Bankless - ROLLUP: Markets at ATHs | Saylor’s STRC Bid | Trump DeFi Scandal | SEC Clears DeFi

Episode Date: April 17, 2026

Markets are ripping back to all-time highs, but crypto still isn’t following suit. Ryan and David break down the V-shaped recovery driven by Iran de-escalation, why Bitcoin is still stuck in range, and the growing bull vs bear divide across macro and onchain data. They also unpack Saylor’s STRC “money printer,” the World Liberty DeFi controversy, and the SEC’s surprise ruling that just gave DeFi a major win. Plus: the Bitcoin community’s plan to freeze Satoshi’s coins and what it means for the future of the network. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔮POLYMARKET | #1 PREDICTION MARKET https://bankless.cc/polymarket-podcast  🪐GALAXYONE | SOLANA STAKING https://bankless.cc/GalaxyOne 🦊 METAMASK | DOWNLOAD NOW https://go.metamask.io/BL-Pod-Download  🌐BRIX | EMERGING MARKET YIELD https://bankless.cc/brix 🎯THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://thedefireport.io/bankless --- TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 2:04 Markets at ATHs / Iran De-Escalation https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2044507788961894462  https://x.com/TheStalwart/status/2044045804596346931 https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2041728989119529307 https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2043285255931441306 https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2043323635671179641 https://x.com/AndrewBeckUSA/status/2043136650478301245 https://x.com/zerohedge/status/2044426813544255859 https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2044055049882476961 https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2044435422944649651 https://polymarket.com/event/us-x-iran-permanent-peace-deal-by/?via=bankless? https://x.com/RaoulGMI/status/2043832901121331527  https://x.com/Matt_Hougan/status/2044095946334843168 https://x.com/JustDeauIt/status/2044127128296313079 https://x.com/benjamincowen/status/2044114246187851783 https://x.com/JoshKale/status/2044425507203166292 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/2044423401763127512 https://x.com/LizAnnSonders/status/2043664934559420916 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UMCSENT https://x.com/perry8888_/status/2044168141148655773 https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/2044375033909264873 https://polymarket.com/event/how-many-fed-rate-cuts-in-2026/?via=bankless? 30:41 Saylor STRC / Bitcoin Bid & ETH Treasury Race (Tom Lee / Bitmine) https://x.com/LynAldenContact/status/2043736183578972443 https://x.com/AdamBLiv/status/2043809798035255790 https://x.com/STRC_live/status/2044029951410635132 https://x.com/pythianism/status/2044425651890147507 https://x.com/nic_carter/status/2044461949895819559 https://x.com/AltcoinDaily/status/2044492873803116649  https://x.com/fundstrat/status/2043683094914335191 https://www.strategicethreserve.xyz/ https://cointelegraph.com/news/ether-machine-spac-ethm-cancelled-dynamix-merger https://x.com/CryptosR_Us/status/2044507049648697717 46:24 World Liberty Financial (FTX-style risk) https://x.com/DefiIgnas/status/2042520040562639186 55:22 SEC DeFi Ruling (Bull Case)  https://x.com/SECGov/status/2043739582273855635  https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/2043754533545746884 https://x.com/intangiblecoins/status/2043709926556492190 58:39 Bitcoin Quantum Plan (BIP-361) https://x.com/BitcoinArchive/status/2044319025711255985 https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0361.mediawiki https://www.bip361.org/ https://x.com/lopp/status/2044406134178795748 1:02:53 Closing & Disclaimers --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Bankless Nation, we got a green week this week. It is the third week of April. It's a very green week. It's a very green week. Markets are up big. We got, just days ago, it seemed. We were down 10% on the S&P. And now. Going downer. Yeah. It was trending down. And how are we now today at all-time high? All-time highs. All-time highs. All in a week's period. Who knew? I mean, I think that's begging the question for crypto. Where are we going next? Up or down? We've got, we're going to name some names on today's episode.

We got some bowls that we're going to name and some bears that we're going to name. We're going to call people out. I actually don't know which side I'm on right now, David. So that's a strange feeling for me. Meanwhile, Sailor's Stretch is new STRC, not that new, but new into the zeitgeist is printing billions of dollars. The market clearly likes it. It's putting a very healthy bid on Bitcoin. Is this the best instrument Sailor has ever created?

Will it be the catalyst to send Bitcoin to all-time highs? Or, alternatively, will it be our demise? Bear or bull? Bear or bull? It's kind of like AI, you know? It could be like the next iPhone or could kill us all. We don't know. Could be both.

