Bankless - ROLLUP: ETFs Back? | Robinhood Acquires Bitstamp | Biden SAB-121 Veto

Starting point is 00:00:00 Let's talk ETFs once again, David. The Bitcoin ETF is back. We also want to talk about the Ethereum ETF. When are we going to actually get that? And what's that going to do for prices? It's the first week of June, Bankless Nation. And it is time for the Bankless Weekly Rollup June. I'm feeling good, David. This has been a pretty exciting week.

Starting point is 00:00:23 What are we talking about today? The Bitcoin ETFs wake up from a nap? How much money did the Bitcoin ETFs take in this week? And also, of course, murmurings about the ETH ETF are definitely. crescendoing, but when, Ryan, are we going to get the ETH ETH ETH. I was promised an ETH ETH. So was I. Also, on the back of that, Van Eck dropped a 2030 ETH price prediction, David. That's, I think, even among the Eth Bulls, it's going to make them blush, because let me tell you, it is bullish.

Starting point is 00:00:52 It's a lot of number. Yeah. We also have Biden vetoing the Sab Bill. He did that last Friday, like, kind of like after hours. It could have been an easy win, but he decided. to DeVito. He had the layup and he didn't take it. Just fumbled millions of votes. Yeah, the big question is, is the Democrat pivot dead?

Starting point is 00:01:10 Or are they still going to give us some crypto wins? And then a Starknet wants to become a Bitcoin layer two, but also not leave Ethereum. How do they do that? And also Robin Hood acquires a major crypto exchange, probably one of the biggest acquisitions in crypto. That's a big one. Very big. A big freaking deal.

Starting point is 00:01:28 So much news to cover. But first, before we get to all of that news, a message from our friends and sponsors over at Grid Plus. If you don't know what Grid Plus is, it is probably the hardest hardware wallet that is on the market. Grid Plus, the lattice one. It's a little box that sits next to your computer

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Starting point is 00:03:04 Well, that's friendly. All right. Speaking of. If you guys want to know more about the grid plus, it's a pretty, it's a kind of a paradigm shift of how a hardware wallet form factor is. So I'm going to be doing an unboxing of one in the coming week. So if you guys want more details about that, stay tuned for that. Your second lattice data, David?

Starting point is 00:03:21 Second lattice. Yeah. Well, you have to, you have to unbox one fresh to make an unboxing video. All right, guys. Let's talk about the markets this week. Thanks to Cracken, as always, for the price. and they're looking pretty good. Tell me about Bitcoin, David.

Starting point is 00:03:34 We're pretty happy, yeah. Bitcoin started at the week at 69,400, up 3.6% on the week. Almost got up to $72,000 for high. We're currently at $71,100. What's our all-time high? That's a good question. 72-something, 73-something? Yeah, 72-800.

Starting point is 00:03:54 We're close again to Bitcoin, all-time highs. Every time we hit Bitcoin all-time highs, like people get excited. We get media coverage, right? kind of like reflexive. At least that's my hope. ETH price, not quite close to all-time highs yet. What are we like 25% down from all-time highs? We're still $1,000 off of all-time highs. Up 1.2% on the week, start of the week at $3,800.00. Just still just a little bit, a little bit above that. But still prices are up, not down. So that's what we're having about. Total crypto market cap, $2.77 trillion. I would call that flatty up. Flatty up. Letty up.

Starting point is 00:04:29 Let's talk about layer two is in this section sponsored by our friends over at Mantle which is a layer two you absolutely should be using right now. David, big news this week. Base entered number two, the number two layer two by total value locked. I know there's some who think total value locked is a meme. I for one don't.

Starting point is 00:04:50 I think it's a meme. I think it is a marker of progress and traction. And so it's a big move. Base taking the spot from the OP main. net still trailing Arbitrum by about half. So Arbitrum sitting on top with $19.3 billion and then base at $7.8. A casual $19 billion. I mean, definitely congratulations for BASE for flipping optimism mainnet.

Starting point is 00:05:15 This has always been the optimism strategy is like optimism mainnet. I kind of think is taking the Ethereum Foundation strategy of operating by a design by subtraction mindset. So it's happy to see its own like child change, its own. Let everyone else do the work is what I call that strategy. Really good strategy. But yeah, you can't really ignore the absolute gargantuan of the nearly $20 billion that Arbitram has TVL. Overall, $47.8 billion on layer two's creeping up and up and up.

Starting point is 00:05:46 That's all-time high. Yeah, that is all-time high. Not $50 billion. I'll celebrate a $50 billion. I'll also celebrate at 100. I'll celebrate along the way too. Also, what's been pretty cool to see over the last. last like month or so is just the on-chain profit for these layer two chains this has been the

Starting point is 00:06:05 thing that ryan and i have been beating the drum about for years and will continue to be the drum about for years it's extremely easy to be profitable as a layer two uh so revenue from layer two gas fees minus the cost of posting state routes on the layer one base took in almost seven million dollars in profits in May, just May. This is one month, $7 million in one month. Optimism, Optimism Maine net took in $1.57 million. Scroll took in $1.3 million. Arbitrum took in $800,000, and Linnea took in $612,000 in one month profitability. That is pure profit, too, no issuance, no additional tokens. Of course, more are getting unlocked, but no additional inflation that are being paid to validators. But maybe, of course, issuance is

Starting point is 00:06:52 meme. Not quite sure. There's been debates about this recently. All of all of the things that you thought were real and fundamentals, Ryan, are actually just memes. Well, it's, it's really cool to see healthy businesses, very healthy businesses being birthed on just like value added reselling of Ethereum Blockspace. That's what they're doing. They're basically adding execution, adding value, and able to like, you make money on this. It's pretty impressive. And I think this is the sort a thing it's going to attract more and more layer twos into crypto, right? I mean, everyone else is looking over there and seeing like, what, seven million a month for base? I want to do that. And I can deploy a chain using the OP stack for free? Hey, it sounds pretty good. Okay, let's talk about

Starting point is 00:07:39 uniswap volume on arbitram as well as well while we're looking at layer two. So monthly Arbitrum volume on Uniswap has doubled compared to last year. So May 2023 for benchmark, we were at at about 6.8 billion, and now 2024 in May, were close to 12 billion. So pretty impressive. Although I will say, David. I was just one more point. That is $12 billion on arbitram. That is $12 billion on uniswap volume on Arbitrum.

Starting point is 00:08:09 That's just one of the layer two. Yeah. And I know this is maybe an unpopular sentiment among some right now. But I feel like Ethereum strategy just like might be working, David. So look at these two charts. ETH still Fee King. This is this yellow line right here is Ethereum fees, right? And the pink bars at the bottom here, this is a token terminal chart, are the top layer

Starting point is 00:08:33 twos combined, all of their fees, the fees that we just talked about for base and all of the other layer two's, plus the Salana combined fees. And Solana has been selling some block space here recently. Salana has been fee positive. It's still about like that, all of that combined is about one-fourth of the total Ethereum fees here recently. And so Ethereum is still the king in terms of generating fees. And also, on layer two's, transaction fees are under ascent, which has been a design goal as well. So you've got fee generation on the Ethereum layer one. And you've got transactions,

Starting point is 00:09:07 at least on layer two's for under a cent. I think Ethereum doesn't get enough credit for that. I mean, that's what it was trying to do. And it's kind of working. It's kind of doing it. Yeah, you can actually see, this is all kind of speculative. We don't really need. know, but like gas fees on the layer one have also been like meaningfully low. We don't really have, you can pull up ultrasound money. Ether has actually been inflationary, sadly, for 30 days in a row, half a percent of yearly inflation over the last 30 days. So there's actually less demand for Ethereum layer one block space, but we're seeing that turn into profitability numbers on the layer two's, which is kind of interesting dynamic. But I mean, that's, that's what we've been saying,

Starting point is 00:09:49 like, hey, go be on the layer two. That's where you're meant to be. And that's resulted in, like, demand for layer two block space. And I guess as a result of that, pretty consequentially, less demand for layer one block space. David, there's three other crypto milestone numbers to talk about on the week. This first one, you brought, drew my attention to this. So, Eganlayer just quietly passed 20 billion in this meaningless metric, total value locked, which I see, 20 billion is a lot, right?

