Bankless - ROLLUP: Is the Bull Back? | The Clarity Act | Wall Street on Ethereum | Anthropic Nukes Perps

Episode Date: May 15, 2026

Markets are ignoring every warning sign as stocks hit new highs, but crypto may finally have its catalyst. Ryan and David break down the CLARITY Act’s key vote, Wall Street’s Ethereum push, Bitcoin’s $80K test, and why private AI stocks are creating chaos onchain. --- 📣GALAXY | INSTITUTIONAL DIGITAL FINANCE https://bankless.cc/Galaxy   --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔮POLYMARKET | #1 PREDICTION MARKET https://bankless.cc/polymarket-podcast  🟦 COINBASE ONE | GET 20% OFF  https://bankless.cc/coinbase-one 🧭OKX | TRADE, EARN, PAY to OKX | 120M+ USERS WORLDWIDE https://app.okx.com/join/USBANKLESS 🦊 METAMASK | DOWNLOAD NOW https://go.metamask.io/BL-Pod-Download  🌐BRIX | EMERGING MARKET YIELD https://bankless.cc/brix 💰NEXO | Get your 30-day access to Wealth Club Premier https://bankless.cc/nexo --- TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 2:46 Trump/Xi Meeting, Nvidia China Deal, and AI Stocks https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/2054607212513730674 https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/us-clears-h200-chip-sales-10-china-firms-nvidia-ceo-looks-breakthrough-2026-05-14/ https://imgur.com/wLddwGM https://x.com/BullTheoryio/status/2054558694785077478 https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2054177816573329496 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/ https://x.com/coindesk/status/2054542868522365141 https://x.com/TedPillows/status/2054545275281182861 https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2054940927379014035 https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2054655260652716149 https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/ethereum 28:06 Circle Earnings, Arc, and USDC Growth https://x.com/circle/status/2053785252037022157 https://x.com/marcarjoon/status/2054539947466522815 https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/11/circle-closes-222-million-from-blackrock-apollo-for-arc-blockchain.html https://x.com/coingecko/status/2054042800203719158 32:54 Coinbase, USDC, and Hyperliquid Team Up + Anthropic and OpenAI Crack Down on Unauthorized Private Stock Sales https://x.com/wallstengine/status/2054928782918816102 https://app.hyperliquid.xyz/trade/xyz:CBRS https://x.com/caseycraig/status/2053568380796367301 46:57 CLARITY Act Passes Key Committee Vote https://x.com/brian_armstrong/status/2054552885376016718  https://x.com/DegenerateNews/status/2054968887796539789 https://x.com/valkenburgh/status/2054968314292486621 https://x.com/EleanorTerrett/status/2052890357952627000 https://polymarket.com/event/clarity-act-signed-into-law-in-2026/?via=bankless? https://x.com/FidelityPolicy/status/2054587652121284648 https://x.com/EleanorTerrett/status/2054295187048853637 https://www.banking.senate.gov/newsroom/minority/warren-statement-on-no-trump-ethics-provision-in-crypto-bill https://x.com/patrickjwitt/status/2054183222305554643 https://x.com/glxyresearch/status/2054635251503108596 https://x.com/EleanorTerrett/status/2054575825681367098 55:58 BlackRock, JPMorgan, and Fidelity Bring Money Markets to Ethereum https://x.com/VivekVentures/status/2054946669083390374 https://x.com/VivekVentures/status/2053101323390754982 https://x.com/NateGeraci/status/2052872497779896460 https://app.rwa.xyz/assets/BUIDL https://x.com/VivekVentures/status/2054305703272103977 https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/2054316547712196688 https://am.jpmorgan.com/us/en/asset-management/adv/about-us/media/press-releases/jp-morgan-asset-management-launches-second-tokenized-fund-on-ethereum/ https://x.com/Etherealize_io/status/2054945868210450519 https://x.com/NateGeraci/status/2054355513182171502 59:23 Bankless Thesis Check-In https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/2054969401154130163 https://www.bankless.com/docs/mcp 1:03:43 Euphoria Mainnet Launch https://x.com/Euphoria_fi/status/2054954998375535097 1:04:45 Closing & Disclaimers --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Bankless Nation is the third week of May. David, we got another all-time high in stocks. I feel like this is on repeat. Is this like the fourth weekly roll-up in a row? Groundhog Day for equity all-time highs? Yeah. Not a bad movie. No, not a bad movie to watch over and over and over again.

I just wish I had more of those equities. Trump is meeting with Chinese President Xi this week. I guess that's why AI stocks in particular are up. But in the backdrop of this, we got inflation. members in, and that is accelerating, wages decelerating at the same time, bond market yields are surging. The question is, how long can markets shrug off all of these counter indicators? And what does that mean for crypto? Well, on the crypto side of things, we had a very big vote with the Clarity Act, which passed moments before we started recordings. We're going to give you all the news.

It's not the final vote. Not the final vote. You are right. A key vote is in the process. Yes. The key vote. But we are over a key hurdle. The Democrats filed over a hundred amendments. There is still the final bosses of the ethics and developer protections debate, but the odds of clarity getting over the final hurdles are up. We're going to talk about all of that and more.

Also, Tradfai, Ryan, did you know, just loves Ethereum? Yeah. Yeah. I think you love it more than me at this point. I don't know. Three major financial institutions of all announced multi-billion dollar tokenized money markets on Ethereum this week. We're going to talk about that, but then also the D-Day for Anthropic Secondaries.

Yeah, what happened here? I want you to fill me in on that, okay? I got you. I got the deets. I got the deets. Okay, before we get into that, of course, we got to thank our friends and sponsors over at Galaxy. So this one is for the institutional capital listening, whether you are looking at the future

of finance, that is crypto, of course, or the backbone of the next industrial revolution, that is AI. There's one name you need to know, and that name is Galaxy. In fact, David, we have a number of business. Galaxy references in our episode today, they've been key in going through the Clarity Act and reporting on that. What's unique about Galaxy, though, is how they bridge these two worlds. So full institutional training, custody and tokenization on the digital asset side of things

and on the AI side of things, they have data centers and they have very big data centers. How big, Ryan? You know, 1.6 gigawatts? That's more than a nuclear power plant, David. They've got all of that approved power feeding their heliocy. They're a publicly traded company. You know the ticker GLXY. And if you want to find out how Galaxy helps institutions in particular, invest, built, and transform.

Go check them out. Link in the show notes. David, tell me about the two presidents, the meeting of the two presidents. We were talking about this right before we hit record. You were like, do we call him President Xi? Is he an official president? And yes, apparently he is. We have President Trump and we have President Xi.

