Bankless - ROLLUP: Gold & BTC ATH | AI Bubble or Debasement Trade? | BNB Surge | $2B Polymarket Deal

Episode Date: October 10, 2025

Gold shatters $4,000, Bitcoin quietly hits new all-time highs, and Wall Street just made its biggest bet yet on prediction markets. In this week’s Weekly Rollup, we break down why the debasement trade is heating up, how the AI bubble is shaping markets, and what it all means for crypto’s next move. We cover BNB’s explosive run to the #3 spot, ICE’s $2B investment in Polymarket, and ETH staking ETFs officially going live. Plus, Solana ETF approval looks imminent, Asian capital rotates onchain, and Galaxy steps back into retail with a familiar face at the helm. ------ 📣IMMUNEFI | CRYPTO SECURITY OS  https://bankless.cc/Immunefi ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAXNET | MINT, REDEEM, EARN  https://bankless.cc/fraxnet 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR L2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🌳KGEN | REQUEST A DEMO  https://bankless.cc/KGEN-podcast 🐂BULLISH | TRADING COMPETITION https://bankless.cc/trading-competition 💠BIT DIGITAL ($BTBT) | ETH TREASURY  https://bankless.cc/bit-digital We’re being compensated by Bit Digital (NASDAQ BTBT) for this segment promoting their company and BTBT. The compensation is paid in cash as a one time payment. You can find additional information about Bit Digital and BTBT on their Investor page at https://bit-digital.com/investors ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 3:31  Markets https://www.theblock.co/post/373369/bitcoin-hits-new-all-time-high-crosses-125000-for-the-first-time-as-uptober-momentum-builds https://x.com/RayDalio/status/1973766977421275598 https://x.com/BTC_Archive/status/1975562328377528702  https://x.com/jvb_xyz/status/1975047567852671125 https://x.com/matthew_sigel/status/1976251057421647886 https://www.coinglass.com/bull-market-peak-signals https://x.com/Grayscale/status/1975262626377834938 https://x.com/joechalom/status/1975251314117648420 https://x.com/TheCryptoLark/status/1975147566351237315 https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1976037299373646270 21:56 Gold ATH, Equities at ATH and PTJ is calling out the AI bubble! https://x.com/elerianm/status/1975782709084500136 https://companiesmarketcap.com/assets-by-market-cap/#google_vignette https://x.com/SpencerHakimian/status/1975608283751981521 https://x.com/FluentInFinance/status/1975704684808560774 https://x.com/lisaabramowicz1/status/1975121018428809484 https://x.com/noahkaufmanmd/status/1975930839201702195 https://x.com/1MarkMoss/status/1973775891626164276 https://thedefireport.io/research/does-bitcoin-follow-gold#correlation-analysis https://x.com/esaagar/status/1975290951787745581 https://x.com/spikedoanz/status/1975806155470635429 https://x.com/MauiBoyMacro/status/1975589846971523102 https://x.com/pumatheuma/status/1976085531500200220?s=46 https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/06/cnbc-transcript-tudor-investments-founder-cio-paul-tudor-jones-on-squawk-box-today.html https://x.com/AltcoinDaily/status/1975363814167380090  https://x.com/dgt10011/status/1975353090128638415 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1975560592166355425 41:48 Why is BNB pumping! https://imgur.com/a/4d6Pnb3 https://x.com/cz_binance/status/1975595775540257262 https://defillama.com/chain/bsc https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1975601864423940288 https://x.com/TheCryptoDog/status/1975602134189285606 https://x.com/mattyboomboom/status/1975888004074922144 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1975909116431515777 https://x.com/eugenegeu/status/1975110416876577133 https://finance.yahoo.com/news/cz-returns-binance-speculations-getting-105754644.html 49:17 ICE - NYSE parent company is investing into Polymarket & Distributing Polymarket - $2 billion https://x.com/polymarket/status/1975528768039985449?s=46 https://x.com/CoinDesk/status/1975935472586125456 https://x.com/shayne_coplan/status/1975534265698812046 https://x.com/shayne_coplan/status/1975994093529690405?s=46 51:20 Galaxy launched Galaxy One https://x.com/galaxyhq/status/1975173116428234999 https://x.com/GalaxyOneZac/status/1975140872753999932 https://www.tradingview.com/chart/1CDu50yK/?symbol=NASDAQ%3AGLXY https://x.com/solspacecadet/status/1975262934797353010 56:11 Monad Airdrop Claim Portal incoming Tuesday Oct 14th https://x.com/monad/status/1976279260869619994 https://dropstab.com/coins/monad 57:40 3 things Ryan is excited about: https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1976044336111341719 https://x.com/Jrag0x/status/1976180218814660675 https://x.com/brian_armstrong/status/1975948961845538985 https://x.com/maxbranzburg/status/1975214629552091239 https://blog.ethereum.org/2025/10/08/privacy-commitment https://notes.ethereum.org/@niard/KohakuRoadmap https://beta.walletbeat.eth.limo/wallet/summary/ 1:02:18 Moment of Zen https://x.com/cocothecorncob/status/1975373485410033673  1:02:45 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Bankless Nation, it is the second week of October. It's not feeling like October though on the week, David. I think our prices are down. But gold is going up. So maybe there's some hope there. Something's up somewhere. We're going to talk about that, right? We're going to talk about gold at all-time high.

We actually did eke out a Bitcoin all-time high last weekend. So it's official technically. The NASDAQ and S&P are all at all-time high. What do we make of all this? Like, what does all this mean? It seems like there's a debasement. trade going on at the same time as an AI trade. And how is that going to play into the crypto cycle?

We got a long discussion about that ahead. Not just Bitcoin, got an all-time high. BNB has been pumping third largest crypto asset now. This week, valued two coin bases. Why? Why is it doing this? What's going on over there? And what's going on on the Asian market?

Because Asian tokens are just up. CZ comes back to Binance and all of a sudden, the Asian token market is as a huge premium. finance? We're going to talk about that. I don't think he did, but maybe. Also, we have staked ETFs coming down the pipe.

We're going to talk about all that news. Galaxy Digital launches a Robin Hood competitor, and you'll never guess, Ryan, who's back to leading it. Is it SBF? No, but, you know, you know. Okay.

We'll talk about that. Not close. Not close, not close. Not close, but, you know, in the vicinity there. In the vicinity, yeah. Also, the New York Stock Exchange parent company, they just made a massive investment in Polymarket, a $2 billion investment.

That is good things for Shane Copeland who became, according to this, it says, the world's largest, the world's youngest billionaire. I'm actually not sure if that's true. It values Polymarket at $9 billion. $2 billion in cash is invested. Does Shane just open the company bank account and just seize $2 billion there? Is that how that works? No, I don't think that's how it works, David.

But we do have a Monad air drop confirmation date, which is a layer one network that I think all of crypto's been looking forward to for some time, which may mean we're close to a main net. After four years, we're close to a main net. So we'll talk about all that and more. Apologies, bankless listeners for my voice. Again, I go into the week, a little sick. You're doing great.

