Bankless - ROLLUP: ETH's Big Pivot | Tariff Recession? | Bitcoin's Political Win | Worldcoin US Launch!

Starting point is 00:00:03 Bankless Nation is the first week of May is time for the bankless weekly roll up where we covered just about everything that happened in crypto, at least everything that happened that's important. David, man, we got to talk about tariffs, all right? I want to bring some macro into today's episode. People have been looking for your macro takes. Oh, yeah? Well, they're hot takes, all right? GDP numbers just came in, and they're not looking great. So I've got three macro catalysts.

Starting point is 00:00:30 I think that bankless listeners, crypto investors should be looking out for. Catalyst, not saying they're good catalysts. They could go either way, but we'll get into that. It goes somewhere. We're also going to talk about the Ethereum pivot or just as strategic reprioritization. It really depends on who you ask. And we're also going to talk about that as well. Worldcoin also, they're rolling out the orb in the U.S.

Starting point is 00:00:52 We'll talk about what that means. And I guess this is like for people worried about dystopia and AI bot propaganda. I don't know which world is better. That world or like we're going to all get orbed or our eyeballs orbed. So, like, I may be up for this. I think as AI has gotten more real, people are slowly coming around to the idea of WorldCoin more and more. We'll talk about that.

Starting point is 00:01:12 And then also, Bitcoin is just embedding itself deeper into American politics. A massive hack sends Minero up 50%. Suey is up 60% on a bunch of speculation that they're going to win Pokemon. Okay. And then Ripple tries to buy Circle, but gets denied all of this and more. But first, before we get into all of that message from our friends and sponsors, Build Bear, This one is for the Web3 devs. We know testing smart contracts.

Starting point is 00:01:36 It shouldn't be a pain. It is a pain. There's a lot that devs need to go through to make testing smart contracts work. Build Bear lets you spin up your own EVM sandbox so you can test, debug, deploy, all in one place. It's like GitHub for Web3, trusted by teams like Consensus and Gelato. So if you want to, which you should, you can streamline your workflow and launch faster. Check it out at bankless.com slash buildbear. All right, Ryan, you ready to get into the markets?

Starting point is 00:01:59 Yeah, let's do it, man. It's been a while since I looked at these charts. So tell me what's going on on Bitcoin. Bitcoin up 4% this week. Really strong showing this morning, $97,000. So slowly grinding up, trying to hit that $100,000 mark. Ether up 5% this week. 5% up to $1,850.

Starting point is 00:02:19 Those are very different numbers. ETH Bitcoin ratio, 0.019, and a total crypto market cap. Ignore the ratio. Total crypto market cap of $3.14 trillion. And as a reminder, Ryan, the all-time high for the total crypto market cap, I believe it's just short of four. Yeah, it's like $3.9 trillion. And we are coming in at $3.13 trillion today. I mean, this is not looking so bad, right?

Starting point is 00:02:45 It's not looking so bad here. I mean, Bitcoin is down. Oh, I know where the blood is. Oh, don't ask where the blood is. Are you going to find some blood? Oh, you know where the blood is. Oh, God. Look at this red chart on the ratio.

Starting point is 00:02:55 But ignoring that, I mean, Bitcoin's looking good. Crypto market caps looking good. There's some positive indicators. So overall, I mean, I don't think we're in a bear market, David. Nope, no, no. First, before we get to your macro takes, we've got to talk about the movers of the week. And this section is brought to you by our friends and sponsors over at Uniswap. Sui is the mover of the week.

Starting point is 00:03:15 A bunch of things going on in Suey land. The price rebounded about 40% in April to $3.6 after falling from his January all-time high of $5.3. The market cap remains in the top 15. So Sui has cracked the top 20, top 15, peaking above 15 billion. Its defy ecosystem has surged recently with a TVL in Sui defy topping over $2 billion, driven by high-yield protocols like Aftermath, SteamFi, and also some native stablecoin integrations. And also Phantom Wallet supported, has improved its onboarding into the Suey ecosystem. Sui itself, pivoting hard into BTC-Fi, positioning itself as a Bitcoin Defi hub with integrations like,

Starting point is 00:03:57 Babylon to enable Bitcoin staking. And then even beyond Sui, Suey is launching its own gaming console. Interesting strategy called the Sui Play 0x1. And then there was this massively speculative rumor, like, found out by the internet sleuths connecting like terms of service between like a sui web page and Pokemon somehow.

Starting point is 00:04:17 It's all rumor. We should say. All rumor. So there's a rumor out there that they may be partnering with Pokemon on digital collectibles and that has contributed to the Suey price action. All of this brought to you. by the bankless writer David C who put this into an article. And that is our movers of the week section, Ryan.

Starting point is 00:04:33 Yeah, it's interesting. Look at this too. Canary Capital Advances first ever Suey ETF with an SEC filing. It just seems like Suey is like trying to speed run all of the things that a blockchain is supposed to do to garner adoption. I got to say, though, look at this fully diluted valuation. That's almost $40 billion, David. $37 billion, okay?

Starting point is 00:04:53 That's what it takes. $12 billion market cap, $37 billion fully diluted valuation. valuation. There's a big delta there. What are we pricing in here? We pricing in like future fees? Is this, you know, DCF model? Is this monetary premium? Only ask those questions about Ethereum, right? Other other ecosystems you don't have to ask those questions about. Yeah, or just pricing in growth. Let's talk about macro for a minute. Okay? So I've been just digesting what has happened since the beginning of this year from a macro perspective. And there's kind of three things that I'm keeping an eye on, David. And I think we should be looking at. Like the first is Terrace in general. And then

Starting point is 00:05:27 this idea of a tariff-driven recession. The second is American capital flight. This seems to be a trade that might be on, may not be. We'll talk about that too. And the third is increasing global money supply. So that is the good old M2 monetary supply. These are the three things, I think, that are going to be really important for crypto investors

Starting point is 00:05:48 over the next three to six months. The first is tariff-driven recession. David, what's like your probability? How do you feel it about things, man? Like, what's your probability of recession right now? I mean, I'm just going to outsource my opinion to Polymarket because I think that's the role of Polymarket. And Polymark is pricing it in at increasingly high.

Starting point is 00:06:08 Okay, so you got it. You just pulled it up because I think you're of the same mind. Coming in at 62% odds of a recession in 2025. Yeah, we don't know better than Polymarket, right? Yeah, that's my take two. I'm not smarter than Polymarket. No way. Okay.

Starting point is 00:06:19 So then you would basically defer to this and be like, hey, probably over 50% odds. 62% odds. that we're going to have a recession sometime in 2025. You pretty much agree with that, okay? So GDP numbers came in just this week, and it wasn't great. So the consensus was we're hoping for growth this quarter, this is Q1 GDP, of 0.3%. What we got was negative 0.3%. And keep in mind, January was actually a positive number.

