Bankless - ROLLUP: Ethereum’s Leadership Move | Solana’s Inflation Debate | Kraken’s $1.5B Acquisition | Crypto's Macro Struggle

Starting point is 00:00:04 Bankless Nation, welcome to the weekly roll-up. Each week I'm bringing on a different co-host to help me go through the news. And this week, I have the pleasure of being joined by Ethereum Community Chief Anthony Sizzano. Anthony, good to see you, my man. How are you? Hey, man, I'm good.

Starting point is 00:00:17 Good to be back after a little while here on the roll-up. Yeah, you have been our regular substitute teacher whenever, like, Ryan or I would need to take just a week off and we just always tap in Anthony Sizzano. Ryan's been taking an extended sabbatical just to spend some very much quality time with his kids. So I've been doing my best to go around just like, it's so easy to come back to Anthony Sizzano,

Starting point is 00:00:40 so I had to get some differing, diverging voices out there. But it's really good to just like tap you in formally. It's like it was inevitable that I would bring you on and it's good to have you back here, my man. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, and I think it's a good thing to get brought a kind of, I guess, voices on the show, definitely. Like, everyone knows my brand,

Starting point is 00:00:58 knows what I'm going to talk about, like knows what kind of tone I'm going to take. So yeah, it's been great to. see you kind of branch out there and get other people on the show. So we got a lot of news to talk about this week. Athena and Securitize are launching their own chain called Converge, which I think that's an ironic name, and I'll give up my take about that. Robin Hood partners with Kalishi, where the prediction market competitor to polymarket.

Starting point is 00:01:21 Then two ETH people are going to talk about the Salana governance debate. The two ETH people are me and Ryan. And then, of course, we got some, excuse me, me and Anthony. And then Ethereum has some updates as well that we're going to talk about and Cracken makes it $1.5 billion dollar acquisition just announced about an hour before recording. So that's going to be the news that we talked about,

Starting point is 00:01:38 but I just kind of want to zoom out and do a quick vibe check, Anthony. Just how are you feeling about where we are? It is March 20th, 2025. We got Donald Trump making crypto strategic reserves. We have a actually competent SEC. Crypto sentiment is completely dog shit. And Ethereum's going through a transitionary period,

Starting point is 00:01:58 taking longer to go through that transitionary period, but still going through it nonetheless. Overall, like, how would you kind of color this phase of crypto? Yeah, I think why people look, I guess, the sentiment on crypto Twitter, you could say, I guess is like not great is because I think people had these really high expectations of things. Obviously, with Trump winning, everyone was like, oh, you know, everything's going to be great for crypto now. We're going to get Gary Gensler out.

Starting point is 00:02:23 The SEC is going to be friendly. We're going to get all these good regulations and they're going to let us do whatever we want and there's going to be a crypto reserve. And for the most part, we got like most of that, right? We got most of that in place. But I think what a lot of people maybe miss is that like those things can happen, but their effects on particularly the market can take a while to play out, right? And when you have the opposing force, which is basically a lot of the uncertainty in the

Starting point is 00:02:48 macro environment right now in the geopolitical environment, you have the positive force of all this positive stuff happening for crypto in, you know, in a vacuum, I guess. And then you have everything else outside of that, which, You know, if you read the headlines, if you read the kind of the media and everything, like things seem not great, I guess, globally right now in terms of geopolitics and the macro environment and stuff like that. So you have these two forces going at each other. And it seemed like for a little while there, the negative forces were winning in a pretty big way because prices came down a lot on things. But we've leveled out at this point. I don't know where things are going to go from

Starting point is 00:03:21 here, but maybe we trend sideways for a while. I think the market's just digesting a lot of this stuff and the ecosystem's digesting a lot of this stuff. But I think with crypto natives, what really hurt was that everyone was expecting a regular crypto cycle. You know, BTC goes up, all-time high price discovery, ETH does it next, and then we have like a quote-unquote alt season, right? But I think this time around what we had is we had BTC obviously be very strong, ETH not be as strong as people expected it to be, and then meme coins, right? There was no old season besides meme coins, really. And that caught a lot of people off guard, a lot of money was extracted out of the ecosystem, and now we're at where we're at today. So I think it's managing expectations. That's my

Starting point is 00:03:59 main takeaway here. But generally on, you know, outside of the markets and on the fundamental side of things, I'm extremely bullish. Like, especially, as I mentioned, all the positive stuff happening in the US on the regulatory side, but especially within Ethereum. There's been a lot of developments of the last few months in the Ethereum ecosystem, which I'm sure we're going to get into a bit later, you know, the Ethereum Foundation leadership changes, etherealize making a really big move, bringing Danny Ryan on. You know, those sorts of things, those, again, are huge things that have happened, but take time to play out in the market. So I think that if people zoomed out a little bit reset their expectations, they would be a lot happier.

Starting point is 00:04:32 Yeah, that's my take on it as well. My take is just basically that there's a huge dislocation between the fundamentals of the industry and sentiment. And if we talk about sentiment, you know, that's an emotional conversation. Like, why, we were basically asking why the question, why are people unhappy? And happiness always is a divergence between expectations and reality. We expected one outcome and we got a different outcome. but the outcome that we definitely did get is very strong fundamental growth in the industry.

Starting point is 00:05:01 Bitcoin Strategic Reserve, a crypto pro-cropro-cropro-cropro-crypto president, a pro-crypto SECC, pro-cptoness wherever we need it, where we needed it to be, which is, you know, in the government leadership positions of the United States, including in Congress, where we're about to get a market structure bill and a stable coin bill. But nonetheless, like prices are down. And this is coming just from twofold, in my opinion, like Donald Trump's chaotic. for like whatever he's doing that is creating a ton of uncertainty in the market up to the point of like actual trade wars which of course is is bad for the market so we have prices down for

Starting point is 00:05:37 that and that's just not even a crypto story that is just all marmal all markets are down other than bonds and then in addition to that we've actually just had sustained high interest rates for a really long time over two years now and crypto has never been inside of a sustained high interest rate environment ever. And it's just continuing to be higher for longer when it comes to the interest rate. So we had the FOMC meeting this week, happened yesterday. The Fed decides to keep interest rates at the target rate of 4.25 to 4.5%. They said that they could still see two rate cuts coming in 2025, although not as large as we've seen in the second half of last year. They said that they are expecting higher inflation and lower economic growth. And this is all just leading to just a

Starting point is 00:06:23 harder money environment. I remember, Anthony, when you and I were getting into crypto, it was in the ZERP era, the zero interest rate era. And that marked so much of the narrative about why crypto is the way that it is. Like, just poor monetary management by our leadership, by our money over, our money's ours. And that was the era of crypto. And that era is over. The ZERP era is over. And I do think there is some like relationship between this entering of a hard. money era and the decreasing dopamine of the crypto speculators because what is bad for casinos is high interest rates and hard money. And so I think people's sentiments of just like, okay, cool, we've gotten everything we need as an industry to grow. You know, we have a

Starting point is 00:07:11 crypto reserve. We have pro-crypto legislation, but prices are down. And that dislocation is creating terrible vibes. But I think that's kind of to be expected when we have this like ZERP era being purged out of like the DNA of crypto speculators. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think so. And, you know, I've been saying this on my show for a little while now is that when money is hard, as you say, when it's hard to come along, when there's not easy money, it's very hard for risk on assets, which crypto is still, you know, for the most part,