They are both presidents and they are a meeting in China this week. This meeting, this summit between Trump and Xi has been planned for like over six or seven months. This initially, like, why is this happening? It initially got inspired by an attempt to kind of just like quell some of the tensions with the trade war. But then Trump invaded Iran or started attacking Iran. And so that kind of added to the list of items needing to be discussed. Let me ask you, though, which president you think was more? excited about this meeting.

Trump or she? Look at this intro video, man. It's got to be Trump. Look at this. Oh, oh. Okay. For the video, yes. I mean, China just rolled out the red carpet for Trump because Trump's so easy to read.

He loves that. Put a crowd of people yelling and cheering and waving flags. Give me a clip I can tweet from the White House account, please. Yeah, make me look regal, which is what China did for Donald Trump. They're good at that. Yeah, they're very good at that. Yeah, yeah. But the question I thought you were asking was like, okay, this is a, this is like a cooperation competition between the United States and China. The optics here is like, let's make a deal with China. We are on opposite sides of the table amongst many issues. But look, we can, we're reasonable people. We can, despite being competitive superpowers, we can come to the table here. The question I thought you were asking, Ryan, was like, who's kind of got the more bargaining chips? Yeah, I am asking that too.

Yeah, who's... My take is she does. President Xi, China does. And the reason is, is because Donald Trump tried to make some moves ahead of this summit. So this summit was planned to first happen maybe like six weeks ago, four weeks ago. But Trump postponed it because he wanted the Iran War to kind of wrap up or progress a more favorable position to Donald Trump. Maybe he got a little bit of that, but really not a lot. And so President Xi, China, actually does have a lot of leverage because Trump feels some urgency to get some deals done ahead of the midterms.

Yeah. And President Xi doesn't have any of that pressure. Trump brought an entire techno corporate posse though with him, right? Like Jensen was there. Elon Musk was there. Yeah. Tim Apple was there. Tim Apple.

Yeah. There was like 12 industry executives that Trump. But then, I mean, China, gee, they respond to economic. You're joking about Tim Apple. It's Tim Cook, right? Yes. But Trump called him Tim Apple. Oh, right. Again.

I forgot about this. Yeah, it was like in a tweet or something. Again this week. There's an official tweet where like Tim Apple will be joining joining President Trump. Just like what you do, David, almost every week with Michael Strategy. That makes sense. It's in your brain. Tim Apple makes sense too.

That might even make more sense. You're right. Tim Apple and Michael Strategy. Anyway. So what does the United States? States want. Yeah. On the United States side of the table, what does the United States want?

The United States wants to secure large trade agreements, mostly planes and soybeans. Like they want to sell Boeing and they want to sell soybeans and they want to sell beef to China. They want to, I think we buy soybeans from China. Oh, do we? No, no, no. We're soy exporters got to be, man. Are we? Yeah, it's huge, huge.

Agriculture is huge. And we also want to produce a board of trade to manage trade relationships moving forward. So we're trying to smooth out the whole trade war thing. Trump also probably more urgently, and this is probably Trump's weak spot, wants to pressure China Xi to use China's influence over Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and push Iran towards a peace deal. This is what Xi knows is a card that he has to play. Iran is a weak spot for Trump.

Which is China wants. China has really signaled that Taiwan is his top agenda. he wants the United States to back off from its presence around Taiwan, especially with arms sales to Taiwan. And also, they want access to American technology. They want semiconductors. They want chips from Nvidia, which is very relevant because Jensen Huang was on the plane to China with Trump.

And Jensen very much wants that. Jensen also wants to sell chips to China, as you could imagine. Which brings us to our breaking news. We are now allowing, the United States is now allowing Nvidia to sell ships to China. That is the news that broke. yesterday. And so it seems like Trump is coming with a gift right off of the plane saying, hey, gee, thanks for

reminding me. We're going to sell you chips now. Yeah, meet Jensen. He's here to sell you some chips. Invita stock, all-time highs. Obviously, on that news. All-time high. So where are we at? Like, Nvidia, like a seven, $8 trillion company? It flipped silver as an asset.

It flipped silver. Yeah. You think it's coming for gold? Maybe chips are the new gold. Why the hell not, dude? I don't know what happens in this. Nvidia is worth more than every GDP of every country in the world outside of the United States and China. Oh my God. That's wild. All right.

Well, that's crazy. Talk about a country of geniuses and a data center. Yeah, exactly. And I think probably a lot of investors feeling like geniuses if they bought Nvidia two or three years ago, huh? Kevin Warsh, final confirmation for his Fed chairman seat as well. So new incoming chair of the Fed, Kevin Warsh, succeeding Jerome Powell. this was a pretty contentious vote, apparently. So the most contentious in history, is that what I'm seeing?

He was confirmed on a 54 to 45 vote. Down party lines, basically. Down party lines, I guess. Okay, so the question is, what is Kevin Warsh going to be like? Is he going to be dovish or is he going to be hawkish on the Fed rates? There's some challenges for him in terms of being dovish. I know President Trump would love him to lower. rates, keep lowering them, bringing them down to zero. He was selected because he was like, yeah, I'll totally lower rates for you, Donald Trump.

Well, and Kevin said, you know, it was a good idea because we have this deflationary pressure from AI, and a new Fed chair has to factor in that deflationary pressure from AI into the story here. And that was his reason for, like stated reason anyway, for thinking about this from a more doveish perspective. But that's going to be hard to do, David, given the inflation numbers that we have been seeing recently. And this was. Maybe the biggest news on the week. Tell us about inflation. What did we hit on the week? April inflation rose to 3.8% which is the highest level since May of 2023. So we all remember 2020, end of 2021, start of 2022, and all throughout 2022, fastest rate hikes in history.

Inflation went up to 8, like 11%, came back down. And then it got down to like below 3%. And it has been 2.5 to 2.7%. ever since then, and it jumped up to 3.8%. So highest level since May of 20203 when we got inflation under control in the first place. And so this is absolutely the high oil prices downstream of the Iran War, finally showing up in inflation, like across the board. We're seeing this not just in core CPI.

We're seeing this in PPI numbers, which are up even higher. So PPI, this is producer inflation. So this tends to be a leading indicator for CPI, actually. So this could be a direction of travel for CPI. It came in year over year at 6% versus the estimation here. This is what analysts estimated 4.9%. Yikes. Okay, so that is well above expectations.

Well above. So it's going to be very hard, as you said, for Kevin Warsh to cut rates in an environment that is asking for rate hikes, actually. And in fact, I believe this is what Polly Market is saying, is that this has led to a increase in the probability of a Fed rate hike in 2026 up 8% this week. It's started the week at 20%. It is now at 28%. And so this is all on the back of a Fed rate hike in 2026. Yeah. Oh my God. That was not even on my like radar at all that we'd be hiking rates. Yeah. There's a couple other inputs into this.

