Bankless - ROLLUP: ETH’s Pectra Upgrade | $2T Stablecoin Push | Apple’s Crypto Breakthrough | Coinbase Buys Deribit!

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

This week, Ryan and David unpack Ethereum’s game-changing "Pectra" upgrade, doubling Layer 2 blob space and sparking fresh debates on L1 scaling. Meanwhile, Washington sets its sights on a $2 trillion stablecoin market, Apple’s App Store monopoly cracks open to crypto, and Coinbase makes a historic acquisition of Deribit. Plus, Bitcoin breaks $100K and ETH $2k, are we officially back in bull territory? Find out on this week’s Weekly Rollup.------💫 LIMITLESS | SUBSCRIBE & FOLLOWhttps://www.youtube.com/@Limitless-FT https://x.com/LimitlessFT ------BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFihttps://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAINhttps://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORKhttps://bankless.cc/Mantle 🌐SELF | PROVE YOUR SELFhttps://bankless.cc/Self 🟠HEMI | BTC & ETH, ONE NETWORKhttps://bankless.cc/hemi ------TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES0:00 Intro0:32 Marketshttps://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/07/fed-meeting-live-updates-traders-await-insight-from-powell-on-next-rate-cut-tariff-impact.html https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?id=EFFR%2CDFEDTARU%2CDFEDTARL%2C&utm_source=chatgpt.com https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114471750357100883 https://x.com/ForexLive/status/1919864600339558405 13:44 Big win for Crypto against Apple App Store Monopoly! https://x.com/hlopez_/status/1918113804938056100 https://x.com/0xCygaar/status/1918335966538068300 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1920486709831033039 21:36 Ethereum upgrade live on mainnet! https://x.com/TimBeiko/status/1920145795430727686 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1919746313760969136 https://www.bankless.com/read/eip-7702-ethereum-onchain-culture https://x.com/adietrichs/status/1920083962472300928 https://x.com/drakefjustin/status/1920343548047569165 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1920488999296078131 https://x.com/tkstanczak/status/1920157389568737478 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1920498941583348014 40:04 Coinbase Acquires Options Platform Deribithttps://www.wsj.com/finance/currencies/coinbase-strikes-2-9-billion-deal-for-major-crypto-options-platform-a87ca4b3?utm_source=chatgpt.com 41:55 Treasury Secretary is ALL in on Stablecoins https://x.com/SecScottBessent/status/1920140049254854778 https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/02/crypto-tether-eyes-us-expansion-with-new-stablecoin-as-ceo-courts-washington.html https://x.com/intangiblecoins/status/1918802270310777128 https://x.com/SenatorHagerty/status/1918827160954909111 https://x.com/BrendanPedersen/status/1920193925081338114 47:26 Dems introduced legislation that would ban sitting presidents from issuing tokenshttps://www.merkley.senate.gov/merkley-and-schumer-lead-the-charge-to-end-crypto-corruption-by-trump-other-elected-officials/ https://x.com/Cointelegraph/status/1919405803112472797 https://x.com/StevenTDennis/status/1920088287747711380 https://x.com/DegenerateNews/status/1919109508120371209 https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/1919120401604477095 https://cointelegraph.com/news/eu-crypto-ban-anonymous-privacy-tokens-2027 54:04 Coinbase announced a new open source payments protocol - x402.https://x.com/CoinbaseDev/status/1919784224170889696 https://chatgpt.com/share/681ba731-5244-8008-b801-37e128e240b8 https://stripe.com/en-cz/newsroom/news/sessions-2025 57:44 Bitcoin community is splitting over limit removal planhttps://x.com/ColeTU/thread/1919769012998647880 https://x.com/MartyBent/status/1919226199529677042 1:01:55 Unichain becomes the first L2 building blocks with TEE! https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1918450159274319876 1:04:26 Charles Schwab wants to launch spot Bitcoin trading by April 2026https://cointelegraph.com/news/charles-schwab-eyes-spot-bitcoin-trading-2026 1:05:15 Bankless’s New Podcast! Limitless - go subscribe & follow https://www.youtube.com/@Limitless-FT https://x.com/LimitlessFT 1:06:55 Closing & Disclaimers ------Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Bitcoin is over 100,000. We are so bad, baby. David, even Eath is catching a bit. What? No way. Right after Ethereum ships its biggest upgrade ever, what's inside of it? Also, what comes next? And also, what was it missing? We also have Apple's Walled Garden just opened the door for crypto. It's wide open for us now. Coinbase makes its biggest acquisition of all time. And Washington, D.C., suddenly wants $2 trillion in stable coins. We're going to talk about all of that. But first, we've got to get to the markets, Ryan, the markets are looking good. They are feeling good. I don't know what was in the water or air this morning, but I woke up and saw it green across the charts. Bitcoin is up 3.8% broke through

$100,000 to where we are right now at the time of recording, $101,000 Bitcoin. It's moved pretty big on the last like two weeks, just grinding up slowly until suddenly we're up like $7,000 on the week. Ether price. Ryan, it was up 1% more than Bitcoin last week. I think, Bitcoin was up 3% last week. Ether was up 4% last week. Bitcoin is up 4% this week. ETH is up almost 11% this week. So we are two for two weeks of Ryan Sean Adams returning back to bankless.

And ETH is green. If it continues to be like this, he can never leave again. Oh, my God. The ratio is up 7%. We are above a 0.02 number still very low. But it is climbing. We got a double digit day in the last 24 hours. Double digit day, yeah.

Eath is up 14%. It never does that. Yeah. It doesn't do that. Okay, what's the explanation for this? I actually asked crypto Twitter. I do not know. I cannot figure out why.

I don't know what the news is. It's one of those more buyers and sellers kind of things. Yeah, I mean, traditional equities markets is up pretty big too. Like my Robin Hood portfolio, which entirely is consisted of coin base stock and Robin Hood stock. It's also up too. A nice balanced portfolio across all the stocks that represent America. Uh-huh. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, well, like, the big question is, are we still in a bare

or did we ever go into a bear market, right? That's what people were saying. I think when, you know, like I was away, it does not feel like a bear market when a Bitcoin is over 100K. In fact, this feels very bullish. And we got total crypto market cap. What's the price here? Am I seeing $3.25 trillion? I think it might be even a little bit higher right now. We are threatening to cross $3.3 trillion. As a reminder, the all-time high of the crypto market. cap. Total crypto market cap is 3.9 trillion. We are at 3.3. Bitcoin dominance is also higher than it has ever been in a long, long time. Of course, Bitcoin dominance started at 100%. But it like bottomed down at like 33 or 40 percent, just a number of years ago, like in the 2021 era. It is at like 67%. So

Bitcoin dominance continues to make all-time high. Down today, though. Down very bigly today. Yeah. Do you know, do you see Rao Paul called the top of Bitcoin dominance? I actually I've seen more and more people call the top of Bitcoin dominance. And I'm wondering if you want to make a call, David. God, I hate it when you do this. Okay, so are we, is this the bull market? Is this back? Are you going to say it's back and then curse us?

And you were going to crash down, you know, another 30% or something. Man, I don't know. I don't know, man. I don't know how to make these calls. I don't know. Sure. We're all, we were never left, you know? We never left.

