just like add fear, uncertainty and doubt into into the, into the, into the market not to mention like the very high highs that we had been at just 15 days earlier like the stock market climbs a wall of worry and like nivia has been just taken this entire economy this entire stock market on a walk upwards yeah Microsoft too and overall what what do we get when we get all

Starting point is 00:11:13 when we add all of these things up is like we get a loss of 1.8 trillion dollars of market cap that's like one crypto it's gone he's gone wiped away in like one day this happened on monday all this red that you see is all from the uh the equities market it's on Monday. Okay, so that was Sunday and Monday. And then it felt like on Tuesday, we just kind of like took a deep breath, we got some breathing. Oh, okay, new normal. All right. And then on Wednesday, we sort of let things settle. Like, where are we now in the markets? What's gone on since then? How are people feeling and reacting? What are some of the new data points coming out? I would say we have erased some of the fears, as in like some of the

Starting point is 00:11:50 fundamentals have kind of been like walked back. So the Bank of Japan announced that it won't hike rates when markets are unstable. So the Bank of Japan was like, whoa, we didn't mean that. Like, yikes, sorry.

Starting point is 00:12:02 Sorry, anybody. And so, like the comment here is, after an amazing 25 total basis points of hikes, the Bank of Japan is done with their hiking cycle. So, like,

Starting point is 00:12:12 totally folding. And honestly, this is what happens when you're a minority central bank. Like, Japan actually needs to go be looking across the pond at America and make sure that they didn't just cause a recession in America. If they didn't cause a recession in America, they actually do have the tolerance to go back in hike rates, but they first need to make sure that they are not causing a recession

Starting point is 00:12:33 in America. Oh, yeah. There were some phone calls made. Let's just say that. Certainly. Certainly. Also, there's just indication and some other stats and analysis and metrics that the U.S. Jobs Report actually is not that crazy. There is a seasonal adjustment of jobs. And so when you adjust it seasonally, this Twitter account who knows more than me, Nick Tim Maros, says that this has arrested fears that the United States labor market is imminently weaking when you adjust it seasonally. Claims continue to run to their year earlier and to their 2018 to 2019 levels. So jobless claims that we've seen before. So, you know, maybe not so crazy. If you believe polymarket, the odds of recession are down to 15% from 25% where it was over the weekend.

Starting point is 00:13:15 And then as well, our federal reserve, our central bank is being predicted to not change rates because they're not going to just allow the market to whip them into changing rates. So it's being, even though we don't know, there's the next September federal meeting is in September. We actually just had one. And we had just had one just before this happened, which was one of the many causes of this fear was like, oh, The Fed just decided to like not change rates and that happened two days ago, which means they're not going to meet for another long while. Yeah. And are they waiting too long?

Starting point is 00:13:52 Are they causing recession? That was in the background. Right. So I mean like and also like prices didn't go down anymore on Tuesday. They actually bounced back up. And so like if you pull open like the S&P chart, we fell like a solid 9% from the all time highs down to the bottom was a drop of 9%. From July 15th to Monday was a drop of 9%.

Starting point is 00:14:15 And then we have since regained 3.5% just this week. So lost 9% over the last three weeks, gained back with 3.5% in the last three days. To me, it looks like a very normal pullback off of just a bunch of market chitters. It's kind of up to, like, it's choose your own adventure time, man. It's up to interpretation at this point. It's, it's, there's almost a crossroad. You can go with the bull case. And the bull case, I think Tom Lee earlier in the week kind of put it well.

Starting point is 00:14:43 He called this a growth scare. This is not a collapse. He says this is a pullback. Investors are afraid of a recession. He said he doesn't think we're actually in a recession. Some data points coming in September and later will sort of confirm some of that that the U.S. economy is actually not that bad and that this was a pullback as part of the cycle. It's similar to what you're saying.

Starting point is 00:15:04 There's still bears out there, David, that are saying... There's always a bear somewhere. Oh, yeah. But like the bears, the magnitude of like the conversation just, increases when you have events like this. And the bears are basically like, hey, look, we've been in an everything bubble for a very long time. Look at earnings for AI companies, right?

Starting point is 00:15:25 It's just like they haven't really performed based on the lofty expectations of investors. So you have like whiffs of dot com bubbles and also the global economy is on kind of shaky ground and the U.S. is already in a recession. We're starting to see that with unemployment numbers and that kind of thing. And so I think for the investor, the crypto investor, it's sort of a choose your own adventure, right? I'll say for myself personally, I'm skewed bullish, but like that's my general disposition. That's my general disposition. I want to be ready for a bear market, but I'm definitely skewing bullish at this point.

Starting point is 00:16:02 Yeah, you did an episode with Tom Lee that I am halfway through and it's been very, very good. Guys, really smart. And so if you bankless nation have not listened to that, there's a link in the show notes. you can go listen to Ryan and Tomley. We also did an emergency live stream more deeply unpacking just the events that unfolded over the weekend. Both of these things are in your podcast player, if you so choose. All right, coming up next in the weekly roll-up,

Starting point is 00:16:24 we're going to dive into the crypto market specifically in their reaction where I'm not done with the market section. Also, why the hell is ETH so weak relative to Bitcoin and Seoul? I demand answers. And are our prediction market's good for society? Or are they affront to democracy? Ponder that question, because we will answer it. Very clearly as we get back from some of these sponsors that make this show possible.