Bond market yields are flashing red. So the 10 year is up to 4.5%. That's the highest since July. the 30-year Treasury yield is above 5%, which is, somebody's tweeted this out, like, this is Trump Taco Territory. So around 5% yields is when Trump starts to, like, freak out sweat bullets and, like, do something specifically to lower yields, whatever he can. And we know that because we saw this with a tariff scare around this time last year. This is when Bond yields started creep up. This is when Trump bends.

Yeah, he backed down, right? And so will he back down? something with Iran. What will he do to do to bend over? I don't really know, but like this, historically, this is always would be kind of like. Well, we've been talking about the pain. Iran pain versus U.S. pain. This is President Trump pain right here when you have CPI coming in a 3.8% when you have yields aside.

That's what you would think, Ryan. You would think that Trump would feel pain. But actually, Trump was asked, what does he think about America's financial situation this week from a news reporter? Let's go hear what his answer was. When you're negotiating with Iran, Mr. President, to what extent are American financial situation motivating you to make a deal? Not even a little bit. The only thing that matters when I'm talking about Iran, they can't have a nuclear weapon.

I don't think about American financial situation. I don't think about anybody. I think about one thing. We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That's all. That's the only thing that's motivated. There you go. You single track mine, David.

Not thinking about American's financial situation at all. Dude, do you think that that was like, was that an oopsie? Yeah, I mean, he knew what he was doing. No, like, I think if you want to be charitable about that, you could say he was just single-track mine. Like, the nuclear issue is a bigger issue than short-term American financial pressure. That's how you could interpret this, but the sound bite is not great. When has any president ever said ever? I don't care about the average American's financial situation.

Yikes. It's not great. Oil up on the week as well. We're above 102 barrels, at least at one point this week. I'm not sure where we are at the time of recording. About there. That's about right. But all of this and like, you know, stock market is shaking this off.

Stock market is roaring. Dude, this is the big takeaway that I have is that AI stocks and also very strong corporate earnings are just plowing through. We have gotten so many bear cases thrown at the stock market in the last few months. We've got the Iran conflict, which did dump the stock market, but then it recovered. Biggest recovery ever. High oil prices, increasing inflation, high yields, consumer sentiment is at all-time lows. Something we skipped over is that because of the inflation numbers that came in in April,

real wage growth has not kept up with inflation over the last like two or three. years. Wait, do we have a chart of that? Yeah. Is this it? Oh my god, yeah. Yes, that's a lot. Yes. Okay. Inflation is now eating up all wage gains for the first time in about three years. This is painful for Americans in a true financial squeeze. They're showing here as CPI, again, the 3.8% we were talking about wage gains over the past year, 3.6%. Yeah. So wage is not keeping up. This is very painful. But Donald Trump doesn't care about the average American's financial situation, as he just said. And the stock market is just plowing. through all of those, everything that I just said, it just does not care because for the fourth out of five days this week, the S&P 500 had as highest close ever. So since the bottom of the Iran War, which happened right at the turn of April, so six weeks ago, you know, I'd say stock market, U.S. stocks have added $11 trillion in market value in the last one and a half months. The S&P since the bottom is up 18%. The NASDAQ is up 28%. InVIDIA specifically is up 38%. It's up 30,

percent despite no Iran peace deal, despite oil above $100, the market doesn't care. Capital's happy. Investors happy for sure. But I think this is the chart really back to the CPI inflation when that is above wage growth. This is a key political indicator. This is not going to win you any elections. That time period where this was, the case was 2022 through 23. You just see it right on the chart. By the way, these charts always crack me up. There's literally in every inflation chart that we see, like from now on, for eternity, we're going to see this gap here. No inflation data due to government shutdown. It's on every single chart, and it drives me crazy. Look at this. The gap in the chart. It's just embarrassing.

If we just shut down the government, we'll stop having less inflation. We'll stop inflation that way. Yeah. Well, should we check in on crypto then? What's the story over in our world? I want to get into crypto, Ryan. We want to talk about the crypto prices this week, but there's first. This is, it technically is about crypto. You remember, Ibit broke, smashed through all records of the fastest ETF to get to $10 billion. Ibit, that's the Black Rock Bitcoin ETF.

Untouchable. Untouchable. 49 days to $10 billion. Like, beat the previous record by like 200 days or something, something monumental. There is another ETF that is on the verge of beating Ibit's record. Tell me it's a crypto ETF. It is a AI. Memory stomp

ETF. The ticker is DRAM. It launched 42 days ago and it is at $9.5 billion. So it's half a billion dollar short and it has seven days from the time of recording. It's going to make it. It's totally going to make it.

The biggest component is Sandisk, which is the best performing stock by far in 2026 and also Micron MU. And there's just been like a huge surgence of memory stonks and DRAM just launched at the perfect time to capture that.

And so it is basically just shy of $10 billion $42 days live into trading. And this is because DRAM is kind of the main supply chain constraint right now. Memory is, yes. The AI compute, you demand squeeze, basically. That's right. And so this is why we're seeing Nvidia all time high. This is why we're seeing DRAM all time high. I even heard last week Larry Think started talking about AI compute being like the new oil, the new commodity.

you're sort of seeing these prices, right? Bitcoin is a commodity, DRAM as an AI commodity. No wonder prices are as high as they are. Yeah. Yeah, I think there's like been two phases in the AI revolution so far and we're in the middle of the second one. The first one is the rise of chips and compute with Nvidia. And just because this is the chatbot revolution,

like LLMs are really good chatbots. They answer questions very, very well. And then memory is the AI agent phase of this whole thing where, okay, sure, we have good compute, but our agents are better when they can remember more things at once. They have longer context windows. They can work for longer.

And so memory is the new bottleneck. And so this is the current inflection in AI stocks. You're telling me we should have pivoted to AI commodities about a year ago, huh, David? I love it more than that. We've been in crypto. We've been in crypto. We'll tell us about crypto on the week.

We're up a little bit. Bitcoin is above 80K, which is a good sign. So where are we on the week? Yeah, 81,600 of 2.2% on the week, severely lagging the S&P. I think we talked last week about the correlation between Bitcoin and QQQ. It's correlated, but I wish it was more correlated right now. I think the correlation broke this week. I mean, we're back up a little bit, but up until like yesterday, we were down on the week while equities were up on the week.

Strategy, micro strategy made a buy for ants. I mean, it's a pretty big. $43 million. That's it. Why are they even tweeting this? What a waste of my time. 533 Bitcoin's bought to buy a strategy this week. Tom Lee bought 26,000 ether for $63 million.

Oh my God. So this is one of the weeks in which Bitmine actually bought more in dollar terms of ether. Is he going to have a 5% ETH supply party? I mean, he's getting close, right? Tom Lee. He is at 4.31%. At consensus, the conference from CoinDest that just happened in Miami, Tom Lee said that Bitmine is actually going to slow its ETH purchases as it approaches 5% of the supply.

