Bankless - ROLLUP: Google’s Quantum Warning | Trump’s Iran Speech | Ethereum Economic Zones | Drift Hack

Episode Date: April 3, 2026

Google just dropped a major quantum warning for crypto, claiming a breakthrough that could accelerate the timeline to breaking Bitcoin and Ethereum’s core security. Ryan and David unpack what changed, how real the threat is, and why the industry may need to act sooner than expected. Plus: Trump signals three more weeks in the Iran conflict and markets shrug it off, a $285M Solana DeFi hack exposes critical flaws, Ethereum’s new plan to unify L2s, and why crypto wallets are rapidly turning into full financial super apps. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔮POLYMARKET | #1 PREDICTION MARKET https://bankless.cc/polymarket-podcast  🪐GALAXYONE | SOLANA STAKING https://bankless.cc/GalaxyOne 🦊 METAMASK | DOWNLOAD NOW https://go.metamask.io/BL-Pod-Download  🏅BITGET TRADFI | TRADE GOLD WITH USDT https://bankless.cc/bitget 🎯THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://thedefireport.io/bankless 🐇MEGAETH | 1ST REAL-TIME BLOCKCHAIN https://bankless.cc/megaeth --- TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 1:46 Worst BTC Q1 Since 2018 https://www.theblock.co/post/395991/bitcoin-worst-q1-since-2018 https://imgur.com/Y8V3LyR  3:15 Trump, Iran & Market Reaction https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/2039508709374636457 https://polymarket.com/event/us-forces-enter-iran-by/?via=bankless https://polymarket.com/event/us-x-iran-ceasefire-by/?via=bankless https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2039525222311731260 https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2039516924762096021 https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2039715963730305106 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/2039718732361040022 https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2039691820419235841 https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/2038650848931193203  https://x.com/robinhanson/status/2038778655204122748 https://x.com/natesilver538/status/2038711622043144529 https://polymarket.com/event/which-party-will-win-the-house-in-2026/?via=bankless https://polymarket.com/event/which-party-will-win-the-senate-in-2026/?via=bankless 18:35 Google’s Quantum Warning for Crypto https://quantumai.google/static/site-assets/downloads/cryptocurrency-whitepaper.pdf https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.28627 https://x.com/drakefjustin/status/2038847732152996108 https://x.com/nic_carter/status/2038804571791761821 https://x.com/mreiffy/status/2038878566796988776 https://x.com/nic_carter/status/2039065325627396309 https://x.com/_jonasschnelli_/status/2039403067511341368 https://x.com/_jonasschnelli_/status/2039049535822147890 41:39 $285M Drift Hack on Solana https://x.com/DriftProtocol/status/2039564437795836039 https://defillama.com/perps https://x.com/dbcrypt0/status/2039677244734677186 https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/drift-protocol https://x.com/StaniKulechov/status/2039587524075491794 https://x.com/haydenzadams/status/2039560830862164329 47:08 Ethereum Economic Zones & Aave V4 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/2038625973260722336 https://x.com/etheconomiczone/status/2038271122907578375 https://x.com/jbaylina/status/2038277153641377865 56:09 X Crypto Wallet + Phantom Super App https://x.com/benjitaylor/status/2036882102420201832 https://x.com/Marczeller/status/2038300072367017988 https://x.com/phantom/status/2039027553940480448 57:43 Apyx, OpenAI, SpaceX & April Fools https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/2037607121676603530 https://x.com/hyperbridge/status/2039318963486625880 1:03:37 Closing & Disclaimers --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Bankless Nation, welcome to the first week of April. It's time for the bankless weekly roll-up. Google released a major quantum warning directed squarely at us, David. Not you and me, but at crypto, let's say. They have an algorithmic breakthrough that just 20xed progress towards cracking ECDSA and some of the crypto signatures that underlie Bitcoin, Ethereum, and basically everything we do here. How bad is it for crypto? I think it's pretty concerning. Some might call me a panicking, though. We'll get into the paper and see what Beggless listeners decide. It's certainly worse for crypto when we can't seemingly come to consensus about how big of a deal it is, which makes it an even bigger deal. It's like a little bit of a coordination problem, if you will. Meanwhile, back into the Trump side of things, he addressed the nation last night about the state of the Iran War, the state of Operation Epic Fury. in my take was that it was a 19-minute speech basically to deliver the bad news to the markets

that we are in this for three more weeks. He said, we're going to talk about that. All that end more. He said the straight-of-hor moves will just open up naturally. Gas prices will come down, the stock prices will go back up, but not before three weeks from now at the very least. We'll see if the market is reassured by that when we get into it.

Also, did Ethereum just come up with a plan to finally unite all of the layer twos? They're called Ethereum Economic Zones We'll spell out what that means. Ave v4 just released. What's new in that? Also, the biggest hack, I think, in Solana history, a $300 million hack, the drift exchange. This is a purpose exchange was hacked.

What happened? And what can we learn? It's all about the lessons we learn along the way, isn't it? Before we get started, Ryan, can I tell you a fun fact? Yeah. It genuinely needs to be fun, though. I don't want any of your not fun facts, okay? This needs to be fun one.

It's fun because it implies good buying price. Okay. Yeah. Okay. It's a bearish fun fact. Tell me. We just survived the worst Q1 in Bitcoin since 2018. Oh my God. This was it? Can I give you another fun fact? Wait, how, like what was the percent down? I mean, down 24 percent in Q1. And that was the worst Q1 we've ever had since 2018? 2018. Yeah. That wasn't that bad. Great. In 2018, like the market topped December 2017 and then it fell like, I think 60% in Q1, 2018. I remember that Q1 very well because that was like Hore into crypto. But my second fun fact for you, Ryan, is that Bitcoin had five red monthly candles in a row,

but March, which the March candle finished two days ago, eeked out a green candle. Is that it? Is that that tiny thing? The monthly candle for the month of March was green after five red monthly candles. Five red monthly candles in Bitcoin is. I think this happened a very low number of times. David, I got to say that that is a tiny green candle right there. That is a candle for ants.

It's a tiny green candle, but it is green. The smallest green candle, I think, on this chart, maybe, but it was green in March. That's good news. You mentioned in the intro, the Trump speech that happened on Wednesday night. So he said he was going to address the nation. I think he gave some 24-hour advance notice. All TV networks have to broadcast it. What was the news? What did he say?

Yeah. So 19-minute speech about Operation Epic Fury, the war in Iran, after a week of just like posturing from Trump, two weeks even about posturing about negotiation talks, how negotiation talks are going well, talking about how he's kind of done with Iran and de-escalation. Like weird stuff. Like it was hard to know what was really going on, right? Well, no, I would say he was firmly posturing and signaling to the people in the market that like, work. kind of wrapping this thing up. Yeah. We're like, we're, we're getting, we're getting office. Yeah, but he was doing it Trump style. Like, I got a prize, you know, from the Iranians.