Also, World Liberty Finance had some drama in the week. This is, remember Trump's D-5 project? It was caught doing some on-change shenanigans. We're going to explore that. And ask the question, is this the new cycle FTX? Did World Liberty just pull a Sam-Begmadfried? We got Justin's son weighing in on. that. Notable morality commentator, Justin's son. But we do have some fundamental serious good news,

you know, putting on the serious hat at the moment. The SEC just gave Defi a broker exemption. Very material for a lot of the company's protocols apps that we know and love. We'll talk about the significance of that and what we can do now. And also, the Bitcoin community, taking quantum seriously, putting forward a quantum plan to free Satoshi's Bitcoins, making progress on the big quantum threat to Bitcoin. All of this and more, we're going to talk about it one by one by one. But first, we've got to start with the markets, which are greener than green. Like we said, just 10 days ago, we were down. The S&P was down a whopping 9.67% from its highs. The highs that it painted in January 28th of this year was the highest that the S&P had was at,

which was exactly 7,000. And right, as of today, we are at 7,000 and 133. 36 on the S&P 500. So we are up into new all-time high territories as of today, the day of recording the 16th and also the 15th, two all-time highs in a row. We got NASDAQ on the all-time high too. So both indices and Joe Wisenthal makes the point. Basically the entire Iran war sell-off has been erased, I guess quite obviously because we're at all-time highs. You know, this dip here in the S&P chart looks a lot like this dip over here. The trade war dip?

Yeah, the trade war dip in April of 2025. doesn't it? Although that dip was steeper, but they both have this kind of this V-shaped recovery right now. Yeah. The trade war dip was pretty significant. That was 20% from top to bottom, peak to trough. So the Iran War dip was just 10%. And this is what I've been saying, I think, on every roll-up and also on Twitter, it's just like the market is just like, ah, Trump's causing some chaos, but we'll get over it and we'll move on. And that seems to be the case. And we didn't totally price in. so much chaos this time around.

You feeling good about your predictions on, David, that Holdenov? Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, like, I think the market does what it does. It's like, oh, could Trump's doing the tariff wars? How far is it going to go? Same thing with the Iran. Let's talk about the Iran progress.

Yeah, because some of the reason for this recovery was Iran war de-escalation of some form. So give us the deal. What happened? Because last I had understood we were in some sort of, a mediated ceasefire. Yes. Ceasefire started two weeks ceasefire, which gave time for Iran and the United States

to come to the table and talk. We came to the table and talked. Didn't last that long, 21 hours one single day before Vice President Vance just talked to them and it's like, oh, we cannot come to terms. After 21 hours? Can you imagine that? Yeah, 21 hours straight.

Seems just like a lot, but also just like one instance of a day of talks and then we're like, okay, we clearly can't come to terms here. So then, but the ceasefire was maintained. So this is just because we, between us and Iran, the United States 10 point plan, the Iranian 15 point plan, just because we couldn't close that gap, didn't mean the ceasefire ended. So we are still under the ceasefire. We just have not come to negotiating terms of how to proceed after that to eat. That was on Friday, that negotiation took place.

That was on Friday, yes. notably the big line out of the Vance talk, that's like three-minute address that he gave giving in the post-intern was that the United States called it bad news, but way more bad for Iran than it is for the United States. And that was kind of how that was left. The next action that was taken was Trump says

that we are actually going to blockade the Strait of Hormuz because we were trying to figure out how to open the Strait of Hormuz to let oil flow out of the Strait to minimize economic pain across. the world and Iran was really holding onto its grip on the Strait of Hormuz. And so Trump did something that I don't really think anyone saw coming, at least most people did not see coming. He just blocks the Strait of Hormuz.

It's like, oh, you guys are going to block it? We're going to block it. Yeah, that's what I thought. It's just like if our ships can't get out, then no one ships can get out. That's right. Except it's one small detail. It actually is, according to international law, illegal to block passage in international waters.

And so Trump and the United States Navy are kind of just strong arming Iran and we push our Navy boats through the strait to prove that you could actually go through it. And now we are securing this rate to allow for ships who are not going to Iran. So any country going to the UAE to Saudi Arabia, those ships can go to those ports so long as they are not going to Iranian ports. So actually it's a complete 180 uno reverse card to Iran. Iran was saying, you know, we're not allowing anyone's ships but ours. And now Donald Trump comes in with our military and says, are we were more powerful than you guys. Actually, the only ships going through the Strait of Hormuz are the one,

everyone else is and not yours. Okay, but that's the state of play. Is that the good news? Is that why the markets recovered? Was that de-escalation? So it was a, yeah, well, we are not escalating back into the kinetic war that, that ceasefire is being maintained. it's all about the boats in the street of Hormuz.