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Starting point is 00:19:44 Billion. Billion. Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah, add some zeros on that. I mean, that doesn't feel that bad. Yeah, it could be worse. I mean, we bounced back very healthfully. Look at the seven day here.

Starting point is 00:19:55 So Bitcoin on the seven day down 5.6. Yep. That's not bad. Salonah down 1.6. Wow. Salon is flat. One of these is not like the other. Ethereum down 17.4%.

Starting point is 00:20:08 17% on the seven day. Yikes. We're going to talk about that. Is there anything more to unpack with the Bitcoin chart here? I mean, like, what's, I guess the week has been down 5.6%. Anything more? Yeah, we touched below $50,000. So that's kind of cool.

Starting point is 00:20:25 If you, bankless listener, were a buyer below $50,000 on Bitcoin, pat yourself on the back. That is a legendary buy. Congratulations. At least on the week it is. Yes. On the week. I mean, like, when's the last time Bitcoin was below $50,000?

Starting point is 00:20:39 It's been a while. It's been a while. No time this year? Is that correct? Yeah. March. March? March?

Starting point is 00:20:45 March. Yeah, that's the best price that you've been able to buy in Bitcoin since March. So if you bought sub $50,000 Bitcoin, go ahead and pat yourself on the back. All right. Ether started the week $3,100, $200, down 18%. Touched below $2,100. On some exchanges, it got below $2,000. If you managed to buy sub $2,200,000.

Starting point is 00:21:05 $2,000 ether, pat yourself on the bat. Wow, well done. That is a bottom tick. Really? Ever I've seen one. Are you sure that was a good buy? We'll talk about that in a little bit more. Well, I mean, we're at 2,600 right now. So like, yeah, equivocally, that's a good buy at current prices. This is what actually happened on Sunday. So 155,000, this is the magnitude, 155,000 traders were liquidated in crypto. Addressers traders, yeah. 5753 million liquidated across all traders. 300 billion wiped from total crypto market cap. And this is just Monday. This is just Monday.

Starting point is 00:21:37 It's just Monday, yeah. Bitcoin went from 59 to 49K. ETH went from 2,900 to 2100. The Niki down 12%. This buy down 3%. If you've made it past all this, the tweet says, congratulations, you survive. Be careful with leverage.

Starting point is 00:21:51 If you did not get liquidated on leverage, congratulations. You're doing great. You pass the test. You pass the test. Fearful is what I would characterize the markets are. On Monday. Yeah. I think we're moving back towards greed.

Starting point is 00:22:04 Are we? I think so. Look at the price. Look at the prices. Like, Solana is almost up on the week. I bet you Solana is up. Since we've started recording, prices have gone up. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:22:13 Each was past $2,600. Okay. I mean, I guess this points to this is just a flesh wound. And like, we're going to, like, regain our territory and resume the bull market. Yeah. Doesn't answer the question. Why the hell is ETH so much worse than the rest of the market? Part of the answer comes from none other than,

Starting point is 00:22:32 Jump Capital, our favorite market makers in the world of crypto, Jump sold over 100,000 Ether, units of Ether, coming up to somewhere between like 300 to maybe up to 500 million. It depends on what price you measure it at. Like $400-ish million of Ether was sold by Jump Capital over the last, over the 48 hours into the weekend. Specifically on Sunday, Jump Capital is selling their ether into the most illiquid moment of the week

Starting point is 00:23:02 in the most illiquid part of the market, which is as it is dumping. And so people were all watching Jump Capital unstake their ether, send it to Binance, and then just like nuke the order bid on Binance. And so everyone was wondering, like, why the hell are they doing this now?

Starting point is 00:23:17 Yeah. Like, it's the worst possible time to sell. It's an illiquid weekend. All weekends are a liquid in the crypto markets. Why are they choosing to just throw bombs into the ETHUSE price? Seems panicky, doesn't it? It seems panicky, right.

Starting point is 00:23:29 So I've seen people defend their level positions. I've been one of these people's before. I know I've looked like. I've looked like this before. I've tried my moments with God. And that's what it looks like. Like walks like a duck, quacks like a duck. Other people are speculating that as a result of their CFTC probe, the CFTC is trying to kick them out of crypto. I think that's extreme speculation. But you can see like the moment that the CFTC did probe them, like all of jump stablecoin volumes on Solana just went to zero. And so like a lot of the stablecoin volumes on the, on the, on the networks just went out there out the door.

Starting point is 00:24:04 Do you think it's, it's fair to say at this point in time, we don't know the full story of what's going on with Jump, but there's something going on, right? It's like, I mean, like, maybe they were in the carry trade and they needed to unwind their positions. There's a few things, like, in the history of Jump, right, they were in the kind of the Lunatara thing. Obviously, they were like, wrapped up with FTX. Now they got this CFTC probe.

Starting point is 00:24:25 They also, their CEO has recently left. But they're also involved in places, too. They're still proceeding on this building out the Salana Fire Dancer client. I know some of this is jump capital versus you jump crypto and these are separate entities and all of this. And I'm kind of like grouping them in this segment. But I guess I would say if you, bankless listener, know anything about what is going on with jump. I would love to hear it. Because this is one of the biggest mysteries over the past week, at least to me.

