Bankless - ROLLUP: Extreme Fear | Tariff Whiplash | Citrini AI Crash | Jane Street vs Terra | Pentagon vs Anthropic

Episode Date: February 27, 2026

February ends with peak FUD. Ryan and David unpack why crypto is stuck in historic “Extreme Fear” even without a major blowup, and why markets feel like they’ve entered an uncertainty bubble. Th...ey break down the Supreme Court striking Trump’s tariffs, Trump immediately finding new legal doors to bring them back, and the looming $150B+ refund fight. Then the “Citrini Crash”: AI doomer scenarios going viral, spooking stocks, and leaving investors terrified that AI will be either not good enough or far too good. Plus: fresh allegations that Jane Street helped accelerate Terra’s collapse, Meta’s stablecoin reboot for its billions of users, ZachXBT’s Axiom insider trading exposé, Hyperliquid’s new DC policy push, Robinhood’s retail venture fund, Coinbase’s 24/5 stocks rollout, and the Pentagon’s ultimatum to Anthropic over AI guardrails. --- 📣FIGURE | CRYPTO-BACKED LOANS & REAL YIELD https://bankless.cc/FigureCBL --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔮POLYMARKET | #1 PREDICTION MARKET https://bankless.cc/polymarket-podcast  🪐GALAXY | INSTITUTIONAL DIGITAL FINANCE https://bankless.cc/galaxy-podcast  ⚡EUPHORIA | REAL-TIME ONE-TAP TRADING https://bankless.cc/euphoria  🏅BITGET TRADFI | TRADE GOLD WITH USDT https://bankless.cc/bitget 🌐BRIX | EMERGING MARKET YIELD https://bankless.cc/brix  🎯THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://bankless.cc/TDRpro    --- TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 2:51 Extreme Fear & the “Uncertainty Bubble” https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/bitcoin https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/ethereum https://alternative.me/crypto/fear-and-greed-index https://x.com/xeer/status/2025867669707043156 https://x.com/Evan_ss6/status/2026363413610238032 https://thedefireport.io/research/uncertainty-bubble https://x.com/kobeissiletter/status/2024862913761001477 https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2026067372604371286 https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2026040229535047769 https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2026028854461047220 https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-citrini-post-is-just-a-scary https://x.com/mattshumer_/status/2021256989876109403 https://x.com/intangiblecoins/status/2027011410627027024 26:24 Was Jane Street Behind the 2022 Crypto Winter? https://www.wsj.com/finance/currencies/jane-street-accused-of-insider-trading-that-helped-collapse-terraform-659e6993 https://x.com/OGDfarmer/status/2026343910923006123 https://x.com/hasufl/status/2026246191550193756 https://x.com/davidzmorris/status/2026286018643603749 https://x.com/1914ad/status/2026757796390449382 35:29 Meta Revives Stablecoin Plans https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/02/24/mark-zuckerberg-s-meta-is-planning-stablecoin-comeback-in-the-second-half-of-this-year 39:49 ZachXBT Exposes Insider Trading at Axiom https://x.com/zachxbt/status/2025917891678523644 https://polymarket.com/event/which-crypto-company-will-zachxbt-expose-for-insider-trading/?via=bankless? https://x.com/zachxbt/status/2027016064534757659 https://x.com/zachxbt/status/2027016170126323925 50:40 Hyperliquid DC Policy Center, Robinhood VC, & Coinbase 24/5 stocks & ETFs trading https://x.com/jchervinsky/status/2024116520427651480 https://x.com/vladtenev/status/2026028297822588941 https://x.com/coinbase/status/2026303315382870364 55:49 AI Watch: Pentagon vs Anthropic https://x.com/DeItaone/status/2027028927756054670 https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/2026382701562048545 https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/2026329054887239697 1:02:33 Closing & Disclaimers --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:03 It is the fourth and final week of February. Thank God. I hate February, David. It is time for the bankless weekly roll-up. I didn't know that. I don't like February. I don't like February. It's just like a cold, bleak month where nothing ever good happens. It does feel like the hufflepuff of months. That's pretty disrespectful to a major school. One of the four houses. One of the four houses, Chan. Hufflepuffs are some of the best people, aren't they? Cedric Diggery?
Starting point is 00:00:33 A Hufflepuff? Yeah, they're like the kind and offensive ones in my mind. They don't change history in my mind. But still, this was not a Hufflepuff week, I think, in crypto. This is definitely a Slytherin week, let's say. We had some Jane Street shenanigans that we'll talk about. Also, Zach XBT exposes yet another crypto crime ring. I guess it's just another week, isn't it?
Starting point is 00:00:58 What else we got? Yeah. In trad markets, we have the Citrini crash, followed by, the Trump tariffs getting revoked and then re-invoked, and then also Bitcoin and the crypto market sustaining the deepest level of extreme fear we've ever seen. Overall, just big old question marks over what the hell the market even is right now, both in crypto and I would say also in the equities market as well. Yeah, a lot of fear going around, a lot of uncertainty going around. We'll dig into that. David, our friends and sponsors over at Figger have a something, something new for
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Starting point is 00:02:40 Banklist.cccc slash figure CBL, if that number has peaked your interest. Good to have stable coins at a time when the markets are so uncertain, isn't it? Okay. Let's talk about the extreme fear going on in the markets. First of all, maybe just touching on price. The time of recording Bitcoin is 67K. Ether is 2010. Wait, ETH up 5% on the week and 1%?
Starting point is 00:03:08 5% on the week, yeah, not bad. Okay. But, I mean, ETH did dip pretty low in the week. I saw like 1800 at one point. Bitcoin went to 62,000, 62K. So, I mean, that didn't feel very good. And this chart is the one maybe to focus in on. This is the Fear and Greed Index, David.
Starting point is 00:03:27 And this is historic highs of fear, which means historical lows, I guess, on this index. So the way this index works is... Fear is at all-time high. Sentiment is at all-time low. Same, same. Yes. Don't get confused.
Starting point is 00:03:39 A hundred is really good. That's all green. Right. That's in the green territory. A hundred is what... What did we feel 100? I didn't feel it any time this cycle. Most recent time was probably the AI meta a little over a year ago.
Starting point is 00:03:53 Okay. Maybe December 2020. That was probably pretty greed. Okay. Well, now we are on the opposite end of the spectrum. So we're in the fear end of the spectrum. very low numbers. So that means fear is high.
Starting point is 00:04:03 We're at a five, David. We're at a five. Five out of 100. From zero to 100, we are at a five. And then at a five, haven't we? Like, look at this chart. What are the comparables if you zoom out and you look historically at what this index is showing us? When else did we feel like this?
Starting point is 00:04:20 You can find it. You can find the COVID crash. You can find FTX. You can find Terra Luna. Notably, all those things have numbers, you know, pretty little numbers. things like 6, 8, 10, 11, there was the crash of 2017. Those are all higher numbers than where we are now. We are at 5.