Starting point is 00:10:16 There's a lot of ETH inside of this protocol. That's a lot of Eith. Yeah. I think people who are starting to just look elsewhere beyond EganL after the Eager token drop. I think people were, I'm sure, we're expecting TVL to like leave Eigenlayer. Why would you leave it in EganLair after the token? But the opposite happened.

Starting point is 00:10:33 I think it was $14 billion when the Egan Layer token air drop happened. Now we're at $20 billion. Why, are we points farming? Like, what are we doing here? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I still have my Eithen Egan Layer. Why I still have it in eigen layer? I guess it's because I'm assuming I'll get rewarded for that for seasons two and three,

Starting point is 00:10:51 even though the parameters aren't out there yet. Yeah. That must be what the market's assuming, because the ABSs aren't live yet. Yeah, and despite the negative feedback about like the eigenlayer token drop, like the APY for depositors into eigenlayer was like stellar. It was like 70, 80% APY for your time. I noticed that negative feedback has mostly evaporated at least. It was kind of like a two-week sentiment type thing.

Starting point is 00:11:16 But that's not the only. milestone to talk about. So this is big. Etherfi and Pendle both surpassed Uniswap in total value locked as well. This is kind of surprising to me. Of course, both of these are like restaking protocols in that in that category. So somewhat based off of that 20 billion and eigenlayer that we just set up. But passing Uniswap, how do you make sense of this? Yeah. So there are transactional applications and then there are like depositing applications. ETHORs. ETHORs, Etherfi and Pendle are both, like, depositing applications, as in, like, you put your money in there and then you, like, hold it there. Pendle, Etherfi is an LRT liquid restaking token.

Starting point is 00:11:56 Pendle is kind of an LRT derivatives platform. It's a yield derivative platform. A lot of people are using it to speculate on points now. So it's kind of like the center point, the center point of all, like, point speculation. And you put your TVL in and then you hold it there over a long period of time. Uniswap is less like that. Uniswap is more like you just go and trade. you go one token in one token out.

Starting point is 00:12:18 So it's not really an apples to apples comparison then. They're kind of like different functions, yes? It could be an apples to apples comparison. Like the reason why you're putting your ether into pendle and etherfi and all your tokens is because of yield. Like you're getting compensated for that. Some people are liquidity providing in uniswap. And that is the $6.1 billion that's in uniswap compared to the $6.2 billion in Pendle and Etherfi.

Starting point is 00:12:44 But like, getting yield out of Uniswap is harder because of this thing called Sex, Dex, Arbitrage. Whereas Uniswap LPs are getting squeezed by people arbitraging out the pools, because it's actually just not a very efficient place to get your yield. I think that there is potentially a renaissance coming for the yield coming out of Uniswap, because Uniswap's generating pretty strong fees for its LPs. It's just hard to be a profitable LP because you keep getting arbed out by M. bots. There's a startup called Sorella Labs that is building

Starting point is 00:13:17 a uniswap V4 hook that does a very similar mechanism to how, you know how all the

Starting point is 00:13:24 MEV and the MEV Ethereum supply chain ultimately either gets burned or passed to Ethereum Stakers.

Starting point is 00:13:30 There's a very similar primitive that Sorella is building as a hook where you deposit your

Starting point is 00:13:35 uniswap liquidity through the Sorella hook and MEV bundles and transaction

Starting point is 00:13:41 bundles through this hook instead of going to MEV bots ends up just going recycled back into UNISWP. So Uniswap LPs are passive receivers of the MEV of Uniswap. And so there's an obvious incentive to deposit your liquidity, if you're going to be a market maker on Uniswap, to deposit it through the Sorella hook, because then you actually

Starting point is 00:14:00 earn the MEV that Uniswap otherwise would accrue. So I think what you're saying is Uniswop TVL is going to make a comeback because like right now it's not very profitable or yield generating for Uniswap LPs to keep their funds. in there, but, like, there are some protocols that are emerging to make it much more profitable to kind of, like, fix that problem? I think a possible future is that this hook design from Sorilla Labs produces a renaissance in Uniswap TVL and also, therefore, like, uniswap price execution. Like, one of the big things, I remember talking to this about Mike Abolito when we had our podcast with him is, like, we need to get price discovery back on chain. We needed to get

Starting point is 00:14:41 price discovery away from Binance, away from Coinance. base and put it into uniswap. And this is how you do that. And that hopefully would come with like a resurgence of the ability of just being able, a passive liquidity provider to uniswap. Anyways, a little bit of a side quest here. Uniswap TVL down then right now. But David's forecasting up.

Starting point is 00:15:00 Something else that's up, though, is the price of B&B. A little bit of old Binance token. So it is apparently at all time highs. All time highs. Coming in at a fully diluted valuation. of $108 billion. And this is not no longer on CZ's watch, of course. So CZ just started his prison sentence.

Starting point is 00:15:22 It was like last week or the week before or something like this. One thing that we are going to do is we're having Richard Tang on the podcast, bankless podcast podcast. The podcast, that would be a great name, David. The bankless podcast tomorrow, and he is the new Binance CEO. So we want to pick his brain, see who he is, find out a little bit more about him, because I don't think the crypto industry has really gotten to know him. But, yeah, all-time highs for B&B.

Starting point is 00:15:49 What does this put B&B in terms of the top? Number five. Number five? Number four. Number four. Actually, you just... Oh, wow, it flips Solana. Oh, wow, it flips Solana.

Starting point is 00:16:00 Oh, wow, it's going to buy a lot. Huh. Interesting. It's got $30 billion on Solana. Should we ask Richard about price? Yes. Okay, so something that's going on across all prices is we're getting some rate cuts. What's going on here, Mr. Tradfai?

Starting point is 00:16:16 Yeah, well, yeah, this is Mr. Tradfai, like chiming in here. So actually two big things happened. First, Canada, Central Bank of Canada, was the first G7 nation to cut interest rates. So Bank of Canada said, hey, we're capitulating. We've been raising interest rates and keeping it steady for the last, like, I don't know, four or five years. And now we're cutting. All right?

Starting point is 00:16:35 So that was like one day last week. And then the European Central Bank also announced a rate cut. And this for the European Central Bank is the first. first time in five years in the last five years that it started to cut rates. So the expectation is a 0.25% cut, which brings the ECB deposit rate down to 3.75 from the 4% top that it received last September. So David, these central banks are beginning to cut rates. And I think that is going to be, this is a bellwether for what the Fed's going to do next. So the Fed could keep it steady, but this marks like the beginning of rate cuts.

Starting point is 00:17:15 Like so it begins. Van Spencer says this is the largest rate cut cycle of our lifetimes. He says, I'm not sure people are appreciating just how high rates are and how low they will move in the coming one to two years. You know that Fed Pivot I was talking about? This is the bellwether for the big Fed Pivot. This is the opener. It's the opening act.