Yeah, we always saw this. You know what? I feel like on the week to week, it's impossible to call market. You're just like in the noise and the weekly when we look at this. But like, yeah, secular bull trend, I guess resumes. You want to talk about the Fed, though? They had a, they had their meeting. They have those every once in a while and everyone was waiting for what would Jerome Powell do?

So would he raise rates? What did he do, David? I was hoping you would tell me, actually. He did absolutely nothing is what he did. He's keeping everything exact same. Oh, we're up on no rate changes. That's good. That means that's our win.

Do you want me to give you the summary? Please do. what Powell said. Please do. Wait and see. Oh. That's what he said. Yeah.

Okay. He's keeping the Fed interest rates at the target range, 4.25% to 4.5%. He noted, this is why. This is why he's waiting and seeing. The risks of higher unemployment and higher inflation have risen, he said. And he kind of blamed tariffs for that. He said, we're facing uncertainty around tariffs. The economy shows some signs of resilience as well as weakness.

So he's like, I don't want to touch anything while this is going on. And just some history for you, if you don't recall, the recent Fed rates. So the Fed hasn't touched the federal funds rates since December, 2024. And at that time, it decreased it by 25 bips. I knew like some BIP decreases. So that's what they did back in December. And from then on, it's been a wait and see. I thought you'd enjoy this chart, David.

So this is the federal funds rate for the last, like, I don't know, 70 years or something like this. This is a weird chart. It's a very weird chart. Like it spikes up in the 1980s, right? This is a vocal era. Neither of us were alive. It wasn't alive, but bad time to get a mortgage. Let me tell you.

It's like up to 19%. And then, you know, it's just such a weird chart, these central banker charts, I think. But the interesting thing to me is like he was talking about inflation. We haven't seen inflation yet. This is true flation. Right now, inflation is hanging out at about 1.6%. Inflation is under control. So far.

And of course, this is a trailing indicator. I guess what Powell is just saying is like, well, yeah, it's fine now, but we don't know the impact of the tariffs. And he's expecting that that's going to be inflationary. You can almost read between the lines he's anticipating some sort of like recession or maybe some sort of, you know, like inflation spike post tariffs. And that's why he's not doing anything. Of course, Trump had a comment on that. Did you see his comment this morning? No, tell me. Okay. He said Jerome Powell is a fool. Who doesn't have a clue? Other than that, I like him very much. mixed signals by Donald Trump, very mixed signals.

Because Trump wants him to lower rates because it's always good for the sitting president, right? Of course. Of course, right? Sitting president always wants like easier monetary policy, right? It helps him get elected. I guess he says this. Trump continues, oil and energy are way down. Almost all costs, groceries and eggs are down. Virtually no inflation.

Tariff money pouring into the U.S., the exact opposite of too late. Enjoy, he says. It's like, I guess he has a point. with oil and energy down and cost of groceries down. If you look at the trailing indicator of inflation, this is not a forecast of what the next 12 months will hold. I don't know. What's your take?

Do you think Powell should be adjusting rates down at this point in time or hold it steady? I mean, I do not have an opinion here. What I do enjoy is that rates are being held steady and markets are still finding plenty of reasons to be bullish and go up. I think it's worth highlighting that we, the S&P 500. is up almost 20% from the bottom of the tariff scare, and the bottom of the tariff scare got pretty low, right?

And so that's 31 days. Over 31 days, the S&P 500 is up almost 20%. Over 17 days, we are up 10%, and we are like only from all-time highs, only like 7% away from all-time highs in the S&P 500s, despite the tariffs, despite persistently high interest rates. And if we can go up as a stock market,

while interest rates are like at 4.75, 4.25%. Yeah. That means that that's real, like, there's no, there's no ZERP excuse for why those markets are going up. Markers are going up based off of fundamentals. And that feels good. And that feels like a very strong economy. And that's also true for the crypto space as well. If the crypto space can go up, because crypto, up until 2021, only existed in a zero interest rate policy environment.

And now in 2024 and 2025, crypto is going up under a sustained. high interest rate environment, which means we earned it. We deserved that. That was our success and that is showing up in our crypto prices. Yeah, I mean, that's definitely a bullish interpretation. I will say, like, trailing off of last week, we still haven't seen what impact tariffs might have. Perhaps this is kind of a blip up before, you know, we get some tariff shock that happens this summer and recession. We talked about that. The R word is still out there. Also, there was this capital flight trade that's like outside of the U.S. that seems to have rebounded it at least right now. I guess on the week it's too soon to tell.

But if indeed markets fully recover, right? That was a buy-the-dip opportunity that a lot of people miss. This is why you got a dollar cost average in and just like not worry about it. Something else that's hitting all-time highs, though, David, is gold on the week. Still worrying me. Still worrying me. Yeah. I have mixed opinions on this because when I see gold going for all-time highs,

I think Bitcoin is not far behind that. For sure. And even more aggressive and explosive fashion. And I think maybe that's what we're seeing recently. But also when gold goes to all-time highs, that just means Uncertainty. Global instability and uncertainty and also the decline of the United States economy as the epicenter of global finance, right?

Like we had a really good thing going. We would export dollars. We would buy goods. They would come to the United States. The rest of the world would get the dollars. And they would reinvest in the American financial system. And our loki of control by being the world's financial system would increase. And that unraveling, there's no way that that unravels without.

pain and people pushing gold to all-time highs, I worry, is like a hedge that people are betting on around the unraveling of the financial epicenter of the world being Wall Street, being the United States. Yeah, gold is kind of a bet on global instability. And I guess it's kind of an anti-bet on the U.S. dollar. I mean, part of the reason gold is up is because the dollar, the DXY, is down. Right. And so that's going on.

So I think you're right about this ongoing trade uncertainties really spiking the price of gold. and that's the story on markets this week, David. What else we got? Coming up next, a big win. I think for like the entire world as it relates to the Apple iOS store and especially crypto because the gates for more free commerce are being blown open inside of the Apple iOS store. So we're going to talk about the significance of that for the crypto industry. What does it mean for crypto to be more intimately related into apps in the iOS store?

And also the Ethereum upgrade Pectra went live last night or last morning. What new features did we get? why it's a bigger deal for Ethereum than what I think people think. And also what it's missing and what we still need and what people are now beating the drum about moving forward because the pace of change in Ethereum is slow and steady. And now we are on to the next upgrade. We're going to talk about all of these things and more. But first, a message to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors who make this show possible.

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Follow Mantle on X at Mantle underscore official and join the On Chain Revolution today. There's a big win for crypto against the Apple App Store Monopoly. A U.S. District Court found that Apple willfully violated a court injunction and basically forced them to change all of their guidelines. This came in late last week, David. Why was it a big deal? I think it's a big deal just because Apple has just had such a strong chokehold on the commerce inside of its own iOS ecosystem. And so they do that in a number of different ways.

In-app purchases pay the 30% Apple iOS tax. That is still remains. And then previously in 2021, a court ordered Apple to like allow them. You is told Apple, you need to allow users to be able to go outside of the app store. you like using regular links and buttons inside of apps in the app store, allowing users to press those buttons, go off platform and purchase goods from your company, from your product by getting around the 30% fee.