Starting point is 00:24:51 I mean, I think Occam's Razor points. So they had a leverage position that they were needed to defend. All right. Alcum's Razor suggests that. Okay. Also, they weren't the only large-scale eatholder to. like sell ETH. Like I think Paradigm sold like $130 million of Eath. Not this last week, but the week before. Oh, really? People didn't even notice that because I guess, you know,

Starting point is 00:25:09 jumped to or maybe I just didn't notice that. It went from a paradigm wallet to an Anchorage wallet, which is a custodian. So you would assume that the buyer is using Anchorage as their custodian. I'm sick of talking about the crypto sellers. Let's talk about some of the buyers. Let's look at our ETF flows. And it's actually looking healthy on the week, ETF flows. Depends on which ETFs that you're looking at. Okay. Let's look at both. Bitcoin ETFs have outflows. So during the first three days of the week, the Bitcoin ETFs had over a quarter billion dollars of outflows, $272 million of outflows. Okay. In that same period, the ETH ETFs had $130 million of inflows.

Starting point is 00:25:46 Wow. A lot going into the Black Rock, ETHA, $157 million. And the last two days in a row have been the largest inflows since launch. The gray scale outflows have very quickly dried up on the, the ether ETFs and outflows have turned into inflows. We are still net negative on total inflows into the ETF, right? And we've described like why this is the gray scale outflows. You have to net that with the inflows as well.

Starting point is 00:26:16 But this number is getting closer to zero and getting closer to the positive territory. So right now the total is 387 million in net outflows at this point in time. But that should reverse. And it's looking very positive. few days, particularly in this bloody market that we've seen. Yeah. Yeah. It's been pretty cool. I would love after the end of this week, this week's going to have this anomaly of this weird week pullback of like what the hell's been going on. It is interesting to see the Bitcoin outflows and eth inflows.

Starting point is 00:26:45 I always want one more week of data as things stabilize. And so next week we will talk about again. Tommy, Tommy World Power saying selling from gray scales diminished massively two weeks. He's talking about the ether, the ETFs. And meanwhile, BlackRock is increasing its pace of buying ETH. So there you go, David. It's funny when they say BlackRock's buying ether and they're selling Bitcoin. Blackhawks not doing anything. Yeah. It's their customers. Yes, it's their customers, of course. All right. So let's take a minute to kind of zoom out and recap the year and like where we are in this cycle. Like one thing to know is look at this, David. This is a Bitcoin dominance chart. And so this is Bitcoin relative to all of the other crypto assets out there. And it is more dominant.

Starting point is 00:27:25 it is stronger than I've seen. It's at 57% than almost like not any time I can remember, but I don't know. The last time it was at this level was 2021. 2021? So Bitcoin is as strong as it was in 2021 then. Since before the last time it was this dominant was before the 2021 bull market. Yeah. I mean, one takeaway from this is like Bitcoin's demise relative to other crypto assets

Starting point is 00:27:50 has been greatly exaggerated, right? Like Bitcoin has been on an absolute tear this cycle. And the Bitcoin dominance has been going up basically linearly since 2023. So 18 months of Bitcoin dominance increasing. This is an interesting chart to look at too. David, should we look at the ETH Bitcoin ratio here? Like that is going down, which means Bitcoin is far outperforming ether this cycle. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:28:12 So Bitcoin has had 18 months of Bitcoin dominance increasing, comparison to the whole market, which of course goes along with the decreasing ratio between Ethereum and Bitcoin. Ethereum Bitcoin, the ratio hit its high in the 2021. bull market hitting like a it's been like ranging between 0.06 and 0.08 until about two years ago which then it had it hit 0.08 right around the merge and since the merge it has just been steadily decreasing downwards hitting like a two year low or maybe even a three year low of 0.042 which is very low but that's measured right at the moment of this week which one of the

Starting point is 00:28:50 reasons why ether got so incredibly hammered this week is everyone uses it as close lateral for their margin positions. Like, Heath is the asset for Defi. What is Defi? Margin positions. And so, like, Heath always gets hammered the hardest is when there's a big market pullback,

Starting point is 00:29:05 because that's where all the liquidations are denominated in. Like, Leith is just getting liquidated. And it just hasn't just been this week, right? And it hasn't just been with Bitcoin. It's also soul. So, yeah, I would say, like, if you characterize the market this cycle so far, we've seen Bitcoin, fantastic performance, and a lot of strength.

Starting point is 00:29:21 We've seen the Salonah Price with fantastic performance. and a lot of strength. And we've seen ether like weak compared to at least those two, right? Relative to those two. So let's take a look at the Salana-Eth ratio. That hit all-time highs on the week. So let me zoom out here to max. This is even higher than it was in the 2020.

Starting point is 00:29:41 The top of the market in 2021. Yeah, Solana, the ether-salona ratio hit a high of 0.06. And so one Solana will get you 0.06 ether, and it's never been that high. And that high just happened now. Like on the backs of like ether getting dumped into the market by jump capital, everyone with the leverage position, overall continuation of ETH weakness over the last like two years or so. Yeah, Solana can hit hitting a new high versus ether. Yeah, I would say Bitcoin has surprised me a little bit this cycle, but like not altogether unsurprising.