Like some strange, it was, it was hard to know actually to sort the signal through the noise. So was this the signal? So then, yes, this is a very formal speech. So he's like, this is, this is the speech. These aren't my, you know, true social posts. This is a Mark Rubio. I prepared.

I prepared this. This is the, this is the speech. Okay. And so the market was going into this thinking like, okay, this is Donald Trump like tying a bow on this thing, kind of giving us the exit plan, wrapping it up, you know, concluding it. That was, I think, my interpretation of both Marcus' anticipation, you know, Twitter's anticipation. Instead, I think what came out of this, my take, is that the whole purpose of this talk was to drop this one line. And I'll read that line that I think was the whole point right now. We are on track to complete all of America's objectives very shortly.

We are going to hit Iran extremely hard in the next two to three weeks. We are going to bring them back to the Stone Age where they belong. I think the whole 19 minutes was basically to inform the public that we are in this for three more weeks. And the market reacted appropriately right after he said those lines. The oil markets shot up 10%. Brent Crude went up 10%. WTI went up 12% futures. The NASDAQ and S&P 500 futures dropped half a percent.

He said a few other things as well. He said that the stock market didn't really go down all that much. He said that the stock market was, he thought it was going to go down more than it actually did. And so we're going to be down a little bit longer. And then they're going to go back up like never before, he said, after this three-week period. That's a direct quote. That was a direct quote.

That's right. That's right. Yeah. And so the market is currently digesting this as of right now. This is the morning after that speech. But this is my take. He basically just gave a 19-minute speech about why we need to be in Iran for three more weeks. Wow, that line, we're going to bring them back to the Stone Ages where they belong. That's so Trumpium. Yeah. Not the first time he said that. Geez, okay. He didn't say we're going to leave in two to three weeks. He just said we're going to hit them hard in the next two to three. to three weeks. And you think the market is interpreting that as we're also going to exit in two to three weeks? No. I think the market was interpreting that we are going to exit like this week at the end of this lake. We're done with this thing. And then Trump is telling them, I was like, no, no, we got two to three more weeks. I think it's safe to round up to three on that scenario. But to your point, I think you're right. He did not say that we're out in three weeks either. This is a polymarket on U.S. forces entering Iran by a specific date. And by April 30th,

Polymarket is showing on 18 million in volume. There's about a 60% chance that U.S. forces enter Iran. That means boots on the ground, does it not? Yes, I think boots on the ground by the end of this month, Polymarket is giving a 60% chance. On probability on Polymarket for U.S. and Iran ceasefire by a specific date, 60% by June 30th, 47% by May 31st. So end of May, almost a 50% chance into the summer. December 31st, a 73% chance. So I mean, that's like a 27% chance that this isn't over by the end of this year. All year. Yeah. Are the markets pricing that in? I mean, we can talk about the efficient market. The markets always price everything in.

They're super efficient all the time. That's right. Like, the growing. conversation is around midterms, the midterm elections that are coming up later this year. So I think we have like just under six months before the midterms start to become are here. And I mean, who knows what Trump is thinking? I certainly don't. But it's to be argued that there's no way that Trump wants the Iran war at all to be proximate to the midterms. He doesn't want that now.

Yeah. But he's also Trump. You know, we don't really know. Well, there's, but there's also a question of, like, once you are in it, right? You know, there are some forces that, like, he doesn't control. He doesn't control the universe. Exactly, including the Straits of Hormuz. So, looking at some charts, I mean, this is volatile, so things are changing in a hurry, but Brent crude up by 10%.

So this was directly after the speech. Boyle shot up. Bond markets, the 10-year T-bill note, back on its way to $4, or sorry, 4.4% yield, right? Remember we talked about, I think it's last week, as those yields number, those yield numbers tick up on the tenure, that's more pressure on Trump. And you kind of saw them back in the tariff scare of last year, 4.6% that started to feel very uncomfortable. And Trump walked back his tariff language. So this is another pressure on him. Of course, crypto prices, what are we doing here, man? So Bitcoin down for,

4%, eat down 6%. Hard to know if that is swirled up in all of this or what's going on. But now the S&P is trading kind of like neutrally. Is that the case? Yeah. So S&P dropped, futures dropped by half a percent. And now at the time of recording, the S&P is actually flipped green, marginally green.

So we were actually at the same stock market prices, at least in the S&P, as we were before the Trump speech. I have a take on this, which is that the long. longer that the market has to digest the news, the news being the war, the whole entire Iran war, the more it kind of comes normalized. And we saw this with the Liberation Day tariffs. Markets reacted violently at the very beginning. And every single time there was another tariff day tweet or, you know, posturing against China or announcement on further tariffs on China, the market reacted, but it reacted in a more muted fashion.

as time went on. And I'm seeing that with Iran here too. Like the market is reacting, but it's starting to shrug it off quicker and quicker and quicker. And we all kind of remember what happened with the liberation did terrorists. Like eventually the market just stopped carrying and then we went to new all-time highs. Every single new crisis is facts and circumstances, so we can't really say that's going to be repeated. But with the S&P being green as of this morning, after Trump told us that they're going to strike Iran hard for the next three weeks and the stock market it comes out green, I'm kind of interested in that pattern. I mean, I guess, it's hard to know what the market is thinking, but there are some forces

that have to impact the market, which is like one of which is oil. And so if straight of Hormuz is closed for longer, oil prices spike. Here's an analysis from the Kobiasi letter. As oil prices rise above 112 per barrel, our models indicate that if current levels are sustained, so if you have that oil price another two months, U.S. CPS, inflation will rise to 3.6%. So energy costs are going to affect inflation. And of course, that's going to affect what the Fed does. That could, Michael NATO makes the point that that could spiral into lower growth in the U.S. And the possibility of a recession is actually up on the

air from like 20% to 36% according to polymarket. And you also have Lynn Alden, who is talking about this. Some people ask me, when I'll be chill about energy? She said, I'm looking at my oil quant guy and he's not chill. He has to become chill again and he is the opposite of chill right now. She is posting a tweet from Rory Johnson, who I presume is Lynn Alden's oil quant person. And he is talking about a scenario, which he calls the air pocket scenario, which as supply is restricted from the straight of Hormuz, it's like a scarcity air pocket that affects different geographies. That takes time to get there. That takes time to propagate, right? So it might take if, you know, that happens right now.

deliveries could stop on April 15th in North America, but they stopped far earlier in Africa and placed it in Asia. And so this is like an air pocket that makes its way throughout the energy economy. So I don't know. It still seems to depend on the Strait of Hormuz. Some of these factors are not in Trump's control, but it seems like he's getting the narrative right, at least for the market right now. They're believing him. Yeah. Yeah. And this is all is going to show up in inflation. Like, what does oil have to do with the bonds? Well, higher oil prices makes everything cost more domestically in our neck of the woods. If things cost more domestically, that means inflation's going up. That means the Fed's going to hike interest rates. And we just had this clip this statement

out from Powell, basically saying that the United States national debt is growing substantially faster than the economy and is not sustainable. And so that goes into can the United States service its own debt. And so the cost that Iran knows. that it's posting to America through the closing the Strait of Hormuz is that we can't pay our debt. I actually thought this clip from Fed Chair Jerome Powell was actually pretty interesting. Let's go ahead and watch it. What's clear is that our debt is growing much faster. The federal government debt is growing substantially faster than our economy.

