Bankless - ROLLUP: ETH ATH! | U.S. Gov Onchain GDP | Google’s L1 | Hyperliquid Prints | EU Digital Euro?

Episode Date: August 29, 2025

On this week’s Weekly Rollup, Ryan and Haseeb debate if ETH’s new all-time high signals the top or just the start, with whales rotating from BTC into ETH and alt season heating up. Powell hints at rate cuts, ETFs keep pulling billions, and Tom Lee’s billion-dollar ETH bet takes center stage while treasury premiums sink. Meanwhile, Google teases an L1, Hyperliquid outpaces Robinhood, and Europe floats a digital euro, setting up another pivotal week in crypto. --- 📣RONIN “ONCHAIN NINTENDO” | DOWNLOAD THE RONIN WALLET https://bankless.cc/RoninWallet --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle --- TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 0:38 Big Sean Crypto https://x.com/altcoindaily/status/1960753873376961031 3:20 Powell’s speech last week https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/powell-opens-door-potential-rate-cut-speech-jack https://x.com/FinanceLancelot/status/1958934829082583312 https://x.com/Cointelegraph/status/1958907551442993491: https://x.com/charliebilello/status/1958910251819786478 https://x.com/AnnaEconomist/status/1958923556680536487 9:10 Markets https://x.com/JSeyff/status/1959982000804442559 https://x.com/BanklessHQ/status/1958941150041317514 https://x.com/speculatorart/status/1960322107864141966 https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/08/25/bitcoin-flash-crash-triggers-usd550m-in-sunday-l https://x.com/JacobKinge/status/1959724849598718428 https://x.com/lookonchain/status/1958767845934080277 https://x.com/woonomic/status/1960442328604200987 24:53 HYPE Crushing it - competitive with major exchanges https://x.com/cointelegraph/status/1960379396927213990 https://blockworks-research.beehiiv.com/p/is-hype-still-cheap-8541fea8eaae3e65 https://x.com/infinitybanyan/status/1960373080389304611 34:55 SOL DATs are coming - 3 of em! https://x.com/matthew_sigel/status/1959942140500365564 https://x.com/SolanaFloor/status/1959948823280619558 https://decrypt.co/336832/pantera-capital-eyes-1-25b-raise-solana-treasury-firm https://panteracapital.com/blockchain-letter/dat-value-creation/ https://mcga.com/news/trump-media-group-cro-strategy-to-acquire-cro-digital-asset-treasury https://blockworks.co/analytics/treasury-companies/market-data 42:01 Google is building its L1 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rich-widmann-a816a54b_all-this-talk-of-layer-1-blockchains-has-activity-7366124738848415744-7idA/ 49:35 US GOV - will publish GDP figures onchain! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbEPqUdelFo https://blog.chain.link/united-states-department-of-commerce-macroeconomic-data/ https://x.com/Cointelegraph/status/1961067983800881224 https://x.com/krakenfx/status/1961081675175149795 https://etherscan.io/address/0x36ccdf11044f60f196e981970d592a7de567ed7b#code https://docs.chain.link/data-feeds/us-government-macroeconomic/addresses?page=1&testnetPage=1 51:41 The EU may release a Stablecoin on a public chain - Ethereum or Solana https://x.com/DefiIgnas/status/1958754787345727712 https://app.rwa.xyz/stablecoins https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/china-considering-yuan-backed-stablecoins-boost-global-currency-usage-sources-2025-08-21/ 56:45 Kanye West released $YZY https://x.com/kanyewest/status/1958346810801697237 https://x.com/CryptoHayes/status/1958356982991401006 https://x.com/lookonchain/status/1958355708010975580 https://x.com/JamesWynnReal/status/1958383968945831940 59:43 DOJ announced that it won’t bring charges against non-custodial developers https://x.com/BanklessHQ/status/1958645825732501566 1:04:51 Closing & Disclaimers --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Bankless Station, it is the last week of August. Time for the Bankless Weekly Rollup. We've got David out. We've got Haseeb Qureshi filling in from Dragonfly Capital. Hasib, how you doing, man? Doing good. Good to see you. You know what?

To get us in the mood for the bankless weekly rollup, I want to play you this clip and see if you can identify. This is Big Sean. Okay? You ready for this? I'm ready. And if it is one time that I'm going to say this, this is not. You're not too late.

Invest in crypto right now. Tonight, if you can, like, do that shit tonight. you're going to get a return from it. You know, Bitcoin is a good one, Ethereum. What's the other one you said? What's the other one you said? Ripple. Invest in that, I'm telling you out right now, this is a-

Ripple. Do it tonight. It's about to go up. You know, I think it's about to go up. It's not like I got no inside of our nation. I think it's about to go up. Well, there you go, Hesib. I could not have said it better.

I think it's about to go up. Not too sure. Do you hear the crowd, though? They're like, X-R-P, X-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-E. That's where the XRP holders are, man. I did hear a little bit of a laugh when he was like, I think it's good. What's the one that's going to go up? You were telling me about it earlier?

It's like, oh, so this is like your bro is telling you this? Yeah, yeah, good stuff. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, you know what? It must be bull season when you got Big Sean yelling it from the stage. Actually, yelling out tickers like Bitcoin and Eath. We got a lot to cover today. So, number one, Eith reached an all-time high last week, okay?

That's after almost four years. four years we've been waiting for this so thanks to Tom Lee for that also the US government is putting GDP on the blockchain what the heck is that about is that cool I don't even know what to think also Google has announced they're credibly neutral planet scale layer one

and they announced it on LinkedIn Haseeb okay I went on LinkedIn I'm never there but I had to go scope this out so we're going to talk about that hyper liquid printing money I want you to tell me what you think about this it's a lot of revenue I don't know if it's a buy I don't know what to do at this point. And also, the EU is considering a digital euro.

And they said on a public blockchain, they said Ethereum, they said maybe Solana. They're not sure yet. But that seems like a pivot. So all this and more, we're going to dive into all these subjects. But before we get to it, got a shout out our friends over at Ronan. So Ronan, they used to be a side chain. They are the chain of Axi Infinity. You guys remember NFT mania from 2021.

They are coming home to Ethereum. They want to build Ethereum Cintendo. In fact, they're already kind of doing that. They've got 4.5 billion NFT volume right now, about 30 million wallet downloads. And their layer two is going to be even more crazy, 12 times faster. Plus, they've got the Ron staking rewards

that are going on for builders and for the communities that are adding value to Ronan. You've got to go check it out. If it's been a while since you checked out, on-chain gaming, now is the time. Download the Ronan wallet. Get a taste of this on-chain Nintendo. It's a bankless.com slash renan wallet.

Okay, Haseeb, I got to start with maybe Powell's speech. I don't know if you track these speeches at all. And did you listen to this one? I did not listen, but I read about the debrief afterwards. Okay. So what do you think about what's going on? Because the market reacted very, very favorably on Friday. I mean, this is where we got ETH price all-time high and it, you know, crypto jumped up.

What's your take on what Powell said? Well, honestly, it was a little bit of a. retrace, because if you look at the CME, so the CME, they have these interest rate markets where you can kind of project the number of rate cuts that you expect to happen. Yep. And immediately after Powell's speech, everybody was worried that, you know, after some, after basically a spat of bad data, that maybe Powell was not going to be willing to actually cut rates. And we saw the Fed minutes from previous in the year that had only been disclosed relatively recently, that the Fed governors were pretty unified in thinking that it was too early to cut rates.