I mean, he's approaching 5% of the supply. He outbid micro strategy in the week. This is a slow purchase this week and he still outbid micro strategy. Anyways, ETH had $2,300 up half a percent on the week. Just not the same amount of like liveliness in the crypto markets that there are. But still, I mean, so if you talk to even like kind of the cycle people like Michael Natives, which I do on a weekly basis, if we lock in above 80K,

so this 80 to 85K number, and we have a few weekly closes like this, it kind of breaks the back of the bear market. I mean, that's how it's worked in previous cycles. You're talking about the whole cycle thing of just like, yo, we're in the middle of the down cycle. It will be unprecedented. I mean, we're looking at some charts this week

where the short-term holder cost, basis, so all short-term holder cost basis. Right now, it's about 79K. And we closed above 79K last week. If we close above it this week and the next week, and maybe the week after, every time that's happened, that has kind of marked, like, an end to the cycle. There's other things to, like, 200-week moving average. You got to keep an eye on that.

Can we look at the long-term charts for Bitcoin and Ether? I just want to, like, zoom really far out because the very long-term chart for Ether. Are you asking me to chart? I'm just pulling point-point-gued. Oh, you did. I did. Yeah, this is, we're still on, we're in the agenda. Oh, my God.

Thanks, man. Thanks, man. This is great. All right, let me click over. There we go. Yes, we can, David. We can certainly pull up those. Here's my chart.

This is EVE. Long-term. Okay, so this goes all the way back to 2020 and 2021. And you can see just like the bottoms. I am not a charter. This is like flashing red territory. David is drawing lines on charts, but whatever. There has just been a very solid base being established of all

of the lows established in 2022 and 2023 again, and then again in 2024 and where we are now. We're like right above the lows. And same thing with Bitcoin. Bitcoin has just like this kind of, kind of stable-ish foundation. Yeah. It looks good.

It doesn't look like it's going to explode any time soon, but it looks like it's doing the thing, which I said it was going to do, Ryan, at the very beginning of the year, which is slow grind up. Remember me saying those words? Yeah. The next thing that happened is we actually drastically dumb.

to down, but I'm still in this slow grind-up camp. That did happen. That did happen. That did happen. That did happen. But now we're slowly grinding up. We're slowly grinding up. Well, Michael Nato's take is that we're still headed for another dump down before the slow. I can also, yeah, right. Dump down to the 60s. Picture that. That could happen back to Fair Market Valley territory and then we kind of slow grind. So it's too early for this to happen compared to other cycles would be his take. I don't know if he's right or not. Again, some of these numbers might change his mind as well. And this cycle could be different. I don't know what the

bear catalyst is natively to the crypto industry, but we did kind of paint the bear case earlier. Yeah. High inflation, high oil prices. Well, that's it. Consumer income, not beating inflation. It's what we're not seeing, David, is like we're not seeing the new buyers. Okay. So spot volumes are anemic right now for Bitcoin. And so that's what we haven't seen yet. Although, E.T.F. is showing up and micro strategy purchases are still showing up. Let's talk about

some of these ETFs coming down the pipeline because these are new. So there's a hype ETF and there are also some Zcash ETFs that have just launched this week. One.

Filed. So the hype ETF is live. This is from 21 shares. So back to my hype staking enabled. So this is hype staking, so this is hype staking, 0.3% management fee. Cool. I mean, hype is just

getting more and more legitimacy, especially as the markets trading on hype are more and more equities markets. Zcash, too, right? This is grayscale filing to launch. As you said, the first spot ETF for Zcash. Zcash making it in the Wall Street Journal cover, it's more a secret version of Bitcoin. It's on a tear. That's what the title says.

Zcash reminds some of Bitcoin's early days, but some see its privacy features as a red flag. Zcash has been on a tear from the price perspective lately. I got to say it is hilarious to see it in the ETF. Let's do my cypherpunk privacy coin. What are we going to do with it? Let's just put it in the ETF. Zcash is the real return to cypherpunk values. I'll buy it in my brokerage.

But the reason why Zcash is being touted, if you will, is it because it is partly very institutional friendly. It has the non-shielded version. that institutions can touch as opposed to Minero, which is just dark by default. You sent me this tweet, by the way. This is first time Nvidia is a top asset by open interest and for the top five assets by volume are stock. So I'm not sure what market we're looking at. I'm guessing this is a crypto-native perps market.

Is this like hyper-liquiter something? Yeah, this is the founder of Ostium, which is a perps market, Perps platform. And just what she's highlighting is that the most traded assets on their purpose. crypto perps platform is our equities. Yeah, I guess there's lessens in there. Sign of the times. Our infrastructure is fantastic. It's our assets that suck.

We got more to talk about, including Circle, earnings day. They had a price pump. Why? Also, tell me about Anthropic D-Day, David. The stocks took a tumble, at least the PIRP stocks. And hyperliquid and Coinbase, they're doing something together. I thought they were competitors. All this and more.

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on top of real world yield. Even the best carry trades can be within reach. Bricks brings DeFi's promise to the emerging world and brings the emerging market yield to your wallet. Let the yield flow with bricks. So it's still earning season, and we got circles earnings this week. The standout number is that USC on-chain transaction volume jumped to 150% year over year. Wow. And so there was a unique, idiosyncratic jump in specifically USC transaction volume in Q1.

USC now has 63% of total stable coin volume out of all stable coins, which is crazy because it does not have anywhere near 60% of total market supply of stable coins. That's still like tether. So volume for USC is up bigly. If you want to go down even into the grittier details of the Circle earnings, there's this newer line item from the P&L that their USYC money market fund didn't even know that's existed. Is the largest money market fund in existence according to Circle. Wait, what? Yeah.

What is this? Yeah, they have a money market fund. And none of them $35 million in Q1. Wait, they have a money market fund that they provide to investors? I guess so. So, tokenized money market? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so this is, I think they have a similar problem that Coinbase had when Coinbase first went public was they had a very non-diversified revenue line. Like, Coinbase was from trading volumes and Coinbase's big thing was the need to diversify the revenue. And I think this is happening to Circle. And so Circle has diversified revenue because of this money microphone. Well, I did see another revenue diversification was the announced raising of 222 million. That's a weird number, 222 million in pre-sale of their ARC token. I suppose it's an ARC token, right? Yeah, it's right of the ARC blockchain.

So ARC blockchain is a layer one EVM chain from Circle. We've talked about this before, a $3 billion valuation. Chunky. And what is the purpose of ARC according to Circle? it's they're building an agent-led future. All right. So this is part of the AI. I've heard this one before.

Circle, they're doing command line interface, agent wallets, agent marketplace. We're going to be the agent chain. Okay, that's our layer one. Yeah. And on all of these earnings reports, what you just talked about and the Circle Arc announcements,

stock was up by 9%. Yeah. I got to ask you, though, what do you think the value accrual, like, why are our, arc tokens valuable, do you think? Because it's not money.

