Bankless - ROLLUP: Crypto Momentum | Regime Shift? | Payments War | Prediction Boom | SBF on Netflix

Episode Date: March 20, 2026

Ryan and David break down a historic week for crypto as the SEC and CFTC finally deliver long-awaited clarity, classifying major tokens and reshaping the market. At the same time, Bitcoin is outperforming stocks and gold amid global tensions, raising the key question: is this a real regime shift or just a relief rally? They also cover the rise of prediction markets, the emerging battle for agentic payments (Tempo vs. Stripe/Coinbase), and crypto’s cultural moment with Vanity Fair and the upcoming SBF Netflix series. --- 📣FIGURE | CRYPTO-BACKED LOANS & ~9% RWA YIELD https://bankless.cc/Figure --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔮POLYMARKET | #1 PREDICTION MARKET https://bankless.cc/polymarket-podcast  🪐GALAXY | INSTITUTIONAL DIGITAL FINANCE https://bankless.cc/galaxy-podcast  🏅BITGET TRADFI | TRADE GOLD WITH USDT https://bankless.cc/bitget 🎯THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://thedefireport.io/bankless 🐇MEGAETH | 1ST REAL-TIME BLOCKCHAIN https://bankless.cc/megaeth --- TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 3:47 Macro & Markets (Oil, War, Fed) https://apnews.com/article/iran-gas-field-south-pars-attack-5ad45090d3b66444467cc255ee966a37 https://energynow.com/2025/06/what-is-the-strait-of-hormuz-and-why-is-it-so-important-for-oil https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116253388303392718 https://polymarket.com/event/how-many-fed-rate-cuts-in-2026/?via=bankless? https://x.com/QuintenFrancois/status/2033469474511429805 https://x.com/zerohedge/status/2033322952238723486 https://x.com/zerohedge/status/2032571409273167950 https://x.com/timevalueofbtc/status/2034612806386086296 https://x.com/fintechfrank/status/2033520517009846618 https://farside.co.uk/btc/ https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2034403519609057593 https://x.com/intocryptoverse/status/2033954843048485174 https://thedefireport.io/research/saylor-is-back-in-the-market 22:35 SEC + CFTC Regulatory Clarity https://x.com/SECGov/status/2033996940363317379 https://x.com/SECPaulSAtkins/status/2034012012460556526  https://www.sec.gov/files/rules/interp/2026/33-11412.pdf https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/speeches-statements/atkins-remarks-regulation-crypto-assets-031726 https://x.com/Dogetoshi/status/2034011111008178657 https://x.com/BChillman/status/2033913119756714298 https://x.com/jchervinsky/status/2034003107391172946 https://x.com/EleanorTerrett/status/2034450575773884694 https://x.com/tradexyz/status/2034260987197444255 https://x.com/jchervinsky/status/2034269594282500329 44:44 Prediction Markets Expansion + Risks https://dune.com/hildobby/polymarket https://x.com/Polymarket/status/2034272538465841410 https://x.com/manniefabian/status/2033505062031344004 https://x.com/clashreport/status/2033513701735551202 https://polymarket.com/event/iran-military-action-against-israel-on/?via=bankless? https://x.com/Polymarket/status/2033635318662860916 https://x.com/ChairmanSelig/status/2034625252831998397 52:16 Agentic Payments & Tempo (Standards War) https://x.com/Quicknode/status/2034261280354394610 https://x.com/tempo/status/2034253707303338264 https://x.com/clairekart/status/2034279348480737719 https://visacli.sh/ https://x.com/worldnetwork/status/2033923684768092436 https://x.com/CoinDesk/status/2033883474755551595 58:39 Onchain Banking & Ethereum Upgrades https://x.com/zksync/status/2033864749016809582 https://fastconfirm.it/ https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/2033661196792967254 https://x.com/_julianma/status/2033851796574154808 https://x.com/adietrichs/status/2033863884067475634 1:02:38 Crypto Culture (Vanity Fair + SBF Netflix) https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/cryptos-true-believers https://x.com/CamiRusso/status/2033946061685850353 https://x.com/DennisonBertram/status/2034013980771877353 https://x.com/netflix/status/2033981949740568829 1:08:31 Closing & Disclaimers --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

It is the third week of March, David. They actually did it. The SEC and the CFTC just dropped something that is absolutely historic. This is rulemaking coming from them that gives us the thing we've always asked for, which is some clarity. Tell us which assets are securities and which aren't in crypto. They're actually doing that by name. I think this is one of the biggest things I've actually ever seen on the regulatory front happened in crypto. Insanely bullish. We'll talk about. this rulemaking today. They just went out and said which tokens are commodities and which are not securities. Basically, nothing is a security. Gensler said it couldn't be done. They did it. It turns out you can just say they're all commodities. There's nothing stopping that. Swimming out to the macro markets, though, all global markets still remain downstream of the Strait of Hormuz, but the crypto markets swimming against the current? Is there a very impressive, David. You like this? I like this analogy. Yeah. There might be a regime shift underway in a regime change, if you will, in the crypto market. Some say there is going to be some, but others say that we are simply in a relief rally before we go into a prolonged to bear market. We're going to give both sides of the arguments. Yeah, both sides argument. But I got my cards on the table on that one. I feel like one is more right than the other. Also, tempo went main net this week. And there seems to be at least battle for agenic payments that's underway. There's two competing standards now with tempo and, almost kind of Stripe, launching something called MPP,

which looks like a... Coinbase versus Stripe or Tempo versus Coinbase. Yeah, Tempo and Stripe with MPP and then Coinbase, maybe on the other side with X4 or 2. We're going to try to unpack that to see if there's really some rivalry. Also, it's Culture Week for Crypto. We made Vanity Fair. There's a photo that was all over Twitter.

We'll talk about that photo. And did you know, David, the SBF story is officially coming to Netflix. This is eight episodes. And the question, of course, is who's going to play Sam? going to play Caroline. They didn't call us. Are you going to watch it? Are you going to watch it? I'm definitely watching this. I don't know. I'm going to wait for you to watch it and then you'll tell me. You're not going to watch this? I don't. I'm, I'm preparing for a max level of cringe.

Not at the show. Maybe the show is amazing, but like me as a crypto person who knows too much about all that. I just don't. It's like, I'm just like, you guys got that wrong. Like, both Caroline and SBF, the actors are just way too pretty. versus what their real life counterparts are. Anyways, we're going to get into all of this and more, but first we're getting to talk to some of our friends and sponsors, starting with Figure. The number one non-bank helock lender in the United States

is bringing institutional grade defy to the masses. They have crypto-backed loans offering at almost 9% at 50% LTV with your Bitcoin held segregated MPC custody, not pooled, not hypothesated. They also give you liquidation protection for volatile markets. But the cool thing that bankless listeners know about is democratized prime. So instead of Wall Street,

financing people's home equity loans, you can finance people's home equity loans. There's a token. It's called YLDS. It is the first SEC registered yield-bearing stable coin. You take that token, you lend it into Figures loan pools for a total of 9% yield backed,

9% backed yield, backed by real mortgages or crypto-collateralized loans. If any of this is interesting to you, bankless.com slash figure, to go get that 9%. Is this like the reverse defy mullet, David, where you got, you know, some defy in the front and tradfai in the back?

That is what is this, this is? That is. What is that? Thank you, Fagher. What is a reverse mullet? Let's talk about the, what's going on in markets. So broaden our horizons here. It still feels like oil is the star of the show.

