Bankless - ROLLUP: False Strength? | ETH Crisis | Altcoin ATHs | Satoshi’s Coins

Episode Date: May 29, 2026

Crypto is splitting in two: Bitcoin and ETH look weak, while HYPE, ZEC, NEAR, and VVV keep breaking out. Ryan and David unpack the strange market divergence, Ethereum’s crisis of faith, and whether this rally is real or false strength. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔮POLYMARKET | #1 PREDICTION MARKET https://bankless.cc/polymarket-podcast 🟦 COINBASE ONE | MEMBER MONTH https://bankless.cc/coinbase-one 🧭OKX | TRADE, EARN, PAY to OKX | 120M+ USERS WORLDWIDE https://app.okx.com/join/USBANKLESS 🦊 METAMASK | DOWNLOAD NOW https://go.metamask.io/BL-Pod-Download 🌐BRIX | EMERGING MARKET YIELD https://bankless.cc/brix --- TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 1:48 Markets https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/2059793993551008245  https://x.com/cburniske/status/2059797889824776463 https://imgur.com/Tp9beNo https://www.theblock.co/post/402816/bitcoin-falls-below-73000 https://imgur.com/R0ih6kL https://x.com/solunavaxxer/status/2060021032455741567 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3ptz8qvZcg https://x.com/readDanwrite/status/2057476278140145717  https://www.artemis.ai/sectors/digital-asset-treasuries https://x.com/saylor/status/2059970505835155782 https://x.com/Kalshi_Crypto/status/2059983883274191046 https://www.hypestrat.xyz/ https://imgur.com/1MUGQy7 https://polymarket.com/event/what-price-will-bitcoin-hit-before-2027 https://polymarket.com/event/what-price-will-ethereum-hit-before-2027 https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/hyperliquid https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/venice-token https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/near https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/zcash https://x.com/JSeyff/status/2059689056368210228 https://farside.co.uk/hyp/ https://x.com/PolymarketTrade/status/2059973516963750204 https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2060004371983667484 https://www.axios.com/2026/05/28/iran-peace-deal-trump-approval https://imgur.com/m7YNdxu https://imgur.com/MIdPjqZ https://imgur.com/VoixfYd https://imgur.com/s5AYaWg https://www.theblock.co/post/402638/tokenized-pokemon-card-marketplaces-record-7-4-million-hype-peaks-30th-anniversary 32:26 Ethereum Sentiment Crisis & DeFi Under AI Threat? https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/2059371247163613489 https://x.com/hosseeb/status/2057455211375976891 https://www.theblock.co/post/402864/standard-chartered-ethereum-amazon-dot-com-bubble-eth-will-catch-up https://x.com/Yogita_Khatri5/status/2059955611085709612 https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/2058583593102844111 https://farcaster.xyz/vitalik.eth/0x88000d5f https://x.com/maraoz/status/2059413578130641052 55:25 Robostrategy: Nic Carter & Andrew Kang Pivot to Robotics https://x.com/RoboStrategy/status/2059650538380165331 https://x.com/intern/status/2059287577257992623 56:52 NEAR Confidential Transactions https://x.com/NEARProtocol/status/2057810480635228666 t.co/BrLpsWmzKd https://x.com/ilblackdragon/status/2059793756933767379 58:10 SoFiUSD & Bank Stablecoins https://www.theblock.co/post/402361/sofi-rolls-out-sofiusd-stablecoin-to-banking-app-users https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/2059676463125655575 59:22 Cash App Adds Multi-Chain USDC https://www.theblock.co/post/402784/cash-app-lets-users-send-usdc-stablecoins-on-chains-like-solana-and-ethereum 1:00:13 Satoshi Coins Finders-Keepers Lawsuit https://www.galaxy.com/insights/research/satoshi-bitcoin-salomon-brothers-patoshi-abandoned-property-new-york-noah-doe-lawsuit 1:03:00 Closing & Disclaimers --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Bankless Nation, welcome to the last week of May. It's time for the bankless weekly roll-up. We got some very hot topics of the week. ETH sentiment, perhaps as bad as it's ever been. Somebody wrote a post this week titled Why I Sold My Eith. That was you, David. That didn't really help with the sentiment. But there are some other things to be optimistic about.

Standard Charter says Ethereum is Amazon in 2021. That is a good thing. And then in the rest of the crypto world, we got Bitcoin below $73,000. largest ETF outflows since January, but, but still, a handful of coins hit all-time highs this week. I think the big question, Ryan, is can these coins that have momentum, sustain momentum, even if some of the majors break down, which I think they are threatening to do so in this very moment?

I think that's a no. That's a no. Oh, you have the answer. I have the answer. The answer is probably not. It's maybe verging on no. Mark Cuban. also quit Bitcoin this week.

It says it's worse than gold. We'll talk about that. Former DeFi security firm founder was... What firm was this? Open Zeppelin. Open Zeppelin, that's right. He's advising friends and family to exit DeFi. We'll talk about whether he's right or not.

And also, David, somebody is suing to claim finders' keepers laws that they actually, in fact, own all of Satoshi's 3.7 million Bitcoin. This is in a New York court case. So apparently you could just do that. You can just claim that Satoshi lost his wallets and he's claimed they're claiming finders keepers? Yep. The property's old fighters keepers. It's like finding a wallet and a subway, David.

The same thing. Same rules apply. Same rules apply. We'll talk about the validity of that case as well. Even though the majors don't look so good, Ryan. The thing that we got going for us right now is the president of the United States is pumping our bags. Is he? On truth social, Donald Trump tweeted out yesterday, Gary Gensler and the anti-crypto army nearly destroyed the American crypto industry by driving Bitcoin crypto perpetuals.

You think he knows what a perpetual is? No, he doesn't. And innovation offshore. But Trump saved it. America is now the crypto capital of the world. And builders and entrepreneurs are coming back to the United States where they belong. Crypto prices fell 4%. And not uncorrelated to this tweet, but this tweet did nothing to do anything to the crypto industry.

Did you expect to do something? I find the juxtaposition worth highlighting that like Bitcoin is down, ether is down, and then we have Donald Trump, you know, beating his chest about crypto. I guess we're getting used to this, but how absurd is it or how strange is it? You know, like if you were to tell me five years ago that the president of the United States would basically on a weekly, monthly basis be tweeting about crypto, I would have been like, oh, look, Ma, we made it. It's like, this is fantastic news. And now it happens, and I just, like, roll my eyes. I read maybe the first sentence of this, and I just, like, couldn't read the rest.