Starting point is 00:17:38 It seems like it. The main headliner is our Fed, our Fed, our federal reserve, but other federal reserves are cutting. You know how they, they're all coordinating behind the scenes. So, I mean, this is, yeah, this is certainly a big deal. I feel like the stock market is maybe like front running some of these rate cuts. What's going on in stock world, David? Mr. Tradfai. I'm here for a zoomer tradfai. So, Nvidia, of course, sells GPUs, sales AI chips, sells the things that we need to have the AI revolution has just been on an absolute tear for like

Starting point is 00:18:11 honestly like a decade but really in the last year or so as it's just you know I think it breached Apple so now InVIA is worth more than Apple just continues to just absolutely pump the earnings numbers that NVIDIA is putting in here is this incredible okay not quite beating Apple but pretty damn close like 50 billion dollars away from flipping it both of them are just right under $3 trillion

Starting point is 00:18:33 The third largest company right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, third largest company ever. The CEO, Jensen, there was a meme going around because he was signing the chest of a person. How do I explain this? Just let him watch the look at the picture. Why is this happening? We have tech CEOs signing the boobies of people. What is this? Is Jensen like a rock star? Like, is he big dealing?

Starting point is 00:19:03 And people, this is this looks like dot-com. He's the CEO of the greatest, like, price rising, like, sector of, like, recent memory. Well, since that signature, the price of NVIDE is up over $200 billion. So, you'd be happy to know. So, there you go. Yeah. Bullish. How. Okay, but that's not the only thing that's going on in the stonk world.

Starting point is 00:19:25 Roaring Kitty, I think we talked about Roaring Kitty last week or maybe two weeks ago. He just tweeted something. And then that caused the GameStop price to, like, double and then liquidate a bunch of people. Okay. This is the same guy that, like, created a whole, like, GameStank. We were, like, Revolution in 2021, 2020. He used to post his positions on Reddit.

Starting point is 00:19:48 This is where deep fucking value was his Reddit username. He would post his positions on Reddit. Like, Relentlessly, he just stopped because, like, the GameStop movement kind of stopped. Interest rates went up. He stopped, like, years ago, three years ago. He posted again his GameStop position for the first time in the, three years just a couple days ago. What was previously like a $22 million position in GameStop

Starting point is 00:20:13 magically over the last three years has turned into a $210 million position in GameStop representing 5% of the entire company. So Roaring Kitty, aka Deep Fucking Value on Reddit, owns 5% of GameStop. He posted this on Reddit, which caused once again the GameStop price to double up to something of like 40 or $50. or something. Where are we are now? $42. $42. Again, liquidating a bunch of people. I think it got up to a high of like $68. Absolutely insane. And then people are wondering, like, where the hell did he get the extra $170 million to go leverage long on GameStop? Maybe people think he's like taking out, he's managing other people's money. I don't know.

Starting point is 00:20:56 It's kind of crazy that he's just doing the same playbook that he's already done and he's just doing it again because GameStop continues to be like heavily shorted. Yeah. It's kind of nuts. All right. So something. people are calling, like deep tradfai is calling this market manipulation. The tradify deep state. Yeah, the tradify deep state. E-trade is, I don't know, calling him out on this.

Starting point is 00:21:18 Do they try to close his account, something like this? Yeah, yeah. So he's managing his like $210 million portfolio, casually just through E-trade. I actually don't know where else you would manage your portfolio, but that's because I don't have a $200 million portfolio. And some people are, they're saying like we're considering kicking him off the platform for market manipulation. but then like everyone watching this is like what market manipulation he's posting his positions

Starting point is 00:21:40 publicly how is he manipulating the market yeah he's posting publicly he's just posting his buys it's not like he's trading off of some sort of insider information and memes huh it's i guess maybe buying assets is market manipulation if you buy in size yeah i'm not sure but i do know that like large funds and large investors do this all of the freaking time all the time all the time intentionally so yeah like ex bank announces like that they're bullish on the stock and then the stock goes up. Like, well. I do think it's no coincidence that he decided to come back like the same week that the central

Starting point is 00:22:15 banks are starting to lower interest rates. Maybe this is a sign of things to come. Oh, interesting. Speaking of things to come, what's coming up in the roll-up? Coming up next, demand for the Ethereum ETFs is back. We had some pretty almost record-breaking, not quite, but almost record-breaking demand for the Bitcoin ETF. And then, of course, that heralds good things, of course, for the ETF.

Starting point is 00:22:34 So we're going to give you the updates on the ETHETF and what's going on with Bitcoin ETFs. Fan Act gives an extremely bullish price prediction for Ethereum. Hold on to your hats. And Biden vetoed SAB-121. So so long to the Democratic crypto vote. So we're going to get to all of that and more. But first, I'm going to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors. That make this show possible, especially Cracken, our preferred crypto exchange in 2024.

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Starting point is 00:26:12 what's that going to do for prices? Let's start with Bitcoin, though, first. So it seems like it was a big week for Bitcoin ETF inflows. What are we looking at in the charts? So the last time Bitcoin was just like breaking, it broke through all-time highs and everyone was super bullish and Bitcoin went from 40,000 to 70,000. And then all of a sudden it stopped and Bitcoin fell down $10,000. All of that was super correlated to flows to flows. Why is Bitcoin up almost to $72,000, almost breaking all-time highs? Because of the flows.

Starting point is 00:26:42 We had almost a record-breaking day of flows, a week of flows in this last week. Just on June 4th, we had almost $800 million of inflows. Excuse me, almost $900 million of inflows into the Bitcoin ETFs. The FDC, actually a standout winner here, taking almost half of that. And so just the flows have resumed. The water spigate is back on buying pressures coming back to Bitcoin. And that's what's been going on. And so really, really just healthy week.

Starting point is 00:27:13 We're hoping, of course, for continuation. This was part of everyone's kind of sentiments about how the Bitcoin ETFs is just going to work. You can have your initial wave of demand. But then there's going to be some laggards, some holdout. a lot of institutions who intentionally move slow just want these things to age. But now the Bitcoin ETFs is starting to approach six months old. And so we're getting getting another wave of flows. Ibit, the BlackRock Bitcoin ETF, is the fastest ETF ever to hit $20 billion in AUM.

Starting point is 00:27:45 AUM is just TVL for Tradfai. And so congrats to Abbott. Look at this chart, David. Look at this chart. This is the Ibit chart. competing against the formerly, the now is the second fastest growing ETF in history, which is something called

Starting point is 00:28:03 the GEPI. I'm actually not sure what that is, right? But some other large ETF. And it got to $20 billion in 985 days. It's only taking the Bitcoin ETF, particularly Ibit, which is just one of the ETFs, 137 days. That's absolutely insane. Like the difference between these, like these two

Starting point is 00:28:24 ETFs on the charts. The JEPI is the JPMorgan equity premium income ETF. It's an actively managed ETF out of JPMorgan. The Bitcoin ETF, one of the Bitcoin ETFs just absolutely blasting through some records here. It's kind of funny. The the ETF, the I bit, the Bitcoin ETF from Black Rock goes up to like $18 billion, almost immediately, like inside of 50 days. It tries to go down. And that was like the last like two to three months of just. like not positive price action. It tries to go down. And then now we're at like record high.

Starting point is 00:29:00 What's also crazy about this and why it's going to continue breaking records is because like it's not just about inflows. Imagine the price of Bitcoin doubles. I mean, we're just talking on an episode earlier this week of Chimov's like bear case bull prediction for Bitcoin this cycle, 250K, right? I mean, that is like a 2x 3. Like that's like a 3x from here. And so that's going to get us to 60 billion in I bit.