Starting point is 00:30:13 And Solana has very much surprised me, particularly relative to Eith. And I asked this question, ETH has underperformed the cycle so far, why on Twitter? got a lot of interesting replies. It's nothing that we haven't talked about already. You know, UX, fragmentation, it's outsourced, its execution layer, you know, burn is down, all of these types of reasons. I don't know what your take is on this. I guess, like, my take is, it's probably less that ETH has been weak,

Starting point is 00:30:42 because if you look at the year from a relative, from an absolute basis, it's, like, actually up on the year. And it's certainly up. It's like 4X from all-time high, as far outperformed other assets. All time lows. All time lows, rather. Yeah. It's more that Bitcoin and Seoul have been just like so damn strong.

Starting point is 00:30:58 Like Bitcoin is crushing its narrative right now. The social layers are like a president coming out in favor and saying, Right. Let's put, we're putting Bitcoin. We're going to buy the Bitcoin. What? We're going to put the Bitcoin in the treasury.

Starting point is 00:31:11 And then Solana, I think, is absolutely crushing UX. Retail flows. Yeah. Retail flows. You know, like casino is like doing far better on meme coins, everything else. And Ethereum's strengths just haven't had a chance to show show themselves this cycle. It's been kind of a slow build. I still think ether's time will come, but the market is like doubting this at this point. That's almost like a contrarian take.

Starting point is 00:31:32 Yeah. I mean, like if you just look at the Bitcoin flows of the ETF, if you summate all of the Bitcoin flows, Bitcoin has taken in $17 billion in flows into the Bitcoin ETFs. If you look at the Ethereum flows, Ethereum has lost $400 million because grayscale is just like exiting rapidly. We are just now watching this inflection point where finally, like, BlackRock, Bitwise, fidelity, inflows are now overcoming the great scale outflows. But we haven't had it. Like, Ether has taken like the brunt of the pain of its own ETH. Hopefully now you will see some positive inflows. But like lagging behind Bitcoin's very casual $17 billion of inflows, like negative 4 to 400 million versus $17 billion.

Starting point is 00:32:18 Like that explains the Bitcoin Ether ratio. And then the Solana Ether ratio is just totally explained by the fact that, like, people want to do fun things on chain. Like, users want to have an execution optimized environment. And there's enough of an inflection point where all of the people who want to do fun things on chain went to Solana. And now it's just like all the fun things are on Solana because that's where all the users are. Like, I think Ethereum is executing on its roll-up-centric roadmap and more and more layer twos are spawning. But they're not Ethereum. And I think there's this debate going around like our layer.

Starting point is 00:32:51 or two's extensions of Ethereum, and I think that's largely a semantic debate, but it also does show up in the price. It's like, it's really sick that like base is onboarding all of these users, and it's sick for base. It's not, but they're less sick for Ethereum. Right, because the users aren't buying ETH and like less, there's less value accrual. It's still my take that Ethereum figures this out its strengths will be realized in the months and years to come, but like maybe a week in cycle.

Starting point is 00:33:18 I mean, that's certainly what we're pointing to at this point in time. Although these charts can change in a hurry, and then sentiment always reflects price change. There's also the idea just like the narrative is whatever the price is. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And when you zoom out, Bitcoin is up 30% on the year. ETH is up 10%. Salon is up 42%. So that's where we are in the cycle.

Starting point is 00:33:39 David, there were some pretty good earnings reports that came out from some of our publicly traded crypto companies, Coinbase and Robin Hood and some insights from those. So what were the reports and you have any takes on this? Yeah, the Coinbase Q2 revenue report, there's like you could spend like an hour pulling, like parsing through it. I really just think the most important thing is looking at retail investor volumes versus institutional volumes because it kind of tells you what the makeup of the market is. So looking at the trading volumes of the different like user bases of Coinbase,

Starting point is 00:34:12 either a consumer called that retail or institutions. And institutional, by the way, is like all, of basically most of the Bitcoin ETS and the Ethereum ETFs are custodied by Coinbase and I think also traded on Coinbase. And so consumer retail trading volumes

Starting point is 00:34:30 on Coinbase from Q1 to Q2 went down from 56 billion to 37 billion. Institutional volumes went down from Q1 to Q2, 256 billion to 189 billion. And we are just seeing institutional volume just like completely dominate retail trading volumes, which tells you

Starting point is 00:34:48 the makeup of the market as a whole. So like about 40 billion for retail, about 190 billion for institutional. If we go back to 2021, like at the height of the market, Q2 of 2021, $145 billion traded by retail, $317 billion traded by institutional. So there wasn't, there was like a two to one ratio. Yeah. It's not a two to one ratio. It's like a five, six to one ratio now. Institution is leading. Like this could be the institution cycle. I actually think was here on Twitter, was crypto, had a really good insight here. He said, this leads me to believe, based on some of the volume that you were talking about, this is going to be an institutional driven cycle. And yeah, the inflows from the past year were from people that were in

