Bankless - ROLLUP: JD Vance Bitcoin 2025 | $425M ETH MicroStrategy | Tariffs Blocked | Stablecoin Summer

Episode Date: May 30, 2025

This week, Ryan and David break down the political storm brewing around crypto. From JD Vance’s fiery speech at Bitcoin 2025 to the Trump meme coin dinner that triggered bipartisan backlash. They dive into Ethereum’s biggest capital inflow yet, as a public company raises $425 million to buy and stake ETH, drawing comparisons to MicroStrategy. They also cover the court ruling that halted Trump-era tariffs, the Circle IPO finally moving forward, and early signs of a “Stablecoin Summer” as banks eye their own dollar-backed coins. Plus, the growing risks of copycat crypto acquisition vehicles, and why some say the next GBTC-style blowup could already be forming. ------ 📣 RE | REAL-WORLD (RE)STAKING https://bankless.cc/Re ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🌐CELO | PROVE YOUR SELF https://bankless.cc/Self 🟠HEMI | BTC & ETH, ONE NETWORK https://bankless.cc/hemi ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 0:37 JD Vance Bitcoin Conference 2025 https://x.com/cointelegraph/status/1927766577845305579 2:59 Crypto Prices 5:13 US court blocks most Trump tariffs, says president exceeded his authority https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/us-court-blocks-trumps-liberation-231041016.html https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114588777076099501 12:29 The microstrategy of ETH! https://cointelegraph.com/news/sharplink-ethereum-treasury-joseph-lubin-board-chair https://x.com/econoar/status/1927380671334404511 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1927344185595633687 https://x.com/hanni_abu/status/1927408350527922585 18:39 Gamestop & Trump Media Buying Bitcoin & SolSolStrategy https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/1927680683847119289 https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/1927352308859330651 https://x.com/SolanaFloor/status/1927408166922293535 https://x.com/mikeippolito_/status/1927450775870931015 25:26 Trump Dinner https://x.com/BillSun_AI/status/1925728406974443607/video/1 https://x.com/Mollyploofkins/status/1926098775233241537 https://x.com/justinsuntron/status/192576411185 9597602 https://x.com/USHouseFSC/status/1925625286818689066 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/senate-republicans-raise-red-flags-trumps-private-dinner-meme-coin-hol-rcna204293 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-22/protesters-yell-shame-at-guests-of-trump-s-memecoin-dinner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNJD-vKtrPc 36:22 The Annual Bitcoin (Stablecoin) Conference Week https://x.com/UnderCoercion/status/1927885141059260768 https://x.com/TheBitcoinConf/status/1927914310212407481 https://x.com/BitcoinMagazine/status/1926324131923976224 https://x.com/Cointelegraph/status/1927763954178150848 https://x.com/TPostMillennial/status/1927767083217039818 https://x.com/pete_rizzo_/status/1927509752931635256 https://x.com/BitcoinMagazine/status/1927479261780127747 https://x.com/DogCandles/status/1927879603055415557 44:08 Echo announced Sonar https://x.com/echodotxyz/status/1927422067801997336 46:18 Circle filed for an IPO on the NYSE https://x.com/CoinDesk/status/1927326167033356458 48:37 Some of the biggest US banks are about to launch joined stablecoin https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/crypto-stablecoin-big-banks-a841059e https://x.com/CryptoHayes/status/1925739441634652654 https://x.com/SecScottBessent/status/1925967578540781743 51:55 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

David, you remember last year around this time we were talking about the Bitcoin Conference? We played this clip from Donald Trump. Okay. And this was like an election promise at the Bitcoin Conference. He was like, if you elect me, I am going to fire Gary Gensler. Do you remember that clip? Yeah, this was like when timelines seemed to diverge from the very barit hole that we were in versus a very bullish positive outcome with a potential election on Donald Trump.

Yeah, absolutely followed by the most raucous applause I've ever heard at any conference whatsoever. Okay, flash forward to this year. This is J.D. Vance at that same conference. The thing that we did for this community, we reject regulators, and we fired Gary Gensler, and we're going to fire everybody like him. Wow. So there you go. J.D. Vance at the Bitcoin conference, Trumpton Show, but J.D. Vance did. And this is sort of a promises made, promises kept type of clip. And again, same amount of applause as last year. It's crazy that we're already one year around the sun from that conference.

I think they're talking about this is an even bigger conference, a Bitcoin conference, which makes sense because Bitcoin is like three times higher price than it was last year. But I don't think there will be anything ever as monumental as the Bitcoin conference from that year when Donald Trump said all those things. And like I said, there were two timelines and we chose the bullish one. Yeah. Yeah. But there are some repercussions for that.

We're going to talk about that. There's definitely some repercussions. The Trump dinner and other things going on. But first, guys, this is time for the bankless weekly roll-up. Got a lot to talk about. Number one, David, the micro strategy of Ethereum? Is it finally here? I kind of think so.

What is it? How much they buy in? What's going to happen next? And what other acquisition vehicles are hitting the public markets these days? And what could possibly go wrong by too many crypto acquisition vehicles? Yeah, that's right. Nothing. Also, courts have made a halt on all Trump tariffs effective immediately.