Starting point is 00:29:23 just like price appreciation alone, like inflows aside. I have an opposite take, actually. What's your opposite? Yeah. So you say like, yeah, in order to get TVL to in order to get like AUM. TVL. TVL. TVL.

Starting point is 00:29:38 Tvil. AUM. Yeah, exactly. But so like, but yeah, we could all, the price of Bitcoin can just double. And then all of a sudden you'll have double the AU. Yep. Well, the only thing moving the prices these days, Ryan, is like, flows into the ETF. You think so?

Starting point is 00:29:54 So that's the thing that is moving the price. Yeah. And like I think there's evidence for this. This is, I think, an answer as to why people are like slightly frustrated about the ETH price after the ETH announcement. Like we had that 25% like God candle, like God candle in Ethereum's history. No net new buyers. That was the crypto industry itself. Like taking all of its slack that it would allow and giving it into ether.

Starting point is 00:30:19 But like not any like there's not any net new buyers. and then people are still like unresistant to buy ether beyond that. Like there are still people like showing what their portfolios are like on Twitter. Some people just like snapshot like their percentages of their portfolios. And like it's still like 60% Solana, 70% Solana. Like the Solana community is like not willing to sell their Solana to buy ether. I think anyone who is willing to buy ether as a result of the Ethereum ETF news has already done it. And so that's the, that's why ETH isn't going up anymore because it's like everyone did it in that one candle.

Starting point is 00:30:51 and now if you want Ether to go up anymore, you actually need the flows from the ETF. All right. We're going to get those flows though. Right? Let's talk about that now. So the Ethereum ETF, two questions on people's minds. One is when is it going to happen?

Starting point is 00:31:05 And two, what's it going to do to price? So let's talk about both these. On when's it going to happen, the estimates that we've heard range from like one to three months, something in that range. That's sort of what the Bitcoin process was. People can't imagine it would take too much longer than that. We are seeing some positive signs

Starting point is 00:31:21 because the issues are doing things. Black Rock just seeded the ETH ETF with $10 million. They did this with Bitcoin. They're just like, that's nice. There's some inflows for you, 10 million. We got from BlackRock. BlackRock has bought $10 million of ether in the last week. That's nice.

Starting point is 00:31:34 And so they're planting the seed right here. Also, the ETH ETF issuers, a fee war, has been set off. So it looks like Franklin is like discounting its fees to 19 bips, David. 19 basis points. Bitcoin ETF too. Yep. So they're leaving the pack. You know, they all compete

Starting point is 00:31:54 for the lowest possible fees. And then we've seen some other eth-related products. So this is a new ether-related filing. This is a covered-call ETF. Eric Balchunis says all of this activity is going on with the ETH filers is the equivalent of the Oklahoma land rush scene

Starting point is 00:32:12 in far and away. I've not seen this movie, but this is what he's talking about. Give you some visuals here, right? It's just like this kind of thing. You see what I'm talking about? where you've got... Oh, we just have everyone on horses

Starting point is 00:32:22 just stampeding westward. For a land grab. Oh, we're going west. Yeah, we're all going west. It's a land grab. That's what the issuers are doing right now. So any, all positive sentiments from that front. But David, but guess who decided to show up this week

Starting point is 00:32:38 and put some rain on that parade? It was our friend, Gary Gensler. What's this? He was apparently on CNBC's quack box and says that the ETH-EATF approvals will quote, take some time. So it's not going to happen this week. Probably not going to happen next week.

Starting point is 00:32:55 I'm going to give it a month. I'm going to give one month. You estimate a month? Yeah, early July. So you don't think Gary Gensler is saying, hey, like, it's going to take some time, putting the brakes on it. You don't think he's going to try to draw this thing out?

Starting point is 00:33:11 Twist the knife? I think he is drawing it out. He is drawing it out. And that's going to last a month. That's your. So, okay. So, David. David Hoffman prediction.

Starting point is 00:33:21 One month is July 6th. So we're going to hold you to that, David. July 6th is the date. July 6 is a Saturday. So, you know, plus or minus a couple days. Oh, you want to be exact on this, huh? We'll give you a plus or minus. I'm doing one month as a vibe.

Starting point is 00:33:37 You're the one trying to make it exact. I'm doing a month as a vibe. I'm trying to hold you to something here. All right. This quote that we just read from Gary Gensler is because he was on Squawk Box with Jim Kramer. You know Trad-Fi Jim Kramer. So it was hilarious.

Starting point is 00:33:49 Here's a segment of Jim Kramer asking Gary why we can't have Bonk ETFs next. This is what Gary says. Bonk the meme coin. Okay. Now, Pocodot, Cordana, Cosmos, Immutable, Ronan, Bonk, osmosis, sushi swap. Codan. My neighbor Alice, have all traded millions. I'm talking about millions of dollars this very morning.

Starting point is 00:34:11 No, should we have a sushi swap, maybe an ETF? Or the proprietary kind of just like, I would think that Bonk, is a natural. Boss is a natural. These are trading millions. Garrett, these are millions of dollars. These things are traded. Shouldn't we have it,

Starting point is 00:34:26 shouldn't we have some sort of product? Let me say something more broadly about the crypto markets. Right now, without prejudging anyone, these tokens, whether they're the ones Jim listed or other tokens, have not given you the disclosures that you not only need to make your investment decisions, but also that are required by the law. It's a basic concept in our securities market. We, the SEC, tomorrow, are turning 90.

Starting point is 00:34:56 Happy birthday, SEC. Oh, happy birthday. And what President Roosevelt did is he created this commission to oversee that you, the investors, get disclosure. And in the crypto markets, they aren't giving you that disclosure. And secondly, that exchanges, like here, this floor of the New York Stock Exchange, get properly regulated to protect against fraud and manipulation, and they don't trade against you.

Starting point is 00:35:24 And these crypto exchanges, Jim, are doing things we would never allow this New York Stock Exchange to do. Our laws don't allow you to trade against your customers. And so you've seen the bankruptcies in this space, and there are some of the most leading lights in this field are either in jail, about to go to jail, or waiting extradition. Okay, let's... There you go, David. That's a taste. All right, let's unpack this a little bit.

Starting point is 00:35:50 Sure. Exchanges are trading against their customers. Bankruptcies and leaders in the field are in jail, about to get a jail, or are awaiting extradition. He's right about that. He is right about that. FtX traded against their customers. That's why Alameda did. They were bad at it.

Starting point is 00:36:06 Three errors capital, Genesis and Celsius all went bankrupt. SBF and Alex Mishinsky are in jail. Doquan is the one awaiting extradition. and the SEC is suing Coinbase, Cracking, Uniswap, and consensus. You've got the wrong guys. Gary, Gary.