Yeah. That's kind of my reaction to me. I actually still haven't read the rest. I stopped. That was me actually reading that tweet for the first time. I'm going to force myself to read the rest here. Here it is. The last sentence. The new frontier finance is being built in America. And Trump, will never let crypto down President Donald J. Trump. Why has he put his name in quotes? I don't know. Trump's choice of when to capitalize words, sometimes in all caps,

I've never seen that anywhere before. He has this very interesting capitalization strategy that I think is actually very intentional. Do you think this is him anymore? Or do you think somebody's like, just like, whoever runs his social accounts? No one can copy this, dude. So you think he is. No one can make this up.

know he doesn't know what a crypto perpetual is, right? Sure, but yeah, he's got like Baron Trump looking over his shoulder telling him. It's like, Dad, right, right, crypto perps. You think so? You think that's how it works? Something like that. Somebody's whispering in his ear, but he's writing it, dude. He's the thumbs on the phone.

How are we feeling about Bitcoin and Eith Price on the week? Well, I can tell you how Chris Berniske feels. He is feeling bearish. I thought this was a pretty interesting tweet. Maybe just to kind of zoom out, all-time highs on the week for a handful of crypto coins that have a lot of momentum. Yesterday, the market really turned over. Bitcoin is down.

Ether is down. We'll talk about that in a second. And so this is the tension that there has been momentum in the crypto markets, the crypto markets, but Chris Berniske tweets, I don't see a new paradigm where majors are rotated out of and select up and comers can sustain their swim against an outgoing tide for long. Instead, I think majors are telling us something and people are finding reasons not to listen. That is a bearish tweet.

And I think for the last couple weeks, you were talking about a lot of the analysis that you were doing with Michael Nadeau about this is kind of like a make or break it where if Bitcoin goes up from here, it's pretty unprecedented in terms of like bare market strength. But if it goes down from here, then the cycles are simply cycling. And right now it seems like Bitcoin ether on the precipice of the cycles are just cycling. That's right. And yet how do we explain the four horsemen pump here of these coins that we're going to talk about? maybe later in the episode, but what is it? It's hyper-liquid, near, Venice, and Z-Cash, all hitting basically all-time highs. That doesn't usually happen during a bear market.

So there is this juxtaposition, but I guess Brininski is saying, hey, like, if the majors aren't pumping, this is not going to be, yeah, this is not going to be long-lasting. Let's look at Bitcoin price on the week. So we are in the low 70s, right? What's the price at the time of recording? Bitcoin's coming in right at $73,000. It is down from $78,000 on the week. So not a great week, down 5% for Bitcoin.

The Iran War, which Bitcoin and Crypta really actually performed well in, we are basically approaching some of the lows, the recent ranging lows. So any sort of momentum that we had has kind of been like a race in the last week here. There's a headline here that says the Bitcoin falls, below 73K as Black Rock's Bitcoin ETF sees second largest outflows since debut. There's a stat that Mike Nato

put out earlier this week that the last 12 days have been the bottom 5% of worst performing days for inflows, outflows, outflows in the Bitcoin ETF. So that is a bottom quartile,

bottom decile, bottom bottom 5% of performance. So So ETF's not holding up at least this week. There was actually a $1.3 billion sale of iBit from a whale. I don't know if that came across your timeline, but I noticed this. The largest single cell event of Ibit ever, I think. Big chunky sell.

And Michael's take is this is like front running some macro worries, right? Just Bitcoin, again, being kind of canary in the coal mine of macro troubles ahead. Yeah, it's really been like the momentum and, morale, I think in the crypto industry, was somewhat higher in the earlier part of the week, and this has just completely got erased. You see the same thing in Ether price. Bitcoin down 5.2%,

Ether down 6.2%. Below $2,000, we're at $1995. When the Ether price is somebody's birth year, it's not good. I don't like that. What is that? What year is it? 1995 right now?

1999. Oh, my God. Yeah. That doesn't feel good either. David, you're telling me before the show, though, there is a way to play this market, and somebody in Hyper Liquid figured it out. You can still make tons of money on crypto in this market. How do you do it? So this is a screenshot of somebody's position on Hyper Liquid. They have a good number of positions. The S&P 500, they have a position on the X, Y, Z, Z, 100, which is just the NASDAQ. So there's two long positions that this one trader has, the S&P and the NASDAQ. And then there's looking something like 12 to 13 short position.

So they're short ether, mega, fart coin, Trump, Athena, layer zero, ZKSink, Bitcoin Cash, Uni, Cardano, Lightcoin, and Shib. They're short all of these things. And they have a perfect portfolio. The two things that they are long on are in the green, and the 12 things that they're short on are also in the green. And so they just crack the code, just go long equities and short crypto, and you can make money, which is a really sad time to just be in crypto. So if you can just blindly do this and it works across the board. Look at the leaning short here.

It's ETH. It's a $10 million position on ETH. It's a 25X position on ETH. And that's by far. 25X short position. Yeah. Short position. That is by far the largest short position they have.

Yeah. Always takes the brunt of this, man. It just cannot catch a break. It also can, it's also just the largest market out of anyone here, of anything here. It's the largest market, but you could short Bitcoin. They choose not to. They skip that and they go to Eith. Let's short, like, FU, Eth, especially, you know, in particular.

For some reason, people feel like they can short ether more safely than Bitcoin. I saw a clip earlier this week from Mark Cuban. David, do you remember it was five years ago now that two enterprising podcasters had Mark Cuban on the bankless podcast. Yeah, this is children. Actually, let me play this. Yeah, hear how crappy my microphone is. Let me just play this really quick. All right, Bankless Nation.

we are super excited about this extra special episode with Mark Cuban. I'm going to introduce Mark in just a minute. That is the voice of someone who is innocent to the crypto market, somebody who's not yet beaten down and is very enthusiastic. That is a second cycler right there. That's what a second cycler sounds like. A second cycler on the upswing. This is literally the most euphoric time to ever be in the markets.

If you're not seeing this, this is 2001, 2021, I should. say where David and I had Mark Cuban on the podcast, and we were shocked at how knowledgeable he was about crypto. He was writing code. He was writing solidity, dude. Yeah, he was like, yeah, I've been messing around the solidity on the weekends, and we were like, okay, this guy knows what he's doing, and he talked, he came on again, bankless later, and he's been very favorable about Bitcoin, crypto, Ethereum, DFi, who's in the weeds, doing loan positions on Avey. I saw this clip of somebody asked him, what do you think of crypto now? And here's his answer. Mark, let's end on this.