And that ratio is going up. And, you know, in the long run, that's kind of the definition of unsustainable. The level of the debt is not unsustainable, but the path is not sustainable. And so it's really important that we get back to, we don't have to pay the debt down, we just need to have primary balance and begin to have the economy actually growing better, growing more quickly than the economy. It will not end well if we don't do something fairly soon. This is not the Fed's job, of course, and I pretty much limit myself to those high-level points which essentially everyone ignores. He limits himself to those points that everyone ignores. It will not end well if we don't do something fairly soon.

He can't say more, but he's basically blaming deficits. He's blaming fiscal on this. And your general overspending coming out of the federal government. Yeah. So all of this is to say that there's a lot of evidence for why this war can't sustain itself over a long period of time. I think the speech that we got from Trump last night is like, I've got three more weeks. I've got three more weeks before this really hurts. You think that's him acknowledging I have maybe three more weeks.

I think he, maybe not in that speech, but I think he knows that. He knows he doesn't have forever. He definitely knows that. He's probably seen these sorts of stats too. This is from Nate Silver, which is Trump's approval rating. It just fell below 40% for the first time. And you could see Trump's numbers on a trend down from the liberation tariffs and, you know, some of these other milestones that government shut down,

Renee Goodkilled, the Iran war starts, and it's been on a steady trajectory down, which is not great when you're in a midterm year. And this is showing up in probabilities for the election. So ever since, let's say, well, ever since November, but there's been a steady trickle up as Trump favorability goes down. The odds that the Democrats will win the House in 2026 are going up on Polly Market right now. that's 86% the Senate. On $4 million of volume, which isn't super high, but definitely not low either. Yeah, and the Senate is more up for grabs. It's about 50-50 right now.

So there's some political constraints. There's some economic constraints and all of this is getting factored in. But so far, I don't think we've really felt the shock in the markets. I mean, crypto prices is down and that aside. But I don't think the NASDAQ has gotten hit to the degree that some have thought it might. and it may still soon. Yeah, that was actually an explicit point that Trump was making was like he explicitly said a number of times in his speech essay is like, we don't need the Strait of Hormuz.

We've got our own oil. We've got WTI. We got West Texas International. And then he also did the whole thing. It was like, Europe, like, this is your guys' problem. You guys need to step in here. But he explicitly says, like, we've got our supply of oil. Like, our economy is going to be fine.

And we also do see that in the global stock market indices. is like the domestic United States markets are doing much better than the international markets. So let's leave it there for the week. Coming up next, we've got to talk about quantum. Is quantum getting ready to come in and just wreck Bitcoin, Ethereum, all our cryptocurrencies? Or is this just fud, David?

Are we being alarmist here? We've got to get into the quantum papers, the research released this week by Google and one other. There's so many details to cover. We'll talk about that when we come back. If you're already holding soul, here's something you may want to pay attention to. Galaxy 1 just launched Salonistaking, and you can earn up to an estimated 6.5% in variable staking rewards on your soul,

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It's a genuine belief that you shouldn't need permission from an institution to use your money. Metamask has been a right. since the beginning of Ethereum, and they carry the same DNA we do. Metamask was my first wallet. And well, if you haven't opened up the app recently, let me tell you, they've been shipping, creating the one app to finally replace your bank and exchange. You can trade just about everything right from within Metamask. Leverage perps via hyperliquidion, prediction markets to polymarket,

tokenized stocks like Nvidia. And you can swap tokens gasslessly and across networks and even spend your crypto with your Metamask card at real merchants all around the world. It's better than institution services, but from a self-custodial wallet. And this is what we've been talking about for years. that's open and is happening. So give MetaMashtray features a look at the link below. So on Monday, a quantum bomb was dropped by two different papers.

One out of Google and another out of a bunch of academics, we'll call it the second one, the Oratomic paper. Right. I know you were paying attention to this. How would you summarize the significance of these papers? Oh, my God, incredibly significant. I think calling it a Q-Bomb, a quantum bomb, is probably right. It's the biggest-

Nice, I just made that up on the fly. Well, everyone in crypto was talking about it. Mainstream news was talking about it. We have a lot of commentators outside who have weighed in. It was basically the news of the week. And deservedly so. I think we should start here with Justin Drake, some of his comments. He said, today he's talking about when these papers dropped, today is a momentous day for quantum computing and cryptography. Two breakthrough papers just landed. Both papers improve Shores algorithm, infamous for cracking RSA, not Ryan Sean. the other RSA. And elliptic curve cryptography. The two results compound, optimizing separate layers of the quantum stack. The results are shocking, he said. I expect a narrative shift and further R&D boost towards post-quantum cryptography. He goes on to say his confidence in Q-Day, which is the day at which some quantum computer

can crack Bitcoin or Ethereum cryptography, 10% chance by 2032, and dropping for Justin Drake. So Google in this paper is strongly recommending that all of crypto take notice and beyond notice and to upgrade to post quantum by the year 2029. In fact, that's what Google is doing internally. Wait, so Google made an explicit statement towards the crypto industry. This whole paper, David, was specifically written for the crypto industry. They're like, hey, crypto bros, this one's for you guys? completely. Wow.

The knowledge It was like... Yeah, it is nice to be heard. It was nice... Like, this is coming from Google, right? And you don't expect them to be as cryptocurrency literate as they were indeed. But this paper is 30 to 40 pages. You guys can go through it, run it through your AI bots if you'd like.