And one of the reasons why I think specifically the American indices have done so well is there have been a ton of oil tankers that have rerouted towards the Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of America. And so a lot of demand for Middle Eastern oil is being rerouted as demand for American oil. It's something that happened this last week is American oil exports hit all-time highs. So we are exporting oil at levels never seen before. for at prices that are like way higher than where they were pre-Iran war. And so this is being perceived by the market as very good. And oil prices are coming down from the Iran war highs still higher than when we went into the war.

But there is the oil markets are sort of just rebalancing and being reallocated. And I think in addition to that being kind of a pretty strong win for the United States. and, you know, the United States revenue and, like, a domestic boom, potentially. It's also, I think people are saying, like, oh, this looks like somewhat of a stable equilibrium here. Like, this is something that we can plan on going forward. So there's no peace deal in place. Correct.

This feels like a stable equilibrium. And the pressure is still being applied quite heavily now on Iran. That's right. I guess, you know, the principle of wars is oftentimes the winners of the war are those that can just sustain pain for the longest. Correct, yeah. And so now this is Trump in the U.S. applying more pain to Iran,

because there's a real economic cost, isn't there? It's a very significant economic cost. So much of Iran's incoming money capital flows comes from, A, the Strait of Hormuz, but specifically their ability to sell crude, Brent crude oil. 90% of Iran's $110 billion annual trade goes through the Gulf.

Oil and gas. accounts for 80% of government export earnings and 24% of the entire country's GDP, all of that is gone. So that is an immense amount of pressure on the Iranian regime, just taking away basically their biggest. Negotiating chips. And they're negotiating chips, but also their ability to fund anything. 80% of their money is gone, of their inflows of capital is gone. Not just that, not just oil, but food is also being imported into Iran using the straits. So food, inflation is at 105% year over year in February of 2026. Rice prices in Iran is up 7%.

And so now if you're paying attention to just the outcome of the Iranian conflict, your eyes are going back to the hyperinflation of the Iranian Riyadh. So there has been now material inflation because the costs of everything is going to go be so high. And you're looking at the Islamic regime's inability to finance the IRA. the Bessigi and really just do things. And so there's a big chokehold on around the entire country because they don't have access to a buy food or B sell oil. So oil prices down in response to this. And President Trump, we've got a truth social tweet here. President Trump saying China has

agreed to not send weapons to Iran. So maybe the market interpreted that, you know, in a positive direction as well. And then there's some more news that the U.S. and Iran, they're still talking. They're still, they're extending the ceasefire for two more weeks as a possibility. And President Trump, you're saying the Iran war is very close to over. So I guess the market is just smushing all of that together and saying, okay, we feel good. Well, this is going to be recovered. This is going to be wrapped up soon. Oil is, is it, oil is not flowing, though, right? Oil is flowing. Oil is flowing. out of Saudi Arabia, like the rest of the Gulf. Okay.

It's not flowing out of Iran. So Iran production is stunted. This is why this economically hurts China. And also why if you are paying attention to like, how does this war like wrap up? China is likely also going to put pressure on Iran because China wants the Iranian oil. And so they want Iran to wave the white flag so that China can get its flow of cheap oil going as well. I got to say, I've been surprised by this recovery. Polymarket the odds right now. U.S. and Iran, a permanent peace deal. By what date there is right now the highest probability is 50% chance by May 31st. By the end of April, only a 33% chance. But by the end of June, a 64% chance. And this is probably all in the fine print of what does a permanent peace deal actually look like.

Yeah. But notably, I say the important thing about this polymarket is the direction of travel because all of the dates on the table have double digit green changes as of a week ago. That's right. That's right. Okay. So where does this leave markets in general? You show us some assets, David. I know you've got a trading view pulled up. So tell us what you're seeing in the markets. So we started talking about the S&P. Here it is back at June at the all-time highs. And we're just just poking above that. And we went from the trough of the bottom of the Iran conflict to the peak where we are now in 16 days. 16 days from down 10 percent to new all-time highs. So equity indices looking good. If I pulled up the NASDAQ chart, it would look just like this is basically the same chart. So all-time highs in the equities markets. We'll pull open WTI. That's West Texas intermediate crude. And so you can see we're still at war time prices,

but it's on the low end of that, $91 a barrel. What do you mean by wartime prices? Because before this whole thing started, what we were in like the 60s. Yeah, it was as the United States military was moving towards Iran. We went from 55 to $60-ish dollars a barrel up to 65. and then when the actual conflict started, that's when it went from 65 all the way to like 110 at the peak.