Starting point is 00:04:38 So, like, we are truly breaching lows on the fear index. And, you know, fear, uncertainty, doubt, FUD. I know, like, sometimes FUD is, like, uses, like, market manipulation. But, you know, if there is a lot of fear, uncertainty, doubt in a market, prices are going to be low. Those three psychological indicators. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:05:00 represent low prices. Yeah, they do represent low prices. And they also cause low prices. And also, they are the result of low prices. So it's this weird, reflexive, you know, loop here. Fun fact, we are lower on the fear and green index. So more fear than FTX. At the point that FTX was revealed to be bankrupt, that was an eight.
Starting point is 00:05:26 We are at a five now. Look these spikes. We've been at five. February. This is another reason I don't like February, David. It's just like... We are sustaining... It's not only are we so incredibly low, but we are sustaining such low numbers without any sort of like resurgence. Okay, why? I mean, nothing blew up. Again, we've been saying this for a while. There was 10-10. We're still not really sure what happened on that date, but there was no block five, there was no three hours capital. There's nothing that has really
Starting point is 00:05:55 blown up in a big way this cycle. And yet we are more fearful than we were when FTCS. blew up. Why? There are answers to that question that I think are native to crypto and then there are also answers to that question that also indicate why the stock market, the equities market, is also going risk off in this moment. I would say on the crypto side of things, the doubt of FUD, fear uncertainty, doubt, the doubt side of things, there's I think a higher level of doubt that the crypto markets will ever access some of the all-time highs that we've ever seen before, at least in the near term. And so there's like fundamental doubt about the industry. In the trad market, we'll talk about a lot of the uncertainty here, but to really drive the doubt point home, there's a tweet that
Starting point is 00:06:42 you and I were sharing back and forth this week from Evans, friend of the pod. He goes, I think what you've been seeing across crypto is people who have had historically 80 to 100% of the net worth in crypto for many years making a permanent allocation shift. Potential reasons are the four-year cycle. We are just doing the four-year cycle. And so now we are in the down part. There's quantum fears fundamentally suppressing the Bitcoin price. We are having the blowback of Trump using his powers to extract money using crypto. And that casts a very bad shadow on us. Same thing with micro strategy just being cooked. Wrench attacks are going up. And then also AI robotics are stealing our thunder. Overall, there's just like, it's casting doubt on
Starting point is 00:07:26 the belief of the industry. And this is something that. like I felt at East Denver and overall the industry as a whole is just like disgusting right now. Huh. It's disgusting. And you think that like... Disgusting. I didn't say disgusting.
Starting point is 00:07:41 I was like, wait. Wow. It's a disgusting podcast list. Well, I mean, there are some disgusting bits of this industry. So I wasn't going to completely question. We'll talk about some of those later. Yeah, but I guess here's what Evans is saying that this is a permanent allocation. from people who have had 80 to 99% of their net worth in crypto, they are permanently exiting.
Starting point is 00:08:04 I'm not sure if that's true, but that's what it feels like right now. That's what the sentiment feels like. How much of this do you think this is the market pricing in a backlash against crypto? So if the wins were in our favor with Trump coming to office and he was going to get the Genius Act done and clarity act done and get rid of Gensler and all of those things. That's well behind us now. Now we're in the other side of that. And the market's looking at crypto and saying, well, there's a lot of corruption and grift from Trump family. And like, you know, everything should be good in crypto, but we're not onboarding as many people as possible as we thought we would. The use cases aren't fully, you know,
Starting point is 00:08:50 and maybe the market's pricing in a backlash as well against Trump and against the regulatory or a tailwinds that we've had. You think that this could be true. Part of this, I think, is illustrated downstream of what we were talking about last week with the guy on Lex Rudman, Peter Steinberger, just talking about, like, I was building my AI product and the crypto people came in and tried to like gamblify everything about it. They hacked my servers.
Starting point is 00:09:15 They got in my way. And I just wanted to quit. And it was such a bad look for the crypto industry. And that was like kind of a cherry on top of so much other grift happening. in the industry that is on the media's front pages all the time. Whenever crypto is on the media front page, it's always bad. And then there's also the issue of Donald Trump, like using crypto as a conduit for Gryft everywhere. And so when Donald Trump got elected, Bitcoin ran from like $60,000 to $100,000, broke all-time highs, went even higher after that because the market was going to do things like put in a favorable SEC, put in a favorable CFTC,
Starting point is 00:09:57 It has. And it has. That's good. And that's good. And now we did all the good things. We got all the good things. And now we have created new bad things. And the one half of the political aisle is now so strongly associating crypto with Trump's
Starting point is 00:10:16 grift, who they hate. Yeah. That like now as an industry, now we have to deal with that. And that's the new problem ahead of us. And no longer are things like the Clarity Act or like for the. removal of Gary Gensler catalysts for the industry. And then you also add on that like we are just not not hot shit anymore. AI is hot shit.
Starting point is 00:10:36 We are not hot shit. Quantum is truly a problem. You layer on four year cycle. It's kind of just like we're getting slammed left and right, unfortunately. Which is kind of what bare markets feel like, which brings us back to the four year cycles component of this. That's right. And that's the flood. I mean, we talked about the fear, right?
Starting point is 00:10:52 And we just talked about the doubt. The doubt right now is that crypto will ever come back, will ever return. Let's talk about the uncertainty because it's not just in crypto markets. I feel like this is the one variable that is everywhere all at once right now. It is global. It is structural. In fact, that's the argument that in front of the show, Michael Nato made in his report this week, they came out on Wednesday.
Starting point is 00:11:14 He's calling this an uncertainty bubble. And there were, I think, two sources of uncertainty this week. Both of them have been pretty persistent over the last 12 months or so. The first is the Supreme Court and tariffs, or just generally tariffs. So what happened on the week that caused uncertainty with tariffs? Yeah, so this week, the Supreme Court struck down Trump's tariffs. So I think we all remember that famous picture of Trump with that Excel sheet poster board on Liberation Day, where he's like announcing all of the tariffs for all of the countries.
Starting point is 00:11:48 And it's like, remember that image. Those tariffs have been deemed illegal by the Supreme Court. Yes. All of that. What we are looking at on screen right now with the China, you know, 34% terrorists, European Union, 20% tariffs. Those tariffs are gone. Those tariffs are illegal as determined by the Supreme Court. That was Liberation Day.
Starting point is 00:12:06 Is that a day, by the way? Are we going to celebrate that day every year? Is that like a national holiday? And we get new tariffs. We get new tariffs every year. And so a 6 to 3 ruling in the Supreme Court held that the emergency powers that Donald Trump used to tariff nearly everything exceeded presidential authority. and required explicit congressional approval. So they said those are legal and we're not, those don't exist anymore.