So we're going to get Ryan's macro analysis coming down the pipe here. and then also the Circle IPO. Is that story finally coming to a close? Will they IPO? Will they get acquired by Ripple or what? We're going to get into all of those topics and more, but first a message from our friends and sponsors over at REE. Re. Re is a real-world re-saking platform that leverages re-insurance contracts to generate yield on staked capital. So users just deposit stable coins, U.S.D.C. Tether, D.D.E. into risk pools. And in return, users earn yield that is uncorrelated with typical market volatility. To date, REE has supported $143 million in premiums and backs 26 different insurance programs in the United States. So if you are peaked by this, you can earn real yield bankless. com.com.com.com. Dot C.C. slash re. That's R.E. Yeah, it's R.E. Just 1E.E. Right. It's not REE. It's not REE. It's just REE. Just REE. It's not REE. It's just re.

Let's get to prices on the week, David. Tell me about Bitcoin. Bitcoin down on the week. Down 3%. The all-time high for Bitcoin. was set seven days ago, Ryan, at $1.11,800. $111,800. We are currently at $107,400. The low, low, cheap, cheap price of $107,400. I thought we were going to get all-time high summer, and it was just week after week after week after week after week after all-time high, right?

Bitcoin let me down this week. You might have just wait one more week. But on Ether, though, we are up. We are up. Yes. 0.2%. No, right, I would usually say at 0.2%, I would usually say we are flat on the week. Yeah.

But since we are counting the weeks and we are five for five weeks of Ryan, Sean Adams being back in the ETH U.S. dollar price being green and the ETH Bitcoin price being green, four out of five of those weeks. Never been down. The streak continues. It's unbroken. It has yet to go down in price since Ryan has, yeah, it's unbroken. Yeah. Well, yeah, it's part of the Blue Money Gospel. And actually, there's some really good news for Eith this week, which is.

It kind of was down for a little bit, but then it popped back up. And you know what? I'm going to make a call, okay? 3K by the end of May. We got to hit that 3K number by the end of May. You've got two days. Yeah. That's in two days, bro.

That's the call. Check me next week. All right. I've got the magic. I may as well use it. Are you sure you don't want to extend that to? Okay, so the 31st is Saturday. So June 1st, Sunday, June 1st.

I think you should take that extra day. No, it rhymes. 3K and May. We're going. with it. Ship this, don't edit it out. Yep, this is the clip. All right. Check back next week. How about the total crypto... You are just taking your luck and you are just throwing it on the roulette table, bro. I'd be too risky with it. All right, we'll see. We'll see how we hold up. Total crypto market

cap. What are we on the week? What are we on the week? We're at $3.4 trillion dollars, crypto market cap, yeah. Or 3.5, excuse me, 3.5. That's exciting, right? Have we ever hit 4 trillion? I'm just... I can't remember. 3.9, 3.85 or something like that. We crazed it. Yeah, we clipped it. We're crazed 4 trillion. We'll get it. I'm not calling for that in May, all right? No, not get ahead of myself here. David, you want to hear about the Trump terrorists? You must have heard about this, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is something that Haseeb even talked about when I had him while you were out on sabbatical. He gave a take on one of the two rant, rants about terrorists that he made, that these, the terrorists are unconstitutional. and that the courts are going to deny them.

And that's the news that we got this week, right? Well, basically. And the courts move a lot slower, of course, infamously, right? But they do move and they do have power in this country. Remember, three co-equal branches of government, at least that's what it's supposed to be. In theory. Right. So what happened was the U.S. court blocked most Trump tariffs.

Okay? So when I say most, I'm talking about the, you know, the 10% across the board tariff that was in place. the 20 to 25% rates on China, Mexico, Canada, all of those things, all blocked, David, effective immediately. And so this is a lower court, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of International Trade issued a permanent injunction, not a temporary, permanent injunction, which basically wipes out all of these tariffs. So even the 10% global reciprocal tariffs, even that is gone? Yeah. I mean, the only thing that still stays is some of the more. I guess niche tariffs like on steel and some of these things Trump still has the power to do that. The courts

didn't take that away. But this is a permanent injunction across like all of the Liberation Day tariffs. What was the premise? The premise was that he doesn't have the constitutional authority to do that the power that the power actually rests in Congress, that other branch of government that just like doesn't do very much. But apparently they have some power to just like do tariffs and Trump doesn't, at least according to this system. And this is nationwide. Okay, so this is a, you know, like federal court. Of course, there's going to be a Trump reaction. Do you see the Trump reaction?

There was one? No, I did not see it. There was one. And Trump said this is a truth social tweet. This is it. This is Trump. He's on a mission from God. It's a meme.

It's a meme. It's a picture. From the president of the United States, nothing can stop what's coming, he said. Okay. Okay, so this is a picture of Donald Trump walking down like what looks like a New York Street with a tariff lane. It's Tariff Street in New York.

Yeah. It sounds like, so blues brothers. We're on a mission from God. And nothing can stop what it's coming. I don't know. Some people like this. But what's going on in the background is basically Trump's legal team, the Justice Department, they're appealing this.

So this lower court doesn't have the final say. So what's going to happen is there's going to be a fight. So the injunction is in place right now. So no tariffs as of now, David. Like that's been completely lifted. The courts do have that power. And this is going to get escalated in the federal circuit. There's going to be some request.

from the Trump legal team to like pause this injunction and that could come into play eventually this could escalate to the Supreme Court. Why aren't the markets sending? The markets are flat or perhaps even bearish. That's a good question. I think I mean, I'll throw out some opinions on this, but these are just like opinions. Like one opinion is basically the Arthur Hay's take of like the tariffs were sort of dead in the water anyway. Trump was on the way to like walking them back, you know, the Chinese negotiations, all of these things. They were sort of end of the line because Trump was spending too much political equity on them anyway. So maybe the markets just priced that in. The other possibility is that, you know, the markets are saying, look, this is just a lower court

kind of injunction. It won't hold. Trump might win on appeal. The tariffs could come back. You know, Trump's going to bypass them in some way otherwise. So maybe the market is pricing that factor in as well. I'll also say the S&P 500 is 1% off of its all-time highs. And so maybe, yeah, the the tariffs, elimination of the tariffs or whatever, has just already been factored. Yeah, that's right. Maybe the markets are on a mission from God, too, which is like all-time high mission from God. I don't know.