When we last sat down in an interview, it was all about crypto, which also had a lot of sports tie-ins. You were into NFTs at the time. Is all that stuff dead, dead and done? I don't know if it's dead, but I'd say it's disappointing. Put aside NFTs, but I think crypto is disappointed because it hasn't come up with an application for grandma. And that's really what I expected. If you looked at apps, when the iPhone came out, it was like, okay, whatever. then the App Store came along,

and now all of a sudden there's Instagram, Snapchat, everything else. Facebook came on there and Grandma had a way to use it. And I always thought that there would be a way for that. So that's part one and part two. And this might get some people upset. I think Bitcoin has lost the plot.

And when I started buying Bitcoin and I've sold all of it, except not all of it, most of it. It was because when all the shit hit the fan with the Iran war and, you know, Bitcoin was always the best alternative to fiat currency losing its value. And I always thought it was a better version of gold than gold. Well, gold just blew up and went, you know, the $5,000, Bitcoin dropped.

And every time the dollar dropped, Bitcoin should have gone up, you know, because if it's priced in dollars, it was cheaper. So anybody from around the world could go pay and dollar, and it just didn't do that. Not such a hedge. No, it's not the hedge that I expected to be. And that was really disappointing. And so I'd say I'm more disappointed in Bitcoin, not as disappointed in Ethereum, and the rest, you know, the token stuff, the meme coins. Garbage. David, he sounds a little bit like you, except maybe the inverse. He's more disappointed with Bitcoin, less than Ethereum, but he's disappointed in both.

Yeah. Yeah, he really ascribed a belief to what Bitcoin is supposed to do, like it's supposed to be an Iran war, like conflict. edge. I think people need to kind of just like understand that I don't think we really know how and why Bitcoin trades the way that it trades. Like I still don't think we know that. You don't think, but isn't that what it's supposed to be digital gold? Like it says, it says what it's supposed to be in the mean. That's what that's what Cuban is saying. Yeah, I think if you over-escribe a model into Bitcoin, you're, you're destined to be disappointed. You does sound a little bit like you and the, you know, I thought crypto was going to be useful for

grandma, sort of the strong crypto use case. Yeah. Whereas we got a bit more the weak crypto side of things. And then he's looking at weak crypto and he's like, well, store value. It's not even performing as well as gold in this type of environment. Yeah. We'll define strong weak crypto later. Yeah.

This is bare market things, though. Let's check in on the Dats. How are they looking? It's worth probably taking a note of what's going on. Strategy, the average Bitcoin cost basis for strategy. is $75,700 $700 Bitcoin. Strategy has spent a total of $63 billion

to acquire what is now worth $61 billion of Bitcoin, so they are down $2 billion on their Bitcoin position, which I think is like fine. It's an explicit part of this strategy of strategy to take

an efficient amount of risk and that's going to involve being in the red from time to time. If you're never in the red, then strategy's not taking enough risk is like, I think the right philosophy to have. But nonetheless, it's notable when strategy is below its position because it shouldn't be below its position for any ongoing amount of time. Did you see they were buying bonds on the week rather than Bitcoin? Were they buying bonds or they were buying, re-buying their convertible notes? Yeah.

Which is kind of the same thing. But they want to clear out their convertible notes. And this is a part of their strategy. Shoring up their balance sheet. Exactly. But, but, but use, some of their dry powder to go short their balance sheet rather than buy Bitcoin, which gives you the sense that the Bitcoin buys are tapering. Yes, that. And it's also kind of like, okay, if you have excess cash, why are you paying down the mortgage on your house faster? Because like that mortgage is favorable and you can definitely use that cash to get better opportunities elsewhere. It's kind of like the same philosophy. Sure. How about Tom? A different story over with Bitmine. Bitmine down $8 billion.

on their position, on their much smaller position of ether. And so much further in the red. Again, being in the red is part of the deal. But $8 billion, being down $8 billion on $18 billion is a very different story than being down $2 billion. He started later. I mean, Saylor's been at this for five years, right? It's kind of surprising that it's cost basis is in like the 75K range, sailor, that is, when he's been at this for five years. It goes to show you how much he's been

purchasing the last couple of years. Yeah, this Michael, the strategy line of credit, the ability to buy goes up when Bitcoin price goes up. And so the higher prices just easily wash out the lower ones. Yeah. Well, with Tom Lee, I either think it's going to go one of two ways. Either this is like a generational trade for him. Totally. Or it really wasn't. No. Yeah. So we'll have to see. but this, I mean, he's only a year in. I mean, this story is not yet written on the fifth line. I think it's even less than a year. There is one dat, Ryan, that is in the green.

Have you heard of per? P-U-D-R. No, I saw this in the gen. I was like, what is this? This is the hyper-liquid. I don't know if it counts as official, but it's seemingly the community-supported one. Tickr-R-Side is per.

It's hyper-liquid strategies. Okay. It is the hyper-liquid dat, and it is the only dat out of all of them. like the 30 of them that I think remain that is in the green. That makes sense. Hyperliquids is doing quite well. Hyperliquins is also in the green.

What doesn't make sense is why per? Why the name P-U-R-R? Hyper-Liquid. Also, there are, the hyperliquid has, I think, like an NFT that is cats. They have cat NFTs. Let's take a look at Polymarket, David. There's a viewer discretion is advised here, okay, because these are some disturbing numbers. This is the question on Polymarket.

what price will Bitcoin hit in 2026? What are the answers receiving the highest probability weight here? So the highest probability, we got a 55% chance that Bitcoin will hit $55,000. Yikes, there's a 42% chance that it can hit $50,000. And there is equivalently a 50% chance that it will hit $90,000. So there's about equal probabilities of Bitcoin hitting $55,000. and $90,000, which when the all-time high is $140,000, oh, God, the majors are just not doing what the market needs them to be doing. I don't like this number.

There's almost a 20% chance that we get to 35K Bitcoin at some point this year. That is wild. I cannot imagine that. 20% chance. 20%. 1 in 5. How about Eith? Is this going to be even scarier?

ETH has a 60% chance that it will hit $1,500, a $25, a 1 and 4% chance it hits $1,000, and a 21% chance that it hits $3,500. Give me some of the upside here. We got a 5% chance of 6,500 this year at least at some point. A chance of 6,500. I'll take those odds. Okay, let's look at the down market because there is just been a tale of two cities in the crypto world, in the crypto industry in the last like month or so

and it's really a bit expressed in the last two weeks. We talked about these tokens last week. The tokens that hit all time highs last week are the same tokens that hit all time highs this week. Neer did not hit an all time high, but it's like a local market high. Everything else did hit an all time high. Hype $64.40 is the new all time high.