Starting point is 00:07:43 pretty much everything outside of BTC is a pretty big risk on asset. I would even argue BTC could still be viewed as relatively risk on. It just doesn't do well in that environment. and it definitely doesn't do well in a very high global uncertainty environment, which I think is what we've been in for at least the last couple of months, as you mentioned, a lot of the stuff that Trump has been doing. You know, people talk about a new world order, not in the conspiracy kind of tinfall hat sense, but in the fact that the US definitely seems like it wants to withdraw a lot of its influence

Starting point is 00:08:12 from the rest of the world. So what does the rest of the world look like in 10 years from now because of that? So there's a lot of uncertainty there and people don't know exactly where to place their bet. So when there's so much uncertainty, usually people will be like, well, I'm going to sit in cash for a bit, especially since rates are so high, I can basically sit in cash and earn a pretty decent yield on it. It's not like it's 0% rates, right? And then see where the chips kind of fall and see where things fall. And then maybe I'll reenter the market once things stabilize a bit. So I think that's the general kind of consensus right now.

Starting point is 00:08:42 But, you know, if you want to go counter consensus and make some bets and do it now, like you might be able to make a generational bet, right? This is where these kind of big investments can happen too. So it's about how much risk you want to take on as per usual with these markets. Yeah, I think that's right. I think right now the place in the market, both the equities market and the crypto markets is we've already just been completely pummeled. You know, even Bitcoin. Bitcoin is still in the, what is it, $85,000 range. But $85,000 still now feels low compared to like where it was, even though that is incredibly high.

Starting point is 00:09:15 But then the rest of the market is just down so bad. ETH is below $2,000. It's at 1990 right now. Salon is at $130. So the rest of the market is just wrecked. And I think, and also if you're like an Nvidia holder, you're probably feeling the same thing. Like, Nvidia is down like 30% or something off of the highs. And so I think the current phase of the market is like, like, okay, Donald Trump has paused chaoticness.

Starting point is 00:09:40 He can't go down anymore. Like, ETH is already below $2. Like, it can't go any lower than that, right? And so I think we're just kind of waiting for confirmation that Trump's trade war era is over and he's going to like let the stock market have a breather. And no one really knows if that's true or not. Like maybe he just resumes being chaotic. But I do agree with what you said, which is just like the current prices of crypto assets and like tech risk assets, Mr. Market is giving you a deal right now. And you know, you can choose whether to take it.

Starting point is 00:10:10 This is a tweet from Chris Berniske who says, yesterday's close was meaningful for a Bitcoin crossing the 20,000. crossing the 20-day and 200-day simple moving average with conviction now to see if we can hold it. We're not out of the woods yet, but I like what I am seeing. And so with Bitcoin over $84,000, Chris is saying, okay, we are in a good spot if we can hold this right now. So I think markets are starting to like settle to these new lower prices. We're going to hang around here for a little bit. And then we're going to like slowly creep upwards if Donald Trump can like, you know, stop being chaotic. That's kind of my take.

Starting point is 00:10:44 Yeah. Yeah, I think so. And I think I said, you know, earlier how people's expectations may need to be managed here with timelines and everything like that. You know, the markets can go sideways for quite a while. And they tend to actually do that. And people don't realize how long they can go sideways for because during the sideways period, it's usually boring. So you kind of tune out most of it. And then once prices start going up again, you forget the fact that we just had six months of sideways price action. Now you're like, oh, it's going up again. I'm happy. And then maybe it turns into like a little mini bull market or something like that. But we'll see.

Starting point is 00:11:15 You know, I think what's on everyone's mind right now in particular is the four-year cycle dead, you know, the four-year crypto cycle. I've been saying for a while, actually, that I think it's dead. I don't think it's going to be the same kind of cycles going forward, especially given that the old season kind of phenomenon seems to have changed pretty dramatically from everything pumps to, okay, whatever's the hot flavor of the kind of season pumps. We'll see if that maintains going forward. But I think that is actually what kind of ruined most people over the last.

Starting point is 00:11:45 six to 12 months is that they had expectations for certain things and it just didn't happen the way they expected. Yeah. And I'm kind of a fan of the four year cycle being over because it's too, you can't just have that forever. Like it's too easy at some point. And when you say just go away. Okay, so let's get into some more crypto-native subjects. But before we do, we're going to talk to our friends and sponsors over at Ronan. Ronan is one of the leading Web3 gaming ecosystems. Focus on growing gaming and consumer adoption. They are taking the walls down off of the chain. used to be a permissionless chain going full permissionless. And now you can go explore that permissionless ecosystem by using the Ronan wallet.

Starting point is 00:12:21 So check it out at banklist. dot cc slash Ronan underscore wallet. There's also a link in the show notes. Okay, Anthony, one of the big news of the week was this converged chain, which is a partnership from Athena Labs, the makers of the USDA stable coin, and Securitize. And Securitize is kind of like this tech service provider that is used by BlackRock to issue the Biddle Fund, Securized. has been around for forever.

Starting point is 00:12:45 They've just wanted to make on-chain securities. Between these two companies, they are making converge a brand-new chain, brand-new blockchain, and they label this. They brand this as the settlement network for traditional finance and digital dollars. And the tweet continues and says, Our vision is to provide the first purpose-built settlement layer where Tradfai will merge with Defi centered on USDA, that's the stablecoin from Athena, and USD-B.

Starting point is 00:13:10 I actually don't know what that stable coin is, all secured by ENA. Treasury bonds. Oh, treasury bonds. Okay, so stakes, state, okay, staked dollars, dollars and staked dollars, and then secured by ENA. So this new layer one blockchain, the staking token is ENA, which is the token of Athena Labs. It's like the governance token of Athena Labs. It is also a permissioned validator set. So it is not permissionless. You can't just stake like you stake on Ethereum or even on Solana. You actually are, it's a whitelisted group of entities, which is apparently just a bunch of institutions and sentencing. centralized exchanges. Centralized known entities with like basically reputation on the line. They stake ENA and they validate the blockchain. I think any user can come to the blockchain. Any user can come to converge. So it's not a permissioned chain, but it's a permissioned validator set. And during the explanation about like with the design choice about this, it was explained to me by Rob from Dragonfly and also Carlos from from from securitized that this has been requested by institutions. in order to get them comfortable with having this place that they can control where they feel comfortable issuing digital assets, you know, digital securities, you know, like real world assets and insecurities. And so this is the compromise that this design has made. We're going to give over the keys of this blockchain to institutions so that they feel like they have sufficient control over their own ecosystem where they can feel comfortable to create issue real world assets, assets that, you know, you would find more in tradfew. that we all want to have on blockchain, but then they just need it, they just need their own

Starting point is 00:14:48 domain to feel control. And then the explanation here is that once it's on converge, technology like wormhole or any other, you know, cross, cross-strain interoperability layer, will be able to take those assets, port them over to Ethereum, port them over to Salon, port them over to wherever blockchain there's demand for it. So that's kind of the simple rundown of the news. What's your take? I thought it was a kind of weird announcement, I guess, because it's an L1, right? Like a brand new chain, L1. But I would even struggle to call it a blockchain.

