Bankless - ROLLUP: ETH Hits All Time High, But Will It Stick?

Episode Date: September 5, 2025

In this episode, we discuss Ethereum's rise past $4,780 and co-host David Hoffman's insights from Burning Man. We explore Ethereum's treasury dynamics, the debut of the World Liberty Financial Token, ...and potential Bitcoin and Ethereum listings on major exchanges. The episode also covers advancements in tokenized securities, competition in prediction markets, and the quirky rise of tokenized Pokémon cards. Join us for a concise look at the latest in crypto! --- 📣SANCTUM | STAKE YOUR SOL https://bankless.cc/Sanctum-report --- 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 🎩DEGEN | JOIN THE COMMUNITY https://bankless.cc/degen --- TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Burning Man 7:30 Markets https://thedefiant.io/news/markets/bitcoin-august-all-time-high-above-usd124k-could-be-cycle-top-coingecko https://www.theblock.co/post/369477/ethereums-monthly-spot-volume-tops-bitcoin-trading-on-centralized-exchanges-for-first-time-in-over-7-years https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1962945359988035865 https://www.theblock.co/post/369497/nasdaq-tightens-scrutiny-of-companies-raising-cash-to-buy-crypto-report https://x.com/intocryptoverse/status/1963240688146948108 https://x.com/intocryptoverse/status/1962989752455700874 32:00 WLFI Dropped https://x.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/1962485085896323466 https://x.com/worldlibertyfi/status/1960068943562870830 https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/world-liberty-financial https://governance.worldlibertyfinancial.com/t/proposal-use-100-of-wlfi-treasury-liquidity-fees-for-buyback-burn/41226 https://x.com/worldlibertyfi/status/1962648359681839381 https://x.com/NateGeraci/status/1962634267764166743 https://mail.blockworks.com/p/wlfi-the-token-is-the-product https://x.com/jchervinsky/status/1962884341626773959 38:30 Tempo https://x.com/matthuang/status/1963633379284587017 https://x.com/zcabrams/status/1963640969183859116 45:00 Tokenized Securities https://x.com/OndoFinance/status/1886822778277351608 https://x.com/rleshner/status/1963211892438049172 49:50 Polymarket in US https://x.com/shayne_coplan/status/1963280673709625346 https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/9113-25 https://x.com/shayne_coplan/status/1962903170859843759 https://x.com/shayne_coplan/status/1960377824793010489 https://x.com/williamlegate/status/1963386120471003607 https://x.com/allanmaman/status/1963406022183465032 55:14 Tokenized Pokemon https://x.com/Collector_Crypt 58:49 Credit Score https://x.com/mattyTokenomics/status/1963009390342242327 --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:03 Bankless Nation is the first week of September. We're September 2025. I've got my co-host, David Hoffman, back. I know you missed him. I'm back. He was at Burning Man. David, okay, not less than 24 hours after you left. We had an ETH all-time high, man.
Starting point is 00:00:17 Dude, how funny is that? I can just call it. We're like, okay, I'm going on some wild crazy adventure. Heath is going to do something. And it's just so consistent to this point. At what point? Because you were kind of off the grid. You're a Burning Man.
Starting point is 00:00:32 I was gone. Okay. At what point did you know that we hit an all-time high at all? It was probably gone by then. I was, we were watching me and Ben Lekoff at from Bankless Ventures. We were in Reno driving to Burning Man, losing service as Heath was flirting with all-time high. Oh, that had to be hard. Yeah. And we lost service and Heath was like 4,780 or something. And then I think I got like was it, I got like a random bit of service on the plight like four days into it. And. And. And then I think I got, I like was it, I got like a random bit of service on the pli-a like four days into it. And. And what did I see? It was already over. I saw some message from the Discord saying somebody was like, oh, congrats on Eth, all-time high. The message was like two days old or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Starting point is 00:01:13 But unfortunately, by the time you got that, if you checked prices, it probably would have been like, you know, 4,200 or something like that. Anyway, it was there. So how was Burning Man, though? Dude, Burning Man is probably one of the greatest. If you can survive being dirty and sleeping in a tent for an extended amount of period, Burning Man is, like, an incredible experience. Okay, this is you. in the sandstorm.
Starting point is 00:01:34 I was seeing all these images of like sand happening and it was the sand-iest burning man ever. I was like, oh, David's in for it. I talked to like burning men people who had gone for like 20 times and people said that it was this storm
Starting point is 00:01:46 that came in and wrecked the burn in the first day was the biggest storm that they had ever seen. And it was like 60 mile an hour winds. I was holding onto what we call tent city. Yeah. And it's like the just like piping that holds up tarps
Starting point is 00:01:59 that gives you some shade so you're not burning up in the sun. And so the tarps are just massive sales and I was holding on to this piping to make sure it didn't blow away and I got lifted up off Oh my god. Yeah. That's kind of fun. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:02:11 Was it kind of fun to be in a sandstorm? No, it was a top three crisis moment where like the tarp started ripping and we all had to strike tent city. So that means you just take everything down. And so we built all day and then we had to take it down because of a storm. Then we built again the next day. And then there was another storm, not as bad, but more rain. And then it was money.
Starting point is 00:02:28 And then there was a third storm the next day. So this burning man got off to a very rocky start. But it all came together. It came together very well. So tell me something you learned and something you learned maybe about yourself. It was definitely the most, like, hyper-social I've been. Like, usually I can spend time with people for, like, six hours at most. And then I need to, like, go be alone.
Starting point is 00:02:50 I did 10 days. And it was fine. People don't know this about you. You're actually, like, more on the introvert-type spectrum, right? Yeah, yeah. And people, so, like, yeah, people meet me at a conference and they expect me to be all chatty. And I'm like, bro, I'm over-sensitive, over-stimulated right now. But yeah, it was great.
Starting point is 00:03:06 The camp was great. The cool thing about Bernie Man is it's very tribalistic in the sense that, not like crypto Twitter tribes, but like you're living with a group of 50 to 100 people. You are making decisions together. You are eating together. You are adventuring together. You are having to like do like make tough calls together. And it's like living in a tribe.
Starting point is 00:03:26 You all have work to do because there's shifts. And you do that. And it's like the most like like primal ancestral like experience. How we were meant to live, though, right? Exactly. It's kind of how humanity has done things forever, except for this last couple thousand years of the modern period, right? And this is why we feel so unnatural most of the time. And it's increasingly feeling unnatural with all of the digitization in our lives, right?
Starting point is 00:03:50 And this is getting way back to how it was. People joke at Bernie Man, that Bernie Man is the real world and the world that we're currently in is the default world. Yeah. But it was great. I encourage everyone to go. There's also, like, there's a lot of big overlap-band diagram between crypto and Bernie Man. There's a like a shared ethos there. I put that into an article if people ever want to read that. Well, let's put it in the show notes. Let's see that. Meanwhile,
Starting point is 00:04:10 though, David, we got to get people up to speed on the week in crypto, including you. Because I got back yesterday. So I have no idea what I'm doing, reading out the news. Well, let me give you a few things. So first, we're going to talk about the mystery of the Heath Treasuries. David, they've been buying so much Eath. Incredible accumulation. We're going to look at the last 90 days of accumulation. But why is ETH still down? And also, David, MNAVs are down. Okay? We got big Eath treasuries and the MNabs are below one right now. Tom Lee, though, says have faith.