Since the Bitcoin has fallen off from like 80 down to 72, hype is now down from 64 to 57. VVVV, Venice hit an all time. time high of just over $20. It's now at $14.88. Near hit $2.88. It's now at $2.33. And then Zcash hit an all-time high of $682.

It's currently coming in at $535. So you can really see the fear in the market from Bitcoin. Each third, the majors, the crypto industry as a whole, like, we're turning over. And exactly what Chris is saying is like, if Bitcoin drops, you know, $10,000, nothing is safe. I'm somewhat off Twitter these days. What's the sentiment there? Are people, like, is energy back in crypto Twitter? Because of this kind of mini altcoin pump?

I would say so. And like that's kind of like the tweet that I wrote out. And I caused a firestorm in the Ethereum community. I'm just like, when you look elsewhere outside of Ethereum sentiment, you get just a vibe shift. Like people actually are making money in the crypto industry on these tokens and a few others. Like rail gun is also up massively. There's a just a handful of other tokens, alt coins, if you will, that have pumped very strongly to all-time highs. And so people are making

money for the first time in crypto in a very long time. Hopefully that time is not over. But again, this is up to Bitcoin and where Bitcoin wants to go. But yeah, there has been just like a morale vibe shift in crypto because people are making money. Interesting. A select few, a select list of assets, though. This is not globally... VVV near Zcash, like on Twitter, these are called the consensus coins. Like what everyone, everyone kind of believes in these things. And the sentiment and the idea is that there are so few people left in crypto that it doesn't matter if these tokens are consensus because there's just like 50 people buying these things

that are left and that's all of crypto Twitter. That's not great. That doesn't feel very sustainable. I think Chris might be right here. Hype got some more attention on the week, though, didn't it? Is this in Tratify circles? ETFs. ETS, yeah. So the hyperliquid ETFs launched between one and two weeks ago. They have done very, very well. There's over $101 million of inflows since their launch earlier this month. This is mostly between the Bitwise B-H-YP and the 21 shares T-H-YP. There are a few others. So Grayscale also filed for G-H-YP, and there's also a Vanek one, which I can't find any information on, but allegedly there is one. But that's one of the big stories of the week is just the strength of hyper-liquid being

expressed in Tradfi. And like, Tradfi is noticing hyperliquid more and more. And this is how they would get exposure to it because they're in their brokerages. And that's where their money is. And so they're not coming to crypto. They're definitely not making it all the way to hyperliquid because you have to go into U.S.EC. into Ethereum to Arbichrump. I mean, but the more they notice, you know, the more they're going to want to enter this market, right? Competitors. So a Coinbase already has a good perp exchange competitor in the U.S., Robin Hood. Not in the U.S. No one has. Not the U.S. yet. No one has. No one has. as I understand it, a perpetual's license because there just isn't one.

And so I think there's a bunch of positioning. And we're actually seeing this from Polymarket. So Polymarket announced that they are building out their perpetual platform. The Perps beta is live for select users rolling out access to more people before. That's a good move by Polymark. Yeah, I agree. I agree. So, yeah, the United people, everyone is positioning to try and

claim the United States perp market and no one has really made a move because compliance and like clarity around this is just like uncertain. But even global markets got to be somewhat up for grabs. I'm sure Polly Market is going after hyperliquids global market for perps right now. Probably. Well, they are also offshore. But I think it's really the regulated compliant onshore market that is really the golden goose. I mean, you know, I'd say it's still the center of capital.

Yeah. Okay. Well, let's talk about the center of capital. versus Iran, and he moves on the week there. So I think right before we started recording, I saw another, more word of a peace deal. I have not been keeping up with Iran and Trump negotiations. What is the latest? So this week, the theme of this week was two contradictory tracks, both a re-escalation of the kinetic war and apparently a real legitimate deal, and she's closer and closer to being signed. The deal, as of this morning, we have a

actually kind of have most of the terms revealed because it was leaked. I bet you it was intentionally leaked, which is why the market priced it as legitimate throughout the week. Because we have S&P all-time highs, right? We have S&P all-time highs, that's right. That's right. And it's on this news. On this news, but also the AI trade is still strong, like memory stonks still up. Gas also down, oil down. We'll talk about that in a second. So there's, the terms of the deal is an immediate reopening of the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for the United States lifting the blockade off Iran, of course. Just travel, shipping travel is just free.

A 60-day ceasefire extension. Kormuz traffic is going to be restored to pre-war levels within 30 days. So Iran stops threatening people. A mutual declaration that all military operations, including in Lamedon, will end permanently. And then Iran reaffirming that it will never build nuclear weapons. These are the broad strokes of things. Importantly, the nuclear issue, the nuclear material, Iran giving it up and suspending their nuclear program, the details of that will be hashed out within a 60-day window after this MOU, this memorandum of understanding, is signed.

So this is firmly a peace deal and not a nuclear concessions deal because Iran really does not want to concede nuclear concessions because it's part of their identity. And so Iran is deferring that. So meanwhile, over this past week, that was all the progress on the deal. and it seems like the deal is like ready to be signed by the highest levels of power on the respective sides. So like Donald Trump could sign this literally right now. Same thing with the Iranians. But over this last week, there was also a re-escalation of the Connecticut Corps. So they have been just trading near daily strikes, blow for blow.

On Monday, the United States hit Iranian missile sites and also mine laying boats. On Tuesday, Iran's headed down to U.S. drone and fired at a U.S. jet. And so that went on. So it's still skitterish. But nonetheless, like, technically there is a deal potentially on Donald Trump's desk right now that he could sign right now. If they don't have the nuclear piece, I mean, like, isn't that the crux of it? Isn't that a big piece of it? You just kick that one out for 60 days with an MOU? Yeah. I mean, I don't, I don't trust the Iranians. And I think Donald Trump also knows to not trust the Iranians with regards to the nuclear deal. Like emphasis on underscoring how existential that nuclear program is for the national purpose and identity of Iranians. Neither party trusts the other party, right? It's part of the reason we're here. So oil, we're below 100 on the week. So oil down? Yeah, oil is at wartime lows.

You have seen it get to war. I've said these words, wartime lows on the weekly roll up a handful of times between wartime highs. It's back at wartime lows. Pretty low. $93, $94 a barrel for Brent. For Brent crude. It's previously been $112, which would be wartime highs. we, in order to really feel good in the markets,

we really need oil to break down below a like $90 and meaningfully and move there. That would be the lowest it's been in the war sustained. 10-year yields is a slightly different story. You know, yields have tended to trade alongside oil. That is not what is happening this week. Yields, 10-year yields are up despite oil being down. And that is not good because we could sell. this whole Iran war thing and nonetheless the impact on the global economy because of the

sustained high oil prices would still show up in inflation, would still show up in yields, which still show up in economic strife domestically. The stagflation word comes to mind. And so yields are not responding favorably. But nonetheless, Ryan, the S&P 500 is at all-time highs. Just on an absolute tear. And not just all-time highs, in specific sectors, like Micron is a stock, maybe to look at this week.