As you said, oil markets and maybe everything on pause, like trying to figure out what's going on. with the war, what's going on in the Strait of Hormuz. Update us. What is going on, David? Yeah, so we are 19 days into the Iranian war. This week, things were kind of going smoothly-ish. It seems like we could start to see the end of the war.

Things were starting to stabilize. And then it all fell apart with an Israeli strike on an Iranian oil facility in the South Pars gas field. I'm sure everyone knows exactly where South Pars was before this week. Here it is on a map. I see it. It looks like it's in the middle of some water, though. It's in the middle of the water.

These are like structures that are in the middle of the ocean. Ocean, is that an ocean? In the middle of the Persian Gulf. And then there's an oil field down there. Israel struck it, taking down some of the capacity of the Iranian oil field there. And then as a result, we have seen a divergence in oil prices based off of where you are. So Brent Crude, which is the oil that predominantly comes. out of the Persian Gulf,

spiked from $102 to $112. This is also, what I left out, is in response to this Israeli strike on Iranian oil facilities, there was an Iranian strike on Qatari oil facilities in response. So Iran was like, you guys are going to strike us? We're going to strike Qatar, for some reason.

Okay. I was going to bring Qatar into the mix. And so as a result, oil production, separate from how the Strait of Hormuz is closed, this oil production in the region is getting constrained just by people striking each other. So that's causing price to spike in. You said Brent crude oil.

Okay. I didn't know what Brent. What is Brent crude oil? And how does that compare to other types of crude oil? Yeah. So Brent crude is just specifically the oil. It's not exclusively this, but if you are looking at the Brent crude price, you are largely seeing the price of oil that comes out of the Middle East, out of the Persian Gulf.

This oil is consumed by Asia and the EU. predominantly. You also have WTI, West Texas Intermediate. That's kind of the North American oil market. Typically, Brent and WTI, they trade around each other because oil markets are global. If somebody can buy cheap oil and sell it at a higher price somewhere else, they will. They're pretty liquid, generally, right? They're pretty fungible. There is a divergence. Usually the spread between WI and Brent is about $2 to $5 a barrel. Right now is clocking in at $17. And so that spread. The divergence is $17.

The convergence is $17. So it says Brent is $17 more expensive than North American WTI. Okay. And that's just telling you the North American oil market is just insulated. It's like it's the oil from Canada. It's the oil produced here in the United States. It's oil from Latam countries. None of that is relevant to the Strait of Hormuz or all the conflict.

And so you're seeing the price of stability in the WTI market. And you're seeing the price of instability coming out. of the Strait of Hormuz here. Okay. And the spot Brent crude oil, that shot up as high as almost $116. Now it's $109 or so. Yeah, that's right.

And the Strait of Hormuz. Okay, so why is this so difficult? I've tuned into some stories around this, which just indicate that there's, like, first of all, it's like 21 mile wide area, at its narrowest point. But this is a prime shipping lane for oil and very difficult to defend, particularly with some of the modern technology and warfare.

Of course, you have like mines and such that can take out boats, but then also drones from Iran can easily take out shipping cargo and even pose a threat to U.S. military ships. So there seems to be like this asymmetry in that it's much harder to defend than it is to attack. Is that part of the story here? That's absolutely part of the story. A massive amount of asymmetry. Iran doesn't even need to do much.

They just need to posture that they will attack ships going through the Strait of Hormuz because then the fallout, the secondary order consequences of that, is that insurance companies are saying, no way are we insuring any ship that goes through the Strait of Hormuz. It just blows out our calculations. And so the idea of Iran just having rhetoric about closing the Strait of Hormuz is enough to scare the insurance companies. And so this is what Donald Trump is trying to posture to the EU about and to the global economy basically saying, hey, we all get our oil here.

Actually, our oil is fine. Look at the price of Brent. EU, China, Japan, your guys' oil is way more expensive. This is your guys' problem. Come help us defend the Strait of Hormuz. Yeah, and EU is probably like, yeah, but you guys started this. So how could you do it? Yeah, but then Trump is like, sure, we started it.

But it's your problem. Oh, my God. That's the status, I suppose, and that's why we're seeing crude oil prices go up. Global equities don't seem to like this very much. So on the five-day, the NASDAQ has been down 2.1 percent, Dow Jones, so these are American indices, down 2%. But in Japan, 3.4 percent, in the UK, 2.6 percent. So global markets, outside of the U.S., being more affected by this, and that makes sense if you see the bifurcation oil markets where Brent crude is much higher than the North American crude oil.

So that's right. Markets aren't liking this uncertainty. I guess the question still lingers from last week, which is, is this going to be buttoned up at some point in time? Is there going to be a piece, a cessation of fire? Like, how long is this thing going to last? Yeah, I think that is a question. I mean, I'm looking at my Robin Hood portfolio as of this morning.

This strike that we're talking about happened yesterday last night. And so markets are responding to this this morning. It's not good. Like it's red for equities. So the question is like, can we just get over? this, when can the markets resume pricing in like the normal things, like growth and revenue rather than pricing in instability and higher inflation due to higher oil prices? So like Trump's after this attack from Israel on Iran and then the responding Iranian attack on Qatar, he released out this

kind of loud, truth social post, kind of doing three things simultaneously. He basically distance the United States association with the Israeli attack on the Iranian oil fields. But then he also said, Iran, you don't get to respond by attacking Qatar. You don't get to do that. If you do that anymore, we are going to come down with a full might of the U.S. military, which I think is, Iran will take very credibly since we are literally doing that. And so basically he's kind of saying is just like, you guys get to be attacked by Israel, but you don't get to hit anyone else back. And that is not anything I would characterize as a conflict coming to its conclusion. Yes.

It still feels very middle gamey, not to end gamey for this whole thing. Donald Trump, when he said, when he announced this conflict, he predicted we will be in this for at least some weeks, if not a month. We are 19 days in, so we still have some time on that month long earlier. It's not winding up, not this weekend. Yeah, it does not seem like we are winding this up any time soon. Okay. So how have crypto markets reacted to this?

Bitcoin down 1.4% on the week. ETH up 3.2% on the week. So interesting, small amount of divergence between Bitcoin and Ether. But even though that Bitcoin is down 1.4% on the week, it is still outperforming equities and mainly gold. And so actually, Bitcoin as a performer lately and especially since the start of the war, has been an outperformer. Yeah. Which is interesting to watch. At the beginning, since the war in Iran started, Bitcoin has been up like,

16% meanwhile the NASDAQ has been down and gold has been down. Yeah. As soon as it's down about 4%. Gold is down even more than like the 8% since the start of the war. Yeah.

And crypto investors of course are feeling this momentum and they're asking the question, oh, was that it? Did we just get a regime shift? Yeah. Is crypto coming back online? This is a poster says the most obvious Bitcoin bottom in history.

And here it is at 69K Bitcoin. That was the bottom, calling the bottom here, looking at prices from 2004, 2005. So because prices going up, of course, people are saying, well, you know, maybe that's the worst of it. Maybe that's the bottom. And in particular, it's been interesting to see Bitcoin rise while gold has tumbled. So look at this divergence here, David. So this is, I guess, gold confusingly in the orange color. And then Bitcoin looks like in blue.