Starting point is 00:15:17 As you said, it's permissions. It's pretty locked down. It's extremely, like, it's completely centralized. And I also wonder, like, why they didn't just do this as like a, just a centralized database instead, you know, because making it a blockchain with consensus and everything, it just adds additional costs and overheads. But it does make sense. And I suspected that it was definitely due to the institutions requesting this.

Starting point is 00:15:40 themselves because they are very new to this and they obviously want to get comfortable with it. They want to have total control over things. But the thing is you can still have total control over it even as like an L2. And I feel like the L2 model is just better generally from a number of different reasons. You mentioned things like bridging, you know, assets across the L2s work better with bridging than L1 to L1 does. You get to basically lower your cost dramatically as well. I know that maybe the Athena was like, well, we could use N A and A for staking and maybe. we can kind of get, I guess, a more valuable ENA through that because there is like this perceived L1 premium on tokens. So yeah, overall, like I saw that all the reactions to it, it was mixed,

Starting point is 00:16:20 you know, it was very mixed. People are like, is this really needed? You know, it doesn't really make any sense. Shouldn't we just be settling onto Ethereum instead? And they can still retain centralized controls through the token standards like Circle does with USCC or Tether does with USDT, right? So overall, I'm going to say, I'm in like a wait and watch kind of approach here, but this doesn't really excite me, to be honest. I'm not in this industry for this sort of stuff. Like, yes, I'm excited about reward assets and things like that. But I don't know if this is the right kind of instantiation of that. I think that hopefully if the institutions get more comfortable, they'll realize that there are better ways to do this than this way. So we'll have to, yeah,

Starting point is 00:16:59 we'll have to see how that kind of plays out. I do see the argument that there are some benefits towards being a blockchain rather than just a database. This is an EVM chain. And so there are some defy apps that they're going to launch on day one like day one apps right morpho maple pendle horizon from ave and so that's going to be these like financial text stacks that are just built on this converged blockchain on day one and and also it's permissionless access so uh even though there are this permission validator set you know you the user can still go to this chain and use some of the assets here and in theory what's the point of the permission validator set then if it's permissionless right like what are that why do you need a permission validator

Starting point is 00:17:40 Let us say, if you're going to let people, anyone come. Like, I don't, I don't buy it. It's not, it's not working. No, I'm, I'm waiting to get to that point, and I'm trying to give them some benefit of the doubt. Okay, so also in their announcement, they say there are three distinct pillars that are operating parallel, a fully permissionless user access to a defy ecosystem, which in theory, there would be more, like, a larger diversity of, like, you know, tokenize equities, tokenized securities, real world assets and so maybe that's why people would come to this permissioned blockchain, permission validiercept blockchain. But they also said

Starting point is 00:18:13 that there are permissioned apps where TradFi can interact with KYC parties. And that is like one of the features of this that might get more institutions comfortable with the blockchain. And then third, new permission apps to build by unsecuredized tokenized assets. And so the permissioned network side of this thing is like really a big emphasis because it's not just that to validate yourself, but they want to also build permissioned apps. But I would take this and this. And this is what Rob from Dragonfly was explaining to me. He said, permission validators is an unfortunate truth of bringing more institutional counterparties on chain. We hear it across verticals. And so he's saying

Starting point is 00:18:47 that he's gone around to institutions and say, they have said to him that we need permission validation, permission validators that in order to get comfortable. And I'm like, okay, I understand that that is what they are telling you. But why are we listening to them in the first place? Because they don't know what they want. Because when have institutions ever been right about how to build on a blockchain. The reason why I incorrectly labeled this a permissioned blockchain in a tweet was because this is what institutions were asking for back in 2017. We're like, okay, blockchain, not Bitcoin. We're going to make, we're going to do IBM HyperLedger. We're going to make a permission blockchain. It's going to be a settlement network

Starting point is 00:19:24 between like permission parties. And that is what the industry listened to and tried to build for them and no one cared about the end product because what is truly valuable in this industry is public permissionless ledgers where individuals, un-KYC'd individuals and KYC'd institutions all operate in the same sphere. The thing that we are trying to fix in crypto is that the previous array of financial institutions are siloed servers. And each Wells Fargo has a siloed server. BlackRock has a siloed server. J.P. Morgan has a siloed server. And all of these siloed servers have very high transactional costs because each one has a server. And we need to figure out how to get these servers to communicate and that just creates a bunch of intermediaries and a bunch of

Starting point is 00:20:08 friction. The cool thing about crypto is that we are inverting that relationship where we are all building on the same server, the world computer. And this is why there is this cutthroat competition between Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin, whatever, to be that same unified server. And now I'm being told that institutions are just going to be a little bit more comfortable creating their own server. We'll call it converge. And it's going to be permissioned. And I'm like, no, The whole point of this is to all converge on the same chain, not diverge away onto different chains. And I would like to contrast that with the announcement that came out of Coinbase called Privacy Pools. And so this is an announcement that came out of Coinbase this week.

Starting point is 00:20:50 I actually didn't have this in the agenda, but I think it's very useful to explain. Coinbase introduced Coinbase verified pools, a trusted way to seamlessly trade on chain. basically using a Coinbase KYC at a station, which is like a token that's in your wallet that Coinbase uses to attest that they have your KYC, you and only you and other KYC users are able to provide liquidity through a Uniswop V4 hook, and all traders in that Uniswap V4 hook can trust that Coinbase knows the counterparty. So I actually don't buy that we need a permissioned validator set because you can just build that logic into the app layer as Coinbase has proven that they were able to do with Uniswap

Starting point is 00:21:33 V4 hooks. And so stop listening to the institutions and what they need because they don't understand blockchain. Just build it into the app layer. If you want KYC logic, build it into the app layer because we know that we can do that. That's why we have apps in the first place. I will end my rant. Anthony, what do you think about all that? No, no. I mean, I totally agree with you. And I guess, yeah, I was alluding to it earlier that it doesn't need a whole new chain. but also on the permissionless point, like I can't call a permission chain permissionless. And that also goes, like people may think I'm a hypocrite here,

Starting point is 00:22:05 but that also goes for L2s with centralized sequences. Like, I've been pushing for these L2s to obviously decentralize, you know, and I think that they will. I think that the major ones definitely will. But when you have literally like an L1 blockchain with completely permissioned validators and you say it's permissionless, well, it's not because those permission validators can censor anyone they want. and it can do anything they want on the chain.

Starting point is 00:22:28 So really you're saying that, oh, you can come here and play, but at any time we can, you know, rug you. You know, we can change the rules. You are beholden to the validators. Exactly, exactly. So it may be permissionless until it's not. Like, I think that might be a better way to put it. Rather, you know, if you look at something like Ethereum L1,

Starting point is 00:22:47 I mean, it's truly permissionless, right? It has thousands of unique node operators. A lot of people would have to collude in order to censor you and they wouldn't even succeed for, many, many reasons, which I won't get into now. And, and yeah, as permissionless validator said as well, and everyone can run their own full nodes. So, yeah, I just, as I said, like, I mean, to wait and kind of see approach with this, but I don't think it's the right approach.