I don't think they're asking that question. I don't think they're asking that question. But these are investors and it's 2026. If we're not asking the question in 2026, when do we get to ask the question? I think the better question is, can they make money from it? Which the historic answer of can you make a layer one and make money from issuing a layer one token, that answer is always yes? Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You think that, like, I mean, there's some savvy.

investors here, BlackRock, Apollo, A16Z, Crypto Native investors. Yeah. So you just think they're just doing the L1 trade that's worked previously, and they're doing that again without any idea how ARC tokens will actually accrue value? Because I assumed it would be through some sort of MEV. It can't really be transaction fees. And or maybe they do kind of the mega-Eath thing where USC on ARC provide some yield. to the token validators or something?

I think you're overthinking it. I'm overthinking a $3 billion token valuation for an L1 in 2026? Yeah, uh-huh. Someone get Jeremy Allerr on the phone. I want to be in the analyst call. I hope somebody asks him that in a quarter of the earnings call. How do these tokens have value?

Yeah. Maybe you should get him back on bank lists. Maybe he'll tell us. Sure. Maybe he won't be able to. I'd love to hear what the updated narrative is for, I mean, tempo falls into this category. Arc falls into this category.

Plasma falls into this category. Why are we still asking this question six years in? We still don't understand how these tokens will occur value. And yet they do are valuable. They are demanded by the market at the very least. My big question is like, it's not even a question. I would just be so intimidated of going up against tempo. Even if your circle?

If your circle, yeah. I mean, because circles, bread and butter is. the USC token. Doing a blockchain is a whole new thing. It can't be that hard, right? It can't be that hard. Can't be that hard. Maybe we should launch a layer one.

We thought about it. No, we didn't. We could never get our heads wrapped around value accrual. So we did the responsible thing, and we didn't. This is a pretty big deal. Another, I guess, feather in the cap of USC and circle, there's always the question, if you're bullish USC, do you buy Circle or do you buy Coinbase, right? I always have the question there because Coinbase does get

50% of all USDA revenue. Am I wrong about that? That used to be the case. That's right. Anyway, so USDC is now deploying on hyperliquid. There was a Coinbase and hyperliquid partnership of some sort. Maybe you get me up to speed on this. What are we looking at? Yeah, so there's some backstory here. So a while ago, there was a competition to become the native stable coin issuer on hyperliquid. That was like last summer, wasn't it? Yeah, it was a while ago. Yeah. And they did this just because Hyperliquid had 8% of all USC lived on Hyperliquid. Crazy number.

Except all the yields from that 8% of USC was going to Coinbase their competitor or Circle. Just like they had all of this 8% of all USC yields. That's an incredible amount of money. And so they were, they auctioned off the right to use the USDA H ticker, the USDA Hyperliquid. This was won by an organization called Native Markets, which got the contract to issue and manage the aligned stable coin.

There was a whole Dow vote, right? There was a request for a proposal. I remember that drama. Yep. Yep, yep, yep. And so Native Marcus won. They could issue USCH. They would manage the treasuries in the back, basically just like Circle or Tether,

but native to hyperliquid. Native markets would pocket 10% of the yield, and then they would give 90% of the yield back to hyperliquid. One half of the yield that Hyperliquid would get would go to buy and burn hype. the other half would be distributed to HIP3 deployers that were using the U.S.EH trading pair. That only got so much traction. It got some traction, not a lot, not enough to displace actual USDC on hyperliquid. And so this is where we get to part two of the story, which is what's being announced today.

Coinbase is saying that, okay, we are the native issuer of USC on hyperliquid, and we are partnering with hyperliquid to basically resemble the same deal structure as USDAH and USCH is being sunsetted. Coinbase sounds like they bought the IP and assets from native markets. And so native markets is being sunsetted in favor of USC from Coinbase. And Coinbase is the default official treasury manager for USC on hyperliquid. Wow. Yeah.

One comment, stable coin network affects undefeated here. Correct. It's showing USDC dominance. Yep. Other comment, I thought Coinbase and Hyperliquid were competitors. Don't they both have Perps platforms? Aren't they both kind of on chainy? I kind of don't get it.

Wait, what don't you get? To your point. It's just like Coinbase is rolling out their Perps platform. Hyperliquid is the Purps platform. Coinbase also, in addition to this, is now staking 500,000 hype. And so, because this is a requirement to do the job. And so there's... It's all both fries.

We all win together. This is like President Xi and President Trump. I guess. I guess. I guess. But like economically, Coinbase and Circle were making more money because they pocketed all of the yields. And clearly Hyperliquid wasn't able to displace USDC with their USDAH platform very much. And then Coinbase was like, eh, we'll just give it to you.

Here you go. Who's bending the need to whom, I wonder. I think this is still, I think this is still a net win for CERP. Coinbase, actually, over Hyper Liquid. Why? Because it's their coin, and they have established network effect dominance, and Hyper Liquid tried to unseat them and couldn't, and they're back at the table. But they tried to unseat them and couldn't, which means that Coinbase and Circle

won, and they get to keep all the yields. But now they're just giving it to Hyperliquins. Like, we won, but you guys win. I think they're playing a longer game, post-Genius, network effects. You get the coin on Hyperliquid, then you win everything. else. You went all of the other, you know, platforms as well. I agree with you. You have to invoke tether there in order for that to really make sense. It's like this is now a defensive moat against tether from ever penetrating into hyperliquid. But just to be clear, this is a big economic

dub for hyperliquid. Hyperliquid revenue. Do you know how much hyperliquid revenue grows from this? Oh, yeah. Like, um, 25%. It goes, 25%. Hyperliquid revenue grows by 25%. There's going to be like $450,000 of hype bought and burnt every day because of this proposal. And again, what does Coinbase move? Get, they kind of get like an optics thumbs up. Hyperliquid is just a money printing machine. You know, you saw the Coinbase layoffs like 14% or something. It was 700, 800 employees or something like that.

And Hyperliquid has like 14 employees. Yeah. Yeah. What are you going to say? They laid off more, like, they laid off like, I don't know, 50x more. Yeah. Yeah, then Hyper Liquid actually has his employees. It's just an insanely profitable.

For all the reasons to be bullish Hyper Liquid, which I'm sure there's plenty. One of them is that they are already ahead of the curve in terms of just labor in the world of AI. Oh, yeah. It's like if you don't have anyone to lay off at Hyper Liquid, they're the most lean protocol of all time. Yeah, it's pretty impressive. I mean, Tether is similar in this way, too, I suppose. So there's the high margin, low employee businesses are the future. Speaking of Hyper Liquid.