And there's quite a divergence. So gold going down, where, whereas, Bitcoin is going up. Bitcoin is used, this is zero hedge posting. Bitcoin used to be the first risk asset to get nuked on geopolitical conflict. Not anymore. In fact, it is outperforming gold

since the start of the war. Regime shift, question. Now, I will say that, I think I gave this take last week or two weeks ago, Bitcoin or gold has been doing this very euphoric, bubbly run-up thing that popped at 5,500 ounces. for gold like a little over a month ago.

Yeah. And it kind of just seems to be correcting and downtrending from that very high point. So I still to this day think that there's plenty of noise. You're just saying this is mean reversion. It's both Bitcoin mean reversion and also gold mean reversion. Yeah, yeah. I didn't really think about it from the Bitcoin side, but I think that's also valid. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, some people maybe think that, but a lot are saying that, look, Bitcoin, this is Frank Shapiro. Bitcoin is weathered the war with Iran. better than many traditional assets, and he's giving more stats. And he's also pointing to the institutional money coming back online. So net inflows and 12 U.S. listed spot Bitcoin ETF's top $763 million last week. And indeed, that's what you see when you go to the inflows chart. You could see a lot of black, a lot of positive days for inflows into Bitcoin, which is,

yeah, we haven't seen that this year. 10%. So all crypto ETF, Bitcoin and Ether ETF's, total AUM of those things, grew 10%. in the last week. My brain, yeah, it is large. It is large. And if you, you know, if you, if you want to believe, I think you can see the, you could say maybe this is the start of a regime change. As I said to you before, like last week, I think, like my, I'm just outsourcing my cycle

mental's kind of brain to Michael Nato. And he had a good take on the week, which was this also played out in 2022. So the last bear market, 2022, we had a two-month relief rally where we went up about 30 to 40 percent. And people at the time were saying, this was at the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war. And people were saying, oh, there it is. It's a wartime asset. And look, the U.S. is sanctioning Russia on Swift and freezing T-bills. And so there was a narrative accompanying this price pump. But what ended up happening, of course, is that relief rally did not last. And it took two more years into 2024 to reach those highs yet again. So by default, this kind of looks like last cycle

and is probably my base case as well. I'm like deferring that to Michael Nato. He's been right too often for me to, you know, dispute his take on this. You know who agrees with you and Michael? Who's that? Ben Cowen. Okay. Into the Cryptoverse. Yes. He thinks that we are basically down for like setting up ourselves for like another down leg and then we will kind of be in the depth of the bear and that will be just where it is which you know what would also agree with that as well who the four-year cycles yes yes undefeated I got to say that the four-year cycles are undefeated but somebody who is trying to defeat them I will say this is kind of news on the week in markets was Michael Saylor so did you know David Michael sailor bought roughly three billion

of Bitcoin over the past two weeks. Just shy of $3 billion, $2.85 billion. That went under radar. I feel like as a news that I saw on my fees and timeline, that went underreported. I agree. I guess we're always just used to Michael Saylor buying. Yeah.

And we kind of forget to size the numbers, but we got $2.8 billion over two weeks is that's motion. Yeah. So if you look at this chart, these are in orange, these big orange dots, these are all of the Michael Saylor purchases, so the strategy purchases all the way since 2020 when he started this whole thing.

And you could see last bear market in 2022, he wasn't doing very much buying. And that's because he didn't have any cash. No one would give him money to buy. So the little amount that he was buying, he was doing this with excess cash from, I think the micro strategy balance he was throwing off cash, that sort of thing.

Micro Strategy as a brand as a name just wasn't known back then. It just wasn't a big of a deal in the depth of that bear market. Yeah, well, and he had just started Bitcoin was unprepared. Like, people were calling him crazy. They were laughing at him at this point in time. He's still crazy. He might be crazy.

He might be crazy right. It doesn't matter what price Bitcoin is at. Michael Taylor is a crazy person. That's just called being contrarian right, though. You can be crazy right and people will celebrate you for it. But you can see the big orange dots this time around in this bear market. They're some of the biggest dots I've ever seen. Okay, so where did he get this capital?

Where did he get the $3 billion to make these purchases? I mean, the whole idea of micro strategy is it's like trying to make a credit engine around Bitcoin, right? And so he has the at the money shares of micro strategy. He has the strife, the strike products. He can just sell a bunch of paper for Bitcoin. Yeah, that's what he was doing. It's harder to do during a bear market. So he had to offer some juicy yield.

So he raised these billions of dollars in a preferred stock offering called STRC. and this gives holders preferred shares in micro strategy as well as 11.5% per year guaranteed yield. So micro strategy has to pay that back to investors, but that's where the capital is coming from. And his ability to finance this right now is quite impressive, actually. Yeah, the other person buying Bitmine also bought 121,000 ether, not quite $2.8 billion, just a respectable 2.8 billion, just a respectable 2. $250 million. But it buys you more eth though. But it buys you more.

Did you know, right, that Bitmin is 75% of its way to 5% of the total supply of ether? That's incredible. And I got to wonder if they're going to hit that by the end of this year. If they keep making these buys, we'll have to keep getting the capital. Lastly, on markets, FOMC, they had their meeting and the rates were left on change. So the Fed decided to do nothing. they left their rates at 3.5 to 3.75%. Everyone on the board agreed,

except for Fed Governor Mirren. So that's Trump's favorite. Of course, he dissented. He was in favor interest rate cuts. The Fed emphasized there's more uncertainty in the Middle East. Inflation is increasing. Actually said that inflation is 1% point above target. So this is not stagflation, nothing to worry about.

We're just going to hold the course. So while the Fed left rates unchanged, there is something that did change in the polymarket, Ryan, is that we have a new leader for the how many Fed rate cuts in 2026 market there is. It used to be pricing in. We were going to get one rate cut at 25 bibs. There was going to be a 32% chance. That was the dominant market.

That has now flipped into the second place. And now what is first place is zero. No change. 34% coming at number one. And so the market, I mean, it's kind of, it's like a three-way race right now between zero, one and two cuts, so zero bips, 25 bibs, 50 bibs. But right now we did it get a flip in the last week from one cut to zero cuts.

So rate cuts aren't going to save risk on assets. I guess that's what this tells us. We got more to talk about, including this, the biggest news, I think, in a long time in crypto. The SEC and the CFTC are giving us the Clarity Act or something pretty close to it. Let's say the regulatory clarity. Yes. This is like everything we've wanted.

So David and I are going to discuss this when we get back. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Galaxy operates where digital assets and next generation infrastructure come together, serving institutions end to end. On the market side, Galaxy is a leading institutional platform, providing access to spot, derivatives, structured products, defy-lending, investment banking, and financing. With more than 1,600 trading counterparties, Galaxy helps institutions navigate every phase of the market cycle.

The platform also supports long-term allocators through actively managed strategies and institutional grade staking and blockchain infrastructure. That scale is real. Galaxy has over $12 billion in assets on the platform and averaged a $1.8 billion loan book in late 2025, reflecting deep trust across the ecosystem. Beyond digital assets, Galaxy is also building infrastructure for an AI-powered future.

Its Helios Data Center campus is purpose-built for AI and high-performance computing, with more than 1.6 gigawatts of approved power capacity, making it one of the largest sites of its kind. From global markets to AI-ready data centers, Galaxy is serving the digital asset ecosystem end to end. Explore Galaxy at galaxy.com slash bankless or click the link in the show notes. Markets are reacting to a world that feels anything but stable. Inflation is sticky, geopolitical risk is rising,

and capital is moving between crypto, commodities, equities, and currencies faster than ever. A universal exchange like Biggett is built for this kind of environment. With a major app upgrade, BitGet now gives Tradify its own dedicated tab in the navigation. One click gives you access to stocks, gold, Forex, and other global markets, all inside the same platform you already use for crypto. You can get 90% off trading fees on stock perps, and you can trade gold and silver without the fee burn. One app, one account.

