Bankless - ROLLUP: Market Top? | $3B ETH ETFs | Saylor Minting Shares | Fed Turns Bullish

Episode Date: August 21, 2025

On this week’s Weekly Rollup Ryan and David ask if the cycle top is in and whether alt season is coming, debating if it is time to buy the dip or sell everything while reviewing 30 market signals. ETH ETFs pull in over $3B as Tom Lee buys and Saylor mints more MicroStrategy shares, yet prices remain stuck and treasury premiums compress. Meanwhile the Fed signals a pro-crypto shift, Wyoming unveils a state stablecoin, and New York threatens new taxes, setting up another pivotal week in crypto. --- 📣RONIN “ONCHAIN NINTENDO” | DOWNLOAD THE RONIN WALLET https://bankless.cc/RoninWallet --- 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 --- TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 0:10 What if $124,000 was the cycle top and there won’t be an altseason? https://x.com/QuintenFrancois/status/1957893416282648646 5:10 Markets https://x.com/TheStalwart/status/1958179878940901700 https://x.com/TheStalwart/status/1958179988802302124 https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/18/openai-sam-altman-warns-ai-market-is-in-a-bubble.html https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/759965/sam-altman-openai-ai-bubble-interview https://www.tradingview.com/chart/1RYLG2gC/ https://finance-commerce.com/2025/08/fed-rate-cut-debate-jobs-inflation/ https://polymarket.com/event/fed-decision-in-september?tid=1755697973403 https://farside.co.uk/eth/ https://x.com/hildobby/status/1957489251890962578 https://x.com/Cointelegraph/status/1957491638671949895 21:12 Treasuries keep buying…but mNAV losing it’s premium.. Is the treasury meta over?  Bitmine became the 2nd largest crypto treasury  https://x.com/SERdotxyz/status/1957417581138288945 https://x.com/arkham/status/1956387897830965711 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1957849710678384977 https://www.strategicethreserve.xyz/ https://x.com/Cointelegraph/status/1957623767443587218 https://www.tradingview.com/chart/1CDu50yK/?symbol=NASDAQ%3AETHZ https://x.com/saylor/status/1957413273122287738 https://x.com/kale_abe/status/1957433733025288674 https://youtu.be/hEJueJxftuU?si=682aUZrlLGwuDDCg  https://blockworks.co/analytics/treasury-companies/bitcoin-treasury-companies https://www.coindesk.com/business/2025/08/18/btcs-to-pay-first-ever-ether-dividend-loyalty-bonus-to-discourage-short-selling 41:00 Is the current crypto cycle over? https://www.coinglass.com/bull-market-peak-signals https://x.com/fejau_inc/status/1957672639054639465  https://x.com/nic__carter/status/1957875046002680141 https://x.com/NateGeraci/status/1957074513365016952 https://cointelegraph.com/news/norway-sovereign-wealth-fund-bitcoin-exposure 50:05 Gemini is getting ready for its IPO https://www.theblock.co/post/367160/gemini-ipo-filing-exchange-targets-nasdaq-as-gemi-reveals-dip-in-revenue 51:06 New York proposed 0.2% tax on digital asset transactions starting September https://x.com/Cointelegraph/status/1956423461342969915 53:43 Wyoming launched the first stablecoin issued by a US state https://x.com/eleanorterrett/status/1957763504435524055 55:01 Exec director crypto whitehouse - Bo Hines left exchanged White House for Tether https://tether.io/news/tether-appoints-former-white-house-crypto-council-executive-director-bo-hines-as-strategic-advisor-for-digital-assets-and-u-s-strategy/ 57:35 SEC is investigating the CEO of WLFI treasury company  https://x.com/zoomerfied/status/1957856353537372614 https://x.com/ALT5_Sigma/status/1957946923647922519 https://x.com/Jonisaac702/status/1957903664393384023 59:04 FED is turning bullish on crypto https://www.theblock.co/post/367508/we-stand-at-a-crossroads-feds-bowman-urges-more-of-an-embrace-toward-crypto-and-tech 1:02:05 Closing & Disclaimers --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Bankless Nation is the third week of August time for the bankless weekly roll-up, David. We've got to get to this question first. This is a meme I saw on Twitter that I think encapsulate what everyone is feeling right now. What if 124,000 Bitcoin was the cycle top and there won't be an old season? And this is a picture of a bald wojack, just lying in bed, thinking about this question. It is McDonald's attire. We're wearing a McDonald's T-shirt. Yeah, it's McDonald's polo.

I mean, I think it's a good question because questions like this, I think we should always be asking ourselves. To me, this is a sign of market rationality. Are you like laying up at night thinking about this? We are not guaranteed an alt season. We are never guaranteed an alt season. And the fact that like this is a question that the market is pondering and turning over, I think it's healthy. You think it's a good question? Yeah. It allows us to not feel entitled as investors to question question our assumptions. Although this is a depiction of someone in a McDonald's shirt, which implies he's like going and getting a job and he's deeply worried. He's spending all night thinking about this question. Do you think that gets to unhealthy territory?

I mean, at some point, crypto-tweater memes are guaranteed to come out of the mental health asylum that is crypto-twinter. Well, we're going to try to answer that question, the best of our ability. Do I buy the dip or do I sell everything? The two extremes of that spectrum, and we'll give our takes in the question. Also, we've got 30 peak bull market signals. And the question is, not two, 30. Not three. Not four, but 30 signals. The question is, okay, are these are the top signals, which ones, which of those 30 top signals are flashing red at the moment. So David and I are going to get into that too. ETH ETFs continue to keep smashing records. So at least we have some good strength signals despite some red on the market. Tom Lee bought another one to two billion

dollars of Eith. Jesus. Yeah. And then Sailor wants to mint more shares of micro strategy to buy more Bitcoin because that's what he wants. See, there was a small amount of money. There's a small amount of Bitcoin buying this week from Sailor, but not a lot. But he is getting ready to do an ATM and at the market sale of Microsanagogy. All of this and more. Ryan, why is this episode coming out on Thursday? Oh, yeah, that's right. So this is a day early.

So maybe we'll package it. This is a gift to bank list. We're doing this a day early, so you get on Thursday rather than Friday. But the real reason for that is because David has taken a little trip. And we never miss a roll-up. And it was just not an option for us to record on Thursday, put it out on Friday this week, because David is going to Burning Man once again, aren't you, David? So you're hitting the road.