Starting point is 00:12:29 They have to be refunded, right? And they have to be refunded. We'll get into that. In order to add it to the uncertainty as to what happens next, right after the Supreme Court did that, Trump reintroduced more tariffs, just under a different lane going a different direction. So the Supreme Court struck down the tariffs and then Trump was like, how about more terrorists?
Starting point is 00:12:51 And so the question might be like, how is Trump allowed to do? Why is he just allowed it to do that? Yes, he's going against the Supreme Court. Is he going against the Supreme Court? So I had to like do a little research here. The IEEPA, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to Institute Terrorist, Act of the President. That's what he used. That's the strategy, the legal precedent that he used to implement the tariffs in the first place.
Starting point is 00:13:17 That door is closed. Okay. But it turns out Trump, the president, has like four more doors available to him. There's section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act. There's Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. There's Section 122 of the Trade Act of 174. Doesn't matter what these things are.
Starting point is 00:13:33 The idea is like Trump just gets to pick one. And that's the new precedent for the new tariffs. And so now if we want to strike down those tariffs, we have to go back through the litigation process, which that is just like the market and me also and the world is like, where does the equilibrium? lie, like, between the Supreme Court and Donald Trump, because it sounds like we're just about to do another rodeo. Well, I mean, the tariffs are remaining in place, effectively. But there is
Starting point is 00:14:00 still the redemption piece of this, right? So with the original door that closed, there's a redemption. I don't think the Supreme Court weighed in on that. Do we have any idea how that's going to get resolved? Yeah. So $150 to $175 billion of tariff revenue has come to the door. Now we have that in the Treasury. That, in theory, could be the subject of reaffirm. refund claims. The Supreme Court did not directly order the refunds to happen, but like now anyone who's been paying tariffs to the government now gets to sue to get those back. Oh, really? Yes. So major companies like Costco and FedEx have already filed suits to preserve their claims. Roughly 300,000 U.S. businesses could do that. So the businesses get it. It seems
Starting point is 00:14:43 like it also costs consumers. Do individual consumers do you get to file for this? I am uncertain about that. Wow, there is so uncertainty in the market. I'm a big you on that one. Okay. So one source of uncertainty is the tariffs. And, you know, where I think this is broader, right? Because this also impacts geopolitics and where does the U.S.
Starting point is 00:15:04 see itself in the world as an agent of free trade and where do other countries see the U.S. There's all of that. Mixed in with that, though, we have the biggest uncertainty. I think that probably you and I have ever experienced in our lifetime. And that is like super. intelligent computers. That is AI.
Starting point is 00:15:23 AI tail risk. I think the future is so uncertain for everyone. You can see this in demographic questionnaire. It's like the zoomers just are so uncertain about their career choices, their career paths, anything. Tech companies, SaaS companies, everyone is like, what do we do about AI? Is it bullish for us? Is it bearish for us? I just don't know.
Starting point is 00:15:45 I honestly don't. Do you know? I don't know. No. The fog of the future. is so unclear. It is, you know, it's unclear.
Starting point is 00:15:54 And it's also. February of 2026. I don't know what 2028 is going to look like. That didn't used to be the case. I used to roughly be able to predict two years in the future. No clue for me personally. That's because AI has driven variance into the future, right? Like, there's the sense that it could be either really, really good up or really, really bad down.
Starting point is 00:16:14 Or nothing. Or maybe nothing. But it does feel like there's some jostling of kind of some experience. stream scenarios. There's some rebalancing of the of the world. That is correct. So there was a substack article that came out that made the rounds in traditional institutional finance as well, as well as crypto all over the place. It was called the 2028 global intelligence crisis by a group called Citrini Research. What was the summary of this article? Yeah. Yeah. So this piece was written as if it were June 2028 and it was doing a retrospective over the last few years
Starting point is 00:16:52 diagnosing a massive market crash in the S&P 500. So like, to be clear, fiction about a potential model of the future. Wait, wait, wait, wait, you said fiction, but in the very first sentence, this says what follows as a scenario, not a prediction, this isn't bear porn or AI, Doom, or fan fiction. It says it's not fan fiction. Ryan, it was bare porn and it was AI Doom or fan fiction. To be clear. That is exactly what it was.
Starting point is 00:17:17 So what, according to this article, does 2028 look like? Yeah, basically at the core of the argument, it's like massive AI-driven productivity gains paradoxically, like undermine the economy as a whole. Basically, AI takes all the jobs. All the companies under duress because of like profits getting squeezed, margins are getting squeezed, many companies lose this. the companies under duress, fire all their employees and replace them with AI agents, which actually, like, adds further capacity to AI agents and profitability to AI agents, which just kind of feeds into this doom loop of basically capacity is going to grow so fast, all companies are going to be dependent on it, like, every, the core of all company is going
Starting point is 00:18:05 to be like, Claude, Gemini, or ChatGBT, BT. Everyone's going to be out of the job. This is going to accelerate in a doom loop style fashion. and the tagline, if you don't want to read the article because it was somewhat long, is like, AI is so bullish that it's bearish. And it's going to, everyone's going to lose their job. That doesn't seem real.
Starting point is 00:18:24 But a lot of people said that this actually was responsible for spooking markets somewhat. Yeah, people called it the Citrini crash. Okay. Cetriene crash this week. This narrative, what? I guess this narrative kind of took hold propagated and people were thinking about job loss
Starting point is 00:18:41 due to AI in the week. And we lost, this was, on the 23rd. So what was that? Like Monday? U.S. stocks erased nearly 800 billion in market cap. AI disruption fears spread and trade war headlines return. So again, uncertainty in tariffs, uncertainty in AI. What's it actually going to do? Is this going to be so bullish that it's actually bearish? Markets got spooked and sold off. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. I do want to point out that there is just a coincidence and timing possibility here. Like the markets are volatile and have been volatile today or that day on Monday, they were volatile to the downside, which happens
Starting point is 00:19:19 to be like the first trading day after the weekend that this article went viral. I would like to allude to some sort of coincidence with that just because, you know, random walk, random walk. Random walk. It doesn't have to be a subject. Randomly walked in a direction that happens to like align with this substack. Well, you called this fanfic. Now, I'm going to ask you to justify that because yes, some people are taking this scenario. of seriously. It is a possibility. But why do you think it's fanfic? Okay, so there was another article that came out the week before that also went viral.
Starting point is 00:19:54 Matt Schumer's article, something big is happening. This grew to 85 million impressions. Like, everyone read this article to the point that everyone was making memes about how everyone was reading the article. And if you didn't read that article, the basic premise was that AI is in like January 2020 of COVID, where everyone kind of is rumbling. They're like, hey, there's this like, you know, virus thing in China that's spreading. But that's just like one of 18 news things and like don't really worry about it.