David, let's talk next about the Trump dinner. Yes. So there were 220 attendees at the Trump dinner. How was it? We're going to fill you in. And I want to tell you about Ethereum's micro strategy, David. Maybe in the Michael Sailor behind it, we'll talk about all that and more. Who is Ethereum's Michael Sailor?

Who is it? Who is it? Maybe it's my co-host. David Hoffman. I think you feel that role very well. All right, we'll get to all of that and more. But before we do, want to thank Uniswap. This is a browser wallet. It's a mobile wallet. It is the best place to do Defi.

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on-chain finance that actually belongs in 2025? Explore Mantle at mantle.xyZ or follow Mantle underscore official. Mantle, bridging Tradify and Defy so you don't have. have to. The Microstrategy of E. Sharplink Gaming is the company, which interestingly has no relation to Ethereum in this title. This was previously like a modest player in the sports betting and internet gaming market sector. Very modest. Yeah. I think this has very modest. This has basically been converted. Call it like an acquisition by Joseph Lubin. Joseph. Yeah. Full name, huh? Joseph Lubin. Yeah. He who's of course the founder, CEO. of consensus.

Yes. But this is not consensus going public, which has also been like a long rumored thing. This is strictly being like turned into an ETH acquisition vehicle. So the company plans to use its proceeds to acquire ETH, positioning it as the primary treasury reserve asset for Sharplink gaming. Now, you might ask what proceeds. They have announced a $425 million dollar private placement. So they are raising $425 million for the specific purpose.

of buying ETH and then staking ETH. They want to go stake their ETH, and so that they can go and do this again. So, of course, this is how this works. They raise cash below net asset value. They buy and stake ETH. If the stock trades above the ETH per share, they raise more cash, and then they repeat. S-Link Gaming jumped something like 500%. Oh, let's look at the chart here.

Yeah, so it's currently at $43. Oh, wow. What was it just a moment ago? What was it? What was the price? You're looking at it. What was it here? It was $6, $3.

$3.76. So we win $3 to $44. And I don't know what market cap that that puts Sharp Link gaming. I don't know how to use these charts, yes. But if it is above $425 million, that means that they can go issue more Sharp Link Gaming equity, and then they can turn that into more ETH, and they can get that flywheel as much as they can. They can just squeeze that juice and that can just turn into ETH on the balance sheet. That's a 14,000% gain for the folks at home.

Well, I think that's because the market cap of this thing prior. to this was approaching So tall. I don't want to... Oh yeah. Oh, look. It was approaching zero. It was approaching zero.

It was probably in the low, I don't know, five, I'll estimate, something like that. It's pretty low. Now it's about $30 million dollar market cap, right? $30 million market cap. I think that needs to be higher. I think that number needs to go higher. Well, I mean, when they buy the Eth, it will become higher because it'll be worth

at least as much as the Treasury. Right. They actually raise the money first. Or they already raised the money and now they have to buy the ETH. I don't know. Well, we'll keep tons on this. They get to buy it, which is nice. That's $425 million worth of buy pressure on ETH effectively.

Which is probably why ETH is up like half a percent and Bitcoin is down 3%. And so that's... Ether has just been slammed against Bitcoin because Michael Saylor has just been buying billions and billions and billions of dollars of Bitcoin. Now we have one particular investment vehicle to do the same thing, but on ETH side. Yeah, it's funny that this is like... Some people could look at this and be like it's a gaming company. So the ticker is not Eith.

The ticker is S-Bet. All right. So it's S-Bet on the NASDAQ. That was just a public vehicle for making this happen, essentially. You guys remember, micro-strategy, remember what it was? It was a business analytics software company.

Still is. They still kind of is. They still make money selling software. Yeah, but Sailor is obviously kind of letting that slowly die in the background. And the main thing is the purchase of Bitcoin, right? So I guess does this make Joe Lubin, the Michael Sailor of Ethereum?

Do you think he can carry that stature? Now, I will say, Ryan, there are others out there. There are other, like, decks that I've seen and other, like, micro-strategy of Ethereum going around the space that are not yet public. Yeah. I haven't sent you the one that got sent to me yet because I haven't. Sorry.

Oh, you were keeping that alpha from me? David, this is how I find out? I'm not investing in either of them, and I don't think you want to either. But, yeah, there are others. This is not the only one. Well, the game is basically this is sort of a levered play on the purchase of ETH. That's kind of what it is for Microstrategie.

They sort of, and it's a public vehicle for that. What's interesting about the fit versus something like micro strategy is there is no, I guess, investor-friendly traditional mechanism to buy Staked ETH because we don't have a state ETH so we just have the vanilla ETHs of just ETH. And so if you stake ETH within this S-BET platform, then that's kind of the only public, like publicly traded way you can get staked ETH inside of your 401k portfolio. So even that alone kind of makes sense. There are a whole bunch of other public companies that have ETH on the balance sheet,

by the way, including Coinbase. But there's also Bit Digital. This is ticker BTBT. Most of them have smaller amounts of ETH. So this is definitely the largest one, really making a play for the micro strategy. Yeah, ticker BTCS. I can't remember where that goes for. but they're also doing the ether micro strategy play as well.