It's not a mountain trip, so don't bid. Oh, yeah. It's a Burning Man trip. This is your second Burning Man, and I can't recall the first time. What happened? Did anything good happen in Crypto while you were gone? Yeah, actually. XRP won their case against the SEC, which cleared the path for the, yeah, while I was gone

in Burning Man. So even though I wasn't on a mountain, I was gone. Yeah. And we had the court case that happened that cleared the way for. the approval of the Bitcoin and Ether ETFs. So you defeated some bosses there. So that was pretty good, actually. That was pretty good. Burning Man style. It would be something weird like XRP. That's what you affect in the markets, right? So it's going to be something

equally weird, right? Yeah. Okay. Well, so David is out and I will be substituting with, who am I doing this with? Hesim. You're with Hesib next week. Of course. Fantastic. So we'll be doing that next week. Also, David, we've got to thank our sponsor this week. I'm a bank this week leave roll up. The Ronin chain, okay? And they've got some big new that they're announcing they want you to hear about, what are they up to? Not just the Ronan chain,

but now the incoming Ronan Ethereum layer 2. They're coming home to Ethereum. Ronin is an EVM chain, and now they are transitioning to becoming an Ethereum layer 2. So what does this mean for Ronan? They are getting up to 12x faster transactions. They're getting lower costs because they can just borrow security and decentralization from Ethereum.

The Ron token will remain the gas token of the Ronn layer 2. But overall, Ronin is just getting an upgrade. EVM chains like to aggregate around the EVM shelling point, which is Ethereum. Ryan, did you know this? $4.5 billion in NFT volume on Ronan chain, around 30 million wallets. It's one of the most active chains out there. It's actually more active than the Ronan chain, which is the home of Axi Infinity, which sparked off.

Yeah, you should say that. This is like the gaming chain. The gaming chain. Yeah. And during the height of the Anna 2020 mania where Axi Infinity was just dominating, Ronan trade actually has more activity on the chain today than it had back then in 2021 during the height of XE infinity. That is a fun fact. Yeah.

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That's a big moan. That's pretty bullish, the L2 roadmap as well. All right, David, let's get to something not so bullish. Feeling some pain in the markets this week. And maybe we'll start with some tweets from Joe Wisenthall. We're talking about the NASDAQ. So that's the ticker is QQQ for the NASDAQ index. Having its worst two days since April 7th.

All right. So some bad days for QQQ on the week, and maybe this accounts for some of the broader selling that we've seen into crypto. We'll into some of those numbers in just a minute. Why is this activity happening? We've got a couple of reasons that we can maybe assign it to. Of course, maybe this is a narrative following price. You could take that interpretation. But still, there are some things that happen on the week from a narrative perspective. What are they? I feel like the MSRs have attracted it up to about two reasons, the first being the AI bubble kind of feels skittish. And then also macro worries. We'll go dive into each one of those. But I'll just kind of say, markets climb a wall of worry. And this is what this looks like to me. Like the S&P nonetheless, up to like four days ago, was at an all-time high. Same with crypto.

And there's macro fears. There is economy weakness fears. But to me, this feels very part for the course. And so I'm not overly scared right now. The first one, we'll talk about the AI bubble. one of the big factors is that just Wall Street's worry is that the value coming out of all of these AI companies, open AI, anthropic, all this stuff, and especially in Vidia, which is also having its worst two days since April. It's just like the productivity coming out of those things. It's not worth the CAPEX going into those things. The costs are not actually resulting in material gains. And so there's Sam Altman publicly stated that last week that he believes the AI sector is in a bubble. So Sam Altman says AI is in a bubble. Yeah, actually, I dug into this to actually see whether this was a headline or what he actually said, and this was an interview on the verge. So it's all posted here. He said this. The question to him was, are we in a phase where investors as a whole are over-excited about AI? And Sam goes, my opinion is yes. And he went on further. When bubbles happen, smart people get over-excited about a kernel of truth. If you look at most of the bubbles in history, like the tech bubble, there really was a thing. Tech was really important. The Internet was a really big deal. but people got over-excited.

And then he said that he's seeing some insane valuations, like, you know, three or four people with an idea, receiving funding at massively high valuation. So he actually did use the B-word bubble, which is kind of interesting because Open AI, of course, is like one of the leaders of the PAC in this whole AI expansion thing. You'd think that would be against his interests here. But he used those words.

Yeah. Also, I think I saw Open AI stock, like private shares of Open AI stock, got approved to sell for at a minimum of a $500 billion valuation. So Open AI being valued at half a trillion dollars. I mean, like, it would be still doing okay. Still doing great. But also, like, if we're talking about a bubble, let's talk about the half a trillion dollar valuation of a company

that just started turning a profit like a couple years ago. I don't know. Maybe he is talking about that too. What's really interesting is AI kind of is the stock market right now. AI kind of is the economy in the U.S. right now. It's responsible for about half a percent of GDP and all the CAPEX that's going into data centers and energy around AI. Like that's the big story of the fuel for SMP, for NASDAQ, for this entire economy. So if this is a dot com.

Invidia is 14% of the NASDAQ. That's crazy, right? Yeah. And that's just Nvidia. The other big tech companies are right there with it. And so this is the driver of the economy right now. And so if this is a bubble, if this does something like dot com, okay, that's what in. are worried about. And this is Sam Altman saying,

bubbly, bubbly. There's also this MIT report. Do you see this? I haven't read the whole report, which I mean to, but the MIT report said 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing, failing to produce some sort of profit. So we're trying all these AI tools. We're trying to, you know, get this diffused within our companies in the U.S., but they're not returning that investment, at least not yet. And so the market looks at these things and gets a little skittish. It's a cell signal. Yeah.

I think this is healthy. We don't really know how AI is going to penetrate into society. Like maybe AI more selectively benefits the margins and allows more people to become entrepreneurs and build startups with fewer employees

and get to market faster. Maybe that's how AI penetrates. Maybe it doesn't penetrate into like large enterprises and streamlines their workflows because there's just so much incumbent bureaucracy in those systems that we don't really know how to make AI work in there. Like we don't really know

answers to these questions. But overall, I do enjoy somewhat material pullbacks across the board because, again, Marcus climb a wall of worry. Without having pullbacks, that's when you should get really worried. Do you know what's funny is this is kind of a pullback for ants though, David? Look at this, man. This is the QQQ chart, okay? We are all the way.

We teleported all the way back to August 4th pricing on the NASDAQ. Not even a month, man. Just a few weeks. Not even a month? Look, August 4th. I mean, like, crypto investors are, like, feeling bad. It's like, it's all over and I go look at ETH price. And like, bro, we're at $4,200.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, but there's not one. There's two. There's two. Yeah, there's, so the double whammy. It's like maybe the line of the aligning of the double whammy is, it's worthwhile. So the macro worries are the second one. Investors are worried about stagnation due to the combination of the weak jobs report.