Starting point is 00:23:09 I think, as you mentioned, Coinbase's approach is the correct approach and will be the winning one, you know, long term. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's a good argument about, like, layer two's. Layer two's in the stage zero centralized sequencer capacity have similar, like, feelings as this. but the point about being a layer two,

Starting point is 00:23:28 even if you're stage zero layer two in Austin Federa from formerly Solana, he said like, well, the actual like nomenclature of a layer of a stage zero layer two is actually not that different from a layer one with a bridge, like point taken. But the idea of being a layer two in the first place means that you are on the path to going into becoming a stage two.

Starting point is 00:23:48 Like that is your path to be. And so if you if you like stop at stage zero forever, then yes, understood the point. But like, no, like a commitment, commitment towards being a fully permissionless layer two, being on that path is what matters here. Yeah, yeah, Converge doesn't seem to be on that path, right? They just said, web permission, validate a set, you know, we have fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:24:12 Anyways, it just throws in the face of like, what the hell are we even doing here? Like, why are we doing this? I mean, I can see, like, if I're playing devil's advocate, like, I can see it from their point of view. They want to get a product, you know, they want to get institutions involved with products. they want to bring them on chain. If they're asking for this and it's non-negotiable, you'd rather land the partnership than you give it up, right?

Starting point is 00:24:32 So I understand that. Like I, and I think it's, it's, that's probably what happened, to be honest. But at the same time, I would love for them to be in the background, keep pushing these institutions to, hey, there's a better way, is a better way, you know? Right.

Starting point is 00:24:45 But we'll see, because there's financial incentives too involved, right? Right, yes, because now Athena is a layer one. So like, not only is it a stable coin like Maker Dow, but now it's a layer. one as well. And so they also get the layer one premium. And so I think that incentive can't be ignored. Anyways, we can stop. We can stop ranting about the kind of verge. We're going to talk about the Robin Hood partnership with Kalishi. We're going to talk about the Salon of Governance updates. And then we're going to talk about Ethereum. We're going to get to all of that and more. But first, a message

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Starting point is 00:28:01 I'm going to buy a penguin on Salana. So I'm going from the Bera chain to Solana. See, no transaction signing, no gas to worry about. You just switch across whatever chain that you want with Infinex. That was so easy. Go check out Infinex and try your first switch today. Robin Hood continues to expand their product offering with a prediction market now with Kalishi. Kalashi is this kind of like aggressive.

Starting point is 00:28:22 polymarket competitor, a non-crypto polymarket competitor. And so they actually, Robin Hood's crypto, but it's mostly not crypto and Kalishi's not crypto at all. And so this is, I think, just us kind of keeping an eye on our non-crypto competition. And so with Kalishi now integrated into Robin Hood, Robin Hood now actually has a prediction markets hub within its app via Robin Hood derivatives. First, it will center on politics, economics, and sports. But of course, Robin Hood's plan is to just provide markets to anything. Robin Hood wrote in their press release, we have been in close contact with the CFTC over the past several weeks and look forward to continuing to work with them to promote innovation in the future, derivatives, and crypto markets.

Starting point is 00:29:03 Kalishi and the CFTC have litigating in court whether Kalishi can offer contracts betting on U.S. elections. I think that was like the Elizabeth Warren, like, tirade over Kalishi, where she thought she just really didn't like betting markets as related to politics. I think that has now been in the rear view mirror. Vlad, when he announced this, he said he wrote on Twitter, as a former mathematician and physicist, I am motivated by the search for objective truth. How can we make sense of all the information out there and who can we trust? Prediction markets are the application of capitalism to the pursuit of truth. Robin Hood rose about 8% in the equities market after the announcement. Any takes with all of this,

Starting point is 00:29:45 Anthony? Yeah, I mean, maybe a broader take here. I think. there's two major companies in the US targeting that have traditionally targeted different market segments. There's Coinbase that has been all in on crypto. Then there's Robin Hood that has been all in on TradFi. But of the last kind of couple of years accelerating in the last year, you've had Robin Hood come into crypto and come more aggressive into crypto, right? They want to be in crypto. They want to offer more and more crypto products. They want to do more and more crypto stuff. And then you have Coinbase, on the other hand, going more Tradify, being like, we want to do more Tradify stuff. We want to bring real world assets on chain. And they did the verified

Starting point is 00:30:20 pools thing that we just covered. So it's an interesting dynamic right now where you have Tradfai wanting to be more crypto and crypto wanting to be more tradfai. And those kind of two things are converging, I guess, for lack of a better word there. And kind of meeting in the middle, which is interesting to see there. But in terms of like prediction markets, there was obviously a lot of fanfare around them during the election because that's usually what happens. People love to bet on the election. There were some pretty big markets there. In a polio market was obviously the leader in that one. And this competitor here kind of came a bit later. But as you said, it's quite aggressive. When it comes to it, like, I just view

Starting point is 00:30:59 it as another betting market, to be honest, like in general. Like, I don't know. I'm maybe not like red-pilled on prediction markets just yet because they just look like betting markets to me at the end of the day. And a lot of them have not really been able to get to the truth. And there's a lot of issues with resolving certain markets because there's always like something in the wording that someone harps on about. And yeah, so I'm wondering like if we're just going to get like these centralized prediction markets will be the things that take off because then decentralized people behind it can just resolve the markets, however they see fit.

Starting point is 00:31:34 Because in a decentralized context, and Orga, one of the original Ethereum projects, had a really tough time with this. What ends up happening is that you go through like multiple rounds of trying to get to the truth of the truth, right? You've got to keep going down this rabbit hole of truth. And then if no resolution happens, you basically gridlocked because you're trying to do it in a decentralized way. So that's, I guess, an interesting part of prediction markets to mean. But I do think that they're going to keep growing. I do think people love to bet on anything. You know, in crypto, obviously we have various different ways of betting on things outside of

Starting point is 00:32:06 prediction markets. But in terms of like information markets and betting on certain things, especially things that happen outside of crypto. So in crypto, you know, you can bet on like tokens, right? That's inside crypto. You're buying a token, betting it's going to go up. But outside of crypto, that's what prediction markets do. They look at the information outside of crypto, the stuff happening there and saying, okay, we'll bring this into crypto and then all the crypto people can bet on this as well. And we'll see the wisdom of the crowd there. But as I said, I get to be convinced on how accurate this kind of stuff is versus normal betting markets. There needs to be some sort of like sufficient liquidity, sufficient number of market participants,

Starting point is 00:32:41 really in order to make prediction markets work. And I think we saw that, we saw prediction markets truly work with the election between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris because there was that one French trader who just like started doing phone calls and sponsoring polls to get information direct to the source. And then they just made a very large concentrated bet because he thought the market was wrong. And that's exactly how prediction markets ought to work. But that was at the like literally the most number one ever in the world in history. most liquid, most bet after most participated in prediction market. And I think in order to make

Starting point is 00:33:17 prediction markets works, we need that size. Prediction markets have to operate at size. And I think like we're going there. Polymarket, even though it came down off of the post-election highs, the volume's still pretty good. And it's way higher than it was before going into the 2024 election. And I think like you could, I think it's fair to be like maybe a little bit nihilist about the current state of prediction markets because they are just betting markets. But there is a top of the rabbit hole there with prediction markets that is the futarchy rabbit hole where prediction markets can actually start to be a little bit more prescriptive about future outcomes. And there's just like a whole entire world of futarchy where there's like prediction markets. You can imagine prediction markets inside of like a Dow or even a corporation that is being allowed to be bet on by employees or team members or stakeholders.