But it is directed towards cryptocurrency. They go through specific solutions and problems for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and a list of other chains as well. So what was the actual... innovation. Yeah, I think that's important. And the way Nick Carter frames this is, you know, Google, I think we reported a couple of weeks ago, did drop their internal quantum deadlines. They want to be fully quantum resistance by 2029. And that seemed to come out of nowhere. And the question is like, what did Google see? Why did they drop these dates? Because NIST and other government agencies were talking 2032 by, you know, 2035. It seemed like we had more time. And then Google's like, hey, guys,

like, we're doing it by 2029. So what did they see? This is what they saw. The Google paper is talking about a reduction of 20x and an improvement in Shores algorithm that could break Bitcoin and Ethereum's cryptography. When I say a 20x improvement, I'm talking about the number of physical qubits required to actually break ECDSA, which is the signature scheme for Bitcoin and Ethereum.

And physical qubits is like, this is the hardware requirement. Exactly. So when we're building a quantum computer, I kind of think of qubits as like, just like the flop capacity of a CPU. Like how powerful is this computer? Exactly.

And so if we have a reduction in qubits, it means the computer is simply not as powerful, but can do more powerful things. That's right. And previous estimates were it would take, you know, tens of millions of qubits to do this. Well, they just released an improvement to the algorithm, to Shores algorithm that now make it take only 500,000 physical qubits.

And so in a runtime of a. about nine minutes if they had the appropriate hardware, again, those 500,000 physical qubit, it would only take nine minutes for them to go attack Bitcoin or Ethereum and yank the keys. And also, this is not just limited to, you know, grabbing quantum vulnerable assets from Bitcoin or Ethereum or other chains. It also enables on-spend attacks. So they can intercept transactions before they confirm within the block time of something like Bitcoin, within nine minutes, they could intercept a transaction. Say, I send Bitcoin for myself to you, a quantum computer with this amount of hardware could go and yonk and intercept that transaction.

So this breaks Bitcoin, basically. And also breaks everything else. It breaks Ethereum. It breaks everything in crypto if we had that level of hardware. Right, if we had the level of hardware. Now, to my understanding, that is still the unknown thing is whether we can actually get to that level of hardware. Right now, we have, the best machines that we have today are like 1,000 to 1,500 physical cubits. And that creates 50 logical cubits. These are all deep quantum scientific stuff. That's right. But it's still an unknown if we can get to a meaningful level of logical cubits.

That's right. 50, we need a lot more. But what this innovation does from this paper is just simply an improvement in the software, an improvement in the algorithm. That means we don't actually need a whole lot more cubits. We definitely need way more cubits. But the amount of cubits that we need is now down because we have a more efficient piece of software. That's exactly right.

That's the thing to underline is this is an algorithm improvement that reduces the amount of hardware required to go attack these systems. And so it is still. an engineering problem. Actually, the, you know, like,

I was wanting to ask this question of, like, how big of an engineering problem is it? Is this like, is this something like fusion,

which like that's an engineering problem? But we have no idea how to solve fusion. It's always like 15 years away or whatever. It's always theory, never practice. Yeah. Or is,

like, understand that quantum is still theory, not practice when it comes to cubits. We do have some cubits. We do. We have 50 logical cubits right now. And the question is,

can we scale that up? And I don't think it's not like, it's not like fusion, like, which is just like, oh, there's a lot more research to do. This is purely an engineering problem. Now, can we resolve the engineering problem? I don't know. But it seems more like AI scaling, which is you just throw more hardware out. You could just scale it up than it does fusion? It's almost like an analog is in the 1960s. Transistors worked. They were discovered. The question at that time was could we pack millions on one chip? And that was the engineering problem. That's similar. to what the engineering problem is now. So their conclusion, Google's conclusion, we urge all vulnerable cryptocurrency communities, which is all of us, to join the migration to post-quantom computing cryptography without delay.

Didn't mention but the other paper, the Oratomic paper, it's actually, they have a different architecture and a different style attack. There's a fast attack, which Google was talking about in a slower attack, that would take days to go attack a key.

But with the slower attack in their method, they improved Shores' algorithm by 50x. So in this configuration, it would only take 10,000 reconfigurable atomic cubits to attack. So there's multiple attack vectors, and at some level, the oratoric paper. Yeah, and the oratoric paper was even more concerning. So flashing red lights, you'd think.

Yeah, I think it's definitely a flashing red light for ecosystems that aren't addressing the problem. But Ryan, we're smart logical people in crypto, right? We're addressing the problem, are we not? I'm not so sure. I mean, so let's talk about Bitcoin, right? So one of the big problems we talked about in the Justin Drake episode, we've mentioned a lot, is even if Bitcoin is able to adopt post-quantum signatures, which would significantly

slow things down from a performance perspective. And that's a problem in and of itself. In fact, the paper talks about this could be like a, the level of change that led to the hard fork that created Bitcoin cash, right? Because if you drop performance with new algorithms, then what are you? Are you a big blocker or small blocker? There could be two sides to that debate. Yeah, so just to trace over that again, quantum signatures, post-quantum cryptographic signatures, the ones that we need to upgrade to are beefier. They're heavier.

They take more space, require more compute. They're slower. and Bitcoin has already gone through its block size wars and these small blockers won, which is fine. Maybe that was the right choice for then. We have to, what potentially happens now is that with even bigger transactions,

Bitcoin TPS is going to go from three transactions per second to if it makes the transition to post-quantum, 0.3 transactions per second. That's microblocks, man. Do we need to even hash out the big, block, small block war? Again, maybe not because, yeah, I could say it just like, you just actually just don't need to transact on Bitcoin. You just need to hold the Bitcoins. And maybe this also solves the Bitcoin fee budget with 0.3 transactions.

Oh, yes. I don't know. I think there's an argument for the small blocker side of things. If only that was the only problem. The other, I think the main problem as well, I don't know, they're all main problems, is you've got 6.9 million Bitcoin, a third of all supply that is vulnerable to quantum attack. Now, some of that can be migrated, except for the $2.3 million or so, which is 10 to 15% of all Bitcoin supply, that is Satoshi's keys and lost keys and keys and keys that haven't been touched. These are assumed tokens that will never move because the owner is gone or dead or the private keys are lost.

And so the only way that they will move is that these wallets are going to get exploited eventually by the incoming quantum computer. and then whoever has that quantum computer gains access to 2.3 million out of the 21 million Satoshi coins. And that is the guaranteed number that is available to the quantum computer. And then there is the 6.9 million, again, of the 21 million total Bitcoins, that is Bitcoin, that is vulnerable that needs to be migrated. And we do not know to what degree that those coins are also lost at least some. And so what do you do with the dormant coins? Actually, Google delved into this as well in their paper. And they're like, there's four options you guys have that we see.