So that had the market spooked, right? Previously, it was, I think, like, 99.9% likely that we were going to get a rate cut in the next Fed meeting. Yeah. And that had come all the way down to, like, 40% chance of no rate cut. Wow. And so the markets were very, very concerned that maybe we're just going to be stuck here and the Fed is going to be too conservative. And with Trump trying to now politicize the Fed and really metal, many people think that maybe Powell was just going to dig in his feet and say, look, I don't want my legacy to be, I, I don't know. get kowtowed by Trump, I start cutting rates and inflation goes up.

And I get, that's kind of what I thought. Right? This is his last speech. He's got nothing to lose. I mean, he's going to ride up in the sunset anyway. So why not come out hard? Well, we'll come out hard meaning like hold rates or cut rates. I mean, he wanted to be Volker, right?

Yeah. If you cut rates and inflation goes up, you get blamed. You'll get blamed forever as being the weakling who backed down to Trump. Exactly. And I think Powell does not want that to be his legacy. So many people were worried that like maybe just. the kind of the ego and the legacy of the man was going to resist the rate cut. Yeah.

But I think hearing from Powell, they're like, hey, I think the data's all there, supports a rate cut, we're currently in restrictive territory. All of that just made markets have this huge sigh of relief. I'm like, oh, okay, thank God. There's going to be rate cuts. We're probably going to be okay. Markets now are pricing, what, like 10% chance of no rate cut? So it's like 90-ish percent that we do cut rates in the next Fed meeting.

And I think that makes ultimately, now that's kind of where we were. Yeah. So I think the ETH rally is largely, okay, both the Sive Relief plus all this stuff happening from Dats and Tom Lee being able to push ETH higher. But if you look at other risk assets, largely they kind of retraced to where they were before when people were already confident in a rate cut. So that's my sense of what has happened over the last couple weeks. And so I guess the market is pricing in what, a 25 basis point rate cut. I mean, some are hoping for, I mean, this is a much lower probability, but like a 50% rate cut in September. Do you think that happens?

I think jumbo cuts off the table. Obviously, you can see here from the chart that you pulled up is that CME says, no, no way, no way on a jumbo rate cut this quarter. Possible that we get three rate cuts by the end of the year. But right now it looks like the median expectation is two rate cuts. But this is all good for risk-on assets, you think? I mean, the reason he's doing this is because of weak job numbers and kind of weak economy, right? So it's a double-edged short always. That's right.

And ultimately what Powell's saying is that, look, I think the inflation increase that we've seen is probably short-lived. It's because of tariffs. If it's because of tariffs, then it's not fundamentally about the money supply. It's about, you know, just measuring the price of goods. And tariffs are a one-time thing. They're not a permanent change to inflation. When you zoom out, though, does it seem a little bit weird? So here's a tweet that I enjoyed stocks, all-time high,

Home prices all time high. Bitcoin, all time high, gold, all time high, money supply, all time high, national debt, all time high. CPI inflation, 4% per year since January 2020. 2x the Fed's target. And the Fed says, we're cutting interest rates next month, guys. Like, should he be cutting interest rates? Or is this actually Trump capitulating due to like Trump's meddling?

Well, look, the Fed themselves believe that right now, so the labor market is softening, right, pretty clearly. if you look at PCE, so just looking at CPI alone, the Fed actually, they don't use CPI, they use PCE, which basically is a different measure of inflation that's less subject to some of these short-term fluctuations. And you also want to be looking at core, which is basically also takes out, it's like a smaller subset of inflation. And the question always when you're looking at inflation is why is inflation up? What are the subparts of the basket that are inflating? If you see broad-based inflation, like it's happening to everything, that's a sign that this is the

bad kind of inflation that's more connected to the money supply and to interest rates. If you see isolated inflation, only certain things are inflating, then you have to understand, like, okay, why is that inflating? It may well be that there's a war somewhere, or there's a shortage or something, or there's, you know, something else that's exogenous and has nothing to do with the money supply. So the Fed, they very data-driven, they look at all this stuff. And now, look, the stocks alt-em high, Bitcoin alt-um high, gold all-time high. I think these things are kind of unsurprising, right? Actually, these are things are supposed to go up over time.

That's why we have an inflationary currency, is that these numbers are supposed to go up over time. The home prices are maybe the one that's not supposed to go up all the time. The home price is supposed to be mean reverting, right? That's a weird thing. That's not supposed to be like any other commodity. It's not like TVs get more expensive all the time. So the fact that home prices are getting more expensive at the time,

that's a problem, a social problem, as well as also a policy problem that we decided that we want home prices to keep going higher and higher. But all these other things are actually, that's kind of how it's supposed to work. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point there. Talking about prices, let's look at Bitcoin on the week. So we are at 112K at the time of recording. That's up. That's basically flat on the week. You know, I saw this tweet, Haseeb, which I found kind of interesting, one of the Bloomberg ETF guys, basically the question of who owns the Bitcoin ETFs, okay? And the number one spot here above banks, above governments, above private equities, was investment advisors.

You know, your Charles Schwab guy, that's the type of person, individual, that is actually a buyer of these Bitcoin ETFs. And they have about double what the hedge fund managers have. Is this surprising to you, or is this somewhat expected that the investment advisors are really the ones driving a lot of these ETF flows? So this is my first time seeing this. When it says investment advisors, does that mean on behalf of retail investors and so on who have accounts of Schwab? Or what exactly does that mean? I think that's what that is, yeah, basically. It's like the registered investment advisor type, you know, who's advising maybe your parents on their 401ks and whatever retirement assets they have.

So, yeah, my understanding was that the Bitcoin UTF complex, when it first launched, institutions, as we normally think of them, were something like 10% of the total Bitcoin UTF holdings. They've come up quite a bit, so now they're like somewhere in the 30-ish percent, which means that most of the Bitcoin ETF complex is still held by retail. And it's, you know, maybe unsurprising that, yes, Bitcoin is mostly owned by retail, even though the institutional interest in Bitcoin has picked up quite a lot. But crypto is still a retail-driven asset. And we still have, you know, a lot of the, even like the sort of high net worth and family office advisors, a lot of them still don't have the authority to be able to,

affirmatively pitch them buying Bitcoin yet. Right? A lot of these platforms don't even offer Bitcoin when they're, when they're, you know, these kind of RAA high net worth, you know, wealth management type arms for like Morgan Stanley or or Goldman Sachs or whatever. So a lot of them are reverse inquiry only, meaning that they're not allowed to sell you the Bitcoin ETF. But if you ask, then they can say, oh, okay, yeah, you should look at the BlackRock.

You should look at this. You should look at that. That will almost certainly change. But my understanding is that for many of the banks, it has not changed yet. Yeah. So I think this number is going up. The amount of institutional ownership of Bitcoin is going to go up. Because in many ways, retail is kind of, it's not fully tapped out, but retail has had access to Bitcoin for a long, long time.

Like, I don't think the Bitcoin penetration among retail is going to like 10x. It's very high already in terms of the number of people in the U.S. who own Bitcoin. The institutions is where the penetration of Bitcoin is much smaller. And for many of the institutions that have exposure to Bitcoin, you know, I speak to many of these institutions. many of them are LPs. They have like 1% Maybe 2% Bitcoin, right?

