Bankless - ROLLUP: David Sold His ETH | EF Exodus | Hyperliquid’s Breakout | Stagflation Fears

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

Crypto’s old leaders are struggling, but new winners are breaking out. Ryan and David unpack the rise of HYPE, Zcash, and Venice, the macro bear fuel markets are ignoring, the EF talent exodus, and why David selling his last ETH may mark a new era for Ethereum and Bankless. --- 📣METAMASK | $100,000 ONDO GM CHALLENGE https://bankless.cc/OndoOnMetaMask  --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔮POLYMARKET | #1 PREDICTION MARKET https://bankless.cc/polymarket-podcast 🟦 COINBASE ONE | MEMBER MONTH https://bankless.cc/coinbase-one 🧭OKX | TRADE, EARN, PAY to OKX | 120M+ USERS WORLDWIDE https://app.okx.com/join/USBANKLESS 🦊 METAMASK | DOWNLOAD NOW https://go.metamask.io/BL-Pod-Download 🌐BRIX | EMERGING MARKET YIELD https://bankless.cc/brix --- TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 3:28 Bear Fuel for Markets & Pockets of Bullishness in Crypto https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2056184339390419205 https://x.com/Barchart/status/2056350919139500364 https://x.com/JesseCohenInv/status/2056297490366837184 https://imgur.com/YqnyoBc https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2056556783221502060 https://polymarket.com/event/how-many-fed-rate-cuts-in-2026 https://thedefireport.io/research/signs-of-a-cycle-bottom#macro-update https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/21/iran-war-us-peace-talks-trump-hormuz.html https://polymarket.com/event/us-x-iran-permanent-peace-deal-by 21:27 Hyperliquid, HYPE, and Pre-IPO Price Discovery https://x.com/Matt_Hougan/status/2056720926234882533 https://polymarket.com/event/openai-ipo-closing-market-cap https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/05/20/elon-musk-s-spacex-holds-18-712-bitcoin-at-fair-value-of-usd1-29-billion-ipo-filing-shows https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/sec-readies-plan-trading-crypto-versions-stocks-bloomberg-news-reports-2026-05-18/ https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/05/21/binance-launches-spacex-pre-ipo-perps 32:43 Wintermute Opens DeFi Vaults on Morpho https://www.wintermute.com/insights/news/wintermute-launches-armitage-bringing-its-defi-and-trading-expertise-to-vault-curation https://x.com/wintermute_t/status/2056722776241902065 https://bitwiseinvestments.com/newsroom/bitwise-expands-onchain-solutions-with-introduction-of-non-custodial-vault 38:12  Trump’s Quantum Bets and U.S. Industrial Policy & Blockchain.com IPO and Ronin Migrates to Ethereum L2 https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2057431484915454235 https://www.theblock.co/post/402182/blockchain-com-confidentially-files-for-us-ipo-as-crypto-firms-continue-public-market-push https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2026/05/11/ronin-set-to-transition-to-ethereum-layer-2-from-independent-sidechain 46:34 EF Exodus and Ethereum’s Identity Crisis https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/2056383261648015443 https://x.com/drjasper_eth/status/2056405742769377490/photo/1 https://x.com/tkstanczak/status/2022315368430067847 https://x.com/0xstark/status/2044757694389670239 https://x.com/trent_vanepps/status/2044412517313556786 https://x.com/barnabemonnot/status/2053914533211558331 https://x.com/TimBeiko/status/2050570831491645874 https://blog.ethereum.org/2026/05/11/protocol-update-may-26 https://x.com/CarlBeek/status/2056379557889143042 https://x.com/_julianma/status/2056391635731128763 https://x.com/DefiIgnas/status/2056403039968174208 https://www.theblock.co/post/395541/miladys-loyalty-pledge-unnecessary-culture-schism-ethereum-community https://x.com/josephdelong/status/2019116049694880021 https://x.com/dankrad/status/2057441946616930799 https://x.com/ETH_Daily/status/2056549932455330020 https://x.com/wmougayar/status/2047274807230611805 1:00:04 David Sold His ETH and a New Era for Bankless https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/2057183150816583834 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/2057216981368221776 1:10:00 Moment of Zen https://x.com/ethcforg/status/2057474005913792654  --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

This is the first time we've had a bankless podcast, and you are no longer holding ether. So from bankless to etheless, David. Ethless. What, why? What changed your mind? What happened here? Bankless Nation, it is the third week of, wait, May? Yes, May.

May. Hey, welcome to May. Third week. We've been here for three weeks. Bitcoin and Eith continued to look weak. Maybe that's why I don't remember. But that hasn't stopped some downmarket coins to reach some almost all-time highs. They are pumping. We got Z-Cash, we got hype, we got Venice.

I know, David, you've been following those. So we're going to take a look at these pockets of bullishness. Hype in particular, I think. They've got SpaceX pre-IPO. I think maybe Open AI. They're getting a lot of, should we say, hype this week? Nice. Nice. The Hyperliquid has certainly broken out further into mainstream, specifically because of how much just attention there is on the pre-IPO markets that Hyperliquid has. I also, Ryan, I have some bear fuel for you. For you? Coming from you?

Yeah, that macro bear fuel that I don't know if the broader macro market is pricing in. I mean, I'm not saying I'm bearish, but if things hit the fan, if shit hits the fan, I do want to say that I told you so. So you want to say both things. You want to give us now, you said the bull case. You want to give us the bear case. You can always be right. That's right.

That's right. That's right. Uh-huh. Also, we've got to talk about this exodus from the EF. It seems like every week, more and more ETH researchers are resigning. Is this a trend? What's going on here? What insights do we have?

Also, David, for the first time in history, talking about the bear case, you have entered this podcast owning no ETH, sir. ETH. Oh, my God. What happened? Did that mark the bottom? I'm really hoping so. I also hope so.

I also hope so. You're going to discuss that, what your reasons are and my position on things, and this new era of bankless that I think we've just jumped into. Before we get into all of that, a message from our friends and sponsors over at Metamask. In Metamask, it's not just a wallet. It is a wallet, but it's not just a wallet. It is also a place to trade perps. It's also a place to trade prediction markets. And now it's also a place to buy and trade tokenized stocks through OndoGM.

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So if you are interested in taking part in what this is you can opt into the rewards tab on Metamask mobile, swap at least $100 of any Ondo GM asset, and then hold that threshold for 10 non-consective days, and then there will be a snapshot on June 18th. There is a link in the show notes to learn more bankless.com. It's out c.c slash ondo on Metamask. I got to tell you, it's truly the future when you can get tokenized stocks inside of your Metamask wallet. That was always the dream. Oh, yes, it was. It was always the plan. It was always the plan. Yeah. All right. Give us the bear case. Last week, We talked about inflation numbers jumping up.