Starting point is 00:20:22 And then, you know, two months later, there was like the COVID crisis. That was this premise of this article, something big was happening is the same thing with AI. It's like, hey, guys, we are we are months before crisis and like it's going to impact all of us. Also fan fiction. It was also fan fiction. The takeaway, our takeaway. is that AI Dumer fan fiction is in because to the point of uncertainty,
Starting point is 00:20:49 we can only see so far into the future right now. It's product market fit for uncertainty. Yes, it's narrative meme product market fit for uncertainty. That's a great way to put it. Yeah, I pretty much agree. Noah Smith, I thought, had a great article about this. He says the Centrini Post is just a scary bedtime story, and he gives some reasons why.
Starting point is 00:21:07 But one of the big reasons why, of course, is like, actors can respond. If AI is so productive and so impactful to the economy from a growth perspective that it spurs innovation and it spurs productivity, well, we know how to distribute that to the people. I mean, we did it to your point in COVID, right? You could helicopter money. You could drop stimulus checks. All the people affected by AI layoffs. Well, we have 15% like growth in GDP. We can cut a portion of that and give that to the population. Like, we know how to fix this at some level. So it's hard for me to imagine. I think Noah Smith made this point, too, a world where, you know, the U.S. falls off because AI is too successful and too productive, right? Or any society does that.
Starting point is 00:21:58 Like, more concerning would be an AI bubble and then a bust. It's not productive. And we go into kind of a downward doom loop of like recession or depression or depression or something like that. But if this technology is all people think it is, then there's a way to slice that off
Starting point is 00:22:15 and give that to the workforce. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, I think you labeled a handful of risks there. Like, one risk is, Alex Thorne actually put this fantastically in a tweet where he said, the market is afraid that AI won't be good enough and won't live up to the $600 billion
Starting point is 00:22:34 of expected CAPEX spending from the big companies in 2026. Yep. That's one worry. The market is also worried that AI will be too good and kill every job, especially in software. The market, like, the interpretation is like, you can validate both takes in the market simultaneously,
Starting point is 00:22:50 and those are opposite outcomes. Yes. And so the market is just doesn't fucking know, dude. Very confused. So the summary is volatility is up, uncertainty is in. Yeah, so, like, the market yo-yo's between AI's good, AI's bad, AI's good, AI's bad. Yeah, and how do you hedge against that? I mean, Michael NATO's answer is like, make sure you have a little bit of cash.
Starting point is 00:23:09 All right, there are some other answers to that as well. I hate that answer. In the meanwhile, in the meanwhile, crypto is getting a beat down on some of this uncertainty. Maybe it's going to spread. We got a few things to talk about. Was Jane Street responsible for the crash of Tara Luna all the way in 2022, Crypto Winter? Are they responsible for suppressed Bitcoin prices now? We'll talk about that.
Starting point is 00:23:29 Also, meta coming back with Zuckbucks. So stablecoin plans, tune in for that, all this and more. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Galaxy operates for digital assets. next generation infrastructure come together, serving institutions end to end. On the market side, Galaxy is a leading institutional platform, providing access to spot, derivatives, structured products, defy-lending, investment banking, and financing. With more than 1,600 trading counterparties, Galaxy helps institutions navigate every phase of the market cycle. The platform also supports
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Starting point is 00:26:19 traditional markets. Try trading gold on BitGet now at bitget.com. Click the link in the show notes. For more information, this is not financial advice. This week, the administrator helping wind down Terraform Labs, the company behind Terra Luna, accused Jane Street of insider trading that helped collapse Terraform. Labs. And so this has led to the crypto Twitter industry, the crypto as a whole, asking like, oh, wait a second. Was Jane Street involved with just a terrible demise of crypto in 2022, starting
Starting point is 00:26:49 with TerraFORN Labs, but then a little bit further after that, starting with the actual accusation here. So a quote from the Terraform Labs administrator, Jane Street abused market relationships to rig the market in its favor during one of the most consequential events in crypto history. on behalf of injured parties, we will pursue all avenues supported by the facts and law against those who exploited their position and reaped substantial profits
Starting point is 00:27:12 at the expense of TerraFORN lapse creditors. Okay. What was the act in question? So I think we all remember when Tara Luna blew up. This happened May 8th, May 7th through 10th, starting on May 7th.
Starting point is 00:27:26 Four years ago. Four years ago, 2020. Jesus. We've been doing this for too long. May 7th, 2022. Terraform Lab. withdrew about $150 million of TerraUSE from the Curve 3 pool, and that was where TUSD, the Terra Stablecoin,
Starting point is 00:27:41 basically had its liquidity, had its peg, was priced. The next day, Doquan would later say that that $150 million withdrawal was meant to move the TerraUSD from one liquidity pool to another, so it was like an innocuous transfer. But the execution and timing of this move was claimed to be non-public information that Terra Labs is alleging Jane Street abused in pursuit of profit because less than 10 minutes after the withdrawal of that 150 million TerraUSD, Jane Street or Wallace associated with Jane Street,
Starting point is 00:28:16 removed $85 million of TerraUSD from the same curve three pool. With this exiting of liquidity from the curve pool, TerraUSD became, what's the word, fragile? The peg became fragile because there just was not a lot of liquidity left after these withdrawals. And like if you go back in Terra Luna history, like a month before, they used a lot of TerraUSD to buy a bunch of Bitcoin to prop up the peg. They bought a bunch of avalanche.
Starting point is 00:28:42 Like they were doing irresponsible things with TerraUSD, which also took away liquidity from this pool. But these are the last few withdrawals of liquidity from this pool that happened right before the demise of the actual Terra Sablecoin. Because the next day after May 7th, the next day on May 8th, TerraUSD fell to 0.97 cents. The next day it fell to 0.75 cents. And then two days after that, it would ultimately trade at just 13 cents.
Starting point is 00:29:14 And so these were the last withdrawals of liquidity before the table coin depegged. Jane Street just was supposed to be an investor, was an investor, but ended up plunging the knife into Terra Forum and Tara Luna and helping to precipitate the collapse also exiting their position. I mean, by the way, the same administrator who is suing Jane Street also has a lawsuit against Jump. Right. Who claim they should jump did the same things. Yeah, for like $4 billion or something.
Starting point is 00:29:48 Like, I'm sure they did these things. Like, these are... These are the most informed people about how Terra functions. Yes. And they have the most at stake. So it's true that, And algorithmic stable coin, the way it was constructed, it was always destined for this type of thing to happen. It was like destiny.
Starting point is 00:30:07 Yeah. And it's also true that, like, at some level, I mean, that's what these funds do. I mean, they're absolute sharks. So you're waving like a chunk of, like a hunk of steak in front of a shark. And you're saying, don't eat this. Like, I know you're going to be my friend. And then it like, what's it going to do? It's going to eat the steak.
Starting point is 00:30:24 Yeah. I mean, that's what happened. Turns out fish are food. Yes. Now, I think there was an especially vitriolic reaction to this, I guess. It felt in some ways, David, to me, like crypto Twitter was trying to find a villain, the story, and hammer on them. Not to say that Jane Street is innocent or they're not a villain. They kind of are, but like, why are we now talking about this four years later?