Starting point is 00:04:39 I want to play you a bull clip of Tom Lee. Get your response on that. He says there's a way for us to hit 60K. All right, we just got to wait. We just got to have faith. Also, I come back and World Liberty Financial, the token is now trading. Apparently Trump's crypto wealth, crypto paper wealth has flipped his real estate wealth, which is just a crazy, crazy thing that that exists.
Starting point is 00:05:00 So we'll talk about everything about the World Liberty Financial and how much money Trump made. And also, United States citizens can now use polymarket. It's not illegal anymore. We can all take down our VPNs. That's pretty exciting. I'm pretty stoked about that. We got some big updates on tokenized stocks this week as well, Ando and Galaxy shipping some things. Also, so more details on you, remember that stripe layer one we've been talking about?
Starting point is 00:05:24 I think before you left, tempo. Okay, we got some more details on that, including an announcement post. Also, this is really exciting. this kind of happened, we might soon be able to buy spot Bitcoin and Spot ETH on the New York Stock Exchange. How does that work? I'll tell you. Not the ETSs. Not the ETS.
Starting point is 00:05:42 This is something else. That's what an ETF was for. No, it is. But we might also get real spot Bitcoin, spot ETHs, not ETFs, excuse me, the actual asset itself on these exchanges, both the NASDAQ and New York Stock Exchange. So all that and more coming up. But first, David, I know you are dying to tell us. us about Sanctum. What is, our friends and sponsors over at Spankton, Spankton, at Sanctum, what are they up to?
Starting point is 00:06:08 First, I, David Hoffman, want you, listener to know that if you are holding soul and you are not staking it, you are being a mega idiot. Our friends and sponsors over at Sanctum want to help with that. Sanctum is the fourth largest Solana Protocol, one of the leaders in Salonist Staking. They give you the best performance on your stake soul. so the value of your soul does not inflate away. They have better historic yields than GitoSoul and M-Sol. And in addition to all that,
Starting point is 00:06:37 they're also setting a new standard for transparency in the space. They are only one of two companies to score a perfect 40-40 on the Blockworks token transparency framework so investors can get assurances about the details of the project that they hold if you hold their cloud token. There is a report, bankless.comcinctum-report, a comprehensive report that will give you a very clear picture about how exactly their business is doing.
Starting point is 00:07:01 I appreciate the notion that we are getting clarity about the projects that have tokens in this space and getting a peek into the inner workings. There is a link in the show notes to see all of that and learn more about sanctum. You got to stake your soul or you lose your soul, right, David? Am I right about that? That's right.
Starting point is 00:07:17 Don't want to lose your soul. Let's talk about prices on the week. We got Bitcoin. It is 109K, I believe. What's this on the week? We're down, right? price of recording $109,400 down 3%. I think there's a big question going on.
Starting point is 00:07:34 I come back to crypto Twitter, Ryan, and I see two things. I see tokenized Pokemon cards, and I see this subject of seasonality for Bitcoin. Yeah. September seasonality apparently is bad. September's bad. They always say that. They always say that. They always say that.
Starting point is 00:07:50 Downtown, basically. And then October is next. Yeah. So traditionally, October, October, November, December, have been up. have been pretty good for crypto, especially during bull years. But Septembers have always been bad for some reason. Allegedly. So the average Bitcoin median September return is negative 3.1%.
Starting point is 00:08:09 Ethereum is at negative 12.5%. Ben Cohen has a couple tweets iterating sentiment that's pretty similar to this. He says, historically, Bitcoin finds a low in September of the post-havening year and then bounces off of it into the Markle cycle top that occurs in Q4. So Ben-Cohen implying a market top in Q4. And then he also has a tweet for ETH. He thinks Eith is going to drop to about $3,600. Oh, no.
Starting point is 00:08:34 And then Ryan goes into price discovery afterwards, going into October, obviously. So if you're into the seasonality thing, this is kind of what Ben Cowan is pointing at. If you're not into the seasonality thing, I'm not into it. I'm not into 3,000, 600, eat. So we have Van Spencer who tweets out, according to Bears, there are only five calendar days per year that you should be long. Sell and May and go away. Summer is a terrible time to be long. September is bad.
Starting point is 00:09:02 October is bad. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Vance saying basically this whole seasonality thing is a farce, just be long, which I think is, that's also, I think, Ryan Sean Adams sentiment as well. I agree. I agree. I like, why? I mean, we're going to look at astrological signs.
Starting point is 00:09:16 Like, what, I mean, a lot of this feels like superstition. Yes. Yes. All right, man. I just choose to ignore that. I don't want to see 3600, but if we have to go there, first, then fine. I'm still, I still remain bullish. And speaking of that, ETH price on the week, are we up or are we down? Four thousand three hundred dollars,
Starting point is 00:09:37 down four point five percent. But it's cool that like, ether's at four thousand three hundred dollars and we're down like almost five percent of the week. Yeah, you know what? We were higher. See, if it happens, if the bull market happens too fast, David, it's actually bearish. I, I 100 percent agree with that. That means it could end this year. And I think now that we're getting some downtember action, maybe it goes a little further, that's going to set us up for an elongated and extended bull run into 2026. That's what my astrological signs are telling me right now in this moment. That's fine.
Starting point is 00:10:08 The low and slow is good. We like that. Low and slow. All right. So, yeah, we did cross an all-time high, David, when you were out. You know, but I want to give you some more opium, all right? From our Lord and Savior, the man who came in and bought just incredible amounts of ETH. We'll talk more about his ETH.
Starting point is 00:10:27 sir Tom Lee okay so this clip was going around yes sir we have to knighted he's night above above like the Ethereum five billion dollars you get knighted you get your sir title okay and he is definitely there he's got some price targets I'm gonna play this clip it's a long one okay so you'll stay tuned and it's in Tom Lee's you know he speaks very um like he doesn't he doesn't put a lot of expression in his words it's just very matter of fact but this is the bull case and some prices that he charts out for Eith I'm going to this and get your reaction.
Starting point is 00:10:58 Well, here's Ethereum's price since 2018. And as you can see, there's two periods I'm shading here. These are called bases. And in Wyckoff's methodologies, they say the bigger the base, the bigger the breakout. And what they mean by that is that you're creating a lot of potential energy as a stock or a network acts at bases, and then eventually leads to a breakout. Well, let's look at that breakout. In 2020, that breakout took place, and Ethereum went from $90 to $4866 or 54 times increase.
Starting point is 00:11:33 Well, the low point here in this base was 1385. So with this breakout, we're expecting an upside move. Is it potentially $54X? I'm not sure, but that's what happened last time. That's what happened last time. Another way to think about Ethereum is the Ethereum to Bitcoin ratio. And in our view, the tail ones I'm talking about argue for. for an all-time high in this ratio.
Starting point is 00:11:59 The 8-year average, Theorem to Bitcoin ratio, is 0.04790, and it's currently 0.04032, meaning we're below the long-term average. The all-time high in this ratio was 0.08-0727. Of course, it started off higher, but I'm talking about the 2021 all-time high. So we think that non-alachy Ethereum recover
Starting point is 00:12:25 to the long-term average, it should probably get to the all-time high ratio and arguably exceeded as we start talking about Ethereum acting as the chain for both Wall Street to build its payment rails and the financial system as well as AI. So let's think about what that means for price. So I have a grid here. On the left side is Bitcoin price levels and then going across our various levels of the Ethereum to Bitcoin ratio. Our year-end target, this is from the Fundstratt side for Bitcoin is $250,000. And if you look at the A year average, then you can see the range of prices for Ethereum using this ratio and different levels of Bitcoin.