And so Apple allowed that to happen, but with a 27% fee, and after a series of very hostile pop-ups saying, we can't protect you here, there might be scams here, highly discouraging pop-ups. And so they tried to do this with some like veil of compliance with the 2021 court injunction.

And now they were taken back to court saying like, no, this 27% fee and all these hostile pop-ups are them doing compliance theater. That's still in-compliant. And now a court is saying, yo, Apple, cut your bullshit. And also potential criminal contempt. So this does not end. So as a result of these changes, applications in the Apple iOS store can have clean speak buttons saying go purchase our goods offsite.

They are allowed to say, if you purchase. just these goes offsite, they are 30% cheaper, and there can be no discouraging pop-ups from Apple to prevent users from doing that. And so, you know, previously, OpenC's, like, NFT platform app was, like, a browse-only for not browse-only. It's like, what is OpenC? It is an NFT marketplace. Right. But on in the app store, it is a browse-only. You can just view the marketplace. It's nothing. The whole point is buying and selling. Yeah. And so now there are reduced restrictions on being able to be, I think, pointed even outbound to your wallet saying, like, go buy this NFT and then like the Coinbase wallet pops up or whatever wallet you

want to use. Yeah. And then all of a sudden you can buy that without paying that in-app 30% fee. Yeah. And the reason OpenC had to do this is because if they allowed buying and selling, they'd be delisted. Okay. That's the entire, like, the whole court case you went through. I was like getting the history of this, right?

It all started with back five years ago. So this was epic versus Apple. Yeah. Yeah. This is Epic versus Apple back in August 2020, and Epic just slipped a direct pay button into Fortnite. You know, so you could directly buy Fortnite skins items without paying the 30% tax. You know what Apple immediately did back then? They yanked them.

But Fortnite actually baited them to do that because they took them to court the next day. So Apple banning them was actually bait. Yeah. And then you went through the history of this whole nationwide injunction, but this was like five more years of Apple kind of dragon's heels. and it's like, yeah, we'll comply. And then they secretly, they added this 27% tax anyway. Now the courts are calling BS on it, and it's resulting in a massive change. So here's Saigar with what this means for cryptos.

Apps in the app store can accept crypto payments rather than routing through the Apple App Store now. So this is huge for integration with mobile wallets where users can spend their crypto directly, USDC, E, Sala, all that stuff without having to pay extra fees. Mobile apps for NFT marketplaces will allow buying and selling of NFT. as you just mentioned with OpenC, for example, and apps that were previously not allowed to gate any functionality via NFTs can now do that. So do you remember that whole add utility to your NFT where an NFT can be sort of a gate on some sort of functionality or feature set within your app?

Apple disallowed that. That wasn't even allowed. Well, now the court is forcing them to allow that kind of functionality as well. So this really opens up the playing field. Yeah. There's this common idea that like, you know, everything in crypto is just completely useless except for like scams and frauds and all that kind of stuff. It's because so much of the incumbency of the world prevents us from being,

having utility in our assets. It's because of Gary Gensler and Tim Cook. It's because of Gary Gensler and Apple makes our assets useless. It's their fault. Not ours. Yeah, we didn't want these things to be memes, right? Like we wanted these to be like, by the way, did you listen to the, there was like a four hour Lex Friedman podcast with Tim's, you know, every single hour

of all hours of like. Freedom and podcast. No, I need you to tell me about what happened. All right. So it was good. I mean, it took me back down memory lane to like my early gaming his, like I was a big Unreal Tournament player and, you know, such like back in the day. I mean, like not big. I mean, like wasn't ranked or anything, but I enjoyed some land parties, you know, back in the day. Anyway, there was a whole section where. With Tim Sweeney. Tim Sweeney. Tim Sweeney is the CEO of Apple or sorry, CEO of Epic, of course, the creators of Fortnite. And do you remember that whole theme of like 2020?

Fortnite is coming to NFTs? Like, Fortnite asses. Like gaming and NFTs, yeah. I was kind of a believer back in the day. And my question going to that episode is like, what are they going to say about it? And Tim Sweeney had some really interesting comments. So first, he totally agrees that items from Fortnite should be completely transferable to the rest of the gaming ecosystem, Roblox, like all of the other games, right? They should be completely interoperable.

Here's a quote from him that I pulled out. if we had a standards body, standardize what our portable outfit fits in games, game outfits you could buy in one game that work in another, then you could have an item economy where every game agrees to respect each other's item purchases of that sort and revenue is shared between the ecosystems as well. Huh. We were right? Huh.

I thought we were wrong about that. That sounds a little bit like NFTs, okay? And so like I listened on, but he says basically, no, it doesn't need, you don't need NFTs to do that. what we need are interoperability standards, essentially. And so this kind of caused me to go down a quest and, like, dig into this some more. Interoperability standards sounds like an asset transfer protocol, like maybe a global internet-based ledger? Right.

And so where this is all, there's apparently there's a whole standards body now called the Metaverse Standards Forum where Epic, Meta, Microsoft, all these game companies have kind of joined. And they're busy like plotting out standards of how you can transfer like a collectible or an item or a skin from one app to another, all of the file formats and 3D renderings. But you know what's all stuck on, David? None of them can really agree on how to like share the revenue. Right.

Interesting. And so like what, there's a $400 million creator economy for items and skins inside of Fortnite today. But do you know how much creators make on that? I'm assuming a very low number. Like 13% 13 to 20% is kind of their take home. None of these things that they create are like transferable to anywhere else. And none of the game companies can really, like, agree on how to share the proceeds.

And I think it's because what they're missing is, like, they want portability, but what you need is portable property. And for a property, you need a property right system that's incredibly neutral. It can't be the epic database. It can't be Microsoft. So my prediction, David, is sometime, some point in the future, maybe five years in the future, okay? The metaverse, NFT, like, games are coming to crypto.

The metaverse is just ahead of its time. It was just out of this time. Never was on target. It was ahead of its time. We weren't wrong. We were just early. That's right. Yeah.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's exactly right. I agree with that. We're never wrong. We're just early. All right to get into Pectra news? Yeah, tell me about Ethereum upgrades.

Okay, so Ethereum's 19th, hard fork happened last night. Pectra, live on Mainnet, went off without a hitch, extremely smooth. Pectra was Ethereum's largest hard fork by sheer number of EIPs. So a lot of tech. that fixing a lot of some marginal EIPs, but there are three EIPs that I want to highlight that are a very big deal. EIP 7691. Each EIP is like a feature, right?

Yeah, it's like a line item upgrade to, yeah, a feature. And like some are marginal. Some are more like security around edge cases, but then some are kind of like the flagship features. And so there are kind of like three flagship EIPs of Pectra, 7691, 7291, 7251, and 7702. So I'll go through these one by one. 7691, EIP 7691, increasing the blob target from three to six. And so what does that mean?

Every 12 seconds, there's an Ethereum block. Inside of every Ethereum block there is space for blobs. Up to six blobs can be in any one particular block, but the target is three. And so if there's more than three blobs and blob space becomes more expensive, if there's less than three blobs, it becomes less expensive. And so the target, the target capacity doubled from three blobs per block to six blobs per block with a max of nine. And blobs are the fast lane for layer two's, right?