We're going to hold through this episode. David, we got a shout out our friends and sponsors over at Immunify. So what do they do? Yeah, of course, security, as we all know, is the biggest issue in crypto security is paramount. Hacks and exploits have cost this base billions of dollars of actual dollars, but also billions of more dollars of just like legitimacy and trust that's lost with people who read headlines saying billions of dollars have been hacked from crypto. And Unify can help with us.

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C-C-E-E-F-I. That's I-M-M-U-N-E-F-I if you want to keep your customer deposits safe in your crypto protocol. And you definitely should be thinking about that. Yeah. David, let's talk about Bitcoin on the week. So it doesn't feel like September, but are we up a little bit on the week? October. October. Yes, we are up half a percent on the week. We did have an all-time high. So, you know, even though we're flat on the week, having an all-time high midweek, and still being up half a percent, you know,

technically still counts. It just, you know, at the moment of recording. When did we get that all-time high? October 6th. Monday or something? That was Sunday. It was Sunday morning. Sunday. Sunday, Yeah, 126,000 even at this new all-time high. Previous all-time high was in August at basically to $124,000. We've got some commentators saying the United States government shut down, loose liquidity conditions, narrowing performance relative to equities and gold is drawing attention to digital assets. That is the CIO at a bank who said that.

This wasn't a very noisy all-time high. It didn't feel like there was some celebration, but it's fairly muted. I think that's just because it's like a technical all-time high. Yeah, it's like $1,000 all-time high, $1,000 higher than last time. Yeah, it just doesn't feel, Bitcoin doesn't feel exciting as an all-time high until like $130K. If that's just me. But I think we start to celebrate more when we actually get a all-time high that feels meaningful and sustained. I've been looking, you know, David, you and I are both big Ray Dalio fans.

I've long been looking for Ray Dalio to weigh in directly. on Bitcoin. Like, Ray, what do you think about Bitcoin? To validate our bags? Yeah. He said good things about it previously. Of course, this is the big debasement guy, right? I mean, he talks about long-term debt cycles, the end of empires. He's a huge proponent of gold. That's probably worked out for him very well lately. And you'd think Bitcoin would be right up his alley. And it is kind of. Someone finally in a podcast asked him a direct question. Ray, is Bitcoin a legitimate currency. And he kind of said yes, kind of said no. So he said that he thought Bitcoin, some consider it as a money, some consider it as a store of value. But the big question for him was would central

banks consider it a store of value? And he said, no, probably not. And the reasons he gave, which are interesting, are it's not private. So he thinks that the public nature, the pseudo-anonymous and not, you know, private nature of Bitcoin makes it such that Central banks will not adopt it. He also says there's code risk. So there could be bugs in the system. You know, it's dependent on people. It's dependent on software, something that gold isn't.

So his conclusion is, I have gold and some Bitcoin, but not very much of it. And I'm wondering how much of this is like a generational type take. This is generational, for sure. Especially the code risk. Like, zoomers don't care about code risk. And you know what gold has as a risk is younger generation. is just not caring about it. So, yeah, you accept the code risk

and you, you know, decline the boomer, the boomer risk. Like, boomers are just not going to buy Bitcoin and not comparatively to, like, zoomers. And zoomers, which don't care about code risk. Well, so when you say they don't care about code risk, though, is this because they're just, like, naive and they don't think about risk?

They're young people. They're, you know, young and stupid, and they just don't think about risk like that. I mean, to me, I think a lot of people in crypto don't care about code risk so much as, like, because these are social systems. So let's say there was some infinity bug to supply in Bitcoin, some zero-day bug out there in a Bitcoin client. Say that happened tomorrow. Well, price would spike down. Price would react to that.

But people would stop running that client. Yeah. We would fix it via a patch. It would get deployed. and then like it wouldn't be a, it's not going to drop to zero. Yeah, yeah. Basically. Like these, you know, no one would accept a infinite supply Bitcoin as the actual legitimate

Bitcoin. Therefore, like, code risk is not so much a risk as people think it is. Okay, but to take Dahlio's side, he would probably say, like, yes, you could just overcome that with like a social fork and then it's everything's fine. But it still is a mark against the legitimacy of Bitcoin because gold doesn't have to have that, do that thing. you don't have to socially fork cold. Yeah, that's fair.

Another clip I found interesting on the week is, what does President Christine Ligarde think about Bitcoin? Someone asked her that directly. Here's the clip. Who is that? She works at the EU Central Bank. So we have the European Union Central Bank commentator here. She's Europe's Jerome Powell, basically.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Here's the clip. So can Bitcoin be like a digital form of gold? Okay. No. That's the final answer, right? Yeah.

I mean, you know, I hesitate to say that, but I say it because I have no fear, because I know that the social media tonight and tomorrow is going to hit me like, you know, like crazy, because that's the community that they form and that's the belief that they have and that's the confidence that they generate amongst themselves. But I still am of the view that there is no intrinsic value and there is no underlying value to it, which doesn't mean to say that there is no hype, creative. as a result, that some can associate with a value, meaning a price, which then moves up and down, depending on what happens, who is instrumenting all this. It's fascinating to me, David, that the reason she gives is there's no underlying value to Bitcoin. That's the reason it's not valuable, which begs the question of, why is gold trading at $27 trillion on the week?

Again, do you think this is a generational thing? the idea that gold can be backed by nothing of value, but Bitcoin, oh, that's a bridge too far. Obviously, that can't exist. That's not a real thing. I mean, this person is just the spokesperson of Fiat. They are just Fiat incarnate into this real world. They are the voice of Fiat money. And so this is what Fiat money would say. He's like, yeah, don't believe in Bitcoin because my life depends on this. Yeah, they're paid to not understand this, I guess. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. There's an interesting graph that went around.

But who owns Bitcoin in 2025? Bitcoin, then the year of our Lord, 2025, is still predominantly owned by retail. 71% almost 72% of Bitcoin is owned by retail. 7% of Bitcoin is in ETFs, 5% is left to be mined, 5% is owned by Satoshi Nakamoto, 4.5% owned by public companies, and 2.5% owned by countries and governments. It's crazy how dominant retail holding of Bitcoin is. Do you hear the headline take here, which is, I'm not selling Bitcoin until the country's bubble becomes as big as the retail bubble today. Do you think that is the end state?