Starting point is 00:13:20 And here's the 2021 high. And as you can see, at a $250,000 Bitcoin, you get to somewhere between $12,000 and $22,000 value per Ethereum token. But that's just a ratio recovery. If you look at the replacement cost of payment rails and the banking system, that gets you to an implied value of Ethereum of around $60,000. And that puts the ratio at roughly 0.2500 Ethereum to Bitcoin ratio. And as you can see, that's how you get to $62,000 per Ethereum token. There you go. That's as simple as that, David.
Starting point is 00:14:04 That's how you get to $62,000 per e-token. I should say, I mean, a lot of people are quoting, that's the top side of his range. He's not calling for that necessarily. He's saying right here, the range, if you just take the ETH Bitcoin ratio and we get back to average and Bitcoin goes to 250k, we get 12K, eth. If we get our 2021 high in the ETH Bitcoin ratio, we get 21 or 22K. So his range there is 12K to 22K, not necessarily by the end of the year, but I don't know, maybe. He said that Bitcoin, his projected Bitcoin end of year price is $250,000. He didn't explicitly say, therefore, my expected ETH ratio end of your
Starting point is 00:14:44 price. He didn't continue that. But it does follow. There is a, it does kind of follow that he does say that. Yes. And then he goes, butabba, ba, ba, 62K. Which, okay, you know, he's doing, he's doing two things. He's combining TA and doing the whole Wyckoff, like, you know, base thing. Yeah. And then he's also making an opinion stance. And then he about, like, if Ethereum captures X percent of commerce and AI, like, agentic commerce, then you just add on. So he's combining two different strategies here. Of course. But that's what everyone does in crypto, I feel like. they combine a little bit of kind of more long-term type T.A. I call it, right?
Starting point is 00:15:20 The Ben Cowan type of thing, right? This is just flavored with Tom Lee, flavored with his characteristic bullishness, and now in particular, his ETH bullishness. So when I saw that, this, I thought, okay, I mean, of course, 62K-Eath, I mean, that starts to get into that doesn't sound reasonable, Tom Lee. How do you get that number? But when you look at sort of the long-term ratio and the possibilities, and the building momentum.
Starting point is 00:15:48 That's what he said. Like, you know, we've been three or four years flat. And now we've broken out of that, right? 12K, 22K? I can see that range being totally possible. Now, I don't know if we hit that by the end of the year. We got to get through down timber, of course.
Starting point is 00:16:04 But what do you think about Tom Lee's bull case? I mean, the whole Wyckoff accumulation that he started with at the very beginning, I resonate with because that was where I got my, like, ships. Wycoff? Wyckoff? Yeah. Yeah. You know Wyckoff?
Starting point is 00:16:18 Yeah. Yeah. That's what we were looking at all throughout 2018 through 2020 when ETH was flat between $100 and $300 for like two years. Yeah. It's actually crazy that we are twice that long. And so he goes like, okay, and then there was a $54x increase from $90 to $4,900. Could that happen again?
Starting point is 00:16:36 Well, the Weikov accumulation is twice as long. And so even if you say that like, okay, you can't go 54X from $4,000. Sure. I'll take that. Like, that probably should be base case. Like, you can't do another 54x into infinity. But the Wyckofficulation is twice as long. And we've done it once before.
Starting point is 00:16:55 So there's, there is something to the notion that, like, E has coiled up for quite a long time. Right. Yeah. I mean, it sounds possible to me. All of this sounds possible to me.
Starting point is 00:17:05 And the one thing I like about Tom Lee, well, one of the many things I like about Tom, Sir Tom Lee, is that he is backing this up. He's putting his money where his TA is, I guess, or where his price predict.
Starting point is 00:17:16 are and he is buying astronomical amounts of it. And then he licks his finger, sticks it in the air and says $62,000. No, no, no, no, it's better than that. Oh, by the way, there's a rumor going around while you're out that Tom Lee's going to be on Joe Rogan. Yeah, I came back. Just a rumor. Just a rumor.
Starting point is 00:17:31 Just a rumor. That would, I can't even. That would actually be material. I can't even predict what that conversation would be like. Tom Lee and Joe Rogan. It's like, just like, it just doesn't seem to fit. But I guess we should play a drinking game for how many times Tom Lee says. ETH versus Bitcoin?
Starting point is 00:17:48 No, I think he says Eth probably 200 times on the show. I hope he explains it to J. That would be very bullish. Then I could see 62K. That's in the cards. Racial, how are we doing on the week? Below 0.04, which is that. 0.03928. Eth is just retraced a little bit.
Starting point is 00:18:07 Down a little bit. And then we are below a trillion total crypto market cap 3.87. David, you must have noticed, too, while you were out coming back, Gold has hit an all-time high. Yeah. It is doing well. This is actually kind of scary to me. When gold goes in parabola mode, I'm like, ugh, that's scary.
Starting point is 00:18:25 Yeah. And that's what it's doing. I mean, it's kind of store of value asset. This is the Ray Dalio thing. This is Bologi's take, which was somewhat interesting. It's basically gold is now the store of value for central banks, whereas digital assets, crypto is the store of value for individuals. And so basically what you're seeing is central banks are.
Starting point is 00:18:46 stacking and buying and accumulating gold and individuals are using crypto assets, primarily as their store of value. Totally checks out. Which central banks is buying all of this gold? Who's moving the gold price? A ton of them. I'm China, Russia. All of them.
Starting point is 00:19:01 Yeah. A lot of this has happened post the sanctions. Freezing of Russian banks. Yep. Yep. And so this is what you get, gold, all-time highs. David, let's talk a little bit about the treasuries. I just want to recap the last like 30 to 90 days of.
Starting point is 00:19:16 Ethereum in particular, because it's had an incredible 90 days with respect to its institutional accumulation story here. This is a chart of ETF flows. Blue is Ethereum. Look at May. That's a lot of blue. June, July, August. Look, August, it's all blue. It's like 90% blue in August.
Starting point is 00:19:36 These are net inflows, I should say. And ETH has just led. It has dominated for the past three months and even into the past four months. This summer, yeah. This is crypto treasury companies purchases by assets. Bitcoin, of course, in orange. Ryan, I give you permission to use the F word right here. Right?
Starting point is 00:19:57 It's fantastic, isn't it? It's, yeah, it's incredible. Like, from June, where Bitcoin dominated. I know what you meant. I know what you meant. July, Eith was still smaller, but August, ETH dominated in terms of treasuries. It's not even close. There's no other colors.
Starting point is 00:20:15 Not even close. This is a tweet from CryptoGushi. Bitmine is accumulating 20 times. Guichi. Guichi. What did I say? Gucci. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:20:25 20 times fast, whatever. 20 times faster than Microstrategy ever did. So this is BitMind. This is, of course, Sir Tom Lee. He is doing this much faster. This is a log chart. A little bit deceptive here. Yeah, a little bit.