Starting point is 00:35:31 crypto, like the tourists. The conditions are totally different. So let's keep in mind, remember the last cycle, yeah, 2021. We were looking at numbers from 2021. We saw all the retail volume. You had stimulus checks. There's none of that this time around. There's no retail that's stuck in home, you know, like in a quarantine, just like looking at charts and like, oh, what should I buy, which I should buy some assets. You know, most retail got wrecked last cycle and dilution. You know, we got lots of unlocks happening with all sorts of tokens. So the take here is at least so far, and maybe this continues, is that this is going to be an institutional cycle, institutionally led, which makes it a little bit different. I don't know if that's good or bad. Are institutions more

Starting point is 00:36:11 diamond-handed than retail? It's, you know, is this a good? thing or like you have a take on this? I mean, eventually crypto is going to eat the world and that is like agnostic to retail or institutions. We're getting them both in the fullness of time. We got retail last year. We're getting institutions this year or this cycle. I kind of wish retail bought more.

Starting point is 00:36:30 Retail is definitely more fun. That's who you get to play with. Those are the people playing the fun game that's doing the fun things. Well, maybe there's some retail in their 401k accounts that are buying it through and you see it as retail flows this time. Yeah. Yeah. also Robin Hood, their crypto-based revenue was up 161% from Q2 of last year, so year-over-year

Starting point is 00:36:50 growth. Crypto revenues are 161% up. So that's pretty cool. All right. So let's go ahead and get into the world of prediction markets because Elizabeth Warren, surprised, thinks that they are bad. She is pressing the CFTC in a letter that she signed and sent to ban political contract events, political event contracts.

Starting point is 00:37:11 in the letter they say election bets cheapen the sanctity of our democratic process. Political bets change the motivations behind each vote, replacing political convictions with financial calculations, allowing billionaires to wager extraordinary bets while simultaneously contributing to a specific candidate or party. And political insiders to bet on elections using non-public information will further degraded public trust in the electoral process. When I was reading this letter, I want to know what your reflections and interpretations of this were. But when I was reading this letter, I was like, these are a bunch of unfounded allegations

Starting point is 00:37:46 as to like how prediction markets work. Yeah. So, okay, so when I was reading it, it sounded so much, because I've read letters from Elizabeth Warren on subject matters. I'm like much more deep on than prediction markets about crypto, you know, in particular. And it strikes me that this letter is written. So the layman, like the voter doesn't really have knowledge. They just see billionaires and they see politics and outcomes and they say, yeah, that's bad. We should get money out of politics. And they are like defaults pro this letter, right? And this is like if you are just an inch deep inside of these subject matters. I think for someone who's a little bit deeper, they just see what you saw, which is like a bunch of pointless, like allegations that just

Starting point is 00:38:29 don't even make sense in this context. I'll note that this letter was also signed all Democrats on this letter, right? This is a letter not that is anti-crypto specifically, but it is an anti-crypto use case, which is prediction markets, right? It's an anti-classical liberal value. And I also see what Elizabeth Warren is doing. She's done this before is using the administrative state. You know how she's used Gary Gensler for the past two years?

Starting point is 00:38:55 I mean, this is my words, but like this is clearly what's going on. The anti-crypto army is Elizabeth Warren, a faction of like politicians seeping into the administrative state through. people like Gary Gensler and trying to control things, trying to curtail things. That's why we have five lawsuits against some of the U.S.'s top crypto companies coming from the SEC. She's trying to do that with the CFTC now, too. Okay? So this letter was addressed to the chair of the CFTC, who most crypto listeners haven't heard

Starting point is 00:39:23 too much about. He's not like a household name like Gary Gensler. Rosten Benham, right? And he's trying to say, you've got to stop this. Not through the legislative process. It's not a bill in Congress. this is going to a regulator and saying shut these political prediction markets down. So that was another take I had.

Starting point is 00:39:42 At first, David, I thought this was about polymarket. I thought they were coming directly for polymarket. Is it not? It's not directly for polymarkets. Prediction markets in general, you know, a couple things to know is one, Polymark is already kind of like VPN blocked from the U.S. anyway, right? So it's not actually accessible to the U.S. there's another prediction market, which is a Web 2 prediction market.

Starting point is 00:40:04 I wasn't aware of called a Kalashi. And apparently there's some beef going on between them and the U.S. government. They're available in the U.S., but they don't have political prediction markets available yet, and they're trying to get them. And so they're trying to work with regulators and legislators to get this. So it seems like it's more directed towards Kalashie, though I will say, right? If Elizabeth Warren is like generally against prediction markets, then she's not

Starting point is 00:40:31 Yeah, she's against prediction market. She's against crypto. She loves writing letters to three-letter agencies. Yeah, yeah, exactly. All of the things that could make this very difficult. Completely irrelevant to Elizabeth Warren, which is my favorite flavor of Elizabeth Warren, irrelevant. Is there some takes in the crypto world about prediction markets? So Matthew Green, who's a cryptographer, we've actually had on the podcast before.

Starting point is 00:40:54 He tweeted out, prediction markets seem to be really good at figuring out whatever widespread opinions are prevalent at any given moment, not so great at actually predicting things. I don't know why people revere them so much. Hazu, also a former podcast guest, says, from a mechanism design perspective, I personally see the mass adoption of prediction markets as a threat to democracy and an acceleration towards plutocracy

Starting point is 00:41:16 may not warrant banning them, and you probably couldn't anyways, but they are unilaterally not a good force. That's one of us. That's a crypto. That's a crypto person. That's a crypto person. Interesting.