Regardless of what Dahlio and Christine Ligarday think about it, central banks are going to have to acquire Bitcoin and hard crypto assets. That's just the future. Or maybe just younger generations take control of these institutions and they effectively become that. Yep, that's exactly right. But that's always been the plan, is Bitcoin only works as a grassroots revolution for, like, central bankers to actually end up holding the bag

and then having to buy all of our bags because we were buying drugs on the Silk Road in 2013. Wait, speak for yourself, dude. Okay, speak for yourself. Hold on now. More evidence of this, though. Actually, some news on the week, you have the first EU sovereign wealth fund

allocating to Bitcoin. It's never happened before. It's the country of Luxembourg, though they bought a Bitcoin position 1% FIA and ETF. So we're already working up that scale. You know, we got to the level of massive institutions, the Black Rocks of the world. Now we're getting into the big money, the big institutional capital, which is sovereign wealth funds. You've got to start somewhere, man. Got to start somewhere, you know, no shade against Luxembourg. They're like a startup country, right?

right? Like, don't they have, like, digital identity rolled out and all of these different things? I think that's right. Yeah, I think a very high GDP per capita. Yeah, just the capital size is pretty small, I guess, you should say. How about little brother, Eith on the week? We should check in. Heath down three or four percent on the week. Down three percent, four thousand three hundred dollars. Hit seven, four thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars was getting me real excited and then immediately went down. So, sad. But overall, just down three percent. Was that it, man? Was that October? Are we done?

October 9th, we got 20 more days. Okay, so I know you had a conversation. I was not feeling well, so I couldn't. But with Tom Lee and Arthur Hayes, and I'm hopeful you asked the question to them of, what about the cycle? Because, again, ticking, you know, clock right now, if this cycle ends like previous cycles,

we only got about two months. What did they say to this? Short clock. Yeah, short time left on the clock. Give me some good news. So they say something a little bit different. Oh, yeah. They're like, no, no, no, no.

It's Fed liquidity, brother. It just is a coincidence that the four-year cycle has just lined up with Fed liquidity events. And Arthur Hayes in the episode just goes through it. It's like, all right, the Bitcoin bubble in 2013, well, here's the Federal Reserve liquidity event. In 2017, here's the corresponding Federal Reserve liquidity event. So he maps it out. He correlates it. And that's why I think that this cycle hasn't felt so frothy is because interest rates are at not all-time highs,

but have been higher than they've been in forever. And the Federal Reserve is only slowly cutting them. But they are cutting. And they're cutting them now slowly. And so my takeaway from that is like, oh, yeah, just, again, the whole plant is the slow cook throughout 2026. So there is a case that the cycle ends this year. But Arthur Hayes and Tom Lee are making a case that we get an extended cycle

just because the money printers are just starting a fire up right now, not only in the U.S., but. in China as well. Did they give end-of-year price calls, by the way? Oh, yeah. But, I mean, come on. The listener's going to have to go listen to the episode. No, no, no.

Tell me what the... Okay, okay. We'll leave that tease out there, then. To listen to that episode, it's in the queue. Good news, David. The bull market indicators. Remember the coin glass bull market indicators that we checked in? None of them have hit...

Our frothy. Nothing's frothy right now. So this is kind of what you wanted, I feel like. You kept telling me the last couple of months, hey, I want slow, steady, up. I don't want anything crazy. We got a good thing going. Things are just up, slowly.

Like, maybe one month is down, the next month is green. But quarter over quarter, over quarter, over quarter, over quarter. We're just grinding up, dude. We're just grinding up. It's not exciting. Okay. We're all getting rich slowly. And by slowly, I mean, over three years.

That's great. David, we have the eth's taking ETFs, a world. first. Who's doing it? Great scale. Great scale. So they launched the first U.S. spot crypto ETF that allowed access for investors to have staked Ethereum via ETH and ETHE. And also, soon for Solana as it's waiting for regulatory approval. So ETH, ETH, ETH, the Grayscale ETH, will now pay distributions. And then, but also ETH, the other one, just ETH, they have the ticker ETH for the ETH, ETF. That's crazy. They will just roll staking returns into the nav, and so it'll just compound over time. But also, ETHE, the old one, charges a 2.5 management fee. So ETH, the better one,

charges 0.25 management fee. So, yeah, 2.5%, you should say. 2%. That's 250 bibs. Yeah, 250 big ones. Which is a big difference. What would you prefer? Do you prefer getting the cash distribution every month? Or would you prefer just... No, I just wanted... To roll it into the nav. Roll it into the nav. Yeah, because then I'm not taxed. You're not, you're taxed on income with distributions, right? Oh, that's right.

It's more tax efficient. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well done. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I've been brushing up all my taxes. Okay.

Dats are not done yet, though, because Dats also want to provide staking, which they do. They're easier to provide staking. So Joseph Shalam, former Black Rock ETF guy, now at Sbet, Strategic Bet on Eath. He says, quote, Having worked on BlackRock's, Bitcoin, and Ethereum ETFs, I've seen how powerful these vehicles are for institutional access and adoption, but some limitations are unlocking your staked eth can take up to 40 days. It's usually not that long.

And then also, ETHs will have to keep a large portion of their ETH holdings liquid, aka not staked. At Sharplink, we are able to stake 100% of our ETH generating superior yield. On top of the yield, we'll develop new businesses that have ETH-nominated revenue, increasing our eth concentration concentration even further. So Joseph saying, hey, we are a better product than even staked ETH ETHs. Because our yields are higher, basically. Our yields are higher.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that feels like that lines up to me. Yeah, but higher yields also more risk. More risk. Not too much more risk. They're like, they're trying to be conservative with it. Well, not just the staking. Like, I mean, they can stake 100%.

So right there, that's risk free. That portion is risk free. I guess that. And that's identical. The risk profile is identical. Yeah. Yeah. David, they're not the only

ETF. This is not the only ETF news, I should say. It seems like it's going to be, we're days away from Salana getting its first, not their first ETF. They've had some more exotic. Their first, like, good ETF. They kind of have this, like, kind of hacky ETF that has been around for a bit.

The gray scale, the 21 shares, the BitWise, the Franklin, the fidelity. Those are coming to Salana. And the final SEC deadline is actually, I mean today, today, the time listeners, will listen to this, the 10th of October. So Bloomberg is pricing.

Like, lots of approval is 95% here. So it seems like it's going to be a slam dunk that this thing is going to be approved. You got to expect this will be, I mean, what do you think? Do you think this will be a price catalyst for Solana? I think the market's already priced this in. What's your take? I don't think the staking component of ETFs

is a big price catalyst. Maybe it is a little... It's not just staking. It's all these Solana ETFs. Oh, the Slana ETSs in general. like fleet of all of these super legitimate ETFs. I mean, we saw what happened with a Bitcoin in ETH price after they got their ETF.

So I would expect to see some correlation with that. Well, what did ETH do? I mean, it kind of slumped after, actually. No, that's good point. Nottings weren't that exciting. Yeah, but Solana doesn't have gray scale unlocks to deal with. So that's actually a privileged position that Solana has. I think they have some, right?

They have a gray scale that's rolling over. They must have some unlocks there. I haven't looked into this. We'll see. I mean, the reason why BlackRock has been, I don't think BlackRock has been, I don't think BlackRock has a Salon at UTF. And like Black Rock's position is like we don't see demand for a salon at UTF. That's why we're not doing it.