At most, at most. Very, very few of them are at like five. Five is like the highest you could possibly imagine. But if you think about something like gold or commodities, most of these have much higher exposure to assets like that than they have to Bitcoin. Over time, that's going to change. That's almost certainly going to flip

is that Bitcoin is going to eat more and more into that. And there's still many, many institutions that are on zero. And that's probably the modal it's probably the modal high net worth or institution in the U.S. still has no crypto exposure at all. So if these institutions have like 0% or 1 to 2% in Bitcoin, how much are they holding of ether than Haseeb? Is it also like 0% not even 1 to 2%?

dramatically less. Yeah, basically zero. And that's been an interesting story. So at ETH price in the week, we're at about 4,477. So that is down. But we did hit an all-time high. Okay. I'm going to give you the new.

all-time high number is 4,954. The previous all-time high that was set sometime in, I believe that was November 2021. And that was like 4,780, something like that. But who's counting? And that was on that Powell Day, okay? It jumped 14% off of the back of the Powell speech, which I guess indicates more liquidity, more easy money, more risk on. And Eath Price like that a whole bunch.

bunch. This was the second largest daily increase for ETH. So a really big day. And just, I think for ETH bulls, hitting that all-time high number, just like psychologically felt really good. Although you could argue Haseep, like if you look at, let's see, market cap, we've already hit all-time high before, right? If you look at ETH market cap, because of course supplies increased. There's another metric you could look at for all-time high, which is Eth staking, right? So if you take all of the eth issuance, essentially maybe dividends, you might say, into the asset, then we were already at all time high. But still, like getting above the psychological dollar amount in all time high, I think felt pretty good for Heath holders and has been a long time coming.

Are you surprised, like, that it took so long? Were you one in the camp that, oh, my God, like maybe the bull is going to skip ETH this cycle? I mean, I was, I was relatively confident after ETH. bottomed that Heath was going to eventually get against all-time highs. And, you know, I think what I didn't anticipate was the Dat cycle

and Tom Lee comes coming in and becoming the same year for this asset. No, it's been absolutely surprising to me. But I remember actually I was on, I think I was on stage at Cornell, at Cornell Tech with David. And we were talking about, you know, who's going to be the Michael Saylor of Ethereum?

Obviously, somebody has to step up and kind of do the same thing. Did Tom Lee come to mind? No, not at all. Actually, we propose David would be the Michael Saylor. And David was like, oh, I don't know if I really have the sauce. Yeah. And, you know, I guess maybe unfortunately he didn't raise his hand and take that seat.

But Tom Lee, his excellency, great work. I mean, holy shit. Like, it's been absolutely incredible to see him just run a masterclass in rebranding the East story. It has been incredible. I mean, he's CNBC. People love him. He's everywhere. I mean, every day.

He's on, like, a podcast, he's on CNBC, he's on Bloomberg. He's somewhere. Tom Lee is just everywhere these days telling the story, and he's stacking a whole bunch of ETH. I don't know. We don't even, I could recite how much ETH he bought this week, but something, another $1 billion or something like that, Haseep. So he seems serious about getting that 5% ETH supply number, which just seems audacious and impossible, but like, he's on his way.

He's creeping up on 2% of all ETH supply. What do you make of this story? There's been a lot of reports. You don't know whether this is just like price increasing, but big Bitcoin whales rotating into ETH. This is Willie Wu with some charts, love Willie's charts. Capital has been rotating from Bitcoin to ETH. You can see the flows into ETH. They're in orange. They're now approaching Bitcoin's inflows right here. So, you know, the ETH inflows approaching Bitcoin inflows. But in general, I mean, there seem to be a report of rotation. So people are looking at big whales on hyperliquid and they're, you know, selling Bitcoin

for ETH. Is this expected? Is this just this point in the cycle? Everyone's anticipating a typical four-year rotation where Bitcoin, you know, makes a run, and then ETH is next, and then we get kind of alt coins. Is that what you think these traders are anticipating? Yeah. In a way, having cycles like this, everybody's kind of primed of like, oh, it's happening again. And once everybody's primed, like, everybody has this pattern in their mind, and they kind of make it so. Yeah. You know, in a way, Like, you know, people, people often think this, exactly. People often think this about the business cycle is that like, why do we have business cycles? And, you know, there's some kind of deep structural things that be like, oh, there's a billup of debt and like bad investments that eventually have to come home to roost.

And then there's defaults and blah, blah, blah. And you have to clear out that. So there's sort of these, these micro reasons why you might have business cycles. But then there are also these kind of macro, almost psychological reasons is because people think that they're business cycles. And if people think their business cycles, they'll kind of talk themselves into the business cycles. which mean that like, oh, now is like the late's part of the cycle, so we should just like sell these assets. They start, you know, it's kind of like, you know,

the longer that you're married, you start to like notice the faults in your partner. And you're kind of like, oh, you know, like it just sort of like almost becomes this thing that, you know, because you expect it to be there, it arrives, you know. And so anyway, that's a little bit of what it feels like to me is that whether or not we'd ever been, if we had never been told that crypto has four-year cycles,

I think maybe we wouldn't be seeing such a ferocious rotation into Ethereum. Yeah. But I think because everyone's ready for this, it's happening and it's happening very visibly. So is that your base case just because, you know, we've all been hardwired into these four-year cycles and we're expecting it so we all kind of then act in unison together? I mean, if we get another four-year cycle, basically the clock is ticking. And if it ends like the previous three cycles, we're talking about November or December of this year. I mean, that would be the Bitcoin top at least, okay, if it repeats previous cycles.

There's others who say, no, this time it's different. We've got these institutional flows. It's less retail driven. ETFs have kind of stabilized things. And we're going to get a cycle extension into 2026. What do you think about this? Do you think we hit the four-year mark and it's over? Or do you think we get into 2026 and have some legs there?

Yeah. I think trying to predict, oh, it's going to be one year. six months, there's an extra extension here. It's a little bit like, I don't know, it feels like augury or sooth saying. Yeah. This is not real. Like, no, I think this is bullshit. What I'm describing is I think the rotation of momentum

from Bitcoin to Ethereum to other majors and then eventually to alts, right? That rotation, I think, is a bit of a self-fulfilling thing in that people are looking for the first sign. Like, oh, has all coin season started? And then when it does, people are like, great, I'm going to chase the alts and figure out which I want to front. run the rotation, right? And by front-running the rotation, you make the rotation happen

because the momentum just, like, crypto is very momentum-driven. So I think that is a, that is a self-fulfilling prophecy. But the timing of, is it one year, is it three years, it's a four years, it's going to be a six-year cycle this time. I don't think markets have that level of granularity. I don't think people have this like internal clock ticking in their heads of, oh, shit, it's been three years, time to get out because, you know, we're too late in the cycle. I don't know, man. At the end of this year, like November, December, I'm getting a little worried. I'm starting to sweat a little bit just because of how history has played out. But we're not at the four-year mark yet. So why? I mean, we will be, though. In November, December. When did the cycle starting? When did the cycle starting? Well, it's last time, four years ago, it was like 2017. I mean, 2021 and then 2017. Every four years is kind of like. Hold on. Well, clearly we cratered in 22, 23. Yeah, yeah. But we're talking about the Bitcoin top. We're talking about the Bitcoin top, at least.

If you measure it by then, it would be November or December. So you're measuring by trough. You're measuring by trough. Trough's a trough is four years. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay. But so the trough was like 23, right?