This, I don't know what this, I don't think I've seen a chart like this. I don't think I've seen a chart like this. I don't think I've seen a chart like this chart like this. In crypto, but not at this size, not at this size. Not at this size. No, is the market cap of... Over a billion.

A billion. You said a billion, but I think it's a trillion. So, skew. You're right. No, I'm it. That's what I meant. It's one point zero six trillion dollars. Which is also over a billion.

Which is also over a trillion dollars? What? I saw someone comment on Twitter that it's almost like, you know, Micron 20 years in the future has discovered like time travel or something crazy. And so somebody came back and like bought it. You know, in the last couple of months. Yeah. What is the depending on? If you had $1,000 of micro stock, micron stock a year ago, you would now have $100,000.

That is insane. Yeah. I can't, I had no idea of stocks could do this, David. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the AI trade is putting a ton of momentum. and creating momentum trades, people are getting in on it. I mean, is it revenue is real?

I don't want to be, like, I don't want to throw this in here because it could be different. But like, does it remind you a little bit of the euthanasia roller coaster where we sort of get these kind of rolling sectors that pump really hard? And then when we're done pumping one specific sector that's tied into the overall AI narrative, we get in another sector with a set of assets and, you know, the market keeps moving from sector to sector. and now we're on my con. Yeah, it's like the question is like when it moves from sector to sector, does the hot ball of money like snowball or does it leak and fall apart?

And right now, I think you can definitely argue that it is snowballing. Like it's getting bigger. This is memory right now. We're going up. Yeah, this is memory. Where's it moving next? Do you know? Can you give me some tips?

I think Leopold is the person to ask for that. How about maybe Pokemon cards? Do you move it over there? You know, it's a viable. contender, dude. The tokenized Pokemon card marketplace and Pokemon cards as a whole is up bigly. I mean, this is so far

away from memory stocks, but like it's worth noting that like it feels a little 20-21 and that like equity markets are at all-time highs and then like weird shit like baseball cards and Rolexes are being priced at all-time high. Anyways, Pokemon cards marketplaces

are also up. So that's it for the market section. You know what's not up, Ryan. In fact, what's down is the supply of ETH in my personal portfolio. I wrote an article about it. I want to get your takes about it. I think people I would like to process a little bit. And so I want to talk to that, to you about that.

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to the emerging world and brings the emerging market yield to your wallet. Let the yield flow with bricks. All right. So, David, you posted this to Twitter earlier this week. Why I sold my Eath. It's a long-form article, and this gets into some of your thoughts. We touched upon this last week on the weekly roll-up. I think maybe you took the weekend to sort of process things and to write things down

why you made the decision that you made, and the result was this long-form article. which is composed of a number of sections which we could get into. But maybe talk about why you felt the need to publish this. Yeah, well, after being so pro-eath for so long, like I feel like I just just, it deserves a thorough explanation, like a complete thought. Some people are curious. Some people want to know.

Like, it's a big pivot of like being so pro-Eath ever since 2017, 2018. and then not having ETH in my portfolio anymore I don't know. For my own purposes, it's worth it to go and do the writing exercise to come to like a pretty coherent conclusion. And so that's why I felt compelled to read it.

Maybe, I mean, do you want to go over like what this article says? Sure. Sure. Just want me to give my thoughts on it. There's two things that I'll just like summarize. the ETH is money challenge was monumental, is monumental, remains to be monumental.

It's a big, ambitious challenge. Ethereum is a big ambitious project that had more ways, more challenges than like easy roads. It was easy for it to fail. It's easier for Ethereum to fail than it is to succeed. And Ethereum ended up somewhere between those two ends of the spectrum. And then also the whole like monetization of ETH, the, you know, accumulating market gap of ETH was environmentally difficult, more difficult than I originally gave credit for.

And so like despite Ethereum's like success, the environment was really just not cut out for it. That kind of goes back to this idea of strong crypto versus weak crypto. Strong crypto, I think, really had its highs, its peak in 2021, where, you know, but defy was growing. Defy was the epicenter. NFTs, on-chain culture, like Dows, all this kind of stuff. Strong crypto is emblematic by like the Cypherpunks building an alternative financial system, you know, in spite of Wall Street, not in collaboration with Wall Street, you know,

something completely our own. And Strong Crypto has never felt weaker to me now in 2026 because weak cryptocurrency, which is just like a back-end efficiency upgrade for the world's biggest financial institutions seems to be the meta. And so the idea of like strong, strong crypto was when ether was the most money. And that environment hasn't been around since 2021. And so there was a particular environment that Ethereum and Ether was particularly well suited for. And that environment hasn't been around since COVID. And it was COVID, dude.

It was like the most distorted time and money ever. And so in addition to how challenging to how challenging. the Ethereum project is to achieve its maximum potential, there's also just like environmental constraints that I think also just provide some fundamental constraints to the maximum market cap of ether. And so I feel like that's an okay summary. I actually thought the strong crypto point was probably the strongest point in the article, the one I resonated with the most. I think that's right. Like a lot of things that Ethereum had hoped would come to fruition, use cases, et cetera, really haven't.

And the things that remain are like some hardcore defy type protocols and store value. It's kind of the money type of thesis things. A lot of the things we thought would happen just haven't happened yet. Not to say that they won't happen in the future, but the prospects of that feel somewhat dim. I think there are some things that I disagreed with a bit more. So one of your points you make, which is L1 assets and REV, like revenue, are tied together. And I think you make the point that that, you know, there's some correlation here, right? When ETH revenue was all-time high, ETH was popping the most, you saw that with Seoul,

you saw that with NIR, and you're sort of doing this thing where you're segmenting out and you're saying smart contract platforms, at least the market is saying that they have to produce some revenue. When they produce revenue, price goes up. when they don't, price goes down. I think that is how the market has priced this previously, but it's not fully how the market is pricing it now. There's a couple of aberrations here, one of which, of which, of course, is Bitcoin,

which you might say, well, that's not a smart contract platform. Yeah. Another, you could say, which we've been talking about in the week, is Zcash. You might also say, well, that's not a smart contract platform. So you're saying, well, you smart contract platforms, different rules apply for those. And from a fundamental perspective, why? Like, why should they have different rules?