I have a conspiracy about how this came to be. What? I think there was, I think it has Kobe fingerprints all over it. You mean Kobe? Kobe's still working for Coinbase, right? Correct. And he's also a hyper liquid bull. Oh, really?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, that makes sense. I think this is Kobe influence. All right. Well, he'll never claim it, I'm sure, at least not publicly. Hyperliquid, speaking of them, like more and more things are getting priced first in our

crypto perps markets, including this. CBRS. What is CBRS? It is a company that just IPOed on the trad market today. The IPO price was $185 per share, and so that's what people bought it at, raising $5.5.5 billion. It is an AI chipmaker specializing in just super high performance inference chips. It's a new Nvidia, new age Nvidia, IPOing, very, very hyped. The interesting story here is that the pre-market shares for CBRS, was trading on Hyper Liquid.

And it was pricing it, hyperliquid traders were pricing it around $300. So IPOing for $185. Hyperliqu was pricing it at $300. And then this morning, at the day of the listing, it opens at $363. And so there is just a, the conversation is giving hyperliquid traders clout

for correctly pricing this thing. Okay, so what you're saying, what you're implying here is that hyperliquid is actually doing price discovery for, Correct. These. For illiquid pre-IPO stonks. Yeah, that's right.

Okay. I mean, and so that worked here. But also on the week, there's sometimes where it doesn't work so well. So this was the D-Day for Anthropic Secondaries. And you're going to have to get me up to speed on this story. How this came across my feed was basically like anthropic perps trading down like $300 billion or something like this after they announced that they weren't going to. to honor pre-market, pre-IPO deals or something? Tell me what happened here.

So what was potentially the trigger was this tweet from Casey Craig out of Euphoria, Euphoria, the Tapto Trade app on Megamith, which just went live today. We'll talk about that later. She tweeted out a pretty funny tweet. She goes, in quotes, I'm buying Spot Anthropic on the Salon of Blockchain, end quote. Spot Anthropic? Yeah, it has to be one of the funniest phrases I've heard all week. there's nothing spot about this.

Brother, you are four layers of financial abstraction and broker crime away from touching actual anthropic share certificates. Your spot position is a tokenized receipt for a possible future economic exposure to a Cayman SPV that owns shares in another Delaware SPV that maybe owns rights to further future equity pending transfer approval. You are approximately anthropic adjacent at best. That's kind of right, though. There's not a lot of problem.

property rights on the tokens people are buying in these pre-IPO markets. And then you do like another tokenization process of that Delaware SPV of a Kman SBV that's trading on the Salon of blockchain. Okay, so that tweet goes around 24 hours later, there is a new article on the Claude Support page titled Unauthorized Anthropics Stock Sales and Investment Scams, basically saying, hey, like, if you guys aren't approved by us, which they have the right to, this is true for all private companies. They have to approve all share transfers.

And so it doesn't matter if you, SPV and SPV and SPV, if Anthropic doesn't approve it, like you're not getting it. So you might have a useless IOU. You might actually not have any rights to the token. They say this in the press release. Any sale or transfer of anthropic stock

or any interest in anthropic stock that has not been approved by our board of directors is void and will not be recognized on our books and records. Yes, yes. And like this is stocks that trade on like a on a platform like hyperliquid or Salonor or some tokenized pre-market, it's pretty adversarial to the interests of the private company that the stocks are represents. So there are approved transfers happens all the time. It's a very big market. And then there are unapproved transfers.

And there is a growing amount of unapproved transfers. And then there's also, Ryan, just straight up fraud as well. People saying, hey, I've got like, I've got an SBV with 50 million. of Anthropic shares, send me money and I will hold that money for you, and then I will give you stocks later, but then they don't give them the stocks later, and they also don't hold their money. That's also happening. Open AI is saying the same thing as well. They did a press release right after Anthropic. And so this led to Anthropic shares on pre-stocks on Solana. That's, I guess, one of the platforms that are doing this. They dropped 34%. Yeah. Open AI tokens fell 40%.

So evaporating, you know, I guess hundreds of millions in billions, I should say. In perceived value. And perceived market cap value on these platforms. But this is what happens, Ryan, when the private markets are just so large for so long. Like, what do you expect? People want access to the coolest companies ever. They're going to do crazy things to have exposure to things like Anthropic and OpenAI and SpaceX. I mean, big picture, it's so shitty that all of these companies.

companies in the AI boom that we're experiencing now, generational event, last time this happened was the dot-com boom, all of these gains are private, you know, and that sucks. That sucks on the way up. On the way down. But then it also sucks that when people attempt to get exposure to these things, like they finagle their way in. Yeah, then Anthropics says, hey, that's not allowed, and then nukes everyone by 40%. Yeah. I think at this stage, David, public markets in the U.S., like, they're almost non-functional with respect to new entrants and new assets. We need like a regulation jubilee. It just costs too much to become publicly listed and it's too encumbering.

We needed to be less encumbering for- Start from scratch, rebuild. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, dude, like, I don't know if the next generation can take another stripe or Open AI or Anthropic turning into a trillion dollars without any, like, point. 0.01% of a generation getting access to that.

Yeah, it's brutal. And, you know, I don't see a lot of people in Congress talking about it at all. No, because the way the public markets have failed. They're trading. They're trading against us. Yeah.

That's right. David, we got more to talk about. Maybe some of the fix could be the Clarity Act. We get these tokens available to the public sooner. There was a make or break vote that just happened. We'll tell you the results. Also, three of the biggest financial institutions in the world just released tokenized money markets on Ethereum. We'll explore that too. Before we do, we want to thank

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through their yield product, or get funds through a crypto-back credit line without having to sell any of your assets. So if you want optionality, Nexo gives you both size of the equation. You can put your assets to work or borrow against them when you need flexibility. Nexo has been around 2018 and has over $8 billion in assets on the platform. And it's paid out more than $1.3 billion in interest to clients globally. So if you're a new U.S. user, there's a welcome incentive waiting for you when you sign up. Check it out at the link in the show notes. And as always, this is not investment advice. Big vote on the week for the Clarity Act. It just happened and it passed. Before we get to that, let's talk about Brian Armstrong. This is him in the halls of Congress.

He was talking about Coinbase's support for the Clarity Act in its current. manifestation. Let's listen. Hey everyone, Brian Armstrong here. I'm back in the Senate office building in DC in anticipation of crypto market structure legislation going to markup on Thursday, which would be a historic moment. And the energy here is just palpable. So first off, just want to say a big thank you to the Senate. And of course, their staff who have been putting in countless hours to get this bill to a good place. I don't think it's ever been in a more strong position and more bipartisan position. And I also want to thank the 3.7 million stand with crypto advocates who have made their voices heard to get this legislation to where it is today.