Starting point is 00:30:49 Yeah. Was part of my question. And there was also this article that came out about the 10 a.m. drop. how Jane Street broke Bitcoin's price. And this starts to cast some blame on Jane Street not only for events four years ago in 2022, but also a reason for price suppression of Bitcoin now. And they're claiming there's a drop at 10 a.m.
Starting point is 00:31:16 of Bitcoin price. It's 10 a.m. every day, like clockwork. And it's because Jane Street is doing some shenanigans. I guess behind the scenes with, I don't know, different trad-fi hedging techniques and such involving i bit i didn't fully cover all of the details of this is an ongoing developing story that like internet sleuths are trying to like you know poke at and measure but we don't really have the the truth of the matter here yeah and so um but they did note that once this lawsuit dropped apparently the 10 a m yeah stopped stopped
Starting point is 00:31:51 happening and so they're pointing at jane street and saying which i'm still categorizing inside of the random walk range. Like it just happened to go up for a day. Like I would need further substantial evidence to really relate Jane Street's activities with the price of Bitcoin. Well, so part of this story though is crypto, I think, waking up to the fact
Starting point is 00:32:14 that with Tradfai instruments, the, that can start to become the tail that wags the dog. So part of the same story, the 21 million cap only works if the market's sitting on top of it is honest. So the 21 million hard cap, that's only 21 million on chain if it's Bitcoin. If you start creating these different Bitcoin,
Starting point is 00:32:36 fractional reserve objects and derivatives and options. You can make 21 billion synthetic bit if you want to and have the means. Exactly. And I bet if that sort of thing starts to happen, then the scarcity of Bitcoin matters less in a synthetic Bitcoin world. And that is starting to have. have ripple effects on the actual price of the 21 million real Bitcoin that exist out there somewhere. That's the charge that TradFi is, I know, Tradfai shenanigans are starting to affect the rest
Starting point is 00:33:07 of crypto. Yeah, this, I remember one of the first financial lessons I ever learned in 2017 was I was I was in a bunch of ICO, like subreddits and communities and chat rooms. And there was a common denominator amongst all of them in 2018, where like, the price was going down across the board. And like the common, a very common thought was like, somebody is suppressing the price. You got to buy our token because the price is suppressed. Yes.
Starting point is 00:33:36 People are manipulating the price of our bags and they're manipulating them down. And when I see that behavior of just like somebody's out there suppressing our price and like Bitcoin's at $70,000 but it should be at $150,000 because this bogeyman is suppressing the price, I'm like, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait, I don't know about that. I don't know. That's how I sort of think about,
Starting point is 00:34:01 not that I'm doubting that these types of things are happening and shenanigans are happening, but I mean, I think it's just like, we can't blame that for the reason that Bitcoin is, you know, trading the 60K range. If Bitcoin's fair value and the market wants to equilibrium at, is truly $150,000, and a change rate is suppressing the price.
Starting point is 00:34:25 price. It can only, markets are truth machines, Jane Street can only do that for so long until they blow up or something happens. That's right. And then we spike up to 150. Like, we will get there. Yeah. The problem is demand, isn't it? I mean, that's the problem right now. It's not something that Jane Street is doing to us. It's just where we are in the cycle. I guess one thing, though, it seems like is crypto Twitter is looking for a villain. We had a very clean, we had a very clean and clear set of villains during last bear market. I mean, it was. It was so easy.
Starting point is 00:34:59 There were three of them. Terluena, three hours capital, F-TX. Yeah, exactly. And also then Gensler, as we were carrying. Like, who are the villains?
Starting point is 00:35:09 This is why I think at some level. Now we just can't get out of our own way. We have to look in the mirror and we have to look at sort of the use case. It's like hard mode now. And so I think there's some reaction of trying to find some villains out there. And there's always,
Starting point is 00:35:22 you can always find villains. We are all temporarily embarrassed, you know, Citadel members. Crypto billionaires. Crypto billionaires, yeah. Meta is reviving its stable coin plans, David. The Zuckbucks are coming back, it looks like. What's this? Okay, so, I mean, you remember the DM project of 2019, correct?
Starting point is 00:35:43 Oh, yeah. Yeah, so Facebook was early to stable coins. I actually technically wasn't a stable coin. They actually wanted to make their own currency using their own internal blockchain. they created the move language, and they wanted to apply that to blockchain. That's how I remember it, right? Yeah, and at first it wasn't a dollar. It was actually like a basket of fiat currencies, right?
Starting point is 00:36:07 It was even more wild than, you know, stable-point dollar. It was even more ambitious. They wanted to make their own currency on their own blockchain. And I will say they were way ahead of the time. Elizabeth Warren did not like this. A lot of people did like it. A lot of people did not like this, but I do have a very clear memory of Mark Zuckerberg getting called into Congress and him just getting grilled about like you are out of line. Like this is out of scope for you, blah, blah, blah.
Starting point is 00:36:35 Nobody wanted. How dare you? Yeah. I mean, this was also way too close after the Cambridge Analytica news. And so the idea of Facebook who's already manipulating elections is also getting their own currency. It was the very beginning of a huge anti-tech backlash that. is still with us to this day. Yes.
Starting point is 00:36:53 Anyways, fast forward to today. Meta is putting out a request for a product, an RFP to third-party firms, with the goal to begin integration of a stable coin into the Facebook ecosystem. So that includes Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, which has, I don't know, a billion users across all of these things.
Starting point is 00:37:12 So incredible distribution. You just sent out an RFP for that? Yeah, you can just do that. That's what they're doing. Hey, we have 3 billion users. We're just looking for someone. We would like somebody build us a stable coin, please. Who do you think that's going to be?
Starting point is 00:37:24 I bet you tempo is at the top of that list. Stripe. Stripe tempo. Do you know that the-stripe founders are actually on the meta board of directors? Do you know that? Well, that makes way too much sense. It's pretty straight. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Stripe is definitely the hottest candidate.
Starting point is 00:37:40 And so the idea here is that like meta is just going to get a native stablecoin for use inside of its ecosystem. Yeah. Question for you, Ryan. Are you bullish on this? Do you think this will be a good, adopted, distributed product? It'll be fine, yeah. I mean, like, what gets me bullish and excited is, like, true crypto-native kind of products, and a stable coin is sort of adjacent to that.
Starting point is 00:38:02 Certainly democratizing finance, I think it's a good step. It's a bit more bankless. I think so goes meta, so goes the rest of social media. So, yeah, I would put this in the bullish camp. I'm not sure how much of that stable coin volume is going to actually hit open public permissionless blockchains. It could be all in something like Tembo, for instance. But I imagine at least some of it will.
Starting point is 00:38:27 So I think this is a big deal, actually. And it's like one of those bare market things where it's news in the background. No one really cares. No one really reacts. But this could be part of the story to get stable coins from, what, $350 billion right now to a trillion plus?