We said April CPI inflation rose to 3.8%. We've got some more bearish action, I think, in the Treasury market. Tell us what's going on here. Yeah, the word of the week is stagflation. It's a word that we all should send shivers down our spine. So downstream of the April CPI print rising to 3.8% highest it's been since like 20, 23, I think. the United States 10-year note hit 4.3% that is the highest yield bond yield on the 10-year

since February of 2025. Wait, do you say 4.3? I'm reading 4.63. Excuse me, you are right. It is 4.663. 4.6-3, I misspoke. 4.63, which is the highest since February 2020. The 30-year note rose to 5.16, which is the highest

since 2008. And this is not just United States bond market, Ryan. This is just all global bond market yields around the world. Our rising fiat is just inflationary. There's global inflation happening. This is because of oil prices. Oil prices are also up. They have not broken through the Iran wartime highs,

but they continue to just push higher for longer. We're currently at $104 on Brent. That's the oil coming out of this rate of Hormuz. the highs are $110, $112 to break all-time highs. So again, we're still below that, but things have just moved higher for longer, which is going to just further the input into inflation. Just another data point, Ryan.

Credit card delinquencies keep rising, which is now at the highest level since 2010. It's just one small data point amongst a pool of others. We can go to the polymarket, Ryan, and we can look at the decreasing likelihood of Fed rate cuts in 2026. Over the last just a couple weeks, we went from a chance of zero hikes in 26% going from 36% to almost 80%, 70% is where we're at right now. And so the market is pricing in no rate cuts. Overall, things just don't look good from an inflation perspective,

but then it always brings us back to what happens with the street of Hormuz. Donald Trump, once again, tweeted out, we are in the final stage of talks with a, with a, with a Iran around a deal. How many, how many times have we heard this? I think since the first week. Four, we have like, yeah, there's been a peace deal on a table since, yeah, since the first moment. Peace was always an option. Peace was always an option. For some reason, I think the market is ascribing some amount of legitimacy to this. Like, people are taking this one slightly seriously. There is a verbal statement from Trump that there is a letter of intent being drafted between Trump and Iran. I'll believe it when I see it.

Put the polymarket odds on this are saying that this is not likely. There is a 55% chance that there is a peace deal by the end of July 31st, which is not anytime soon. And if you can imagine the Strait of Hormuz stays close until then, oil prices are probably going to break through all-time highs. And I don't know, man, like, I don't think the global economy can take $120, $130, $140. dollar oil. And according to Rory Johnson, who knows way more about oil than me, he's like, I don't understand why it's not at $180. He's saying $180 now? I know when he came in the podcast, it was $150, but now he's saying $180.

Yeah. And so all things come down to will Iran relinquish the street of hormones? And I have no reason to understand why they would ever do that. Especially when the pain is increasing, right? I mean, they can look at charts. They can listen to the bankless show and realize that, 30-year treasuries are increasing to the highest level they've been since 2008. And they look at that and they're like, nice, pain. This is our retaliation against America. Exactly. And the longer they keep the straight close, the higher it goes, the higher CPI. Now, use the stagflation word a little bit earlier.

I actually hadn't seen that on the timeline. But I know this term comes up all of the time. And it's often sort of a, yeah, it does strike fear in the hearts of investors and those monitoring the economy because it means we have negative growth. We're in kind of a recessionary type phase and also we have inflation at the same time. Interesting, I'm not seeing the negative growth with recession. I mean, we've had a pretty strong year when it comes to kind of GDP. You're definitely seeing the inflation numbers. I think at least it seems like more the near-term fear is inflation. Let me show you some nightmare fuel on the inflation charts. This is a chart that

I picked up from the defy report this week when I was talking to Michael, this is U.S. inflation comparing the 1970s line chart to today. And if you just overlay these things, okay? They overlay pretty well. They overlay pretty well in a concerning way. There was actually two tops to inflation during the historic 1970s kind of inflation. There was 1974 when we jumped all the way above 9%. But then there was another one in the early 19.

That was the second top. There was a double top to inflation where we actually inflation went above 10% all the way up. Oh my God. Why? Yeah. Can you imagine 10% inflation? Yeah. I mean, can you imagine that?

This chart is asking whether that could be in the future for us if there could be a double top. And the reason people are giving for the possibility of double top is, of course, the straight remains closed, but then also consumer sentiment, consumer expectations. can almost cause inflation to rise. The first time we had inflation, you know, after COVID, people hadn't seen it in 40 years. This time they're anticipating it. And will that drive consumer behavior towards more inflationary tendencies? That could be a possibility. And all of this, and you have Treasury, you have Besson, and you have Warsh, and what are they going to do when they

have over 100% debt to GDP and the interest payments keep going up as their yields are increasing, Right? That's a rock and a hard place for treasury and the Fed. And so the only way out, the only answer has been the long-term thesis of crypto, the long-term bankless thesis, which is Fiat, you got to print the money to get out of this. Now, in the short run, that could be bearish for our risk-on assets, which crypto is kind of lumped in the risk-on category right now. Over the long run, scarce assets, alternatives to the Fiat system have got to outperform. And this is an inflation area, money printing decade. You could just see it in the charts. This is kind of where I've concluded. I think that it could just be short-term hard, but debasement ultimately just benefits anyone. Like, as you said, it benefits all of crypto

because we are scarce assets. Maybe Bitcoin specifically, maybe there's idiosocratic ways that the crypto industry response to this. But, man, I see a world where it's like short-term difficult because of interest rates, but then I do 10% inflation. You know how much money we're going to print when we do that? Well, there could be, it could be the case that Warsh comes in. And he's like, oh, inflation, it's just transitory.

Remember when we were talking about transitory inflation because we have the deflationary force of AI. It's transitory. They'll be good news soon. Maybe the straight will reopen. So he might be able to kind of sweep this under the rug for some period of time. But I don't know. I think that the market forces here are pretty strong and consumers are expecting inflation and supply chains are being hit with it. I think we're in for an inflationary set of months, maybe years.

When Kevin Warsh says AI is deflationary and this gives me room to cut rates, I don't know where he's getting off on that. Like I kind of understand the logic, but as a governor of the Fed. Wait, do you understand the logic? I mean, the logic is, right? you know, the economy's humming and cost of services go down. Yeah. Right. So productivity is up.

Healthcare costs, decrease. Yeah. Costs decrease. Yeah. Because of AI. Yeah. Which is the, the thought. But we don't know, dude.

Like, we don't know if that's what happens. Yeah. What we're seeing right now is 3.8% in rising. Yeah. And like, I'm, I'm, that would be great if that happens. But it seems aspirational. And I don't think. that a federal governor should be aspiring manifesting in order to create Fed policy, dude.

No, you don't believe in manifesting? No, I do not believe in the Federal Reserve manifesting. We'll see. I mean, he hasn't gotten in yet, so we don't want to prejudge him, but definitely a tough place for the Fed and Treasury. I'm sure they have a way to get out of this one, but it's going to be more money printing. And the stock market reacted to everything that we're saying Friday through last Tuesday. Oh yeah, we didn't start the episode with all-time high, so we didn't get an all-time high in stocks.

Yeah, no all-time high in the S&P. The all-time high was last Thursday, Friday. It was red at the end of Friday, Monday, Tuesday, and it was down like 2%. But now we're back up 1%, so we're less than 1% off of the all-time highs. And so the market is seeing everything that we're talking about. And it's like, I don't care yet. I don't care yet. It's all about the AI trade.

I mean, I guess that's fueling all of that. Yeah, I guess. There are some pockets of bullishness in crypto, though. So blue chip assets, the Bitcoins of the world, the Ethereum's of the world, not much movement to the upside, down on the week. But there are a few things that are happening. Oh, we should mention strategy, micro strategy. Bought two billion or Bitcoin.