Starting point is 00:34:07 And that can actually create like a an outcome, a directional outcome. for the decision-making of some organization. And so I think there's that. We're actually kind of just like kind of scratching the service of prediction markets. And we just have to start with building out liquidity in this world. And then we open up doors to this whole theorized vertical called futarchy, which that's like the optimistic case.

Starting point is 00:34:30 Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm definitely open to being convinced and, you know, showing the power of these things. But yeah, I just think up until this point, it's been relatively niche and small. and really, I mean, it had its breakout, obviously, with the election stuff. But, yeah, I think if we can get to that point of what you just described,

Starting point is 00:34:48 I would probably be convinced at that point if we can get there. All right, this is the point in the agenda where two Ethereum people talk about Salana's SimD-228 proposal. So this is the biggest probably proposal that's ever existed in Solana. And then there's other people out there who are saying this is actually the biggest governance event in crypto history. we'll talk about Anthony's I think there's an okay argument about that

Starting point is 00:35:16 maybe I'll skip to the fact or the claim as to why that's true something like 74% of all Salana voted on this proposal so take the market cap of Solana, take 74% of it that amount of capital

Starting point is 00:35:33 voted on this proposal now there's no like slashing or there's no like yeah but that amount of capital is concentrated in very few validators. It's true. That's true. That's very true. That's very, very true. Yes.

Starting point is 00:35:43 Like, you know, so it's like top 20 validators of like 33% of the stake. So. Yeah. So individual humans or individual entities much lower. But like it is still like 74% of a very large market cap. Or ecosystem. So you could you could kind of see why, why this is like a big deal in terms of like crypto governance.

Starting point is 00:36:03 But also crypto governance goes way beyond on chain governance. Totally. Totally. I, you know, you know what I mean? Like if you're just looking at the on-chain portion of it, you're missing like a whole ocean of off-chain portions of discussions and everything. I don't know. This was, I don't know.

Starting point is 00:36:18 I'm not just saying this because of Solana. I just don't think this is the biggest. I think Ethereum has always had the biggest governance kind of debates around things. You know, I think like our issuance debate, like if we were to have a proper one, even the small bits and pieces we've had with the recent kind of issuance discussions, they blow up, like, massively. So, yeah. But I didn't follow these too closely.

Starting point is 00:36:40 I just, yeah, I sold the aftermath and I was like, okay. Okay, so this is a monetary conversation for Solana, but it's also kind of a crypto-economics conversation as well, because of course, if you tinker with a monetary policy of Solana, you're also tinkering with the economics of validators. Okay, so what did SimD-22A propose for Solana? I wanted to change Solana's issuance curve decay to be able to flex up or down. So Solana has like a Bitcoin-esque decay function in the issuance rate. It's just like the issues less over time.

Starting point is 00:37:13 Now there is a more, call it precise version of monetary policy that was proposed by 228. And this new mechanism, it would have reduced current inflation by 80% and then also targeted 50% stake rate. So if there is more than 50% of Solana staked, it would decrease issuance. If there's less than 50% Salana staked, it would increase influence. So this is something like stake targeting. The arguments in favor of this was increased network security due to the dynamic increasing inflation if staking participation dropped too low. Also preventing overpaying for security by just decreasing the overall amount of issuance. And then by decreasing issuance, you're encouraging people to unstake, which allows for Seoul to flow into defy.

Starting point is 00:37:57 So it was thought as a subsidy to like so long as defy ecosystem. Those are the arguments in favor. arguments against is that smaller validators will be less profitable because smaller validators really depend on that high sole inflation in order to be profitable. So this is kind of like chopping off the tail end of smaller validators and because only like more, only larger validators could be really able to be profitable here. And then the higher yield is an important component for ETF buyers in Europe, even though that's nominal. And those are really the big things. The result of the voting is that 74 of the stake supply voted against this proposal. So the the proposal was

Starting point is 00:38:39 failed. So this is meaning that Solana inflation will continue to be high. And so from my point of view as like a money person, I'm like, okay, increased Solana inflation, less good for the moneyness of Seoul, less good for the defy ecosystem of Seoul. And so that's like a negative. But then also I'm happy that the long tail of validators of Solana are still profitable because that means that Solana will be able to be more decentralized than it would had it been able to, had it actually pass this. So I'm kind of like of two minds of this. It's like it's less good for Solis money. But I don't even think the Solana ecosystem really cares about Solis money.

Starting point is 00:39:16 And it's better for the decentralization of Solana, which is something that like I don't really think they can really afford to decrease that much already. Like I'm already not satisfied with the state of decentralization in Solana. And so at least we are keeping viability of like long tail validators. And so the monetary policy of Solana will not change. I think this is probably going to be iterated on and reproposed. But as as of now, there's no change should they still on a monetary policy. Anthony, what's your take? There's a lot to unpack here, I think.

Starting point is 00:39:47 And I'll try not to be too ETHMAXI about it. I think first and foremost, you can't claim to have economic security on your chain if you have no slashing, like as a proof of stake chain. I'm, I just, I strongly believe that because there's no punishment, right? So it doesn't equal any economic security in my item. Well, maybe not any, but it's just very low, especially compared to something like Ethereum that actually has slashing in place. And that goes for all the chains that don't have slashing all the proof of stake chains.

Starting point is 00:40:14 I just, I don't consider it to be, you know, the equivalent there. But the thing is, you talk about smaller validators. The problem with that is that the Slina Foundation runs a subsidy program where they give soul to the long tail of validators in order for them to be profitable, even with the high inflation. Now, I don't know the current state of that program because there's not much transparency around it. It's like government handouts for the pores of the Salana Validator set. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, and as I said, not much transparency around that. People found that on chain based on information that was given a while ago about this.

Starting point is 00:40:50 So there's all these, there's kind of things going on when it, when it comes to this. And, you know, as you said, like the high inflation obviously is not good for monetary properties here. I don't really buy the argument that if you had less sole stake that would just flow into defy, I actually think people would just sell it because the problem with a high staking rate is that why is it high to begin with, right? And there's a lot of different reasons. But what's the number one reason? Well, I think it's because the inflation rate is high, right?

Starting point is 00:41:14 You see whatever the issuance rate is. I think it's like, what, 7 or 8 percent or something like that? It's quite high. You see that as a normal retail user. You're not accounting for the inflation. You're just seeing 7 and 8 percent. You're like, oh, I can earn this on sole, right? I'll buy soul and I'll stake it.

Starting point is 00:41:30 And it's not just soul. It's the other proof of stake networks that have high inflation rates as well, right? So I don't really buy the argument that if the inflation was lower, that soul would unstake and then flow into defy. Maybe some of it would, like a very small portion of it. But I do think that the stake rate is so high because people don't care to do anything else with those tokens. They're just staking it. And this is true across pretty much like most of the delegated proof of stake networks out there. Kadano has a really high staking.