That's come in over the last two weeks and the high PPI numbers that we talked about last week. Jobs data starting to look very weak. inflation seeming to be sticky and hot, more sticky and hot than previously understood to be. And that combination of inflation spiking with weaker job data is just putting the Fed in a tight place. The Fed has the dual mandate of stability and jobs and also managed inflation. And they are just being placed in a particularly difficult spot to do both of those things. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell will deliver a keynote address at the annual Jackson Hole event on Friday, this coming Friday, the 22nd, at a crucial time as the economy anticipates the central bank's next interest rate cut,

and as his tenure will, at the helm, the Fed will wind down. So this incoming speech from Fred Jerome Powell might be his last since his tenure ends in May of 2026. And so this will be his last big speech apparently. And so the incoming September 17th is the next big Fed meeting that happens alongside the FOMC. So Powell and the Fed is going to present this. summary of economic projections, basically like forward guidance for the economy. And so the FOMC meeting and the next Fed September 17th meeting happening at the same time, these combinations of these two events usually coincides with a Fed decision to make just bigger announcements

about any potential change in a rate cut policy. Brian Scott, the polymarket pulled up ever since that the PPI numbers came in last week. I think that's what the change in those graphs look like. All of a sudden, the numbers about what the Fed is going to do has jumped around quite a bit. 70% chance, according to the PIPP's decrease. That didn't used to be the case. It used to be pretty tied between 25% BIPs decrease and no change. So right now, 70%, 25% BIP decrease and 30% no change. But now the decrease has taken the lead with the high inflation numbers. People are worried about if Powell does not cut rates, then Trump is just going to get very angry

and become a bull in a China shop. And so that's potentially also a fear. But overall, between like AI being skittish, stagflation worries, job market worries, inflation worries, and then Trump being a bull in China shop, I think people are just like, ah, scary.

And we are seeing a pullback. And I think this is mostly near to following price, right? Because price pullback and then we're like, oh, you remember those things that were scary that were lingering out there? Those were the reason. and it's the same things that we've been talking about that, you know, of course, if AI is a bubble, that, you know, things will be bad.

But I don't see that that's the case, at least at this point in time. Anyway, we'll give our takes on whether this is a buy-the-dip moment or whether you should sell everything a little bit later in the episode. Let's talk about the price of our beloved crypto assets on the week. Unfortunately, they are down. Give us the bad news for Bitcoin. Bitcoin down 6.5% to $13,600. Ether doing something similar down 10% to $4,200. Yet nonetheless, over the last week, ETH ETFs have attracted $3 billion of net inflows.

Well, this is for August at large, so for the entire month. So Bitcoin attracted base rounding up to $1 billion during that same time period, ether, $3 billion. So a three to one increase. Three to one for ETH over Bitcoin in terms of ETH flows for August? In dollar terms, yeah. Uh-huh. Wow. We did see some outflows this week, and so $422 million came out of the ETH ETFs in the last seven days.

$650 million came out of the Bitcoin ETFs over the last seven days. But nonetheless, it's still a fantastic August so far. This is a Hildabi metric here. At current pace, the percent of ETH in ETS will exceed Bitcoins in September. Okay, that's it. Current pace, which has been ferocious. But look at this. We already have about five, just over 5% of all ethth supply in Ethereum ETFs.

Bitcoin is 6.3% looking at like 6.4%. We keep moving like this. They'll be like, there'll be more ETH in ETH ETFs than there is Bitcoin and Bitcoin ETFs. I'm trying to understand what this means. Like is higher better, is lower better? Is it kind of neutral? It's just, it represents, I think, institutional capital flows for sure in a big way.

Yeah. Yeah. So that's good. That's good. I mean, if you start to get, like, you know, institutions have like, you know, 20, 30 percent. Yeah. More than 30 percent starts to really materially scare me. Yeah.

Yeah. But I feel like we're at safe numbers. And the thing that we've been looking for that ethibles have been looking for is, like, where the institutional flows into ether. And we're starting to see them in a big way. I want to zoom out on these charts. So we're talking about, you know, the seven day and the weekly and Bitcoin's down. eth is down. If you kind of zoom out, both Bitcoin and Ether have had different months. So if you're a Bitcoin holder, right, you are like, you're feeling on the monthly, you're like down on the month. Like this

month, the last 30 days, we were at 118 and now we're back in the 112 range, right? Can we go to three months? Let's look at three months. I like to see three months. So we're still up on three months for Bitcoin? Wow, that is flat. That is, that is flat. It's green, but flat. It's green but flat. Now let's look at Ether. This is a difference. So this is, we talked about the seven day. This is the month. You're still up on the month. So in the last 30 days, I should say. Months looking good. Yeah, about 30 days ago, Price of East was 3,800 and now we're above 4K, of course. The three month, though, looks a real good. Yeah, that's, we were down in the dump. Yeah. Uh-huh. Uh, 2.6K, right, right? And now we're above 4K. So, Eath holders feeling better

about the momentum here than Bitcoin, which has been relatively flat. Um, that, that's got to show in the ETH Bitcoin ratio, too. What's that on the week? That is right. 0.037. I think we just like raised 0.04. We never really crossed it. 0.037 is where we are now.

Still looking to climb up to that 0.05.06 range before anything, I think, needs to be reconsidered about the ETH BTC ratio. And total crypto market cap is down below $4 trillion, right? We are healthily below $4 trillion and $3.9 trillion. Yeah. I think the new all-time high for the total crypto market cap is like 4.2 something. 4.2, which we hit the second week of August. Yep, yep.

And now we are below at 3.9. All right. I think, like, just summing it all up, right? Like, you're not supposed to feel good the entire bull market. Like, you need to have moments of fear and uncertainty and doubt in your mind before it resumes. Yeah. And the people that, you know, have diamond hands, the people that hold that. have some level of stoicism about them, get rewarded if it goes back up, obviously.

Yeah. Some people are going to get shaken out and they're not going to make it. And that's just how it goes. Or some people are just ahead of the curve and they get shaken out because there's actual real fear. We don't really know. And I'm not being helpful at all. I think, well, I think that is somewhat helpful because I think what you're indicating is, like, we're going to talk about top signals coming up next.

But what you're talking about is if you're feeling too good about these markets, like they can't go down. If you're feeling like a genius in these markets, right, that just like everything's unstoppable, that's probably a top signal. And I'm not seeing crypto markets feeling like that right now. They're constantly questioning. We're in the stage of, here's the stage that we're in. Are we really in a bull market?

Or was 124K the top? And there's going to be no ETH season, really. There's going to be no alt season. You're questioning it. Okay? And you don't question things when, like previously in previous cycles, you're not questioning things. You are drunk.

Okay? You are winding up leverage at the top. Yes. Yes. Or at least many people are. Anyway, we'll talk about that next because we got Tom Lee buying $1 to $2 billion in Eath. We got him trying to catch Michael Saylor, it feels like. But MNAV premiums.

Remember the MNAV premiums, David? Those are going down. So some people are saying, is the Treasury meta over? And then more broadly, we got to talk about this. Was this the cycle top? Should you buy the dip? We'll get into those top cycle indicators, all that and more. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors.