And they've already been like raising money. Yeah. So I guess the flywheel is you raise cash below the net asset value of the stock price. You buy and stake ETH. And then if the stock trades above ETH per share, you raise more cash and you repeat. You just keep doing this. And as long as number goes up, things are fine. It's a long as number.

Well, yes. And the difference here is if number goes down, things aren't necessarily bad. And that is that is the number. crux the fulcrum on which many of these acquisition vehicles will lay on because, you know, this is technically, this is neutral. Like, micro strategy pioneered this. And because no one really copied Michael Saylor for so long, he was able to hoover up a bunch of lending credit in the market. There's only so much like lending dollars willing to be lent out to a micro strategy. Michael Saylor was the only player in town. So he got to absorb a lot of that lending demand for like pretty

secure loans from micro strategy. But now there are many more. players on the scene as well that are doing that are turning into like acquisition companies. GameStop just acquired 4,710 Bitcoin for $510 million this week. GameStop, of course, has still a decently large, real business, but they are also leaning into the Bitcoin acquisition strategy. Interestingly enough, GME, the equity of GameStop, dropped by 11% when this went out, which is okay. The opposite of what you want.

You need the equity to go up, not down. Sure, sure, sure, sure. Nonetheless, GameStop now has almost 5,000 Bitcoin on the balance sheet. Trump Media announces a $2.5 billion Bitcoin Treasury deal. So Trump Media and Technology Group plans to build one of the largest Bitcoin treasuries held by a public company. This is also the same company, the parent company of Truth Social, and they have confirmed that they have raised $2.5 billion from around 50 different institutional investors, which will include $1.5 billion in Common Sock and a billion in billion dollars of convertible notes. This cash will go straight into buying Bitcoin. So that's $2.5 billion of incoming Bitcoin buy pressure.

The TMT stock, the DJT, dipped about 9% after the announcement. Again, not what you want. Yeah, you can't have that happening. If we want this to work, you need the equity to go up, not down. But again, this is not just for Bitcoin or even Ethereum. Soul Strategy has filed a $1 billion preliminary base shelf prospectus. no clue what that means. I think the TLDR is that they don't yet have a billion dollars, but they are like, it's a precursor of having a billion dollars to buy soul. So this sole strategy thing is

trying to finagle its way into billion dollars. The listener is going to need to like go and do their own homework on this. This is on the Canadian Stock Exchange as well. Do you remember there's a company called EtherFi that was listed in the Canadian Stock Exchange? And this is years ago. Not EtherFie. Not EtherFie, excuse me. Ether Capital. Ether Capital. Yeah. So Ether Capital was kind of doing this play. back before it was cool in the Canadian Stock Exchange, it's not as big a deal until you get listed on the New York Stock Exchange or you get listed on the NASDAQ and you have access to that level of capital. So what's interesting to me is like there are all of these levels of sophistication.

So you mentioned, you know, Bitcoin has been running this play for the longest with Microstrategy. Fun fact, he started in the year 2020 doing this. Before that, Michael Sayers actually a Bitcoin skeptic, okay? So like, he wasn't. He wasn't bullish on the asset, and still he started buying it. Fun fact, guess what the price, the market cap of Bitcoin was when Microstrategies started doing this? $200 billion. Yeah. Around $200 to $300 billion, right?

Which, interestingly enough, is the exact market cap of Ethereum today. Oh. And so what you kind of hope happens is that if you're an eth holder, you hope that Ethereum and Ether, the asset just follows in the footsteps of Bitcoin. Right. Okay. So this is the first one. This is like $500 million of capital. That's half a billion dollars.

That is size. The NASDAQ, and so you start there at the same market cap, and then it continues, it rolls. You convince other, your treasuries to sort of buy ETHIth the asset and it follows in the footsteps of Bitcoin. I mean, that's the case for ETH holders. And Eric Conner puts it this way. The upshot for ETH holders, supply compression, new narrative fuel, potential leverage by an equity wrapper, and a bullish milestone.

in East March to mainstream balance sheets. There's kind of a worry, though, in the waters, isn't there? Because all of these are levered plays on the underlying asset. And so whenever you see that, you have to ask yourself, like, what could go wrong? Mm-hmm. Yeah, a lot of people's pattern recognition, parts of their brain are perking up and correlating this to the GPTC, wind up, and then the ultimate collapse of the last bull market. So as a trip down memory lane, the 2020 through 2021,

Bull Market started with this GPDC, the gray scale Bitcoin Trust, having this premium to NAV. And so you could take your Bitcoins, put it in the trust and then pocket some like 20, 30, 40% premium. And then you could do it over and over and over again. That premium turned into a discount. And then all of a sudden everyone was underwater. But that took like 18 months. And during that 18 months, it fueled the yield of every single thing in crypto. It fueled the Celsius yield.

It fueled the pool two. It was this cascading like the yield system. Three arrows capital. Yeah. Entire hedge fund. All of that stuff. Yeah. And the pattern, it's not a one to one pattern matching, but I think people are kind of like recognizing that there is a pattern here.

And then the other thing that people worried about like, okay, Bitcoin, great. Like it's a $2 trillion asset. It feels like relatively safe to add leverage onto ether. Like same same. But like once you start to go down the market cap stack, people are looking at like, okay, what happens when there is like a acquisition vehicle on something much smaller than this? and what happens if this becomes a little bit too replicatable for a little bit too long. And then also Michael Epilito from Blockworks, I think he put out a pretty good tweet,

kind of diagnosing the situation. And so he said, quick thoughts on the acquisition vehicle meta. It seems like we found the 2025 equivalent of GPTC. To spell out the risk, it's that if these acquisition vehicles accumulate a lot of crypto at much worse terms than Sailor, they might eventually become forced sellers. And then he says, I'm not sure people truly understand. how much of a wizard Michael Saylor is. Saylor financed the majority of his Bitcoin buys with converts.