Starting point is 00:41:58 rate last time I checked, same with like Pocod and a bunch of other chains that use this kind of similar mechanism here. Whereas it's very different in Ethereum, which doesn't have delegated proof of stake. And ETH is used as a proper money within the ecosystem, is used within the DFI ecosystem, is used as collateral. And people love using ETH. And that's why, one of the reasons why ETH is at what, whatever it is, like 30% or something like that these days, right? It's very, very small percentage there. If each issuance is lower. as well, and that kind of discourages staking there. But ETH's use as a money and as a kind of like a collateral asset within DFI

Starting point is 00:42:36 has been very strong for a very long time. So I think, as I said, there's a lot of different kind of moving parts here. And it was kind of funny to me that this was, I don't know how long this was in the works for, but the timing was just poetic where the sole price suddenly started going down a lot. And they're like, break, you know, break glass in case of emergency, this proposal. But I think this proposal had been worked on for quite a while. I just thought the timing was funny. But yeah, I think the small validator's point is probably the most important in that

Starting point is 00:43:03 because Solana is a very expensive network to run because the hardware requirements are quite high. You're going to naturally get centralization because of that. And then at the same time, you're going to need, you know, subsidy programs and you're going to need the high issuance to offset that as well. So it just doesn't really make for good economics. It doesn't really make for a good, you know, sustainable chain in my opinion. but hopefully I wasn't too ETHMAXY about that

Starting point is 00:43:27 because I do think that Ethereum isn't perfect but it's pretty good right now the way Ethereum works on its economic side. Yeah. I know one of Anatoly's points to like kind of counteract

Starting point is 00:43:39 E like FUD about Solana's decentralization where he made this point was like well over the years Solana actually has become meaningful meaningfully more decentralized because more validators have come online more like Elana's validator account is growing over time

Starting point is 00:43:53 and so he's saying it actually went down by like a thousand over the last 18 months. Yeah, so that was exactly my point. So that is expected behavior when sole price goes up because simply it's more economical when soul is prices higher to be able to spin up a validator. Like more when sole price goes up,

Starting point is 00:44:09 more people can put up validators. As sole price collapses, and you see this in the same thing with the Bitcoin mining set of miners, when prices go down, things centralized. And that has always been the critique of proof of work is like, okay, sure, you can afford a more diverse set of miners when Bitcoin price is going up. But when Bitcoin price is going down, it converges, it collapses down on the most efficient miners. And that's the same thing that's

Starting point is 00:44:35 happening with proof of stake validating when you juice up the hardware requirements. And so, yes, there has, as sole price went from $7 post-FTX up to like $250, $250, almost $300, you would expect more validators to come online because there's just more fees to accrue. It's more economical. But as prices converge, and collapse, then the validators that also collapses. And if you keep your hardware requirements up, the natural convergence towards centralization

Starting point is 00:45:04 is just accelerated versus if you just keep your hardware requirements down. Ethereum has the same convergence towards profitable, only profitable validators. And so it has the same effects that Solana has. But since Ethereum has like one, one hundredth of the hardware and bandwidth requirements, the impacts of that effect are just so much slower. So it allows time for other mechanisms to come in and take over and allow for people to join the network.

Starting point is 00:45:31 And it's funny that you mention revenue, you know, because stakers don't just get the inflation. They also get revenue from whatever the chain generates. That's true for every chain. I remember I had like debates with, you know, Salana people a while ago now, maybe like over a year ago where they were discussing, well, you know, fear of you will eventually get so high that will just cut sole inflation. down because the fair revenue will make up for that. But what ended up happening was that the fear of anew did go quite high for a little while there, obviously because of the mincoyn mania, but now the fear of a new is very, very low. So maybe this proposal would have passed like six months ago because everyone was looking at the fear of a news being like, oh, they're so high, right?

Starting point is 00:46:12 But I remember looking at them and I actually said this to you, David, we were talking about this where I said, this looks exactly like ETH did during the NFT mania where so much money is just like extracted out by the MEV mafia, and that comes from the fear of a new, and then it just collapses, which is what we've seen here. So I wonder if this proposal would have passed six months ago, because the validators might have been like, well, if inflation is going lower, but hey, we have a lot of fear of a new coming in that will make up for it. Because that was, as I said, one of the things that I debated with Sala people a while ago. And my kind of side of the debate was, guys, I think like most fear of an you is just going to get internalized by apps because

Starting point is 00:46:49 most fear of new comes from MEV. So you actually just need a sustainable tail issuance. But the problem for Solana is that it's incredibly expensive to run the chain compared to Ethereum. So they need more tail issuance, which yeah, which which is not good for a money, right? Or not good for the longer term kind of price of the asset. In a different world of Solana news, Salana is actually getting sole futures from the CME. And this is the first step, the first known step that we have seen both Bitcoin and Ether go through before they get their actual ETFs. So first,

Starting point is 00:47:21 Solana Futures, ETFs and then is that an ETF? Maybe not an ETF. But anyway, so Salon is getting futures. And then actually, excuse me, it launched, did launch. The day one volumes were well below of Bitcoin and Ethereum volume. So on the Bitcoin Futures

Starting point is 00:47:38 debut in December of 2017, $102 million in volume on day one launch when Ethereum futures debuted in February of 2021 and had $31 million. on day one launch and then Solana had $12.3 million of trading volume on day one. But nonetheless, that is the first foot in the door for Solana to get an ETF, which I think this administration is much more open to the idea of ETFs.

Starting point is 00:48:02 And then also, since we're just on Solana, happy for fifth birthday. So Salana, that happened on March 16th. So congratulations, Salana for being five years old. They're still in Main Net Beta. That's why I'm laughing. I don't even know what Maine Net Beta. means at this point. No, I think they're just running with it as like a meme at this point. Like, but it would be hilarious if they finally took it off and the chain went down again.

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Starting point is 00:51:35 ETH Acceleration. And then in this tweet, we have Danny Ryan on the far right, Tomaz, who is the incoming co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, Onsgar, Georgios, Brian Armstrong, Matt Hwang from Paradigm, and I actually don't know this lady on the left. She's tagged in the photo. She's tagged in the photo. And this is Alana, Alana from Paradigm, Alana from Paradigm.

Starting point is 00:51:58 This is the COO. The COO of Paradigm. COOAWAWRDARD. Apologies, Alana. And I just really wanted to just like use this tweet as like an opener up of like this Ethereum conversation. Tomaz, incoming new executive director, co-executive director along with Hesiao. I think that's the big news. we have a to be scheduled podcast with Tamaz and Hesiao not totally confirmed we haven't gotten the 100% confirmation yet but I'm pretty sure it's happening and then also Danny Ryan I do a podcast with him tomorrow and Vivek about etherealize and then since we're on the subject Tim Beko will be coming out on Monday I believe to talk about the future of Ethereum overall Anthony there's been just a lot of churn in Ethereum a lot of changing up of vibes and sentiment and leadership overall what's your take yeah I just love that we went from

Starting point is 00:52:44 shitting on Solana so now pumping up Ethereum, but this is good. This is my vibe. Like, we can do this, right? So, I mean, obviously, like, I'm just going to be biased here, but at the same time, I'm going to give my reasoning behind it. I think over the last few months, Ethereum has repositioned itself for success, like, as a TLDR there. And it's done this in various different ways.