But I mean, that was a while ago. So maybe there's more demand. Yeah. Coming up next, we're going to talk about the debasement trade. Gold has hit another all-time high and shows no sign of slowing down. What is that telling us? And scary? Is that scary?

But also there's the AI trade too. Also perhaps scary. Uh-oh. Yeah. And then ENB has now become the third largest asset in crypto, up 40%. in 30 days. Why is all of Asia catching a bid? We're going to talk about this and more, but first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Ethereum's layer two universe is exploding with choices. But if you're looking for the best

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The big news in all of finance this week was the gold all-time high. Let's start there because this signifies something that a lot of people are calling the debasement trade. What happened was gold hit a new all-time high surpassing $4,000 per ounce earlier this week on Monday for the very first time. And just to put some perspective on it, this is up more than 50% this year. Gold, okay?

Up more than 50% this year. And it has more than doubled over the power. two years. A reason for this, consistent buying of foreign central banks. China is definitely one of them. People say a lot of this is happening after the 2022, U.S. imposed sanctions against Russia and other non-U.S. aligned countries are like, well, we're not keeping our money in treasuries. So they're buying gold, and that accounts for a lot of the price action. Also, retail is allocating to gold as well. But David, when you look at this, you know, the list of the world's largest assets.

Gold is now like, there is no second best here. It's not even close. It's not even close. Jesus. Gold is $27 trillion in marketing. Okay? That's so big. That means over the past couple of years, David,

they've added about, let's see, $12 trillion. $12 trillion. So how many Bitcoins is that? Six Bitcoins. Six Bitcoins. When gold moves, I mean, with 50% or doubles over two years, these are like deca trillion dollar moves here,

we're talking about. NVDA is the second largest asset in the world worth $4.6 trillion. So, oh, by the way, gold is having its own alt season two, not talking about it, but silver is catching a pretty massive bid on this too. The light coin to gold, yeah, that's crazy. Yeah, that's right.

I mean, this is the debasement trade, obviously. It's just kind of crescendoing right now. And why it's crescendoing, I think we would probably have to talk to some macro people to really get that answered. But at some point, this has always been the trade. This has been the trade as long as I've gotten into crypto. It's just like, oh, yeah.

The debasement trade, you're talking about? The debasement trade, yeah. Yeah, it's basically like fiscal deficits, fiscal dominance. The U.S. is like 7% of GDP deficit this year. Congress isn't stopping it. The economy is doing pretty well, and still Trump is like, yeah, you know what we could use some rate decreases. We could replace Jerome Powell with somebody who is much more dovish and willing to cut rates.

And we're doing this at a time when can we afford to actually do it? I guess maybe we can't afford not to with our interest rate payments as a nation being so high as well. I mean, when the United States national debt is 38. $8 trillion, and we're paying like 4.5% on that interest payments on $38 trillion. Like, gold doesn't need a reason to go up. That's got, that's plenty of reason alone. Yeah. I mean, when you even zoom out, right, it's always been taught to me that, hey, like the Warren Buffett thing, why would I buy something that doesn't have cash flows? It's not a productive asset. Why would I buy something like gold? That's stupid. You should buy U.S. stocks, okay?

Over the last five years, our best performing indecy in the world has been the NASDAQ. It is up 98% over the past five years. Gold is up 112% over the last five. Gold, this inert, you know. If you owned real estate 100 years ago, it's about the same value as it was in gold terms. Yeah, it's incredible. Some more stats. Gold up 50% in nine months.

the S&P is up 10% in the same time. If you go back in time all the way since 2000, what if the stock market gains were measured in gold? This is if they were measured in gold, this is all stocks around the world, all in the U.S. It's basically down only as far as, you know... That's crazy. Right.

See, I mean, the gold bugs, your crazy uncle is right the entire time. Gold is on pace for its best year since 1979, up 51% of course, as we've said. If you look at these numbers. And the world's biggest asset. The last time we saw something in like higher than 50%. Going back through these years here was all the way back to 1979. And so what happened in the 1970s?

You get some really good return years for gold. 1972 was about 50%. 73 was 73%, 74, 66%. Well, what happened in 1971, right? We got off the gold's taken. We made our fiat currency worthless. We killed the redwoods. Gold goes on a tear.

So it's the 1970s with respect to debasement again. That's what the 2000s are, it seems like. Yeah. Yeah, in the 70s, we took our dollar off the gold standard. And then in the 2020s, we can't pay our debt. So now we're printing a ton of money. Well, the question is, like, at what price point, though, does this become alarming? So right now, gold bulls are like, yay, celebrate, celebrate.

But I mean, if we keep having 50% years, this implies something is going very wrong with our fiat money systems. There's a comment from Twitter. Gold's parabolic move towards 4,000 is sending a warning sign to the traditional finance system. Developed market nations are losing clout as being good stewards of capital. This comes on a day when the U.S. government has shut down due to dysfunction. France's prime minister resigned after three weeks. and Japan's new Prime Minister plans stimulus at a time of elevated inflation.

Nation states are just like not handling their finance as well and so people are resorting to gold. But at some point this gets like scary, right? This gets into like... I mean, you're making comparisons to like when Fiat currencies collapse relative to gold is usually not a good time. Like the Weimar Republican Germany,

the Bretton Woods, in the 70s. I mean, it's not a collapse, but it wasn't great. Anytime a fiat currency collapse, there's like discord and chaos. Like, hyperinflation is different from gold appreciation,

so we can cut off those comparisons. And also at the same time, like, we're in 2025, like things are very liquid and fluid in capital markets. And so, I mean, you investors have more optionality and more escape valves

from the fiat system better than ever. And so, I mean, part of that is just like, yeah, it's very easy to buy gold now. Yeah. and let's talk about one of those other escape helps, which is crypto. So how about our digital gold products? How about our non-sovereign store values? How about gold versus crypto?

We could look at that on the year, David. So gold, as I said, is up 50%. I never thought that gold would be beating both Bitcoin and Eith on the year. It is. So Bitcoin up 30% on the year. Eith up 30%, 33%, gold up 54% on the year, which is pretty funny. Now, if you zoom out, though, okay, if you zoom out all the way to Bitcoin Inception in 2012, you price Bitcoin in gold terms, okay?

Gold has been down only relative to Bitcoin, right? So I guess the answer is kind of zoom out. Although. Yeah, that's not fair, though. It is fair, but it's not fair. I think it's like another look at it, right? Yeah. But I think the big question is, will, now that gold is 27 trillion, okay, well, we can just

like, Bitcoin can catch up to that, right? Crypto can catch up to that as an asset class. And the question is, do you think it will? Over the long period of time, yeah. It's just like, again, it's a generational thing. Right now, I think it's because the central banks are freaking out because the United States has all this debt to pay and it's just debasement. And so banks are like this largest financial institutions in the world are making

this trade, which is why it's such a big move and gold and like trillions of dollars are sloshing around. But like if we are long-term investors, and I'm talking like, like decades, like what am I going to put my life's denominator into? It's going to be the internet equivalent of what is exactly going on. Because slowly the balance of power will shift from the analog to the digital. That's the whole cryptothesis. And millennials and Zuber's, as we get our hand on Boomer Capital, Central Bank Capital flows

down into Zuber's hands. All of a sudden they're like, you know what? One day, Ryan, there will be a millennial Jerome Powell. What are they going to do? Like, are they going to buy, they're going to be like, we have a lot of gold and not very much Bitcoin. I am going to equalize those things. I mean, that's probably the case. We just have to wait for the millennials to own the banks.