Starting point is 00:36:24 But the thing is, like, he's listing things that he knows happened from different entities. Just drawing the connection. So he knows. Yeah. Yeah, he knows. You know, part of this, too,

Starting point is 00:36:35 kind of that whole monologue here is just it felt very much like Cope, like, guys, stop trading. You know, look over here. We got a great securities market here. And you guys keep going for the coins. Why are you doing that? Stop trading. I don't know why he feels like he needs to boost his value proposition. Anyway, happy 90th birthday to the SEC. It feels like they want to take us back

Starting point is 00:36:55 to the 1930s with respect to the regulation, David. All right. So we've said it's the ETH prize, back to the ETH price. It's all about inflows. That's what's going to move the markets on Ethereum. And there's some question as to what those inflows might look like. Let me give you an analysis from J.P. Morgan. They believe this is an analyst. report from J.P. Morgan, we believe the demand for spot Ethereum ETFs would be just a fraction of that scene for spot Bitcoin ETFs. The reason they say is Bitcoin, number one, had the first mover advantage, okay, so it stopped up all of the demand. Number two, Bitcoin's happening event, the happening event was a big deal. Number three, the ETH ETFs won't have staking. Okay,

Starting point is 00:37:40 number four, Bitcoin competes with gold. ETH doesn't. And number five, there's lower liquidity overall in Ethereum. So those are the reasons. Those are odd reasons. Yeah, there's an actual quote. Demand for spot ETH will be negative because it doesn't do a happening like Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:38:04 That's ridiculous. No one in Tradfai knows what the hell a happening is. like the Bitcoin has a first mover advantage, I think does check out. Bitcoin happening event is just not on the radar of TradFi. Like whoever this analyst is is a Bitcoiner, probably, because they're using a Bitcoin or like frame of mind. ETH ETF won't have staking. That's why there won't be demand for it.

Starting point is 00:38:27 The Bitcoin ETF doesn't have staking either. Like, again, some elements that crypto natives know that Tradfi just is unaware of. And lower liquidity in ETH, they are not aware that ETH is extremely price sensitive. In fact, this benefits, ETH from the demand perspective, because the price appreciation is going to drive FOMO because it's extremely price sensitive. I'm guessing you're on the bullish inflows side of things then, David. You're not like this Jakey Morgan analyst. Who would have guessed? All right. So another estimate on inflows from James Safer and Eric Balchion is he, James actually DMed me, David, and he said he listened to the roll-up

Starting point is 00:39:03 and I think we gave a lower prediction on the inflows for James and Eric. Then they actually believe. I think they've revised some of their numbers. So James Seyford, one of the Bloomberg analyst says, my number is 20 to 25% of Bitcoin ETF flows. And Eric Belchunis, his counterpart, has moved his estimate up to around 20%, though he thinks it might come in less. So larger than other estimates, I think last time we talked to James, he said like 10 to 20%. And now he's saying 20 to 25% with 20% as the base case. So what price would that translate to is kind of of a question just on a pure inflows basis let's say we get the higher end of james's estimate at 25 percent that would imply 25 percent of bitcoin inflows is what a theorem would deliver that would imply

Starting point is 00:39:51 net inflows by the end of 2024 of 3.47 billion in additional buying pressure and so the implied price performance of that if you use like a 4x amplifier which is like fairly reasonable back of the napkin calculation given the the lower liquidity of ether's smaller smaller market cap size is a price by the end of 2024 of you ready for this? Yeah. 5,294 eth. Can I don't know if, is it even possible to predict this? I don't think you can make forward like you don't know what the market's going to react.

Starting point is 00:40:29 It's just in a vacuum. It's in a vacuum. That's all. Yes. Right. You can, you can project implied net inflows of three and a half billion dollars. We can, we can, that checks out. of like how much actual buying pressure there will be,

Starting point is 00:40:41 you won't be able to actually anticipate what the market's reaction to that buying pressure is. So you sound disappointed, David. You could have a lot of sellers into that $3.5 billion. You could also have reflexive buyers of that $3.5 billion. I don't think that these are like solid.

Starting point is 00:41:02 You can't predict this. You could, but it's an estimate. It's not a prediction. It's an estimate, right, based on some amount of inflows. You sound very disappointed about this. So let me give you a better bulk case. I don't call myself disappointed. I just disagree with the concept of the prediction.

Starting point is 00:41:18 So here are some numbers you might like a little bit better. These numbers come from Vanek. So they put out an Ethereum report. They do price predictions. This is a price prediction for Ether for the end of 2030. So five and a half years from now, David. So they have upgraded their price for Ether. And the catalysts here, they think, are the Ethereum ETF News, scaling progress.

Starting point is 00:41:38 and their read of on-chain data. So they have upgraded their base case price prediction to 22,000 ether by 2030. How do you feel about that number? Let's see. 22,000. That seems like a good base case. I expect that to be the floor.

Starting point is 00:42:01 Yeah. That's my floor. That's your floor. Okay, so they not only give a base case, they also give a bear case and a bull case. Which one do you want first? Give me the bear case first. Bear case, $360.

Starting point is 00:42:16 What? $360 is the bear case. What? Yeah. And here's the bull case. $154,000. So it's quite the range here. It's like it's all possible things.

Starting point is 00:42:33 Okay, so it's 2017 prices or the dollars of shit coin prices. Yeah, you know, but they back into these estimates with, like, like estimated revenue and yeah like a validator cut and they're like some fundamentals but of course you can kind of adjust the spreadsheet variables to whatever you want but they they do get the kind of the core fundamental drivers right which is kind of cool so oh you know are you don't know how to reason I don't know how to reason I am somewhere between I'm not I don't think in 150 in 2030 I'm I'm I don't know if I'm bullish as $154,000 but I'm way more bullish than 360 so yeah somewhere between those two you know I guess five years from now

Starting point is 00:43:11 would be about like just a little longer than another bankless pot. Like we've been doing the podcast for like four years. One more bankless. Yeah. So we just got to double everything we've done in bankless. We just got to double that and we'll get to 2030 and we'll get to that 154K eth. That's it. We started bankless at like $150 ether.

Starting point is 00:43:30 Yeah. And now it's 20 times, 25 times that. This would be a $20 trillion market cap. All right. So that's a bold territory there for you. A $20 trillion market cap is like end game Ethereum. That's kind of what I expect to like see Ethereum when I like retire. When you're like old man.

Starting point is 00:43:49 Climb mountains for the rest of my life. Yeah. Granddad David. Yeah, that's when I'm handing my crypto punk to my kid kind of time frame. All right. Well, let's move from kind of like fantasy land here and price predictions and talk about this absolute layup that President Biden miss. So he vetoed Sab 121.

Starting point is 00:44:07 This was the pro-crypto legislation. Congress put on his desk and he said no comment out of the Biden administration he says my administration will not support measures that jeopardize the well-being of consumers and investors appropriate guardrails that protect consumers and investors are necessary to harness the potential benefits and opportunities of crypto asset innovation is this Joe Biden himself saying these words or is this just his administration and Joe is just signing off on it in my opinion definitely the ladder. Does it matter? Not really. It's just like he's just being a conduit for other people's opinions and desires about the world to be expressed. And he's just like greenlighting it.

Starting point is 00:44:46 Who these people are that's telling him DeVito Sab 121. I don't know. But it's certainly not the banks. Well, it's not the banks because the banks wrote him a letter. The American Bankers Association penned a letter an attempt to sway the decision on Sab 121. So the bankers write a letter to Biden's administration saying Sab 121 represents a significant departure from longstanding accounting treatment for custodial assets and threatens the industry's ability to provide as customers with safe and sound custody of digital assets. Limiting banks' abilities to offer these services leave the customers with a few well-regulated trust in options for safeguarding their digital asset portfolios and ultimately exposes them to increase risk, which is something

Starting point is 00:45:28 that we've been saying inside of the crypto industry for a long time now. So we know it's not the banks who are whispering in Biden's ear. So this kind of goes back to what Joe Lubin at Consensus is saying it's more of like the political elite political establishment who don't want another tech sector of Elon Musk's and Mark Zuckerberg's and all these other like tech bros to have more power because they didn't expect the internet to be such a big thing is the conspiracy which I'm 100% on board with. It's kind of also surprising too because it's halting the momentum. I felt like we were starting to get on the Democrat party side of things. Right. Right. So we got the Ethereum ETF.