Starting point is 00:06:51 So we had kind of a shitty February, kind of a bad, March to contribute to that negative rather than positive on GDP numbers. So missed expectations by 0.6% feels large. Yeah. Yeah, it is large, right? And so this is, this is clearly the result of tariffs. It's very difficult to, I think, spin this and say it's something else. This is, this is tariffs. Right, because Q1, like we started Q1 being very bullish and we, in the middle of Q1, tariffs unexpectedly happened. And so that's why we're, that's why we missed. Yeah, they did. And keep in mind that now there's a baseline 10% tariffs that America has just on basically everybody.

Starting point is 00:07:30 Right. And the secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, says that this is the new normal. So that's what's just generally in place. There is a next decision point on July 9th where, you know, ideally the U.S. is negotiating with all of its partners. So EU, South Korea, Switzerland, it's said that these deals might take like weeks, not days. So maybe that those deals could call. come in before the ninth.

Starting point is 00:07:56 If not, then, like, that's another decision point, and the tariffs could increase for those partners there. And the China tariffs, they're just, that's true tariff war between the U.S. and China's all part of this geopolitical struggle. So there's a report I read from a, you know, a fund, Apollo report. They're predicting a summertime recession, David, and here's kind of how this works. So we got our April 2nd Liberation Day tariffs, right? And then we start to get, you know, container ships to you have.

Starting point is 00:08:25 ports coming to a stop. These tariffs kick in. And then they kind of time box this out. Trucking demand comes to a halt that happens in May or late May. And then in early June, we start to see layoffs in trucking and retail industry. And we get a summertime 2025 recession, right? That's how this could possibly play. It is May 1st.

Starting point is 00:08:44 It is May 1st right now. That is not far away. That is almost here. Okay. So is this going to happen? I think that's what Polly Market is saying is definitely a possibility at this point. And short term, that's got to be not great for crypto, okay? Like, in the short term expectations on that catalyst, recession is probably not good.

Starting point is 00:09:05 Crypto is generally a risk on asset. That's the perception so far. That's how it trades. So that's probably not going in our favor. The second thing, though, David, is American capital flight, okay? And this kind of trade seems like it's on. You can sort of see it. When U.S. stocks go down, bonds go down, like, you know, bond yield.

Starting point is 00:09:25 prices, dollar goes down, and then you have gold skyrocketing up. People are leaving. Capital is just saying goodbye. Basically, the U.S. has been the store of value. I mean, like for the entire world. So people store their value in the risk-free rate. That's U.S.T. bills, the U.S. stock market, S&P, it's been kind of the capital of the property rights system of the entire world since Bretton Woods, really. And maybe that's showing signs of reversing.

Starting point is 00:09:53 And so the question is, does that trade? continue. I guess like it could be worse. When you reflect on the year, the SMP is only down 4 to 5 percent. And of course, like indices like the S&P and the NASDAQ, NASDAX down 8%. These are future predictions, right? So it doesn't seem to be pricing in that much capital flight, at least at this point in time. But bonds, of course, are stubborn at 4% 10-year, you know, treasuries. Scott Besson is trying to get bonds down as a result of all these tariffs and they're not really falling. So you got stock market down. You've got bonds kind of pricing up or being very sticky. And then you got, of course, we talked about total crypto. But then you have gold,

Starting point is 00:10:36 which is trading at 33% up on the year. This looks like capital flight. Trump, of course, says this ain't my stock market. This is Biden's stock market. Do you see this tweet here? That was so funny. Everyone thought that was so clowning. Just read it out. What did you say here? So Donald Trump tweeted this out on on truth social, his platform, his Twitter platform. This is a tweet from January 29th, 2024. So a little like almost a year and a half ago is when he tweeted this. He tweeted out, this is the Trump stock market because my polls against Biden are so good that investors are projecting that I will win and I will drive the market up. Everything else is terrible and record setting inflation has already taken this toll, make America great again.

Starting point is 00:11:17 Okay, so that was his position that this is the Trump stock market a year and a half ago. He truths out just yesterday. This is the Biden stock market, not Trump's. I didn't take over until January 20th, which was nine days before that he tweeted up the last tweet that I just read. Tariffs will soon be kicking in and companies are starting to move into United States. Nine days in a year. Yes. Excuse me.

Starting point is 00:11:41 Excuse me. So, you know, I think it's pretty classic. If it's going up, it's Trump. But if it's going down, it's Biden. Yeah, he continued. This has nothing to do with tariffs. I'm not sure that the market is, uh, bleeds. leaving all of that.

Starting point is 00:11:53 But so let's say the American Capital flight trade continues, right? So it's tough to know what magnitude this is. It's clear that there's something kicking in here. What do you think? Is that good or bad for crypto? People have noticed that Bitcoin has started to trade more like gold since the tariff announcements. And I consider Bitcoin as being in this like third body superposition between tracking the

Starting point is 00:12:16 NASDAQ and tracking gold. And sometimes it tracks gold more. Sometimes it tracks NASDAQ more. And in this moment, it has shifted to tracking gold more. But it still is exposure to NASDAQ. So I don't, I'm embarrassed on crypto if the stock market goes down. But if the gold is going up in response to that, Bitcoin does get that benefit. It does get to be positioned as a non-sovereign store of value, which is what this current

Starting point is 00:12:42 market is looking for as an asset. I totally agree. I think the tariffs are negative in the short run. But this is basically the trend that everyone in crypto has predicted. This is the entire thesis. It's the decades-long thesis that a credibly neutral alternative to the U.S. monetary system, to all the Fiat monetary systems around the world, and alternative property rights system would kind of kick in.

Starting point is 00:13:04 That's what we're seeing with Bitcoin. And I don't think it's just going to be gold and Bitcoin. I think it's going to be the rest of crypto, too. But that might not play out over the short run. We have no idea. And so can that counteract the tariff recession? Like, we don't know. So you've got to take that in mind.

Starting point is 00:13:17 And the last thing is, David, increasing global money supply. And look at this chart, Raoul Paul puts out. This is Global M2. It's a projection on global liquidity, basically, all of the money in the system, the Fiat system across all countries. And it charts this with Bitcoin here. And we're at the point we're at a bottoming zone of Global M2. So the last few years, we've had a cycle of actually decreasing global monetary liquidity

Starting point is 00:13:43 in all of the Fiat systems. And now we've sort of bottomed out, and we're starting a new cycle. We're starting another Raul thing. of these in four-year cycles, a liquidity cycle, and M2 is going up. And if you get recession, okay, you get American capital flight, what's going to happen? The money printers are going to turn on. So what's that, my friend? Is that bullish-barrish crypto? Ray Dalio put out a really good tweet that we don't have time to cover, but he titled it, it's too late, the changes are coming. This is an essay and article that he wrote inside of Twitter.