That's probably the case. Then goes back to the clips we played earlier. Although, I will say, what you just said is more the narrative, right? And this is certainly the Bitcoin crypto narrative, which is, hey, crypto is also a debasement hedge. Okay. There have been periods of time where it traded like that. where it was correlated to gold. So there was a long stretch from late 2022 to late 2024

that the CME summarized that gold rose 67% while Bitcoin surged nearly 4%. There was a relatively tight correlation. But there are other times, in fact, most of the time, these two assets have been pretty decoupled. Okay? So it's a narrative that Bitcoin should catch up to gold and trade like gold and is a debasement head.

But it's actually, in point of fact, Bitcoin is much more correlated to what the NASDAQ is doing. And so Michael Nato from the Defi report wrote an entire post, which is basically the question of, does Bitcoin follow gold? And even should you have gold in your portfolio if you own crypto assets? And his conclusion was basically like, if you look at the data, no, not really. Bitcoin behaves as a distinct tech-like asset driven by adoption, liquidity, and reflexivity. it's not like levered gold. Gold is inversely related to real rates and the dollar Bitcoin shows

almost zero relationship to either of those things, which is somewhat interesting. So we've got the narrative that says, yeah, it's just like gold. It'll catch up to gold. It'll do what gold does. But in point of fact,

it's actually still very much correlated to tech stocks and not the basement trade. So we'll have to see if that changes. Yeah. I do think Bitcoin and Ethereum, especially when they're so early in their lifespan. Like Bitcoin's 15 years old.

And so the first seven, eight, nine, ten years of Bitcoin are just, it's like infant-aged. And same thing with Ethereum. And so like the next 10 years of Bitcoin where it's more an adult and same thing with Ethereum, I think it's going to have different investment properties, different comparatives than what we have when it's like a child. I think I agree with you too. Okay. So that's the debasement trade. But the interesting point in history where we are,

David, is that's one thing that's happening. It's not the only thing that's happening. We have gold all-time highs, but we also have stock market all-time highs. We have NASDAQ and S&P 500, all-time highs. So they are both up about 20%, 20 and 15%, respectively, on the year as well. And the real driver of growth, of course we know, 40% of US GDP growth this year has been AI. Okay. If you look at 80%, percent of all of the gains of the U.S. stock market this year, it's all been AI. An economist out of Harvard this week said this. Without data centers, GDP growth in the U.S. would be 0.1% in the first half of 2025. Okay? So all of the KAPX spend, all of the growth that we're seeing, it's highly concentrated on AI. And we also, you know, there was a time where

I think AI bulls have been saying, well, all of this is with cash rich tech companies, they have really strong balance sheets, and they're just financing all of this CAPEX spend with retained earn. That has been true. It's starting to be less true. So here's a report. The amount of debt tied to AI has ballooned to $1.2 trillion. So we're starting to get some debt in the system to fund some of this CAPEX.

It's not just retained earnings. And of course, we know what this looks at. Like, right? So here's kind of a diagram of almost the human centipede of AI right now. Which is like a very small number of companies that are all cutting deals with one another and all pumping each other's shares up, right? So just as we- Yeah, has a bunch of money made an investment, or open AI made an investment in India.

Invidia who bought, you know, a bunch of Oracle stuff who, you know, who, you know, competes with AMD and then it all flows back into Microsoft. Exactly. It's all the same money. It's all the same like $500 billion to be sloshed around. Did you see this week like OpenAI does a deal with AMD and AMD shares are up 27%? And what was part of that deal? That OpenAI would get AMD shares.

What the heck? Hey man. Okay. When the Fiat money is worthless, like this is to be expected. Okay. So, but this is kind of weird. We got debasement going on at the same time. As like hyper growth.

Hyper growth. Like, or what's maybe another word for hyper growth? starts with a B? Is it bubble? Notable investor, Paul Tuber Jones, had a great interview on CNBC that I enjoyed very much. He actually compared all that's going on to the 1999 tech boom and bust, okay? And he predicted that a blow off the top was coming soon. So he said, hey man, I was there in the late 90s. This looks a lot like that right now. You're saying we're in 1999. For those that don't know the timeline here. October 1999,

tech stocks were still booming like crazy. Meanwhile, by the way, the Fed was actually increasing rates. So monetary policy was tightening. It's going like from five to five and a half to six. Anyway, during this time, there was still a bull run ahead. And then we got massive gains from October 1999 in the NASDAQ

to the top, which was March 2000. And he said, I see something similar. here. We got price increases. We got the tech fervor. We've got the buildout. You know, everyone calling AI a new paradigm. And he's saying this seems a lot like what we have seen before. This feels a little forced to me. I mean, the dot-com bubble was truly a bubble in a sense that, you know, bullshit was getting priced at billions of dollars because, you know, it had just like a, you had an investment brochure. It's like the same thing with the ICO bubble. It's like you'd spin up a website.

you could get hundreds of millions of dollars investment. And so, like, it was purely all just hype driven. And, like, you know, AI, it's not hype, man. It's like, these are the largest companies in tech. These are Google, Microsoft, Facebook, meta, like, NVIDIA. These are the, these were all preexisting companies before AI came in. So that's a big difference, right? It's not just like anyone spinning up an IPO because they have a website,

which is what happened in the dot-com bubble. And, you know, also, like these are real products. Like I pay opening, I have a $200 software subscription to opening AI. Like I'm paying them $200 a month. That's ridiculous. Jeff Park pushed back on this.

He had a tweet that I thought was useful. I read a small part of it. He says, I occasionally hear macro traders comparing the current bubble to 1999 because of the AI mania and stretch valuations. But this is quite a lazy thing to say, in my opinion, and should be taken with a grain of salt.

Then he goes on to say a few things that you iterated, like the Fed was raising rates in 1999 and it's cutting rates now. I think the big one that I like from Jeff Park's tweet was in 1999, there was no Bitcoin, there was no social media, there was no smartphones, and today money moves so fast. And there are just escape valves everywhere. And, you know, markets are just way more informed these days.

I mean, the 1999 tech bubble was because of the existence of the internet. We didn't have the internet to talk because that was what we were speculating on at the time. Today, we have the internet. Like, markets are much more efficient, much more informed than they were back then. and investors have like a lot more optionality. And so I kind of see that all as like bubble armor, bubble resistance, at least as it compares to like the 1999 bubble. I think that there is some bubble resistance,

but I'm going to take more of the Paul Tour Jones case on this. Not necessarily that this is exactly like 1999, but you can see like overinvestment allocation towards one specific area. I mean, there's at some price point where AI is just like promising far more than it can immediately cash the same way the Internet did. Like, everything in 2000 about the Internet did prove to be true. It just took another like five to ten years for that to germinate. And I think that might be true at AI.