Starting point is 00:20:39 Until you realize it's a log chart. But it is a log chart. And look at the BitMine line versus micro strategy. So being well above 10. percent of a micro strategy is still pretty like large given how long sailor has been buying yeah what's the way to say this uh bitmine has done what like in 60 days what took microstratogy how many like four years to do three or four years to do in terms of percent of supply yeah is absolutely incredible not only uh tom lee though but ether machine also bought 654 million
Starting point is 00:21:09 of ether through a private transaction uh yeah so brings the total holdings in nearly 500,000 eats, almost half a million eth, as it prepares for a NASDAQ listing later this year. So, yeah, ether machine not yet actually being traded, which is kind of interesting. And then also, you know who bought eth, a bunch of eth this year, Ryan, or just recently? Yeah, who. Jack Ma. Jack Ma, the guy from Alibaba. Well, not technically Jack Ma, but a, there's like a series of events between this, like one Chinese financial group.
Starting point is 00:21:41 Jack Ma owns 30% of it. He founded the thing that the current thing bought. whatever, young Feng financial group bought 10,000 eth for $44 million to just put it in its corporate strategy. Yeah, this is a Hong Kong finance company. And the reason that they said they bought it is as a strategic reserve asset, which is obviously narrative violation there. And then it jumps by 10% after the announcement, which means they have more capital.
Starting point is 00:22:07 Yeah. One thing, David, is we kind of zoom out and we look at the strategic eth treasuries here, all the eth treasuries here. We see BitMind, the scoreboard is bitmine clear in the only. in the lead. 1.87 million. Sharp link gaming 837,000
Starting point is 00:22:20 ether machine under that just under 500,000 eth. So three horses in the top here that are still kind of competing.
Starting point is 00:22:29 One thing I should draw your attention to though is this column right here, the MNAV column. Okay? So BitMine right now. 1.05.
Starting point is 00:22:38 lowest I've seen it on the week. Sharplink gaming is under one at this point in time. And there's, There's some dispute as to whether it's actually under one. It depends on who's measuring how it's measured.
Starting point is 00:22:50 Because we don't know how many shares equities have on the stock market, which is an insane thing to not know. Yeah. But the whole stock market, you don't know how many shares there are. It's hard. I mean, so we've got different dashboards claiming different things. And they're all, like, pretty close. This is actually the official Sharplink dashboard that they published.
Starting point is 00:23:08 Oh, wow. That's really smart for them. But this doesn't have of 0.84. Okay. So there's that. There's the strategic eth reserve is 0.87 blockworks with somewhere around there as well. So different dashboards are giving you different numbers. Here's another one.
Starting point is 00:23:24 That is crazy. It looks like it may be one. It might be one or it might be under one at this point in time. So what's your take on that? I guess one thing it means is the ATMs, the at the market purchases, where these treasury companies can basically dilute their shares in order to buy more ETH, they're not going to be able to do this anymore with MNAV at 1 or. below one. So that's a that's an obvious takeaway. So that buying has to stop. But what do you think about
Starting point is 00:23:51 these treasury vehicles? Like are you worried about this? Do you think that this is a buy? I think we need more data really just with the East Treasury companies because it's still such a new phenomenon. But my current understanding of MNAV is it's kind of an oscillator in the sense that it will oscillate above and maybe and I guess also now below one. And it'll oscillate around kind of like retail sentiment retail froth around ether the asset. And so one potential path forward is like maybe we do this whole downtemberth October thing. Maybe MNAVs even go way lower. Maybe they go to 0.8 or something and everyone gets wrecked. But then Ether goes into price discovery and MNAVs go back up to 1.2, 1.5, maybe even two. And it just oscillates back up. And it's kind of just like a
Starting point is 00:24:40 it just overshoot it. It's a sentiment checker on steroids. And so if retail is bullish ETH, then MNAVs go to two, and then all of a sudden, more ETH goes on the balance sheet. And right now we're just in a depressed state. Like there was a lot of froth like last month. And now everyone's like, okay, let's check if like we're all still good here. And, you know, let's like let the tide go out a little bit. Everyone's still wearing shorts. Okay, we're good.
Starting point is 00:25:04 All right. Let's send it back up. And I kind of feel like that's where we are right now. Well, if that's the case, if you're right about that, then it does seem like some of these treasury companies below one could be a big buying opportunity. I would say. And I spoke to Joseph Shalom from Black Rock last week. Yeah, that's good. Really good episode.
Starting point is 00:25:19 You caught up with that? Yeah. These guys are long-term oriented. It's Joseph Lubin. He's been holding ETH forever, right? Yeah. The two bald Joe's, man, they're going to get us there. Another thing that's happening with the ETH Treasury companies, ETHZILA, where I think
Starting point is 00:25:31 that's number four, I think the largest ETH Treasury company, they are deploying $100 million into DFI. They're putting it into ETHERFI. This is why Ethereum is so cool. It's because you can buy the asset and you can research. circulate it into the economy that supports the asset. Etherfi's got 11 billion TVL. It's the largest restaker.
Starting point is 00:25:53 And I just love the fact that we can actually repurpose our capital. That's why Ether is so excellent as an asset is the capital efficiency. You can buy it and then you can do things with it to get more yield. Why are they putting it into Etherify? Because EtherFi gives you some of the best yield on your eth. And yeah, so that's pretty cool. That makes sense to me. In addition to that, speaking of EtherFi, they're kind of having a moment right now.
Starting point is 00:26:17 So Etheri also has a credit card. So you can deposit eth into or like Staples into your Etherfi vault. It gets yield kind of similar to like urine back in the day if you remember. But then you can swipe your Etherfai credit card and it spends the money straight out of your accounts on chain. So that's pretty sick. So you're bypassing a bank altogether. Bypassing a bank. Yep.
Starting point is 00:26:35 It's just straight non-custodial on chain. Pretty sick. Apparently Brazilians figured this out and like Brazilian sign up. for EtherFi credit card is just like up and to the right. And this is basically like just a huge revenue stream for EtherFi. So congrats to the Ethify team on the success. Like seeing actual adoption of their product plus deposits from East Treasury companies is pretty cool. All these Heath Treasury companies are looking for yield.
Starting point is 00:27:00 It's hard not to think this is going to cause a DeFi, an Ethereum DeFi echo boom as some of these large treasuries go and look for yield. On that, David, I don't know if you notice this, Lido, they launched a new Earned product. this week, which is kind of cool. So this is them kind of going up market. And it's basically blue chip earn potential for your ETH. So this thing is called Lido DVV, and it gives you 4.5% APR on your ETH. And it kind of distributes it to Blue Chip Defi, essentially.
Starting point is 00:27:31 So with one-click button, you can get that yield. So I think Blue Chip ETH yield is going to be a big thing to watch. Yield, yield, yield. Yeah. Something that's also happening. Strategy, I'm going to put my eyes on strategy right now. looking at a potential inclusion into the S&P 500, which is the end games. That's free money.