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Let's talk about some big things that happened this week first. Bitmine became the second largest crypto treasury, okay? Not just ETH treasury. They've been the first for a number of weeks, but the second largest crypto treasury, like completely. So just behind micro strategy, of course, is the first. It's going to be hard to catch Michael Saylor. they overtook Mara Holdings, which was a Bitcoin treasury, the second largest Bitcoin treasury, and they are now in second place with about $6.5 billion worth of ether primarily.

You can actually track this. One and a quarter percent of the total Eth supply. Yeah, one and a quarter, one and a quarter percent. I mean, he's getting there. He's getting like over the last 50 days or so. I mean, he is 1.26% of his 5% total. He is chomping buying that ether. My question is, are we really going to let him, he almost, depending on the price.

Yeah, I mean, like, Tom Lee, slow down, man. Like, I want this to, like, be a long-term thing. Like, if you just win, like, next month, like, it's not really as fun. Well, I think he's in hurry to buy it under 5K, and it feels like crypto's going to let him. Like, he's probably going to stack 10 billion in ether under 5K, and the market's just going to let him do that. I mean, like, I kept on asking the same question every single time I saw Michael Taylor buy a billion dollars of Bitcoin every single month. I'm like, where the fuck does the money come from?

That's one of the questions. So that's one of my big questions is like, where's the money coming from? And Tom Lee, maybe we could go scan some SEC filings or something like that. But when we talk to him, you know, kind of private about that. Someone's secret. Yeah, I asked him twice. And I was like, Tom Lee, what's the strategy? How do you use velocity and liquidity and all that stuff to get more ETH on the balance sheet?

And he's like, David, stop asking me this question. That question is inappropriate. That's an inappropriate question. God bless him, though. I mean, he's doing, look at this. This is Treasury, Crypto Treasury companies. This blue line here is Ether in terms of percent supply of the network. This orange line is Bitcoin.

Look at Ether ratcheting up. We are almost at Bitcoin levels as a percent of the network in Treasury. So Bitcoin level is almost 3.5%. Heath has climbed all the way up from 0% in June, all the way to almost 2.5% of total ether supply and treasury companies. So this buying is happening at a frenetic pace. But my other question about this is like, why isn't it moving price more?

Yeah. Do you have an explainer for that? I have a partial explainer for that. One of them is Joe Lubin's S-Bet and Andrew Keys is the ether machine. Sure. Each of those contributed their own personal ether into those treasury companies.

Part of the initial race, the pipe race. Yes, and that is showing up in this chart, in this line that's going up into the right here. Some of the early stuff. I mean, like Joe Lubin and Andrew Keyes are very large ether holders previously. And so there was the hundreds of millions of dollars that is their own ether that got contributed into these ether treasury companies is not net new buying. There's no new money coming in to buy that ether. They already owned it and now it's showing up in a chart that we call the ETH Treasury Company chart. And so that at least is not by actual buy pressure.

It's just like saying ether getting wrapped into wrapped ether is not going to move the price. That explains some of it. It doesn't explain all. Like, look at these Tom Lee purchases, man. This is $6.3 billion in a dollar reserve. He bought another $370K last week. That's what's that, you know, one to $2 billion worth of Eath?

He just did that last week. Oh, and then he bought another $1 to $2 billion the week before. And then the week before that, too. that's a lot of net new buying pressure. That's not all existing ETH pipe funding. Yeah, there's like other theories about this that I think are unsubstantiated because no one really knows because these are all kind of black boxes at the end of the day.

But like some people have pointed out to like some of these treasury companies are doing like paper ETH, not true ETH. And so they're having ether as kind of their denominator and they're using financial derivatives to accumulate more like paper ETH. And so with ETH goes up, they have exposure to it. But it's not actually true vanilla spot. ETH. And no one really knows.

No one really knows. Yeah. I just, I mean, this is buy pressure. Like, a simple explainer is there's still people selling ETH. There's still enough cell pressure to kind of neutralize all the buy pressure. And it's not just BitMine and Tom Lee, of course, like Sharp Link Gaming aspect. Big week last week, too. I mean, on August, let's see, August 17th this week, they bought 75K ETH.

That's after on August 10th, they bought ETH. 83K, ETH. They're total right now, ESBET, almost $740,000 E's, so $3.1 billion in ETH. So they're buying lots, too. Yeah.

Either there is, you know, a commensurate amount of sell pressure or the ETH is, the supply of ETH on the secondary market is truly drying up. And it will do one of its things that it did. It's done it twice now, where it went from $1,300 to $2,500 in two days.

Yep. And then it went from $2,500 to $4,500 to $4,000 of $4,500 in like two weeks. And then it goes flat and everyone's like, why isn't it going up? And then it goes up with two X's in like three days because all the supply runs out. Yep. And people are trying to trade that, you know? They're like, oh, okay, I'm like bearish and try to trade that.

Just stay in the market. I think that could be the simplest Occam's razor explanation. I mean, we have two data points that that's how it's happened. That's how it always happens in crypto, right? It's always, yeah. Oh, it seems like it's barely going up. all this like, you know, bullish energy, all this by pressure, and then suddenly it teleports up, step function change, super volcano explosion.

I think that's my base case for ETH at this point, but absent another explainer. Some other news on the week when it comes to Eith Treasuries, the company ETHZilla, they used to be a different ticker, A-TNF, was like a Life Sciences ticker. They are now officially ETHZ. So if you want to find ETHZLA, yeah, great ticker. I love it. ETH Z. You know, the ETHZilla name is kind of growing on me.

Yeah. Did you ever watch the Rugrats? Yeah, of course I did. Tommy. You remember Reptar? Yeah, I remember Reptar? Oh my God, that's been a long time. Yeah, every time I see Eatszilla, I just think of Reptar just like eating up all the

Ead. Repter! So like a, yeah, that's a throwback, man. They're number five, by the way. So not to be dismissed, they've got about $400 million worth of Eath, about $100K worth of Eath, and they are chopping it. Reptar style. So, yeah, we got that going on again.

But of course, the ETH Treasury companies are not the only people putting crypto on their balanced street. The OG Micro Strategy is buying once again. They bought 430 Bitcoin, a modest amount in micro strategy terms. Yeah, they spent about $51 million near the Bitcoin all-time high price for an average purchase price of around $19,000. Micro Strategy stock owners didn't really like it, mainly because it was partly because It was just a small amount of Bitcoin in the grand scheme of things.