And then it's been between $85 and $106 for the entire, like the month of March and April. We're at $91. And so we're still in the high zone. Like it's still high because of the war, but we're on the lower end of the whole entire war pricing. So this is something that I'm watching. If we can see oil breakdown below this, then like this gives Eve Donner.

Trump even more tolerance and flexibility with what he can do in Iran. And then let's see, here is 10-year yields. 10-year years are up recently up in the last two days. Because this is another constraining factor for Trump, right? Those yields get too high and, you know, he starts breaking. If you could scroll out for a second, dude, I would love to see where did these go during the 10-year yields go during the tariff scare in April? The tariff scare was from here to here, I believe. Okay.

They spiked from, what? From 3.8 to 4.7, yeah. And they didn't go quite that high. They went to 4.5. They went from 4 to 4.5. And when they were at 4.5, that's when Donald Trump was like sweating. It's when things did not look very good. I think this is the big one.

This is the big constraint, maybe even bigger than oil price. Yeah. Since the peak of where they were at 4.5, they have come down to 4.3. Could come down more. It's still high. Like, we still have a huge debt burden. The direction of travel here is very important, but it has trended down

and it needs to continue to trend down. We can look at some crypto prices. So this is Bitcoin. Bitcoin doesn't look anything like the S&P index, Ryan, is trended down. It's not at all time highs, I'd notice. No, definitely not. But it has gone up during the war.

So there's that. It's still kind of in this range that I think everyone is kind of watching this right now between the $65,000 and $75,000 range. We are post. poking at the $75,000 Bitcoin number. We all want it to be, to break through that. Is Michael Sailors, Michael Strategies, Stretch products?

The reason why it punches through this range that has been trading in for over two months now, it could be. There's a lot of momentum in stretch. We'll talk about that later. We can also talk about the ETH price, which is kind of doing the same thing. It's been ranging between 1900 and 2,350, which is exactly the price it is right now, 2,350. in that same sort of range. But right, can I tell you my favorite chart? Yeah.

That I don't want to spend too much time on. No. Because I don't want to be too excited about it. Take a quick peek. Okay, just a glimpse. We won't even talk about it. We'll just take a glimpse. We'll put it on.

If the same range that Bitcoin has been trading at and Ether has been trading at, you can see that same range behavior in the ETH-BTC ratio. That would be the only time I say those words. But it has been trending up since the start of the Iraq. Iranian conflict has been trending up. Wow. Poking through at 0.032. Even more of a wartime asset than Bitcoin, huh?

That'd be weird. It is at least a more of an Iranian wartime asset specifically. During this time period in 2026. Very specifically. Yeah. So I find all of these charts to be very interesting. They all kind of tell their story. But overall, I kind of think it's hard to paint, it's harder to paint a bearish picture than

it is a bullish one, in my opinion. It certainly is. makes me a bill. This week. This makes you a bull. You're coming out. You're coming out as a bull. I'm coming out of the closet.

No way. No way. I'm kind of bullish. Are you full bull or are you just partial? I'm not full bowl yet. Never go full bowl. Yeah, I've seen you full bull. But like, I don't know, man.

Like there's a pretty, like the market, in my opinion, is pricing in a pretty firm U.S. victory in Iran. I think is pricing an Iranian white flag waving at some point in time. They're just going to have to give up a lot of stuff. Meanwhile, just like fundamentally, the United States economy is going to get a big boost because we are exporting more oil at higher prices than we were going into this war. That's very big for us domestically. I think the U.S. dollar gets a boost as a result of that as well. There's enough evidence here.

You want to paint a bullish picture. I'm going to confirm some of your biases with some statements by some other bulls. You ready for that? Hell yeah. All right. I got three bulls for you who agree. The first is Raoul Paul, and he's been saying this for a little bit. He's always bullish.

Okay, well, he happens to agree with you at this moment in time. Total global liquidity is rising. Global M2 is rising. U.S. total liquidity is rising. U.S. M2 is rising. China total liquidity is rising. ISM is rising. There's a lot of things that are rising, including David's bullishness.

Try not to overthink it is what he says, so don't overthink it. You know, there's a contrast point that I've been trying to. to get at the root of because Rao Paul in Real Vision keeps saying liquidity is rising, whereas my liquidity quant, Michael Howell, has said it's already peaked and it peaked late last year and it's now falling. It's now slowing. And so I've been trying to get at the bottom of that. Raoul Paul says he honestly doesn't understand where the discrepancy is.