Starting point is 00:14:16 And his first big point is that we are on the brink of a new monetary order, the domestic, political, and international world orders are breaking down to unsustainable bad fundamentals that can be easily seen and measured. I think what he's pointing to and what I think everyone agrees with is like, okay, yes, new world order incoming, trade imbalance is being fixed. You know, China's needs to become not dependent on United States debt. United States needs to become not dependent on Chinese manufacturing. That is going to cause pain.

Starting point is 00:14:42 And in no way is there at all any sort of need to not print a bunch of money in order to ease that pain. Why would we not do that? Yes. And so if anything, if pain is going to happen, that is going to come out of the value of fiat currencies globally, because we just are going to print ourselves into less suffering, which has been the Bitcoin or thesis about monetary policy since as early as I can remember. Look, and all the governments are going to do this because the more they print and the more closed they become, the more isolated they become, the more attractive, a credible neutral monetary system that is permissionless. and completely open becomes. That is bullish crypto.

Starting point is 00:15:22 All right. Maybe on the short run. Maybe we got through a summertime recession. I don't know what's going to do. But like long term, time horizons, 12 months and further, we got to be going up. Yeah. All right. Coming up next, things are changing in the Ethereum Foundation.

Starting point is 00:15:37 They put out a blog post, a handful of blog post talking about the new leadership structure. This isn't new news, but it's really codifying into an actual reality and putting that into a blog post. We're going to talk about that. We're also going to talk about did Ethereum pivot? Or did it do a strategic refocusing? I do think the words matter. Basin scroll are all stage one roll-ups and also WorldCoin's U.S. rollout.

Starting point is 00:15:58 Have people changed their minds about the eyeball scaling company? Because now there is perhaps is going to be an Apple-like WorldCoin retail store coming to a city near you. To get orbed. So you just go walk into a WorldCoyne at Orb Store and get orbed. We're going to get to all of that and more. But first, a message from some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible like Uniswap. It's a browser wallet. mobile wallet. It's also the best place to do

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Starting point is 00:19:02 for airdrops or governance participation. And then last, secure verification. Apps validate your proofs instantly on chain, like on cello or off chain. Audited by ZK security, the self app is live on iOS and Play Store. Visit self.xy-y-Z and follow self-protacle on X. The Ethereum pivot or the Ethereum reprioritization? This is the theme, I think, that has been going around the Ethereum ecosystem, starting with the Ethereum Foundation announcing leadership structure change.

Starting point is 00:19:31 So like I said, this is not anything new. Shaoui and Tamash are the new co-executive directors of the Ethereum Foundation. And with that comes just overall of restructuring of the EF as a whole. So now there are four board of directors of the EF that includes Fatalic Buren. Ayamai Gucci, Patrick Storchneger, who is the Swiss Legal Counsel, and then also Choway, who is also the co-executive director. And so the board oversees the Ethereum Foundation's vision, ensures alignment with his values, holds authority over the executive appointments.

Starting point is 00:20:06 Holds authority over the executive appointments. And of course, the executive appointments are Choway and Tamash, who I think everyone is very bullish on Tamash coming in and providing some, like, leadership operations. excellence in the Ethereum organization. And so the Ethereum Foundation put out this blog post. And also another blog post from Mishawe and Tamash about kind of a co-statement about what their near-term goals are. What are those? What are those goals?

Starting point is 00:20:33 There were a handful of goals, but Tamash specifically identified three things that Tamash wants to bring for the next 12 months of time during his time as his first 12 months of as co-ED of the EF. Scaling the layer one, scaling blobs, improving UX. Now, these three things have kind of turned into an Ethereum tagline. This is the take that Hissie put out on Twitter this week is that, oh, these are very clear, precise three things that can represent a rallying cry for the Ethereum community. Scaling layer one, scaling blobs, improving UX. And to me, I'm kind of like wrapping this all up and calling it Ethereum's pivot towards a product-centric roadmap. So rather than the roll-up centric roadmap, which we are still on.

Starting point is 00:21:17 It is now a roll-up and a strong layer one roll-up-centric roadmap, which is the thing that Ansgar and Donkrad identified in on my podcast episode with him. But I think if you can just really distill it down to what is the theorem trying to do? What is it pivoting towards? What is it refocusing towards? It is refocusing towards a product-centric roadmap. What's your take? I agree with that. So, like, there was some debate, though, whether you call it a pivot or a reprioritization.

Starting point is 00:21:42 I mean, the thing that I would say justifies a pivot in some people's minds, I would say, including mine. is this top one, scaling the L1, that did not seem to be, according to the roadmap, a priority three months ago, six months ago, certainly not a year ago. It was all about number two. It had also been like culturally blasphemous to talk about scaling the layer one at times. Well, I definitely felt that. Like I felt that last summer when we had episodes with people like Max Resnick, for instance, who is now he's on Solana.

Starting point is 00:22:12 And his reason for that is like, he's basically like, oh, Ethereum didn't scale the L1. So I'm going over here to a place they will. So that feels like a change to me, and I would hazard to call it a pivot. But what's the other side of this? Anthony Sistano says, look, it's not a pivot. We always had scaling the L1 as part of the roadmap, merge, surge, scourge, verge, purge, all of that stuff. And he's also not wrong. And he's saying this is more of a prioritization.

Starting point is 00:22:35 So you're just taking things that were out there and you're bringing it up here. So pivot, reprioritization. Like, do you think this debate even matters? I think it does matter. The messaging does matter. And I agree with Hazu's commentary on this where he says, yes, you can point to Ethereum's 100 item roadmap and say, look, we have been working on all of these things, which is true. Scaling the Layer 1 was always on the long-term roadmap for Ethereum. The pivot is that that long-term, a part of Ethereum's roadmap has been brought to the forefront.

Starting point is 00:23:04 And there are people like Dunkrod and Onsgar and Tamash who are like, okay, we are going to emphasize Layer 1 scaling now this month. And really, like, zooming out, again, I will also talk. talk about site Hauser's take here where this is just like an ego thing. It's an ego thing where like we don't want to admit that we were wrong. We don't want to admit to fault. And we actually get to save face by saying it was always on the roadmap. And I think that is damaging because it's, it's good to admit that we got things wrong. Like it's okay to change your mind. It's okay to change our minds. We don't have to like always say that we are infallible and we always got everything right. And so I think the market and the broader crypto industry, which is becoming larger and larger,

Starting point is 00:23:51 where, like, you know, there used to be a large amount of Ethereum dominance. There's now less Ethereum dominance. Most people do not align themselves with Ethereum messaging. It's good and okay for us to say it is a pivot because we got things wrong and we're going to make things right. And that is what the market wants to hear. I hear that take too. And I think Tamash at the EF is clearly a pivot as well because this is somebody from the outside coming in and changing things. By the way, bankless listeners, we have an episode that drops with the two new EF co-leads.