But also, the bigger story is after MSCR fell 8%, it fell 8% after the company indicated that it would lower its restrictions on issuing more shares. And it's actually interesting to note that micro strategy has not been doing this as of late. Michael Saylor originally promised that he wouldn't mint new shares of micro strategy unless the trading price was at least 2.5 M. nav. So 2.5, 2.5, a market cap of microstrategy versus the actual amounts of Bitcoins that they hold. And so he would only mint new shares above 2.5x. He's, he's reneging on that. He's going

back on that and saying, just kidding, I'm going to do that. Microsuragogy is currently trading at 1.6MNAV. And I was like 1.6 MNAV is good. Like, that's healthy. It's still good. You have a lot of premium to be able to juice to just buy more Bitcoin. Sure. And so, I mean, This is very rational. Like if Michael Saylor says, hey, MSDR holders, I'm going to dilute you to buy more Bitcoin. Make sense that micro strategy goes down by 8%. Yeah, I mean, that's what Ether Treasury companies are doing primarily. I mean, they have some debt instruments, but primarily they're doing it with these ATM purchases,

which is basically any time MNAV premium gets like higher than, you know, and they decide to mint more shares in order to buy more of Ether. And the thing, though, with Micro Strategy, though, is Michael Saylor said he's not going to do that below 2.5. And now he has changed his mind at 1.6. He's still minting new share. So there's some anger at this. So he tweeted this out, this new guidance. You know, here's a Twitter account. I've been a holder of MSTR since August 2020.

I've held through the bears, bulls and splits. But until today, this is now, I will be taking some profit at this point. There's too many question marks. Red flags about what you're doing that making me feel a bit unsettled for the first time. So it's just a little bit of maybe promises broken. for MSTR holders. But Michael Saylor just wants more Bitcoin, right? And this is a way to do it.

But doesn't this indicate that some of his debt instruments, that kind of ammo in the toolkit is probably running out? Milking the MNAV premium is like kind of the last thing you do. Not to say that it's a bad thing to do, but it's kind of the last thing. It's the thing you want to preserve the most, which is the MNAV value of the equity over the actual assets that you hold. If you can access the debt markets,

If you can access credit, then you should do that first before issuing shares. And so there's like, Michael Saylor has made a bunch of tranches. He has all these like fixed income coupons that he's issued that pay out 10%. And he can issue those without issuing new equity to buy more Bitcoin. And he has done that to great effect. To me, saying that like, yeah, we're actually going to go and mint new shares indicates that like the rest of the tranches have kind of dried up. And now he's going back to the last source, the, the, last source. the kind of the final backstop to squeeze out any sort of liquidity premium that he can get.

And I mean, it's actually bullish that he hasn't been doing this up to this point. The e- Treasury companies, smaller as they are and more new as they are, they don't have the same level of debt instrument optionality that Michael Saylor has. And so if you're a brand-new, e-tresher company, you only have the M-Nav as a source to squeeze juice out of to put more ETH on the balance sheet. I think it's like the hopes of people like Tom Lee, Joe Lubin, to be able to access the credit market as they get the market caps larger. But micro strategy market cap is massive by comparison.

I don't know it off the top of my head, but like tens of billions, if not 100. Oh, yeah. Did I see like 60, 70 trillion, a billion, excuse me, at some point in time? I think it's in that range still. And BitMine and S-Bet are in the single-digit billions. Yeah, he's still saying, though, that he's going to buy more Bitcoin, right? So if you're bullish Bitcoin, he's still buying it. He's just doing it with the MNAV premium.

Actually, there's an interesting. A reporter asked Michael Saylor what he thinks. Because some of the story of why the convertible debt type instruments are drying up might be because eith treasury companies are snapping some of it up. And he was asked what he thinks about, quote unquote, alt-coin treasuries that are spinning up right now. Do you want to hear him? Of course, micro strategy, as it's now known, really started this crypto treasury company

trend that we're seeing now. I know that you broadly are supportive of seeing that, seeing competitors come out and also raise their own crypto treasuries. But how do you feel about the trend that now it's moving more into altcoins? It's moving away from Bitcoin. Do you think that that's a sustainable setup? Yeah, I still think the vast majority of the capital flowing in the space is flowing into Bitcoin. We've gone from about 60 companies capitalizing on Bitcoin to 160 companies just in the past six months. So I'm laser-like focused on Bitcoin.

I think Bitcoin is digital capital. I think it's going to outperform the S&P index over the indefinite future. And I think it's the clear global monetary commodity in the world right now. So it's the lowest risk, highest return, most straightforward strategy if you want to outperform the S&P. And if you want to inject vitality and performance into your balance sheet. So it sounds like you're not. concerned that perhaps the fact that we're seeing these other digital asset treasury companies come to the fore here, expand into all coins. You're not concerned that that's going to detract attention

away from what strategy is doing. You know, I think there's an explosion of innovation across the entire crypto economy and on the margin it's really good for everybody in the digital asset space right now. I think the big idea is $100 trillion plight. of capital and the traditional equity capital markets and traditional credit markets. And what we're focused on is delivering digital asset-backed equity and digital asset-backed credit. And I think those credit instruments and equity instruments are just going to outperform the traditional fiat credit and traditional fiat equity instruments all around. And capital is going to flow into the digital economy due to that.

By the way, David, that was Michael Saylor. Did you see those numbers on the screen? I actually had... Yeah, 67%. Yeah, that's the strategy premium, but the value of Bitcoin held is 70 billion. We should correct this. And the diluted market cap of his company is 120 billion.

$120 billion. $120 billion micro strategy right now. Yeah, so what do you think of his comments there? Very friendly to what is essentially his competition. I mean, he did the thing, which is like, yeah, I'm laser focused on Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin is digital capital. But yeah, there's an explosion of innovation across the crypto industry.

And this is good for everyone. It was a very tide lifts all boats kind of stance that he had. It's very not like a Bitcoin maxi of him. Yeah, yeah, very much. I mean, maybe he changes based on the venue. This is Bloomberg. So maybe like very rational on that. But the bigger question is this, okay?

Is this Treasury meta diminishing? or is it over? I'm going to go through some numbers with you, particularly that MNAV premium. So there was a time the good old micro strategy was trading. This is the orange line. Look at the orange line. Above three from an MNAV premium perspective,

like well above, like not, well, yeah, decently above three. This was October, November of last year. And then since that time, it has been on a decline. There's some periods of flatness here, but it's basically at a local low, let's say, of 1.5x MNAV premium at this point in time.

And if you go, if you look at the Ethereum Treasury companies, which of course they're brand new, but we do have some MNAV premium stats, it's actually very low, lower than micro-strategy. So you've got S-BET. There's some different reports on this. Well, you know, the Strategic Heath Reserve has a different M-NAV premium,

but this is showing an M-nav premium just above one. Okay, so valued not much more than its underlying. I think the Strategic Heath Reserve shows something similar, maybe a little bit higher. Tom Lee's entity, 1.35. Some of these other ones, and that's the highest of the ETH Treasury companies. Actually, one of these is under one at this point in time. I think it's the number seventh largest ETH Treasury company. So they actually are about 0.7 MNET.