We are Google and we see four options. I should say there were other co-authors on this paper, one of which was Justin Drake, interestingly enough. So the The Theorem Foundation Justin Drake named. But anyway, they said the four options are you could do nothing. Just let the quantum attackers, you take them. You could burn. You could take this whole dormant supply, figure out what, you know, get consensus on what coins

are dormant and burn them all. That would require a hard. work? Yes. You could do an hourglass approach, which is a scheme that they developed to limit the rate that dormant coins could be spent, so you slow the drain, or this was also a Justin Drake idea. They called it bad side chain, where you'd have this pegged side chain, you'd put all the dormant coins on that, and then owners would have to submit some ownership proofs, and if they submitted the right proof, they could get their coins restored to them. I see. So that is kind of, that is the burn, but with an escape hatch for people who actually do have the private key.

That's right. Yeah. See, I like that one. I would do that one. I do kind of like that one. But I do kind of like that one. I don't get to decide. That requires the most coordination, which is the biggest challenge for Bitcoiners.

Yes. Now, CZ has weighed in, at least at this early phase. And he said this about, you know, number one, don't panic. Some people are panicking about quantum. Don't panic about that and its impact to crypto. Number two, what do we do with the Satoshi coins? Well, if they don't move in a certain period of time, it might be better to lock or effectively burn those addresses

so they don't go to the hacker who cracks it. That's it. Just lock them or burn them. And I was, like, shocked at how nonchalant this answer was from CZ. It's just like... Burn three million big queens. That's a big deal, right?

That's property rights. You know, that is the reason that Bitcoin exists, I thought. Yeah. They also talk about Ethereum, of course. So the TLDR for Ethereum is the attack surface is much larger than Bitcoin, right? And so it's like a harder problem to solve because not a harder engineering problem to solve. Yes. You're not just dealing with execution, ECDSA signatures.

You've got data availability, vulnerability. So the KZG ceremony that they did, that's all toxic waste. That's all a backdoor. You've got admin accounts, so stable coins. Some of the smart contract keys for stable coins have quantum exposed admin keys. So there's all sorts of things that you have to upgrade on Ethereum that you don't have to upgrade to Bitcoin. So I don't know if it's an order of magnitude of a larger task. I don't think it's quite that much, but it's probably like a two or three X effort.

Engineering effort, you mean. Engineering effort and just like the work required to you. The work required, yes. qualitatively, Bitcoin has a coordination and a consensus problem. Yes. And Ethereum, like some of these things, like admin vulnerability for something, for example, 200 billion in stable coins and real world assets controlled by quantum exposed admin keys. Well, the admins just need to do the thing.

That's right. And there's a lot of those examples, but it's a matter of just like, hey, you guys are the admin over the smart contract. You guys need to upgrade. And, I mean, they will because they have $200 billion. at stake. And so while that's an engineering challenge, it's not really a coordination challenge in the same way that Bitcoin is. And so, yes, broadly, there's more to do on Ethereum. Like you said, maybe two to three X more to do. Maybe even, I could go up to 5x.

But it's qualitatively a different kind of problem because there's less of a coordination and an agreement problem. And you don't have to deal with a big thing, which is property rights. What do you do with 10 to 15% of the supply? Like, there's no. good answer for Bitcoin there. Actually, Google makes the same assessment. They said Ethereum has a broader overall quantum attack surface than Bitcoin. However, this is compensated by stronger community

leadership in Ethereum Foundation. Theorem already has a roadmap for this. Bitcoin is kind of like, are quantum computers real? Are they real? Bitcoin is still in the Don't look up phase. Yes.

They're like the Bitcoin zealots, the laser-eyed maxis are like, shut up. This is not a problem. Yeah. Everyone stop. Blah, blah, blah.

Yeah. We'll give you some like takes on the takes later. But they also mentioned some other chains. So Zcash, they said it was likely like a first target. They mentioned stealth inflation attacks that are available. Also, Minero. If you're on Monaro, all of the private transactions could be yielded public like this with a quantum computer. Are you serious?

Yes. Yes, David. So all of your nefarious transactions on Minero. Every illegal action on Minero is going to be revealed. Yes, yes. That's going to be juicy. Now, some genes are ready for this. Algarand is ready.

They're already ready. So there you go. Maybe that's a boon for Algarand. Salana, they said it's similar to Ethereum, but, you know, they have less institutional inertia. They'll be able to implement it. They released proof that... The 20X algorithm, Shores algorithm improvement was like a real thing, not by publishing the algorithm itself and how they did it.

Because that would be irresponsible. Because they said that would be too dangerous. Yeah, because they're just giving the secrets. Yeah. They prove that they could do it, but they're not releasing those secrets to anyone else. So they use a succinct ZK proof in order to prove that. So they didn't tell you how they did it, but they did prove that they do have a 20x improved algorithm for shores for cracking this type of thing.

You got to know that China is like somebody go get that secret. Oh my God, that's a great point, right? And I mean, I think it's also a point that we are beyond the days where this is going to be released publicly. So there's like quantum is a military weapon, isn't it? So if Google is releasing this quasi publicly, they're saying we have the capability, but they're not showing you how. what are nation states actors doing about this, like today?

Because remember, this technology allows them to spy on their neighbors. Like, it's a military-grade technology. So that is kind of the scary thing. Nick Carter reminds us, you will not get a warning. The warning is what you are getting now. This is your warning. Once logical qubits start to meaningfully scale, you will go from cracking 5 bits to 256 bits very quickly.

So Google's kind of being the good guy by telling us in advance. There might. That's not the expectation necessarily. One day you could wake up and the attacks are sharding. Yeah. I think that is the mic drop moment, is that this is the warning shot. This is the shot across the bow. And we probably won't be getting any more.

All right. Now, I'll dampen that a little bit. There's some takes around crypto. This one's from Anatoli founder of Solana. He did remind us that we still have no clue on how to manufacture and add qubits. So this getting from five logical qubits to 1,400 qubits, we don't actually know how to do that from an engineering perspective. We don't know if that scales yet.

And it could be the case that there's some impossibility in the world of meat space that just makes that very, very difficult or decades out. Technically true, not something to depend on. I kind of agree with you. But maybe you're being a panicking, David, because this is the other take. It was a take from a former Bitcoin developer, which is, And we also, we talked to, you and I talked to Michael Saylor this week. And we asked him about the Google quantum paper.

We did a recording with Michael Saylor. And he took this view. He said basically, like, ignore the alarmists. There's a lot of pessimists out there that want you to feel fud. And if you move too fast, sometimes the cure can be worse than the disease, right? So everyone calm down. Don't panic. The devs will figure a solution out.

This is Jonas Chenelli. He said, don't rush, avoid the FUD. Bitcoin devs I know, they acknowledge that quantum is a risk. They're looking at researching it. Maybe it never materializes. But like it's just don't be all alarmist and panicking about it. It's hard for me to take the don't be a panicking, don't believe the FUD response seriously, because this is, is this not existential for Bitcoin?