So this is like a subsidy for layer twos. And I guess from three to six, we're saying there's double the amount of fast lane for layers. Yes, exactly. So layer twos can consume even more Ethereum layer one blob space. They can, layer twos can go faster now. And there also can be more of them. And so there's just a higher equilibrium for the aggregate amount of transactions across

the Ethereum layer two economy. So that's bullish. Also very simple. We're just doubling the blob space. So Ethereum Blaswase got doubly big. Then there's the max effective balance. That is EIP 7251. Previously, ETH stakers could only stake explicitly just 32Eth.

Now Ethereum Stakers can stake anywhere between 32 and 2048. And so right now if you have 320Eth, you run at 10 validators, very likely all on the same machine. So 10 independent instances of Ethereum validators on one machine, consuming 10 times more bandwidth than you really need to. And so if you are a, if you're running 10 validators, you can consolidate that down to one validator on one machine. If you're coin based and you're running a bajillion validators, you can also consolidate that down to a much lower number of instances. And so the validator count of a theorem is going to go down from like a large number to a smaller number. It's not impacting decentralization at all because it's still the same number of entities at the end of the day. What this does, Ryan, is this seriously reduces the messaging bandwidth overhead that's required for

the Ethereum validator network to gossip around information to each other. And so that is becoming, so say there's like 10,000 validators and we go to like 3,000 validators, we're reducing the bandwidth needed by Ethereum by a significant margin. And that's going to happen over time because, you know, not everyone is going to consolidate all at the same time. This is up to the market. It's up to individuals. But bandwidth goes down.

And so that is actually what we are able to, why we are able to increase blob space is because as we increase blob space, we need more bandwidth. We can't have infinite blobs because that consumes too much bandwidth. But now with 27251, we have more bandwidth to spare. And so we were giving that to the blobs. And this is going to happen over time, right? Because to like to your point, you have to, in order to run on fewer values, you have to kind of exit the QI, I believe it, you got to go back in.

There's going to be a turn process. Yeah, so this will take a while. And we got to set it up and go back in. Okay, okay. Yeah, so we will have increasing. And like I think the three to six target of blobs was conservative because they knew they were going to be able to unlock some bandwidth, but not how much. and so they chose a conservative blob target number,

and then we're going to watch how much bandwidth opens up over in the future. All right. So roll-ups are super happy, right? Their blob space just got cheaper again, allowing them to onboard more users, more transactions. How about the third one? The third, I think, is my favorite, actually. I think the third is the biggest one.

So 7702, it's kind of like account abstraction light. So most users, you, me, Ryan, are all using EOAs, externally owned addresses other than like any sort of NOSIS safe. NOSA safe is a smart contract wallet. what 7702 does is it lets normal EOA addresses, run this one-off contract code, do its thing, execute its contract code, and then reverts back to an EOA by the end of the transaction. So in the moment that it is processing a transaction, it is bestowed account abstraction properties. Superpowers.

And by the end of the transaction, it reverts back to an EOA. It happens behind the scenes. And so what does this enable? The big thing that this enables, I think, is batched transactions. and so you can, you know, you can line up a queue of like two to, you know, 20, 50, 100 transactions all at once and have them execute atomically. Yeah. And what that does is that removes the goddamn approved pop-up. So when you hit the swap button on uniswap, the thing that happens is it swaps tokens.

Rather than you having to try and assign a approved transaction, you just swap. The swap button just swaps tokens. That's what it does now. So it's like a small thing, but it's a very big U.S. This also reduces the surface area for failed transactions because all this is atomic. So overall, this is just a transactional user upgrade. There's some other things as well. So applications can now sponsor transactions for their users.

And so if you go into like www. my favorite defy app.com, that application can give you a wallet and you can deposit 100 USDC and then you can charge you USC for gas. So you don't need to pay ETH for gas. It's swapped to ETH in the back end. You don't need to be exposed to that. And tokens can now pay for gas and applications can now pay for their user's gas. And so there's a lot of just abstraction.

It's just such a convenience thing, such a quality of life increase for any kind of like user of Ethereum. You ever been in like a new wallet and you're like, you're getting ready to do something. You're like, damn, I have no, there's no ETH for gas. Right. And like you have to go like through a process of going and finding some ETH and like doing all of that. Basically, what it allows is all of the existing addresses that everybody's using to for all intents and purposes, become, they're not really converting smart contract wallets, but become a smart contract by the end user, the benefits of smart contract wallets are being besought upon them.

Yeah, and we've talked about how cool smart contract wallets, you listed out a few other things. I'll just add, you also get native social recovery possibly. That's what smart contracts wallets can do. You also have support for session keys. This is William Pistair writing this. So you can grant apps limited timebound access to your wallet. Social recovery, of course, is kind of cool because that allows, you know, somebody else may a third party maybe like your your spouse or someone like that to recover your keys so all of

these features are being added and essentially upgrading to a smart contract functionality william pester also noted that this might be the beginning of the end for wallet sprawl you know that problem where you get all of these different like wallets and you got to manage a guy yeah right like i mean ethereum users probably by this point in time i've probably had 50 wallets over the years i mean and like yeah and more so if an EOA can temporarily act temporarily act like a smart contract account then I think users will increasingly just not have to split their identities across all these wallets.

That's all great. What about the layer one though? Did we get any layer one throughput increases this go round? Okay, so the new like memeified, simplified roadmap for Ethereum in 2025 and beyond is scale the layer one, scale blobs, improve UX. Pectra brought two of the three things. We are drastically improving UX. We are doubling the blob size.

There was no explicit EIP upgrade for the layer one in Pectra. And I also will say that this is a problem because the next upgrade to Ethereum Fusaka, targeted by the end of this year, introduces pure Das, which is like a 10x increasing increase of blob space. It's more blob space. It's more blob space. And so with the bandwidth that we are saving from the max effective balance upgrade, we gave it to blobs in Pectra.

And then we are giving it to blobs again in Fusaka. And so, like, we're saving these resources and according to Ethereum priorities, we're giving them to blobs. That is, in my opinion, and many others opinion, not the best use of those resources. Where does the prioritization of the layer one come into play here? So we need to rethink about reconsider prioritizing the resources back to the layer one. So Ansgar tweeted so far in 2025, execution throughput is up 20% while DA throughput is up 100%. This is a good start. We're ramping up our scaling efforts. Both execution and DA have a path to 1,000% increase over the next 12 to 18 months, then up only for there. But you'll notice we are prioritizing blob space far more than layer one block space. And I think that's good. We need to maximize both of these things. In my opinion, we are under indexing on the importance of the layer one. We have for a long time. We should stop doing that. We should start to reprioritize the layer one. So I would like to see the resource. is that we are saving and leveraging be applied to layer one scaling. So this is Justin Drake

tweeting out. I just configured my node for 60 million gas limit. So this is gas limit is like the size of layer one blocks. We are currently at 36 million. It was 30 million, not too long ago. So that's why Onscar said we have increased the size of layer one by 20%. Justin Drake is saying, I configured my validator to a 60 million gas limit. That's a 66% bump from the 30 million limit and this is safe post-Pectra and then he's calling for validators should set the limit and they can vote with their validators. Wait, wait, this is something

that people I think don't understand because I think it's saying hey, now it's time to like let's continue to scale the layer one, right? But you just said it's not in the next Ethereum hard fork. Fusaka and Fusaka we're doing 10x more for blob space, right? That's not. But what you're saying here is configuring your

validator for 60 million gas that's a way to scale the layer one outside of hard Forks. Yeah. So this has always been a power. This has always been a power of Ethereum. We could always do this.