So they're trading under their MNAV premium. and maybe this is related, but they offered their first ever ether dividend to those with stocks. So basically they'll pay you a dividend equal to 0.05% of the share in cash or in ether. You actually collect that if you're a shareholder in ether. They were doing this basically to say,

hey, like, this, you know, we shouldn't be valued under our book value. You're getting dividends for this. Like market, you should at least give us an MNAV of, one, if not an MNAV higher than that. So MNAV premiums are collapsing, it looks like, at least it, you know, locally. And some people are saying, that's it, you know, the Treasury play is over. We had micro strategy, now ETH enter, and we're not going to see premiums again.

And that's going to be a bearish indicator because not as much buying will happen on the Treasury institutional side. What do you make of this? The MNAV premium collapsing down to one is what's supposed to be. to happen. That's just the market doing its normal thing of all of these treasury companies are supposed to be milking their premium to be able to put more crypto assets on their balance sheet. And they do that as much as they can until they can't do that anymore. Like the MNF premium is why people have kind of like jokingly called this stuff perpetual

motion. The perpetual, the energy to fund the perpetual motion runs out when the MNap premium collapses to one. And then it gets a little bit harder. So like all of the treasury companies I feel like have been in this kind of like tutorial island, like the beginner mode, easy mode while they have this MNAF premium and then once it runs out, actually the real game starts of like,

okay, now how do you do this? Now that you don't have this MNAF premium, now that the market is a little bit more rational, now you have to figure out how to get more ETH on the balance sheet. So what's your next move now? This is all, this has been according to plan. MNAV premiums, we're always going to go to one.

Not only this, they are supposed to fluctuate between going being higher and then also being at one. And right now during periods of like, we're worried about the AI bubble. We're worried about the economy and the inflation and the jobs, jobs reports. So it makes sense that the MNAF premium has approached lower levels of froth more closer to market rationality. And like maybe they go back up. But like there's nothing inherently wrong about finding its way back to just complete rationality. So do you think it's over?

Or do you think there's some more juice in the treasury side of things? No, dude. I think it's like as the S&P and QQQ reach reach all-time highs and VEA goes back up. Like the trend is across all markets is good right now. And I've said this like a few roll-ups ago. Just like the trend feels very good. I'm happy to have these like normal pullbacks. Inflation is going to scare people.

The jobs report is going to scare people. Like whatever. So long it's just like this keep the trend intact. They'll reinflate in the future. They'll go back up. Maybe they don't really have the same level of, like, main character focus that they had. And so maybe MNF Freemans are just fundamentally more modest moving forward. So like 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 maybe.

I just can't really think of, like, why this would be really bad. This just seems healthy. I kind of agree. And I think they could spike back up. And I also think Tom Lee is still dead serious. I mean, his velocity of accumulation. I think he's still dead serious in targeting 5%. And, you know, I think he, if there's, I think he's going to find a way to do that or get something close to that.

So I don't think it's over for the Treasury meta this cycle. At some point it will be, but it still seems early to me. Let's talk about how early we are, though, in, you know, the total crypto cycle. This is a fantastic table I saw from Coinglass. These are, David, these are 30 bull market peak indicators. All right. And this is looking at things historically of how things have played out. in previous crypto bull cycles and what those top indicators have been.

What I like about this is there's 30. So you look at a whole bunch in an aggregated view, and that's what they do on coin glass as well. And then it's also just like, it's kind of what's happened at previous time. So if you believe that this market will play out as previous crypto markets have played it out, which I think that's still my base case. Like I don't see why this time is different. It's certainly not looking different.

We're getting many of the similar things that we've seen, patterns we've seen in previous crypto bull cycles. This is what this looks like. So do any of these metrics like, what do you think of when you see some of these metrics? Are they things that you track? Yeah, well, some of them are just kind of like a blast from the past. It was like, oh, I remember looking at like the Puell multiple and of course Eric Walls, Bitcoin Rainbow Chart, MV, RV, like all of these things I remember individually learning about

one by one over the years. It's kind of cool to see it all in one spot so you can kind of view all of them. You know, all, what was that line? Like, all models are wrong and some are useful. And I think we're just making them, in aggregate, more useful by putting them all in the same spot and kind of evaluating them in uniform, in unity.

I think, I think, it's kind of cool. Yeah, it is cool. There's a ton here. So we'll include a link in the show notes if you guys want to go over here. But yeah, you mentioned a few. The Bitcoin Rainbow charts in here. I know you're a big fan of that, the simplicity of that, okay?

We're at about 60% of our way to that being a bull market peak you should think about selling, just that one metric alone. We've got the MVRV score, which we talked about, which is kind of like, you know, how long are the buyers holding for or the long-term buyers are they starting to sell? You've got Bitcoin bubble index, Bitcoin dominance, all of these all put together. And what you get actually is, of these 30, zero of these 30 indicators. One of these should cause your alarm. Not one of them have hit the cell signal.

Not one of them are in the red. And, you know, there are a few that are somewhat close, but pretty much, like, the majority are, like, 60% are under. And so if you that are somewhat close, and then there are a handful that are just nowhere. They're close to zero. Yeah. So we're not in red territory at all from these long-term indicators.

And what should you be doing this type of market? You should be holding. If you can, maybe you should. should be buying more. You should be buying the dip. I think that's my, that's my base case, man. If you're aggressive, you're buying. If you, I think it's totally fine to also just hold. Yeah, you could totally hold. Just don't do margin. Just don't do margin. We'll never do, never do margin. Never do what I do. That's one indicator for you. Also, another one that I saw was somewhat good here is Nick Carter posted this, but this is a report from Galaxy research, which is the amount of lending.

in crypto right now. Okay, so the amount of... The credit markets. This is C-Fi lending. Crypto markets, C-Fi lending. And you can see right now in the second quarter, 2025, it is about half of its peak.

Last peak was 22. G1, 2022, right? Right before we had the... The major... The you know what. The you know what. All right. And that was at its peak.

It was above 35. It was closing in on almost 40 billion dollars. Right now we're just at, what, $16, $17 billion? So that's a... Tether is so much of that. Yeah, Tether is a lot of that. Yeah. So, I mean, the lending markets in crypto are looking kind of healthy.

They're not looking topy. They're not looking peaky. That's another thing you could look at. Basically, this means that, like, people's lines of credit are just modest. People are not borrowing a lot. I think you got stuff like this. So this was a report that Nick Jarcy highlighted from the base. of America, the Bank of America Global Fund Manager survey, okay?

And of all the Bank of America global fund managers, 75% of them own zero crypto right now. Zero percent. Nice. All right. Six percent own two or less. But like 75% of them don't own crypto at this point in time. Yeah.

I mean, I'm in New York. And so I talk to a lot of like asset managers when I'm in my travels with Normies outside of the crypto world. And most frequently, they're like, yeah, I don't care about crypto. And then I ask like, okay, what kind of like asset manager are you? And they're like the big ones that trade tiny amounts of bips because they have like people's pensions. And so they can't think about Bitcoin.