Keep him Bitcoin afloat. Yeah. Keep him Bitcoin afloat. Thanks, Mike. That comes down soon to all of us. A little $2 billion donation. A little two billion. Yeah.

So he bought, it was something like $20 million. dollars of Bitcoin last week and everyone was like, dude, why even bother announcing this? Yeah. But the next week, the following week, he gets $2 billion. So much money. That's crazy. Also, Bitmine locking in that ETH target of 5%. They are on track, as you know, to hit 5% of all ETH by September.

Just over a year later from when he started, Tom Lee almost has 5% of all the ETH. Did he buy some more last week? No, he didn't. This is somebody extrapolating to where and when he has. Why is this Tom Lee working at Starbucks? I don't know. Oh, he's handing me a latte. An Eith Latte.

The milk thumb shaped in the Eith prism here. Yeah. Beautiful. What happens when he hits 5%? Because I feel like that's the big question for Bitmine. Like, what happens next? Oh, mission accomplished. Yeah, mission accomplished.

He did it. But it's a company. It's a company. What, they can never just stake Eith into the sunset? Look, you just stake it. And right now he's making like 300 million a year for just staking that Eath. Nice little yield. But he's also not selling that.

Right? What happens next? What happens next? What happens next? That's a big question. Maybe Tom Lee will come in and help us fix the Ethereum Foundation a little bit. I don't know. That would be good.

More to discuss later. But first, let's get to Hyperliquid, Zcash, and Venice. These are tokens in this crypto bear market that are actually up. They are breaking the trend line. You got some farch for us here. What are we looking at? Yeah, first hyperliquid all-time high. New all-time high coming in.

Oh, it's down a little bit. But it hit $61.5. That is a new all-time high for a hybrid. What's the market cap here? Are we talking like $50 billion or so now? There's a big dislocation between the market cap and fully diluted valuation of hyperliquid. The market cap is. It just surpassed on FDB.

Do you see this? Hyperliquid surpass Salana FDV. It's a little bit of rivalry going on there. 56 and a half billion dollars on the FDV only $14 billion on the market cap. So big dislocation there. I'd actually like to learn a little bit more about what that dislocation is.

Oh, it's just tokens that haven't unlocked yet. Yeah, but like how and why? What's the nature of those unlocks? How quickly are those going to come unlocked? Pretty fast. You think so? Oh, yeah. I mean, Michael Nato's got it in the TDR.

He did a report on this. And I read up on it. Of course he did. Of course he did. But don't let that be a reason you're bearish with Unlocks, right? Because that happens over time. And the here and now, we got what on the week? A 47% increase in price in the week?

Yeah, 47% increase over 30 days. 40% increase in the last week. There has been particular momentum behind Hyperliquid in the last week. We'll talk about that in a second. Zcash up 25% as well this week, knocking on all-time highs, not quite all-time highs, but knocking on all-time highs. All-time highs in a bear market?

I thought Bitcoin was supposed to lead. Yeah, no, no, there has been idiosyncratic moves, down-market coins. Yeah, you're right. We don't really see firm all-time highs, but we are, that's what we are. And also Venice, VV, the private AI inference application on base, also new all-time highs. That's not so surprising to me. So I could, I know we're going to talk about hyperliquid more, but obviously that's some kind of perps. it's purposes and IPOs.

You get stocks. It's kind of not necessarily purely correlated to crypto, right? And then you got Venice, which is part of the AI trade and picking up traction and, like, pretty amazing, private AI. Zcash is the truly idiosyncratic thing because it is a quote-unquote alt-coin. It literally is an alternative to Bitcoin. Yes. It's literally a fork of Bitcoin. No, it's not.

Yeah. No, it's not a fork of Bitcoin. Yes, it is. What? Yeah, dude, it's a 21 million hard cap. No, I know, they forked the supply and such, but it's not like they didn't actually forked Bitcoin. The blockchain did not fork. It's a code base fork. Wait, what? They forked the, the, it's actually a fork?

Yeah, I don't know about that. It's not a blockchain fork, but they took the Bitcoin code base and they forked it to make Zcash. I know they forked obviously the supply schedule and some of those details, but the whole code base, I mean, it's all. Pretty sure. Zook. For sure. Fact check, David. Okay.

We're in fact check and come back to this. Didn't you just do a podcast episode on Zcash? Yes, which is where I got this from. Oh, really? Okay. Well, maybe.

I'm out of the loop then, quite possibly. Is Zcash a fork of Bitcoin? Yes, Zcash is a fork of the Bitcoin code base. No way. It was developed by taking the original Bitcoin core software

and altering it to introduce enhanced privacy features. Yeah, it's a fork of Bitcoin. I just found that out. Yeah. And so they forked it and then they added the ZK stuff. You got a coupon list in the bankless suit.

Yeah. I guess I do. All right. So that, I guess my point is that is the truly idiosyncratic thing. Like, it's not supposed to happen in a bear market that some alt coin is like drastically outperforming. Actually, have you looked at the Z-Catch, the Bitcoin Z-Cash ratio, the pair here? Oh, that's got to be at all-time highs. It's got to be, right? It's got to be at all-time highs. Somebody can go look at that. Not even close. What do you think that means? Well, this is also why Venice is pumping. Privacy is in right now. You also say, you also say, Railgun, which is a more niche privacy project on Ethereum and also Vail a more niche privacy product on base, those tokens are also doing well. Privacy is in, dude.

Privacy is in. Well, that's great. I'm very glad it's in. It needs to be in. We need more privacy. David, we got more on hype coming up. And what else? After we're done talking about the hyper liquid momentum, we'll talk about the incoming.

Potentially biggest, most historic IPO season ever. We got SpaceX who filed this week, Open AI on the. cusp of filing, and then there are even more after that. And then we're going to talk about winter mute, getting into vaults and the SEC framework that got teased about tokenized securities. We're going to talk about all of this and more. But first, a message from these sponsors that make the show possible. Trading is changing. Not gradually right now. OKX just launched trading bots directly inside the OKX app. Grid trading, DCA, arbitrage. You set your strategy once and it executes around the clock. No staring at charts all day, no manual entries,

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Up 47% on the month. Why is hype so strong? from Matt Hogan. Hyperliquid is not a crypto app. It's a super app. It's not targeting the $3 trillion crypto economy. It's targeting the $600 trillion global asset market. That's all the trillions. I think that's the tam of just about everything, Matt. He said investors are valuing it as one thing. It's the other. The other, he means, the bigger number. The bigger number. Yeah, it's the bigger number. Yeah. And this is, Bitwise, is pretty bullish on hype on the week. There was some bit wise news, right? Yeah, they launched their hyperliquid ETF last week.

We covered that briefly. They're taking 10% of the fees from that ETF, and they are just buying hype with it and holding it on the Bitwise balance sheet, just Bitwise treasury. So just an alignment statement, a marketing statement from Bitwise that obviously the hyperliquid community really, really likes. There's only two ETFs. Bitwise has one, and then 21 shares has the other. They are doing some pretty okay volumes to start.