Starting point is 00:53:06 I think, as you mentioned, you know, the new co-directors of the EF are going to bring much needed kind of refresh and energy to the Ethereum Foundation, especially with, you know, Thomas already being so active on Twitter. He's putting his calendar out there on public. It's like, it's just raw dog in the calendar, man. Like, that's crazy. I would never do that. But he's doing it. And he even did it as like a shitpost reply to Carl Somani because Carl Samani was like, no one in the EF takes any criticism from anyone seriously. Tomas is like, Kyle Samani tweets out. I can confirm that the EF leadership is not interested in hearing direct. dissenting opinions from their loudest critics.

Starting point is 00:53:42 And then Tamas replies, Hi, Kyle, appreciate you bringing this up. We're hoping to hearing different perspectives, critical, or otherwise, here's some additional availability for the critical ones, and then adds his calendly publicly on Twitter. Just on Twitter, here's my calendar. Please come and talk to me. Yep, that's just insane, right?

Starting point is 00:53:57 So that's the kind of vibes and energy that I'm liking. I'm liking seeing because it really, and especially because it's in public, right? It really gets the people going, if you will, there. But it's not just, Tomas, it's not just Showay at the EF, but it's also theorized, right? They've made a huge name for themselves in a very short period of time. As everyone probably knows by now, they brought on Danny Ryan as a co-founder along with some other people as well.

Starting point is 00:54:23 So there's four co-founders, I think, in total, Vivek, Grant, and the fourth one, I've forgotten the name right now. But yeah, there's four co-founders. And obviously, Danny Ryan was, you know, everyone's pick for the EF kind of leadership position. but I actually think that he's much better suited to etherealize than the EF for what he wants to do and wants to achieve. And at the same time, he has a close relationship with the EF. So essentially, etherealizing the EF are like the dynamic duo, with a theorized targeting all the stuff that the EF is not equipped to target and the EF doing all the things that etherealize is not equipped to do.

Starting point is 00:54:57 So that just makes me incredibly bullish on that front there. But I also think generally on maybe the core development front, the core research and development front, there's been a real push obviously to accelerate things, even with the L2s, and accelerate the right things. Because you can say, well, let's accelerate things and then be like, oh, let's accelerate better censorship resistance for Ethereum. It's like, okay, yes, that's good. That's critical. We want that. But we can wait for that. What we can't wait for is scale. We need to accelerate things like blob scaling, right? The Gassimus scaling. So there's been a reprioritization around what to actually kind of focus on as part of that Ethereum acceleration effort.

Starting point is 00:55:33 And from what I've seen, everyone seems to agree that we should be focused on increasing blobs, increasing the L1 gas limit, just scaling Ethereum as much as we can, capture as much market share as we can, and worry about other things later. That's my general take on that. But yeah, the vibes have improved greatly. Like, I'm sure people have felt that over the last couple months. Even though the price hasn't done much, the vibes have been really good there. And I think that's definitely due to these more kind of like public changes in leadership,

Starting point is 00:56:02 but also you're seeing more EF people be more public as well, which is great to see because people want to hear from the source. And core developers generally, even the ones that work outside of the Ethereum Foundation, like you had up on your screen there, Terrence, who works at Pryelabs, who is part of off-chain labs, which builds arbitrium. They're just tweeting more,

Starting point is 00:56:21 tweeting more stuff out publicly and getting that energy out there. Yeah, there's a tweet from Uma Roy, which has turned into Ethereum copy pasta, which I'm trying to find right now. but it was basically just talking about the vibe shift at the EF and how it's starting to like permeate outwards. And I think you can kind of see it in different corners of Ethereum land. It's actually worth noting that Tomas has actually not started his job

Starting point is 00:56:47 at the Ethereum Foundation for whatever reason. He was going to start, I think, on the 14th and he got punted by a week. So he actually starts next week. I can't find this tweet from Uma. And so there's like early, like it feels like the Aya era of Ethereum, the EF, was like, we did that. That was like, you know, mission accomplished.

Starting point is 00:57:07 We did the whole addition by subtraction thing. And that thing went to its logical conclusion. And now we can like check that box. And now there is two new EDs who are going to come in with a different like mentality, a different mandate. And that and because of that new change of leadership, there's been like a reorging of like just how Ethereum communicates with itself.

Starting point is 00:57:30 And so it is worth seeing like there's a little culture set from the top. Now there's new culture. And this is all happening so early because like I said, Thomas hasn't even started his job of the EF. And then one more thing in the Ethereum land. The Ether Guild has launched. And so the Ether Guild is Ethes Money HQ on Twitter. It's this kind of community effort to supporting ETHIS money. Think of this as like this community grassroots guild of people who all want Ether to be a monetary asset.

Starting point is 00:57:58 And this is, we talked about this actually at the bankless summit, ethosmoney.xyz, is kind of like this layer to beat for, for ether the asset. And so it kind of gives you metrics and stats and figures about ether, the asset, and how it's being used as money, where it's being used as money. And this is just a kind of community effort with a large push from the, grow the pie folks, really chat team over there, as long with some community body-up adoption from Anthony's on here. Also, Ryan, this was a Ryan brainchild. And so if you want to support the Ether Guild, there is a link in the show notes so you can get started and you can also join the Guild. You can apply to join the Guild. Basically, if you believe in Ether's money, that is you. Any comments

Starting point is 00:58:44 or commentary about this? Yeah, I mean, I like how the Ethes Money effort that Ryan started kind of evolved here into the Ether Guild because the Ether Guild is being broad strokes now. They're basically trying to bring the different, I guess, areas of Ethereum together, the ethos money area, the Ethereum as the world computer kind of area, the kind of regenerative stuff, the public goods funding stuff that Ethereum does, just bringing this all together under the Ether Guild and doing that in a community-driven way. They have these concepts of quests that people can go on and complete different things and just, you know, adding a bit of gamification to it as well. But there is definitely a very heavy focus on the

Starting point is 00:59:21 ethys money side and its value kind of accrual properties and stuff like that, which is another thing that I didn't mention earlier, there's been a real big community kind of outcry that more focus needs to be put on ETH, the asset, rather than just Ethereum, the network. And I think I've seen some people calling for it to be basically some organization or some kind of team to literally just be out there kind of spreading the message of ETH itself, not even talking about Ethereum, just talking about ETH the asset, because typically when we talk about ETH and Ethereum, we talk about them together, right? And we do put a pretty heavy, emphasis on the network because the network is honestly the most interesting and exciting part,

Starting point is 01:00:01 right? Like the network makes the money exciting. It's not the kind of like other way around. So I think there's been a pretty big push there and I think Ether Guild wants to be like a main part of that as well. But I'm hoping to see more of that going forward, especially more of that from EF people. I know Ansgar recently put out a tweet about this where he said that he's been relatively quiet on the ETH front, but he wants to be louder about it going forward once the L1 kind of reprioritization stuff that they've been doing with the roadmap is kind of finalized there, which I think it's going to be very soon, actually. They've gotten to the point where they feel pretty good about it, pretty comfortable about it. And that L1 reprioritization effort is like probably

Starting point is 01:00:40 the next five year roadmap essentially for Ethereum. So yeah, pretty important stuff going on. Yeah, there's never been complete holistic community consensus in the Ethereum community about ether the asset and promoting ether the asset. There's like some of the developers in Ethereum who got into Ethereum so early, like 2015, 2016, because they saw Ethereum the vision and really just saw Ether the asset as a means to an end of elevating the world computer. And I think my message to them and my message to the broader Ethereum community is that if you believe, if you're here for Ethereum the computer and Ethereum the network, supporting Ether the asset is 100% aligned with that goal.