So this is like a to do for me to understand why their measures and metrics are different. I still give a bit more weighting to Michael Howells because it's longer lasting, it's more comprehensive. I get the sense that Raul Paul's global liquidity stuff, it maybe has more metrics that are sort of U.S. centric, although I don't know all the details there. So I will caveat with that. But Raul Paul joins the bull camp, has been in the bull camp, and he said that the NASDAQ has a 97% correlation with the total global global. global liquidity. So if total liquidity is going to all-time highs, then the NASDAQ is obviously following. That doesn't necessarily mean that crypto also follows, but I think he also still believes

that Michael Saylor is another bull, but again, he's in the camp of I'm only always accumulating. I'm always bullish on Bitcoin. Bitcoin is going, as he said, earlier this week on our podcast, to $20 million by the year 20, what? 21, 21 million. $21 million. Of course, yeah, it got to be 21. By the year 2050, I think that was his prediction. 246. Okay. We did the podcast with the man.

Yeah, I can't. Geez, those numbers just, you know, didn't sing to my brain. Matt Hogan, he gives the case that Bitcoin is kind of the bunker coin. Chaos is a ladder. If you look at this chart, David, which is Bitcoin and S&P and gold from the start of the war in Iran to now, Bitcoin has outperformed those other two assets by, quite a bit. Bitcoin up 11.7% up about 19% from the February lows. So his comment is nations can't trust each other. They can't trust financial rails. The world gets a bit more chaotic and

neutral asset like Bitcoin wins. So those are the bulls that agree with you. You want some bears? I'm actually, so I'm glad that they agree with me. There's some analysis here that I'm slightly skeptical of, which is like the post, the war performance of Bitcoin is positive. because Bitcoin is a chaos asset, is like, well, it also had just fallen by like from $140 to $70,000. It's allowed to go up 19% after that. I don't know if we can correlate that to the war. Okay. So does that mean you're getting a little bearish from after those bold takes?

No, it means that I don't agree with that analysis, but I'm still bullish independently of that. I mean, that's what on the bare side, someone like Michael Nato would say. This is just kind of a mean reversion tactic. He thinks actually global liquidity tells a difference. different story. It's tapering off. It's going down. There's a macro slowdown. But also the main thing that he waits in his analysis of why he's, he thinks that we haven't dipped. We haven't seen the final dip yet is the on-chain cycle data. This has been a much milder winter with respect to on-chain holdings and all of the activity there than previous winters. It doesn't usually,

bear markets don't usually end like this. And easily, yeah. If you think that this is going to be an easier bear market. I've heard that before. I said that last bear market and then it wasn't. Yeah, and it might be slightly easier, but this would be just way too easy. No, again, Bowles will say that's because stretch. That's because Michael Saylor, which we'll get into. Ben Cohen tends to agree with him. He thinks that even if the SMP goes above all time highs, which now it has, that doesn't mean the S&P is kind of in for a bullish 2026. We could still be headed down. So those are some takes. I thought the biggest indicator for me or the like bubble indicator for me was actually this.

This is, have you ever had Allbirds, the shoes? You ever worn those? I know of them. Yeah, I know they're famous for like San Francisco Tech Bro. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I bought a pair. I did this in 2020, okay, during COVID. Apparently I didn't keep track of their stock.

This was just a shoe company. They IPOed in 2022 a $4 billion dollar valuation. They then proceeded to lose 99.5% of their value over the next four years. They closed all their U.S. stores. They sold the brand. They just this week renamed to New Bird AI. And the plan, get this, the plan is to pivot to GPUs and competing by renting out GPUs, AI, GPUs, competing with AWS, basically. On this news...

And they're pivoting into like a core weave play. Yeah. renting out AI data center stuff. Do they have any of their core business that means that they're competent in what they're living to? They're in San Francisco. So there's that. That's fine.

But they're up 450% on the back of this news. No, I think they're up 800% because that's an old snapshot. It went up. The price doubled after that screen. You're making my point even more starkly. And this reminded me when I saw this. Do you remember 27,

where you're going with this. Where am I going? Long Island blockchain tea company. What was it called? Long Island Ice Tea blockchain? Yeah, they had like hard iced tea or something. Long Island iced tea. In December of 2017, they rebranded to Long Island blockchain.

Right. Their stock went up 200%. Three weeks later, Bitcoin hit all-time high. And then after that, all-time high. The absolute pico top of the 2017 cycle. It was the pico top. It was the pico top. That was followed by a...

That was around the same time that Katie Perry did her crypto token nails. Yeah. Yeah. Top markers, top marker. And of course, three weeks later, we hit the top and it was all over. Bitcoin trades down 87%, you know, 12 months later. Yeah, but that's not crypto. That's an AI problem.