Trade crypto and traditional assets side by side without bouncing between platforms. No scattered tools, no login juggling, just a unified trading experience built for speed and flexibility. When gold is reacting to global risk, crypto is moving on liquidity, and macro headlines can shift markets overnight. You need a platform that keeps everything in one place.

This is BitGET's universal exchange, vision and action. If you're the kind of trader who adapts as the world changes, Bigget is built for you. Start trading crypto and tradfi in one place. Click the link in the show notes. This is not investment advice. The SECC and the CFTC just clarified the rules of the road for crypto. They're actually telling us at this point which crypto assets aren't securities and which ones are. It's almost like they're giving crypto everything.

It's always asked for. And that it is possible to provide clarity on crypto assets with, out going through an act of Congress. The velocity of good news coming out of both the CFTC and the SEC is like a little bit overwhelming. It's like we were we were getting good news last week. We were winning last week and we're winning again this week. There's a clip from Chairman Paul Atkins introducing this probably worth watching.

Let's just go ahead and listen to it. So today I'm pleased to announce that the SEC's persistent failure to provide clarity on this question is over. As we speak, the commission is implementing a token taxonomy and investment contract interpretation, and you should find that in your inboxer if you look on the website when you get home. Our interpretation, which is grounded in existing law and informed by extensive public input, establishes four asset categories that are not deemed to be securities. So digital commodities, digital collectibles, digital tools, digital tools,

and payment stable coins under the Genius Act. With these categories in place, the interpretation then clarifies that only one crypto asset class remains subject to securities laws, namely digital securities, which are traditional securities that are tokenized. This distinction returns the SEC to its core mission and statutory authority of protecting investors involved in securities transactions. We're not the Securities and Everything Commission anymore. So, thank you. The laughter and the collapse, we're not the Securities and Everything commission anymore. We're going back to securities and we're going to tell you clearly which

crypto assets are securities and which aren't. And they name five. So this is sort of an informal rulemaking document that the SEC and the CFTC released. How many pages? This is a 68-page document. So you guys can go through it. We'll include a link this show notes. Put it through your AI bot if you want. But it's our job to summarize. There's five categories, a taxonomy of crypto assets

that the SEC just released. Let's go through them. Chair Paul Atkins did go through them. But digital commodities is the first. These are assets tied to a existing functional, decentralized crypto system. And on page 14, I believe, they named some assets specifically.

So, Aptos, Avalanche, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, this is all alphabetical. Cardano, Chaldao, Apto, Apto, Atecoyne, ETHERA, Lightcoin, Pocodot, Shibuino, Shibuino, Solana, Stellar, Tezos, and XRP, those are the assets by name that are in this category of digital commodities. Included but not exclusive to, I think, is the vibe of this. That's right. And these are all not securities. That's the first category.

under CFTC jurisdiction. Which is great because they're like, CFTC, this is your guys is. This is your guys a problem. We don't like this. Mike Seagli, we talked to him. Everything that's not a security is a commodity, right? And so this is not a security.

So therefore, all of our decentralized digital commodities are commodities. What's the next category? Digital collectibles. This would be a shout out to Richie Torres, tokenized Pokemon cards. Yes. Following this category. NFTs, meme coins, artwork tokens, in-game items.

Gensler was so unable to answer this question as to whether tokenized Pokemon cards. So simple. Turns out you can just say these things. He was flummoxed by it, but Paul Atkins, he's just like, yeah, these are not securities. Next up, digital tools, these are, we'll call these utility tokens, utility style tokens for access or functionality in a network. Did they name ENS? Yeah, they did. membership tokens, credentials, domain names.

The next is payment stablecoins. These are also not securities. So the four we've just listed, not securities. Any payment stable coin as defined by the Genius Act, which is our registration. That's where Gary Gensler tried to make stablecoin securities. I forgot about that. He said every token is probably a stable coin except Bitcoin. Or sorry, is probably a security except for Bitcoin.

So now this doesn't mean all stable coins. These are stable coins that aren't securities are those that fall under the Genius Act framework. There could be some stable coins that are actually securities. And SEC will figure that out on a case-by-case basis. I do find this interesting, Ryan. There has been almost a core quest line of the crypto industry, which is Ripple versus the SEC.

Really, really, Ripple versus the world. Yeah. And with the SEC explicitly classifying XRP as a commodity, you just have to say Ripple 1. this quest line ends in a win for Ripple I'm not a huge I don't think Ripple is going to the moon

I'm not a huge like I wouldn't buy Ripple myself I have never bought Ripple this has been a quest line which is Ripple against the SEC and they've been almost a heat shield for the rest of crypto kind of winning their case and this document clearly says

XRP is a commodity Let's get into So question What are securities then? Oh yes So those are the four categories of crypto assets that aren't securities. The one that is are real world assets, are actual securities that we then and we take and we put on chain. So tokenized securities are securities.

Yes. And you tokenize them. Those are securities. That's right. They were securities. And when you tokenize securities, guess what? They're still securities. This is so clear.

It is so clear. I have clarity. It is so common sense. It feels like this. have been done a long time ago. I mean, Paul Adkins said as much. There's also some clarity around some specific activities that we care a lot about. So how about air drops? You remember the geo-blocks where like American citizens couldn't get theirdrop along with the Iranian citizens and citizens of North Korea, right? United States, Iran, and North Korea. Like you guys. Well, the whole problematic.

The SEC has clarified that air drops of non-security crypto assets aren't securities. So don't worry. you can get air drops. That's fine. That is fine now. Mining and staking, those activities, even LSTs. So if you take ether and it becomes a version of staked ether, that doesn't magically turn it into a security. It's still not a security. It's still a crypto commodity. Also, wrapping non-security assets. If you wrap an asset, you know, Bitcoin, you turn that into wrapped Bitcoin in some way. That's also not a security. This is all clarity that we didn't have previously that we now have. It's kind of like wrapping.

We all intuitively knew that like wrapping doesn't do anything to an asset. This is like a technical thing. It shouldn't. It's common sense. But like we still needed them to say the words. I know because you didn't know whether Gary Gensler was going to drop a well's notice on you just because you wrapped. Because you wrapped a token. You wrapped a token or you received an airdrop.

They also touched on the Howie test too, David. What do they say? They said if an issuer makes specific promises of managerial. efforts from which buyers expect profits, the offering is a security until those promises are fulfilled. Interesting. Until those promises are fulfilled. So once the promises are fulfilled, then it becomes a commodity. That's right. And this is very similar to the XRP, sorry, the Ripple versus the SEC case, which is basically before you released XRP and you made these investment contracts, Ripple was a security. But then it turned into a commodity once the network was

launched once the managerial efforts were concluded and once it was available on the market. Right. The investment contracts was the security, but the token, once it was on the network, is not a security and buying and selling the token does not represent a security transaction. It's almost like, and this was the judge's position, the asset itself was never the security, just the deal around it was. The deal. Yeah, the initial deal, the introduction of the deal, where they still packaged up a bunch of extrape and sold it, yeah. So again, more common sense with respect to the Howie test. But that's not all.