Yeah. Well, no, I'm not troth. Just Bitcoin top. So Bitcoin topped is 2021. End of 2021. Okay. And then before that four years before, Bitcoin topped December 2017. Four years before 2013.

It's like you get the top every four years. All right. Anyway, I'll worry about that. You don't have to worry about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So here's the other thing I'll say. Here's the other thing I'll say is that very clearly, in the early days of Bitcoin, Bitcoin was basically impervious to macro. And this was largely because Bitcoin was just so small that, like, macro was just not the dominant factor relative to its own growth, right? We're not in that world today. We're in a world where we can clearly see macros in the driver's seat. Macro has huge, huge effects on Bitcoin, ether, on all of these assets. We went from, if you recall, beginning of last year, CME was pricing seven rate cuts last year. Instead, we got, you know, three, basically. And this year, it was, again, the beginning of the year,

pricing seven rate cuts, six or seven rate cuts, the beginning of the year. Here we are, you know, getting excited about like, oh, we're finally getting a rate cut, markets are rallying, you know. So the reality is that macro has actually been pretty unforgiving in this environment. And if there's like, oh, well, you know, it's like four years since the last top, blah, blah, blah.

But like we were going into this cutting cycle, and we know that, look, whether or not Powell is going to stand the line, Powell's getting replaced, right? His term is coming up fairly soon early next year. And when he gets replaced, markets are going to be dancing because we all know what Trump is going to do. Once he basically controls the Fed board, they're going to be cutting as fast as they possibly can.

So that is going to be very stimulative of risk assets, and that includes Bitcoin, includes alts, includes either. So I think the macro setup has to be positive going into medium term. And that may, you know, even if you're right, there's a normal, very strong draw toward a four-year cycle. That cycle may get elongated just because of the massive impacts. Yeah, you've got to be right on that because it is macro. Macro is the dog weighing the tail, right? Whereas crypto, I mean, this is the four-year cycles has got to be somewhat superstition.

I mean, macro is going to be the dominant force that drives all this. So we'll have to see what's in play there. We got a lot coming up next, including one of those all coins. I want you to tell me a bit more about Hyper Liquid is now bigger than Robin Hood. Okay? How the hell did that happen? Some incredible volume. Also, Solana is getting in that public treasury game.

They got three that launched. Who's going to be Solana's Tom Lee? That's why I want to ask you, Haseep. And also, Google launching a layer one. We'll talk about all that and more. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Ethereum's layer two universe is exploding with choices. But if you're looking for the best place to park and move your tokens, make your next stop unichain.

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Some of the trading volumes are competitive with some of our largest exchanges right now. So this is a headline from Coin Telegraph. Hyperliquid recorded 330 billion in trading volume in July, surpassing U.S. brokerage giant Robin Hood. Okay, in July, Hyper Liquid was bigger than Robin Hood. It had some days, I believe, well, was this all of December where Hyper Liquid was the second largest Bitcoin spot exchange by MarketShare, only succeeded by Binance. Finance was 38. Hyperliquid was 12%.

We're seeing all of this big whale activity of like, you know, Bitcoin traders, you know, swapping some of those Bitcoin to ETH trades that I mentioned, all of that was happening. on hyperliquid. And then as far as revenue goes to see, I don't know if you've seen some of these charts. Hype is doing 36% of all crypto revenue. Okay? It's 1.2% of total crypto market cap and is doing 36% of crypto revenues.

This is hyperliquid, this chart. See that dark green in the bottom? And then we've got some other chains. We've got like Solana. We've got Ethereum. What else do we have? We all have some other layer twos, I suppose, here. Anyway, hyperliquid is just crushing it in terms of network revenue.

Tell me about this story. I don't know how much you've been following it. Maybe you guys are investors in this. I'm not sure. But like, what is going on with hyperliquid? How do you account for this success? So we own some hype. And I'll confess, I'm not the deepest on the hyperliquid space because I know there's

going to be some hyperliquid bros who are going to be mad at me for missing some of the details about this. Every time I talk about Hyperliquid, I get dunked on by somebody who's a bigger hyperliquid fan. So a lot of respect for the Hyperliquid team. They've obviously executed amazingly. They're now one of the largest exchanges in the world. And they're kind of the darling of Defi at this point. Like, the biggest success story with respect to actually getting an exchange working. I think for hyperliquid, look, the reality is that comparing them to Robin Hood is a little bit misleading because Robinhood is a brokerage. Sure.

It's not an exchange. Sure. And exchange, like, you know, a lot of the volume on hyperliquid is like market makers, you know, just providing liquidity or crossing other market makers or people hedging and stuff like this. That kind of activity doesn't happen on Robin Hood. So, because it's a retail brokerage, right? Only retail is interacting with them.

A better comparison is probably, finance, right? Yes. Binance or Coinbase or Cracken. These are better comparisons. Now, to be clear, it's very much hold its own against those global exchanges as well. but it's continuing to grow, which is probably the most amazing thing, is that many people thought that like,

okay, now that it's owned most of the volume in defy, and that was really the big question mark, is like, okay, hey, it's expanded the market significantly, but now it basically dominates perps trading volume in defy, right? It owns almost everything in the entire market. But it's going to hit a wall because the centralized exchanges, are people from centralized exchanges going to move over into hyperliquid? And it didn't really seem plausible

that they were going to be able to get to the scale of the really, really big global exchanges, right? If you look at Hyperliquid daily active traders, I don't know the exact numbers, but I believe it's around like 30 to 50,000 on any given day, which if you compare that to a Coinbase, to a Binance, much, much smaller numbers

than what you see at the global exchanges, right? And that being said, hyperliquid's doing this with one hand tied behind its back. It doesn't have the ability to go out, take, you know, TV ads, or to go out and, you know, do the kind of normal playbooks that these global exchanges do

of like, you know, sponsoring F1 teams and all those other stuff they do in order to get in the eyeballs of retail. They're doing this kind of global defy go-to-market. And I'd always believe that defy was just not going to be able to get to the same scale as something that can dominate an entire country

and have these fiat on ramps such that for Coinbase is like, okay, if you've got U.S. dollars, where you're going to go? There aren't that many options. But people have increasingly learned how to get their capital directly onto hyperliquid. And they're doing it now around the world. They have huge market share in many, many countries

that are otherwise impenishable for a lot of centralized exchanges to be able to compete with them. And they're doing it on very, very attractive fees, really, really strong liquidity, very fast iteration in their product roadmap. It's honestly unprecedented. Is that why people are using them?

Is it because just the product works? Or is it also because, I mean, there's low friction, I mean, I guess the volumes are good. I know perps are incredibly popular in general. We've seen them in crypto. I guess is it also because they can do this anonymously? Like, is there any AML KYC?

And what's interesting about this is like, I recall like, you remember the BitMex days, right? And Arthur Hayes, I believe he, I mean, he was on house arrest for like a year or something like this for AMLKYC types of violations. CZ. Right. Okay. So are they going to be able to get around that as well? Or like I haven't really fully unpacked the story of hyperliquid, honestly. Yeah.

So it's a complex story because very clearly hyperliquid is a decentralized exchange. And you can see from this administration that they've been trying to be much more open and permissive on decentralized exchanges. They've dropped the case against Uniswap. They basically said, look, we're not going to go after people criminally for non-registration or sort of these quote-unquote victimless crimes. So I think for hyperliquid, that's a good set of facts for hyperliquid. It means that probably the U.S. government is not going to be as aggressive against something

like a hyperliquid. Now, Hyperliquid has been under a lot of criticism for maybe not being as decentralized as many of its counterparts. So, for example, hyperliquid is still closed source. You cannot see the code that the denotes are running on. And it's pretty openly known that almost all the nodes, or I believe all the nodes in hyperliquid run out of AWS Tokyo. Okay.