Starting point is 00:24:19 That's coming out on Monday, I believe. Already out for premium subscribers. Okay, so you can hear from the horse's mouth what they're planning to do there. So that to me was like kind of a pivot in leadership. There's actually been some sort of cultural pivot at the EF. And like things like this. So did you see this proposal from Dankrad? Dankrad, yeah.

Starting point is 00:24:36 He put out. So this is EIP to scale Ethereum L1 100x over the next four years. All right. And EIP, this, let's go. I don't think this could have happened six months ago in kind of the cultural state that Ethereum was in. And I don't know. Did you read his details?

Starting point is 00:24:55 Like the details as to why. He said, like this was a very, my take was it looked like Ethereum is waking up, particularly the EF researchers. I mean, you and I, we're investors, we're podcasters. What can we do? We're just like, we're just talking heads, right? But the EF researchers kind of moving towards, well, let me just for you. what Donkrad said. He said, key considerations why I think we should commit to the gas limit

Starting point is 00:25:18 change. Oh, first he says this, the current way of doing things is likely to make Ethereum irrelevant over the next five to 10 years. And so instead, he said, we shouldn't just do the current thing we're doing. We should aim to 3x the scaling on Ethereum, transaction throughput on Ethereum, every year for the next four years, and basically guarantee that to the market. market. Like, that's the roadmap and then back our way into like making that possible. And he lays out how he plans to, how he plans to do that. And he gives the reason. He said, Ethereum layer one will always be the fee revenue driver. It's the moat for DA. If you have an unimportant layer one, then you lose the alliance of all of your layer,

Starting point is 00:26:04 layer twos. Layer twos want to join a layer one that is like actually winning, actually has liquidity, actually has defy. And fragmenting the layer one. liquidity across the number of layer two is a good way to lose the battle. It's pretty stark and also pretty like objectively. Like we can action this. We can turn this into an EIP and ship it. I really like his line where he says, committing to a scaling timeline makes it clear what the goal is and lets us plan backwards

Starting point is 00:26:33 from that goal, which I don't think is really the thing that has happened in the EF and all core devs calls where we there was no, there's always incremental progress towards a future, but not goals to work backwards from. And I think Donkrad is advocating for it. Like, let's make this very firm commitment and get there and actually get there. Yeah. What's Fatalik going to be doing?

Starting point is 00:26:54 Because he put out some tweets as well about what his focus is. So Vitalik tweeted out, my personal focus is for 2025. One, Ethereum, obviously, particularly, number one, layer one, long-term roadmap, single-slot finality, long-term VM, statelessness, security, resilience and decentralization. So interesting that Vitalik is emphasizing the long-term roadmap of the layer one. And then also full-sac security, open-source privacy, all the cipherpunk stuff. And then also two big picture diac. And so this is Fatalek saying, oh, I'm focused on defensive acceleration, diac, which is stuff outside of crypto, right? Outside of crypto, inclusive of crypto,

Starting point is 00:27:34 outside of crypto, which is just like, you know, comms, tools, things like signal, infrared and social layer mechanism design. And then he lets him some other things as well. Yeah. And so that's what Vitalik continues to be like kind of leading Ethereum via like philosophical blog posts. And I think that is what he is saying like this is my direction for 2025. I think overall this is a good development.

Starting point is 00:27:57 Most in the Ethereum community I've talked to seem pretty excited about these changes, reprioritization or pivot. And I think it's going to be bullish. Something else that's bullish for Ethereum, David, is two big layer twos. actually got to stage one on L2B with respect to their level of decentralization, a key milestone. Something a lot of people said would never happen. They said these chains were not incented to ever become, you know, stage one. Base got there this week.

Starting point is 00:28:24 That was a big move. And also scroll got there. So now we have like the top four chains by total value secured. And they are all stage one level of decentralization, which is like fantastic. Can you remind like what is stage one? Can you remind people of the difference between stage? one and stage zero? Stage one is just a measure of property rights as users have on these layer two.

Starting point is 00:28:47 And so as stage zero, I would describe as like a pretty trustful layer two. It's a pretty rugable layer two. Like the operators can kind of do, they have a large degree of control over users' assets on layer two. On a stage one roll up, there is degrees of protections for users. And so base hit this milestone by having a fully functional security council of 10 independent entities across multiple jurisdictions. Upgrades to base now requires 75% consensus between the council, base, optimism, and then

Starting point is 00:29:18 Coinbase and a few other things. So this has significantly reduced Coinbase's unilateral control over base. Great. And so there's just like a very strong set of user protections for all users on base now. Big step towards decentralization. David, tell me about the World Coin news this week. So they're World Coin coming to the U.S. I thought they kind of were in the U.S.

Starting point is 00:29:39 What's been announced? Yeah, so WorldCoin is kind of rolling out, maybe like a boots on the ground brand for itself. So the at last event in San Francisco, World Coins event, that Sam Altman gave a keynote presentation at. He just rolled out a few key announcements. So, of course, the U.S. rollout. World is deploying orbs in six major cities, Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, and San Francisco, with a series of Apple-like in-person stores. So Worldcoins like stores that you could go into.

Starting point is 00:30:10 New users will receive 16 world tokens upon Iris scanning. And existing users will get a pioneer grant of 150 world. Interesting. So there are some partnerships as well. So collaborations were announced with Visa Stripe and Match Group. Ryan, do you know what the Match group is? Are you talking about like match.com? Like the dating website?

Starting point is 00:30:29 Yeah, I'm actually surprised because, you know, you're a married man. So yeah, like Match.com, hinge, Tinder. they are going to integrate world ID so that they can verify that you are talking to a human, not a bot. Wait, is that a problem on Match.com? Apparently there are... Like, there's like dating bots that just like try to date you?