It's pretty damn important. Yeah. It's pretty important. Yeah. No, it's existential. There's like a level of fun that we all need to get on board with because these are, this is our industry here.

And so to say, hey, don't panic is like, uh, that the building's on fire. Like, sure, don't panic, but like, do rush for the exit. Don't panic, but prepare. Maybe. And I don't mean exit Bitcoin. I mean just like, go to the solution. Yeah. We, it's urgent.

Brian Armstrong seems to feel that urgency. So just this morning he posted, going to start spending time on this personally, seems like we need to solve it sooner rather than later. Yeah. I don't know what the solve is actually going to be. You know, there's so much here. This actually leaked outside of crypto Twitter as well. This is a Chimov co-host of All In podcast. He said, I mentioned last year and the crypto bros freaked out about it.

But there's two things that are true about crypto bros. They're extremely technical and extremely belief-oriented. Sometimes, though, the latter clouds the former. This paper from Google is quite reasonable. These are just bit corners. It's quite reasonable, and it raises some important technical questions. The crypto elders should start spending more effort organizing on a timescale that makes crypto quantum resistant and do this in the next few years with a conclusive roadmap. I hate it when Shamath makes the point that echoes around the world, and he's right. What do we got coming up?

Coming up next, we're going to talk about the biggest hack on Solana. There's $285 million exploited from Drift, and we're going to talk about the lessons learned from that. Then we're going to go on to Ethereum in the EEZ, the Ethereum Economic Z, and why that might be Ethereum 3.0? You didn't hear from us though. And also the clearest evidence so far, the X is working on a crypto wallet in their X money super app,

all of that and more. But first, we're going to talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that makes it chill possible. Markets are reacting to a world that feels anything but stable. Inflation is sticky, geopolitical risk is rising, and capital is moving between crypto, commodities, equities, and currencies faster than ever. A universal exchange like BitGet is built for this kind of environment. With a major app upgrade, BitGet now gives Tradfai its own dedicated tab in the navigation.

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in action. If you're the kind of trader who adapts as the world changes, BitGET is built for you. Start trading crypto and tradify in one place. Click the link in the show notes. This is not investment advice. Some exciting news. We are launching a new podcast to help people figure out the crypto cycle, how to navigate it. The best crypto cycle investor I know, his name is Michael Nato. He runs the Defi report. This is the guy that sent me a sell alert before the 1010 price drop happened. 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 into 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. On Wednesday, April 1st, drift protocol, which is a Solana perp Dex, was exploited for $285 million. $1, if not the biggest hack on Solana. There was the wormhole hack a while ago in 2022. That was $325 million.

But that was a bridge. Drift is a defy app on Solana, so definitely ranks up there. 50% of Drift's total TVL was drained. How did this happen? The attacker somehow got a hold of two of the five multi-sig signatures through social engineering, and they just were allowed to push a transaction through that I think some of the other multi-sig signers couldn't comprehend, and so they just

pushed them to approve, which gave them control over the protocol. That's market creation, Oracle assignment, withdrawal, limits, and also importantly, no time locks. And so once the exploiter had access to the sufficient number of admin keys, they basically had full admin control over the protocol. Weeks before they got access to these keys, they made this fake token that they had minted and washed traded for days and days and days so that they could create this fake volume that made this token perceived to be real. That allowed them, once they had governance over the protocol, to add this token to the Drift Protocol,

and they controlled the entire supply. And so once this token was approved as collateral, they could collateralize this token and then withdraw USDC, USDT, CB Bitcoin from the protocol. All of this happened in 31 transatl, actions over 12 minutes that resulted in $285 million getting drained. The drift token fell 20% in the hours after the exploit was first reported. The amount of planning that went into this, and it was like the multi-sig signers were kind of like almost like hunted, right? So again,

it took two or five on this multi-sig in order to have this kind of god mode ability to drain 285 million, which is 50% of drifts, TVL. And it was a very sophisticated, very sophisticated group that pulled this off. So someone like the Lazarus group, maybe even indeed was them. I'm not sure. I haven't seen kind of the reporting on this. And that was the vulnerability. So they were able to trick two of Drifts, five multi-six signers to sign these transactions that they didn't fully understand. And that's how this hack happened. Unfortunately for users, like there's, I mean, the money's gone, right? So Drift hasn't come out with a way to Renumerate users.

Drift was not a huge Perps protocol in the scheme of all Perps protocols. They were kind of like top 30, but they were the biggest, I think, on Solana, at least one of the largest on Solana. And as you said, I mean, this ranks is one of the biggest hacks ever. Certainly the largest on Solana.

This reminded me a little bit of the Ronen and side chain hack. Do you remember $625 million? That was in 2022. That was also a multi-sig type. pack, social engineering, compromised keys. Like, these multi-sigs are, they are just hazardous for protocols to have in place, right? And I mean, what are the lessons that we learned from this? There's a lot of just kind of criticism on the drift structure, the admin setup, the multi-sig

setup of drift from some DFI founders. So both Stani from Avey and Hayden from Uniswap said something to the effect of, Drift was not defy. If you have admin keys that can do these sorts of things, like one single entity can govern this protocol in this particular way, that's just not defy. Hayden said, people might accuse me of grave dancing for saying it,

but we have to stop letting centralize things call themselves defy. An admin key that can drain all the funds? C-fi. Otherwise, defy means nothing in the brand is destroyed. No admin key can drain any version of uniswap for a reason. I think there's a point there to be taken of just, The whole point of this thing is smart contracts and code. And that's the thing to aspire to.

Granted, that's a very difficult thing to aspire to. And we've also learned other lessons in the inverse direction of things completely governed by code also have problems. So it's a little bit stuck between a rock and a hard place. I think the big lesson to be learned was the zero time lock, the zero second time lock where new governance decisions, new admin changes go into a, immediately and don't give any sort of recourse. There should be, I don't know, 24 hours, seven days before some things take effect that

would allow people to just raise a flag and be like, yo, this is not right. Yeah, certainly even if you have a multi-sig, there are better ways to design it. It was only a two or five, right? You could do a five of seven or something like this. Yeah. There's all sorts of time delays, all sorts of things you could have done. I think another lesson learned is the social engineering behind these hacks is getting crazy sophisticated, right? So how they got these signers to actually sign, I don't know if that's

completely known, but it could be like supply chain attacks where like there's some kind of code library that they downloaded as a dependencies now infected their machine. I mean, if you're a multi-signor, you should be concerned with your setup at all times and be paranoid about it. You should have a setup that does not touch anything else other than doing it one job. Absolutely. David, there was something big that came out of ETHC this week that caught my eye. I want to tell you about it. Is that okay? I would love to hear it. Okay. So there was a dream that was the United Chains of Ethereum. You remember this? I had this same dream. That's what I thought we were kind of getting back in 2022.