I'd be worried if I was an Invideo holder, not an Ether or Bitcoin holder. There's other things like... Because Bitcoin and Ether are clearly not in the bubble. Can you explain consumer sentiment then? Like, so here's a tweet. the share of consumers saying their financial situation is worse compared to a year ago due to higher prices jumped to 54% in April versus 47%. It's now the highest on record. There's another consumer sentiment put out by the St. Louis Fed.

We are at, this looks like COVID lows. Do you remember during this time period, 2020, actually this is post-COVID lows, 2022. Kyla Scanlon was talking about the recession where 2020. The vibe session, yeah. The economy looked good, but the vibes were off. consumer sentiment was down. She called this the vibe session. What's happening now?

Are we in like the second round of the vibe session? Yeah, I don't know how to wait this, but it has to be one part reality. Like it's never been affordable to be in the bottom 50% in America. Like we have had wealth discrepancy problems throughout this country. That's like a reality of the thing. Like the job market, I don't think the job market is amazing right now from my understanding. And then on the other side of things, I'm like, social media just makes this way worse.

Everyone just talks about how bad their vibes are. And that is also contagious. And that's why it's a vibe session, not just like bad consumer sentiment. Yeah. Something about uncertainty that have skewed these numbers. Yeah, AI uncertainty, I think, is also showing up in this chart. I think that's a good point.

So there you go. So Kevin Warsh is going to be the incoming Fed Chair likely. He just has a Senate vote. and, you know, one direction of travel is where are the Fed rates going? Donald Trump came out and said, hey, look, as soon as my guy Warsh comes in, interest rates are going to drop. President Trump says interest rates will drop once Kevin Warsh becomes Fed share. I don't know if Kevin has any autonomy on that situation.

I will tell you, Polly Market is not reflecting that. Still, there's a 41% that we get 0% increase in Fed rates in 2026. or decrease, no change. There's only 27% that we get a 25-bips change. So that's interesting. Some people are- And notably these percentages did not change despite Trump saying that.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, no, like the market's not believing it. Yeah. I mean, these polymarkets has actually been pretty good on Fed rate cuts, like when people have run the analysis. Yeah. I mean, there's $20 million of volume. That is a liquid market when it can compare.

to other prediction markets. But I don't know if you saw this week. So Kevin Warsh had to disclose his finances this week. So it's like a 70-page document. And this is Perry. Someone on crypto Twitter tweeting out, Kevin Warsh owns 30 plus crypto projects in your bearish, and he lists all of these holdings.

Like, look at these things. Compound, D-Y-T-X, blast, later. These are some on Juno, Solana, Kinetic. There was Friends with Benefits is on here, okay? And so a bunch of crypto people. Friends of SWB? I mean, they're still around, but wow, that's a blast in the past.

Getting very excited that the incoming Fed chair was going to be, like, it was holding all of these assets. So just to put a little, I guess, rain on that parade, it represents a very small percent of Kevin Warsh's net worth. So his net worth is like, he's doing quite well for himself, $200 million or so, between $130, $200 million. All of those tokens, I bet Kevin didn't even know he had them because they were not. through a VC firm. That would be a surprise. I've been to some SWB events. You've never seen Kevin?

I don't, not only have I not seen Kevin there. It's not his type of people. It's the wrong cohort. Yeah. So, and unfortunately, nothing disclosed that he owned Bitcoin or Eith directly at all. Oh, I see.

So I would have liked to have seen some of that. Still, he's probably going to be the most crypt, obviously, he will be the most crypto-friendly Fed chair that we've ever had. What does it mean to be a crypto-friendly Fed chair? I don't know because Jerome Powell really didn't do anything to curtail crypto. I don't know if the Fed share, I mean, I can understand that him personally and intrinsically he's crypto-friendly and then he is also FedShare.

I don't think there's a lot of overlap between those two things. I think you'd want the Fed Chair to not be anti-Stablecoin or anti-Bitcoin or anti-Etherian. Other than that. I suppose, I suppose. I suppose it doesn't matter too much. But he's not going to be like Bitcoin is crap. I got a lower interest. I don't think he's going to do that. No, he's not the guy. We'll have to wait for a few generations later for that. We got a lot more coming up. Michael Saylor, is he the guy saving us from

crypto winter right now with his new stretch asset? It offers 11.5% yield. Coffeezilla does not like it, though. We'll talk about that controversy. Also, World Liberty Finance, are they running an FTX-style rug? We'll talk about all that and more. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. bankless isn't just a name. It's a genuine belief that you shouldn't need permission from an institution to use your money. Metamask has been around since the beginning of Ethereum, and they carry the same DNA we do. Metamask was my first wallet, and well, if you haven't opened up the app recently, let me tell you, they've been shipping, creating the one app to finally replace your bank and exchange.