Starting point is 01:01:20 The Ethereum computer, I think you have seen with the decay of the Ether market cap, you have seen a decay of the coordination incentives around Ethereum the computer. When the Ether market cap is lower, you get stupid stuff like Converge, building a new layer one instead of building a layer two on Ethereum. If the Ether market cap was higher, you would see more layer ones being interested in becoming layer two's on Ethereum. You would see more apps being grown. You would see the Ethereum, the computer, grow higher.

Starting point is 01:01:52 And so I think that Ethereum, the Ethereum is a world's computer mission people. We are 100% in alignment with. And I think that we need to also have the perspective that a valuable ether is helps that mission more. And so it's like, it's not like Ethereum, the world computer is a first class citizen and eth is money as a second class citizen. They are both first class citizens. What would you say to that? No, I mean, I completely agree. It's a message that we've been pushing for a very long time now.

Starting point is 01:02:20 And I'm quite puzzled sometimes by people who are saying, you know, are indifferent to ETH as an asset or saying that our ETH going up is, you know, gross or cringe or not something we want to see. I think the only negative to ETH going up is that the people who don't own ETH are going to be sad. Like, I don't really, there's no other negative to it. Like the more ETH goes up, the more secure the network is the better coordination we have. The more economic bandwidth we have within the Ethereum economy to use. The more attention Ethereum gets, the more people want to build on Ethereum. I'm like, there's literally no negatives here. And I've been saying this for like a long time now.

Starting point is 01:02:55 It's probably like six years at this point. They've been saying this. There's just no negatives here for Heath going up. And funny thing is, is that Heath going up means the Ethereum Foundation has more money. Like, if nothing else convinces you, that should convince you. So I think that's important there. But I think there's also a related but interesting discussion topic. We don't have to get into now.

Starting point is 01:03:17 I know we're coming up on time here. But just for something for people to think about. is that I think in Bitcoin, the reason why the BTC's digital gold narrative stuck is because anyone who didn't believe that was purged from Bitcoin. And the reason why it's easy to purge people from Bitcoin is because it doesn't do anything else. There's nothing else. It does nothing else. Whereas in Ethereum, not that I want to purge people, but you actually can't be purged because

Starting point is 01:03:40 there's so many different areas of Ethereum, if you don't care about ether's money or ether's a store of value or whatever, you can go do something else in Ethereum and be free to do that. No one's going to stop you from doing that. No one's going to shame you for doing that. Whereas in Bitcoin, if you don't believe in BTC as digital gold, you are shit out of luck. There's nothing else you can do with Bitcoin, right? So I think that's an interesting topic that I don't think gets brought up enough. I want to quickly delve into the Ethereum app layer.

Starting point is 01:04:04 This is a cool project that I saw a guy announced this last week called Megapot. And I think the pitch behind a megapot, the idea behind Megapot is just incredibly easy to understand, is a global internet lottery. and I think maybe people just started thinking about pool together recently, which is a no-loss lottery. Pull-together is this is not pooled together. This is straight-up a megapot. This is a straight-up lottery. As in, like, you buy a ticket.

Starting point is 01:04:29 If you don't win, you lose your money. Whereas with pool together, you would get your money back. And so the idea here is that this can be a global lottery, larger, a superset of all previously existing lotteries, not not the jackpot, not mega-millions, like, not whatever, which are also, I would say very toxic because the expected value of a ticket, like you pay $1 for like the expected value of returning $0.23. With this one, you actually get to either buy a ticket, by $1 ticket to win $100,000 or something very, very skewed like that. Or you act as an LP and you can be the house. And so you as this is not something that you can do in like the mega millions or mega jackpot

Starting point is 01:05:10 or whatever, the trad trad lotteries, you actually never get to be the house. The house is. The house is the company. And so with Megapot, you either get to speculate as a D-Gen or be the house as an LP. I thought that's kind of cool. Did you see this announcement, Anthony? Yeah, I did. And the thing is, is that I've actually been saying for years now that I don't know why someone didn't build a proper lottery on-cha. It seems so obvious. It's a no-brainer. I think maybe the main blocker would be regulations and not wanting to get in trouble with law enforcement over this. But you can do it anonymously too, right? And the code can be on chain so anyone can verify it, so they know they're not going to get rugged.

Starting point is 01:05:45 But yeah, I'm glad to say this finally happened because it's such an obvious thing. This has been in like the early ideation of Ethereum since 2015. The fact that it's taken 2025 to somebody to actually like build this is kind of like crazy to me. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I'll add the disclaimer there that the Megapot is a bankless venture portfolio company.

Starting point is 01:06:05 We're a minority investor in it as well. Last news of the week. Just really quickly, this came out right before we got started. Cracken to Acquire Ninja Trader for 1.5. billion dollars is a 1.5 billion dollar deal. I actually had no idea what Ninja Trader is. No, I had no idea. Apparently, it's a leading

Starting point is 01:06:22 U.S. retail futures trading platform. I think this is largely a licensing play, maybe and also a user acquisition play. But the idea here, like why did they do this, is they, Cracken wants to unlock global regulatory licensing and growth, especially in the futures market. So now crypto futures and derivatives can

Starting point is 01:06:39 be provided inside the United States. Big, big, I think this makes it the biggest deal. I think we had that $1.1.1.2 billion bridge acquisition by Stripe for stable coins. This is now the number one M&A deal that crypto has ever seen. Yeah, that's massive.

Starting point is 01:06:57 Like 1.5 bill, for something I never heard of, but I guess it's a US-only product. That's probably why I haven't heard of it. I mean, I'm in the US, and I still had no idea. Yeah, you've got no excuse. All right, Anthony, really appreciate you coming on

Starting point is 01:07:10 to the weekly role of this week and helping me go through the news. Anthony, you do the Daily Gway, which is one of the few podcasts that I listen to on a daily basis, or whenever you don't rug the daily, the daily Gway community and you skip an episode. If people like the sound of your voice, like your takes, where can they go find you on the internet? Yeah, just Twitter is the easiest place, Sassil Zero X on there. You can find you pretty easily. I'm sure you'll link it in the show notes. And you can find my podcast there, which is called The Daily Gway.

Starting point is 01:07:37 I do Ethereum Education, like related kind of episodes three days a week. Now, it used to be daily, but it's just too much doing it daily. It's a crazy ecosystem. So it happens three times a week, but as David said, sometimes I'll miss an episode. But hey, it's totally free, not monetized at all. So, yeah, you can go consume it whenever you see fit. Bankless Nation, you guys know the deal. Crypto is risky.

Starting point is 01:07:59 You can lose what you put in. But nonetheless, we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you are with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

Bankless - ROLLUP: Ethereum’s Leadership Move | Solana’s Inflation Debate | Kraken’s $1.5B Acquisition | Crypto's Macro Struggle

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