We can, we have done this. We have done this. Okay. But we could always do this. The Ethereum layer one gas size, the gas limit is voted on by validators. So validators can dictate the consensus among the validators dictates the gas size limit. And so it is up to validators to increase the size of layer one blocks. And so Justin is signaling I have set my gas target to be 60 million, which is a 66% bump.

I think all validators, I think we should do this. Okay. How many do you need in order to do this? Do you have to have like some sort of majority or some sort of number? Yeah, there needs to be some sort of like, that's a good question, actually. I'm fuzzy on the details on that. But there does need to be some like consensus, a majority consensus among validators because it's like kind of like emergently decided.

But yes, validators do vote. And you're right, Ryan, this is out of, and this is not an EIP. This is just every single individual validator says, hey, I'm targeting 60 million gas and we should totally do this. What I would also like to see, and what I think is more important than layer one block size is layer one block speeds. And that does need an EIP. And the reason why block speeds is more important than block size is because these are global asset ledgers. We issue assets, we trade assets, we exchange assets. Lower latency on trading on block times means faster trading speeds.

Smaller amounts of MEV, Tim Ruffgardin, has proved this empirically. faster block times reduces the total amount of MEV. It allows market makers to quote tighter spreads. Overall, like, Defi is more efficient with faster block times. And so there's two ways to scale. We can make our block size bigger, which we should. We should also lower the block times. It is a qualitatively better product for what we are trying to do right now.

Right now, TradFi is looking at all the blockchains and being like, where should we put our assets? And Wall Street is hypersensitive to getting fleeced by middlemen. And so what has Ethereum, the Ethereum ecosystem been investing in over the last five years? It is MEV mitigation. It is fair order execution. We have flashboss. We have this very sophisticated, built-out pipeline of MEV mitigation.

And we can leverage that fact by reducing block times and having the best execution in all of crypto because of all the infrastructure that we have built out. So I think in addition to scaling out the size of layer one blobs, which Justin is calling for, Onzgar is calling for, I think we should also focus on reducing the block times from 12 seconds down to eight seconds as just a signal to the market that we understand what we need to do and where we need to go. And so that is also my message for the Ethereum community too. No, size matters and also speed matters, huh? Speed matters, yes. Yeah, size and speed, you know?

No, I get it. Believe me, I get it. All right. So it's like, but what is likely to happen? So the thing with Fusaka is that's the next Ethereum hard fork. Pure Das is already like there. It's already there, yeah. I saw some comments from Tamash talking about this. And his take was like now, again, he's executive director, sort of an operational lead over all of this.

He's like, okay, in the next six months since Peer Das is already here, we'll go, we'll do that. And then the hard fork after will be the one where we focus on layer ones. And maybe you get a block time decrease there too. So made 2026. You want this to be faster. So do I.

Yeah. Yeah. So the Peer Das in Fusokosok. has already been established a long time ago. It's been that way for a while. And so like the prior, the turning of the ship,

the Ethereum pivot is being put at the end of the queue, which means that's for Clamsterdam, maybe, which already has like a pretty solid. What's Clamsterdam for people? That's the next one. Glamsterdam is the hard fork

after Fusaka. Fusaka is like all of the Ethereum hard fork names are portmanteaus of a big star and a city out there, DevCon cities. And so Pectra is Prague and Electra. Fusaka. I don't know.

There's a star in a city out there. You slap them together, you get Fusaka. Clamsterdam is something in Amsterdam. And so, yeah, it would be very good if Ethereum shipped eight second block speeds as soon as possible. I agree. It would be amazing in 2025. I also think that if you got Fusaka in 2025, that would be a huge operational victory. Yeah.

Even if just pyrdazes in it. Yeah. Right. So, yeah, we got some good things on the horizon for Ethereum, I think. It's really, like, yeah, doing well. And not to say that, like, blob space isn't important. We have to simply emphasize blob space quite a lot. Also, there are people, there's now an end of like a product effort at the EF around layer

twos. And so we are not just naively expanding blog space. We are also working on layer two interoperability standards. And so with increased scale, we can actually turn that into increased layer two cross-chain composability too. So it's not just naive blob space scaling. Because it's a blockchain. It's not a blob chain. That's not all we do is make blobs. We also got to make our blocks better. David, a lot more to talk about. What do we got? Coinbase makes a massive acquisition. The biggest acquisition in crypto to allow it to go

toe to toe with some big giants in Tradfai. Also, like you said, the White House wants a roadmap to two trillion dollars in stable coins. What are we doing to get there? And the Bitcoin community goes through a heated debate about a potential upcoming upgrade in the Bitcoin ecosystem. And I'm going to tell you, Ryan, I think it mirrors quite a lot of the blob space conversation that we just had right now. Just 10X more hardcore. Yeah, yeah. All right, so we're going to get to all of that and more.

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becoming the most comprehensive global crypto derivatives platform. What's the story here? What's Coinbase doing? Yeah, so Deribit is an options platform not allowed to U.S. citizens. So offshore options platform for Bitcoin and Ether, definitely the largest amount of options volume in the space. And Coinbase bought it. $2.9 billion in a cash and stock deal. So $700 million in cash and $11 million in coin shares. I guess this will close by the end of the year pending regulatory sign-off. So we need some regulators to say that this is okay.

But yes, the, I'm pretty sure, the largest acquisition in crypto's history, one of the largest M&A deals ever. And, yeah, it's pretty. So what does this allow Coinbase to do? This is, Coinbase is like going toe to toe with things like the CME or like other like derivatives or options platforms inside the United States with Bitcoin and Ether and make it available to U.S. citizens. Well, this is like, yeah, this is like kind of, you know, Binance, right? Like Binance has some of this market, but Deribit handles 90% of Bitcoin ETH options open interest right now. And as you said, all of that, like, all of that's international.

So Deribet is like located in Panama and it doesn't actually. actually allow for U.S. customers. I wonder if Coinbase just saw the opening with kind of the existing soften regulatory regime and was like, hey, we're going for it. This is our, a big, like, tuck-in acquisition. Now we're a lead in the crypto options market internationally. I think it's like a good one for Coinbase and certainly like, yeah, it just cements their lead as an exchange. I wonder what Binance is going to do in reaction. Yeah. Yeah. Congratulations to Derape. They've just been grinding on that platform for a long time. I think this also also positions Coinbase for the big stable coin win. So I think the U.S. David is now,

we could say it, on a path to $2 trillion in stable coins. And it's not just me saying it. This is the Secretary of Treasury, Scott Bessent saying it. This is him in front of Congress. We believe that the United States should be the premier destination for digital assets. And as members of this committee and the Senate are attempting to do, create good, market structure around that so that U.S. best practices are used around the world. And that's really the point, right, is having American U.S. best practices to sort of set the pace for others to follow rather than us trying to fill in the holes that others, that may be created by it as others set that pace. Yes, sir. And also, the digital assets are an important

source of innovation that will drive the that can drive usage of the U.S. dollar around the world as with stable coin legislation. There is speculation that there may be up to $2 trillion of demand over the next few years for U.S. government securities from digital assets. Hear that? Two trillion in demand. Okay. And this is what a 180.