So if you're in AWS Tokyo, that's where all the validators are slash have to be. And being in one data center means that you can operate the exchange in much lower latency. So it's a better UX to have all the nodes in one data center. But it does also mean that if AWS Tokyo is like, hey, we don't like that this is happening here, they could shut down hyperliquid. Now, it might not be trivial for them to figure out which boxes within AWS Tokyo is running on. But does that matter?

Because it's not custodial, right? You're not putting your, you know, assets on this exchange. Correct, correct, but any P&L that you have that's unrealized, or if your hyperlicker blows up, like a lot of bad stuff will happen. And of course, there's hypercore, which, sorry, not hypercore, hyper EVM, which, you know, hyper EVM is a stateful thing, you know, so I actually don't know exactly what happens if the exchange goes down with respect to your assets that are bridged because hyperliquist is not layer two, right?

It's a layer one. Right. So I don't know exactly how that works. I'd assume they have some mechanism, but honestly, I haven't looked into this. but probably there'd be some way they could coordinate and figure out with the last snapshot of state. I mean, people are moving billions of dollars on this thing. I would expect somebody has looked into this. Totally.

But they have indexers. There's the ability in principle for you to index a state, figure out what the last valid state was, and then eventually do some kind of very painful, but eventual kind of figure out who owns what and who needs to withdraw from the bridge. So there'd be a way to do it, but it would be painful. It's not so close source that you couldn't actually figure out. who owns what? What's really impressive to me, too, is like we've been looking for revenue driving kind of defy tokens and assets, and Hyper Liquid is just like printing revenue.

I mean, here's some comps. I believe this is maybe the equivalent of a price to sales type ratio for Hyper Liquid. Last 30 days, about $100 million in revenue for Hyper Liquid. Okay, so that's a, I think this is a price to sales ratio of 12, which is like incredible. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's not a price of sales. That's, that's P.E. Is that P.E?

They're buying and burning. They're buying and burning. Yeah, they are. They're buying and burning on a run rate of over a billion dollars a year. It's kind of a cool asset, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. To be clear, these kinds of earnings are only really seen by the world's biggest exchanges. Hyperliquid is on that scale.

And famously, they have a very, very small team. And so their fixed costs are pretty low. And they buy and burn, like, I think, 97%. Yeah, it almost reminds me his seep of, like, tether. in terms of their profit margins, right? It's something that traditional finance has not seen, the level of, I guess, profit on, you know, that you can scale to in defy

with just like a small number of employees and team size. That's right. Anyway, do you think that Hyperliquid has a ways to go? Do you think it's going to continue to attract volume? Well, one thing that's clear is that Hyperliquid right now is still pretty hard to buy. So you can buy it on Binance now, but you can't buy it in, you know, Coinbase,

I believe, does not list hyperliquid. It still doesn't have a lot of market access. There was a dat that launched recently, although I think it has kind of had very volatile price action on the, I think it's S-O-N-N is the hyperliquid debt. But I think the penetration of hyperliquid into the mainstream of crypto still hasn't totally happened. I think it's one of these things that actually crypto-Twitter, despite everyone saying that crypto-Twitter is now like got no alpha.

Something crypto Twitter was early on, right? Yeah, yeah. CryptoStrude was certainly early on hyperliquid. And I think it actually continues to be early. I think just the, you know, give it a year of this asset kind of making its way across more and more exchanges and more and more countries. I think Hyperliquid is likely to just get more of an addressable market for the token itself. But I'd say as a, as in terms of its, it's awareness among traders, you can see it's already

there. And the kind of revenue they're making speaks to that is that traders, DGENs, they love hyperliquid. It's a great product. It's executed incredibly well. So, Haseeb, there were some big Salana Treasury companies coming out, publicly traded treasury companies. I think three of them within the last week, at least these are the ones I saw. One that was about looking to raise a billion for Salana Treasury Company.

This is a Galaxy Digital multi-coin and Jump. There was another medical device company pivoting into a Salana Treasury company. This is called Sharp's Technology, $400 million private placement. And then we've got Pantera Capital as well. looking for a $1.25 billion raise to create a Salana treasury firm. So we've already had some Salana treasury firms out there, but now this week, suddenly there's kind of a slew of new entrants. We saw something similar with Ethereum.

What's your take on these treasury entities? We saw them for Bitcoin, obviously Michael Saylor, massive strategy, like run. That's been incredibly successful for him. We've seen Ethereum. That seems to be very successful. is absolutely crushing it. Salana, it seems like, does not yet have a spokesperson.

The question is, who's the Michael Sailor of Solana, but it does have some of these large entrants jumping in. What's your take on this trend overall? So I think right now, the time for Bitcoin

and Ethereum Dats is probably over. In the sense that what you see is that the MNABS have really drifted pretty far down over the last couple months.

It used to be that almost every single DAT was trading above par. Now what you see is that actually the majority of DATs are trading at 1XMNAV, and some of them are even trading below now. And what you see is that basically the premia almost entirely belong to the winners and or ones that exist in kind of weird jurisdictions that have their own idiosyncrasies like Metaplanet and Japan. But in the U.S., what you've seen is that the MNAVs have come way, way down. Unless you are the winner, if you're Tom Lee, if you're Michael Saylor, then maybe you get an extended premium. and you get to do a lot more gymnastics.

Tomley right now is about 1.03 MNAV. And Sailor Microstrategies now 1.5 or so, 1.55. And that's down, of course, from like, what, 2.8 or something that he was last year? At the high, it was 2.8. I think earlier this year it was like 1.8, then came to 1.7. And so the MNAVs have been coming down for sure, which, to be clear, I think is a good sign. Okay. But now that the MNAVs have really compressed.

So BitMind has been kind of fluctuating between like 1.1. 0.05 and then like 1.15. I guess it may have come down recently with the ETH pullback. But everything else is trading basically at one or below one. And that's basically a signal to the markets. Stop doing this. No more new ones. Nobody wants to put any more money into these.

And so the private fundraising for these, I mean, we get pitched on a cajillion of these vehicles. The assembly line is frozen now. There's no new appetite for a new BTC or new ETH. Because why would you? Because there's no MNAV training. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. There's no MNF premium, and so you're just taking a liquidity for what, for nothing, right? There's no upside to you doing this. So, and I think that's what you're waiting for is that the reason why there's a mad dash to create these vehicles for an asset is so that a sailor can emerge. And everyone wants to be that sailor. And Tom Lee has proven that, okay, he's the only guy who has the kind of mandate of heaven to do this for Ethereum. Now, for Solana, there's been just total fragmentation. Yeah. Right? So you've got DFI strategies, you've got OPEXI, you've got all these little vehicles trying to do this.

to be the micro strategy for Solana. And clearly none of them have really taken off. And then you had Accelerate, if you guys remember, there was all this drama about Joe McCann who was going to run Accelerate. Accelerate kind of fell apart after all that Twitter drama. But that was going to be the biggest. And the idea was that, okay, Joe McCann is going to be the spokesperson. He's going to be the sailor for Solana.