Starting point is 00:27:48 That's for all treasury companies. If you get into the S&P 500, you just have the permanent, infinite bid. Like if you're a hardcore Bitcoiner, which I definitely appreciate these perspectives at times, you kind of understand micro strategy is like an attack on the United States dollar. Just short the dollar as much as possible, long Bitcoin as much as possible. And if you get into the S&P 500, you get a free flow of cash. capital to continue shorting the dollar. It's all that passive yield. I don't know if you got that episode. Because you're in 401k's, because you're in all of the funds. So people have to buy micro strategy. And what does Michael Saylor do? He
Starting point is 00:28:24 translates the value of the MSCR stock into Bitcoin on the balance sheet. And if you're in the S&P 500, you just have free flows to constantly reload your ammo to buy more Bitcoin. Yeah. This is the endgame for all treasuries. Micro Strategies almost there. Um, an East Treasury could get there someday. I mean, Before you get to S&P, you get to like wrestle, which is another index of like what is, I don't know, thousands of companies. So they're all trying to get into these indices. That's why it's a power law winning game as well. David, the NASDAQ looks like it's tightening some of its disclosure requirements for DATs, though. I think they are very aware that there is a DAT bubble happening.
Starting point is 00:29:00 There are quite a lot of Dats. And we're going down the long tail of the shitty assets in crypto and they're getting DAS. Like Story Protocol is getting a DAT. Yeah. So the headline reads, the NASDAQ is tightening scrutiny of companies raising cash to buy crypto. They are beginning to require shareholder votes for some deals and pushing for more disclosures. They may also suspend trading or de-list firms that fail to comply, according to anonymous insiders mentioned by the publication. And so actually following the news, share prices of several debts actually fell.
Starting point is 00:29:34 So I think people owning these assets, like know that there was probably some shenanigans going on. and I am just perfectly okay with this. More disclosure is good. Yep. Thanks. Coming up next, David, we've got to talk about World Liberty Finance. It's a token just started trading. And the Trump's crypto wealth, they are now like crypto mega billionaires.
Starting point is 00:29:51 Yeah. And stacking in quite a hurry to talk about that. Also, maybe this caused Gavin Newsom to want to launch a meme coin. All right? He actually said this. No, thank you. I think he's going to do it regardless of what we said. We're going to cover all that and more.
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Starting point is 00:31:43 The World Liberty Financial Token finally started trading. It's officially listed on major exchanges on both spot and perps on Monday, started on September 1st. There are a total supply of 100 billion tokens, which makes some of these maths pretty simple. 24.6 billion tokens were unlocked, so effectively 25% float. Not bad.
Starting point is 00:32:06 Not flat, not bad. If you are in the pre-sale, 20% of your tokens have unlocked, and so pre-sell investors have unlocked, the remaining roughly 75% of supply will remain under vesting schedules, different investing schedules, depending on what kind of tier you are in. The first day of performance, the opening price was 30 cents, which gives it a fully diluted valuation of $30 billion. We are down to about $17.18. cents. So that's about $18 billion fully diluted valuation, a market cap of effectively
Starting point is 00:32:38 almost $5 billion. That puts World Liberty Financial at number 39 in all crypto assets, which is pretty crazy. Eric Trump says, even though it's down, this is just the beginning, so a long way to go. We should do kind of a reminder of what World Liberty Finance actually is and like what they've launched. Do we know? They don't have a function of app. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so they do have some stuff. Let's just go here for a second. I'll pull it up. Okay, so first of all, there's the USD1.
Starting point is 00:33:10 So they have a stable coin. It's not nothing. I was looking at the charts. It's actually $2 billion stable coin at this point in time. Wow. Okay, so that's launched. I stand corrected. There is something here.
Starting point is 00:33:20 There's a stable coin. It's a $2 billion stable coin. So 19 providers there. And then, of course, you have the token. The token is the product. All right. Okay, so we got two tokens. World Liberty Finance.
Starting point is 00:33:32 The WLFI token, you can stake that if you so choose. You could also buy it. You can sell it. What happens when you stake it? I don't know. Who knows? You can trade it. Maybe you can't stake it.
Starting point is 00:33:45 Look. I guess delete that. Maybe you can't stake it. You can unlock it. You can trade it. All right. And you could do governance. There was a governance proposal.
Starting point is 00:33:52 That's great. There was a governance proposal actually to distribute the profits back to WLFI token holders. The profits of what? Well, this is the same. stuff that's TBD. WLFI app soon. And so there's going to be an app and then there's lend and borrow. What I think this is going to be is basically AVE. So you know how AVE had go, they have their stable coin. They have borrowing and lending. I think this is like World Liberty Financial America, Trump branded AVE kind of wrapped with a meme, WLFI meme token, basically.
Starting point is 00:34:27 Can we launch your website with a bunch of features that I'll say soon on it and make a token? you can't because you're not Donald Trump, okay? So, you know, it's harder to do if you don't have that. Can I tell you what the first governance proposal is on World Liberty Financial? Yeah. You actually mentioned it, buybacks. Yeah. So they announced that they kicked off a governance proposal where 100% of the fees earned by WLFI's protocol-owned liquid.
Starting point is 00:34:53 No, no, no. No, no, current. The protocol owned liquidity. So there is owned like ether and stables. Oh, that's right. They put that into, into, they click. fees on that by like LPing it into AMMs or something. They collect fees. And those fees go back to burning, buying and burn. It's pretty home. You don't want to show, you don't want to show your
Starting point is 00:35:12 revenue here, you know? You got to imagine the revenue possibilities. It's better as it's worth more as a meme coin. Speaking of how much it's worth, crypto is now the biggest portion of Trump's families, paper net worth. So big in real estate, but all of their real estate holdings were worth like $2.5 billion or something. World Liberty Finance alone, at one point, was worth $5 billion. And that's not to mention... The Trump family's ownership of World Liberty Finance. Yes.
Starting point is 00:35:40 And that's not to mention, you know, Trump media and technology holdings. They have 15K Bitcoin. That's $1.6 billion. They also partnered with crypto.com on the CRO-type deal. They have a holding company, which is a crypto treasury vehicle. The Trump's sons also this week... They launched a Trump-back Bitcoin company called American Bitcoin. This is a Bitcoin Treasury and a Bitcoin mining company.
Starting point is 00:36:08 They have a chunk of that. That's $7 to $8 billion in terms of market cap right now. I don't know how much down. Total. But I think, I don't know, I was reading maybe 30% of that. Look, dude, it's definitely, I don't think it's double-digit billions, but like $5, $6, $7 billion that Trump has just in crypto holdings at this point. And keep in mind. They are doing a fantastic job of monetizing the role of the president. Yeah, all of the things. No one's done it better. Oh, last week while you're out, Trump Jr. became advisor for a polymarket. Yeah. Yeah, we've got that later in the gender. We're going to talk about that. It's like all of the things. So this has caused probably people like a Democrat, Gavin Newsom, who is like in a meme war with Trump right now to talk about launching a meme coin. I'm going to play this.
Starting point is 00:36:55 And if you want a real prediction, I know we talk. talked about the Taylor Swift prediction. The real prediction is, you know, we're about to put a mean coin out. And you know what, Donald Trump will see how well your coin does versus our coin. I mean, we're just trying to tune up, turn up the heat and trying to tune people into the absurdity. Is it going to be called Gavin coin? No, it's I think Trump corruption coin. You're going to lose, man. He's hard not in it, is it? You're going up against Trump. Gavin's a, he's not a bad. He's not a. He's not a. bad meme, but he's going up against Trump. Like, you're not going to out meme that man. What would be funny, though, because Trump launched his meme coin on Solana, if Gavin launched
Starting point is 00:37:36 his meme coin on Ethereum just for the sake of the meme, just like, put all the libs on Ethereum. Oh, God. I don't want those political wars to bleed over into crypto. I just, it's funny. I just don't think Gavin's heart is in it. I don't know if he's actually going to do it. I think he just threw out that comment.