And so it's definitely penetrating into the Tradfai circles pretty well. Ryan, do you follow this account? Geiger Capital. I've seen Geiger Capital, usually in meme form or some chart. He's a decently well-informed tradfi kind of fin-tuit investor, but really his strengths are FinTwit memes. And he tweeted out Hyperliquid. First time I've seen him tweet about anything about hyperliquid. And this person is just like the meme guy of all of FinTwit tweeting out Hyperliquid. Now, why? Why is it, where is this attention coming from? First, it's worth noting, that real world asset volume on hyperliquid is breaching 60%.

And so it's servicing the normal economy. It's servicing that $600 trillion that Matt Hogan said. It's also got, you know, Bitcoin perps, Solana perps, ether perps, dogecoin perps. It's got all the normal stuff. But really. The normal stuff. Our normal stuff. Yeah.

But really like the growth of hyperliquid has come from just real world assets. It launched oil markets. It launched the S&P 500 with a real partnership with the actual S&P 500. It launched gold and silver during their golden silver mania of a couple months ago. And that's where the dominant volume has come on. And now the new thing, the thing that has pushed a ton of momentum into it in the last couple weeks, is the pre-IPO stonks. Because you can't get these anywhere.

Because you can't get these anywhere. And so ahead of IPO filings, really this is trade XYZ, which is the dominant market deployer on hyperliquid. they create a pre-IPO market and allow people to trade it, which is why you can trade SpaceX on Hyperliquid ahead of the IPO, which is the most hyped IPO, the biggest IPO in history. And so Hyperliquid is getting noticed by TradFi by doing a service that TradFi doesn't have. And so it's getting its momentum.

It's also a source for price discovery for these assets where we don't really know where they're valued. I mean, the last valuation was some sort of private round. They was somewhat opaque, right? And now price discovery for some of the world's largest companies, and these companies that are getting ready to IPO is happening first. Where on hyperliquid in this market? So that's price discovery 24-7, like on crypto rails for assets that just aren't available anywhere else.

There was a tweet that rocket around the hyper-liquid community of somebody doing the Sarah Bress. There was the IPO that happened. last week, the Nvidia competitor. We talked about this, yeah. Yeah. And somebody, there was a, like on the Wall Street trading floor, there was somebody from the, I don't know if I'm pronouncing the company, right,

but the Sarah Briss company was like, yo, congratulations to like the Ceribus team. And they had computers in the background. And there was very clearly the hyperliquid interface up on the trading floor of Wall Street. Right. Yeah. And so you know people are using hyperliquid to determine prices, to look at prices. And this is SpaceX last week, I believe, officially, while their S-1 registration statement with the SEC

ahead of this IPO. Their revenue is about $5 billion, but the value of this, the current value in Hyperliquid, is it like north of $1.8 trillion, something like this? I mean, that's what I thought the IPO price was. That's like $1.7 trillion or something.

That's the, okay. Yeah. Okay, so I was kind of curious because I was thinking about this. With Hyperliquid, they're releasing an asset called SpaceX. It's SpaceX. price exposure, you're definitely, this is a synthetic, so this is a perpetual of some kind.

You definitely don't, if you buy this, you don't own SpaceX equity, okay? You're not an equity holder. But you do have price exposure. But the question is, with all of the other perps on hyperliquid, right? Bitcoin has spot price, ETH has spot price. There's all some sort of reference spot price Oracle to refer to. How do you get a reference point for the price of SpaceX if there's no spot market? It doesn't even exist in the real world.

What is this thing? What are you buying if you buy SpaceX on Hyper Liquid? That's exactly why this is an innovation. This is an innovation. Is that how do you find the price when there is nothing to refer to? And so just a small nuance, it's not Hyper Liquid that's deploying or like listing SpaceX. It's trade XYZ or any HIP3 deployer. So it's like a third party who's a service provider on Hyper Liquid.

And so they just go and they do a little bit of due diligence. They look at the last funding round of SpaceX, how much that was valued at. They look at some documentation, the 409A's, the secondary bids. Yeah, they kind of like, you know, like their finger, stick it up in the air and be like, eh, seems about $1.7 billion.

And so we'll pick a number that seems correct. And then that's the anchor number. That's the reference number. And then traders can trade around that number. And as perps work, if the price that traders are trading around, number dislocates the yields, the interest rates go up, but they, hyperliquid and the pre-market IPO, IPO platforms, they dampen the volatility or the severity of the yields if it

dislocates too far because they want it to dislocate away from the anchor price because that's, that is the price discovery. And so this is in contrast to Bitcoin, ether, or anything with an actual known Oracle where the interest rate, the yields paid by the people going long and short are set off by how many people are going long and short. And so the yields can get really high if it's one-sided. The yields, the interest rates that's charged to traders stays pretty manageable, which allows for the price discovery. And so this is all before the actual IPO, actual moment. Traders are free to push the price around this arbitrary number set in stone by whoever is deploying the market. But then there is the moment of the IPO. And then that is when kind of like

the Indiana Jones things happen where they hot swap the actual anchor price. So the former anchor price, the arbitrary number is just discarded. And then now an actual Oracle price of the actually trading equity takes over. And then it kind of resumes it being a normally like more traditional perpetual. Did I explain that okay? You did. Yeah. And so there's a, but before IPO, it's kind of this, this reference number set by hyperliquid after IPO, the spot market becomes kind of the reference Oracle. And the pricing around that, provided you have enough liquidity and hyperliquid,

has shown that it does, seems to be pretty close, pretty accurate to what the actual market would price these things at. It all works, I guess, even better than you think it would, like, work on paper. Yeah, it's because there's literally trading nothing before the IPO, and then they're trading around an Oracle price.

You're trading nothing, but you are trading something. You're trading what investors demand and supply for that IPS. So you're effectively, you're finding a market price for this thing. Yeah. That's why it all works. But then also there's the mechanism of in the future, it will be anchored to the Oracle so that you know that it will settle. It's actually incredible.

And I think Tradfly is probably looking at this and be like, oh, shoot, we should have thought of that. We do have to give a tip of the hat to lighter, lighter the purpose platform. on Ethereum. They actually listed SpaceX two weeks ago. Oh, they did. Yeah, they were way ahead of the curb here. Well, actually, so did Hyperliquid, right? It's been available. No, Hyperliquid just launched it like a couple days ago. Lighter beat them by like two weeks. Yeah. I mean, it's fantastic. We're innovating here in crypto. What's so striking to me about this, too, David, is this is some of the original things we've been excited about in D5 for a long time. It's happening outside of the platforms and the apps that were originated here.

This is like Kane Warwick synthetics on everything. It just like we're in a different regulatory regime where apparently this is okay. Now we have the ability to scale this. We have the kind of user demand. It strikes me that is so much about sometimes getting these things right is so much about timing. Totally. You need all of the prerequisite infrastructure and regulatory apparatus in order to make the thing happen. But the idea like has been around for like years.

Synthetics was early. Synthetics, yeah. Synthetics was early. So that's the SpaceX IPO. Again, going to be the biggest IPO of all time, 1.7 billion. They're trying to raise something like $1.7 trillion out of the gate. It's already going to be like a top 10, top 20 company,

which is just wild. Fun fact, Ryan, did you know SpaceX holds almost 19,000 Bitcoin? I didn't. Wow, I knew Tesla did. I guess all Elon companies own a little bit of Bitcoin in the balance sheet. Yeah. Yeah, I actually don't know how SpaceX got so much Bitcoin. That's a lot of Bitcoin.