So this was incredible taxonomy. There's more. Yes. So Chair Atkins also in his remarks, he provided a, he hoped to provide. So you specified a safe harbor for token issuers. So there are three components to this. Startup exemptions, fundraising exemptions, investment contract safe harbor. What are these?

Yeah. So a startup exemption is like an early stage startup. you don't have to fall under the rules and jurisdiction of the SEC for four years if you raise $5 million or less. So you do a very simplified disclosure requirement, very lightweight, not encumbering of small lightweight startups that need to stay lean. That's the first one. Then there's like a second gate, which, okay, if you want to get even bigger and you want

to raise $75 million, then you can do a more structured disclosure. that's like your second tier, and you have 12 months to do that. But then you can raise up to $75 million and you have four years to figure out how to make your thing decentralized, distributed, fulfill your obligations if you have any,

and then you get to become not a security at the end of that. So it's basically just like a demo period, a trial period, sandbox period, for you to do the thing that you said that you needed to do so that you can become decentralized. And it just protects startups

so they could go through the process of maturing, and decentralization without getting a wealth notice. So this would have protected something like the original Ethereum ICO, let's say, where you can raise under one of these safe harbors, and then within 12 months, say it's less than $75 million the raise, you have a path to releasing this as a commodity asset rather than a security, so long as it falls under one of the four categories in the taxonomy that we just went through.

So it's a path. And I expect ICOs, like ICOs in the market will do this. And so they will probably, you'll probably see ICOs raise under $5 million from the public. And then later they'll raise under $75 million. But I think this is like a permission to ICO or an ICO structure that teams can do. That's the way I see it. I mean, so it's a new type of capital formation that the SEC is providing as a safe harbor. Again, so long as on the other side of that, you become some sort of a digital commodity, a collectible,

a tool, I guess payment staple coins probably wouldn't apply, but you have to be one of those. If you're a security at the other end of that, then while you're a tokenized security, and you'll still remain a tokenized security. So that's all really good news. There was also some good news from the CFTC. The CFTC this week gave a no action letter to Phantom. So this is, I think, something that Phantom requested. They asked for a no action letter from the CFTC saying, hey, like, please don't sue us. And the CFTC said, like, yeah, we're not going to do that.

About plugging into perps and prediction markets. So Phantom is now being told by the CFTC that the CFTC will not take any action against Phantom for allowing their users to access prediction markets and perps inside of the app. And so what does this mean is that this means that Phantom is not being considered to be a broker. It is just a wallet. It's always been a wallet. It's only ever going to be a wallet. but it doesn't have any broker responsibilities

by integrating prediction markets or like hyper-liquid, any derivative platform, into the wallet. There are some restrictions, some conditions that Phantom must meet. They must not handle user funds, so it must remain non-custodial. There must not be any discretionary trading

or no advice given by Phantom. I don't think Phantom wants these things anyways. And then also the prediction markets and the derivatives platforms that Phantom points its users to must also be CFTC registered entities as well, which is kind of interesting. The CFTC said this was the first of its kind letter, and it totally is. I mean, the CFTC could always do this if they were pro-innovation, pro experimentation. Now they're deciding to. But I think this is absolutely massive, David, because it blows open wallets as super apps and other non-custodial types of things. I mean, Twitter could like X could get in this game, other social media platforms.

anyone can get in the non-custodial game. And this is for two of the most interesting high-growth financial products that we have right now. One is perps, which are effectively being rolled out and legalized right now in the U.S. by the CFTC. And that's a massive market. So every market equity, you know, crypto asset will have some sort of perp in the U.S. And non-custodial crypto laws can list those. And also prediction markets, so events-based markets.

Perps and prediction markets, this is blowing open the category of super apps. Like very good to be a phantom right now or a rabbi or a meta mask right now and anyone that wants to list these things. But wait, there's more. The SEC has approved the NASDAX plan to introduce tokenized securities trading.

So this is news that we've had in the past. So NASDAQ had this idea of just like, hey, maybe with our regular exchange and engine and trading venue, where we typically allow security, normal securities, normal equities to be traded. What if also in the back end, some equities that are able to be tokenized

because people want them, what if we also tokenize those? And the SEC just gave them a thumbs up. And so what does that mean? Is that post-trade, the DTCC, which is the clearinghouse for all the securities, the depository trust company, will just go through a tokenization like supply chain

and then out pops a token on the other side, Not for every asset, not for every equity, but for some that want to opt into this and the NASDAQ wants to help create that flow, a token can happen on the other side. So settlement could happen in a tokenized context. The regulators right now are just saying yes to everything, basically.

They're saying, yep, this is what winning looks like. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. This was news as somewhat related, which is the S&P 500 just went live on the hyperliquid. And I think this is the first kind of defy, open finance, perps market that's been able to list the S&P 500. I know you sent this to me. You thought it was a big deal.

Yeah, I think it's a very big deal. It's a very strong validation of Hyperliquid as a trading venue. Like this is the S&P Dow Jones Indy like officially licensing the index. I think they're probably, they're also probably doing creating the Oracle because Hyper Liquid needs an Oracle and needs like a price feed for the perp to trade around. but that is something that we have a robust price fee being piped straight into hyper liquid from the S&P 500 Indycee.

I think that's absolutely nuts. Where else in the world, Ryan, can you go 50X long or short on the S&P 500? I don't think that's pretty cool. Yeah, I do love PURPS as a product too. I mean, very valuable. Do you? Well, I don't use PURPS very much,

but if I did, more trading, I would, David. I guarantee you I would. So let's wrap all this up. What are the takeaways? So what just happened? We've got self-custodial apps that can list perps and predictions. The two biggest, fastest growing financial instruments today. We've got this new way to raise capital,

which at some level, ICOs are back and they're legal this time. You just launch a crypto network and decentralized later, and you get this grace period. We've got full regulatory clarity, a full taxonomy for a crypto asset. This is effectively the Clarity Act just delivered to us by regulator earlier. And then we're getting more than we asked for it even. This is everything crypto is asked for. But now we're actually getting the SEC pushing old TradFi organizations like the DTCC to tokenize on chain.

You actually feel this push. They're kind of like, hey, we're not just making the crypto stuff legal. We're actually asking Tradify to hurry up and tokenize so we can modernize the American capital market system. And keep in mind, the SEC regulates $80 to $100 trillion worth of assets, and the CFTC has $5 to $10 trillion. I mean, these are the deepest capital markets in the world. So go these regulators. So go the rest of the world.

This is just a huge deal. And I know we still need to get the Clarity Act done in order to enshrine this in the hard code legal system of the U.S. But even without that, we're getting a lot of the benefits of the Cleary Act. Clarity Act, and it's just being delivered to us by these crypto-friendly regulators. Can I put on my pessimist hat for a second? Sure. So one thing we're watching happen is we're watching the banks just stall on clarity because they are just happy to stall on clarity. I think they're kind of fine, like having clarity fail. And what they're doing on the other side of things

is they're also building in crypto at the same time. So they're pumping the brakes on clarity and also like, therefore, the rest of the crypto industry, while they are stocking up their own crypto-native businesses because they are behind, but they're kind of playing both sides of the table here. Sure. I kind of think that's the same thing that Gary Gensler was doing. He was just like, stall, just stall the industry,

stall, stall, stall, stall, stall. And like, one thing I'm bummed about is we get all of the things that we just said, which we have been asking for for so long, for years, like five, six years now. And we're doing it in a time in which crypto builder energy is like at an all time low. Oh, right. Investment is at an all time low. Like imagine if we had some of this stuff in like 2021, 2021, 2022, 2023, when like investment was higher, builder energy was higher.