This is the Secretary of Treasury. What a 180 from Janet Yelland. It's basically like kind of on the cusp of banning all things crypto. Certainly never talking about stable coins at this level. I'm very grateful that this is Scott Bessent who is saying these words because Besson's stock is up with Donald Trump. Whereas other like Commerce Secretary Lutnik. Lutnik, yeah. His stock is down.

Oh, really? And he's the Canter Fitzgerald Tether guy. So you could have easily imagined a universe in which the Canterfichael tether guy is trying to like do the sable coin things. but his stock with Trump is down. And Bessent, thankfully, is actually the guy pushing the stable coins in addition to, like, doing things in Trump's favor. And so good stars are aligning. Happy case. I mean, in the background, I don't know if you saw this, Tether is actually planning to launch a U.S. version of U.S.CT.

Do you see this? Yeah. Yeah, I did see this. And Rob Haddock from Dragonfly had him on the show to talk about stable coins. And he predicted that Tether would do this because he said, like, yeah, rumors are going to be that Tether does a U.S.-centric stable coin to comply with, you. US-centric regulations. Yeah. Because they are not going to pivot

the current tether strategy to make that work. Yeah. Why would they? It's working so well. It's working great. It's working great. Yeah.

And he was bearish on the United States Tether Stable Coin. Interesting. That's interesting take. Well, you know, Paulo says a domestic, this is the CEO of Tether.

A domestic stable coin would be different from the international stable coin. And he says it's all going to be, depend on the timeline of the final legislation. So are we still doing, like, is Paulo coming in the show

pretty time soon? Yeah, so we scheduled an episode with him with a special co-host who I think is extra informed and extra equipped to ask Paula questions that I think are beyond. I think you would be great. And I think actually the interview is with you and our special co-host. But like this special co-host, I think is going to ask the best questions. We'll have to ask about it. Okay. And then he mentioned legislation here.

So what is the status of legislation? You informed me last week because I forgot the names. There's the Genius Act. That's the Senate. Don't say that one first. You have to say the other one first. The Stable Act, which is in the House, and then the Genius Act, which is in the Senate. Stable Genius. Stable Genius Acts. So I was doing some research on this, and it seems like the Genius Act is the one to keep it eye on

because, first of all, the Senate is more important than the House. And secondly, as a greater chance of actually happening, you know, the Senate has to co-sign anything else. And so, you know, if Genius can get 60 votes in the Senate, then it's on, baby. the U.S. has an actual staple coin legislation. This week, Democrats were saying, nine Democrats in particular, who had been presumed to be on board with the Genese Act,

were saying they're getting cold feet. We're not sure we want to do it. And they cited a few things. Seems unexpected. Yeah. Seems unexpected. Really? You expected this?

Yeah, well, some amount of pushback from the Democrats. I think it would be unexpected if Democrats are just like, you know, please waltz right in and let's get this bill signed. I think there has to be some amount of pushback. They were kind of warming to,

like crypto, it seemed like, right? I mean, they, I think they realized that crypto is just not the hill to die on, like post-election, post-like losing the election. So this was somewhat unexpected, I guess, from folks working on this bill in Congress. And they said, we want more anti-money laundering. We want more national security. We want more anti-terrorism, anti-child trafficking stuff. All the same things. Yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So Democratic Senator said, Bill Haggad, he's actually one of the co-authors here. He's like, we have a choice to make. We either move forward or we let the Republicans own the whole digital asset issues. He's trying to shake the Democrats into like, you guys want to be like, you want to be pro-crypto, all right? We just

learned anti-cropos, like, not going to win you any votes. It's not going to win you any elections. So like, why are we just seating this to the Republicans? So there is some further rumor that like, okay, the Democrats are kind of like getting behind this. They're getting some changes for it. And I don't know, I don't know what the chances of this getting approved are, but I think it's greater than 50%. So at least my take. But I somewhat wonder if the Trump coin is slowing it down a little bit, David. Okay. So this is the RSA conspiracy that I'm not totally sure I'm on board with.

So tell me about this belief that you have. Okay. So this week, too, right, the Democrats introduced legislation that would ban sitting presidents from issuing tokens. I wonder why they did that. Why did they decide to do this? All right. So who's on this bill?

I'm sure Elizabeth Warren is on there. Oh, yep. There she is. There's Elizabeth Warren. Yeah. See, I told you. crypto, like anti-crypto army, like raising its head. But, okay, so currently people who wish to cultivate influence to the president can rich him personally by buying cryptocurrency he owns or controls,

said one of the senators, Senator Merkley, who's behind this bill. This is a profoundly corrupt scheme. It end our national security and Rhodes Public Trust in the government. Let's end this corruption immediately. Okay. I would have preferred Trump to be like super pro-crypto, Bessent to do, you know, the two trillion in stablecoin thing. And Trump just, not to have launched a meme coin. Like that would be my preference because then you wouldn't have stuff like this. Right. You wouldn't have that pushback.

I don't see anything wrong with this. I think it is good policy. This bill. I think it is a good policy to say that presidents and sitting congressmen and women, senators ought not to be able to create financial assets, crypto or otherwise, SPACs included during their term. I think all the creation of financial assets downstream of like a sitting, you know, congressmen, men, or a president, that should not happen. It's surface area for corruption, right?

Yeah. I mean, like, and we sort of talked about this with the Pelosi Act last week that Democrats were going to come up with some anti-meam coin type thing. Here it is, anti-memememecoin thing. And like, meanwhile, anything wrong with this. This is, look at this. Do you see this poster here? The Trump, gala dinner. Trump, of course.

Gala dinner. Is it a different dinner? then the first dinner? No, this is, this is, oh, it's just now also a gala. Actually, no, this is this is May 22nd. This is if you have the, if you're one of the 250 people with the largest is the Trump meme coin. The Trump meme coin, yes. Yeah, the dinner is still on is what I'm saying. And Trump's like, yeah, now's a gala. That's an upgrade. That's an upgrade. Yeah. And this is a Bloomberg analysis report. Most of the top holders of Trump's meme coin who are vying for this intimate dinner with president of the United States are likely foreign. You see some of the names on the

Do you just automatically get a visa to come, like just Justin's son just get free, please come to the United States and come to the Gallic? You know, Justin Sun is the largest holder of Trump meme coin, right? Yeah, he's got 16 million. Literally, what is that? That's buying influence. Is this not? He's going to be one of the people who could be at this dinner.

And of course he's going to be at this dinner. Why would he not be at this dinner? Right. He's going to be at this dinner. He's also the biggest investor in World Liberty Financial. All right. So do you want to hear, there's actually an interview this week where a reporter brought up the meme coin, the Trump coin

with a Trump. Here's what he said, yeah. No way. Is it? I don't think you've been asked much about, which is you've branded your own cryptocurrency. The coin's values actually surged recently after you announced

that top holders would be invited to have dinner. I don't even know that what did it surge to? What did it surge to? Yeah, what's it worth? You might as well tell me because I have no idea. Well, it's, it surged. It surged.