So there's plenty of equity risk for investors, but little risk of liquidation. Basically, Michael Saylor is the CTO or the CFO, chief financial officer of micro strategy, and he's making sure that he's acquiring Bitcoin at very low risk terms. If we hurriedly copy and paste this crypto acquisition vehicle over and over and over again, and you're not smart about your acquisition terms. then this can turn into leverage in the system that will result in cascading liquidations. Yeah. And even micro strategy, Michael Saylor, a lot of people point to that and have some worries too.

And he has probably the best terms and has been doing this the longest. I don't know if you saw like Nick Carter, for instance, he's like, all this stuff is a ticking time bomb. Is his take on all of the kind of treasury asset type side of thing. So I don't know. I like in order to diagnose this you really have to get into kind of the all of the financial statements, all of the leverage vehicles. And it's just so much for me to unwind. But it's just kind of raising an eyebrow at this point. We have a segment, I think, where Michael Saylor comments on this at the Bitcoin conference.

We'll get to that in a minute. First, should we talk about the Trump dinner, David? Okay. So the Trump meme coin dinner happened last Friday. This happened at his Trump National Golf Club in Virginia for the top 220. holders of the Trump token. It was promoted as the most exclusive invitation in the world. That was reminiscent of 2021 NFT clubs. So what actually happened at the dinner, Trump did arrive, although he was not promised to make an appearance at the dinner. He did make an appearance at

the dinner. He delivered a 20-minute speech. From what I hear, it was normal Trump stump speech. I'm the crypto president. Biden sucks, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, normal Trump things. I fired Gensler. I hope he said that. If I fired Gensler, yeah, yeah. He did not, he did mingle with any of the guests. He spent 23 minutes at the event before leaving by helicopter again, so 23 minutes in and out. He did dance to, he did have time to dance the YMCA. He danced for a MCA? Yes. All right, that might be worth it. According to sources. That might be worth it. Reportedly, most guests were disappointed, especially some people who spent large sums of money, but did not get to interact with Trump personally. It also featured a three-course meal that

TikToker Nicholas Pinto described as wired as the worst food he's ever eaten. This is a. And the Trump's speech at the event was pretty much like bullshit. Oof, out Ouch, rough words. I don't know. I mean, what did people expect from this? What did they expect? I don't know. It's a meme coin dinner. I think you get to, I mean, if you invest in something, you want to be like aligned

with it. I do know someone who is at the dinner. I asked him what his take was and I'll, and they said. On disclose source, right? I'm not, disclose it. I'm not going to disclose it. I'm not sure it matters. I'm not going to disclose it. It was pretty cool. Honestly, had some good conversations at the dinner with people I probably would not have met otherwise.

lot of market maker CEOs were there. Best part was definitely the VIP room and being able to be near Trump and have him give a short speech 20 to 25 of us before he went into the bigger ballroom. Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, and then the next sentence is between us. And so I weren't, I'm not going to repeat that. You know who else was there, David? Justin's son, of course.

Not only was he there, he is the largest Trump holder, top holder of Trump coin, which of course is what you need in order to get to this. You have to be top 220 owners of Trump coin in order to get to here. and not only was he excited to attend the dinner, he put out this fantastic influencer video about it. I got to show you this. Oh my God, Justin Sun, what a guy. You know what?

I just can't watch anymore, David. It's just like more of that. It's Justin Sun photo op. Most Trump glazing I have ever seen. Even the music, dude. Never a wasted opportunity with Justin Sun. Wow, that's incredible. But let's talk about some of the controversy outside of crypto.

about this because it's not insignificant, right? Do you see this? Even in the Trump, you know, 20 minute speech he gave, this is the presidential seal. Right. This is, and so when that seal. He's giving a speech at a podium with a presidential seal in front of it. And when that seal is present, it signals something, right? It signals that the present of, like, it's not just Donald Trump speaking.

It's not Donald Trump. It's the president of that represents the people, the United States of America, who is here. And this goes against the rhetoric that the Trump administration was saying, which is that Trump was there at the dinner in his personal capacity. So this is directly antagonistic to those statements. So what backlash have you seen about this? Oh my God. Dude,

everywhere. Like, everywhere in like mainstream media. So 35 Democratic lawmakers after or right before this sent a letter to the Department of Justice urging an investigation into possible violations of federal bribery laws and the Constitution's annulment's cause. This raised concern that foreign actors, Justin's son, could buy influence via the Trump meme coin and gain under.

disclosed access to the president. The letter demanded a press conference and public disclosure of the dinner guest list. Well, you could actually get that on chain. Just before the event, Representative Maxime Waters introduced the Stop Trading, Retention and Unfair Markets Payoffs in Crypto Act, targeting crypto-related corruption by U.S. officials. She cited Trump's and Melania's meme coins, the family, a world-lebody financial-backed stable coin, and Trump's proposed National Bitcoin Reserve as risks of foreign influence. Even some of the Republicans, Ryan. Senator Cynthia Lemmiss, one of them. Huge Bitcoin supporter.