Why should different rules apply to smart contract platforms? And I think if you were, like, building this from the ground up, my objection would be like, that's how the market sees it. And that's why there's a massive opportunity in ethers, because smart contract platforms don't necessarily need to have Rev. In fact, none of them actually will because they will perpetually expand block space. If they're doing what they should be doing,

they will minimize M-EV. And so no layer one blockchain will actually have sustainable fees into the future. They're all money or they're nothing. And so now you're back to a competition of which assets are the best money. But you've heard that pushback before. You know, like so that's probably nothing new coming from me.

My evolved thoughts on that, because I was thinking about your voice was in my ears while I was writing this section. And so my attitude on this is that, yes, what you are saying could have happened where Ethereum and the leading smart contract chain is not valued by revenue in any particular way. But in order to create that stable equilibrium, Ethereum would have needed to basically be so dominant and have such a monopoly on the smart contract. ecosystem that like the second, third, fourth place to smart contracts are so distant that they're just not valued by the market. And so because something like Solana actually did nip at Ethereum's heels and actually did take away users and revenue, it's Ethereum is different when it's like 95% dominant versus 65% dominant. If it's 95% dominant, then it's likely that eth is valued as money. If it's 65% dominant, then it's going to be valued as a smart contract chain. And so Ethereum

losing momentum is the difference between those two realities. Yeah, I just don't understand why, like, if you're looking for the properties of money, right, which is decentralized money, it would be a different access. You wouldn't say, is it programmable or not? You would say, how censorship resistant is it? How decentralized is it? You know, what's the hardness of the inflation schedule? And on all those points, ether and Ethereum score really well.

And nothing else is really close. So I would just say, okay. point acknowledged up to this point, but it's still kind of too early. And that goes to a theme of like my rebuttal to this is a lot of, I feel like what you're saying is, all right, right now in 2026, this is what it looks like. Yeah. But it's still, it's still early. I mean, the monetary fight competition will take years and decades to actually play out.

this idea that ethos money required everything to go right. I don't quite agree with that either. And so like Bitcoin, certainly not everything has gone right with Bitcoin. It's had many problems, many flaws. Imagine if you said the criteria for Bitcoin is that everything goes right.

I mean, the title of the white paper is peer-to-peer digital cash. It's not used as a cash. Store of value is almost a pivot in some ways what Bitcoin is. The lightning network. It was a pivoted narrative, but never a pivot in direction. Yeah, that's true.

I mean, Bitcoin has had a more cohesive direction. But, like, you know, lightning didn't work out. There's so many things that just, like, didn't work out on Bitcoin. I think that Ethereum can make mistakes, and it has made mistakes, and that doesn't disqualify it. So the idea that perfection is what's required, you know, I don't quite agree with that either. The other idea, a few other things that I felt like were, I agree with, but they're kind of incorrectly framed, or I would frame them differently. The idea that Ethereum is a giver, not a taker, I agree with that.

And yet I would say, that's why it's a fantastic money. Like, I totally agree. And like the condition for me to think that this money is like it would have needed to maintain market dominance for that to be perceived as money. market dominant. So the other thing of, you know, when you say ETH is, you know, let's say it's being valued by revenue or something like that. It's not right now being valued by revenue. There's clearly a monetary premium.

This is what you said later in the article where you're like, well, it was a partial win on money. And yeah, it definitely was a partial win on money. We can work with that. We can work with the first 10 years being a partial win in building on that success into a brighter future. one of the things that I do feel like I don't agree with, like this is almost a 100% disagree,

which is the idea that you can be bullish on Ethereum without being bullish on ether the asset. I actually think this ties into the original sin that Ethereum had in the first place, which is this emphasis on the blockchain rather than the asset itself. And I think that it is paying for that sin right now. Right?

Like, ETH effectively is skipping a cycle. And it didn't, it barely hit all-time highs last cycle, didn't overperform. And now we're feeling this crisis in the bear market. Part of this had to do with a roll-up centric roadmap that felt like kind of a side quest in retrospect. Yes, you know, the weak crypto kind of winning over the strong crypto. But the original sin, this idea that Ethereum matters, and Ether and DeFi is, don't matter so much and that embedding of that idea into the culture where we talk about crops but we don't talk about crops for what. I just like it's like that goose meme, you know,

I'm like, people are like crops. I'm like, crops for what? For what? For Ethan Defi, right? That's what we're doing here. And culturally, we have not emphasized that use case enough. We've been distracted by other things like Dow's and like what if we build a decentralized Uber. I know this early days, but almost everything aside from things. Aside from focusing on ether as a store of value asset. Literally anything else other than either of the asset. And this was a fight we somewhat took up at Bankless in like 2019 and 2020, which is like, hey guys, ether is an asset, eth is money.

And I think we tilted the culture somewhat in that direction. But still, the original sin came back to bite us this cycle. By the way, Bitcoin has an original sin too. I think all crypto networks really do. Like Zcash does. Was the Lama has original sin? They're not scaling, dude. they're going to end up with all of the Bitcoin in Michael Saylor and ETFs, and they're scaling on side chains.

They're not scaling and they don't have native defy. So it all ends up and it all collects in custodial institutions. And that's something. It'll still work, but it's still a sin that they will pay for. Ethereum doesn't have that. It actually is scaling. It does have defy. Ethereum's original sin was like a lack of focus on eth the asset.

and crops for what and decentralized finance. Anyway, there's an element where, David, I feel like we're paying for that now. Yeah. And I knew there would be like some blood during the bear market if we, quote unquote, skipped a cycle. We certainly skipped a cycle. So now the blood is being paid.

I guess who else is left to sell, though? If one of the original bankless guys has sold, I mean, I've seen a lot of bottom tick memes on the timeline, right? Yeah, a lot. Like, at some level, look at the staking queue. You know, it's up. There's, you know, 31% ETH staking. Who's left to sell?