Starting point is 00:37:54 He threw out that comment, you think. This is a Jake Trevinsky take, which I resonate with. World Liberty Financial will make it way harder to get market structure legislation done in the Senate where we need seven Democrats to vote, yes, and for whom a pro-crypto vote will be politically challenging, to put it mildly, no matter what the bill says about policy, happy fall. So we got genius act in. This has always been the danger of politicizing and putting crypto behind one political party. Stuff like this becomes more difficult.
Starting point is 00:38:21 Yeah. So I think he's right about that. I don't know how this votes for clarity, but I'm a little bit worried about this. In better news, though, David, we have a clear, a possible clear path now for spot Bitcoin and spot Eith to be sold on the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ. How does this work? All right. Are there other things that are just directly listed on the NASDAQ?
Starting point is 00:38:45 How does that work? Okay. So you know currently there's like two worlds. You have crypto exchanges and then you have Tradfai exchanges. And those two worlds are pretty much. separate. The CFTC and the SECC issued a joint statement. That in itself is notable. A joint statement. Like, they're actually talking to one another and cooperating? Who would have thought? Well, that's happening. So very bullish on that side. They basically said the path is clear. And they were looking for proposals
Starting point is 00:39:17 for these large US-based exchanges, tradfai exchanges, to submit a proposal to be able to list assets like spot Bitcoin or spot Eath on the New York Stock Exchange, on the NASDAQ and the CBOE. Okay. Now, in order to do this, there are some hoops that these organizations would need to go through. They would need to figure out, you know, the filing itself with the SEC, custody and CFTC, custody and clearing as well. So they're not going to store it. They use like Coinbase or Cracken or somebody else to actually store the assets.
Starting point is 00:39:52 And the surveillance hurdles, right? So SEC and CFTC have surveillance laws. But if they get through those things and they submit a report, the SEC and CFTC are saying, it's legal. You could do this. In fact, we want to see these reports. And David, one reason why this is significant is because these exchanges alone, they do about 600 billion in daily volume across their assets.
Starting point is 00:40:13 In comparison, our largest exchanges in crypto do about 20 billion. Okay? So we're talking about massive volume if these assets, spot Bitcoin, spot Eath, are listed on these exchanges. It's not going to happen overnight, but now the path is clear for them to do that. Okay, here's what I'm a little bit confused about. First, this seems competitive with some of their current customers
Starting point is 00:40:35 being like BlackRock, Fidelity, Bitwise, who have listed actual ETFs. And so they're going to be competitive with their biggest customers. Like, I wouldn't want to piss off Black Rock. And also they're going to have to charge fees for custodianship and other things. And are they going to be fee, competitive with BlackRock who's coming in it, I don't remember how many bips, but a low number of bips. With Bitcoin and ETH ETFs, you mean?
Starting point is 00:40:59 Yeah. So if NASDAQ lists their own financial products, which are competitive with what they're supposed to offer a service of a platform to trade, but then they're also offering products that are competitive with other people. I'm kind of confused by how this works. Yeah. I don't know that they would be offering the products themselves. They would just be, like, these products could be available outside of an ETF from some
Starting point is 00:41:19 other issue, I suppose. Okay. Yeah. And so the only way they've been available right now is an ETF form. I'm not sure what like what that unlocks. Yeah, what do we unlock here? Because like the ETF is like the ERC 20 token for a Tradfi. Like it's the composable thing.
Starting point is 00:41:36 You can collateralize it in your brokerage. It's like what everyone is used to. I don't know what this unlocks here. I don't know that it's going to lock a lot of pent up liquidity that hasn't been able to access these assets right away. But it is a marker of the convergence here that's happening between the world of you have crypto exchanges over here, and then you have all New York Stock Exchange, all the Tradfai exchanges over here, and now of these can list crypto assets, the Tradfai exchanges. And the crypto exchanges, we're seeing them evolve to start listing equities and tokens. So it's just another marker of
Starting point is 00:42:08 the growing convergence that we're seeing between these worlds. I did like that line in your recent debate with Omid versus Austin Campbell. Great fucking episode, excuse me, where the premise was that there's like currently the Tradfai world and the crypto world. Yeah. And in the future, there's just going to be one big financial world and these things are going to bleed together. I did like that line. Speaking of that, we got some details on Stripes Layer 1, the tempo release. We're talking about that. Also, some big moves in the tokenized securities world, both on Ethereum and Solana. And David, you got to talk to me about tokenized Pokemon. I don't know how I missed this last week, but you came back and he told me that was a thing happening in crypto. How did Ryan Chonis possibly miss the tokenized Pokemon meta? We'll get to all that and more. But first, we want to shout out our friends over at Fracks. Some of the best yield in DFI. We're just talking about blue chip yield like Circle, Athena, and Maker all had a baby.
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Starting point is 00:44:25 Transactions post directly to the blockchain, compatible with TradFi Rails and packed with integrated DFI futures. UR transforms Mantle Network into the ultimate platform for on-chain financial services, unifying payments, trading, and assets like the MI4, the MEath protocol, and functions FBTTC, backed by developer grants, ecosystem incentives, and top distribution through the UR app, reward stations, and by-bit launch pool. For M&T holders, every economic activity in UR drive. value back to you, embodying the entire stack and future growth of this super app ecosystem. Follow Mantle on X at Mantle underscore official for the latest updates on blockchain for banking. That's X.com slash mantle underscore official. Introducing Tempo, a payments first blockchain incubated by Stripe and Paradigm. This interestingly got broken on Twitter by Matt Huang from Paradigm before anyone I saw
Starting point is 00:45:13 from Stripe actually tweeting it, but the people from Stripe followed up a few minutes later. So here are the details. Tempo is a purpose-built blockchain for, stable coins and real-world payments, born from Stripes' experience in global payments and paradigm's expertise in crypto, to ensure Tempo serves a broad array of needs. We're excited to be working with an incredible group of initial design partners, including Anthropic Deutsche Bank, DoorDash, LeadBank, Mercury, New Bank, Open AI, Rev.
Starting point is 00:45:42 Shopify, Standard Chartered Visa, and more. Interesting to see some of the AI companies in there. Obviously, blockchains and AIs go together. our AI is going to send money on a blockchain. It makes way more sense. Tempo is being designed to be a payment. I'm all reading from Matt Huang's tweet. Tempo's payment first design includes predictable low fees,
Starting point is 00:46:03 payments and gas in any stable coin via an enshrined AMM. What does that mean? That means that the Tempo blockchain has an AMM built directly into the blockchain. Paradigm also, Dan from Paradigm, just basically helped build Uniswap V3 and V4. So I would assume this is very significantly overlapping with Uniswap. Just put that right into the blockchain. And then because it's enshrined, you can just pay for gas via any token by having liquidity access straight through the AMM.