Starting point is 00:38:43 Hmm. What do you think? I'm bearish on the product, growth here. I don't see meta and meta's ecosystem. I don't know why I need stable coins inside of like the
Starting point is 00:38:58 meta products that I use is basically just Instagram and occasionally WhatsApp. I don't see that my personal need for stable coins. What do you want to pay someone on WhatsApp? You can pay someone on Instagram or WhatsApp. It's probably far more likely than because like WhatsApp does have like it's actually
Starting point is 00:39:13 the normal people's telegram. So I've noticed I've noticed I you know a certain of my family members of contacts, when we get on a call just to do like a video chat, catch up with them or something, we'll just use Instagram, right? You know, I don't need a special app
Starting point is 00:39:26 for that because, oh, okay, we're all on Instagram. Well, what if I just want to send my cousin money, let's say? Yeah. I could just stay on Instagram and send them some stable coins. I suppose remittances through WhatsApp would be a pretty big possibility for them. I guess like I'm bearish on it in Instagram and Facebook.
Starting point is 00:39:44 I'm probably more bullish on it inside of WhatsApp. Okay, well, yeah. Those are the tables, we'll have to see who wins the RFP, huh? And maybe go from there. Also, Zach XPT, did we talk about this? This is the crime. The crime exposure they were seeing in crypto. Okay, so Zach XPT, he started with a teaser.
Starting point is 00:40:02 It was a pre-announcement of the crime exposure. He dropped this on February 23rd. Was this Monday? A major investigation dropping February 26th, that's today, of one of crypto's most profitable businesses where multiple employees abused internal data to insider trade over a prolonged period of time. So Zach XPT just drops this.
Starting point is 00:40:23 And of course, Zach XPT is the sleuth of all sleuths. I mean, you don't want to be on any of Zach XPT's exposure. You do not want to be in Zach's crosshairs. If you are in Zach's crosshairs. He's a hero. Yeah. He's bringing justice to crypto. He's like a wild west.
Starting point is 00:40:37 He's the, he's the, uh, vigilante, the sheriff. Sheriff, he's our sheriff. Of the Wild West. Yeah. Yeah. Uh-huh. And he brings justice.
Starting point is 00:40:45 He's doing a fantastic job. If you don't like Zach XPT, that's a bad look for you. You're a criminal. You're kind of a criminal. Anyway, so now he's getting to the point where he's like pre-announcing what he's about to do. Dude, 12 million views on this tweet, man. I was excited. I saw this tweet and I'm like, this is my Super Bowl.
Starting point is 00:41:07 Though a polymarket spun up about this. Which crypto company will Zach XPT expose for insider trading? Were you watching this this week? I was actually, I remember sending this to you in the week, and I was like, there was like five or six companies that had like a decent probability on it. And I was like, wow, the market truly doesn't know. The market does not know what's going on.
Starting point is 00:41:31 I think the highest one was Meteora was people's guests, the biggest guest. And Meteora is where the Libra debacle came from and a lot of the other like meme coin sniping games of old. Pump fun was on there, a handful of others. Bankless was not on there.
Starting point is 00:41:53 I'll say that. How would we do? We don't have a venue for insider trading. But there was one contender that just started gaining markets here on polymarket all week. Yes. And you know that's a bad sign. Slowly creeped up.
Starting point is 00:42:08 Started low, ended up. Wait, you said meteor? Excuse me, you're right. Axiom. Axiom. Axiom. Axiom. Axiom.
Starting point is 00:42:15 Oh, did I just drop it? Axiom! The winner is Axiom. Congratulations. You won the crypto company, Zach XBT will expose for insider trading. And it spiked up pre-ZACCPT actually formally announcing this. So it was, surprise, surprise, axiom. That's who won the prize of the week.
Starting point is 00:42:33 So what did Zach XPT expose about axiom? What's the charge here? Or the allegation, I should say. The allegation, yeah. So we should probably start with just what is axiom. Axiom is a Marketplace Memcoin marketplace on Solana
Starting point is 00:42:48 that also has a lot of like social features as well and so if you are just in the meme coin trenches it's kind of like your front page it's like Reddit for like Reddit for meme coins and for talking about meme coins and learning about meme coins not necessarily talking but just like a lot of market information so like meme coin markets and secondary and tertiary information as well are these some of the markets
Starting point is 00:43:12 here? Don't dofone, one crime. Are these mean coins? Rug coin, yeah, detective coin, imposter coin. Like these aren't, this is not my corner of the internet. So anyways, according to Zach, Axiom staff had access to internal dashboards and that allowed staff to search users by wallet or referral code and a view other linked wallets, transaction histories, just a lot of
Starting point is 00:43:40 data, kind of like what I'm visioning is like a data war room of who's playing in the meme coin games, in the meme coin trenches. And like, you know, by the year of our lore 2026, the meme coin trenches have just like devolved down into just like the most cutthroat, uh, capable, sophisticated traders. Like there's no, there's no like unsophisticated trader left in meme coins. It's all people who like truly love the game, poker players who have been at the poker table for a long time. All sharks, no fish. Sharks. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So Zach alleges that like there's the axiom internal employees who have way more data than anyone else in the market. Now, the thread here of Zach XVT has a bunch of screenshots and evidence.
Starting point is 00:44:25 Here's a clip that kind of, I think, illustrates pretty well what's going on and was actually used as evidence as to how Zach ExPT discovered all the fraud here. This is one of the employees, a senior business business. development employee of Axiom, and he's talking about researching various wallets. So here's what he had to say. Is that if you have a wallet or a ref code or a user ID, any of those three, I can find out anything to do with that person. If they're on Axiom, I'll have all their wallet. I'll have all, everyone, I'll have time and dates. I can even see who they track and what they're named. this employee was going to parts of the Axiom database that he probably shouldn't have access to. And he was accessing this in order to find out information about like the wallets and the traders behind these wallets. It's kind of a vast kind of data intelligence system tracking all sorts of information on trade. And then he was what, like front running or he was trading based on this insider intel information? So what he would do is he would just, like, kind of identify who are the most successful traders, the biggest influencers.
Starting point is 00:45:47 And he knew what whose wallets were whose and he could map wallets to influencers. And then he would be able to identify like, oh, you know, four of these influencers all started buying up allocations in their private undisclosed wallets of this particular meme coin. I'm going to copy trade them. And then lo and behold, later the influencers tweet about the meme coin. The meme coin goes up. And so it's- And the influencers, by the way, they mostly are dumping on their community, on their, you know. The meme coin complex is not my favorite corner of the world.
Starting point is 00:46:20 So yes, that's a yes. It's kind of the game that people like playing. Sure. It's like it's just cutthroat left and right. I don't want to moralize about it. It's just like a, it's a cutthroat part of the internet. I don't recommend anyone really go there unless they really enjoy the game. Intrinsically, this person had an advantage that no one else.