Starting point is 00:46:06 which is probably like a phone call to Gary Gensler saying, hey, make this happen because November elections are important. And like that was not expected to go through. It went through. We got the Fit 121 bunch of Democrats in Congress kind of signed on for that. And even the Saab bill, the Saab repeal that Biden just vetoed is pro-crypto legislation. And Chuck Schumer, right? The majority lead of the Senate, like Democrat of Democrats said yes to it.

Starting point is 00:46:34 He voted yes to it. and now is putting like a breaks on this with with Biden vetoing. So Nick Carter says here, rest in peace, Dems are just as good on crypto talking point. That crypto talking point is dead. It was born May 2024 and died May 24 as well, the same month. It just kind of is weird. Like, why would you start the process of becoming crypto-friendly

Starting point is 00:46:59 and then like slam the door shut on that same process like a week later? because now we got the ETF, so sick, I guess. I mean, definitely sick, but then they still are losing the crypto vote. Like, they were almost able to have people who just really don't want to vote Republican, able to still be pro-crypto and vote Democrat, but now you cannot be pro-crypto and still vote Democrat. You have to kind of choose. Do you want Democrats or do you want crypto? Yeah, I think they lost the single issue of voters there.

Starting point is 00:47:31 There's a layup, and they missed it. and it's kind of perplexing more work to do. And talking about some of that work, do you know the Stand With Crypto? Advocacy group is attracting tons of members, attracting funding. It just hit 1 million members, okay? This is the website, Stand With Crypto.

Starting point is 00:47:49 I've joined this, David. You can join this for, you know, like text alerts and such. Get in on the key races as well. It's got a whole like ranking of who your legislator is and it scores them from A, B, C, D, and F on a various scale. And we just hit 1 million members on this, which I think is bullish. If you have not joined this, a group, go to standwithcrypto.org. So you can join that, get active, let your voice be heard.

Starting point is 00:48:13 So all of this has like crescendoed in a very vibrant conversation on crypto Twitter, just about, like, politics. Something that's like adjacent to this conversation, but somehow also extremely relevant is like there's big volume on polymarket in the political sphere, just because it's like political politics and crypto are now like almost the same conversation. So you can go to like the polymarket and express what your opinions about the future of things. Meme coin trading about politics is also doing that same job. So when Trump got guilty, found guilty on 34 accounts of fraud, like all of that news last week, the Trump token dropped 35% after that news. And then the Biden token jumped up 20%, so Trump fell down 35%. Biden went up 20%. And then they equalized afterwards.

Starting point is 00:49:05 They went right back to the prices that they were before that moment. But in that moment of time, you could have had made very good money betting on Trump being found guilty or not guilty, either through the Trump token or the Boden token. And this is not the first time we've seen this. Like meme coins are becoming like super accurate prediction markets. Remember when Ansel like his like kind of terrible performance in the boxing ring? all of the Ansel tokens just immediately started tanking in price afterwards. And so we're seeing like this

Starting point is 00:49:37 weird phenomenon of meme coins also becoming like prediction market bellwether for like in real life events. So something that's also happening in the political sphere that I thought is worth bringing up in the market section. Well, we got more to talk about on the celebrity coin wars because Vitalik has weighed in on that whole world.

Starting point is 00:49:54 Also, Starkware. It looks like they're expanding to Bitcoin with a ZK rollup. Can Bitcoin support ZK rollups? And Coinbase got a new fancy wallet they think is going to onboard billions. So we're going to get to that and more. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including Mantle, one of our favorite Layer 2s.

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Starting point is 00:51:47 And if you're not a developer, those with staked CTSI can take part in the governance process and vote on whether or not a proposal should be funded. Make sure your vote ready by staking your CTSI before the votes open. Breaking news as of this morning, Thursday morning, Robin Hood has announced that they are acquiring Bit Stamp, which is a pretty actually huge cryptocurrency exchange, one of the earliest cryptocurrency exchange that's out there, really just to expand on Robin Hood's just crypto program. They just want to add more customers, expand out into the EU, the UK and Asia. And if you don't know what BitSamp is, it's actually one of the oldest exchanges, the first big exchange post-mount Gawks. Mount Gawks was the first first. major competitor of BitStamp, or BitSamp was the first major competitor of Mount Cox. 85 tradable assets, plenty of licenses all over the world, millions of customers. People don't really know about BitStamp. It's just not in vogue, but they've been around for forever.

Starting point is 00:53:35 They are currently headquartered in Luxembourg, but with offices in London, New York as well. And now they are part of the Robin Hood Crypto Program. So Robin Hood is just acquiring all of those users. Here's Vlad, the CEO of Robin Hood saying, We believe crypto will fundamentally reorganize the financial system and we're acquiring BitStamp to accelerate our vision. Soon we'll combine forces with BitSams global footprint, core spot exchange and industry leading products like Crypto as a service, institutional lending and staking. So this is Robin Hood just not making some tokens available on Robin Hood, but they are doing, they're just trying to compete shoulder to shoulder with the Bess in there in the cryptocurrency. Yeah, I think here's why this is a big deal.

Starting point is 00:54:14 So first of all, Robin Hood has a ton of retail users. in general, 25 million users, and now this is them doubling down on crypto. They also, if you recall, David, they're one of those five, like, crypto companies that are now being sued by the SEC, and they're based in the U.S., right? So what does this say, right? It's like the SEC has told them to stop trading crypto, and they just bought a crypto exchange, which is, I think is hilarious. Is this now the second crypto exchange that is now technically public since Robin has a

Starting point is 00:54:42 public company? That's the third thing. So, you know, Coinbase. Oh, and by the way, this is kind of breaking. I haven't had a chance to get into the details, but there's rumors that Cracken is potentially going public as well. These are just rumors as to the stage. Imagine if you had Coinbase, you had Robin Hood, and you had Cracken,

Starting point is 00:54:58 all publicly traded companies with lawsuits from the SEC. It's absolutely crazy. I think this is a really big deal. David, get us up to speed on the celebrity culture wars and Vitalik weighing in here. What happened last week? All right. So this is the continuation of Mother.

Starting point is 00:55:16 This is Iggy Azalea's mother token, which is coming in at a whopping $205 million market cap. It almost hit a quarter of a billion dollars. $118 million in 24-hour trading volume, just absolutely insane. It's kind of crazy. Definitely like it hasn't gone down. And just the price has not gone down on this thing. It's still like two weeks old. It's still pretty young.

Starting point is 00:55:40 But kind of doing some crazy price action. Vitalik put out a tweet following Chris Berniske. who put out a tweet earlier that we talked about in a different episode. Chris Berninski says, if mother breaks into sustainable value creation, it will be the mother of this cycle's celebrity experimentation. Vitalik responded to this Chris Berninski tweet saying, saying,

Starting point is 00:56:00 I'm feeling quite unhappy about this quote, this cycle's celebrity experimentation so far. And then he adds, in quotes, financialization as a means toward an end, end quote. And then he says, I can respect if the end is worthy, health care, open source software, art, etc., etc.

Starting point is 00:56:15 financialization as the final product, though, like throwing up emoji. Ashton and Mila's stoner cast was vastly more honorable than anything we've seen in this 24 celebrity meme coin era. At least there was an actual show being funded. How do we push things in a better direction? And of course, this just got a ton of traction because it's Vitalik commenting on meme coins. So Vitalik saying, not really happy. This is a financialization as the point is not a noble destination.