Not necessarily now, but at some point. Now, Paul Tudor Jones does say that like, hey, in situations like this, you cannot afford to be out of the market for the months preceding the blow off top. Okay, you've got to be absolutely allocated because that's the time you get the 2x, the 3x, things get crazy. You just have to be cautious. And I do think it's worth being cautious about what is going on in kind of AI.

He, someone, they asked him, what assets should you allocate to? And this is what he said. If you look at the biggest winners, right? The biggest winners are gold. I think it's up 46, 47%. Bitcoin, I want to say it's up 50 or 60. I'm not even sure. There's a Morgan Stanley basket that's a retail flow basket that has all the meme stocks. It's up 67, 68%. So it's really what retail jumps on.

So crypto digital goal, that's obviously something that's very, very appealing. Does that mean you're jumping on all of that right now? Well, I'd want to have positions in all of it, for sure. So if you said to me, what are they going to be the winners? Again, we have this race. Right. The race, realistically, is certainly to the end of the year, because that's when everyone marks institutionally. And then you have to figure out what's going to go on in next year. So what would I want to have?

I'd want to have a combination of gold, crypto, probably the NASDAQ. I think I want to say that I've said that before, and I think that's still the world. the right one. And I think whatever the fastest horse is at this point in time probably has a good chance of being that on deck 31. Whatever the fastest horse probably has a good chance of saying it. So he's saying

crypto, he's saying gold, and he's saying the NASDAQ. The question is, though, if this is a bubble, what do you like escape into? Do you sell for treasuries? We just keep these assets. Like, if the denominator is shifting, what do you actually sell in some kind of an

AI bubble? And I mean, I don't think that's clear. Yeah, well, that's why I think part of this is happening. It's just like all of these tech companies have hundreds of millions of dollars to slosh around because of the debasement. So on one end, we have debasement because there's so much money. And then where does all this money go? It went into AI. And so that AI is propping up the valuations, not because not just because it's a bubble, but also because there's too much money around. Speaking of money sloshing around, we can get into some crypto-native subjects finally, this big Marcus episode this week. BNB, a top five asset over the last month because it's up 40% on the month, 20% week over week. And, you know, it's crypto.

Things move volatile. Things are volatile on crypto. So 40% in months, it's not crazy. But when you're a top five asset and you move 40%, that's something like 30 or 40, excuse me, no, that's like $60 or $70 billion on a fully diluted valuation. And it puts them at number three, right? The third largest crypto asset, just behind Ethereum. Behind Ethereum, yeah. They're also behind Tether, but of course, let's not count Tether. They were ahead of Tether earlier in this week, so they've been back and forth. Tether's coming in at $178 billion of stable coins. That's a stable coin. B&B, yeah, it's a stable coin. But, I mean, you know, I think it's, I think it's funny. Do you think that this price is justified, David? Why is B&B worth anything?

Is B&B money? Is B&B a utility? What's the rev profile of B&B? Do you think it should be the third largest crypto asset? I mean, you're asking very intelligent questions. I'm not sure if those are the right questions to ask in order to get a good. Let me ask you another one then. So at this valuation, B&B token is worth 2x, the market cap of Coinbase. Yeah. And interestingly, B&B token is not the same as shares in Binance. No.

Finance revenue used to burn BNB. It no longer does that. All we can really talk about are some of the things that have happened in the last month. Aster, which is one of the new perp-dex is to come in after Hyperliquid. CZ has kind of like, King made Aster. And so if you're on Binance smart chain, Astor is like the thing.

And there's just been a bunch of wealth effect downstream of Aster. So if you're an Astor token holder, you're just, you're doing great. And so there's been a Binance Smart Chain wealth effect. Downstream of that is meme coins. If everyone's on Binance Smart Chain is rich, then like what happens next is meme coins. And so meme coins have attracted a lot of the meme coin traders on Binance Smart Chain. And overall, just revenue on Binance Smart Chain is like, 3x over like a month long period.

It's like 3x more activity. So fee revenue has now exceeded Tron, which used to be just like a number one or two chain in terms of fee revenue. So Binance Smart Chain is like tied. It's like only hyperliquid is generating more fees than Binance smart chain right now, which is kind of crazy. And so all of these have started to happen. The waves, the momentum behind Binance has definitely because of all the on-chain activity. why it's two times a coin base? I don't know, dude.

Yeah, all of those reasons I think are right. There's also B&B holders get access to Binance airdrops. So there's something like 2.4 billion in airdrops in 2024 or to Binance holder. So I guess that makes it a cash yielding asset as well. The thing is I was digging into this that I didn't realize is there are reports that CZ holds between 60 to 70% of B&B tokens. And this is not transparent. This is a reporter who worked on an article for Forbes.

I'll include some sources in the show notes. I didn't fully do the slew thing to look this up myself. But it seems like it could be the case, right? Because Binance has a whole bunch of B&B tokens, and he traces the wallet to that. CZ has a whole bunch personally. CZ owns 90% of Binance. He might have between 60% to 70% of the B&B supply. He's probably not selling.

Yeah. It makes it really easy to go up if your largest holder holds. 60% and isn't selling. Oh, there you go. But it's a different type of asset than something like Bitcoin or E or some of the other assets that are much more evenly distributed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there's been a wealth effect across Asian crypto, the Asian side of crypto.

So Mantle has been on just a pretty crazy run. Mantle's trading at $2.50. Whereas just like three months ago, it was trading at 60 cents. Mantle is like the bi-bit token. And that's downstream of the buy-bit exchange. So that's also gotten a wealth effect. So overall, just the Asian markets are very, very hot. I didn't go to token 2049.

Neither did you, Ryan. Apparently, the token conference is just flush with cash. And so there's just like a lot of liquidity over there too. Oh, there we go. David, what do we have coming up? Coming up next, the world's largest tradfai exchange gave polymarket $2 billion, making Shane Copleman, the youngest self-made billionaire. Also, Galaxy has launched a Robin Hood competitor.

It's not what I expect to come out of Galaxy. and you wouldn't guess who's leading it. Who's back? Who is back to be the CEO? And also, Ryan here has got three things that he's excited about. 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 this show possible. Introducing FRAXUSD, the genius aligned digital dollar from FRAX. It's secure, stable, and fully backed by institutional-grade real-world assets,

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Seize the mandate and register today at bullish.com slash promotions slash pro trader. That's bullish.com slash promotions slash pro trader. There's a link in the show notes for more information. All right. Ice, the Intercontinental Exchange, which is the New York Stock Exchange parent company, is investing into Polymarket with $2 billion valuing Polymarket at about $9 billion. Wow, $9 billion valuation for Polymarket. Apparently in cash, I don't know, right?