Kind of what I thought with the whole idea. So I want to take you to maybe DefCon, 24. Do you remember when Drake gave his first kind of lean Ethereum, talk. Yeah, the five-year plan talk. Yeah, and so there was news like Justin Drake was getting on stage, he was going to present something. I was hoping it would be a way to unite all the chains, what I was thinking of calling kind of Ethereum 3.0. Yeah, we were meming before it was announced, we were meming Ethereum 3.0. Okay, and what we meant by uniting the chains was basically synchronous composability. So the problem with the L2 roadmap and L2 strategy in general was that every L2 felt like a separate country, right?

Like it had its own borders. It was a separate blockchain. It felt like a separate blockchain. Sure, there was some shared security there, but like when it comes to liquidity, oh, that's a separate liquidity pool. You have your L2 liquidity. You want to get that. You get a bridge.

You get a bridge. You have different implementations of Uta swap. 18 different implementations of Avey. Like no, no one plus one equals three. It was a security alliance, like a very loose federation of countries. It wasn't a united chains of Ethereum. It wasn't kind of like no borders. Everyone shares the same liquidity.

Okay, well, the dream might be back on the menu. We'll see. Am I ready to be here again? Don't get your hopes up yet. But actually, I do think there's some meat on the bone here. So this is a rollout from Nosis and also from Jordi. You remember Jordi, right? Yeah, Jordie Belina.

Yes. So ZK, genius. Anyway, it's called EEZ. It stands for the Ethereum Economic Zone. And the promise here is that it's a way for layer twos to synchronously compose with layer one. So all shared liquidity. Okay. Shared fees, shared everything.

So it seems seamless to be on, whether on an L2 and the Ethereum Economic Zone or the L1, it all feels seamless, shared liquidity. It's all unified. You can get atomic transactions through. And it does indeed feel like one chain. So the way they are doing this is through technical architecture and some specifications, a sprinkling of ZK magic. You know, that's important for kind of fast withdrawals.

To add some ZK and then you're done. Yep. And what they, and then developer tooling and ecosystem integration, some of these details are going to happen are going to emerge over the coming weeks. And the hope there is that you get chains to opt in. So one chain that would be nice, which is currently now one, is the Nosis chain. So Martin, I guess one of the leads for the Nosis chain, had said, if this works, the Nosis chain might come back and might transfer from an L1 to an L2. And why?

What's the reason? Shared economics. You get to tap into all of Ethereum's liquidity and this alliance can grow. So it's kind of a, you know, a sum type story. A sum is greater than the parts type story because every L2 that joins adds some more liquidity and they all kind of share it together. That's kind of the alignment hope. I don't know yet. It's too early to see whether they can pull it off, but the dream is still alive.

Yeah. This sounds like just based and native roll-ups applied? Yep. Is that what this is? Because I know Martin was big on native roll-ups. Is this that? Well, it's funny because Martin gave the talk at the same DevCon I was talking about about native roll-ups, right?

And so this is the manifestation of that. And he thinks now it's kind of possible. It means not quite native roll-ups. in the way he talked about them as being completely homogenous, but for all intents and purposes, it feels kind of like a native roll-up. And the bottom line is united liquidity, united network effect,

a much more coordinated ecosystem of chains, that was the original vision, and maybe this pulls it off. I think the thing that I am still undetermined on, the jury is still out on, is this kind of like, closer to a main quest line for Ethereum that somehow Martin from Nosis is doing instead of the EF?

Or is this more of another like technical side quest, intellectual masturbation kind of thing that we like to do in Ethereum? Which one is it? It all kind of depends on traction, I think, right? And some have said like Zaki Manian from the Cosmos ecosystem, where have I heard this idea before? We tried this in Cosmos in 2023 and it didn't work. Cosmos tried everything.

Yeah. Martin Koppelman says, to be frank, being in the same economic zone as Ethereum is more relevant than being the same one as Cosmos. That was always our argument, which is like, well, Cosmos didn't have money. Like, atoms were never money.

ETH is money. And so that's a material difference. If this path catches on, it would be great because the EF can focus on scaling the L1, they could focus on getting Ethereum quantum secure, right? And the community can focus on efforts to unify all the change.

So maybe we get the best of both. But again, we'll have to see how this actually plays out in practice. I do like saying the ethos money words. Because what would be, Ryan, the native currency of the Ethereum economics zone? You know, right? Every united country, I suppose, has a single currency. So it would have to be ETH. It would have to be ETH.

Speaking of things that make ETH money, AVEV4 is now live on Ethereum. So we've been at AVEV3 for a while. V4 has been in development. It is now deployed. Some of the biggest changes is that V4 turns AVE from a collection of independent lending pools into a single liquidity hub that has specialized lending markets called spokes to plug into the hub. So each spoke has its own underwriting rules, collateral types, specializations, etc. And also the idea is that anyone can launch a spoke with Dow approval and all of the spokes just plug into the hub. So shared liquidity, but how does risk work?

Like if some pool kind of like or some spoke, you know, the debt goes bad or something, it's a bad asset, something bad happens. Right. Okay. So this is the toxic contagion model. So if some spoke is like, let me allow for some terrible token to be collateral. What was the San Bankman-free to FTT? Let me allow FTT to be collateral.

Yeah. Well, first, I'll answer that question a second. First, there's a risk premium, different for tokens. And so in V4, if you, Orion, are collateralizing ether to borrow USDC and I'm collateralizing FTT, the San Bakeman high concentration, low float token, Avey will charge me as the FTT collateralizer a much higher premium than you for collateralizing ETH because ETH is money and FTT is a scam. And so at first, at first there's like one.

defensive layer off of that. Second, there are credit lines as like blast radius constraints. And so the credit lines are created by the hubs to govern the spokes. They set limits and conditions for borrowing. And so AVE is the main risk manager of the hub. And they will govern over the size of the collateral, the size of the credit limit, which constrains the damage anyone one spoke can do. So it is, it's a little bit of a tradeoff. It's not completely constrained, but it is balanced between the two ends of the spectrum. Yeah.

I mean, I think this is a big deal. Now, they're starting small. I think there's some limits on how much can be added to AVE4 right now, but I'm sure they'll take those limits down as security is proven and time goes on. It is worth highlighting that they, the explicit intent is that users never really interact with the hub directly. They interact with spokes. not dissimilar from the layer two model.