Starting point is 00:41:27 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like some pushback against like the cheering of polymarkets that has come out of this industry, myself, ourselves included. What was your reaction to this? I don't see it. I don't understand the threats to democracy. I think money and politics in general is a threat to democracy. But go back to look at Citizens United.

Starting point is 00:41:48 Basically, all these super PACs are dark pools for this type of election influence, the entire lobbying industry. This is not a problem born of prediction markets. In fact, prediction markets, I don't think, can. contribute to this problem. If anything, they kind of shine a light on this problem. I think that the main use case for prediction markets is identifying truth and reality discovery. And this is like, my base case. I mean, we've given a very bullish takes on prediction markets in the past. I kind of like stand by them. In this environment where it's very difficult to figure out what's true and what's not

Starting point is 00:42:23 true, just like in general on the internet, what's happened or what hasn't happened. It's a great mechanism so that people can put weight, some stake behind actual outcomes. I love it. It's a, it's a place for a certain type of truth on a particular type of event that I go to quite often. So I don't see this, but maybe you'd have to ask Hasu a bit more what he means to really fully understand where he's going with this. Right. Here's a take that is kind of aligned with this pushback. This is Dahmer who treats out the criticism that a prediction market reflects conventional wisdom is a bit daft to me for a number of reasons. Some of the markets communicate quite important information that will have large ramifications on the world,

Starting point is 00:43:01 like federal interest rate changes, recession odds, next U.S. President. And getting some sense of what the conventional wisdom is about the future is important for decision making. The goal is to be better than the alternative, a better flashlight to look ahead at a murky future exactly what you're saying. I also like to, I put up my own tweet in this take about this. I want to parse between the two types of markets that might be found on a prediction market, there are our prediction markets for betting on something unknowable, like betting on the

Starting point is 00:43:29 weather or better, you know, betting on like chaotic events, somethings you can't inherently know ahead of time. You're kind of gambling. Sure. And that's going to produce materially different outcomes. Maybe that's just like the whole conventional wisdom take. But that's going to produce materially different outcomes from betting on something that is privately knowable.

Starting point is 00:43:46 So if some insider knows something that the rest of the world does not know and it's relevant towards a prediction market, that single insider can go. to that prediction market and since markets are priced at the margins, they can bet all of their, as much capital as they want on the fact that they know something. And so as a result of this behavior that whistleblowers are allowed to do, call them a whistleblower, call them like a nowhere of facts. Prediction markets can like turn into clearing houses for disclosing private information without actually disclosing it.

Starting point is 00:44:18 Right. And so think in a authoritarian world where a whistleblower can't actually do the job. of whistleblowing, they could still go to a prediction market and bet on something. And then the truth comes out in that particular way without the truth actually coming out, which I think is why people like you and me are and like this is why Vitalik talks about prediction markets as like a threat to authoritarian democracies. It is a truth-telling mechanism. And it allows the marginal individual who knows the truth to like is insented to come out and and bet on it. Well, from that lens, it's basically the opposite of what Hasu said. It's a state-

Starting point is 00:44:54 That's what I thought. That's what I thought. Yeah. That's how I've perceived this. Anyway, interesting that there's some debate on this. Maybe it's a topic we'll dig into in future episodes. All right. We got some on-chain updates to talk to you about.

Starting point is 00:45:06 There's a big release out of the Zora and Uniswap universe. Those two things are now the same universe. Pretty cool. The SEC's budget getting slashed, but why? It's done such a good job. And Donald Trump's sons have now fallen in love with Defi. What is, where did this come from? What are they up to?

Starting point is 00:45:23 Let's go ahead and get onto into all of these subjects and more. But first, a message from some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. New projects are coming online to the Mantle Layer 2 every single week. Why is this happening? Maybe it's because Mantle has been on the frontier of Layer 2 design architecture since it first started building Mantle DA, powered by technology from EigenDA. Maybe it's because users are coming onto the Mantle Layer 2 to capture some of the highest yields available in Defi. And to automatically receive the points and tokens being accrued by the $3 billion dollar mantle treasury and the Mantle Reward.

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Starting point is 00:47:04 and vote on whether or not a proposal should be funded. Make sure your vote ready by staking your CTSI before the votes open. The Uniswap extension is here. The self-custody wallet created by the most trusted team in Defi, Uniswap Labs, designed to make swapping feel effortless. This extension lives in your browser's sidebar, you swap, sign transactions, and send or receive crypto without ever losing your place on the internet. Plus, with human readable transaction messages, you'll always know exactly what you're signing.