That's not an indicator of, because you can still sell after you put your ETH in the seeking. You can, but, I mean, price is holding up for what it is. This is like the worst sentiment I've seen since 2019. Yeah. And we're still a, you know, $200 billion asset, maybe end-dropping. but I don't know if we can get through this

what I go back to is I do see some of the ethas money fundamentals still being strong we have privacy we have defy we have quantum resistance do we have scaling would you say

do we have privacy not yet but like it's being worked on you can with rail with rail gun on the app layer yeah on the app layer right yeah I just like if you're looking to store your value a nosis multisig with privacy like that's not a bad route to go

I mean show me that on Bitcoin show me that on Zcash I don't know the fundamentals I think are still there it's just like really a crisis of faith so overall I didn't disagree completely with this article I think it was well put I think you put a lot of thought into it

I guess the summary would be like it's not over one I kind of hope you're wrong but like two I hope I'm wrong too yeah too if you're wrong it's because like it was just

it took longer than we all thought yeah I think that's fair I think that's fair yeah it's like that I think it's like the main

I'm thinking about writing an article about why David Hoffman is selling his eth is wrong and like just doing that exercise and I think the

the leading argument would be like currencies are a centuries long battle. But at the same point, it's like, I don't, I don't got centuries, dude. Like, I need to get on with my life. Like, I need to do things. Yeah, I understand. And I will say the strongest point of our article is strong crypto is not played out. Strong crypto has not played out. There have been a lot of distractions of use cases that Ethereum, the ecosystem, the culture

of the community has been pursuing that have just not panned out. We got to get back to the basics, which are defy and ethos of store value. Yeah. I would like to, plant a flag and make it to be known that I am not an ether bear. I am an ether is about tracking the market is like kind of my base case. I don't see how it gets re-rated in any direction. Haseeb made a tweet that I really really liked called Ethereum is the Microsoft of crypto is what he said. And like I thought this was a pretty good Roershock test because like Microsoft is just like

not cool or innovative or it has like just a boomer brand. But it's like the fourth most valuable company in. in the NASDAQ or in the S&P. And so, like, being Microsoft, it's not a bad place to be. It's just like you're not on the innovative frontier. Like, you're too big to grow, but you're too existential to die. Yeah. So I do think another analogy is like it's silver.

I feel like it's kind of like silver right now. Sure, yeah, yeah. Versus Bitcoin's gold. Yeah. But, yeah, I see that. But let's end this on a bullish note. Not from either of us, all right? Standard Charter.

is saying that Ethereum right now, ETH the asset, is trading like Amazon during 2001 after the dot-com bubble burst. And if you look at how Amazon did, and if you project that into the price of ETH, David, you get ETH by 2030, 40K. Oh, boy, let's go.

They should put some money on polymarket. Yeah, so standard charter coming out and definitely... Declining. Yeah. Declining the bearer for now. Yeah, and they're looking at a ratio appreciation too, so a doubling of the ratio. Oh, the Bitcoin. They named the Bitcoin ratio.

Yep. Wow. So, you know it's credible. We see that. Standard Charter, Eth to 40K by 2030. Do you know what Vitalik's doing to work on Ethereum? Are you saying he's writing sci-fi? Yeah.

I didn't read the sci-fi. I saw this all over the place. I'm not reading the sci-fi. He posted this on Farcaster. In lieu of the usual. blog post, I decided to try my hand at decentralized governance sci-fi. I can't read it. I'm kind of done with decentralized governance for like a long time. Yeah. So we'll just let that be sci-fi. I did appreciate however his post on where the Ethereum Foundation is going. And so the summary is,

he basically said, it's shrinking. We don't have a lot of Eath left. We have to focus on one thing. The rest of the ecosystem is going to have to focus on other things. Our focus is going to be crops. And so we're sizing the team and the foundation to support censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security. He did say this. I liked this, David, because maybe you might say this is a little late incoming. But he said this, the most high value product of the Ethereum blockchain, financially speaking, is ETH the asset. Ethereum secures 250 billion of ETH. The type of properties of Ethereum that I mentioned above are very good for ETH the asset. Nearly 90% of my net worth is an ETH, and most of the remainder, 40 million, of

on-chain fiat, of which every dollar has already been allocated, that's the remainder. So he's basically saying, hey, crops, because of Eth the asset, I can't recall him ever saying this so directly. Yeah. In this way, and I appreciate it. Vitalik, we were just not acknowledging the existence of ether. Honestly, this is part of the original sin. to me, and it feels like it's 10 years

kind of not too late, but like I would have appreciated it maybe five years ago, but nonetheless, he's saying it now and he's saying it pretty directly. Yeah, yeah, this is good, this is good. There's this one tweet that rocked around the Ethereum community. It's the founder of Open Zeppelin and Open Zeppelin is a premier

security company, smart contract security company. He tweeted out this tweet that kind of sent shivers down everyone's spine. I've been privately advising friends and family to exit all defy positions, including low-risk blue chips like Ave, MakerDAO and compound due to coding agents that are superhuman at finding vulnerabilities. And so when it's not a new take, AI coming to make DeFi risky is not new, but when the founder of Oplin Zeppelin says it, it kind of takes on a new meeting.

This got a very mixed response from different parts of the community. Some people said that because of this background makes this warning extremely legitimate. Others called it alarmist and outdated and just disagreed with the blanketing all of Defi. Mostly Defi founders had the most to say about this. Stani from Ave said this is not a good take. Defi Infra today is materially more resilient than in prior cycles. Mark Zeller said, what a ironic thing to say. Less than 10% of the past year defy issues are due to code-based bugs.

Jack Sanford said $630 million was lost in April 2026. Unfortunately, over 96% of those losses were unrelated to code security. And Hayden Adams from Unswap said something pretty much to the effect. This is not a defy problem. This is a supply chain OPSEC problem. But nonetheless, I think the conversation, one of the weaknesses I think at the WRILs uniquely is the threat of defy under AI. And so that conversation went around Twitter this week.

Yeah, I agree. And I understand the sentiment for sure. We've seen a ton of hacks this year. Not all of them have been AI related, but at least some subset of them certainly have been. What do we have coming up? Coming up next, remember Andrew King, Ryan? Do you remember that name? I do.

Yeah, he left crypto about like a year and a half ago to invest in robotics. And now he's back, and Nick Carter is joining him. We're going to talk about what they are building over there. Somebody is using finder's keepers laws in New York to claim Satoshi's coins. I don't know how that works. And then SoFi has launched a stable coin to its 14. $14.7 million banking app users. So we're going to get to all of that and more.

But first, I'm going to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. What's something you're actually looking forward to next month? Because Coinbase 1 member month starts with 20% off your first year of Coinbase 1. Plus a $50 Bitcoin bonus when you spend $100 with a new Coinbase 1 card in your first 30 days. They're also layering in extra awards and perks throughout the month. And if you're active in crypto, Coinbase 1 is basically designed for you. You get zero trading fees on thousands of crypto assets, 3.5% APY on USDC, and boosted staking and lending rewards, and up to 4% Bitcoin back with the Coinbase 1 card. So if you're going to try it, now is the time to lock in a 20% discount before the weekly rewards kickoff.