Starting point is 00:46:39 had and was like using that advantage to their benefit to insider trade. And probably shouldn't have had access to this information as the net of it. So Axiom actually commented about this. They said we are surprised and disappointed to hear that someone on our team abused internal customer support tools to look up user wallets. We have recommended access to these tools. We'll continue to investigate and hold the offending parties responsible. Do you know what this reminds me of, Brian?
Starting point is 00:47:06 What? Do you remember the name Nate Chastain? Oh, was that OpenC? Was that the OpenC employee back in like 2022 or something that was front running NFT? So the Nate Chesson was this guy who worked at OpenC who was privy to the information of which NFT's OpenC would feature on their homepage, kind of just like in a rotating band of like this hour, we're going to put up this NFT and he would use that information. He would buy the NFTs ahead of time and then sell them a few hours later for a profit. and he was doing it under like Nate Chassain.eath. And like this person got sentenced to jail by the Department of Justice.
Starting point is 00:47:46 Wow. He made something like $60,000. He made something like a very, what seemed like a very small amount of money in the grand scheme of things. And like I think this person is making a lot more than that. But like the department just just doesn't care about this corner of the internet. Because granted, like I said, I don't know about that.
Starting point is 00:48:06 remaining at this. Oh. Yeah. So, I mean, this is at the end of Zach XPT's thread. He said, given the person that we're referring to, Brokes is, I believe his last name, given Brooks is based in New York City. I think the case presents itself as a good opportunity for the Southern District of New York, since it may fall within their jurisdiction. So Zach XPT, just given a layup to the authorities in New York to go prosecute this. Yikes. Okay. Well, maybe it was NHTSA and 2.0. We got more to talk about. Hyperliquid is opening a policy center in D.C. Also, Robin Hood launching a venture fund that's opened all, getting some private access to deals.
Starting point is 00:48:45 And Pete Hegesith, the Secretary of War goes toe to toe with Anthropic. We'll talk about all that and more. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Euphoria brings one tap trading to the palm of your hand. Built on MegaEath, Euphoria takes real-time price charts and projects it over a grid of squares. You tap the squares that you think the price will enter in just five to 30 seconds in the future. If the price goes into that quadrant, you can pocket anywhere between 2 and 100x your trade. No other application helps you trade faster and with more leverage on market-driving events,
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Starting point is 00:49:42 and everything gets converted into Mega ETH's native stable coin, USDM, in the background. Check it out at Euphoria.finance and download the app or find it in Telegram as a mini app. Few people in crypto put real skin in the game when they make public top or bottom calls. The D5 report is one of them. The week before the October 10th flash crash, Michael from the Defy Report emailed his entire newsletter saying he's going aggressively risk off and sold the majority of his book from crypto
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Starting point is 00:50:43 Hyperliquid is opening a policy center in D.C. being led by a huge friend of the podcast, Jake Shravinsky, who tweeted out, I am proud to announce to launch up the Hyper Liquid Policy Center where I will serve as CEO. HPC is an independent research and advocacy organization dedicated. to ensuring that defy can flourish in the United States, the future of finance will be decentralized. So, I mean, I think you and I both have the utmost respect for Jake Chervinsky. So pretty, it's just exciting to see Jake do anything. He was previously a general counsel at variant, a VC fund.
Starting point is 00:51:16 And now he's doing this. What's your reaction? My reaction, I think, is if you are playing in the exchange game, you need to have lobbyists in D.C. these days. And so Hyperliquid, they, I mean, Jake is calling them D.C. defy here, and I think that's partially true. Also, somewhat generous. But I would agree with that. I think if you were playing in the trading game for crypto assets, you need to have a lobby force in DC just like Coinbase, just like Cracken. If you are hyperliquid, Coinbase is not advocating
Starting point is 00:51:48 for you and potentially is advocating for the opposite of you. That's right. If you're not at the seat, at the table, you're on the menu, right? This is what is often said in DC. So this is hyperliquid trying to get a seat at the table for sure. Jake is not the only big name. Chris Giancarlo, X CFTC chair, is also a legal advisor. Crypto dad, crypto dad, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And also Bob Diamond X. Barclays CEO, I don't know that name. But like, those are some heavyweights.
Starting point is 00:52:16 Kind of stacked. Yeah, heavy weights. So good for hyperliquid, probably a shrewd, smart strategy, good business move. Robin Hood, launching a venture, Ventures business? Wait, what are they doing here? Is this getting us access to some of the private deals that we haven't had exposure to? What's going on? That's the idea. Yeah, so Robin Hood is Robin Hood Adventures. And their first fund is Robin Hood Ventures Fund One. The ticker is R-V-I. Close-end fund that will IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. That's the thing. It'll IPO, right? So this is
Starting point is 00:52:47 not a venture fund that only is available for accredited investors. It's a public market thing. you, if you are an unincredited investor, you can buy shares in this thing just like anyone else. There's no privilege, privilege parties here. What's in it, though? The idea, they're going to raise $1 billion. Okay. And then after it will trade like a normal stock,
Starting point is 00:53:08 and then that $1 billion will go into the following companies. Air Wallex, which is a global fintech payments platform, Boom, Supersonic, which is an aerospace company that's working on hypers supersonic passenger jets. Did you, Ryan, listen to the interview that me and Josh did on Limitless of the Spoon CEO? I did.
Starting point is 00:53:28 Super good interview. I'm very excited for him. I can't wait for a supersonic air travel to come in like 20, 29. Not anytime soon. Don't hold your breath, but whatever. Databricks is another AI company inside this portfolio,
Starting point is 00:53:42 an AI and analytics focus enterprise software. Mercore, don't know what that is. ORA. Maybe you have an aura ring, Ryan. Ramp, a corporate finance expense management platform and Revolut a fintech banking app. And they are also, Robin Hood is also in late stage negotiations to get Stripe Equity, which I think is maybe the most interesting of that into the fund.
Starting point is 00:54:02 I look at this and I'm like, this is great. It's better than nothing. However, like it would, I wish we had access to these companies earlier. Like, Stripe, I don't know, it's worth like $100 billion or something. It's been private all that time. I mean, it would be so much nicer. And it says like, no, I don't want to buy Stripe at $100 billion. I want to buy Stripe it.
Starting point is 00:54:20 like $5 billion, five years ago, 10 years ago. Yeah, public markets are still broken from that perspective. But you do have to give some credits of Ladd and Robin Hood. They're the ones breaking it open a little bit earlier than everyone else. Yeah, it's an incremental move for sure. Also, this was a big deal. Coinbase adding stocks and ETFs trading to the Coinbase platform. So they announced that they were doing this, I think back in December, actually.
Starting point is 00:54:45 But now it's really starting to roll out in earnest. I know you mentioned to me before the show that you actually saw stocks for the first time in your Coinbase account as of this week, right? That's right. That's right. Yeah, so, I mean, this kind of puts them approaching product parity with Robin Hood.