Starting point is 00:30:51 Like towards what if you try to scam your money or... I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, but apparently there's bots on like Hinge and Match or whatever. Okay, so there's going to be like retail stores in malls across America the way there's, you know, Apple stores, where people can go in, stick their eyeball into... an orb. This is what it looks like for people who are not familiar with this. Still looks as dystopian as it always did. Okay. In exchange for world coins so they get sort of paid for this, right? Yep. And

Starting point is 00:31:17 then what? You get the world app, you're all set up, you feel good that, and then you have your own identity. Well, you can also go on to, you can open a pinch and tell your, uh, perspective, wife, uh, that you're real, that you're real, yeah. And there's like, was it, 10 million users have already been orbed? Something like this? The population is huge. Yeah, I think more people are getting signal about the users of the world app more than the number of users that have been orbed because the world app is actually, it's actually boasting like by far the crypto's most active application. And so that's also part of the announcement here. So the world app will support USDC transactions through circle, integrate strike for payments.

Starting point is 00:31:57 And then also offer access to Kalshys prediction markets, interestingly enough as well. And then I also noticed this tweet from Joe W. Weizenthal, who I think he was a pretty... Tradfai. Yeah, Tradfai commentator out of Bloomberg. Also did a fantastic job covering the tariffs. So he's like kind of grown. The Joe's stock has grown recently.

Starting point is 00:32:19 He was also recently on chopping block as well talking about crypto. And he said, on the chopping block podcast last week, I thought that WorldCoin was the only thing in crypto that is really interesting to me. And so he reiterated this on a tweet. So Joe's tweet, his opinion carries weight here. Okay. So what do you just what do you think? about this. So for people who look at this orb thing, look at it on the screen, this guy looking

Starting point is 00:32:40 into an orb, and it feels very dystopian to have the guy who is like leading the AI race is also the guy behind the company that wants to like biometrically scan your eyeball. So just stick your eye into this orb. You know, like don't ask too many questions. We got it all covered. This feels kind of dystopians. Okay, here have some tokens. We're paying you for this. Like, if it's so good for me, how come you have to pay me to do it? Yeah, I can just imagine that's like the reaction. This really hasn't hit. mainstream yet, but it will. Okay, so there's that.

Starting point is 00:33:10 Maybe a dystopia, like not sure. It seems kind of dystopic. But then I was listening to the AI roll-up earlier this week, and you guys were talking about all of the Reddit propaganda bots. These are bots literally trained to, like, methodically convince people of different opinions. Like, you don't even know you're talking to a bot, and it's basically 100% effective. The humans don't really know on Reddit, whether they're talking to a bot or not, and you can unleash these bot arm.

Starting point is 00:33:36 AI bot armies to basically like get the humans, get the squishy humans to believe whatever you want. And the thing is we don't know who's a human online and who's a bot. They all look the same. And that is just starting to hit us. That's dystopic as well. So which dystopia like do you want to choose? Maybe Worldcoin is actually like the thing that we need right now. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:33:59 I think the World Coin dystopia thing has really been overblown because they've actually done a very good good job and they always have the like many in the crypto community just kind of rejected it largely because it's like it had this it was a massive high fdv low float coin and so that always gives crypto people like a bad taste but like the security practices around world coin has always been like top notch like they actually don't store pictures of your eyeball they just make a hash they throw out the data and so unless you think that they're lying which i think is your onus is on you to prove that like the actual dystopian nature of world coin is much more like cosmetic than fundamentals. And I think as people are realizing how bad AI is going to get, and by examples that

Starting point is 00:34:43 you've heard, the stories that we hear, the AI that's proliferating throughout all of our applications, uh, that people are starting to be like, okay, no, we actually, this is actually very useful. We actually need this. Yeah. Like civilizationally, civilization might actually need this. Yeah. And if we're not doing this, what's the other answer? Right. Yeah. Yeah. Nick Carter tweeted out, uh, it's a bad look to be the arsonist and the firefighter at the same time. But I, I also don't think that's a fair. It's funny take. I don't think it's a fair take because, I mean, Sam Altman's just trying to make AI happen

Starting point is 00:35:12 along with Anthropic, along with Deep Seek, along with Claude, along with, you know, everyone else too. And so, yeah. Okay. So you see an orb store in your local shopping mall. You're just hanging out. What do you do? You go get orbed?

Starting point is 00:35:26 I don't. I told, I've said this take before that I will get orbed when it becomes practically useful for me to get orbed. I'm open to being orbed. I do not need to get orbed, and so I will get orbed at a future. I'm bummed I didn't get 150 WorldCoin tokens, though. I don't know how much that money that actually is. So Dave's not going to be the early adopter.

Starting point is 00:35:45 He's going to wait for a few more millions. I'm going to wait for utility. 150 world coin, the dollar and $8 a token is $150. Okay, so not that, not that great. Okay, so you wouldn't do it for $150. I wouldn't know for $150 now. Maybe $1,000. Now you're talking.

Starting point is 00:36:00 All right. Coming up next, the Trump administration is doubling down, tripling down on Bitcoin. We have even more interviews out of the White House administration, all about how bullish they are on Bitcoin. We got another Howard Lucknick interview and a few others. And then also, Ryan, some breaking news in the crypto space. There were some shenanigans this week.

Starting point is 00:36:21 Chanigans happened. Movement, Manero, all of these things, a bunch of shenanigans. So if you were ready, if you were missing the shenanigans in your life during your three-month hiatus, let me tell you, I got some shenanigans for you. But first, before we get to all of those shenanigans, we're going to got to talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible like Frax, the decentralized central bank of crypto and the Frax Stable Coins got some of the best yields on Defi. It's like if Circle Athena, MakerDow, all had a baby. And it's got a layer two, the fractal layer two. Let's go hear from Frax right now.

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Starting point is 00:39:06 journalists all the time is how much do you want? And I think that's really a silly question. That's like asking any country, how much do you want of any asset with intrinsic stored value? You want as much as you can possibly accumulate. You know, there are stipulations in the you know, we must do this in budget neutral ways that don't cost a taxpayer or dime. But as the president likes to say, we have a lot of high IQ people in this administration, specifically over at Treasury and at Commerce. And I'm very confident in the leaders in those buildings to come up with with extremely creative ways for us to accumulate. And we're very excited about that.

Starting point is 00:39:35 And certainly we want to move as expeditiously as possible to do that. I think that there is definitely a sort of space race as it pertains to accumulation of this asset, no different than there is with gold, right? So a space race when it comes to accumulation, David. Bitcoiners have fully infiltrated the White House at this point. Yeah. No different than with gold. So it is, there's a little bit of a hedge there.

Starting point is 00:39:59 It's like, yeah, it's Bitcoin and gold. You know, Bitcoin's not alone, but it's also positioning gold as this extremely legitimate asset. Yeah, according to Coin Gecko, if you're looking at the charge, governments now hold about 2.3% of the total Bitcoin supply. So like 2.3% is not nothing. It's still just like not a lot, which if you're bullish on this, that means there's a lot of room to potentially grow. Of course, the U.S. has it. And it's mainly these countries own it. the U.S. and China, they own it because they've acquired it from nefarious actors in the past year.