I will find it. Hold on one second. 5.2 or 58%. So 58%. To what number? That's not bad. 14.32. What? 14.32 what? No, dollars per cryptocurrency.

Billion dollars? No. What's the number? I mean, what is the amount? The coin's value hit a peak of 7535 on January 19. That doesn't mean anything. And that's before your inauguration, and then it's surge. Look, I'm in favor of crypto. He's just trying to bait her into talking about the multi-billion-dollar market cap.

That when they hear that, they worry you're profiting from the presidency. I'm not profiting from anything. All I'm doing is, you know, I started this long before the election. I want crypto. I think crypto is important because if we don't do it, China's going to do it. So there is a reporter struggling with the concept of like market cap, right? It's like, what is the Trump market cap right now? That is a good question.

But, yeah, he was, he totally knows what it is. Yeah, he definitely knows. It is fully diluted 12.5 billion dollar valuation. So he was trying to get her to say. Wait, wait, wait, 12.5 billion? Yeah, FTV. Yeah, 2.5 billion market cap, 12.5 billion FDV. That's nuts.

And that's because 80% is basically owned by Trump and Co. Yeah, Trump and Company, yeah. That's incredible. He was right at Bayhur. It's like, say it's worth $12 billion. Say the Trump coin is worth $12 billion. But she didn't know, though. I don't know if she was like, I'm not going to do this.

that or I don't even know what that means. I think she doesn't know what it means, David. I think she doesn't know what it means, David. I think she doesn't know what it means. I'm saying, like, I don't even know the price. It's not important to me. I've been doing this the whole time. When did he launch it? He launched it sometime in January, right? Yeah, early January. Like, it was like right before inauguration day or something. He goes odd, basically in that interview to talk about fantastic things about crypto, how it's the future, all of the things that, like, crypto, you know, wants to hear. I guess my point is, it's just shrouded by this whole meme coin thing. And that's just fodder for opponents of crypto to just say, hey, it's always been a scam. You know, like we told you so. It's a vector for corruption, all of these things. So I guess it's just not ideal from my perspective, right? You got- Oh, yeah, I think that's an understatement. Okay, but like, what I mean is you got some on the left who basically their solution to crypto would just be like, ban it. Yeah, right. Europe is this week. Do you see this? You're up this week. Europe, EU, to ban anonymous crypto accounts and privacy coins by 2027. Yeah, that's bad. That's literally what the Biden administration of future held for us, right? Europe is just all Democrats. Okay. So we went like to the other side and now we got to deal with a little bit of the

grift tax. Right. And I guess that's better. Or quite quite a lot of the grift tax. Not ideal. Yeah. It's not ideal. Well, that's why I'm a friend of like, hey, let's throw the Democrats a bone. I don't even think it's any amount of concession to say sitting presidents can't issue crypto assets. Yeah, but then that's Trump support. He kind of wants the Trump coin. It's not that bad. It's not that bad. You're still a billionaire, buddy. We become more. bipartisan if we get that bill signed. Yeah. That's my ideal. More stablecoin stuff. This is, this one's

for the nerds though, Dave. This is for the devs, okay? Well, I'll tune out for this one then, because I'm not a nerd. You know, you've heard of 404 errors, right? You know, like go to website, server press fail. Yeah, website not found or whatever. Yeah, website not found. That's been in the original kind of, you know, HTTP, internet specifications from the very beginning.

Do you know what a 402 is? No clue. Okay. A 402 was the error that never completed. That was the web standard that was never fully finished. It was a payment web standard. Okay? And it's literally sat on the shelf from 1992,

the Tim Berners Lee drafts. Okay? So basically it was a standard where you could call a service on the web through, you know, HTTP web type protocols, and the service would return some sort of like, you would pay it, and the service would return some resource or some feature in exchange for your micro train Jackson payment.

Commerce gated content on the internet? Like pay gated content on the internet? Exactly. And you know, Mark Andreessen's like, how he has this line of the original sin of the internet was we didn't add payments to the internet? This is the original sin. It was like, we never finished the 402 specification. Wow.

Okay. So it's literally sat dormant. This is fascinating. All right? For the last like 30 years, it's sat dormant. Okay. Until, until today, until now. So Coinbase is bringing it back 402, a new open.

source payments protocol built on HTTP Rails. Okay, so they're filling out the specification. And what's kind of cool here, here's the example. This is actually Claude. So this is AI chat bot and users asking what's the weather. It's calling an external weather source paying that external transaction using 402 like cents in stable coins and the weather service is returning the answer. Micro transactions for AI bots, you on, settled on base, which settles to Ethereum, using stable coins. All right? What? Kind of cool, right? Wow. Yeah. I remember this brings me back to like the 2017 micro-transaction IOT, like narrative of crypto. Yeah. See? We weren't wrong just early. We were never wrong. We're always as early. Anyway, I think this is super cool.

That is really cool. Under the radar, but like you can, like, this is probably the protocol that like bots can use, we'll use, and Coinbase is a stable coin behemoth is kind of getting behind this. It's open source, by the, anyone can use this protocol, right? Yeah, so I bet you could just like, there's some sort of standards here of like Ethereum address, token contract address for payment. Exactly. And it's dominantly going to be like, you know, USDC on the Ethereum base network. But the base network could be popped out for any network.

The token payment contract address could be popped out for any token. Right. And there's just a standards there. Well, super important. as all the AI bots are like, you know, taking all of our data from us without paying any of the content creators for it, right? I mean, like having some paywalls in front of it

for microservices so that AIBots can pay their fair share. Wow, that's cool. No 3% credit card transaction fee, no minimum, you know? We get to put the last puzzle piece of the internet in. This is like when the puzzle's almost done, but you're missing one piece and you get to put it in it. See, this is how we get to $2 trillion in stable coins. Scott Besson is right.

And like Stripe's doing this too. There's some big releases this week using its bridge protocol. I guess they just launched new money management capabilities stablecoin powered financial accounts in 101 countries. So like Stablecoin accounts for Stripe accounts. So all Stripe accounts have a stablecoin account now too. Yeah. Yeah. All right. That's stable coins. Tell me about the Bitcoin debate. Okay. All right. So this is going to start to mirror a lot of the same words that we're using in like the block, block versus blob size debates. And so this is a Bitcoin split over this op return debate, the op return outputs. Op return is kind of like.

like call data. Call data for Ethereum. It allows in Ethereum. It allows for arbitrary. It's like blob space. It's blob space. Yeah. Call data is like,

give me the data that you want to be called by other contracts. I think that's right. Yeah, sure. And then we just formalize that into blobs. Like, okay, let's create blobs, this arbitrary space for data. Op return is the same kind of function of Bitcoin

where you can just put arbitrary data in. It's not the only place that you can put. Is that where ordinals is getting stuffed right now? Exactly. Yes. Yes. It is not the only place that you can put arbitrary data in. and this is a big conversation and a big talking point is you can kind of,

blockchains are just data ledgers. And we format these data is to become like transactions and ledgers. But it's really just a database at the end of the day. So data goes into blockchains. So there's no removing putting arbitrary data into blockchains. Yeah. Bitcoin transactions are just data, right? UTXOs are just data.