Starting point is 00:46:30 That's kind of cool. Payments first UX, dedicated payment lane memos, access lists, etc. Opt-in privacy. Scale 100,000 transactions per second with sub-second finality. And this is all built on Reth, the Rust Ethereum client pioneered by Georgios in the paradigm team. So this is Reth's first big debut in production. as a dedicated client for a layer one blockchain. And then lastly,
Starting point is 00:46:57 tempo eases the path to bringing real workflows on chains, such as global payments, payouts, pay ins and payroll, embedded financial accounts, fast and cheap remittances, tokenized deposits for 24-7 settlement, micro-transactions, and agentic payments. Interestingly, we are building tempo. This is Matt again. It's always been Matt.
Starting point is 00:47:15 We are building tempo with principles of decentralization and neutrality. That includes stable coin neutrality. Anyone can issue a stable coin and any stable coin can be used for payments or gas along with an independent and diverse validator set with Ryan a roadmap to a permissionless model, which I find interesting. It is interesting. And so this is EVM, which is cool. It's all breadth. So you can see this is really a fusion of, there's a lot of paradigm influence in this as well. I actually got some of the inside scoop because I talked to Zach Abrams earlier,
Starting point is 00:47:50 week. That episode's going to be out on Monday, I believe. And Zach is the guy who sold a bridge. It was basically a payments, a staple coin payments company. He sold Bridge to Stripe for a billion dollars. And Matt's had a key role in actually selecting this platform and going with an L1. And so I asked him. I was like, Zach, why did you guys do it? And he went through a case. Actually, he tweeted about this, but one of the things that they had been trying to do at bridge was do like basically an airdrop. Imagine for instance, if you, remember the stimmy checks we all got? Imagine if you wanted to issue stimmy checks to like 50 million Americans.
Starting point is 00:48:30 And they did some of this. I forget what country he mentioned, but they were doing large scale, airdrops of stable coins to some users for some particular use case. He said none of the chains, none of the L-1s could actually support that use case. They were too slow, cost too much in terms of gas. They even tried things like stellar.
Starting point is 00:48:48 so people don't remember, but Stripe was an early investor in Stellar, and that was a chain that they were attempting this on. Yeah. Okay. And so his take was basically, we couldn't accomplish this with any public L1, and so we needed to roll our own. And so if you want that subsecond finality, and if you want the, even the privacy and like low gas fees, layer one for them, he said was the only option. So that's some of the reason why and some of the use cases around it.
Starting point is 00:49:18 Now, he... I find that answer incomplete, but I'll accept it for now. Yeah, he was also very quick to say, this isn't Stripes Jane, right? And hence you saw that consortium of other companies. It almost reminds me a little bit of the resurrection of Libra, just on a smaller scale. This is just Libra. This is Libra. But Libra was not EVM.
Starting point is 00:49:36 Now they're doing a Libra version with EVM and sort of a consortium. This is the spirit of Libra. Same kind of lot, which honestly, you have to give credit to Libra for being way ahead of its time. Yeah, it was just like wasn't political. politically tenable at the time and now it totally is. That's why they're doing this. Yeah. Yeah. David, there's some big moves in the tokenized securities world. The first was Ondo. So Ondo launched tokenized securities on Ethereum. So are you familiar with Ondo at all, David? I know the name. I haven't really ever done the rabbit hole deep dive. Yeah. They've been around for a very
Starting point is 00:50:09 long time. They've been pretty big in the world of like tokenized treasuries for a while. And this is their first attempt, I believe. It's restricted. So here's the thing. It's not available for people in the U.S. So I'm not on a VPN right now, just like a good American. I can't access this. But it has a whole bunch of stocks. ETFs, there are some limits in terms of how much you can buy. ETFs, all the big fangs. I don't know, it's like 100, 200 different stocks and ETFs that you can buy.
Starting point is 00:50:36 And the benefit here is it's not like X stocks. So the benefit here is you get better liquidity guarantees. So the problem with some of the tokenized securities like X stocks was there almost like a a synthetic version, and they would trade off the price and liquidity of kind of the primary versions of these assets that were on like real trad-fi exchanges. This gets around that, and I'll tell you how it gets around this. This is on Ethereum, but it's actually using intense infrastructure, okay? This is actually a unique use case for Ethereum real-world assets, how they work. So I was talking to the team. Our liquidity model, they said, is fundamentally different
Starting point is 00:51:16 from existing permissionless solutions like X stocks, we do not rely on on-chain market inventory. Instead, their architecture runs on intense-based systems, where the tokenized stock is only minted when investor demand occurs. All right, so there's some investor demand, like I'm doing a 10K buy for Apple shares, let's say, and then an intent clicks, and that is fulfilled on the other side. So this allows them to not pre-fund the liquidity on chain, so it lowers the capital cost of bringing traditional markets on chain. And it was beneficial for them to launch on Ethereum
Starting point is 00:51:48 because Ethereum has very well developed intense-based infrastructure to support that type of a use case. So it's interesting. I think it's an evolution of what we've seen with tokenized stocks, like X stocks, kind of janky, had some problems. This is better from the liquidity side of things.
Starting point is 00:52:06 It's still not the same as like actually owning a stock, all right? But you can redeem it very quick and it should trade closer to the price. Well, Ryan, if you want to, actually own a stock, you can actually own Galaxy stock. You're just going to have to go to Solana to do it because Galaxy has tokenized their actual stock, not an IOU of a stock, but the actual stock is now tokenized on Salana. This is with Robert Lesherner's a super state. There's a coin gecko page, which is pretty cool. It's not yet trading, so there's no price or
Starting point is 00:52:36 like price action at all. But the fact that there is a coin gecko page of what is an actual stock, again, not a redeemable for a stock. It's the first, like, native security that we've seen on a native security on a blockchain, which is pretty damn cool. I, of course, went right to my DMs with Robert Leshner. I was like, Rob, why is it on Solana? He says, if you are the issuer of said stock, you get to choose what chain you put it on. Apparently, Galaxy just chose Solana. Yeah, I think this is a big step forward, actually getting native securities on chain. And that's much better than the X-Dock design, much better, I guess, from a property rights perspective.
Starting point is 00:53:15 Right. Because it is the property. It is the property. The problem is, though, it is going to be harder to bootstrap this. And to get, because, like, what this requires is that every single issuer, like, want to do this, cooperate, create a new legal structure specifically for their tokenized. You'll stock on chain. So, like, it seems like you could get one or two or some niche players.
Starting point is 00:53:36 It's going to be hard to get the type of volume that Tradfai is getting. Right, until you kind of break through that bootstrapping problem. Hopefully, this is where everything goes. And we get actual native stocks on chain, but it could take a while to get there and we'll have these hacky type solutions until then. Well, I want to push back a little bit on that because, yes, everything you said right is, is correct and right. It's like there's friction, your new legal entity, all that kind of stuff is going to have
Starting point is 00:54:00 some costs. A, there are IPO costs. And so costs are being paid to access liquidity one way or another. But like if our thesis about defy is correct, which is you get capital efficient, you get, if you put a token on Ethereum, you get access to Ethereum's complete defy, like, tool set, there's a very strong gravitational pull to be able to put your stocks inside of AVE or Morpho or, you know, any sort of defy app. I think for crypto-native companies, it could be worth it for them, right?