Starting point is 00:40:34 But like, are you surprised at how far Bitcoin has gone? I mean, like, this is the White House now talking about, yeah, we view this as digital gold. This is space race. We're going to get as much as we can without like, quote unquote, costing the taxpayers, anything. Like, it's incredible how much progress the Bitcoin story is made. Yeah. This is always, this has always been the Bitcoin or thesis that I remember being given to me into like 2018, 2019. It seemed incredibly far-fetched then. I think the thing that I did not account for was that

Starting point is 00:41:02 Bitcoiners could ride the pendulum swinging from the Biden administration to the Trump administration, which was all about the oppression of crypto. But like more or so about the market beyond Bitcoin, it wasn't really about Bitcoin. It was more about Ethereum and everything else. Like you saw that clip maybe going around about how Gary Gensler talked about how Bitcoin was a special snowflake and all the Bitcoiners are like, Gary Gensler is a Bitcoin Maximist. And so the thing that did not account for was that the United States government was going to come with the absolute banhammer during the Biden administration on crypto. And then Bitcoiners would leverage the swinging of the pendulum to their gain to win the Donald Trump administration to like totally capture the Donald Trump administration. It was masterful.

Starting point is 00:41:47 It was masterful. It was well done. It was well done. Yeah. Yeah. Very impressive. I mean, it's not just that official I was saying it's Howard Lutnik who's the Commerce Secretary. So he sat down with Bitcoin magazine and emphasized the same thing. Bitcoin by this administration is to be treated like oil or gold, not as a currency.

Starting point is 00:42:04 So major support for Bitcoin acquiring Bitcoin as a reserve asset coming out of this administration. I think that's a big plus one to your blue money thesis for Ether as well. It's coming from behind, though, isn't it? Yeah, we are a little bit behind on that one. All right, tell me some shenanigans, David. Shenanagan. I was missing all this when I was off. All right.

Starting point is 00:42:26 What is going on with Movement Labs? Movement Labs, which is the company, the organization, the development team behind the Move Layer 2, is under investigation after 66 million move tokens were dumped the day after launch, causing a $38 million sell-off. Tokens were loaned to RenTech, a shadowy entity tied to both Web3Port and the Movement Foundation. Web3Port is a market maker in crypto.

Starting point is 00:42:49 Under a deal initially flagged as predatory, but later signed anyways, co-founder Rushi Manch, who purchased the agreement is now on leave, and both movement labs and the foundation are implicated in using the same market maker to offload tokens, raising serious questions of insider self-dealing. So that is the accusation going towards movement labs. I think everyone in movement is saying there's just a bunch of lying movement is actually the victim in this scenario.

Starting point is 00:43:16 They got taken advantage of by this market maker. And so movement is kind of declining the legitimacy of the story. but they are nonetheless kind of on the defensive as a result of this story that got broken by CoinDesk this week. Yeah, it's kind of a question is like, were they actively participating in the scamming or are they just like incompetent and negligent with this market maker, right? And like both scenarios aren't great. I mean, it's just a shady market-mealing making deal just like designed to dump tokens onto retail, whether it was the market maker or move or like the both of them in cooperation. It's not a great look, David. It's definitely not a great in a look.

Starting point is 00:43:52 market making and new tokens, especially the high FDV low flow tokens, has left sustain on people's feelings about this industry. All right, you ready for the next trade, andigans? Yeah. When is the last time you heard about Minero? It's been a long time. Like, 2017 era, right? It's like privacy coins were catching a bid. It was Cache.

Starting point is 00:44:11 It was Monaro. And like the thing that Bitcoin Ethereum were missing is like privacy at the base layer. And so these chains were sort of the future of that. And that was probably the last time I left Monaro. Yeah. Yeah, there was all, Manero always had like a pretty like hardcore like Bitcoiner like ideology around it. It's like privacy is actually the number one thing, not not the 21 million. Anyways, Manero pumped 50% due to a suspected $33 million Bitcoin theft. This was ousted by Zach XBT who identified a $33 million Bitcoin theft and then identified that the transfer of $3,520 Bitcoins was going to be going through Monero. a privacy, the privacy focus cryptocurrency by, the stolen funds were rapidly funneled through six exchanges and then converted to Manero. And once people identified that this person was selling Bitcoin for Manero, that caused

Starting point is 00:45:04 Monero price to surge by 50%. So peaking at $339 before settling around $274. So, I mean, that was always the thesis around Monero is that like if you need to hide your bitcoins, you got to buy Manero. Yeah. It's interesting the lengths that hackers will kind of like go through to sort of, you know, project their privacy. But when they use Monaro, my question is like, so you get those assets, you get that value onto Monero. First of all, you're going to spike the price if you saw.

Starting point is 00:45:32 So that's going to be massive slippage costs, et cetera, to do that. And then what do you do when you're on Monero? Like there's not much of an economy kind of surrounding Monero. But we've seen similar attempts with like tornado cash and trying to like wander money through other privacy tools. So, yeah, it's interesting that it pumps price, though. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. All right, coming up next, Tether now holds 7.7 tons of gold to back their tokenized gold token. 7.7 tons of gold.

Starting point is 00:46:04 How much you think that's worth? How much? Just like off the cuff? I'm not off the cuff. I have no idea. It's like, 7.7 tons. It is currently $2,300 per ounce. Okay.

Starting point is 00:46:17 I'm going to guess like 50 million. This is a shot in the dark. You got to pump those numbers up, baby. $570 million of gold. No way. Yeah. I guess 7.7 is a lot of tons. Where is this?

Starting point is 00:46:31 Is this not like Tether Corporate Office holds this, right? Yeah, it's right in under Palos desk. Yeah. He's sitting on it as a chair. No, it's in a Swiss fault. It's in Switzerland. And so 7.7 tons of physical gold to create the X-A-U-T token, which is the gold-backed,

Starting point is 00:46:47 token issued by Tether. So Tether is in the business of issuing Tether, treasuries, and now also gold. I wonder how they monetize that one, though, because they can't monetize it with the interest from the yield markets. That's a good question. It's also good to remember this is, of course, an IOU for gold, right? So it's like, we think it's in the Swiss bank, I guess it is. It's not like a on-chain crypto asset.

Starting point is 00:47:09 How about this one, Dave? This is good news. The U.S. bank regulators, they pulled back guardrails on bank crypto activities. So this is like a Biden administration thing that was like hanging over crypto. Basically, any time a bank, right, any bank wanted to do something with crypto, there was guidance from the Fed and the FDIC and the OCC that said, no, you just can't do that. You have to come ask us for permission first. And did they ever give permission?