And so OpperTurn is kind of this like an almost pseudo enshrined. You can just put your data here. Yeah. And right now there is a cap, like this 80 byte cap size limit on OpperTern. And some parts of the Bitcoin community wants to remove that cap limit, which is like if Ethereum increases blob space. So the proponents argue that supporters believe that arbitrary data storage on Bitcoin is inevitable. Trying to suppress it only leads to more harmful workarounds, like securing data in other ways or doing private deals with miners. The proponents argue that OpperTurn is the least damaging method.

It's a small, provably unspendable place to put. data and it also avoids polluting the UTXO set. So other solutions to put data into Bitcoin requires sending Bitcoin transactions, just making UTXOs with data in them, whereas Opperturn does not. They're basically like people are going to hack it anyways. You might as well formalize it. Exactly. Yeah. The critics argue that removing the limits on OpperTurn invites more spam and non-monetary data into Bitcoin blockchain graffiti, crowding out financial transactions and burdening nodes. And so there's this notion of like legitimate and illegitimate Bitcoin transactions. And, you know, legitimate Bitcoin transactions are ones that are made for commerce that use Bitcoin as money.

And illegitimate Bitcoin transactions are ones that have arbitrary data in them. But then also it's like, well, who's to say a legitimate Bitcoin transaction is a little bit legitimate Bitcoin transaction. You know who's to say that? The Bitcoin Core Code. And the only way to make a Bitcoin legitimate Bitcoin transaction is if you pay the fee. And so that, according to the software, is the non-subjective way of interpreting what's a legitimate or illegitimate transaction. If you pay the fee, then it's a legitimate Bitcoin transaction. There is truly a lack of consensus here. This is a split, but this is currently

the debate in the Bitcoin land. I would say, we'll say that reducing the, eliminating the cap on opereturn and having unconstrained arbitrary data in Bitcoin would be very good for Bitcoin 2s, which are a real thing. Very good for Bitcoin layer 2s, but it's like sometimes I get the sense when I see these kind of debates in the Bitcoin community that like, they just rather not have a network at all, do you know? That is true. They want the asset. The network is a burden.

The network is a burden because the only purpose of the network is the asset Bitcoin itself, right? And everything else is kind of like graffiti. It's a means to an end. It's a means to an end, right? And if they could eliminate it, there's a large cohort of the Bitcoin community that kind of would. But that limits your ability to scale via layer twos.

The industrial use cases and the jewelry use cases of gold are a burden on gold as a financial asset. And now with Bitcoin, we've, finally have the most pristine version of a hard money asset, and anything that's not using that is just a burden and a distraction and slows the progress of the hyper-Bitonization down. Do I sound like a bick-corner? You know, that was a good. That was a good imitation, to you know, and it's funny how hardcore these debates are.

So we think debates and Ethereum are hard. Like, they are arguing over an 80-byte cap limit on an op code. Tell me about uniswob, David. T-E's. Okay, yeah, okay. So unichane becomes the first layer-to. to, I think the first blockchain ever to use TEEs for blockbuilding trusted execution environments. And so this is technology brought by flashbots and Uniswop labs to the unichain.

TEEs isolate execution from tampering, tampering even by the operator of the TEE. So it enables verifiable priority-based transaction ordering. So this just mitigates extractive MEV by enforcing transparent, auditable sequencing. It reduces the failed transaction costs and weighted gas, wasted gas via revert protection. It also allows for 200 millisecond blocks. And so there are sub blocks. So a real unichane block is one second, but you have four sub blocks, so four increments

of blocks. So for the end user, it feels like a 200 second block, which is the fastest block in crypto. Arbitron is at 250. Salon is at 400 milliseconds. This is just killer execution, right? You were just talking about earlier what Wall Street wants. This is what Wall Street wants. Exactly. Unichane.

If we want to compare the execution of all blocks, blockchains, unichane has the best trading execution technology out of any blockchain in crypto. I'm pretty confident in that statement. And so like, you know, maybe retail doesn't care because retail is happy to pay like 10, 20, 30% slippage on illiquid casino shit coins on pump.com. And, you know, more power to them. That pump.com fund token has the opportunity to do the thousand X. That's why they're all there. That's good. Keep on doing that. Wall Street is high. hypersensitive to BIPs. They pay attention to BIPS.

And this is prioritizing and optimizing, maximizing the return of BIPs to traders on Unichshade. Do you know what's really also important for Bips though is like liquidity? You have to have deep freaking liquidity. And I can't help but think like if all of the rollups, if the liquidity wasn't fragmented and the user experience felt kind of the same across all rollups and there's like one unified liquidity pool, Ethereum would like be miles ahead. You know what we need to do that, Ryan? What? We need to have fast finality on the layer one. Okay.

We need to have fast layer one block speeds. We need to have a coherent cross-chain interoperability standard. Shout out base roll-ups for tapping into layer one liquidity. And then we also need to scale blob space, which is exactly what Ethereum is doing. All right. Well, let's see. With a less than satisfactory emphasis on layer one scaling. By the way, meanwhile in Tradfide, you see this?

Let's end here. Charles Schwab, CEO eyeing spot Bitcoin. trading. So if you're looking for Bitcoin trading on the spot in your old Chuck, Chuck Schwab account, okay, that's coming. I am not looking for that. It's coming in 26. That's not the product that I am looking for. I just think it's hilarious how they're all showing up now, just like, you know, five years too late to actually beat out some of the, like, you know, crypto incumbents in this field. So, you know, Charles Schwab coming to a Bitcoin here. Hold your breath, Bitcorners for trading Bitcoin on Charles Schwab and

April of 2026. So here we are. Etha feels like it's slowly getting back on track. David, stable coins, going to a trillion. Two trillion. Two trillion. App stores opening up. Yeah, feels pretty bullish on the week, I'd say. Yeah. Yeah. You know what else? I'm pretty bullish on, what? What? You listen to the AI roll-ups with me, I Jaws and Josh. I did. I think that those are killer episodes. I have a ton of fun doing them with Josh and Jaws. We are rolling out. Bankless is rolling out our second podcast. It is called limitless. This is not a joke. This is for real. We are spinning out all of our frontier tech content, which I'm just pilled about AI. I'm pilled about frontier tech. We have enough content and enough

co-hosting power to build out a second bankless podcast called Limitless. So this is the call to action. There is a new YouTube channel. There will be a new Spotify out soon called Limitless. Go subscribe to that podcast. We're putting the AI roll-ups on the Limitless podcast. We are putting all of the Frontier Tech conversations on the limitless podcast. We are interviewing founders in manufacturing, founders in space exploration, robotics. Josh is just a huge robotics bowl. So anything that's going to materially shape our world, especially AI, we are building out this podcast to explicitly explore those frontiers so that you will get the bankless podcast feed focused on crypto and markets, crypto macro markets, tradfi, all things crypto. And then all things, AI and frontier tech will

be going on Limitless. So if you are listening to all those things, go subscribe to the YouTube, go subscribe to the podcast when it comes out. Make sure to give us a five-star review. I'm pretty stoked. I've got two podcasts coming out on a Limitless that I'm guest hosting, David. Ryan is hosting. Ryan is also a host on Limitless too. Occasionally for subjects that are super interesting. Yeah, I'm very excited about what we're doing in that space too. Of course, guys, you know crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we're headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. a lot.