I think Shane has a big account with $2 billion in it. That's what I'm reading. Yeah, it's pretty good. Yeah. They're not only investing, right? They're also distributing. So again, this is the company behind the New York Stock. Exchange is also planning to distribute polymarket markets. Not exactly sure what that means,

but that's part of the deal here. Oh, interesting. I don't know what that looks like, but that's awesome. That's great for Polymarket. Shane Copland, founder of Polymarket, 27 years old. And this makes him his net worth over a billion dollars, which, I mean, congrats to Shane. I mean, on paper, he has to IPO or drop a token, which he hinted at this week. Okay. The Polymarket token was officially hinted at, not confirmed, but hinted at, from a tweet from Shane Coplin, who just tweets out a bunch of tickers, Bitcoin, ETH, B&B, Seoul, and then ticker sign Polly with a little, you know, hmm, emoji. Well, there's a certain order to this, because this seems to mirror the current crypto market

cap by like order. So first Bitcoin, then ETH, then B&B, then Solana, then Polly. So he's implying. In terms of attention, not market cap. an intention landscape. This is attention. Yeah. Maybe he's going for number five, though. Yeah.

In, you know, Markyap there. This is not confirmed, of course, but would you call this a tease? The founder of Polly Market just tweeted out a ticker that says Polly, dude, with a little hmm emoji. So, no, is this not confirmed. But like, come on. Come on, come on. Now, is this the equity or pseudo equity of Polly Market?

Or is this a token? We don't know what the token does. We don't know what the token does, but pretty interesting tweet nonetheless. Galaxy launched Galaxy 1. What is that statement? It's a finance app. So I'd imagine you can deposit money into it. And then there are different strategies as well as stocks and ETFs without commissions.

And so just pulling straight from the Robin Hood playbook. Earned interest can automatically be reinvested into crypto and stocks. I'd imagine Galaxy has a bunch of products and indices and ETFs. I would imagine that they are first class citizens in. side of the Galaxy app. I didn't expect this from Galaxy. I don't know if you did, but this is a Robin Hood competitor, right? You have crypto, you have stocks, do staking, you can do all the things, yield, all the

things inside of an app. I always thought of Galaxy's more of like a institutional Wall Street type brand, and that's what they have been doing, OTC trading, that kind of thing. Now they're getting into retail. And they brought a retail guy into Run It. Who is this? Zach Prince, the former CEO and co-founder of BlockFi, which doesn't have to be have the best reputation, but it's been a while.

So, you know. It's only been three years, David. It's not been that long. That's plenty of time. Plenty of time. Okay, so for those that weren't around or just don't remember, BlockFi was part of the downstream contagion after FTX and Celsius as well. It's co-founded by Zach.

And co-founded by Zach, Zach was the CEO. And so he, it was a Bitcoin depository institution. So you could deposit your Bitcoin and you could get yield, something like it started off at like 3%, but then it started to creep up 4%, 5%, 6%, it started to be pretty compelling way to get a Bitcoin or just get yield on your Bitcoin. Turns out when FTX exploded and also Celsius was also caught up in that, you know, the wave,

the tide went out and BlockFi was caught swimming without trunks. And so they just didn't have money to repay the customers because they were giving out loans to three hours capital as well. Well, mostly, it was most of the loans were Alameda research. and then they had about 350 million on FDX. So they had their money on FDX and they had a $700 million loan to SBF's crypto hedge fund, which was like defunct and bankrupt.

And that's where they were getting a lot of the yields. So that was BlockFi depositors funds. So that money was gone. Yeah, so a lot of customers lost money with BlockFi. And that's kind of the story there. Zach Prince testified during the criminal prosecution of Alex Mishinsky. And so we were able to kind of get some insights there. My big takeaway from Zach Prince was that he was kind of dragged down into the mud by competitors that were cheating.

Like Alex Mishinsky was a frog. He was cheating. And he made all of his competitors. It made their life way harder because he was giving, he was literally giving away a Ponzi scheme. And legitimate competitors had to compete with that. So they kind of got dragged down into the mud in order to just be market competitive with a cheater. And so that's kind of like the... He wasn't a criminal.

He didn't have... The more forgiving interpretation, yeah. Right, right. Alex Mishinsky had criminal charges. Wait, wait, did he get... Is he in jail right now? I can't remember. Alex Mishinsky's in jail.

As we went to jail. Zach had no criminal charges, right? No criminal charges for that. But he did make a huge mistake from a risk perspective in giving funds to Alameda and SBF. He got totally SBFed. And as someone who lost money in black, BlockFi. I'm just like, that still kind of hurts. Yeah.

You know, in their bankruptcy. It's like a little insulting to see him as the CEO of a retail deposit. A little bit. You know, asking for more, you know, crypto asking for more yield. But also, man, who's got more experience than Zach? Oh, yeah. Totally. Run it back differently this time. I mean, I do feel for it, like, the entire industry got screwed by St. Bankrupt Free and FTX. But at the same time, I'm, like, raising a little bit of an eyebrow on this. Yeah. People have Zach on the show sometime. he can tell us what happened.

I think you're cursed with context, dude. Oh, I'm cursed with only getting 50% of my collateral and paid in Fiat, not in actual Bitcoin, but another story there. The Galaxy equity on the NASDAQ jumped 8% after the announcement of Galaxy 1. And so, Galaxy is just an institution these days. They're in everything. Yeah, doing quite well. I mean, there is a case for their stock at these levels.

I mean, they're a $15 billion stock. Look at Robin Hood. They're north of $100 billion right there, right? They're like almost $200 billion now. Coinbase is 80 to $1915 billion. No, Coinbase is higher than that. They've got the institutional side. Now, if this Galaxy 1, the retail takes off,

I mean, they've got a value appreciation story here. So that'll be exciting to watch. Yeah, Robin Hood coming at $133 billion. All right. for those that pay attention to things like this for the DGens, people in the trenches, the Monad AirDrop, Monat, the Twitter account, tweeted out.

The Monad AirDrop Claim Portal is incoming on Tuesday, October 14th, end of tweet. That was a whole tweet. And so we're getting, I don't know how they're determining who gets anirdrop because they don't have a blockchain to the airdrop to users. But somehow air tokens are going out. Community stuff.

Community stuff. and we will find out how who and how we are getting tokens on October 14th. But that means they're going main net, right? Yeah. It's got to mean that. I think it's like an open secret

that like the monad blockchain is running up and running somewhere. It's just not publicly accessible. Oh, we should say for people don't remember, this is a layer one, it's an EVM, layer one that they maxed out efficiency for. Yeah, they reconstructed the entire EVM. From scratch, brand new database.

brand new execution engine. So right now, it could be, in theory, a brand new Ethereum client because it's EVM equivalent. It's not just EVM compatible. It's like the same thing. And they did open source it, which is like credit to them. However, it's not a layer two. It's not, it's its own separate layer one. Uh-huh.