Starting point is 00:47:37 No. The answer would be no. Or like, we're not home. You have to come ask for permission and the answer is no. Yeah. Right. So like nothing really happened. Well, that guidance has been reversed under this new administration.

Starting point is 00:47:50 So the Fed, the FDIC, the OCC, they officially said, guys, you don't have to ask. You can just, like, do stuff with crypto now. Stop asking. Just do it. It's like that's a big move. So here's a comment from Alex Svanivik. Regular banking oversight still apply, but the path is way clear for banks to enter crypto. So there you go, David.

Starting point is 00:48:12 You don't have to ask permission. That was always allowed, apparently. Okay, coming up next, the Senate moves to ban congressional stock trading. Again, this has been tempted before. So Senator Josh Hawley has introduced the preventing elected leaders from owning securities and investments act. Preventing elected leaders, P-E-L, owning securities and investments act, OSI. Otherwise, called the Pelosi Act. Love it.

Starting point is 00:48:39 You know, Ryan, okay, so there's two stable coin bills going through Congress. You know what they're called? I should know what they're called. What are they called? The one is the Stable Act and the other one is the Genius Act. Do you remember these words? Are they trolling us? No, no. They're trolling Donald Trump, the Stable Genius Act.

Starting point is 00:48:59 Remember, like I'm a very stable genius. I don't know how that ended up trolling Donald Trump, but it did. I feel like U.S. government used to be way more serious, you know. Now things are done for like... I think they might have always done this. It's always been like this. I wonder how much... of them are tapped putting this into chat GPT.

Starting point is 00:49:17 And then also like maybe it's like the staffers. Yeah. Like the young, you know, millennial zoomer staffers who are like, I bet. What should I, what should I call this bill? Also make it stand for Pelosi. Okay. So the Pelosi Act prevents Congress from owning securities investments or at least has some restrictions around that.

Starting point is 00:49:36 Of course, like Congress has been running wild. Particularly the members of Congress have been just like insider training. That's at least the allegation. So this kind of like puts us. stop to that. Now, let me ask you, this is coming from the Republican side, okay? So, do you think Democrats, you know, when they regain your control of government apparatus, do you think they come after crypto in a similar way? I mean, they got to be like, I saw you post it on Twitter, like, from the Daily Podcasts, and they were talking about, like, the inherent corruption. I mean,

Starting point is 00:50:04 you tell me, in, like, the Trump meme coin. And, like, that's a vector for, like, all sorts of insider trading. We were talking about this last week, but, like, that's also a vector, too. So it's not just securities. It's basically any asset that you can profit off of that allows corruption to seep into the system. So Democrats will just come back and just be like, oh, call it the Trump Act. And it's like, you know, tokens. Don't launch meme coins. Yeah. Something like this. Yeah. I mean, I think that we should have an act that is inclusive of presidents and government leaders issuing crypto assets and having crypto businesses that are good conduits for corruption. And like, it feels like, yeah, it's the same thing.

Starting point is 00:50:45 And like, I don't think anyone is defending Trump's actions with like the Trump coin and all this stuff. So like what I kind of expect is like Democrats to take charge and just be like, okay, no one in Congress or government can own any crypto. And like we get a bill like that instead instead of something measured and like actually reasonable. Yeah. So faith in government is not an all time high right now for me. The only crypto assets that government leaders are allowed to own is Bitcoin. How about that one? Nice.

Starting point is 00:51:14 Brought by Bitcoiners. Bitcoiners love this one. All right, let's go check in on Alex Mishinsky, David. So for people who don't know, for people who were in Celsius, I bet you knew. Oh, Ryan knows. I know who Alex Sinski is. He's the guy running a crypto scam company from like circa 2022 that blew up after FDX called Celsius. And he is in front of the DOJ.

Starting point is 00:51:40 The DOJ is seeking a 20-year prison sentence for the Celsius founder. I was always, like, wondering why this case is taken so long. Like, Sam Beg-Madfrey, it's been prosecuted. Like, many of the other cases have already been prosecuted. I have no idea why it's taken so long for Alex Michinsky, but it seems like they are unleashing everything they got asking for a 20-year prison sentence. Yeah. $4.7 billion in crypto user losses here.

Starting point is 00:52:07 Yeah. Yeah, the DOJ cited his role of a year. long campaign of lies. Mischinsky did admit to leading this fraudulent scheme and personally pocketing over $48 million. I think that means that he has pled guilty in some of these accounts. Sentencing is up for May 8th, which is seven days from the time of recording. So that's coming up pretty damn soon here. The other conversations going around, Ryan, is that talking about SBFs.

Starting point is 00:52:31 SBF's like 25-year sentence without parole. But then also people are looking at, well, actually, FTCS with their investment in Anthropic and then billions of dollars that were able to be recovered actually is paying back its users. And then also the bankruptcy lawyers are walking away with $1 billion of profit for themselves. So some people, some of the conversations looking back towards Sam Bankman Freedom

Starting point is 00:52:55 and be like, huh, I wonder, like, since everyone is getting paid back, do we really need to sentence this guy for 25 years? I don't really have an opinion here, but that is the conversation that's going around. Yeah, do you think some future president just like pardons them or something like that? that feels like a long shot.

Starting point is 00:53:12 Yeah, but who knows? No, there's not, like, there's not enough global sympathy for San Bankman-Fried.

Starting point is 00:53:17 Like, compared to Ross Oldbrick to which had so much, who had so much sympathy, like there's no sympathy for San Binkman-Fried. All right, what's the last thing we cover?

Starting point is 00:53:25 Last news of the week, Circle, rejected a Ripple takeover bid of $4 to $5 billion. This is kind of breaking this news. This bid did not happen this week. But Ripple tried and failed to buy Circle, apparently,

Starting point is 00:53:36 for $4 to $5 billion. And, This is, uh, Ripple just kind of buying their like, first they pumped their token and now they are buying assets that make it a valuable business, uh, which got it is a, is a strategy. That is like the true, like I think that's the true strategy of fake it till you make it, right? Basically, because like Circle does have massive utilities. Circle of course issues of USC, which is like the most used stable coin, at least in the US.

Starting point is 00:54:03 I mean, second to tether still, but it's absolutely massive. And they did it on the back of the value of. XRP, right, in their treasury and the meme that it's created. I mean, it's like not much USDC like does anything on, uh, ripple right now, right? On the XRP chain, right? But you have to imagine if they, if they acquired Circle instead of circle going public for four to five billion dollars, it would have all been on, uh, XRP. It would have all been on ripple. I mean, at least they would have given massive preference right, toward their own chain, right? Because that's in their, that's in their interest. So that's a reality we could.