That fell apart. And now there's this big hole. And so you've got actually a number of groups that are all jockeying to try to become like, hey, can we become the sailor for Solana? And so there's a few groups now that are in market, and obviously you just mention a few of them, that are trying to position themselves as that person. And right now, my sense is that the jump multi-coin coalition is probably going to be the biggest. And now here's the issue is that, you know, if you're looking at the all coins, for many of these all coins,

when the foundation is getting involved, they're like, hey, we like this thing, we want there to be one dat that like attracts the best team and has the best kind of sailor-like voice that can get on Wall Street and tell our story, they'll often subsidize the data. And that's what's happening here, right? Is this with the Salana Foundation for Sharps and maybe the multi-coin one as well? It's fairly little, actually. Relative to a lot of the other ones I've seen, the subsidies that the foundation is giving is quite small.

So I don't know exactly what it is at this point because it depends on the total raise. Sure. Because all the other money dilutes the subsidy that the foundation is going to be giving. So if they go above the target, let's say they hit $1.5 billion or something, Then let's say the foundation subsidized with, let's say, you know, 50 million of free money. Then that 50 million of free money gets smaller and smaller and smaller as a percentage gain that you get for participating in the debt. Anyway, there's all these mechanics around it. But the most incentivized person to do it is, one, the foundation, and then two, the big holders.

Right. If you're a big holder or three, if you have locked tokens and they're willing to cut you a deal on your lock tokens, right? Which maybe public markets will ignore the lockness because the debts are supposed to be long-term holders anyway. So all that is to say, my guess is what happens is that we're going to have three, four of these vehicles competing to become the micro strategy of Solana. Probably most of them are going to fail is one that succeeds and that one guy is going to get on CNBC constantly and they're going to do the same playbook that we've seen now for Ethereum. So that's the game right now and probably the people behind it are going to be very large Solana holders who are going to be willing to take a haircut and will be willing to subsidize some of the economics. in order to try to get the underlying momentum for the asset because they own enough of it that they care.

Do you see that leader emerging? Like, who is the Michael Saylor type of persona or the Tom Lee type of persona for Solana? Could that be like a Kyle Simani or something like that? Kyle Somani would be probably the first person that comes to my mind. Some people have said Chimov. He's kind of visiting. Yeah, I don't think Chama.

I don't think it would make sense for Chama. I think that's not worth it to him. It's got to be somebody who owns so much soul. that like it's going to be worth it to them. That's Kyle. To play this game. Kyle seems like the most natural person. But there's there's a number of people I think who could play that role.

But none of them I feel like are as visible as faces, you know. Probably Joe McCann and Kyle were the two most loud and sort of, what would I say, most brazen. Yeah. And I think that's really what you want. You want a big personality. You kind of need to, yeah, exactly. You want a big personality. You want to make headlines.

you want to make waves and probably there aren't that many people who really have the personality to sustain that. Well, the job applications open if you're that person listening, okay?

I mean, Solana could use that. This last thing, news that Google is building its own layer one. So this was a LinkedIn post by the head of strategy of Web 3 at Google and he's looking at the Stripe Layer 1,

the Circle Layer 1 as well, and saying, we've got Google Cloud, a universal ledger. It's got private test net right now, Google scale network effects, billions of users, hundreds of institutional partners adapted and built for finance. I guess I want to ask you not so much about the Google Cloud Universal Ledger and whatever this thing is, the layer one that they seem to be talking about on LinkedIn.

I don't know how real it is. We'll look into that a bit more. But what do you make of these corporate layer ones that Striper doing, circles doing? Also, Tether has plasma, I believe, where they're invest in that. It seems like they're pouring a lot into that. Now, Google with their own layer one. Some in the Ethereum space are like, well, why not layer twos? And others just with general blockchains are just like, why didn't you just deploy this on Ethereum or Salon?

We have tons of different blockchains. Why are you doing your own corporate L1? What do you make of this? So, first of all, we don't really have enough detail. this LinkedIn post by the way the weirdest way possible to announce

a blockchain which makes me extremely bearish but this LinkedIn post gave so little detail that it's really hard to tell what they're talking about or like in what sense

is an L1 so you know it's called the Google Cloud blockchain right having the cloud in their Google Cloud like Google Cloud

is like an enterprise B2B sales you know juggernaut right I remember when AWS you might you probably remember this, when AWS had like a blockchain offering.

Oh yeah. And it was a hosted blockchain on AWS that was like basically for enterprises. I can't remember. They had a name. Awesome. And it was just like a complete nothing burger, you know, like no, you know, the people who are going to be like, yeah, I want AWS as blockchain offering so I can have a blockchain and like, great, now I have a blockchain.

It's, it almost caters exactly to the people who like don't understand what they're buying and don't understand what the point of a blockchain is. So you don't think this is a threat to layer ones or anything that's more cryptonated. This is almost certainly not a threat to layer ones. Now that being said, again, we need a lot more detail. I think the reason why they're calling this an L1, right? So first of all, they say very clearly it's permission to blockchain.

Yeah. They say very clear, it's a permission to blockchain. Has AML and KYC built into the chain. But then they say it's an L1. So now, to me, that sounds like an enterprise private blockchain. We normally don't call those L1s, right? So in what sense is it in an L1? What do you mean when you say it's an L1? Does it have its own token? What secures it? What is the, is it credibly neutral? Is there a commitment to not censoring things? So like they're sort of using the terminology of blockchains, but then they're clearly targeting a customer that doesn't know what an L1 is. But maybe like that's just we're in a new moment now. And people have heard the term L1 and they've heard that it's good. Right. So in the same way, like remember in the days of the Ethereum, Enterprise Alliance when people were like, you really want to build on Ethereum, but not actually

on Ethereum, on something that looks like Ethereum, you know? And so like come build on Quorum, come use this thing, come use that thing. And businesses more or less will just like, they'll be like, yes, yes, that's what I want. I want an L1. I've read, my kid says that L1s are great, so I'm yeah, let's buy an L1. And so Google Cloud gives you a nice L1, you can get it by your CIO or whatever. So I just don't know. I think what Stripe and Circle are doing is clearly very different than what Google is doing. The difference, though, and this ultimately we have yet to see, because of course, Stripe has not actually themselves publicly announced what any of this stuff is going to be for

tempo and for Circle. We have some information, but we haven't seen that much. It's important to recognize that the history of enterprise-driven blockchains is pretty bad, right? It's mostly been failures. If you remember, Stripe had an enterprise blockchain before. Do you remember this? I don't even remember that.

No, I didn't know. that. It's called Stellar. It's called Stellar. Remember, Stripe made a huge investment into Stellar. And there was all this stuff about how Stripe is going to be using Stellar and integrating in, da, da, da, da. And of course, they never really did all that much.

And they kind of forgot about it. Remember, they also acquired KeyBase and that was going to be part of their strategy with Stellar. And it just never went anywhere, right? And so companies keep doing this. They keep finding some way to, like, get in the game. And the real big success story, of course, among enterprise blockchains is base. And here's the really important takeaway that I think very few people fully understand

is that the reason why most of these enterprise blockchains have not worked is that you as a competitor to that company do not really trust the credible neutrality of if I build my business on your chain, can I expect to build it unmolested by your fuckery? And the answer for base is that somehow base has actually gotten the sense that everybody thinks base is credibly neutral. Everybody. Even the directly, if you're Cracken, like you might not want to build on base,

but you probably believe that if you build on base, it's going to be okay. They're going to leave you alone, right? And that is extremely difficult to buy that level of credible neutrality. Binance does not believe that about OKX chain. You know, like Cracken probably does not believe that about any of these other, like people probably don't believe

that about ink. Maybe they do, but I wouldn't assume that they do, but people do believe that about base. And that took a lot of work for them to build the level of credibility that only is really shared by true layer ones. I don't think that is in the cards for Striper Circle unless they do the work to make people believe that about themselves. For Google Cloud, I think absolutely no way that people believe that about Google Cloud. That's a good point. Actually, there's a similar kind of theme that I want to talk to you about after the break.