Starting point is 00:47:31 Navigate a multi-chain world effortlessly with support for 11 chains like Ethereum mainnet, base, arbitrium, and optimism. No more chain switching or token importing. All your assets are right where you need them to be. The Uniswap extension is designed to level up your swapping experience with other Uniswap Labs products as well. Easily on board to the extension using the Uniswop mobile wallet to begin managing your assets across platforms and take advantage of smooth, seamless synergies with the Uniswap web app. So go and download the Uniswap extension today by clicking the link in the show notes. Just another way Uniswap is helping you swap smarter. The Zora protocol has now created pools on Uniswap. But how does this work? Because Zora is a place to mint

Starting point is 00:48:09 NFTs and Uniswap is a place to trade ERC 20 tokens. What is going on here? So what is going on here? Glad you asked. Thank you. Is that they are wrapping the ETSWR. ERC 1155 standard, which is an NFT standard, it's an NFT standard of producing many of the same NFTs is like one version of this. So like if everyone's minting the same thing, like that's an ERC-1155, you can wrap that into an ERC 20 contract and then you can put that

Starting point is 00:48:38 into an AMM like Uniswap. And so you can buy NFTs because there's, because they're fungible, ironically, when you wrap them, you can buy them on Uniswap inside of a liquid pool. And so through this integration as well, the trading fees of a said NFT actually goes to the creator. And so the creator gets the LP fees, which is pretty cool. And so it allows you to speculate on NFT mince using Uniswap. I think that's pretty cool. Oh, I think this is super cool. Actually, I didn't understand fully how it worked, but basically the problem right now

Starting point is 00:49:14 that creators have or collectors have, when they go and they mince something, they collect an of some sort. Part of their collection is in order to sell that NFT, they have to find another buyer on the other side, like a peer-to-peer person. Like, in order to sell it, I have to find someone that wants to buy it at some price. And a lot of these markets are small.

Starting point is 00:49:33 A lot of these markets are kind of long-tail, particularly for creators. With this, they can just always trade against a bonding curve. And there's always liquidity for the thing that they collected. Even it's not the price that they want. They can always sell it back whenever they want to. So this is like liquidity is oxygen.

Starting point is 00:49:48 You know, liquidity is, everything for markets, and this gives all collections on Zora instant liquidity. So we'll see where this goes from here, but I think it's a super important ingredient. I think over in Zora, they're creating this primordial soup of just things, of organic material, and something really cool could come out of it. I feel like this is like the last piece of the puzzle potentially. Ripple Labs is now settled with the SEC for a whopping fine of $125 million, which maybe you think that's a lot.

Starting point is 00:50:20 But for what it was, which was $2 billion, the proposed $2 billion fine, $125 million is a huge ripple victory. And so this is Lex Knoad saying that ripple is popping champagne right now. So they have won a settlement. He says probably the first sign that the SEC has litigated to a final judgment without achieving in the earnest total destruction of the company question. It feels like a game changer and a major loss of pre-litigation settlement leverage for the SEC. And so Brad calling Brad Garlinghouse, who's one of the founders, CEOs of Ripple says, the SEC asked for $2 billion. The court reduced their demand by 94% recognizing that they overplay their hands.

Starting point is 00:50:59 We respect the court's decision and have clarity to continue growing our company. This is a win. It's a loss for Gary. This is a win for XRP. It's certainly a win for crypto. David, I don't know if you saw this this week, but this headline absolutely cracked me up. It's the SEC claiming that a Coinbase subpoena is a waste of time. All right. So remember.

Starting point is 00:51:18 The SEC is telling Coinbase that the air subpoena of the SEC is a waste of time. Yeah, because so Coinbase has countered, tried to subpoena some of the SEC's internal documents and materials, including Gary Gensler's email. Okay. So they're asking for all of this discovery. In the same way the SEC has been asking discovery for all of these crypto companies. And that's coming back to the court and saying, they're trying to waste our time. They're asking for 240,000 documents. They're asking for, this would take 400 hours of work from SEC to provide all of this documentation. And it's so crazy to me and ironic that the SEC's complaining that Coinbase is wasting their

Starting point is 00:51:53 time because what has the SEC been doing to crypto this entire year in their lawsuits against MetaMask and Uniswob and Cracken and Rob and Coinbase. How much of our listeners' time have we wasted talking about the SEC and their shenanigans? We are wasting your time now. We are wasting your time now. It's all so dumb. And the thing that really like grinds me is it's all tax-pics. fair funded, of course.

Starting point is 00:52:18 Right. And so, you know, our tax dollars are paying for this. Anyway, if they don't like it, they should just drop the case. And I can't believe they're complaining about this. Anyways, moving on, the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee has proposed to reduce the SEC's budget for 2025 down from $2.6 billion to $2.23 billion. So taking $400 million out of the SEC allowance. The SEC Union, which is related here, accused Gary Gensler of Price

Starting point is 00:52:47 prioritizing other forms of expenditure over employees' benefits and ignored signs that the budget approval would not happen. No more Gary Gensler influencer videos, David. The budget slashed. Oh, the influences videos. I would love to know the budget behind those things. So a memo read, in effect, Chair Gensler waged your compensation, the workers of the FCC, your compensation and benefits, knowing that his staff would suffer those consequences if he lost the bet. Man, his staff just must hate this man. I wonder what the prediction markets say about Gary Gensler's tenure at the SEC right now.

Starting point is 00:53:23 I wouldn't mind taking a bet on that. It's going to zero. David, okay, this other thing, what was going on with these tweets from? I would love to know. Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. I'm just going to read them verbatim because I think we should set the context here. This is Eric Trump tweeting out on August the 6th. I have truly fallen in love with crypto and defy.