It was like a more opportune time to do all this stuff. You're saying it would have been more crypto-native builder-driven rather than trad-fi-driven, where it seems more trad-fi-driven now. It's all the traditional incumbents catching up. Yeah. Like the Tradify Wall Street, the people that we've been going up against have bought themselves enough time so that they get a larger share of the wins that we are just talking about. And if we had gotten it earlier, maybe we could have retained on a little bit more of the crypto native side of the pendulum. And they have successfully delayed to the point where like finally Wall Street's relevant. And now that stuff is happening.

But that's just that's just that's just that's good. I get that. I mean, maybe that's how it was always destined to work out. There has to be something in it for Tradfai and Wall Street. I guess even if the Clarity Act doesn't pass, though, let's say banks are able to stall this indefinitely. This feels like very hard precedent to go back on. So even if you got a Gary Gensler v2,

do you think that person would be credible to a court system if he repealed and revoked all of this guidance and replaced it with like all tokenized assets are banned? At that point, the cat's already out of the bag, and Wall Street has fully come online. Like, I don't see any world where this gets unwound. It might get mitigated a little bit in a future administration, but I can't see it coming unwound. I think that's bullish.

And with the Trump story, you and I have been critical on Trump on a number of things, right? So the grifting, the personal enrichment, the meme coin stuff. Last week, like, seeing the DOJ come after Roman storm, the lack of protection there. but you have to give him an A plus on one promise to crypto, which is like giving clarity to the industry, getting rid of Gary Gensler and putting an SEC and CFTC in place that are pro-innovation and pro-Cripto. Like on that score, this is an A-plus grade from my perspective

from the executives here. So yeah, we're getting everything we wanted. Now I guess it's our opportunity to go do something with it. Yeah, that's right, that's right. All right, coming up next, we're going to talk about the tempo main net and the battle for agenic payments that is arising. The MPP standard is going up against X402, Coinbase Stripe Visa, MasterCard.

Everyone is trying to build this agentic economy. I actually do think that the agentic economy is going to be kind of a main quest line from the next couple years of the internet, so it's a quest line worth paying attention to. And also, the Ethereum just dropped finality from 13 minutes to 13 seconds without a hard fork? Ryan's going to tell me all about that. But first, before we get to...

All that news, we're going to talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Some exciting news. We are launching a new podcast to help people figure out the crypto cycle, how to navigate it. The best crypto cycle investor I know, his name is Michael Nato. He runs the Defi Report. This is the guy that sent me a sell alert before the 1010 price drop happened. His cycle analysis has been absolutely on point. I've been following him for years. And this year, we started recording weekly podcast episodes. Each one, we get into his portfolio, what he's holding, the market structure, entry targets, fair market value of Bitcoin and Ether, and where we are in the cycle, there's new episodes that are released every Wednesday.

They're 30 minutes. They're short. They're punchy. I think this crypto cycle is harder to navigate than most. So let's do it together. Go subscribe to this podcast. Search the Defi Report. Wherever you get your podcast, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or find a link in the show notes.

There's a new episode waiting for you now. Another week, another all-time high in polymarket prediction market volumes. Okay, so Ryan, at the peak, the spike of the 20, election, there was a weekly volume of just over a billion dollars traded on Polymarket. And that was, when is that, November, 2024. So now we are into March of 2026. We are three weeks in a row of polymarket volumes being over $2 billion a weekly volume

for three weeks in a row. And so we are starting to look back on what looks like a very high spike of polymarket trading volumes. And we are doing double that on a consistent basis week after we. after week, I think it's pretty cool. It is cool. I mean, part of our thesis from the early days has been crypto-eating finance.

This almost seems like it's definitely crypto-eating markets, but it's like crypto-eating media because this is a new form of media. I'm seeing it everywhere in media. And indeed, Polymarket announced something called the Situation Room coming to Washington, D.C.,

which is some sort of physical manifestation of polymarket. Polymarket in real life, yeah. The world's first bar dedicated to monitoring the situation. It's a sports bar, but instead of sports, it's, it's polymarkets. I'm kind of curious as to what this is going to actually be and whether polymarket starts to go a bit, I don't know, would you call this up market or down market into the news game? It's a lateral move into the news game. You can even see that with a lot of the posts that Kalshi and Polymarket are actually doing a lot of

its news. There is kind of a dark side, though, cropping up to some of these prediction markets, some things to get ironed out. And one of them was, this story, which was an Israeli journalist threatened by market traders. What was this about? This Israeli military correspondent for the Times of Israel, he was just reporting about the conflict. He wrote an article about this Iranian missile strike, and that impacted this somewhat substantial polymarket that has like $14 million on it, at least in trading volume, about whether Iran will strike Israel, will successfully land a missile in Israel. And so because he reported this, a market cleared one way or the other.

And so it cleared in a particular direction. So the market oracle was based on the Times of Israel correspondent journalism and what they said, basically. That was the resolution. Yeah, the resolution was, will Iran strike Israel? And I guess the Times of Israel or a meaningful journalist would state the following and this following would be like a missile fell in Israel from Iran. So then he reported it.

And they're like, there was Iranian missile. It happened, landed in the same. Israel. And then he started receiving emails, WhatsApp messages, ex-DMs, demanding that he, quote, quote, like, correct the record to say that the missile was intercepted. I don't know. I don't know if there was any dispute about it. Seems like there wasn't. But there were threats. There were meaningful, meaningful threats to this man and his life saying after. And his family and friends too. Yeah. Just like collateral damage to this man and his loved ones. Like some of the quotes were saying, after you make us lose $900 million,

we will invest. Excuse me. After you make us lose $900,000, we will invest no less than to finish you. So, yikes, obviously, so he just filed a police report. Polymarket announced that they banned the accounts involved and will share their information with authorities.

But it's kind of this thing that we need to deal with as a prediction market industry of the tail wagging the dog of like the market impacting the real world rather than it just being a one-way flow from the real world impacting the markets. Like we need to kind of like manage the reverberations, the real world reverberations of like prediction markets. Yeah, because there's real financial incentives

and in a dark world like some of those financial incentives can turn into threats of violence or actual violence. And the journalist is like, I'm just reporting facts. I didn't sign up for this. You guys took the wrong end of the trade, not my. problem? Yeah, and they're like, I don't piece, I'm sure the journalist is like, I don't get paid enough for this shit. Like, what, like, why, I'm just trying to, I'm just trying to write a story. The news, yeah. One of the things that needs to be sorted out, and I think Polly Market made,

had a good response to this. It does bring up the question of like, how much you really need an identity as part of these markets to kind of moderate. There's something else that's going on with prediction markets, which is the CFTC and the MLB signing some sort of a partnership. What is this? And MOU, CFTC and MLB signing an MOU. Yeah, this is the second memorandum of understanding that we have last week was a memorandum of understanding between the CFTC and the SEC. There's one slightly different. Basically, there is a partnership between the major league baseball and the CFTC.

The quote from the article is that the MOU is a collaborative step towards promoting the integrity and resilience of prediction markets related to professional baseball. We saw something similar last week or maybe it was two weeks ago with Paul market, Palantir and TWG Global. TWG owns a bunch of soccer teams and like football teams and basketball teams. Basically, there's this like three way harmony of incentives between prediction markets, sports leagues, and the CFTC as a financial regulator to create trust and integrity in these prediction markets.