Now, there were a number of open issues that have now made incredible progress. Stablecoin rewards was a big one. You know, I think there was a healthy compromise there, brokered by Senators Tillis and also Brooks. And you know it was a good compromise because both sides left a little bit unhappy, but at least we got to a place that we can all live with. And then, of course, the other issues which I mentioned in my ex post back in January that were problematic in the prior draft, things like defy and tokenized equities and CFTC authorities and CFT These have all been improved and fixed from our point of view. And so the bill is stronger than ever.

It's bipartisan. It's ready to go to markup. And I'm incredibly bullish on what this could mean for American innovation and ordinary Americans benefiting from this technology. So we'll keep you updated and keep fighting the good fight. Thanks. So David, he was talking about the latest rendition of the Senate Banking Committee draft of the Clarity Act.

And there was a key vote that happened on Thursday. We have the results of that vote. It passed. The Senate Banking Committee, what was, let's see, 15 to 9. Okay, that was the vote in the Senate Banking Committee. And it wasn't conclusive, either that it would pass or that we'd get as many Democrats on board to vote in favor of this bill as we actually did.

So it looks like the results of this vote were better than many in crypto actually expected. And there was some question going into this vote, too. about how they might edit it, what amendments might be in play here. One was the BRCA. We've talked about this previously. This is something we care a lot about at bankless. Coin Center cares about.

This is non-custodial developer protections. This is the Roman Storm part of the bill. Yes. And it's pretty much a bankless defy red line here like it has to be in. And CoinCenters put in Yeoman's work to actually make this happen from 2018. they got the BRCA tied to Clarity Act fantastically, David. BRCA actually made it through this committee.

And this was a committee that it might not have made through. So that's fantastic news. We're over a big hurdle that could have killed us. We are. Now, what passing means is that the committee is marked up the bill and then they're going to send it to the full Senate floor. Okay. So this is a banking committee.

This is not the Senate floor yet. But even passing this is a big deal. has to happen next is we actually have to get 60 votes in the Senate. That happens in June. I'll remind you that we had 68 votes for the Genius Act. So that's kind of the precedent. And that was approved. So we need to get 60 and that will require many key Democrats to come aboard here. But it passing the Senate Banking Committee is a good sign, certainly. And then after that, by the way, after it gets through the Senate, we have to go through the House. Remember, there was another bill in the House.

Oh, damn. There's so much left. Takes a long time. And then ultimately, you get to the presidential signature. So the White House goal is July 4th, of course, you know, that might slip into August. But this was a key vote. And David, there was a lot of pushback here. I don't know if you saw on your timeline all of the banks, like sending mailers,

sending emails out, freaking out over Mother's Day. And I wasn't totally tapped into what was going on. Are you? Yeah, I mean, I just saw some of this. Like, here's, it looked like a bunch of banks in, this is a tweet. The banking cartel is in full panic mode. While Americans were celebrating Mother's Day with their families, the CEO of the American Bankers Association, sent a frantic alert to every bank CEO in the country demanding immediate engagement. So they're still freaking out.

They're still worried about the stable coin yield issue. So this is Robert Nichols. He is the ABA president. That's the American Bankers Association. saying like, this is, we need your help. You got to contact your senators. You know, this is going to cause capital flight and deposit flight from our banks if the yield issue goes through untouched. So anyway, the banks are trying their best, but despite that clarity has gotten through. Again, some compromises. We discussed the compromises last week. Can you remind folks what is actually

in this version of the clarity bill? So there's three main things. There's the splitting of the oversight between the SEC and the CFTC. SEC surprise gets security like tokens. CFTC surprise gets commodity like digital assets. It also creates a mature blockchain test. So tokens can migrate from a security to a commodity once the network is sufficiently decentralized with a pretty fantastic definition of decentralization, like one that actually did its homework.

Then there's stable coin yield. It bans the passive yield. allows activity-based rewards. Still kind of like TBD on what that means, and that's a question that I have for Alex Thorne when we interview him tomorrow, or I think I'm on that interview, you're not? So that'll be a question that I will ask him.

Jake Schrovinsky tweeted out yesterday, the clarity text came out pretty good last night. It's not perfect, but nothing that passes Congress ever will be. If we want a market structure bill, we need to be pragmatic. There are compromises here, but the deal is decent. Now we wait for it to survive the amendments. I'm happy enough with it so long as we get BRCA. And again, that's not a given. So there's still some pushback. Senators, particularly Democrats, they want some give on ethics provisioning, preventing Trump from doing things in crypto. That's still contentious. I'm not sure how that will pan out, but that could be some fly in the ointment. David, one of the things I was most excited about reading was actually this, you said it was a fantastic definition of decentralization. And it really is. So in the Clarity Act, there are, three, there's like a full definition of what decentralization actually means. So if you're

going to get into that commodity status, you have to be fully open source. You have to be permissionless and credibly neutral. So there can't be a person or group that has unilateral ability to restrict sensor or prohibit use of the system at all. It has to be distributed and they define that. You can't have more than 49% of outstanding units. So, you know, kind of the voting power has to be distributed, autonomous digital ledger system. So it has to abide by something decentralized, has to abide by consensus rules. Like it has to be in code. This has to be fully open for everyone to see and then economically independent. So Gabe Shapiro says the U.S. Congress is officially more cypherpunk than most of you on here are. He was talking to the crypto Twitter crowd,

a crowd because this is like a really strong definition of decentralization and it made the clarity bill here. It's pretty solid. So the Democrats in total and aggregate made something like 100 plus, maybe 200 plus amendments proposed amendments. Elizabeth Warren made 16 proposed amendments to the bill. Yeah, she was not happy about this. Do you know how many of her 16 amendments actually made it through? No, actually. Zero. Really? None of them. Well, she was trying to amend crazy things. Like I saw something... Probably. There was anti-Defi amendments in there. There was definitely some things that would

scale back the BRCA in there. I think there was things that were glommed on to prevent crypto companies from opening master accounts with the Fed. So there's all this weird stuff that they tried to tie in here. It looks like that got rejected. Just trying to choke out whatever she can about crypto left and right and just not getting any of them. Let's go to the Polymarket. Clarity Act signed into law in 2026.

question mark. We've been watching this polymarket, probably our most watched polymarket ever, coming in at 69% chance likely. Nice. That is up just from last week where it was like 60%.

So we're up 9% on the week. It's still like, I want it to be higher. But you saw it has to go through all of this process still, even still. But this was a pretty major step. We'll take 70% odds here.

Yeah. Okay. Money markets. on Ethereum, three of the biggest financial institutions of the world. BlackRock, JPMorgan, Fidelity, all shipped tokenized money markets on Ethereum this week. I actually kind of thought we already had tokenized money markets on Ethereum from all of these. Not like these. Okay, not like these. So we had Biddle, okay. Right. Which wasn't a tokenized money market. That was tokenized T bills. That's right. Now BlackRock is doing two new tokenized funds. They have filed this week for that.