Huge Bitcoin. Laser-eyed Bitcoin Cyberhornet senator. Yeah. Cynthia Lummis. I was like, oh, this makes me uneasy. I am not really cool with this. What was this? Gives me pause. Gives me pause. Even though I support the president, this gives me pause. Yeah. During the dinner, there were protesters gathered outside chanting shame and calling it an illegal crypto party and among other things. The way that this, the way that I-

I'm paywalled. I want to see this photo of the protesters, but I'm paywold. Can you describe it? Imagine a left-leaning crypto-leaning crypto-hater with the word shame. Just imagine what that looks like and then you're going to get pretty close. Thank you. The way that I stumbled across the pushback here was from Ezra Klein. I listen to the Ezra Klein show every now and then. He's definitely like a Democratic liberal commentator. And also, I've mentioned this a handful of times. Sam Harris loves to bring up the Trump meme coin as a continent.

to it for corruption because he also hates Trump. Ezra Klein also disposed to not like Trump. Did a one hour and like 20 minutes show on the relationship between Trump and crypto. And it was pretty thorough. It's a video is titled, The Growing Scandal of Trump.

And what he means is like dollar sign Trump. Trump coin. Trump coin. Yeah, but not just that. He talked about World Liberty Financial. David Bailey got mentioned as well as, and like there were clips of David Bailey being like, we the Bickhunter community, can use

Trump as a conduit to make Bitcoin go to the moon. And it's like pretty unfortunate clippings of David Bailey talking about Trump as a way to get the Bitcoin community to make Bitcoin go to a million dollars. You sort of see, I sort of see the dry Tinder for like an epic backlash here. Okay. I see the same thing. And it's not going to happen immediately. It's not going to happen now.

But the Trump coin in itself is probably the most notable of like, but like there's other things. too. So it's like, you know, we just mentioned early in the episode, was the Trump media acquiring $2.2 billion worth of Bitcoin, $2.5 billion of Bitcoin. What's sort of interesting is like, we've been talking about kind of treasury policy, which may be effectively to inflate U.S. Treasuries away at some level, right? So it's kind of interesting is like, you're the president, you inflate treasuries away while you're buying an alternative store value. It's like, remember, like, okay, crypto is the escapeboat. So you're loading up on the escapeboat while you're in charge of like

You the leader are getting on the arc while you are also potentially causing the flood at the same time Yeah, it's one of those. And so, okay, so like tell me about this episode. I don't know if I'm going to watch it, but like what was the- Dude, it was really thorough. They even went into the Trump baseball card NFTs that he launched in like 2022. Yeah. So they just touch on everything he's ever done with crypto.

And of course, they put it in a pretty like bad. light, but it's also a light that's like, not wrong. It's accurate. Yeah, it's not wrong. Like, they're not making up lies. Do they, do they other sided a little bit? Do they, do they talk about how like shitty, like, Gary Gensler was and how like terrible? They talk about Gary Gensler, but not that he, no, they don't talk about how shit. They don't talk about that. That's what frustrates me so much. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, I think this is, this is what we did. This is what we, this was the bargain. We got the crypto president. We got everything we wanted. Did we? We're also getting the crypto president grift to got to pay the grift tax yeah and there like we the industry

are going to in the future have to reckon with that reckon with this in the future yeah well we'll see how it goes i still think the alternative may have been worse and probably would have been worse but there's no free lunch bullish no free lunch let's talk about what's next uh more on the bitcoin twenty 25 conference who attended what are they doing over there and uh circle are they going to ipo is that is that Is that what's happening now? I think so. We're going to talk about that and more. But first, I want to tell you about FRAX, some of the best yield in DFI.

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Stable coin. Stable coin. Stable coins. Stable Coins. Stable coins. Stable Coins. These faces here. I mean, this is Robbie for Black, Stablecoin. It's a nice of Black Rock. Who did I just see as CEO of Robin Hood, right? Who else I'd just see? Vlad, Robbie from Black Rock. Yeah. There's Paul from Coinbase. There's Cynthia Lummis. Pete Rizzo's Stablecoin. Stablecoin. Stablecoin. He's turning in him. There's, who else is there? Oh, Representative Emmer here. Tom Emmer. Tom Emmer. Tom Emmer, yeah. Stablecoin, stable coin, stable coin, yeah. Okay, okay, okay. So are you implying that? Oh, and J.D. Vance to finish it as well. Are you implying that this was like a lot of talk at Bitcoin was about stablecoins? I mean, I just saw this clip. I wasn't, I'm not at Bitcoin at the Bitcoin Conference.

This is, this has been the meta of crypto. But like, you know, Bitcoiners don't necessarily like, they're not anti-sable coins because more stablecoins makes Bitcoin even better. Yeah. I feel like it's very, it's very nice for Bitcoiners like from a narrative perspective to promote stablecoins because that feels very US aligned. Like the government gets stablecoins and we get big. It's non-threatening to Bitcoin, obviously. Like no one cares about, you know, so Bitcoin and stablecoins.

That's sort of the Bitcoin or barbell here. So it makes sense that there would be a lot of companies. But this is a three-day conference happened in Vegas this year. 30,000 attendees registered, okay? 5,000 companies, 400 speakers, a whole bunch of people. We mentioned JD Vance was there. You know, senators, Bo Hines. Eric and Donald Trump Jr. were there.

So sons of the president. president, not the president. Of course, he had Michael Saylor's there and all of Bitcoiners, Jack Mallors, Adam Back, CEO of Tether. And they spent three days. They talked a lot about stable coins, I'd imagine, but pretty much talking about Bitcoin the asset. A three-day conference talking about Bitcoin the asset. Well, not talking about Bitcoin in the blockchain. Let me tell you. Yeah. So, I mean, have you ever been to one of these conferences? I have. Yeah. I went to the 2019 Bitcoin conference in San Francisco and then the 2021 in Miami. But I went to the 2021 one very briefly. I went to mainly the side events. It's very impressive. The amount of... It's a big conference.