Because I think if you're the MLB, if you have a very large like economy of prediction markets around your games, that's good for you. That's attention, that's money, that's capital, being around your industry. It makes the MLB more valuable. But if these markets start to influence the integrity of the baseball game and you have players like throwing the game or like missing pitches intentionally, then that is destructive to the MLB. So I see this as like, again, trying to constrain the tail wagging the dog and being there, the games are pure. Yeah. And everyone participating in the prediction markets above them trust that they're pure. And the CFTC and prediction market platforms and the MLB are like,

we're going to do everything that we can to create the largest most high integrity markets around these things. This is pretty interesting. So Mike Seleague, actually, the chair of the CFTC and bankless guest is rolling this out, right? So this is signing the first ever MOU between a sports league and a federal agency. one of our questions when we had him on was like, hey, how are you going to deal with market integrity? How are you going to deal with, quote unquote, insider trading on these platforms? And he's like, we're going to regulate it. And you get the sense that he's very open to innovating here, working with even sports leagues in order to get the information required and put the restrictions down to actually make these prediction markets, event-based markets, high integrity.

And so he's like putting in the work and the effort and stretching the agency in areas it hasn't been stretched before. I don't know if this counts as a 4D chess move, but it's a very strong move from Mike Sellegan and the CFTC against the state because you're aligning all of the major sports leagues with the federal regulator side of things over Nevada and the state's gambling laws. Yeah. And at some level, prediction markets are going to be a battle for hearts and minds, I think. And if you're going to win that battle, they have to be high integrity. If users and participants have to feel like they're legitimate, they're not getting ripped off. And so this is part of that, I guess. David, Tempo did their main net this week.

Refresh us. What is Tempo? Payments First, Layer 1, EVM Layer 1, built by paradigm and also Stripe, heavy involvement with Stripe. It's basically going to be Stripes Payments chain. It's focused on very high throughput, very low-fee, dedicated stable coin payments. As it turns out, you were telling me this, Ryan, tempo, the chain. the construction of the chain has a fast lane for stable coins specifically. So while anyone can deploy a contract on tempo,

you have a separate con. If you're like a defy app, like somebody can take Ave and put it on tempo, that'll be in one lane, but it'll be separate from the fast lane for stable coin payments. Yeah, that's right. Stable coin payments will have like this first class right of a fast lane on tempo. Yeah, so they're optimizing for payment tokens.

And so what you're referring to is it's kind of a direction. derivative of ERC 20, like the token standard. It's called a tip 20. Tempo 20 is just for payments tokens, but it's giving them kind of an isolated throughput fast lane, such that if defy activity on Tembo gets oversaturated and fees go up, payment fees will always stay low because they have this priority fast lane.

So that's like one of the innovations. Another piece of this is actually something called MPP, and this gets into the agenic payment type wars, But this is another standard, and when I first read about it, it reminded me a lot of X402. What's going on here? It's another X402. Apparently it also plays nicely with X402,

but nonetheless is a different standard. And so there is some collab or competition tension between these two things. There's not the only one. There's like a handful of people going for the agentic commerce standard. We're going to talk about Visa in a second. But really the idea here is agentic payment. is going to be a very big thing. We need to figure out how to give AI agents

the ability to transact money. It's not that simple as simply handing an agent a credit card, really all visa networks and a lot of like banking stuff is really to prevent bots from using these things. And so we're trying to figure out what's the right way to give agents money. This is one standard. The tip of the iceberg,

we did a podcast with the tempo team about this. The tip of the iceberg is like, the whole internet, might get reconstructed with a money-first AI agent paradigm. And this is kind of just like one of the pieces of the puzzle. Rather than ads being the business model of the internet, it might go back to micropayments through AI agents. Yeah.

Yeah. So this would be like tempo and AI agents. You know, there's a lot of frontier technologies that are all getting birth and this is one of them. Yeah, I do worry a little bit about, hey, we got another standard. Like, why couldn't you guys just? use X-4-2. But when we asked Georgios that question, he was like, it wasn't complete enough.

And this gives us the ability to add credit cards, for instance, not just Stripe. So maybe there are some good reasons for this, but I guess may the best standard win. Visa, like I said, also opened up their standard for agentic payments. You can now hand your agent a Visa card is kind of the idea. I'm sure it's not that simple. But there's also a command line interface and dev tools.

Basically, an agent with guardrails. is the standard that Visa is building. Yeah, it's like command line interface. So it's straight into the dev tooling. I do wonder when you have something like stable coins and micropayments, whether Visa is going to be able to get away with that 3% transaction for you. It is like 30 cents just to issue a transaction. I mean, that can't work in the micro payment world, right?

I would imagine that the dominant majority of transactions from AI agents are going to be below 30 cents. A ton of the innovation. though we've seen this quarter and specifically has been staple coins, agenic payments, also World doing more in this space. So you called this like a dog tag

for your AI agent. So what is World just rolled out? So they are rolling out agent kit, which is a developer toolkit that lets agents prove that a human is basically the owner of an agent. And so there is a human owner somewhere. This agent isn't just like rogue on the internet.

No one knows whose it is. No one knows what it's doing. it's like a dog tag. Dog tag for your agent. You know, if you see a dog out in the world and there's no human there, but it's got a caller on, you know that dog is...

Belongs to someone. It has their name and address on it. You can go over to the dog and check out the phone number. And the address. I think this is like actually private, I'm assuming it's starting with privacy. And so these agents have ZK

proof of person heard. And so it's provable that there's a human there. The information of that human, I don't think is disclosed, but you can easily imagine World could like open that up and be like as the human owner of this bot, please give someone an ability to contact me if they so choose. This is necessary because if you have all these agent pets running around, right?

And like they do something. I don't know, they bite someone or they get into someone's trash or they, you know, go in their house. Like legally speaking, there needs to be a notion of like liability. So if some agent causes a ruckus, then like it's this guy's agent and somebody needs to go knock on his door and if an agent doesn't have that human,

that agent is going to be recategorized by the internet websites, platforms as not an agent but just a rogue bot and it's going to be removed to be a second-class citizen. Yeah, the further we get into this, the more world actually makes sense to me. David, some other news in the payment space, MasterCard acquired a stable coin

infrastructure company called BVNK. So you recall Stripe Acquired Bridge that was last year. This is MasterCard's version of Bridge. I think that's what BVNK is $1.8 billion. Largest crypto acquisition to date. Really? That's the biggest one. The Stripe acquisition of Bridge was the previous large one at $1.1 billion.

Back in February 2025, we have a new high water market at $1.8 billion. See, the longer Tradfai weights, the more expensive it's going to get you. That's right. That's right. Yeah, that's my takeaway, too, almost twice the price. Yeah. I was excited about this. So this is a announcement from ZK Sync.