Starting point is 00:54:27 Because they already have the crypto customers. But if you're looking at, like, the liquidity of basically, you know, the traditional exchanges in 600 million in securities volume, and then you go, you look at crypto securities liquidity. and it's like, I don't know, 20 million a day or something, you're definitely going to want to put your asset where the volume is. And that's just the bootstrapping problem. And now it's Robert Lesnar's job to go and seek out like the larger and larger like deals so he can go start climbing the ranks of publicly traded companies and be like,
Starting point is 00:54:56 hey, you want to get your tokens on crypto? And the more he does that, the more liquidity flows. More like stable coin all-time highs are being broken every single day. And so the size of the gravitational pull is increasing. it'll just take some time. I agree with that. David, Polymarket finally got the green light. Do you want to read this tweet?
Starting point is 00:55:14 Yeah, yeah. So this is from Shane Koppelman, the founder and CEO of Polymarket. Polymarket has been given the green light to go live in the United States by the CFTC. So they received a no action letter. They filed saying, hey, are we going to get in trouble if we allow U.S. citizens? And the CFTC said, no, basically. No, you're not. And so we can all take down our VPNs now.
Starting point is 00:55:36 United States citizens can now access a polymarket directly. And this is pretty cool. I mean, this is huge just for, I think just like assurances and sentiment, I would say. It will be kind of cool. I guess also funds can now go trade on polymarket. I don't really think this really stopped any individuals, but it definitely stopped funds from trading on polymarket if they want to take a position in something. I think it stopped polymarket from going as mainstream as it could have. and it probably will go post this, right?
Starting point is 00:56:07 Just because there's friction in a VPN. Yeah. You know, like, how many people are going to... It's no friction in getting USDC on the Polymarket, but plenty of friction because of the VPN, yeah. Is this Mr. Beast talking about his own Polymarket? Mr. Beast was on a live stream looking at Polymarket, and he just was having a good time.
Starting point is 00:56:23 So, yeah, like, Mr. Beast on Polymarket. Polymarket is becoming just like a household name. As we mentioned earlier in the show, Donald Trump Jr. takes a stake in the prediction market platform polymarket. So he bought a bunch of shares and now he's on the advisory board. Interestingly enough,
Starting point is 00:56:41 he's also on the advisory board of Kalshi. And have you been following the Kalshi Polymarket just a little bit? Absolutely boiling like war between these two organizations. Some big hatred, right?
Starting point is 00:56:53 It's a big rivalry. I don't think I've ever seen a level of hatred should we get them on for a debate, the founders, both founders, just like a... I don't know if there's any debate to be had. It would be more of like a mediation.
Starting point is 00:57:05 Okay, so there's a tweet from this guy, William Legate, which I thought was pretty interesting. And by interesting, I mean hilarious. He said, when I joined Kalshi a year ago, Terrick, some guy at Kulchi, made their mission clear. Quote, copy everything Pollymarket does. Our moat is regulatory capture. And then he's tweeting out the fact that CFTC granted Polymarket the approval to make available to U.S. distance. So William continues and says, today, that moat no longer exists. I couldn't be more proud of my decision to join Polymarket.
Starting point is 00:57:37 Why copy the best when you can build it? So basically he's not a teen Polymarket. He flipped from Collier to Polymarket because Polymarket is the cooler one to be. The founder or somebody of Colchie came into his replies and said, this is a lie. Territ did not say this. You are just spreading misinformation. And he shares an email from William talking shit about Polymarket trying to get a job at Kalshi.
Starting point is 00:58:02 I don't know what the hell is going on here But like the oh god There's some huge beef I mean there's there's rumors that Kalshi I don't know if I should say this But there's rumors I've heard that The FBI swatting of Shane Koppelman
Starting point is 00:58:16 I heard those rumors That was like that they had it reported him or had some sort of Antipa I mean it's there's beef there That's a rumor I don't have evidence of that But no one does You can see why there's some beef there
Starting point is 00:58:28 You also see why they want some political protection Right if FBI is going to raid your house. How about getting the president's son to invest your company? I'll do that. God, I hope the political pendulum doesn't swing so hard next year. It could swing so hard. So, enjoy this brief period of time we have, David.
Starting point is 00:58:45 And tell me about tokenized Pokemon, because we can still do that right now. Dude, okay, so I come back online from Burning Man and I log into crypto Twitter. And we are doing two things. We are ranking crypto Twitter accounts and we are buying tokenized poker. And I'm like, oh, nothing's changed. We were doing the same thing. Okay, so this is the current trench meta of tokenized Pokemon cards. There's apparently three different platforms, but this one platform, Collector Crypt has taken
Starting point is 00:59:13 off. It is real tokenized, excuse me, real Pokemon cards. The actual physical Pokemon cards. Held in a vault somewhere, like a physical vault. So it's a real world asset. It's a real world asset, tokenized by this one project called Collector Crypt. And you can go and you can like open up, you can buy for 55. dollars you can buy a pack a Pokemon card packet and you open up the pack and they
Starting point is 00:59:34 set a Pokemon card in there and like some people are like celebrating like oh I opened up a Charzard and then you can sell it on the marketplace uh you're not going to get a Charzard statistically speaking uh but technically is possible and so yeah this is the current meta we always do this was going to happen at some point right yeah yeah are you are you a collector do you ever do Pokemon cards or magic cards I did back in the day never never once I ever play the Pokemon game didn't even know that there was a game I thought the point was to just buy the cards You were just speculating. I had my binder with my, like, charbander and my Bulbazar.
Starting point is 01:00:04 Who didn't? This is how we reach out to the next generation. Okay. It's not our, like, D5 boomer stuff. It's Pokemon cards on chain. I knew this would work. But when can you put them in Ave? Yeah.
Starting point is 01:00:14 Good question. Good question. All right. Actually, I'm going to show you something, David. You showed me tokenized cards here, Pokemon cards. Did it, has anyone alerted Richie Torres to this fact? Richie Torres. We actually haven't now.
Starting point is 01:00:28 It's, you know, Gary Gensler cannot stop us. This was kind of cool, though, and with this, you can now borrow in Defi using your credit score, your U.S. credit score. This is always a use case I thought would be cool, and it's just started happening. So, you know, you have a credit score based on your credit history in the U.S., right? You pay your rents, like mortgages, whatever. You know, do you pay your credit card bills? And this is a score. I don't know what your score is.
Starting point is 01:00:56 Some people track this to the nth degree. As soon as I got into crypto, I was like, I don't care about it. I don't care about this. You know, there's like a 600, 700 is better, 800, whatever. I don't know what's good. Okay. So you can just import that into Defi and using this protocol called, let's see what it's called 3Jane.
Starting point is 01:01:14 You actually just borrow money on Defi using your credit score. So get your credit karma score, whatever, beam it in here. It'll give you a certain amount based on your credit score of what you can borrow. So this is like a credit use case. using a real world credit score. Do I need to put my ID in? Probably. I don't know, probably.
Starting point is 01:01:34 So like if I run away with the funds, can they come after me? Well, it'll hurt your credit score. Don't do that. Yeah, but I don't care. If you don't care, it's a one-time only thing, David. If you don't care, if you're never going to use the credit score again. I just saw a screenshot with $42,000 on your screen. If I can go to this app and I can mute my credit score for $42,000, you'll do it.
Starting point is 01:01:55 You'll take that trade any day. Your credit score is. literally dropping as we speak because someone's probably listening in is like we're not giving this guy any money. Well, let's end it there. You know, crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we're headed west. This is the frontier.
Starting point is 01:02:11 It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

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