$1.3 billion of Bitcoin. Oh, yeah. That's a lot of Bitcoin. I mean, we're not talking Michael Saylor levels. That's probably the second largest dat, though, for Bitcoin. Yeah, dude, it's more Bitcoin than I got. Something like that.

Yeah. But then, okay, so it's not just SpaceX. It's also Open AI. Open AI is rumored to be filing, potentially as early as this week for their IPO. And then also, you know, just Anthropic and other companies are just shortly thereafter, which why people are calling it

the most historic IPO season of all time just in terms of size, which is why hyperliquist positioning here is particularly strong. Adding to the momentum, Ryan, the SEC this week hinted at releasing a framework for trading tokenized or digital versions of securities. Yeah. There's a rumor that was leaked somehow that the SEC is expected to release an innovation exemption

for tokenized stocks, potentially as soon as this week, which would be today or tomorrow. So we should be hearing about this soon. Such a different era of the SEC, right? Yeah. Like with Gensler's SEC, you would have had office hours with Gary Post where he would have a video wagging his finger at you and saying that don't buy those illegal securities. Don't believe those SpaceX, you know, like products. It's not the real thing. Like you can only get the real thing from an SEC regulated like trading market, whatever. And now the SEC is much more embracing, encouraging, certainly not preventing some of the this free market discovery. David, there was some news about. WinterMute as well, opening vaults.

The vault theme is a pretty big deal, I think. This is on Morpho. Tell us about this. Yeah, when we had Matt Hogan from Bitwise on the end of last year to do a predictions episode, this is one of their big predictions, was vaults are we going to become a very big deal? Wintermute, probably crypto's biggest market maker

is getting into a new line of business, brand new line of business, a new defy vault curation business. they have two vaults that they are deploying on Morpho. USDC Prime and USD Select. This is just two different levels of risk appetite. One is less aggressive. Prime is less aggressive at 4 to 5% to 5% to 5% to 8%.

Which do you prefer? Obvious. More aggressive? I'm not here for 8% yell than my USCD dude. Wake David up when you have an ultra-hardcore aggressive. We're going to be up for double digits. Anyway, it's great. for less aggressive investors than you.

And this is on USDC, so it's a stablecoin type product, right? Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah. So what's interesting about this is they're doing it in Morpho, right? So it seems to be these companies, this is not exactly Wintermute. It's what a subsidiary?

No. Well, today we're launching Armitage. So they're doing this under a separate brand, I suppose. But they're bringing all of their market-making expertise and risk management skills to these vaults. So rather than just throw stable coins into a vault from somebody who you don't know or is part of some governance form or something else, it very much feels like professionals taking over the management and the accountability and the risk with a brand name of these vaults.

Right. So Bitwise did this earlier in the year with a Bitwise vault. This is a press release. Bitwise expands on chain solutions with non-custodial vault curation also on Morpho. there's was a 6% APY. They have a whole team around this, a whole risk management team that you can just be like,

these guys have looked at what's going in the vault, how the yield is generated. It's got the Bitwise brand name. We're doing this, we're dotting all the eyes and crossing all the T's. And so this is implied, something you can trust

because the Bitwise brand is being staked on it. I like that model. It's a cool model. It's still a smart contract, but there's some reputational skin in the game from risk managers

so that you have a bit of assurance that you're not just like chucking your money into something that who knows where the yield is coming from, right? Some like defy farm somewhere that's going to get hacked or going to get rugged. The professionals are on the scenes with these faults. I think bitwise,

now they're 15 billion in assets and management. So they're pretty large and upcoming financial company, quite honestly. How long until Blatrock does this or fidelity. Like all of the fit. I think Matt Hogan is exactly right.

Like this is a big move. I think VALTS are going to be a big deal this year and then into the next year. Well, I enjoy seeing DFI evolve and get more sophisticated and mature. I can't help to feel a little bit sad because the juxtaposition between the hacks on AVE and Defi native stuff in some of the OG Defi platforms. the juxtaposition between that and then these legal entity managed financial structured products. There's just a gap there.

Oh, do you miss the yam farms? Do you remember that? Yeah. That's not exactly what I was going for, but I think that's a different topic. I do miss the yams. What was that era? That was defy summer. Yeah, you would just put your stable coins in some vault.

had no idea where the yield was coming from. It was double digits, sometimes triple digits, the way you like it, David. But like, it was not sustainable. Because the reason why it wasn't sustainable was because people were speculating on a token called DMs, which had no plan whatsoever. I'm just talking about, like, putting USDC and Ave, like people, like I was listening to Kane Warwick on his podcast, on Laura Shin's platform. He's like, I feel so stressed out about putting my money into defy right now. Just hacks. You're talking about.

Just hacks. Just hax. Defi risk. Had the hack thing. Yeah. And then like I look at BitWise's vault strategy and they're like, that is a completely valid answer to this problem. Why is it a valid answer? Because there's someone with accountability.

There's a legal entity with accountability. Not really the bankless like true defy, you know, code, not kings philosophy. And so again, why I like that this is growing. I like things that grow. this is clearly working, this is clearly a solution here. I can't help to feel like, yeah, I think you get what I'm saying. I get what you're saying, but you know what I mean? It's still permissionless.

Anyone can spin this up. It's nice to have state back reputation. It's nice to have somebody who's looking where the yields are coming from and giving investors that level of assurance. I'm not sure how they're handling smart contract risk. That might be another question. But that might be required before some of the big, big guys, the Fidelity's and Black Rocks come aboard.

David, the Trump administration is investing $2 billion in quantum computing companies right now. I know quantum has been a big theme for us this year, as we've talked about the effect of quantum computing on all of our crypto cryptography, including Bitcoin. Now Trump, the U.S. government, is spending $2 billion in this area. So $1 billion going to IBM, another to chipmaker, some to some startups. By the way, I was looking at where does this funding come from? Where do you think it comes from? Taxpayers? Yeah, that's right.

It's from taxpayers. More specifically, it's Biden's 22 Chips Act. You know, Trump's kind of allocating some of that and throwing that out of quantum and putting his name on it. That is humorous to me. Yeah. Do you support this? So, like, I think in our agenda somewhere it said this was a grant, it's an investment. It's an investment.

It's an investment. The U.S. government owns these. companies. They own equity. They're investing. It's an interesting that they use the word grant, but then they get equity. And so it's an investment. Yeah, they are investors, right? So we are investors. You're a taxpayer in the U.S. You're an investor. You own some of this. How do you feel about that? You think the government should be doing this? Yeah. So like, what's the rationale here? Industrial policy, right? Industrial policy, but these are what he is investing and what the White House has invested in. It's semiconductors with Intel, it's chips, critically important in the world

of AI. It's minerals, also critically important in the world of drones. You're talking about previous investment. It's not this quantum one, just previous things. Yeah, this is actually not the first or second or even the third time they've done this. This is the fourth time they've done this. Yeah. And like quantum is just the new tech stack that the government is deeming a national security interest that they need to invest in and also own and govern over. So critical minerals, they also did this. There's six different critical mineral companies that the White House owns now. There's a nuclear energy company. There's, semiconductors, as I said, with Intel.