They have deployed a network of providiums. These are Ethereum Layer 2s built on the ZK Sync stack, providium because they're private alongside five U.S. regional banks. And the reason this was exciting is because tokenized deposits and deposits in regional banks in the U.S. are about an $8 trillion market, David. And so you know that thesis that every bank is basically a ledger. And if Ethereum is the global led of ledgers, the super chain, ledgers are effectively

chains. So every bank becomes a chain that's connected to Ethereum. This is furthering that vision. And ZK Sync may have a shot. Now, tokenized deposits are different than stable coins. It's a bit more banky. Yeah, it's more like a bank collateral than a payment. token. That's right, but they are user deposits and they're FDIC insured, so they have some benefits

there and they're one of the next things that we are going to tokenize. You know what this reminds me of? What's that? Remember during Operation Trokepoint 2.0, you had the CigNet from Signature and there's another like payment standard. So a lot of the same crypto companies use CigNet from signature and the other one that I can remember the name of. Yeah, like a bank to bank payment gateway type thing. Bank to Bank Payment Gateway and they would settle up between each other because there was the standard that allowed for very rapid dollar payments for exchanges to be able to load balance and trade between each other. It's just very crypto-native back-end banking way to send money around. This kind of reminds me of that. So there's five banks, five regional banks, they say, all on the Kari network, all on the same ZK circuit, which allows for very fast transactions to happen between them.

and if it's all on the CK circuit, there's some notion of composability and it's the private and the way that the bank wants. Kind of reminds me of that. I think you're right. I mean, if you had all the banks on that, that's exactly what it would be.

It would enable that. Something else from the EF that I was excited about that shipped is FCR. So this is the fast confirmation rule. You know, in order on Ethereum, nice. Yeah, FCR. In order to get a full economic finality on Ethereum,

you have to wait, it was like 13 minutes, right? So two epochs for full economic finality. Once you have that, it's like, the transaction is, it's all of Ethereum security now backs that transaction. The full faith and credit of the Ethereum Stakers. Yeah, so that's a big deal. But the problem is you have to wait 13 minutes for it. Well, it turns out the F has just rolled out a standard where if you assume just two things, here are the two things that you have to assume, communication model synchronacy and that the adversarial threshold is less than 25%. Basically,

these are assumptions that are almost always true and always have been true. If you want the details, you can look into them. But what this does is it drops the finality from 13 minutes to 13 seconds if you assume these two things. So they call it the fast confirmation rule, but to me it's almost like it's pretty good finality

for almost all intents and purposes. For like 99% of purposes. Yeah. And so what this is really good for is for L1 to L2 Brits. rather than waiting in the 13 minutes. It could just happen in 13 seconds. You know, confirmation of moving assets from on chain to a centralized exchange.

Again, if you have these assumptions, just 13 seconds rather than 13 minutes. Institutions, asset issuers, it's just a nifty standard that doesn't actually require a hard fork. And it's just kind of common sense, Ethereum pragmatism. And this is coming out of the EF, which is always nice to see. It's been a while since I've heard the nifty word. empty, this is empty. We still ultimately do need fast finality. I will not be satisfied until fast finality.

That's right. David, we got some crypto culture maybe to end this episode on. So this is a Vanity Fair photo. Tell me who's in this photo. I could name everyone but one person in this photo, which according to crypto Twitter means I need to be admitted to a psych word. That's a bad thing? Yeah, from left to right, we have Danny Ryan, notably always in his bare feet.

Devin Finzer in the black suit, he's the CEO of OpenC, I don't know who the Asian lady is in the back. We got Mike Novigrass in the Elton John suit, front and center in the red, Kathy Wood sitting on the counter in the back, Olaf Carson Wee in the crazy blue thing, and then Meltem DeMeres in the leopard print on the right. And what's the caption of this?

The caption is, Crypto True Believers demand to be taken seriously. You know that meme of, Wait, Arrested Development, I think. It was like, I don't know what the reference is, but there's like a meme from Arrested Development, and it's like 12 weird-looking people and weird clothes, and it's a sign saying we demand,

it's a homage to that of like, we demand to be taken seriously. Some people thought, like, I will say generally the reaction on crypto Twitter was this felt out of touch. People didn't like it. I mean, maybe I saw some positive take, but Cammy Russo said,

this Vanity Fair photo an article feels so off to me, and I can't figure out at why. And she says, maybe it's because it feels like something that was written in 2018 era of crypto. Indeed, I kind of got those vibes from everyone pictured here. It feels very 2018, you know, everyone's getting hilariously rich and you're not. And it just feels kind of out of touch with 2026.

There was also this other take from Denizen. I was a fashion photographer for over a decade before crypto. I worked for magazines like Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, brands like Louis Vuitton and Gucci. The Vanity Fair article was set up to mock crypto and those depicted in it. So the whole article he contends is just set up to mock crypto. And if you sent this to kind of like your normie friends, I mean, it's probably not a good look. What's your overall take here? I don't know if I really have a take.

crypto Twitter is infamously harsh and so the bias on a neutral thing will always be negative. Yeah, that's true. And so that's kind of what it is. Some people definitely came out optically looking better than others, at least by my value and by my ruler.

Like Danny Ryan in like the normal looking clothes and he's barefoot. And so I guess that's kind of weird. But also I get it. Like Danny Ryan is about public good. And he does yoga and he's trying to D, he's trying to make sure like tech oligopolis don't control us. And that's his vibe.

He's got long hair. And so Danny's fulfilling the Danny role of Ethereum and all that. And I kind of like that. And like everyone else is like, we've got like Armani suits on. Like our outfit costs $10,000. We're in this upscale bar in New York. And it's not exactly exuding the ethos and vibe that I think we want crypto to be known for. I'm doing the thing of I'm providing social commentary about Vanity Fair,

which is itself social commentary. So that's kind of the point here. Yeah. Yeah. So I kind of agree. I mean, nothing more than that. Probably in Vanity Fair did what they wanted to do, which is get some attention to this picture and to this article.

The fact that there is an incredible amount of debate over it means, like, job well done, vanity fair. I guess. It also probably means prices are low, right? Which they are. Yeah. David, who is going to play SBF on the Netflix special? So I believe this is a eight-episode drama about hyper-smart, ambitious, young idealists called The Altruists.

Okay, so this is the SBF and Caroline Ellison's story. We got eight episodes coming on Netflix sometime in 2026, and these are the actors. We have playing Caroline Ellison, Julia Garner, playing San Beggeman-Fried. We've got Anthony Boyle. Do you recognize any of these folks? Who's Anthony Boyle? I don't know an Anthony Boyle. I think I've seen him around, but I don't recall anything I've seen with him.

Julia Garner, do you ever watch the series Ozark? I know it, but no, I never watched it. Oh, she was fantastic in that. And then also, you sent me a movie recommendation recently, which I haven't gotten to. What's it called? Weapons. Yes, she was in that. Yeah.

Yeah, I like that movie. Yeah, otherwise I don't really know any of these people. But you're not excited about this? You're not going to watch this? It's just like, we were there, dude. We watched it all unfold. Like, the thing it's going to be is just like, I'm going to be there. They're not going to represent it perfectly.

And maybe they don't represent it like accurately at all. And they're just there for the drama. Like, you know, based on real world events, but they make something completely different. and I'm like, why am I even watching this? This isn't even the story. I'm going to watch it just for entertainment value and to see. I'm going to watch it with some normies. You're going to watch with your family?

Totally. That's what I'm going to do. I'll see. I'll watch it for both of us. I'll let you know. Will your family care? No. They won't care at all.

They might find it interesting, though. If Netflix does what they should do is they should make an entertaining series that people want to watch, it's not necessarily going to be the truth. But I will be there to fact check, okay? Do you think they're going to put the amphetamines part in there? Definitely. That is hydroman. They're going to stack it with infinites as many as they can.

There's no way they do the episode that we did with Warheads. They don't reference that at all. Can you imagine? That would be a little of reach. We'll see that. We'll see if that makes it there. Other than that, guys, we've got to let you know. Of course, none of this has been financial advice.

Cryptos risky. You could lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.