So I can't, I guess you're not going to, you're not going to listen to this on Burning Men, but we got an episode with Eric Peters. That's coming out on Monday. I'm very sad. I'm, A, I'm very sad that I missed that. And then B, I'm also sad that. I'm not going to hear that for 10 days. It's a great episode.

I love Eric Peter. So he's an institutional investor. He's kind of behind the scenes. Probably the biggest crypto institutional influencer allocated that most people have never heard. Institutional influencer. Like honestly, that influencing happens in like different settings. You know, it's like Zoom calls and phone calls and text messages, stuff we don't see. Anyway, his take was, guess what?

The institutions haven't even arrived yet. Because when he thinks of institutional money, He's thinking of sovereign wealth funds. He's thinking of pensions. And he goes through this story of basically, 2021, they were all getting set up to buy crypto. They're like they had these teams of like 15 people. They're going to like go into crypto big.

And then 2022 happened, blew it all up. And they all got scared. They all, oh, it's dead. It must be dead. And now the U.S. regulatory regime is against it. It's dead. And they went in complete hibernation mode. And they got caught off sides.

And they still haven't rebuilt those teams. All right. And I was looking at this, you know, Norway sovereign wealth fund. They just increased their Bitcoin holdings. Okay. Like, they just doubled now. It's like, oh, that's cool. Norway, you know, it's a sovereign wealth fund.

Let's go Norway. Yeah. You know what they're buying, though? It's like a micro strategy in circle, dude. They don't, yeah. And it's just a tiny sliver. And it's not actual, it's not even an ETF. It's not actual crypto.

Why not? Who knows? Maybe it's because their regulatory apparatus doesn't allow them to. Maybe the kind of the risk. risk managers when they float this up the chain, you know, it's just still too risky. It's just they're off sides on this. Pensions are off sides. Are they buying micro strategy and circle because those are sufficiently large that they're in an index? Or are they buying that because they want the crypto exposure? No, they're buying it for the crypto exposure. This was exactly

Eric Peters point. He's like, that's why you're seeing stuff like Circle go crazy because institutional allocators are, they're nibbling at it and they're, they've been caught off sides on this whole crypto. So they haven't even entered. So, When people who have like a trillion dollars in assets nibble at circle, it pumps by like 3x off the IPO price. Yeah. Yeah. Right, right, right, right.

Anyway, why don't you go nibble at my bags, please? He said they will. They will. So you just got to, you know, be in the market and wait a little bit. Speaking of that, Jamonize coming into the market. We got this coming up next. They've filed for their place on the NASDAQ.

How do the financials look? What's this going to do? Also, New York, your state, David, is trying its absolute best to not become the crypto capital of the world. We'll talk about that. And the Fed? Why do you think I'm not in New York right now? The Fed is getting bullish on crypto right now.

There's a recent speech I want to tell you about as well. All this and more. But first, we want to thank our sponsors, Frax. Some of the best yield in Defi. It's like Circle, Athena, Maker all had a stable coin baby. There's a beautiful system. Go check out FRAX. In the wild west of Defi, stability and innovation are everything,

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Ready to join the forefront of Defi, visit Frax.com now to start earning with FRAXUSD and staked FraxUSD. And for bankless listeners, you can use frax.com slash R slash bankless when bridging to Fraxel for exclusive fractal perks and boosted rewards. Gemini, one of the oldest crypto exchanges founded by the Winkle Vi, of course, Cameron and Tyler Winkle Boss, uh, publicly filed for an IPO to Alyssa. on the NASAC under the ticker GEMI. So the leading underwriters are banks like Goldman Sachs,

Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and Cantor number of shares and their price have not been disclosed yet. But nonetheless, the WinkleVye are pushing to make Gemini a publicly traded company. There's also a loan agreement with Ripple revealed that it gave it $75 million of credit for extra liquidity for its IPO. It can potentially extend that to 150.

I don't know what that means. What does that mean? I don't know. I guess they're just, yeah, I don't know, something between Ripple and Gemini, just providing some additional capital here. Okay. Gemini will operate through two entities

the Gemini trust in New York for its regulated services and then Moon Base in Florida where Gemini will transition most of its users because, of course, New York is the most hostile state to put them under the Bit License rules. As we are about to see

when we talk about the new proposed, not actual, not, there's not yet law, but it's being proposed. And the reason why we're talking about it is, is how ridiculous it is, 0.2% tax on digital asset transactions inside of New York. And so this is Assembly Bill 8-966,

introduced by the Democratic Assembly member Phil Deck. The bill notes that funding from crypto tax sales would be used to expand a substance abuse prevention and intervention program to schools in upstate New York. It would include the sale and transfer of any crypto or NFTs, Cryptopunks, pudgy penguins, any of those, 0.2% tax. How do you, if you just transfer a pudgy, so you say you transfer a $10,000 pudgy

and you owe 0.2% off of something you didn't, just transferring it? Absolutely ridiculous. I don't think so. I don't think this just transferring. It couldn't be. It would have to follow. It says it would include the sale and transfer of any crypto or NFTs.

That's what I'd say. But it's got to be sale. It can't be just a 0.2% tax. Even if it's just on sales, though, this is like your tax situation in crypto is already more, like, complicated enough. And now New York State is going to add, like, why digital asset? They don't realize how incredibly complicated that that makes everything. Right. And this, well, no, maybe they do realize that.

Maybe they don't care. I don't know. They just, it's, it's, why digital assets? Yeah. Why digital assets in particular? That's the question. It's like New York, New York State is trying to not become the crypto state, trying not to become the crypto capital of the world. And this is like.

I think you see, like, a lot of. of like, I don't know, crypto socialists out there who are like voting, or anti-crypto-socialists, excuse me, who are voting for like Zoran Mamdani, who are like, yeah,

let's get the crypto bros to pay for our substance abuse programs. That sounds great. I don't know any crypto people, so they can pay for that. Yeah. It's also worth saying that like, New York, especially New York City,

is the most tax prosperous location in all of America. They have so much tax income. And the reason why, but I'm not saying like New York's, they have some problems with allocating all that capital. They don't have a budget problem. They have a capital allocation.

They can't figure out how to appropriately spend the money. And then you have people like the socialists, like Zohan Ramdani coming in who would be like, you know what? We need to fund more stuff because look at all the broken stuff around us. So let's tax more people. Tax the monkey JPEGs. Tax the monkey JPEG so we can fund more stuff.

When we realize we have so much money, we just can't figure out actually how to spend it correctly. Yeah. Well, meanwhile, you've got other states, and maybe this is a state that you might consider, you know, exiting to. You could do Bellaji Srini Vosson. You could use your agency to exit New York and you could go to Wyoming because that is a crypto-friendly state.