So Biddle is about $2.5 billion in AUM. These new ones are going to digitize an existing Treasury liquidity fund that they have, a $6.1 billion fund, so they're going to put that on chain, and they're explicitly targeting stable coin holders with this. So this is BlackRock, like full steam ahead, just rolling out tokenized funds. You can see the Biddle charts here, by the way, this is, well, I have this somewhere in the charts. Yeah, realworldassets.com. The bigger one I thought on the week from a news perspective was J.P. Morgan. So they're going to launch their second tokenized fund on Ethereum. They had something called money, M-O-N-Y. But this one is even bigger. It's, you know, J-L-TXX. So this stands for J-P Morgan, on-chain liquidity, token money market fund. And this is an actual registered government money market fund. Okay. So it's a big deal. And it's really purpose. built for the Genius Act. It comes out of kind of the Genius Act of requirements. And if you buy a money market fund, say you want that, you know, three to four percent yield in your

brokerage account, you're probably doing something like a Vanguard type fund. You might be paying fairly high basis points on this. This is only 16 basis points. Okay. So the best available right now is Vanguard 11. This is 16. So this is very competitive. And again, this is J.P. Morgan releasing it. The third was Fidelity. So they released something called F-I-L-Q, same playbook, this is international. Anyway, it's very clear to me that all of the biggest, like look at, who just said, J.P. Morgan, biggest bank in the U.S. These are the two big to fail banks. Yeah, biggest asset manager in the world, BlackRock, two more, Fidelity, eight trillion in assets under management, and they're all doing money market

funds. So they see that this is the future. And they'll just do more of this post-clear act as well. I have mixed opinions on this. Obviously, it's good. We want more value capital to go onto Ethereum. The contrast, the juxtaposition that I'm seeing is a couple weeks ago. We had the worst exploits in Defi where people were looping these crypto-native assets on these crypto-native protocols to get extra yield. And so we were looping R.S. ETH or the kelpf restaked ETH in AVE, crypto-native asset, crypto-native protocol,

hooked to another crypto-native protocol to juice up the yield. And then on the flip side of this, the drug's position is we're getting the too big to fail banks putting some of the world's safest yield directly on chain. And so it's like an antidote

to the problem that we just had that we just created for ourselves with this crypto-native looping to really get the yield. Like, okay, we now have, maybe it's less yield, but we now have like very safe and stable yield. But we're getting it from the banks

and we're not getting it from default. So I feel mixed about that. I was thinking, too, actually. I've been doing a lot of reflecting because, David, we're six years in to the bankless podcast now and the bankless thesis. And actually, James on our team, he rolled out all of our transcripts. So if you're a bankless premium member, you can now access this. You can have an MCP connection.

So dial your clod, dial your chat, GBT, into the entire bankless content live. and you can get that beamed into your interface. The amount of data that this represents, the amount of conversations that we've had with literally everyone. Yeah. That's crazy. I know. And so it's 1,130 episodes that we have in this library here.

And I hooked it up to my clock. 1,200. 1,000, 130. Yeah, not 12,000. 1,230 episodes. Right? All of our transcripts, everything. I mean...

We've been doing this for so long. I know. And so I was going down memory lane. And the question I had is, you know, our first 10 episodes, which I feel like we're cornerstone to the entire bankless thesis. We did economic bandwidth episode. We did triple point asset, Eith episode. We did money as a meme. All these core episodes.

We basically painted our own roadmap of understanding everything for the next like four years. That was kind of the bankless thesis in those first 10 episodes. And so I asked Claude to analyze all the trans. scripts and now give us a report card six years later how well how well did it hold up did you make sure that's like hey don't glaze me no I didn't ask it to not to glaze me all right so maybe it's glazing me I feel like my claw doesn't glaze me but that's probably what everyone says maybe your cloud is just really smart yeah my clot is smart I know this anyway here's what it gave us overall grade on the bankless thesis was an a minus okay on the eth bet specifically we can

got a B. There would have been a in a different era. Yes. It said we got the macro call right. Okay? So our very first bankless episodes were during March 2020 COVID. Okay? We predicted Fed money printing, all that stuff.

ETH is a triple point asset. Claude loved that. It said that became the industry standard way of evaluating ether. Let's fucking go. Oh, I forgot to tell you our stats. Okay. So since our first episode recording, ETH is up 20X. All right.

Okay, so I was on a thread guy earlier and he asked me what the best business decision we ever did a bankless was. And I just go, talking about ETH. Well, you had to do it in 2020. Yeah, exactly. If you did it in 2020, not so much. Not so much. Yeah. All right.

So, ETH was 110 at the time. Bitcoin was 5K. Crypto market cap. We're up 20X since our first episode. Defi TVL. This is where we outperform, David. we're up 320x in Defi TVL. And those were our big bets, right?

It was Bitcoin, it was Ether, Ether in particular as a monetary asset and DFI, right? So that's why we're getting the A minus. I look at those prices. I'm like, okay, that's justified. Maybe if you started listening to Bankless in 2021, maybe not so much. Yeah, like if the frame of reference really matters here. That's right. And then so we got D5, we got a B plus on that aspect of it.

it summed up to a minus, but the things where we got lower scores were, it said we were too triumphalist. The bankless future arrived through tradfied, ETFs, BlackRock, stable coins. This is what I was just saying. Not against it, exactly. And so it said, this is the framing that needs work. It wasn't actually a, it was a hybrid future. It wasn't a fully bankless future.

And also said, ETH didn't lead the decade. So ETH underperformed relative to like what we were hoping, at least to this point. We had a multi-chain blind spot, and we were underway on stable coins. So that's kind of how I feel. That's fair. Yeah, I agree with the analysis. I think the grading is perhaps subjective, but the analysis, I think, is spot on. Yeah, I was going to give us more like a B overall.

Yeah. Although, I don't know, maybe, like, you know, 20X, that's a territory. It depends on when you measure it from. David, you want to tell me about euphoria. I know you're very excited about this app We like Crypto Native apps This is a Euphoria As a tap to trade app on MegaEath

It's probably the most excited Anticipated Mainnet release on MegaEath I already know you, Ryan You definitely have not traded done this app Use this app No, I'm not into trading Euphoria, no

It's a price line And it's like one second charts And there's a line And you press your finger On parts of your screen and this little square gets highlighted and if the price line goes into the square then you get money.

Is this investing? Is that what we're doing here? No, it's trading. Okay. Trading. Trading. You're making bets like 17 seconds into the future. Oh my God.

Wow. Anyways, they just went live. It's pretty fun. There's going to be a trap-to-trade composition or a bunch of other, like, activations. So I think it's pretty cool. You can only do that on a very high TPS blockchain, I'm guessing. That's right.

That's part of the Meggieeath pitcher. sure. Well, we got to end it there. Of course, none of this has been financial advice. 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.