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notes to learn more and get started. Not investment advice. Okay, Ryan, so over the eras, Michael, micro strategy, otherwise known as strategy by Michael Saylor. Otherwise known as Michael strategy. Michael, I love Michael Strategy. They've released all of these different equity instruments. They have stride, strife, and they're all different structuring to basically borrow from the future in a particular way targeting a particular investor. It's preferred shares too. It's not like the MSCR common shares. Yeah, some of them are preferred.

Some of them are like junk bond. Right. It's all over the place. Yeah. There's this one that they've issued, that they've released that is just dominating. And on our podcast episode with Michael, Sailor, he said like, oh, yeah, we tried all the different ways. And it's stretch. That is the winner.

That's our iPhone. That's our iPhone. That's the debut product. that's the thing that's going to take us to Valhalla. Stretch is now over 40% of all of the market cap of all strategies preferred stocks that they release the equity instruments. The strategy has issued $7.8 billion of preferred shares in total.

Over $3 billion of that is now stretch alone and that number is increasing the trading volume of stretch. It looks like $6.3 billion to stretch right here. Oh, yeah, that has gone up. It has gone up. Yeah. So we're looking at over 50%. Over 50%.

Yeah. It's also trading at basically as much as micro strategy's common equity is in trading volume is basically equal to that. Five months ago, it was just 10% of the volume. Now it's almost equaling the trading volume. That's impressive because that's not get some volume. Yeah. So just as a recap of what stretch is, stretch trades at $100.

If it trades above $100, strategy issues more stretch and sells it into the market to lower the price. if it trades below $100, there's, I'm sure, market making going on to push it back above 100, but the reason why it will go back above 100 is that if it ever consistently trades below 100, strategy will increase the yields that it pays, making it more desirable. Right now it pays 11.5%. 11.5%. Strategy can continuously sell, like, inflate more shares of stretch at the market and constantly be selling,

which is why this thing represents a constant flow of capital. into strategy, which allows them to buy Bitcoin on the back end. So for strategy's purposes, it's a very tight loop between any excess demand of stretch above $100 and them buying Bitcoin because they instantly get to pocket that difference buy Bitcoin with it. And this has, in the zeitgeist of, you know, FinTwit financial commentators, people are talking about this thing. Oh, yeah.

It has a strong opinions. A lot of opinions. It has very strong opinions. Yeah. Yeah, there's this Twitter account called STRC Live that shows various STRC purchases and what happens. And this is an example at Tuesday this week at 827 AM, 41,000 shares were purchased, $4.1 million of stretch was purchased. It didn't even, you know, no price slippage there. It didn't even, you know, up zero, up barely a cent.

And that directly converts to 153 Bitcoin that, that, 4.1 million converts to 153 Bitcoin that Michael Saylor and strategy can purchase on the back of that. What's happening is people are buying the stretch to get the 11.5% yields. It's not really moving the price. And Michael's saying, thank you for that. Thank you for your dollars. Thank you for your cash. I'm going to go buy Bitcoin with that. And that happens pretty continuously and fairly instantly gets converted to demand. So that is a case where you can kind of see it maybe blunting some of the the crypto winter then, right? If there's the sustained bid for Bitcoin. The big question is how many investors or how much capital is there in the world that is interested

in 11.5% yield year over year. Now, it's not risk-free, but I think a lot of people will take this unknown risk, this risk that strategy will simply not pay or because they're not obligated to pay. And so many people are like, yeah, they're probably going to pay. And so many people are like, yeah, they're probably going to pay me. I'll take the 11.5%. And that's a very popular, like 11.5% is huge, dude. Like a relatively unknown risk, but I think the market is perceiving it as low risk. Low risk, 11.5%?

Like, wowzer. There's no free lunch though, right? Like who's losing from this interaction? Van Spencer makes the point. Saylor's best year ever was 2024. He bought 320,000 Bitcoin that year. He's on pace this year. 26 for 400 to 600,000 Bitcoin.

The case for new all-time high is relatively straightforward, he says. Then Nick Carter follows up with this and he says, okay, but every dollar of stretch issued subtracts a dollar from MSTR common shares. The higher the ratio of stretch to MSCR, the more tenuous the situation becomes good for Bitcoin, though. And then Van says, sir, I don't give an F about MSDR common. So, and Nick follows up with you and Michael both, which I think is the punchline. Nick is making the point that some of this excess demand for stretch is coming at the cost of MSTR common shareholders.