How much will the token be worth? We don't really know, but we do know that the OTC valuation for Monnet as a whole is coming between $11 and $14 billion. Oh, there you go. Not a small chain. Not a small chain at all. All right, Ryan. We got three things that Ryan is excited about, and we got three minutes left in this episode. So you got one minute per thing, dude.

One minute each. Well, first thing is lighter. So we talked about it last time. This is a layer two perps on Ethereum. They just debuted on layer 2B. So they're getting a lot of traction. They got their report card, their security report card. Yeah, they got their security report card.

And it was exciting from a couple of angles. Number one, doing quite well. So, you know how hard these pie slots on? L2BR to acquire, they got four out of five in the green. Okay? Wow. Now, they're still stage one, but they're pretty close to being... Stage zero.

Stage zero. Stage zero, excuse me. And they're pretty close to being a stage one. Not only that, they are debuting at number six. The sixth largest layer two that exists. By TVL. By TVL. Not only that, if you exclude all of the other layer ones and just focus on app chains,

app chain is kind of like single-purpose app. All they're doing is perps. they're the largest app chain in Ethereum. And I'm just like kudos. They're doing it the right way. This is the founder. His comment was being in layer one is a bug, not a feature. An L1 is just an Ethereum layer two

without any of the security and verifiability parts. As a property rights maxi, I love that because, you know, lighter is showing that you could do an app chain, be super fast performant, and actually pass on Ethereum property rights. It's kind of the way Vitalik has always wanted it to go. And it's an experiment we're seeing on that. So that was exciting to me. That's number one. We have a podcast with him. We are recording with him on Tuesday next week. So that will be in your

podcast feed soon. Number two, David, is Coinbase in Brian Armstrong doing the Defy Mullet. Just continuing it. It's been a, like a number of weeks we've talked about this. This is Brian Armstrong. Now everyone in the U.S. can access millions of assets on Coinbase, excluding New York. Sorry, David. But this is within the main Coinbase app. You can go in CoinBank. You know, anyone of your friends, your family that has Coinbase, and they can buy pretty much anything. They can buy fluid. They can buy meme coins on base.

Anything on base they can buy, which is a whole lot of things on Ethereum. And they're doing this through a Dex. So it's going through base on chain, but you get the same user experience as if you're on the centralized exchange except it's creating a non-consodial wallet for you. You're doing it through Uniswap or Aerodrome, some sort of Dex aggregation. and you're doing it on chain. So this is the Defy Mullet in action. They are also rolling.

It's a good looking mullet. And they rolled out morpho. And this is, of course, like Defi borrowing and lending. And this is at already $200 million in USC. So this is Coinbase. The thing preventing us from doing the defy mullet has always been regulation. And now regulatory is open.

And so we're doing it. And you love to see it. That's the second thing. Not saying. What is it? Last thing is Ethereum's privacy wallet reference implementation. Okay, so the EF has been talking a lot about privacy recently, and I'm like, okay, you're talking about it, but like, what are you doing? Well, this is one of the big things that they're actually doing.

It's Kohoktu, I believe I'm saying this right? So this is a privacy wallet. They're taking the Ambuyer wallet. They're forking that, and they are totally building it. So this is the EF actually building kind of a wallet, building up. Wow, the EF is building a product? Yeah, but they're doing it like full soup to nuts, full privacy. Because if you look at all of the wallets in crypto, just in Ethereum on the market,

none of them passed the privacy test, right? You have private token transactions? No, no, no, no, no, no. Like your RPC, it's no. They track your IP address. So this is a wallet from scratch that's going to do soup to nuts, true crypto privacy. Private sends through various privacy protocols that exist like railgun, private receipts, private payments,

you're even running the Helios Light client behind the scenes. So you're creating one account per address. Anyway, this is the EF being like, okay, we haven't seen a good wallet on the market that respects privacy to the degree we want it to. So we're building it,

and you guys can use this as a reference implementation. It's great to see. That's the most bullish thing I've heard out of the EF, because no chain has privacy other than actual privacy chains, but then you can't do anything because you can only do privacy.

If they can actually establish privacy standards for crypto wallets, that's just a huge selling point for so many people. It's very cyberpunk. It's very cyberpunks. I've seen them do. David, we got a moment of Zen. You found this for us. Set it up.

Yeah, okay. This is El Coco. We have done moments of zans from El Coco before. He is a fantastic singer-songwriter, and he makes songs about crypto, about Eith. It's our favorite subject. And I don't know, I just listen to these little songs that he makes. They're really well done.

They're really good. I'm just like, I just get a little, I get proud. I get proud of our, yeah, it's very wholesome. It reminds me of 2021, 22. So enjoy this, guys. Gotta let you know, of course, none of this has been financial advice. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, because I'm losing my voice right now.

But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot. For Heath is money. Eat is money. What's a big improvement on the current system? it ain't even funny

Now the word money is confusing It's more than just currency So I did research and wrote this song About what money means What is money? What does it mean? It's the way to get you to do something for me When I don't have the thing that you particularly want

Because we all bring Different things to the table And that's what makes society a thing that people want it like a thirst and they always put it first it's the thing everybody uses to measure other people's worth it's easy to move

there's enough to go around it should retain its value and that's what we all call sound I may come up as cynical but I just understand humanity's doomed but there's still room to improve things while we can and needs a better money

Yeah, it's a better money Hard money A future built on money Legos is looking kind of sunny When the system's built to not extract It's amazing what you get How about a loan you don't have to pay back Self-repaying debt

What executes no matter what is told Ethereum What inflates less than gold Ethereum But we'll issue enough in perpetuity To uphold security What's the same is going to use Inaps and devs and devs

two. When base roll-ups in or operate, what will be the glue? You said if we want to scale to worldwide use, then no chain is prepared. But only one chain's really facing this. No others compare. So what's so good about it? Don't have to store it in a bank with a greedy CEO that keeps all of the interests made on all your hard-earned-do. Don't have to put it in a mattress or hide it in a

dirt. You retain complete control while you put your funds to work. You can loan your ETH to the highest bidder on the other side of the globe. He's guaranteed to pay you back. It's written in the code. You can start a business enterprise with strangers you just met. And no one needs to know your name. No red tape from the government. And money, ETH is money. Programable money. The current system costs too much And it's as slow as honey Why the hell do I need permission to VINMO My friend who paid for lunch

Why do I need to put my name and address And social security number And whole goddamn life story Into a big honey pot So the banks can say Hey hackers, look here I got a whole company full of employees For you to socially engineer

Heath fixes this by the way And eat this money Just try to take it from me You can't. The most pristine collateral used in defy, and it ain't even funny. It takes away the power from the banks and the governments. Money's just a product of people agreeing, and they're deciding, it seems to me. And when people use Ethereum rails, the money's always Eith.

So when Ethereum's used by all the government's companies and people in the world, what's the money underneath? Well, it ain't Bitcoin. You know, that's right. Well, you know what? At least it's an authentic human-sounding episode, right? AI can't do that.