The EU is considering a stable coin on a public blockchain. Maybe they're not going to go the CDBC route. Maybe they're considering something like Ethereum and Solana. We'll talk about that. Also, the U.S. government is putting their GDP on chain. That also sounds like a headline from 2016, but everyone's excited about this. And I think you'll find this interesting, Haseeb, if you haven't seen it already. The DOJ announced that it's no longer going to prosecute non-custodial devs like Roman Storm.

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Fraxel perks and Vucid Rewards. All right, we're back. The U.S. government is going to publish GDP figures on chain. This is Secretary of Commerce lead, Howard Lutnik. The Department of Commerce is going to start issuing its statistics on the blockchain because you are the crypto president and we are going to put out GDP on the blockchain so people can use the blockchain for data, distribution, and then we're going to make that available to the entire government

so all of you can do it. We're just ironing out all the details so we can do it. There you go. We're putting GDP data on the blockchain. So everyone's excited about this. It seems like everyone in crypto is involved. You've got chain link involved. You've got a bunch of the chains. They're publishing GDP data

to you. So Ethereum, I believe, Tron's in there, arbitram mantle, base, optimism, Sonic, like all sorts of different chains. Who else is in here? Pith, I believe. The, yeah, Pith as well as Chainlink doing some of the... Avalanche, ZKSync.

I know, they're all here. They really touch everybody. Yeah. And everyone's excited about it. And they're actually buying the, I suppose, the tokens in order to pay for the gas for these tokens from like Cracken and Coinbase. So it feels to me a bit like a PR run. They're basically saying crypto president. So, of course, we're going to publish the GDP data on the blockchain.

And you get everyone in crypto involved. Everyone gets to tweet something. Everyone gets to issue a press release. and everyone's very happy to be in the crypto capital. So I guess that's good news, unless there's something I'm missing here, Haseep. Do you think it's a fundamentally cool idea to put GDP data on chain? I mean, this is just such obvious, like, pork for the industry. I mean, like, who has this problem that you can't find the GDP prints and you need them on the block?

Like, I don't know. Maybe I'd love to hear somebody give an argument for why this matters. for why this feels like just, yeah, this feels like just totally, this is just red meat for the crypto industry, which like clearly they're taking it. They're very happy about this, but this feels totally symbolic, right? This is not solving any large problem that I've ever heard of.

I'm wondering if you saw this clip, so this is a different topic, but somewhat related to your take around corporate L1s and why would, if your stripe, why would you deploy on, you know, your competitors layer one? This was an interesting headline. The EU is speeding up plans for the digital euro, after the U.S. passes Stablecoin law.

So there's some, an ECB official wrote this without a strategic response. Stablecoins, he's talking about U.S. Stablecoins, could undermine Europe's banking system and threaten its financial stability and even lead to geopolitical dependency. So this is Europe kind of worried about the Genius Act and about dollar stable coins invading their economies. And they had been talking about, a lot of talk, a European Central Bank digital currency, It seems like, according to this article, where is this from? The FT.

They mentioned that they would be considering deploying a digital Euro stable coin on Ethereum or Solana. So maybe pivoting to a credibly neutral public layer one instead. Do you think this is just how the game theory works out? If the US is a dollar stable coin, well, then Europe has to have one. And then maybe even China has to start issuing on a public blockchain. I mean, do you think it goes that far? It seems pretty obvious that that's where the endgame is, is that, yeah, all of these assets are going to be competing

on public blockchains to be accessible from anywhere, everywhere. Now, that being said, I am pretty bearish on the EU actually responding quickly and strategically. Like having some position paper from some guy who's senior in the EU Central Bank is not the same thing as EU is doing this. So, you know, the headline here, I didn't actually read the headline with that. the headline reads, the EU considers. Yeah, they're always considering, right? It's like a position paper by some guy.

I mean, they were considering doing a CBDC. They haven't done anything yet. So I'm just very bearish, EU being fast on anything other than regulating things. So let's see if they're actually going to make a move. Great. I will applaud them when they do. But de facto, like the U.S. dollar basically just dominates the high seas of,

you know, on-chain liquidity. And if the EU is like two, three years late, it's kind of game over. Like it doesn't really matter that much if you have a government-sanctioned version of the euro that's on chain. If you're not there when the build-out is happening, then you're largely going to be ignored, right?

There's very little value to being like, you know, the fifth social media platform. It's like, well, Facebook's already at scale. Like, sorry, we don't need you. There are some EU stable coins out there, but the market share is about 0.16%. So about 500 million in stable coins versus the dollar,

is 277 billion. There is a dark horse here, though, which is like China. China does move fast, like different from the EU. But it seems like the CCP would never go to a public blockchain. Although maybe their hand is kind of forced into doing this. So there's always headlines like this out of China. This is a Reuters one. China considering won-backed stable coins to boost global currency usage,

not clear whether they're talking about public blockchains or not. But do you think we ever see a Juan on something like Ethereum? So I think it's more likely that you would see it through Hong Kong. So they probably wouldn't issue it domestically, but they'd issued out of Hong Kong. And of course, you know, the currency is the same, but there's just like, there's onshore R&B and then offshore R&B basically. And now, that being said, they did do ECNY, if you remember, that was the central bank digital currency in China, that, you know, unlike you actually did launch, there.

CBDC didn't really work, didn't really get a lot of traction, and they were like throwing subsidies at it, trying to get people to use it, didn't go anywhere. I think, look, I'm generally bearish CBDCs. I think that stable coins are the big story. And the reason why stable coins are the big story is that they're global, they're programmable, their real time, anybody in the world can use them with just a mobile phone and an internet connection. That is a really powerful thing. China has spoken for a long time about the internationalization of the R&B, and they've not really succeeded. like the R&B is just not use that widely except by basically, you know, satellite states

of China or countries that predominantly trade with China. Now, the U.S. is doing more to maybe, you know, kind of fragment the U.S. dollar hegemony around the world is because we're, you know, he's trying to push other countries to trade less with us, right? That's what tariffs do is they cause trade to decline with the person who's tariffing you. So if we're trading less with other people,

that is going to hurt dollar dominance around the world. and then maybe does leave an open spot for China to become a friendlier trade partner people and to internationalize the RMB more. So it's certainly possible that China will pick up the mantle and they'll start to internationalize the RMB by bringing it onto on-chain venues and get it to trade more so than it does today. I think that's actually pretty plausible for China to do this. And I think China is actually tech forward and aggressive enough to do it. This was big news in some circles.

Yeezy money came out last week. Okay. This is Kanye West. Y Z Y-Y coin. Okay, I'll just give the headlines here. The token rocketed to $3 billion in marquee cap in 40 minutes. And then, of course, it just like shrank into the hundreds of millions. It turned out that this was largely like the bulk of it.