And Trump is like up on his Intel. He's up so big. He's like up so big on all of them. Even all of the quantum companies, like IBM is up 4%. And that's the one that's up the least. Like the other eight companies that he invested in are up between seven and 10%. So like anytime Donald Trump dumps money in these things, these things go up, obviously, because they have like regulatory protection because they're owned by the government.

It's like as far as being bullish goes is a pretty good owner to have. but like how do I how do you feel about the government politics having corporate governance over yeah this is a libertarian right this is not like free market let the free market play out this is industrial policy this is selecting winners this is i don't know what else this is this is also a vector you know for corruption quite possibly right give the right person a bribe find the right contact they will invest in your company everyone wins like there's some challenges there's some like bad sides to it as well. Yeah. This is basically explicitly the China model. This is what China does. They just, they effectively own all of the companies inside of China just because they govern,

they govern everything. And so this starts to look a little bit like that, which I probably is a good play because China's, China's been winning. They are efficient. I don't know if it's the long term, I'm worried about it eroding everything, at least in the short term, I think, is a good move. I would, I need to do some study up on like industrial policy in governments and what I think. Because I don't really have a strong opinion on this yet. And I would like to have a strong, I would like to have a really stronger opinion on this that I can help people. What is your gut say?

What is your gut say? Probably necessary, but the tradeoffs should be acknowledged. And we should be careful. so that particularly the corruption vector and the over the the loss of private competitiveness those are the things I sort of worry about but like there's kind of the idea of like USA Inc. America first. Yeah. Moving.

Well, no, I mean like the United States is a corporation now, right? Yeah. Like it kind of is but it, you know, anyway, I have some hangups with it but like maybe maybe necessary but we've got to have some moderation around it. That's all I've come to. I need to give it more thought and to really have an opinion on it. A thread will continue to pull on. Blockchain.com has filed for IPO, so they're doing it, David.

Also, Ronan, you remember the gaming chain? Yep. They have now completed their migration to Ethereum L2. I feel like we were talking about that maybe six weeks ago. Anyway, that happened. Here's the big thing for me. Because they're on a layer two, this has been a big big, bankless theme. They actually did the thing where they reduced inflation from 20% a year to less

than 1% a year. Their token issuance. And they're taking those savings and they're putting it into their Ronan treasury. So David, they're doing the thing where they're saving issuance by outsourcing that to Ethereum effectively, outsourcing their security to Ethereum and they're picking up the proceeds. I haven't seen many. When you say picking up the proceeds, what are those proceeds? Well, inflation of token economics goes for 20%. Issuing their token less?

Yeah. So they're just spending less on their token. So they were spending 20% per year. Now they're spending less than 1%. Those are cost savings. That's the benefit. I saw somebody's tweet, which they were making some bearish Ethereum Layer 2 tweet.

And they're like, look, only base is the only layer 2 making above like a million dollars a week or something or a day or something. And like, you know, Arbitrum is like 600,000. I think it was a month. It was like 600,7 dollars. How much are they saving an issu? And then you, in that same screenshot that they were tweeting out, there was like a margin column. And all of them are like 97% margin. Yeah. And we're like, whatever, dude. It's a great business. We're making $700,000 a month and it costs us nothing. Oh. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, Roni did the thing that we've talked about, one of the virtues of the LTO. Few have done this, but Ronan did, and that deserves some congratulations.

David, more to discuss, including, I think the next section is all about Ethereum, the EF talent flight. Is everything okay over there? We got to look at that. What's going on at the EF? Yeah, also, what's going on at Bankless, huh? A new era. What's going on with David?

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Let the yield flow with Bricks. Ryan, have you noticed people at the EF tweeting out, hey, I'm no longer at the EF anymore? Yeah, it usually starts like after X amount of years, I am announcing that I'm and then they departing the EF. There's been a lot of those. There's been a lot of those. The most recent one, Carl Beak, after seven incredible years. I've decided that Friday, May 29th will be my last day at the Ethereum Foundation. Carl led the KGZ ceremony, which enabled Denkhan, dang charting, all this good stuff.

The kids don't remember that. The kids don't remember that. It's been forever since I've said that. KZG, they don't remember that. Yeah. But let's just kind of quickly go back in time a little bit. We can go back to February when Tamash stepped down as the executive director. In April, we lost Josh Stark and Trent Van Nupps.

In May, we lost Barnett. Tim Beko and Alex Stokes from the Protocol Cluster leadership. Oh, there's some big names. Tim Beko shipped EIP-1559, dude. Like, if you know any of the names that we said, like, it takes a lot for an E3. Most of the work that EF researchers do is behind the scenes. You'll never hear about them. They're like unsung heroes.

If you recognize a name out of the list that David just said, that means they're kind of a big deal. Yeah. Barnaby, six plus years at the EF, Tim Beko. It was there since 2020 or 2021 or something when he just saw EIP 1559 and be like, I'll grab a shovel and do that. Al Stokes has been at the EF. He was working on proof of sake since forever. You know what? I've been terrified of like it set notifications on for Justin Drake's Twitter.

Justin Dake will not. I don't think so. Can you imagine? I cannot imagine. I cannot. I don't think he is. Let's not talk about that. And then the most recent ones, Carl,

Beak and Julian Ma, Carl, seven years at the EF, Julian Ma four years, built fossil in the fast confirmation rule, all like pretty critical infrastructure for Ethereum. There's more, too. We've heard of more. There are more. There are more. There are about as many as we know. There are about as many as we don't know is kind of like what I'll say.

Why are they leaving? That is up for interpretation, I think. Can I give you some interpretations that I've seen and see if you resonate with them? Please do. So it's not your words yet. So one interpretation is, do you remember the loyalty pledge? I think this is the big one. Yeah, so this was the-

This spun off from the mandate. The mandate. So the The Theorem Foundation released a mandate where they talked about emphasizing in crops, which stands for, let's test our knowledge. Censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and S. O, P, privacy. And then, uh, sensory resource, open source privacy. Is there an S?

God, what's the S? Censorship resistance, open source privacy, and. Not security. Maybe it is. No, because you already have security. I don't know. Okay. So there's an S too.

We're missing in us. Embarrassing. We don't. I guess we wouldn't. We're, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, wouldn't have passed as employees at the EF. Because apparently you were supposed to, there was a mandate to sign this.

That was the rumor anyway. And so this is Defi, Ignis saying that, you know, people that didn't want to sign the mandate for whatever reason, didn't want to be forced to sign the mandate, they were leaving.

And that's maybe the reason for some of these departures, at least. So the loyalty pledge was kind of controversial. Yeah. That's one reason I've seen. Other reasons, of course, EF researchers are notoriously underpaid. There's other opportunities for them. You know, manage, there's been management concerns at the EF, right?

Like how well is it managed? How well is it governed? We've heard rumors of that over time. So anyway, there's a number of things that you could point to as reasons. Why do you think they're leaving? Yeah, I don't know. I'm sure being underpaid doesn't help. Like, there's that famous Vatala quote that he said, like, if people aren't complaining about how much they are paid, then they are paid too much. And so, like, if people should be complaining about how much they are underpaid by, I'm sure that doesn't help.