Starting point is 00:55:01 The 24-5 trading, I actually think, is leapfrogging Robin Hood. Less 24 hours a day, five days a week, so just not on the weekends? Not on the weekends. Not on the weekends. Yeah. But, like, Robin Hood fully stops trading,
Starting point is 00:55:16 you know, once the most the weekends. market closest in a little bit more after hours. So that's pretty cool. Yeah, I mean, so can you buy any stocks? Is it going to be? I think so. Stocks and ETFs. I think so. I haven't, I haven't, I don't know all the stocks, but like all these tickers that I searched showed up. So that's great. I mean, look, this is Coinbase becoming more like Robin Hood as Robin Hood becomes more like Coinbase. As the rest of the market becomes more like the both of them. The big gap there, while that's a true statement, the big gap there that I think truly differentiates Robin Hood from Coinbase is the U.S. of the app.
Starting point is 00:55:51 Yes. It's nice. It's so bad. It's lacking. It's so lacking. They have to know this. They get some ketchup to do. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:55:59 I'm sure they're trying here. On the AI watch this week, there's so much we could talk about with AI. I know this is one that we both saw and was interesting. It's notable given our previous forays down AI safety, the AI safety conversation. Yeah. And Vitalik commented on it. So apparently Anthropic is getting an ultimatum from the Secretary of War, I believe not Secretary of Defense, the Pentagon demanding full control of AI in a final offer to Anthropic. So there's the showdown happening between Anthropic and the U.S. Department of War around how Anthropics LLM will actually be in use of the Pentagon.
Starting point is 00:56:38 So I believe there's a contract between Department of War and Anthropic for a lot. like $300, $200 million, I believe, something like this. And the Department of War wants the ability to use Anthropic tools, basically unfettered. No constraints, completely unconstraint. So right now, Claude Anthropic has guardrails up to, like, you know, protect against certain behaviors. Well, there's two things in particular. They have guardrails. They signed a contract with Department of War saying, you can use our tools, but there's two things you can't do.
Starting point is 00:57:10 You can't master avail U.S. citizens and you can't use it for fully autonomy. autonomous weapons, AI, fully autonomous weapons. Those are the two things. And the Department of War is saying, no, we don't want those guardrails. We want, we want those things. We want the ability to do anything that the law permits. Yeah, you don't get to tell us what we can and cannot do. Right.
Starting point is 00:57:30 We are the government. And so there's some escalation here between Pete Hegeseth, who is a secretary of war and Anthropic top brass. And Pete Hegseth, I believe he was giving them until Friday to relax these. guardrails and constraints or else they were going to kick them to the curb, make their lives difficult, cancel the contract, you know, dot, dot, dot, who knows what else is kind of the implicit threat. And as the time of recording, Anthropic is not yet backed down, I believe. I'm not sure whether they're going to negotiate or what's going to happen in the future, but this is notable
Starting point is 00:58:05 to me. Very notable. And one of the notable things with reasons is that say Anthropic holds up to its values and to its commitments. You know, Anthropic, of all the AI labs, probably has the strongest allegiance to AI safety out of any of them. But the problem is if they, if they hold fast and hold to their values, the Department of Defense, Department of War, it's just going to XAI. It's just going to Google. It'll go to somebody else.
Starting point is 00:58:33 Oh, yeah. And then they will make all the money. And then they will have further resources and funds to make their product better. and then Claude will suffer as a result. So it's a big Molok trap. It's a prisoner's dilemma. Yeah, it's a coordination problem. Because you can imagine Elon Musk and X saying,
Starting point is 00:58:49 hey, we won't put those guardrails up. But the fact that the Department of War actually is going to Anthropic and fighting so hard for it does also signify to me that Anthropic must be ahead on a number of dimensions. Like, why do they want it so? Yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah, I saw there was a thread guy tweet,
Starting point is 00:59:06 which was clearly Anthropic Claude, can see God and the Department of War wants that. Yeah. Vitalik actually had a message for Dario, he said. It will significantly increase my opinion of Anthropic if they do not back down and honorably eat the consequences. In my opinion, fully autonomous weapons and mass privacy violation are the two things we want less of.
Starting point is 00:59:30 So in my ideal world, anyone working on those things gets access to the same open weight LLMs as everyone else and exactly nothing on top of that. So Vitalik telling Dario, the CEO founder of Anthropic, to stay strong and try to resist the Department of War for as long as you can. Do you think you actually can resist the Department of War if they want something in the U.S. I mean, the U.S. domiciled company, you mentioned the coordination, the Moloch trap. Is any of this realistic? I mean, it depends how aggressive the Department of War actually wants to get, doesn't it? I guess there are laws against this type of thing.
Starting point is 01:00:03 But I don't know. the way the U.S. is going, it feels like the administration will do anything it can, right. It wants to do and can get away with. Yeah, I think the AI safety people are right here in that this is a massive uphill battle to have a desirable outcome here because first, Anthropic needs to win a case against the government. And then XAI, OpenAI, Jugal, need to go in locks.
Starting point is 01:00:34 step with Anthropic and agree to the same things and not defect. And so, like, it doesn't really matter in my mind if Anthropic wins this one fight. You have to win a series of fights that prevents the negative side of HGI coming out and And that's just in the U.S. right? What if China is not going to have any guardrails with respect to mass surveillance of its people? China is like, Claude, please fight this fight as hard as possible because that gives us a lead. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:01:06 And you don't master veil your citizens. We're happy to master veil our citizens. We're doing it. We were doing it for decades. One last thing I had on this is I wonder if it's less effective to kind of overtly resist, although maybe overt resistance is a good thing. And Anthropics should continue doing that in this case. But why not just give all users the option to encrypt their message logs with Anthropic?
Starting point is 01:01:32 That's a step forward. Because if all of these messages are encrypted, then there's no data to actually share with the U.S. government. And so you take the mass surveillance prong out of the arsenal here. You don't even make it an option, right? It's kind of the principle of like the government will ask you to do as much as you can do in this domain. So what you should be doing, your posture should be, we don't want responsibility. We want to control. Let's encrypt the data, at least have the option to encrypt the data and let individual citizens fight it up. That's right. Anyway, maybe there's a reason they're not doing that. There's so much to watch here. And this is partly why the markets feel uncertain. I feel uncertain.
Starting point is 01:02:13 Is the United States government about to have an omnipresent, omnipotent AI model that they can use whatever for whatever reason? Because it also materially impacts what the future looks like. Yeah. The theme of the week is fun. I think it's going to be the theme of the next five years maybe. Oh, God. Oh, God.
Starting point is 01:02:32 That's a lot of uncertainty ahead because there's just a lot of variance right now in the markets. Well, we've got to end it there. Of course, you know, crypto is risky. So is the rest of the world. You could lose what you put in. But we're headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

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