Starting point is 00:53:42 Stay tuned for a big announcement. Trump's other son, Donald Trump, Jr., says, we're about to shake up the crypto world with something huge. Decentralized finances the future. Don't get left behind. Really, really fire me up. And he's got these great hashtags here, David. Hashtag crypto, hashtag defy, hashtag B defiant. What is happening here? I don't know, bro. I don't know. Can you go back to your comment below the first one? What? Yeah, before.

Starting point is 00:54:07 Okay, this is Eric Trump saying, I love defy. And then Ryan John Adams saying, what have you used in defy? I'm just curious. Name every defy protocol. What are you talking about? Someone replied to this, and by the way, the use case is using people's exit liquidity. Oh, sure. Yikes. Yikes. Are they brewing something?

Starting point is 00:54:25 Like, what's going on? Is there any story here? I don't know. I mean, like, they already did NFTs. They haven't done the meme coin. Oh, did you see the Donald Trump meme coin went to zero? Martin's clearly formally rugged. Oh, wow.

Starting point is 00:54:36 Surprise, surprise. There's some speculation about what it could be. It's probably nothing for us to really talk about, right, until something happens. But now the president's two sons are trying to do something in crypto. We'll see what it actually looks like on the other side. Why didn't we think of the B defy the fact? What if they used to go bankless? How did you feel about that?

Starting point is 00:55:00 Oh, God. I hope it's paired with something about the banking industry. Yeah. Okay, so last weird-ass thing in the week. This is actually weird but very cool. Pop quiz. Who is the co-founder of Coinbase that's not Brian Armstrong? Who's the other one?

Starting point is 00:55:13 Are you asking me? I know you know. I know this. Pop quiz for the list. This is Fred Erisim, who also founded Paradigm, but about a year ago, he put out a tweet saying he's like stepping down as like managing director of paradigm. He's just going to be like a general partner. And he just wanted to go do.

Starting point is 00:55:32 I think the guy just loved starting things. And also like to great effect, by the way. He's done. They also finished. Yeah. Like paradigm, Coinbase, like doing great. Yeah. He put out this tweet saying, I found a nudge.

Starting point is 00:55:44 with Quentin Frichich. Building an ultrasonic headset, ultrasound hedge set to enhance human experience, press a button to shift your brain state, go to sleep, boost focus, break habits, elevate mood, etc. We believe this device has the potential to improve people's daily lives

Starting point is 00:56:01 more than any other technology. So, just if you were curious, Ryan, about what Fred Erison was up to, he is building an ultrasound headset. Ultrasound headset. From ultrasound money to ultrasound headset, huh? Oh, wow. I didn't even realize that.

Starting point is 00:56:14 I don't know if he was ever in on the ultrasound meme. That would be really cool if you had a headset that could just help you fall asleep or improve your concentration or just like... I would love that. Break your crypto gambling addiction or like whatever. I don't know what that... I bet you it goes the other way. Like, what would happen if you gave this to a drug addict? What would they do with it?

Starting point is 00:56:35 Oh, oh, geez, that's dark. I didn't even think about that, David. I'm sure he's thinking about it. This gets into like medical devices and that kind of thing, which is also a tightly regulated. So, I mean, Fred's going to have to navigate all of that. But a complete departure from crypto, more in the biohacking camp, I would say. Yeah, yeah. I played a game of chess with a EKG headset on one time.

Starting point is 00:56:56 And the guy that was, like, doing this, like, experiment thing on me, he's like, he could tell, like, when all the, like, the important moves in the chess game were happening. Really? Yeah, it's kind of cool. You sort of read your mind, like, in a very... Uh, he was... His experiment was, like, he wanted to figure out if he could guess who would win or lose the chess game, just by reading the EKG readings.

Starting point is 00:57:16 I don't know what the outcome of the study was. Cool stuff. I guess the next frontier beyond crypto. David, we got a meme of the week. You wanted to tell me a story about Elon Musk and what he's up to. Should we start with the meme? We're just going to leave it at the meme. I'll explain some backstory.

Starting point is 00:57:31 Maybe about a year ago, Elon Musk was like on stage somewhere and somebody asked him about like his like hostile relations to his advertisers. And then he very like pointedly said, F you to the advertisers. Specifically this one like Bob Iger guy. I don't know who he is like, I don't know. Disney, Disney CEO. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:57:50 Anyway, so like he just says like our advertisers can like, F off. These are like, I'm going to protect the users, blah, blah, blah, blah. This last week he has announced that he is suing this like group of like, this advertising group for not advertising on his platform. For not buying his ads? For not buying his ads. So a year ago he tells him to fuck off.

Starting point is 00:58:12 and now he is suing them for not advertising on his platform. That's just free markets, Elon. Come on. I don't know what's going on here. I am confused. What's this meme? But Elon does exactly what Elon wants. And so that is what this meme is.

Starting point is 00:58:26 It is basically that meme. Well, let's see how that works out for him, David. And risk and disclaimers, of course, as we leave this episode, you know crypto is risky after this week. You know it a little bit more. You can lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier.

Starting point is 00:58:40 It's not for everyone. you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

Bankless - ROLLUP: Crazy Markets Week | Prediction Markets Bad? | Zora Release | More Gensler Ls | Trump’s DeFi Sons

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