Remember when we were saying, like users go on the layer twos? This kind of, to me, Ryan, mimics central banking where you have the hub, the central bank that governs the spokes, the commercial banking layer, and it determines the interest rates, you know, who's got the money,

all this kind of stuff. And so users go to the spokes, the spokes are the commercial banking layer, and then the spokes are governed by the hub. And so this is Avey going into like a platform model. Yeah, it's kind of cool. I mean, this is a big network effect game, right? And so AVE is a leaps and bounds ahead of their nearest competitor. And it seems like a plan like this, they'll remain so if they can execute on this. David, it looks like X is clearly working

on a crypto app. Maybe call it a Money Super app. We have Benji Taylor, who just announced he is joining X. He's got a photo here with Elon Musk. This is Benji. If you don't know who Benji is, I do. I do not know who Benji is. Who is Benji? This is the guy that built the wallet that got poached by Ave. So he built a crypto wallet. I was purchased by Ave and they rolled it into a consumer product. Then he was poached by base. Oh, yeah.

Then he was poached by base. They're building wallet stuff there. So it's all crypto stuff, all wallet stuff. And now he is working for Elon Musk and X. So he just, hey, do you have a wallet that he's built for your money app? Yeah. I can build that for you. Exactly.

And I'm sure X was like, hey, we need some talent to. go build us a crypto money app wallet, and so they go when they picked up Benji. That's a sign of things to come. Meanwhile, you have Phantom and some of our crypto-native wallets coming steps closer to building their own money super wallets. Starting today, this is Phantom. Anyone in the U.S. can fund with bank transfers or Apple pay directly to a Phantom wallet.

Send and receive wires. That's a bank feature in a defy wallet without Phantom fees. And then Phantom has a debit card. There's another convergence happening here. where crypto wallets are becoming a bit more trad-5 friendly. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, especially when we got the doors blown open by the CFTC and the SEC

about financial super apps. Like, we have the green light and now the race is on to build the Phantom Super app. Absolutely. Something that caught my attention this week, Apex, is now building on base APYX. We learned about this actually through our conversations with Michael Saylor. We've recorded with Michael Saylor yesterday. That episode is going to come out in a week from Monday. So premium subscribers get it like 10 days earlier.

So if you want to go listen to that episode, you can subscribe to Bankless, get that in your podcast feed. Aprex is bringing Strategies Stretch Product, their yield bearing $100 pegged equity instrument that spits out, I think, 11% yield right now. 11.5. Yeah. And it's putting that on base. And so we have strategy, which buys Bitcoin, puts it into its equity holdings behind MSTR. Yeah. Issues another equity instrument called stretch.

Fixed income instrument. Fixed variable because it fluxes up and down. It used to be eight, now it's at 11.5. It's got $6 billion of AUM right now because retail just love this products. And then we have Apex tokenizing that equity instrument and putting it on base. Okay. So we took a digital asset, we converted to a security, then we took that security and we tokenized and we put it back on chain. Yeah.

We issued another security in between those steps. You miss what those steps. Cool. Innovation. I mean, if this is what the market wants, right? Defy Lugs, yield, stretch is yield. I don't hate it. Best of breed, best of all things. I don't hate it.

The market will figure this out. David, you know, Open AI just closed $122 billion raise and the valuation was almost $900 billion. This is a company that just released a product, what, like three years ago? Fastest growing product in history. 2 billion revenue per month growing at 4X faster than when they raised at 157 billion. That was the last time they raised. These private valuations are gargantuan.

So this is still a private company. There's some other news on the week that SpaceX, they are targeting a June listing at a $1.75 trillion dollar valuation. Now, this would be an IPO. Okay? Yeah. So a company goes from zero to $175 trillion completely privately. And then at IPOs to dump on retail. No, I'm sure it's a great company.

But like, after all of the upside has been achieved privately. It's hard to get excited about $1.75 trillion valuation. It's cool. This is also such an indictment of our public markets today in the U.S., which is the vast majority of the growth, the most exciting companies, the decacorns and future unicorns, are now. something privately and retail does not get accessed because of accredited investor laws. So Amazon, contrast that 1990s.

Amazon, if you bought it at IPO, at IPO and held all the way to now, that would have turned, let's say you had $1,000 you did that, $1,000 into $2.88 million. Okay, almost a 3,000 X return. Returns like that just aren't existing as these companies are IPOing later in the cycle. So cool, and also I'm pretty frustrated by that. You're saying Ryan's little butt hurt. I couldn't get in either of these companies. Ryan, I've got some breaking news for you on the backs of the OpenAI news.

What's that? This happened just a moment ago. OpenAI has acquired TBPN. Oh, really? The media company? Yeah, that just got announced. The media company out of L.A. Yeah.

That's crazy. Yeah, what are they doing with them? I mean, obviously, it's a very cool media company to own. Yeah. I don't quite see synergies between TBPN and the OPAI. You sure about this. This isn't like a remaining, you know, April Fool's joke. Leftover April Fool's.

The date on the blog post on OpenAI.com is April 2nd, 20206. All right. We're safe then. If it's April 2nd, we're safe. It's a bad April Fool's joke. If is April Fool. Let me tell you, man, there were some good ones. Like, I enjoy April Fool's.

I just like it. It's fun. Meta Mask had a good one. They had, they released MetaMast Tradify mode, which you can activate on your wallet and it slows everything out. Banker hours only. I thought that was pretty clever. Did you see anything that was good?

Well, we, I think, Ryan, we do a bang-up job with our April Fool's jokes. We have a history of pretty good April Fool's jokes. Our April Fool's joke this year was that we issued, we did an IPO on Canton Network, which is like just believable enough that it got enough people. You're like, huh? Like, some guy was in the reply saying, like, I sent this to people in a furious rage. No way. Really?

Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah. I remember some of our previous ones. Like, one time we announced that bankless was acquired by Wells Fargo. And my inbox was full. Yeah. We lost one percent of our email subscriber list.

We lost community that day. People were furious at us. Well, that does bring the question of, like, can you push an April Fool's joke too far? I think there were some crypto protocols that maybe did that. What? You tweeted about this. A paper bridge? Yeah, I'd never heard of this before.

And granted, this is a victory for them because now I've heard of them before. But they are a bridge, I think to hyperliquid. They are a bridge. And they tweeted out, we've been hacked. We're working hard to fix this. This is a terrible April Fool's show. If you are a crypto protocol, do not tweet on April Fool's that you've been hacked. There is a unspoken, but should be spoken rule of if you're a crypto protocol, if you're a crypto company, you do not make April Fool.

fools jokes that are related to customer funds. Yes. Or move the market. You do not disturb markets with your April Fool's jokes. Use some sense, people. Use your, yeah, God damn it, people. Jesus Christ. All right.

Well, we've got to end it there. Of course, you know, April Fool's is risky. So is crypto. You could lose what you put in. But we're headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey.

Thanks a lot.