Starting point is 00:56:44 And so kind of kicked off a conversation about this. Like there's been this conversation, but Daleks now weighing in. And then here is the meme that Iggy Azalia posts, which is Iggy Azalia, with her face on a mother breastfeeding a baby Vitalik saying he was just hangary, which is not a very nice response, I would say, to Vitalik's message. Yeah, I guess so. I guess Iggy is just doing it for the culture, David. it. So this is Hayden Adams also weighing in saying, no issues. What culture is that? I don't know. The Iggy mother culture. If you own some mother tokens, you'd understand. No issues with meme coins or sled coins. This is Hayden Adams now weighing in. I think there's value to

Starting point is 00:57:29 memetic attention. It's cool to create markets for it. That said, the underlying purpose and value of the tech goes way beyond financial games. And the best builders in the space are motivated by positive social change. Iggy could have responded positively. Instead, she condescends the best builder in the entire space proving his point. So Hayden, standing up for Vitalik on this meme saying it's like not like not respectful. It's funny because she did just kind of prove his point. How serious is it? I mean, people post all sorts of memes of Vitalik.

Starting point is 00:57:58 Like I personally don't have a problem with this meme. But like the firestorm that this whole conversation like Vitalik, I go back to like Vitalik is just saying, how do we push things in a better direction? And people got absolutely angry. about this saying there shouldn't be gatekeeping, there shouldn't be elites, like dictating the terms of the meme points. It's a whole discussion on celebrity meme coins right now.

Starting point is 00:58:21 And I feel like it's part of the culture wars. It's part of the crypto culture wars that we're in. There's a dividing line in these culture wars. The war is being fought like over the line of like meme or utility. There's like a tweet that Iggyzalia put out saying like, I'm thinking about ways to like make my token useful for holders and they can like do things. like compete in like competitions and stuff.

Starting point is 00:58:45 And like a large number of responses to that tweet was like, no, no, no, don't do that. No utility. Don't put utility in the tokens. There's people that want it to just be memes. And then that that's like the nihilist camp, the meme coin camp, the culture coin camp call it. And then there's the other sides of people who's like, hey, can we like make these things more productive? Can we make these things beneficial to society? Like how can we make these things better?

Starting point is 00:59:09 And that's the line that is being fought over. Like, do you want to make these things into productive things for, like, GDP, or do you want these to just be memes? I just continue to not really care about this, David, honestly. It's crazy that this is all we're talking about. Man, I'd rather talk about the ETFs than this, honestly. That's our meme. Those are our memes. That's the memes that we start going on.

Starting point is 00:59:32 While the Slebcoin Culture Wars rage on, the good news is, David, the builders are continuing to build. This is a Coinbase post, a new era in crypto wallets. The smart wallet is here. So Coinbase has released something they call a smart wallet. They say it's easy enough to onboard the next billion users, or the first billion users into crypto. So tell us about this. What is this wallet?

Starting point is 00:59:53 What's cool about it? Probably the first thing that if you go and get one of these wallets, the first thing you'll notice is how fast you get it. And actually also the familiarity of the signup flow. And so I use a password manager like most people. So when I signed got my wallet, it put the key in my password manager. And so your password manager manages your keys. And what is the difference between a password and a key?

Starting point is 01:00:17 Really, the only thing is like the length of characters. And so my password manager now has my key. And I also have that same password manager like on other devices, which means I have this wallet on all the devices that I have my password manager. Everyone who uses a password manager now has this. That is your security model setup for your private key for your service new wallet. It's not just password managers too, right? It's just like if you use face ID, if you have a phone with a secure enclave, then it just just like stores it in that.

Starting point is 01:00:42 So you don't have to have a seed phrase. All of those things are password managers, right? Like you're circular enclave and Apple in like your keychain. That's a password manager. You just need some sort of password manager somewhere. Like it'll use Chrome as a password manager if you want to use that. And so this is like probably the best security that we can get a billion people to use because, you know, many people you also use password managers.

Starting point is 01:01:06 I signed up for this on just like a web browser, just like www. whatever the URL is.com. They'll put a link in the show notes if you want to access it. But then the idea is if this is your most secure and accessible wallet. It supports base, Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitron, Polygon, Avalanche, BNB, Zora, so all of the EVM chains. And then this is probably just like the foot in the door for Coinbase to just do some really cool things with people who have these wallets. And so it just starts with getting this wallet into more people's hands. I think if you kill seed phrases and you use existing like password management infrastructure,

Starting point is 01:01:42 like face ID and this sort of thing that people know, and there's no network fees to like get started with a wallet, that removes like 90% of the barriers to entry for crypto. So this is really cool to see. There's also something at Coinbase rolled out, which is like, it's kind of cool. You can now text tokens on base. So David, if I have your, if you have your phone number, I can actually text you, some mother coins because like I want you to have these coins

Starting point is 01:02:09 I mean maybe maybe not mother because that's a lot of had to use mother coins no no I think actually I can right because mother's on Ethereum too so I could send you some mother tokens David mother's not on Ethereum Jenner's not theory oh Jenner we got the Jenner token which is at zero

Starting point is 01:02:22 man I need to keep up that's a zero now anyway I could text you tokens you could text your friends tokens that could be a cool onboarding experience as well so pretty neat to see this speaking of Builders Building David Starkware is trying to bring ZK Rollo to Bitcoin. Is this possible? What did they announce this week?

Starting point is 01:02:39 Ellie from Starkware put out a video this week talking about how they are going to simultaneously put Starkware on top of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Turns out you can do that. And so this is actually there's a, there's a cohort of people out there who are just Bitcoin OGs who started building in the crypto space, but they were constrained about what Bitcoin could do in the available technology that they have. And they all just have kind of like a first love for Bitcoin. I think Brian Armstrong definitely fits in this category. Eli and Erie of Starkware definitely fit in this category. They started building Starks and saw the powers that blockchain technology could give Starks because of Bitcoin. They ended up building on top of Ethereum

Starting point is 01:03:15 because they needed something more expressive, a stronger foundation to build Starknet, Starkware. But they all kind of have like this first love for Bitcoin. Since Starks and ZK technology has become sufficiently powerful, that they can now actually start to take that technology and bring it back to Bitcoin, especially with this conversation around O.P. Kat, which is a new op code that people want to get into the Bitcoin, soft fork into Bitcoin. If you don't know what that is, we did a podcast with Eric Wall about this.

Starting point is 01:03:43 And so importantly, no new chain is being created. The same Starknet network that you are currently using with the same governance and same tokens can now also support Bitcoin scaling without supporting a fork. And so this is actually kind of like Starkware, probably from the perspective of Uri and Ellie, kind of coming home to their original purpose,

Starting point is 01:04:02 which was to scale Bitcoin. I think it's really cool. just for all of the decentralization maxis out there, right? Because if Bitcoin can have ZK layer twos, that can further decentralize Bitcoin. You could do more on top of Bitcoin, which is bullish. That one caveat, though, David, the OP CAT thing, kind of wonder how long it's going to take Bitcoin to deploy that.

Starting point is 01:04:23 Don't hold your breath. I mean, this could take years. I wouldn't be surprised if this took five years to get O.P. Kat into Bitcoin, which would make this announcement still five years out. I mean, maybe it happens sooner. but like, huh, two to five years is probably an estimate for this. Of Bitcoin like changes. That's for sure.