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His cycle analysis has been absolutely on point. I've been following him for years. And this year, we started recording weekly podcast episodes. Each one, we get in to his portfolio, what he's holding, the market structure, entry targets, fair market value of Bitcoin and Ether, and where we are in the cycle, there's new episodes that are released every Wednesday. They're 30 minutes. They're short. They're punchy. I think this crypto cycle is harder to navigate than most. So let's do it together. Go subscribe to this podcast. Search the DeFi report wherever you get your podcast, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or find a link in the show notes. There's a new episode waiting for you now. So Nick Carter has signed on for Andrew King's Robo

strategy. Robo strategy is a publicly traded on the NASDAQ closed end fund, the tickers bot, and it's basically a fund of all these different positions in robotics and physical AI names. So figure AI, one of the leading companies behind humanoid robots, Apptronic, Dyna Robotics, StandardBots, just a bunch of robotics companies that are not public, that are that are still private. And then if you want access to these, you can you can just buy this fund. Nick Carter, I think it's actually pretty notable that is joining the board as an independent director. And then also, if you know intern, former Monad ecosystem individual is now also on the Robo Strategy Board. Are these just crypto people pivoting to AI?

To robotics? Yes, it is. That is what's going on. No, Nick Carter isn't leaving Castle Island. Correct. Nick Carter is saying with Castle Island. He's like an extra set of eyes on the investor board. Independent director is what the title is.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So the whole, like, Robo Strategy is actually a direct call out to micro strategy. So the idea is that if the NAV trades above, if the asset trades above NAV, they will issue new equity to purchase more shares of the robotics company. So it's kind of doing the micro strategy ATM thing. This only works at the fund trades above NAV and also new buyers are willing to pay the premium, which is two very big ifs. But nonetheless, it's something. David, I know you've been going deep into the NIR protocol lately.

There was an announcement of near confidential transactions. So this is actually sending ETH to the Ethereum Foundation wallet from NIR. Confidentially. Can you explain this? Yeah. So NIR has a near confidential transactions. It's like T-E encrypted magic on the near side of things. Oh, so it's T-E.

It's T-E. It's not cryptography. It's T-E. It's not F-H-E. It's not Z-E. I don't think so. No, it's T.E. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if that's a final form, but nonetheless, it's got an adoption. And so with near-intense, confidential intent, Venice uses this. Venice uses a Neo to do this. And now it's kind of just a proof of concept of you send ether from Ethereum address A to Ethereum mattress B, but you route it through near confidential intents and it's private. And the fact that it's in production and working, I think is notable, because

privacy apps are hard, and this is naturally just not just privacy for Ethereum, but it's privacy for anyone who wants to integrate with it. And this is one of the reasons why NIR is up so much because this is actually seen adoption and has led to a bunch of NIR revenue. The adoption part matters, doesn't it? The adoption part does matter. Speaking of that, SOFI is launching at SOFIUSD. Is this a new staple coin to its 15 million banking app users? Yeah, they claimed, SOFI claimed the first instance of a

a U.S. National Bank issued stable coin embedded directly into a retail banking app. This is all genius compliant. It's all genius compliant, yeah. And the narrative that they are saying is that this is the end of the crypto versus banking tradeoff. This is crypto and banking.

Cool. They can F off. I still think it's crypto versus the banks. It was something I thought was pretty funny. Salana, like, tweeted out this clip about this one, SOFI guy, talking about the Salana conference about why SoFi picked Solana.

If you go to the SoFi stablecoin on Solana, there's $26,000 worth of SoFi. If you go to Ethereum, there's $100 million. Oh, my God. Yeah, that's quite the difference. Quite the difference. Oh, wow. But the Ethereum account needed to tweet out that,

that there was 100 million SOFi stable coins instead of the 26,000 on Solana, but nonetheless. No, no, they don't. You know, it'll just happen in the background. Credit neutrality is all you need. Cash app adds multi-chain USDC support. So blocks Cash App now.

They have 60 million monthly active users, and rather than just sending dollars, you can send USDC, I suppose. And you can withdraw that to all the popular chains, Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Salana. Yeah. And you can also, this is Ilya from Near, you can also do that with Near Private Intents.

So you can go from Cash App to Near Private Intense to any other blockchain Zcash, for example, is what Ilya's example is, through NIR Intents. And so you can go from Cash app to Zcash privately with NIR. I think it's pretty cool. I'm shocked that NIR is like coming to dominate the NITDA space.

Like there are so many other earlier movers. Now NIR is getting into it in all these places. I don't know if it's pivot. They just made some investments and they're working off. They're paying off. David, should we end the roll up with this story? So this was crazy. This is someone is suing.

A pseudo-anonymous individual or set of individuals is suing to claim legal ownership of Satoshi's coins. So Noah Doe, that was the name, fake name, of course. I also would not want my name public if I was doing this. That's right. They filed a lawsuit in New York Supreme Court claiming that the 3.8 million Bitcoin in wallets that haven't moved in six plus years, so that's 18% of all Bitcoin that will ever exist, is actually his. And the way he's claiming this is through a set of laws, I believe, called

finders keepers laws. This is a law from the 1958 that covers things like, hey, I found a wallet on the subway. Can I keep it? Finders keepers. Yeah. You know, am I good to keep this? Yeah. So Noah Doe is essentially arguing, I found these wallets. They've been dormant for six to ten years. How did he find them? He used the blockchain to find them, David. He used a block explorer to I know, yeah. And he's like, ah, I found it.

I found, I found, Satoshi's public. This is abandoned property. And so, you know, you could have found this, David.

You missed your opportunity. I'm pretty sure I did find it, actually. And anyway, he sent them notice. So he dusted all the accounts, sending them some notice. I guess there was some

embedded text inside the account. You got no response. He's like, hey, I told you it's abandoned property. I found it. and you got no response, so now he's going to court and saying, therefore I own these.

I own $285 billion worth of Bitcoin. And, by the way, given the way the law works, I think the way he's filing this, and they're escalating this under New York law to, from the New York Police Department to the court system. So there's something there that somebody needs to decide. The only way that this actually pays off for the individual, assuming Satoshi's

wallets are burned is that quantum comes, the United States, some entity inside the United States gets the Satoshi coins and then this person says, oh, those are my coins because I filed this in the state of New York. I guess if there's like a 0.01% chance

to get a hundred billion dollars, it's worth the EV. Yeah. I mean, but like that's also assuming that the court like thinks this is credible at all, right? I mean, imagine, I'm factoring that into my 0.01% chance of working. Then I think it should be less than 0.01% chance. I think it should be far less, but crazy that he's actually doing this.

Oh, my God. We'll have to follow this. Entertaining anyway. Yeah, it is entertaining anyway. All right, bankless station. That is it for the week. Thank you for being with us as we continue our journey west. This is Frontier's not for everyone.

But it is for us, and we're glad that you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.