But, like, nonetheless, EF people have been working at the EF for six plus years, seven plus years. And so I don't know. Just another reason. That's a long time. It's a long time to work anywhere. And so there's just a natural reason for this, which is just like, hey, people have been doing something for a long time and they want to change. They want to do something now. Yeah, but that answer to the question is so why it's happening all at once? You're right. So why is it happening all at once? Why is it happening all at once?

I think that there, I think morale is low. I think it is downstream of the leadership hammering the importance of the importance of that. this mandate, like being a little, like, totalitarian about the mandate and saying this is the mandate, like, sign it. It's funny, though. Why would the mandate be a center point for this? Because everyone who works at the EF, everyone who supports Ethereum, like censorship resistance, open source, privacy, sign me up. Those are the things.

S is security. Thank you. I knew it. We knew it. We did get them on right. But, okay, but isn't everyone on board with that already if you work at the EF, if you care about Ethereum? Of course,

crops is the thing we've been doing. And thanks to the mandate, there's an acronym for it. Yeah. The mandate's different, though, because, like, crops, crops is becoming, like, the end, the means to the end,

like it's the end, whereas other people, like me, and maybe also you, it was, like, crops is a means to a greater end, and that greater end is, like, growth and adoption. And the mandate,

my interpretation of the mandate, has always been that it was a, a dog whistle to say that we are not actually doing the growth thing and we're actually not doing we're not prioritizing the thing if it happens it happens it happens if it happens it happens but we're not we don't care about it um and and i think maybe making that explicit and doing this whole like sign the mandate thing just was a big turn off i think that okay so you and i don't know we have no particular insight the ethereum foundation is a fantastic organization by the way in all sorts of ways is the reason

Ethereum is what it is today. We're not insiders, so we don't know. But I do think you're right about that. I do think that there's a pattern to these departures and almost like kind of an organization to them. They're not random. They're not one-offs. I think there is a contingent of the folks who are leaving, it seems to me, who are

leaving because they don't want Ethereum to just be a niche project that's focusing on crops. sanctuary technology. Right. So they care about building Ethereum as a world financial system, for instance, and not just a, it's crops. And, you know, if we build it, they will come. I think the EF has really focused on the protocol only. And the protocol is incredibly important. But there's also, like, an ecosystem around this, right?

Like coordination for interoperability among all of the L2s. And I think some of the departures are maybe frustrated that that hasn't happened. Also, it's just like the tone of the EF is kind of philosopher-ish. It's kind of academic. And it's long-term. It's kind of like the galaxy brain, a thousand-year time rise. In fact, the mandate was a pledge for a thousand years, right? And I know that's somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but I think some of the defectors are just like,

the people departing are like, hey, but what are we shipping now? What about- I'm alive today? Yeah, and we want this to be relevant like next year and the year after in our lifetimes. And so not that Ethereum has failed on that entirely, but it hasn't succeeded in all of the ways that I think many of the believers thought it could and thought it should. And there's a number of people who have said this. I thought the EF was supposed to do all of these things. Turn Ethereum into a global financial system, be kind of a padding for the ecosystem, work up the stack, not just at the protocol layer.

I think my take, though, David, is the EF is what it is. You know, they are guarding the soul of Ethereum. They're doing this crops thing. That is a useful function. They can protect Ethereum from corruption. And this is kind of the focus.

A thing for me is just like, I feel like the decisions for of addition through subtraction and max decentralization, some of the structuralistness, you see the focus on crops, they are protecting Ethereum from corruption that you see

with many other chains and many other crypto systems, but they're not protecting Ethereum from irrelevance. Right. And that to me, this is something you and I have talked about, but that to me is at this moment of time, actually the bigger threat.

Totally. Because what if you build this max ivory tower decentralized system, but like, it has a few tens of thousands of users only. Yeah. What have you actually achieved? Yeah. And that I think is what some of the defectors

are maybe seeing, and why. there's some departure, jadedness with the EF direction. But I guess my point is, I don't think the EF will ever get us that. I think what Ethereum needs is new institutions going to step up and fill those gaps, let the EF protect us, do the sole thing, preserve, you know, keep us max crops and save us from corruption.

Other organizations need to work on the real world adoption. Yeah. Yeah. What do we know about the EF people? As you said, they are crops people. But I think they were all crops people, the Ethereum people, to change the world. And I think that's been the more, the bigger schism in the EF right now where a lot of the people who are leaving the EF are like, I'm trying to change the world today.

And I want to bring crops to the world today. And what does that look like? That looks like, you know, impact and adoption and changing the world around Ethereum, where this thousand-year mandate is much more of just like, hey, like we're going to maximize crops in the eventualality, the hypothetical, the circumstantial need, potential need for crops. And that's just not, it's hard, all these people are motivated by impacting the world. And Ethereum needs to impact the world,

not be a check on a particular version of the world that might not happen. Yeah, I get it. I think the people who would be hardcore crops who'd just be like, no, but like this is the one thing that we can do. And it is actually the key to unlocking adoption. And they're partially right about that because Ethereum is special in so many ways. It is, I think you could argue even more than Bitcoin, the most maximally decentralized network. Yeah, I agree. And, you know, that is unique.

That is special. And maybe adoption will come from that. Don Krad actually had this, the post. He said the way to save Ethereum, Donkrad, of course, former EF, now at Tempo, the community needs to create an organization that's economically aligned with Ethereum and accountable to it because the EF only holds less than 0.1% of all ETH. There is no flow of Ethereum staking or fee revenues to it. I think Donkrad is calling for like, hey, there should be like, capitalistic incentives. There should be number go up incentives to the organization that is helping to steward the Ethereum Foundation. My take on this has been like, I would love to see some of the big Ethereum dads, right?

I know, you know, Sharp-link consensus Joe Lubin, he's already done so much. Tom Lee feels like new blood here. I would love to see Bitmind step up and fill some of the gaps that the EF is leaving in terms of like global adoption. I don't know. Maybe there's an opportunity to fund some of the EF developers who are leaving to create a separate structure. Because, man, losing this talent from the. Ethereum ecosystem feels like a setback. Yeah.

And they also don't want to leave Ethereum. Like, they're still Ethereum believers. They still want to work on Ethereum. I think they're just kind of looking at like, how can I better commit my time and energy and actually create impact on the world? And so, like, this talent, I don't know if this talent's leaving. I think it's just trying, is trying to find a new home. Did you see Lorishin's posts about this, by the way?

I did, yeah. Yeah, I thought it was pretty good. There's a line that stuck out to me. She said, I think Ethereum's original sin was not considering tokenomics with every move it made from Denkun on. The ultrassad sound money thesis was a good one. And with Deng Koon, they should have stopped to say that this was going to hurt the ultrasound money thesis and consider how perverse it is. I think that's up for debate. It's not really, I debate that.

I debate that. What she said next, I think, what she says, most people don't want to believe in something that isn't also putting up points on the scoreboard. True. That I believe in. Oh, well, speaking of David, this is the first time we've had a bankless podcast, and you are no longer holding ether. That's right. From bankless to etheless, David.