Starting point is 01:04:42 Other people are saying Starkware, what the hell are you doing? This is a lack of focus. Like, you guys should focus on Starknet. Well, they don't have to do anything until OP CAT is deployed. That's true. It ought to change anything. Yeah. Anyways, as Starkware develops their Bitcoin scaling strategy,

Starting point is 01:05:00 we can ask them that at permissionless because Ellie will be at permissionalist. So maybe this is a topic like a conversation that comes up in the ZK track or the Bitcoin scaling track, which we have both of. If you do not have a ticket with permissionless, prices only go up. So you should definitely get it now sooner rather than later. If you are listening to this, you get 10% off with bankless 10. If you are a bankless citizen, you get 30% off in your perks page. There is a link in the show notes. I'm super stoked for permissionless.

Starting point is 01:05:24 We have like one of the sickest lineups I've ever seen out of a conference. So don't be a laggard because then you just end up paying more. but if you want to be paying less Cryptopunks are now selling for under 30 Eth for the first time in three years. Is this for my benefit? You want me to buy CryptoPath?

Starting point is 01:05:40 This is in the weekly roll-up because Ryan has always just faded Cryptopunk because he says they're too expensive. I've always always just been too expensive. Well, Ryan, I got news for you because they're the cheapest they've been in a really long time. So I bought my Cryptopunk at a 22-Ether floor.

Starting point is 01:05:58 And so I've been like, I've been able to be, be completely fine with my punk even though the of the depreciating price for a really long time but now we're in the 20s like a crypto punk got sold for 28 and a half ether um so yeah punks below eth i will think about it i'll think about it david people are saying like oh like nfts are so bearish like crypto punks are bearish 28 ether is 108 000 it's still very pricey yeah that's a lot of eth for sure um another bit of news this week that went a little below the radar, I think, is BlackRock and Citadel. They're trying to launch a rival

Starting point is 01:06:33 stock exchange. And they're going to do this in Texas. So this would be a stock exchange that would compete with traditional stock exchanges, like I guess the NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange. And so they haven't done this yet. And they're going to try to do it. I didn't know you could just start exchanges in the old world. I know you can start exchanges in crypto all the time because we have a trillion of them. I didn't know you could just make a new exchange. If you're BlackRock and Citadel. You certainly can. You certainly have the liquidity and assets to do that. But can I give you some hopium, though? This is a... I'm pretty sure I know where this is going. All right. Here's some hopium for you. Here's a tweet I uncovered. Okay. Conspiracy theory here. BlackRock is

Starting point is 01:07:08 launching TXSE competitor to New York Stock Exchange. This guy says, this Twitter account says, they'll create an Ethereum L2 for this exchange. Okay? Why? Here's the reason why. SEC Commissioner Hester Purse wants to create a sandbox for issuing trading and settlements of securities on a distributed ledger. Where will this sandbox run? Probably on the new TXSE. What if, David, BlackRock, Larry Fink, were so bullish on tokenization and crypto that they actually decide to launch this thing as an Ethereum layer two? What do you think about that? That gives you some hopium. Does that send ETH price to 154K? That is some pretty good hopium. That's some grade A hope, yeah. I definitely can accept the conspiracy theory of Larry Fink is all about tokens, and he

Starting point is 01:07:58 would like to produce an exchange that works with tokens. That, that conspiracy, I can definitely get behind. Taking it all the way into an Ethereum layer two, and it's going to be a tokenization base exchange, that's, that's like straight, straight delusion, Hobium. Yeah, I, I kind of love it, though. Maybe in the fullness of time, we get there. David, the last time you gave out a take that I thought was extremely delusional. It was the fact that we were going to get the ETH ETF on a political pit at the last hour. This is not my take. I will say that. So don't get your hopes up on this one. In the fullness of time, though, all things are possible. There is something that is missing from this weekly roll up, Ryan, that we promised them, promised the listeners last week, which is a

Starting point is 01:08:39 competition between you and me about our ability to pitchies. I need to call me out publicly because I didn't do my homework. Yeah. Ryan didn't do his homework. So he is requesting to punch. I don't have my punt yeah to punt because he wasn't he's not ready to pitch he can't finish he's not very good at it next show that i'm here i got to punt this pitch because i want to get it right next show that you're here but you're here every single week ryan wouldn't that be next week i need more time i need more time to prepare so anthony sasano on the show next week you guys will enjoy him yeah anthony's on the roll up next week i'm out i'll be preparing my pitch i'll come back and i will give you the best elevator pitch you've ever heard for ether the asset that's the focus right not if you're in the

Starting point is 01:09:18 network. We are trying to sell ether the asset to tradify. And I will come equipped to give you the best pitch you'll ever hurt. You've ever heard, David. You're just going to knock your socks off. So last week, we agreed to present our pitches this week. I'm ready to go. I've got my pitch like right in front of me. Save it. So we have to add a pitch off. If we're going to punt this by two weeks because you didn't do your homework, I think we have to actually up the stakes of this debate, of this bet because we actually didn't have any stakes. Yeah. What do you, what do you, now I have,

Starting point is 01:09:50 now I have to, I'm not going to fight you. I don't want to fight you. That's not what I'm interested. All right. I don't know. Think about it. If I win,

Starting point is 01:10:00 you have to buy a crypto punk. Dude, that, no, no. A worthless JPEG? Definitely not. Think about it. I'll see if I accept your terms and, you know,

Starting point is 01:10:12 propose something to me and we'll bring it. Bankless Nation, I need help upping the stakes for Ryan for me. I'm not buying CryptoPy. But he's on bankruptipunks. All right.

Starting point is 01:10:21 On raises this week, bankless ventures did a thing of raise. We should disclose it. Mountain Protocol is a tokenized treasury. They've just raised $8 million. We're pretty excited about this one. Why are we excited about Mountain, David? Well, this is part of the thesis that all stable coins on in crypto, on crypto rails will eventually just turn into tokenized treasuries.

Starting point is 01:10:42 Why will that be the case? Well, because a tokenized treasury will spit out five plus percent yield. It spits out yield. whereas a stable coin does not. Circle, tether, one of those profitable businesses in all of crypto, and they do next to no work. Shouldn't you as the owner and holder of stable coins get that yield, get that the T-bill yield? Well, Mountain Protocol is doing that. They've already issued over $50 million of USDM, which is a interest-bearing T-bill-backed stablecoin.

Starting point is 01:11:11 So individuals can get the yield that tether is otherwise getting. multi-coin capital is the lead Castle Island Ventures Participation, Coinbase ventures and bankless ventures as well all a follow-on participation. Bullish, Bullish Martin, bullish Argentine founders

Starting point is 01:11:26 because Argentine founders definitely enjoy stable coins and definitely yield-being stable coins. So there's a link in the show notes if you guys want to read more about Mountain Protocol. All right, let's close this out with a meme of the week, David.

Starting point is 01:11:37 What are we looking at? This is a meme from me. So I get the pat on the back for being the meme of the week. I also selected myself. this is the guy poking the thing with a stick asking it to do something and then the thing that we're poking is the ETH ETFs will you please start trading is this going to be the next month

Starting point is 01:11:57 according to David of podcast but not in longer than the meme of the week for the next four weeks four weeks only because David's date was July 6 if you guys recall don't know July 6 is a weekend like the vibe around there early July early July first half of July is the prediction here We'll be poking the stick at the ETHETF until then on the weekly roll-up. Got to end with this. Of course, you know, crypto is risky.

Starting point is 01:12:21 You could lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. Not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

Bankless - ROLLUP: ETFs Back? | Robinhood Acquires Bitstamp | Biden SAB-121 Veto

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