And this week, this is actually pretty surprising to me. They launched the first stable coin issued by a U.S. state. The state of Wyoming did this. They're saying it can be used to fund public service. It's a revenue driver, and it's also kind of a hallmark of Wyoming innovation. And you could actually do this. So this was in the genius bill. I don't know if you remember, we talked about this very briefly, but I'd sort of forgotten

about this. States can actually issue their own stable coins. So every state of the 50 states in the union, they could have their own, like, branded stable coin if they want to, and that revenue can be used for public goods or whatever else they want. I'm not sure practically how commercially useful this is or how many more states will actually go do this. It does have to stay under like $10 billion or so, so it's more like an innovation sandbox. But this is just Wyoming saying like, we are welcoming the crypto industry here. We're welcoming crypto people here. And by the way, we got our own stable coin. Kind of cool.

That's kind of cool. Going up a level higher to the White House, the executive director of crypto in the White House, Bo Hines has left to go to Tether. So they're going from the White House to Tether, served as the executive director of Trump's White House Crypto Council until just last week where he announced that he's going to work in the private sector. So what is he going to work at Tether? He's going to lead and coordinate Tether's U.S. strategy and expansion efforts, advise on digital asset policies and compliance for the U.S. market, cultivate relationships with policymakers and regulators, and help overseas Tethers continue. investments in U.S. infrastructure.

So Tether, with the passing of the Genius Bill, wants to make inroads into the United States because they're deformed and stable coin. They would like to also become the domestic stable coin. And Bo Hines, the guy who's the executive, previously the executive director of Trump's White House Crypto Council is going to go help him do that. Who would be better? Who would be better than that? Of course.

I mean, there's a bit of a revolving door going on here for sure, right? It's like, I don't know how you get out of that or get past that. What's really interesting? Is the revolving door a United States-America native term? Like, well, European or South American listeners know what that turn is? I guess revolving door just means somebody gets a job in government, right? And they're not making as much money, but they gain kind of influence and the ability to kind of, you know, make phone calls in government and get companies what they want.

And then after their government job, they go back into industry where they can basically make lots of money or they go to a lobbyist group or something like that. And they use their network and their influence, yeah. Right, right. And that's essentially what's happening. Like, that's how the game works. I don't know. There's some elements of this is just like how the game works.

I don't know how you accomplish things in DC or actually. Like, what the other option that crypto tried, which is just to kind of like lay down and die and not be at the table. And they were definitely on the menu, right? And I think in 2023, 2024, the entire industry realized it had to be present. So it is. And this is the type of thing you see. But what's interesting is Tether David, last quarter, they bought more treasuries.

They bought $8 billion worth of treasuries. Okay, so only six other countries, sovereign countries, bought more treasuries last quarter than Tether did. All right? They are a quasi-nation state with respect to the amount of treasuries they buy from Bessent. They are a customer of Besson. And so you can see the interlinking here between, you know, like government and private sector. in this way. Yeah, yeah. In a different part of Capitol Hill, the SEC is investigating the CEO of WFLI, the Trump World Liberty Financial Treasury Company. So they, we talked about this last week,

the World Liberty Financial has a Treasury company coming online. The information reported that the SEC investigated John Isaac, the CEO, sometimes referred to as the president of Alt 5 Sigma, a world-duty financial treasury company, there were accusations that Isaac and Alt-5 Sigma misrepresented earnings by overstating revenue and understating expenses to boost the company's financial results,

which, I mean, Trump does this and has done this in the past. Look, if they did this, right, and they could prove this, then SEC is the regulator to hold them accountable for this. This is what we should be like striving for. If we don't see this, if this type of thing gets pardoned, repealed,

if the dogs are called off, right? That's evidence of corruption, basically, in the government. Totally. We don't want to, like, we had a very crypto unfavorable government that was, like, corrupt in different ways. We don't want to swing to the other side of having, like, a grifting, fully corrupt government. That just allows this type of thing to happen.

Crime is still crime. Crime is still crime. We don't, we don't want crime season. It's really hard to have a nuanced conversation about this stuff, right? But I do, I'm going to be watching this one to see what the Trump White House actually does with this to see, you know, whether we've gone too far in the other direction here. Speaking of going far in the direction of crypto, which I am very supportive of, this is the Fed turning bullish on crypto. So this is a speech. Our Fed. Our Fed. Our Fed. Yeah. Jerome Powell's Fed.

The same thing. That same Fed we were talking about earlier. This is Michelle Bowman. She gave a speech. Now, what's her position? She is the vice chair for supervision of the Fed. All right. So she kind of, I think she reports to Powell. She's one of two vice chairs that are under Powell right now. And she's the vice chair for supervision. She said this in a speech, I believe at a crypto conference, that the U.S. is at a crossroads and must embrace crypto and new technologies to stay ahead of financial innovation. She said regulators need to abandon an overly cautious mindset and essentially double down on crypto. And you know that whole Fed bank supervision that, like, department within the Fed that made banks feel like it was very risky to do anything with crypto? She completely gutted that. So that's no longer,

this bank supervision program is no longer in effect. And she's easing all the restrictions there. And she also added this. This is what I thought you'd really like. She added that Fed staff should hold small amounts of crypto to better understand the technology. She said, He's comparing it to learning to ski by actually putting on skis. That's so good. Right? We haven't been saying that for so long. The last executive office basically banned anyone who owned crypto to be a regulator of crypto.

So if you were bullish crypto and say you were in government office, the SEC, and you were like, oh wait, wait, Bitcoin is actually pretty dope. Yeah. I would like to own some of this to hand down Bitcoin to my kids. I'm like, you would have to quit. And then all the people who are inherently are left at the SEC are people who don't give a fuck about crypto and don't see the value in it or any of the regulators, the entire executive branch. And this is the thing we're saying. You're self-selecting for people who like are bearish, hey crypto, don't understand it.

And this is the opposite of that. Now, by the way, we're not advocating that you shouldn't have full transparency over your holdings. You can't trade this type of thing, right? You know, maybe should be locked in a trust or something. We should have full transparency and visibility. But to put out a blanket Implementation details. Yeah, but to put out a blanket rule

in the White House that if you own crypto, you can't do anything to regulate crypto. That's like the opposite. So I guess what I'm saying. The number one way to onboard someone and get them into crypto and see crypto, the value of crypto, is just give them some crypto.

Just give them some crypto. And they will become a crypto person. It works. It's the highest success rate I've ever discovered. Yeah, I totally agree. And what's amazing to me is how 180 we've come from like 12 to 18 months a year ago when we're gonna completely,

now this is somebody in the Fed saying, hey, everyone in the Fed should own some crypto so you guys understand it. Go use some stable coins, you know, go grab some ether, grab some Bitcoin. So very cool from that perspective.

Yeah, definitely. All right, guys, we're gonna end it there. Gotta let you know, crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west and David is headed towards Burning Man. This is the frontier.

That's west. That is west. He's literally going west. It's not for everybody, but we're glad you. You're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.