It's the industry's biggest conference. Yeah. And just like the energy there, the excitement there. This is J.D. Vance. We'll play another J.D. Vance clip from his speech. 50 million Americans own Bitcoin and I believe that's going to be 100 million before too long. A hundred million Americans owning Bitcoin is just a doubling. We got 50 million with Bitcoin right now. David Sachs, the AI and Cryptozar. He was also there at the conference interviewed by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. He said that while he can't promise anything,

a pathway does exist for the government to buy more Bitcoin, which again, this line was cited in the Ezra Klein show as like the corruption, a corruption vehicle is like, oh yeah, like Bitcoiners paid Trump. now the government money is the biggest money out there. And if you can get the government money to buy your Bitcoin, that's bullish. But anyways, the question is, David Sachs continues saying the question is, can we get either the Treasury Department or the Commerce Department to get excited about that? Because if they do, and if they can figure out how to fund it, they actually do have

presidential authorization. So the president's on board. It's bullish. It's on bullish. The president's buying Bitcoin. He's definitely on board with this, right? So they just have to get the Treasury Department, which is basically President's Cabinet, and Commerce Department on board. And then it's going to happen, according to David Sachs. Senator Lummis, actually, she had kind of a sequence of events.

She's like, first we get the Stable Coins bill, then we get the market structure bill, which is, you remember, fit defines what's a commodity and what's a security. And then she thinks we get Bitcoin in the U.S. Treasury. So she's still bullish on that last piece. She's really bearing that under a pretty tall, like, order. The stable coin bill will get passed relatively easily. The market structure bill is it's not trivial for that to get past. There's a lot of work to be done on that one. Yeah, I was actually...

It's not a guarantee. You know, the Genius Act, right? It didn't really move very much this week, right? I think, what's the status of this? I was actually chat GPT. Yeah, what is that? Nothing legally changed this week. The bill is just in momentum.

It's still kind of an holding pattern. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, the fit bill or the market structure bill. Austin Campbell has some pretty spicy takes. He thinks that that thing is not going to get passed as is. He thinks it's going to get unbundled and pass in like piecemeal fashion, which will take a lot longer.

Yeah, I guess that's less important immediately given the current SEC, right? I mean, under the Gensler SEC, it was really critical. Yeah, true. David, Michael Saylor was there. And maybe we should continue the discussion we were having about what happens if micro strategy starts trading at a discount to NAV price. And NAV prices, like, I guess the book value price of all of its assets, right? That's NAV for micro strategy. Right now it's- The market cap of that micro-strategy was less than the value of all the Bitcoin that it owned.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, well-point. And so right now it's trading at 1.7X premium to the Bitcoin. Which is the premium that they just keep on juicing and they keep on turning into that premium into Bitcoin on their balance sheet. So what happens if that goes negative? That's kind of the nightmare scenario that people worry about. This is Michael Saylor commenting on. that. GBT and Grayscale went below one times NAB before. And what they miss is that Grayscale was a trust company, a closed-in trust, and we're an operating company. And a trust company doesn't have the option to refinance or take on leverage or to sell securities, buy securities, recapitalize, or buy their own stockback. So this is a sailor saying, we're not like GBT. It's not going to happen

this way. And the reason is that trust had no options, basically. Right. It was rigid. Yeah. Sailor saying, look, if worst case scenario happens, you know, we get into some like trouble here. We got all sorts of, we can print more stock. I can find financing. Like, I can figure it out. And I think that's probably true if it's very short term, let's say. So you get months like this. I'm sure he can figure it out. I mean, if that ever turned to years, I think maybe then you have. more of a problem, but he's probably right that he does have more options than a trust. It's just like the question is, is all of that dry powder enough? It depends on the severity of the discount to NAV. Right. Part of the crux of the issue, I think, is Sailor's commitment to

always be buying. And if you are always buying, like if that is what you are doing, you are never really giving yourself padding. And so if there was like a moment where a sailor had enough Bitcoin and he just stopped buying, I would feel a lot more comfortable with it. But I think if you will make a commitment to always be buying, you are also simultaneously making a commitment to potentially put yourself under duress in an extreme situation. Yeah, that's right. David, Echo announced Sonar. What is this? Okay, so Echo is Kobe's startup, which allows for people to, like, create groups to invest in deals. You still need to be an credit investor, but it's a way to, like, democratize access to, like, early stage investing.

It's kind of like an angel list for crypto, would you say? Crypto native angel list. That's right. Yeah. They have since announced Sonar, which is, I think, even more of like a trying to be an open platform. So Echo was designed with kind of these rigid groups that people said that they didn't really like groups.

They just wanted to invest as an individual into opportunities that they found exciting. So Sonar, think of this as like a compliant ICO platform. So Kobe with Echo and now Sonar has trying to bring back, trying to bring back ICOs. which I love ICOs. I think ICOs. I wish crypto would go back to ICOs. And so this is what- Just like better ICOs, right?

Like fair, more transparent. The ICO mechanism is solid. And I'm sad that we ever got away from that. Why did we get away from that? Security regulations. We can get back there. Kobe's doing it like compliant. So they're still like KYC AML.

You still need to be accredited investor, all that kind of stuff. But it does open up access for like founders to kind of just route around venture capital if they so choose and just go straight to Sonar to do a public sale. This has pros and cons, of course. There are reasons why VCs are VCs, but if you don't think you need VCs and you just want to go straight to like

why does a distribution as possible, then maybe Sonar makes sense for you. It's pretty cool. I mean, Kobe's very passionate about this, right? To the extent that he said, hey, like he doesn't do podcasts anymore, he's like, hey, I'm willing to come on the bankless podcast and do an episode. If you guys make an echored, So we did.