Ethless. Why? What changed your mind? What happened here? It's what Laura Shin said, dude. It's like there's not too many parts of Ethereum that's focused on putting points on the scoreboard. I actually think that, like, you know, Vitalik is doing this thing where he's trying to maximize crops to, you know, create Ethereum as a bulwark against some of the worst possible futures of the world.

And I think that's great. I think there's actually a part of him who's just adverse to growth. And the time for Vitalik to have, like, handed over the keys to somebody who could take the momentum that Ethereum had in 2022 and 23 and run with it and grow it was like back in 2023. but he sees himself as like a protector of Ethereum's soul. And if you understand the trials that Vitalik had to go through navigating all the co-founder mess, you can totally understand and empathize with why he's doing that. But it seems that there are interests that prohibitive are prohibitive for Ethereum growth to happen

and therefore eth growth to happen. And a lot of the things that we see on Ethereum like the layer two's, all of the banks tokenizing money markets on Ethereum, all this Ethereum adoption is great. The Ethereum network is great. Like, lean Ethereum is also great. And in fact, it doesn't need a valuable ether to do any of those things. Like, which has been some of the counter arguments for Ethereum for forever,

is like eth is just gas. And it didn't have to be that way. But we needed to have leadership to think like that and push forward like that. that when ether wasn't gas, when eth was more money back in a previous era, but now, like, I kind of feel there's just been so much momentum lost. And I don't know how Ethereum gets it back, especially when we have, like, a leader who's trying to protect Ethereum's crops for a thousand years and is, like, somewhat disinterested in growth and adoption today.

You know, there's one part there I disagree with, and you'll know why I disagree, which is I actually don't think Ethereum the network is very valuable without ether the asset doing extremely well. And the reason for this is because I think in order to have actual decentralized finance, you need a crypto-native censorship-resistant store of value with like the shares the same security as everything else. I totally agree. Yeah. That feels like it should be this way. Exactly.

It is it. It very much is a hopeful it should be this way. And I would also acknowledge what you're saying, which is the last cycle, it hasn't put points on the board to proving the ETH is a store of value thesis to the extent, which I mean like, as we said since the very early episodes,

money is a coordination game, store value is a coordination game. You have to have believers believe this thing is an actual store of value for it to become one. It's a memetic game. That was like episode five we did at Bankless. It's like money is a meme. Like we talked about all of this stuff.

Totally. Totally. And well, it's done well since 2020. Eath as a money meme is in a trough, I would say. Yeah. A store of value meme.

And now it's like, oh, what is it? After ultrasound money, like what is it if it doesn't burn? I still think that story can change. I'm still bullish but I understand like man confident

this is like this feels a little bit to me like 2019 we're confidence in ether of the asses at those types of lows and it feels like the Ethereum Foundation is not really stepping into help yeah so I get it but this is definitely like

it marks a new era I think for bankless because part of the reason we started this podcast was actually Ethereum it was we're excited about defy we're excited about Cryptom money. And we thought Ethereum was the platform that put all of those things together. ETH as a store of value asset, defy on top of it, smart contracts, all the same environment, same ecosystems, same shared security. And, you know, I think now that's like, and of an era at some

level, right? Like, it's kind of like, we've been doing this for six years. And it's just like, when you tweeted that out, and this was the same way. by the way that we had to let go some members of the bankless team, which was really difficult. Like a bunch of team members that have been doing fantastic work. And by the way, I should say you should hire some of these people. So the people on our media team, the people in our newsletter, fantastic people. David and I've been tweeting about them. So I'm sure they'll get snapped up if they don't have job offers already.

Go take a look at this talent set that we had to let go. And part of it is bear market stuff, right? companies expand and contract. But part of it, I feel like, is the end of a first era for us for bankless, which is like crypto, Ethereum, Defi, six years of doing this, we brought the thesis to this point. And now what's happening? Well, ETH probably still has another era. There's the opportunity for it to become a store of value asset.

The confidence in that has somewhat decreased, but I'm still bullish. I still think it can happen. I'm still a believer. We've got things like Justin Drake's Lean Ethereum, quantum resistance, scaling L1, that's happening now. We've got ETH and Ethereum is truly unique to centralize assets.

Bitmine, Tom Lee, I mean, he can come in and do some stuff. I still think the architecture is correct. But it's a different era now. We got TradFi. We have all sorts of new horizons that you want to explore to, and that sometimes I'm less interested in, sometimes I'm more interested in.

But like I think, so for instance, I think hype is super cool, but is not as cool to me as ether the asset and Ethereum when we started this thing. I totally agree. And maybe I'll take the time to talk about what's not changing at bankless.

Ethereum is the most interesting thing in crypto. That does not change. And like I'm not... Even Ethereum at like a very low market cap price, David? it's more interesting when the price is higher but like yeah Justin Drake's lean Ethereum Ethereum getting over the quantum hurdle

there are things that are like bullish and exciting and I have absolutely no interest in pivoting away from not doing content like that so like I don't want people are thinking that I'm like swapping to be like an Ethereum antagonist not at all the case

I absolutely intend on covering all the interesting, cool stories about Ethereum from whether it's adoption from TradFi or again, whatever Justin Drake is building or stuff like this, like that, still going to cover all of that. I'm just not holding Eath. Just doing it while I'm not holding Eith.

And that's fine. And that's why it is, I think, a new era, in part, but the other part for some of the reason I said. So I'm going to be stepping back a little bit from the podcast, not completely. So for listeners, I will be here, every single week for the roll-up, David and I are going to do these together. We just enjoy hanging out. We just enjoy talking about crypto. I'm staying up to date on things anyway,

so it's a fun platform to still do, and we appreciate all the listeners dialing in every single week and listening to what we're doing. David is going to be taking on more guest interviews. So I'm going to be less a part of that. I'm going to be less a part of the content focus moving forward. And what are you going to be exploring, David, on the frontier? So, So I know it's crypto. Is it primarily crypto? Is it other things as well? More primarily crypto.

I think when you and I would do interviews together, we would be pretty expansive about the subjects with just one of us. I think it's just more apt to laser focus about the crypto specifics. So I'm now kind of just like investigating what's bullish in crypto. As we know on the week, there are three crypto assets that hit all-time highs, hype Zcash VVV. I want to talk about those. I also want to talk about the other assets

that might also hit all-time highs. And so a little bit of just like learning what's bullish and poking around corners that I otherwise haven't. I didn't mean to like offend anyone when I said on my public tweet that like I don't have any more ETH but it's also the

every conversation I would ever go into I was always the ETH guy and that was that steered and shaped the conversation in a way that now I don't feel like I have to do that anymore. And so, yeah, a lot of crypto. I totally get that. And I will say, there's a non-zero chance here that David bottom ticked. Okay.

So David may have just sold the bottom. This could be the bottom signal we were all waiting for, Heath Maxis. I'll take that too. Guys, thank you so much for hanging with us. We will see you next week, of course, and got to end like this as we end each roll up. Actually, no, we have a moment of Zen, too. This is a scenario where David has bottom sold here, okay? We're going to play that one for you right after the break, but got to let you know, none of this has been financial advice. Crypto is risky. You could

lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot. Yes, he sold. Fompid.