Starting point is 00:54:40 have actually lived in. You imagine if Jeremy Allaire is just like tweets out announces. I'm so excited. I'm joining the ripple chain. Like, wow. I know you were out when they released it, but the Circle is filing to go public, right? Did you get a chance to poke open their S1? No, I didn't. What's good there? So the thing that people are taking away from the Rip of the Circle S1 is the gap between Tether. and Tether has like maybe two to three X the market size of USDC. So there's like two to three X more USDTs than there are USDAs. And then Tether is printing something like, something like a billion dollars a day, dude. It's like an insane amount of money.

Starting point is 00:55:21 And then Circle, because they have an incredibly high operating overhead costs, is making something like $1 to $200 million a year. And so even though the gap between Tether and Circle is only two to three X in terms of size of the stable coin, the revenue, the profit of the respective businesses is hugely different and way more positive to a ripple. Excuse me, not just ripple. Get ripple out of my mind to tether. And so when you have that level of treasury, it allows you to use that capital to buy

Starting point is 00:55:53 political influence. Okay. I'm not making any allegations, but of course, like Howard Lutnik is the Commerce Secretary. And like he is very much into tether world, right? And there's like lots of financial incentive there, which makes it difficult for a circle to kind of make regulatory inroads and do like in a McAvellian way what's in their best interest, which is like, oh, the dollar should only be and the only regulated coin should be USDC and we're going to block tether. And it's very interesting how all of this is working. We're definitely, crypto is definitely in the geopolitical arena now. Like I've never seen it.

Starting point is 00:56:28 Yeah. Yeah. All right. That's all the news for the week. And we are coming up. We thought this is going to be a hugely long agenda. thought we were going to go 10 minutes over. We're getting efficient.

Starting point is 00:56:36 Yeah, welcome back, dude. Okay, so last week you came back for your first episode, but it was still kind of like a better episode about like Ryan and his break and like what you've been missing. And so now this is actually back into the just like we are trying to cover as much news as possible. How does it feel to be back? I mean, it's good.

Starting point is 00:56:53 It's like kind of where things left off, to be honest. Just like some of the things have, like one thing I've been focused on is getting that fighting spirit back in Ethereum. Ethereum, like mentioned last week is still kind of like, one of my first loves in crypto and I feel like it's it's undervalued and so I've been spending some time doing that like writing some articles otherwise I mean crypto is just kind of like just watching it you know further invade the public sphere but stable coins and bitcoin seem to be like the main thing I guess like I'm not really into meme coins but um so not a lot has changed is maybe one answer to this

Starting point is 00:57:29 yeah I think that's right I think you and I have been going back and forth about like what Ethereum need to do? And I think we're like slowly coming up to like you, like, it's interesting that you and I have this grown a divide of focus. We don't have a mutually exclusive opinions, but like I am very interested on establishing and strengthening Ethereum in the product. And you are very interested in establishing ether as a global reserve asset. And we have different focuses right now. Yeah. And the reason I'm more focused on eth asset rather than the network and the product is because I actually feel like the product is now post-reprioritization slash pivot going in a very positive direction.

Starting point is 00:58:08 And also, like, I can't contribute towards that. Like, I'm not a dev. I, you know, I can't, like, submit an EIP. And so the thing that I feel like Ethereum is missing is all of the inroads that you can clearly see Bitcoiners have made, which is, like, meming the asset into something larger, a global world reserve currency. And they did that through kind of like a small cults that just chanted and believed

Starting point is 00:58:37 and they kind of like worked their way up. And the same surface area exists for Ethereum to do something similar. Like it has the properties to be a global store of value reserve asset, but it just doesn't have the religion. And so incepting a bit more of that, I think, is important. The network's always going to be important.

Starting point is 00:58:58 And the network actually is the differentiator versus Bitcoin in the end. So it's not not important. It's just like something I'm focusing less on because I just like I have less impact there. I think there's a lot left to work left to do on the whole pivot thing. I think there is a lot of old culture of Ethereum that needs to be overpowered by the product focus side of Ethereum. So like, you know, Bitcoin had their big block small block wars, right? Is Bitcoin a payment's currency or is it a store of value and the store of value side one? To me, the division that I'm seeing in the Ethereum community right now is that you have the

Starting point is 00:59:36 product-centric roadmap people and then you kind of have this older, ideological, holier than thou side of Ethereum, which I'm trying to like, trying to like, dislodge. And I think that in order to like, the money side, the side that you want to build for, Ethereum, the blue money cult, needs to be established on a very strong product. And so this is something that we've kind of like gone back and forth on. Like Ethereum has always been this balanced ecosystem. Like take the middle road, don't be too extreme on one end. And that is true for the Ethereum product.

Starting point is 01:00:15 We need to have convexity in the product to enable concavity in the like religious ferverness around the asset. But we do not have convexity in the product because we do not have. people thinking of Ethereum as a product. We have people thinking of Ethereum as an ideology. And that needs to change. I think the thing on that to watch for everybody listening is what does Tamash do at the EF? So in our episode with him, he said, we're going to deliver like upgrades, forks every six

Starting point is 01:00:46 months. Okay? Will that happen? Look for that. Look for that organization. Look for that coordination. If that happens, it's bullish that you're right, that the product pivot is like, fully instantiated. The other thing I think is people like Donkrod's proposal, four years,

Starting point is 01:01:01 100x, how is that received? And is it actually actioned, right? Even if it's just 50x over four years, you have to kind of scale back. Or if it's 100x, but it takes five years, something like that. If you get signs like that, then I will feel secure that Ethereum is kind of reprioritized the right things. And yeah, you're right. It's not like, it's not over yet. Like, it's just like some of this is still talk. Right. And we have some new leaders. We have some cultural changes, but it needs to be put into action before you can say, like,

Starting point is 01:01:32 yeah, mission accomplished. This, you know, like, this pivot happened. I feel very good about the presence of Tamash's, like, operational leadership. Because he, nethermind is his old company, still, still his company, but he's like, you know, focusing on the EF now. And so he's bringing a founder, CEO, product mindset to the Ethereum foundation and to the Ethereum, like, organization. which is great. In addition to that, I deeply trust Donkrad's direction and leadership direction

Starting point is 01:02:03 for the change of the protocol changes that needs to happen to Ethereum. And so I hope the Ethereum community elevates Donkrad more because from what I hear, he is still in the minority. And I think Ansgar and Donkrad are definitely on the target for what needs to happen with Ethereum. We'll see how it plays out. Guys, of course, got to let you know all this stuff is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

Bankless - ROLLUP: ETH's Big Pivot | Tariff Recession? | Bitcoin's Political Win | Worldcoin US Launch!

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