Which we did make... All right. We actually had an echo group like in process. Yeah. So I actually think... He owes us one. He owes us

because it comes on the podcast. I think that's how this lays out. I wonder where this takes are. Just so like in the market. He's always got really like interesting reasonable takes. And yeah, we'll have to ask him when he comes on, right? Because he owes us. That's right.

David, Circle and the IPO. What's the status? Yeah. Okay. So I think Circle is moving forward with the IPO, declining the ripple acquisition. And I think therefore, are also declining the Coinbase acquisition, even though Coinbase already owns, like, a quarter of

circle to begin with. So they are offering 24 million Class A shares, and the shares are going to be priced between $24 and $26. They're looking to raise $624 million-ish dollars, which would make the value of Circle around $6.7 billion. Okay. $6.7 billion. That's pretty cool. I mean, another public trade company, obviously we've got Galaxy in there now, crypto company. We had, you know, Coinbase, there's a lot of smaller ones, but this would be a pretty large, like, Market Cap size, public company on the NASDAQ, I imagine. So this IPO is expected to occur next week, it looks like, June 2nd. Is that right?

Yeah. That's the note that I'm reading the same notes, yeah. I'm almost surprised, though, David, that Coinbase didn't like snipe this. You know, there's a conversation about Ripple, but like maybe in some way because they have an ownership percent. Maybe they already own 25 percent. Yeah. I don't know if they need to.

Okay, so like what's interesting is USDC is primarily distributed through the Coinbase wallet. And so the deal that Coinbase and Circle have for USDC yield proceeds is that Coinbase receives 100% of the USDC when it's held on the Coinbase exchange in custody. Okay. I don't know if you knew this. Fun fact. If you hold your Coinbase in custody on the exchange, or if you hold your USDC on the exchange, then they get the yield. But if it's off platform, it's split 50-50 with Circle. So that means if it's on base layer two or if it's in the Coinbase wallet, their revenue share gets cut in half.

And this is not a small amount of revenue for Coinbase. You know, it's like 13% of their revenue. It's a large amount of revenue. Coinbase printed on this deal. Yeah. And so it's kind of interesting. It just I wonder if that's going to, if Circle is going to stay a separate entity and that's the Coinbase play or like what's going to happen long term. Yeah. Yeah, when you're buying a share of Circle, you are buying affiliation with Coinbase.

For sure. Cornbase will always be in the room with you. The distributor. The distributor. There was this. This seems almost like a rumor. But the question is, what are the big banks going to do in the stablecoin summer meta right here? This is big banks exploring a venture into the crypto world together with a joint stable coin venture. So this is J.P. Morgan. This is Chase. This is Bank of America. This is Citigroup. And of course, our friends Wells Fargo. reportedly in a deal, or sorry, reportedly in a joint discussion about launching a venture, a joint venture around stable coins. And the idea here is to create a digital dollar alternative that could be used across all of these banks. I am so bearish on this. There is no way that they are going to be able to coordinate and cooperate with each other on a joint venture. Banks do not innovate. I'm getting the same vibe as this as when like, the central bank or the Federal Reserve said that they were going to research and produce reports about their potential experimentation to CBDCs, the same energy.

Like, nothing is coming out of this. This is never going to hit mainstream. They're never going to release this. Not going to do it. It's not going to work. Some people disagree with you, Dave, including Arthur Hayes. He said, this is bye-bye circle. Thanks for playing.

Basically, Arthur thinks that the banks control kind of the world and they're going to control the stable coin. They certainly control the dollar. and banks will win the long game here and it's just like only a matter of time for circle. Who is inside of these banks? Who's an employee in these banks that has the innovators juice or the hunger to make this product?

Because if you have that, you don't go work at a bank. They don't have the talent. The way that I could see this working is like some sort of swift system where like they all can mint the same stable coin and whoever mints like 40% of the stable coin has 40% of the governance, which is kind of how Swift works, kind of how Visa came to be.

Sure. I could kind of see that, but no, like, I don't, I'm betting against this. Yeah, so the thing is. My gamble is that we never talk about this on the weekly roll-up ever again. If we have anybody from these banks that listens to bankless is probably trying to get a job in crypto, if they aren't, if they haven't already. You know, so there is definitely a brain drain because it's got to be so hard to get anything done in these banking systems. So we'll have to see. In the meanwhile, David, let's send it here.

I do think Stablecoin summer will be a big deal once this genius act is signed. I don't think anyone else is saying Stablecoin Summer. So, like, I guess I'm saying it. But Scott Bessent, okay, the Treasury Secretary of the United States. Yeah, no one's excited about that because price stays flat. But I think Stablecoins are going to be a big freaking deal. We should end the roll up on this clip. And then I'll read out the disclaimers.

Here it is. Scott Bessent, U.S. Secretary, Treasury. When asked about stable coins, here's what he said. I've seen estimates that just over the short term, stable coins, could create $2 trillion of demand for U.S. Treasuries and Treasury bills. To put that in context, the number is probably about $300 billion right now. If that doesn't get you excited about Stablecoin Summer, David, I got nothing else for you. Scott Besson's voice. Staplecoin Summer, what?

What? Anything else, dude. Gotta let you know. Numbers stay flat technology. summer, let's go. Our wealth is staying the same. In Fiat, you have Fiat denominated. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in. Maybe not stable coins, though. We are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.