90 to 94% analysts say supply was controlled by insiders. One wallet alone had 87%. It was pretty shitty, Haseeb. I guess I'm just wondering, do you think this is the marker of the meme coin kind of meta? Is it over at this point? at least celebrity meme coins, do you think it's over? Look, I think celeb coins, this was kind of like the last gasp. So if you remember, I think it was toward the beginning of the year,

Kanye was initially teasing that he was going to do a meme coin. And I remember there was like this photo of him and Olaf like in some place in L.A. doing a handshake. Really? Oh, it's coming. It's coming. I missed that. This was like big news.

Well, he keeps deleting his tweets. So there's not a lot of archaeological record. But he was like teasing that he's going to do a meme coin. And there was a lot of. talk that it was going to launch earlier this year, soon after the Trump meme point. And it didn't. And for whatever reason, he kind of timed it perfectly

in that the market was just, just, you know, it vomited on arrival, seeing that, oh, good, here's what we needed for like the trenches that are already on life support. We need Kanye West to come in and, like, dump on us too. And I guess the thing that, the thing that gives me some comfort is that the dump of this asset was so fast.

and everybody was cynical about it. And it took all of like, what, what, 48 hours or something? It was over very quickly. Yeah, it was totally over. And then Kanye came out and said that he was hacked and that he had. And like, there's a polymarket on whether or not Kanye was hacked. Yeah. And right now it's sitting at 2%.

Okay. So I think there's like, it's just so farcical, right? It's just so obvious that this was just like an extraction from a very, very, troubled man. Like, obviously, Kanye's had all these, you know, kind of mental health issues. So, this whole thing is just kind of sad. This is kind of like the, like, we don't need regulations because the market figures it out, right? They get burnt enough times and they just stop buying. Kind of. I mean, there's all these stories about, was the guy Hayden? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I know who you're talking about. This idea that like Hayden made millions of

dollars on this thing, too. Just like the guy who extracted on the Libra. So it's like the same cabal. It's the same people. Apparently, Sahil was also in the mix. Just like every villain, it's kind of like an Avengers movie. It's like every villain from a previous cycle is also back as part of this thing. So it is a nice way to wrap up the saga. If this is the last celeb coin that we're going to deal with, you know, it's good to go out with a whimper instead of a bang. And this is very much a whimper. Well, that is a hopeful note.

I'm glad to see the thing die off. So, so I'm going with this last hopeful note here, which is pretty good. I don't know if you saw this clip. This is a speech by the. the assistant attorney general at the DOJ, the criminal division, I'm not going to play the clip, but a few things he said. This was a speech that he said the attorney general wanted him to give to make it clear to the crypto community, that merely writing code without ill intent is not a crime. He goes through in the speech and he says, basically, the DOJ is not going to go after non-custodial open source software developers that are just writing code.

He didn't mention the Roman Storm case by name, of course, but from his comments, it was very clear that they wouldn't have prosecuted. This new DOJ would not have prosecuted someone like Roman Storm moving forward, which kind of begs the question of like, well, what about poor Roman, right? The DOJ case against him still proceeds, but it does seem, it was nice to hear this. It does seem to be a much softer touch from the DOJ. If you watch the speech, I don't, what reflections did you have from this? Well, I think it's more nuance in that, right? So the line is merely writing code without ill intent is not a crime. Okay, so what is ill intent? And under what standard are you going to put somebody to figure out whether or not they hit ill intent for decide to bring a case against them? One thing that's very clear in our criminal justice system is that it very, very, very strongly favors the government. Is that there's a strong, you know, nominally we have this presumption of innocence. But in reality, there's a presumption of guilt, which is that, you that, you know, grand juries, the famous line is that you can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. And when it comes to criminal cases, the government wins something like 96% of cases that it brings to trial. So just the act of the government going after somebody is itself enough to either one, make it very, very difficult for them to end up making it out unharmed. But also, it creates a very, very long and uphill battle for them to fight against. even if they're in the right. You know, Roman, obviously he ended up having a hung jury on the two most serious charges.

Now he's facing the less serious charge, the unlicensed money transmission charge. And he's going to appeal that. And I think it's very likely he's going to prevail on appeal. But it's going to take a long time and a lot of money and a huge derailment of this person's life. And that alone is enough of a chilling effect to tell the next person, hey, if the government decides that you had ill intent in you building this thing, then maybe you're also facing three years and a criminal trial and, you know, all this money in your entire life being upended for you to defend yourself, right? That alone is sufficient punishment to deter anybody from wanting

to do this again. So I think it's a little hollow for the DOJ to come out and say, hey, hey, hey, just so you know, like, we're not going to do this again. It's like, okay, well, you're not going to do this again. First of all, you're doing it right now. You're still doing it. That's true. You haven't dropped the charges. And then second, it's like, okay, well, what is the boundary? What counts to you as ill intent, right? If Roman Storm gets up on stand and says, no, no, no, I was doing this in response to what the Ethereum community told me they wanted, is they wanted privacy for being able to transact on chain unperturred by other people. We didn't do this for criminals, right? If that's what Roman Storm says in the stand,

and you prosecute him anyway, then, like, okay, then now it's a mind-reading competition, is that you're going to try to mind-read to see, did this person really have ill-intent, or really were they doing it for the wrong reasons, okay? I think this is not how a justice system not to operate is that is this defendant going to be able to predict how you will perceive their intentions? Or are you going to say very clearly, here's what's okay and here's what's not okay. Here's what we learned about the Roman Storm case that you should not do if you don't want to also get prosecuted, right? DoJ has not said that. What they've said is that, look, all these developers are freaking out, all these civil liberties groups are freaking out, all of these now,

even politicians are hearing about this, that like the Roman Storm case is a scandal. And the The response is, no, no, no, no, don't worry. We're not going to go after you, too, right? Okay, prove it. Yeah, I guess from that vantage point, it is kind of weak, maybe. And, you know, your take is that one speech doesn't really repair this. If they were really serious about... If they drop the case against Roman Storm, then that would be...

Now we're talking. Okay. Yes, I see. And also, you see clearly what the line is, is that Roman Storm was not over that line. But we don't know where the line is, right? What exactly is the boundary of criminal intent or ill intent, quote, unquote, not criminal intent. ill intent. What is the boundary of ill intent? I don't know. Do you know what it is? Do you know who is

that person who would be prosecuted versus the person right next to them who wouldn't be prosecuted? I don't know. And the principle of criminal justice is what's called fair notice. Fair notice means a person of ordinary intelligence should be able to understand what is prohibited and what is not prohibited. Do you know that Aztec is not beyond the pale, but Dornado Cash is? Do you know? Do you know whether that's true? No idea. If not, why not? No idea. I have no idea. Yeah, it's basically a DOJ discretion, basically. Exactly, exactly.

Which to me is like, that's the opposite of what you want from a justice system. All right. We're looking for another step from the DOJ beyond just words in the speech, and it would definitely go a long way if the Roman Storm case was dropped. We're going to end it there. Haseeb, thank you so much for filling in for David. And where can folks catch you just like in your travels these days? I know you're on chopping block, know you're on Twitter.

Where are you appearing the most these days? I mean, I'm kind of everywhere at this point, but the easiest way to find me, just look me up on Twitter. I'm Haseeb. Just Google my name and you'll find me. I think I'm the top rank at this point. Definitely do that, guys. Risk and Disclamers, of course, got to let you know. None of this has been financial advice, not even that hype advice back there. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we're 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.