Now, it all benefits Bitcoin, of course, but at the cost of common shareholders. And of course, because these are preferred shares, they're higher on the capital stack. And so if there was some sort of forced liquidation, preferred share. shareholders are going to receive the benefit. And, you know, common shareholders will be more caught kind of holding things, right? Their shares will go down. And Nick's point is that it's not a high fidelity mechanism. It's $1 of stretch issued subtracts more than a dollar of master common valuation.

And so he's saying this is a lossy transfer of value in order to do this drop. My big query quandary concern, Ryan, is that like there's no limit to what the amount of stretch that can be issued. It's literally a money printer. He could print 10 bazillion shares. But there needs to be a limit. I mean, his financial quants to people at strategy have to limit this because the ratio to stretch to MSDR can't get too high or things get lopsided. And the teeter totter wobbles like, you know, too far in one direction. There are, I have not talked, I've not heard in the discourse of some constraint on the level of stretch issuance because the more stretch that's out there, the more a strategy is obligated to pay in like, it's like the government debt. It's like they, they have a big amount of debt because they have all this stretch out there. If they are just hammering the ATM on the market and constantly issuing shares, they're hammering their obligation to pay and have yearly bills to pay. And at,

some point, that has to become overly burdensome. Well, I wonder if you are critical in the same way, CoffeeZilla is critical. So CoffeeZill is a notable YouTuber. He quite often talks about rugpoles, scams, at least when he's interacting with crypto. I don't know what his general content is about, but he weighed in with a video on STRC this week. Let's play a clip.

Now, what is the problem with that? Well, ultimately, Stretch is nothing like a savings account. It is a stock, meaning the company has no obligation to pay you that money back. Like you give them $100, they have no obligation to pay you back. Why haven't people realized this? Why haven't people realized there could be a risk of this stock going down? And them ultimately not getting their $100 back that they put in. My entire problem is that they're leading people like a Pied Piper with this kind of ludicrous idea.

Their pitch is of a money market. bank when that's just not what this is. And this is a snowball of yield that will accumulate for this company, which admittedly does have tons of Bitcoin. They have this massive treasury, but Bitcoin, it's very well known, does not yield anything. So eventually, Stretch will have to be funded by what exactly, right? They have a cash reserve, but that'll eventually run out. Bitcoin doesn't yield anything. So you'd have to sell it at some point, which would put a negative pressure on your entire treasury. Or they can try to keep issuing shares in perpetuity, but how are they going to do that? Well, maybe they just keep raising the yield of stretch. Doesn't seem like that would work forever.

You can pretty quickly realize that, hey, this is maybe not as sustainable as they're claiming it is. So I think Coffeezilla's main critique here is that it's being pitched or sold as a risk-free money market account, you know, except it has 11.5% interest. And he's saying, look, there's some, there's some risks there. That's too simple. The risk by the investor, by. anyone who buys this thing aren't properly understood. It's not like savings in a bank account. It's not like a money market. Right. Because the stock itself, the asset itself can go down. It's a share at the end of the day. The principal can go down. Yeah. The principal can go down. And he is right about that. Although it is called a preferred share. Yeah. I feel like, I don't know. I mean, maybe there's someone, there's some people in retail who don't actually know what they're purchasing. But for someone like me and hopefully for bank listeners, they know that this is a preferred share. This is not a bond. There is no obligation to pay. Yeah.

But it is preferred to the common equity. Yeah. It's mixed. The risk is mixed. It is mixed. I just can't hate the product because he's right about maybe the way it could be advertised. But if it's advertised in the correct way, I don't really have a problem with the product. He did make that AI video of the babe in the bikini who was like, I made all my money with stretch.

Yes. But he did that to rage bait people, not to market to nudge. Normies. I think so, right? And it's kind of the same thing. So, you know, retort to that is what is what is dollars in a money market fund? This is a Bitcoiner saying this. Oh, you need cash flow for retirement. Just continue lending your money to a government going and solvent, covering up for pedophiles and drone striking the Middle East. That way you can get 8% less than STRC and feel a lot safer. Of course, that's a bombastic kind of like take on this. But the point that's not being made is wherever, if you have money in a money market, you're taking currency risk.

That's the currency risk of the U.S. government. If you have preferred shares in STRC, you're also taking currency risk. That's the currency risk of Bitcoin. Like, you should know that. That's what the product is. If you're comfortable with the currency risk, it's not a bad product. In fact, I know I was talking to you on the debrief of like, oh, do you like stretch? Would you buy it?

Like my take on this now is like, I wouldn't buy MSTR. I kind of like stretch and I kind of like Bitcoin. Stretching Bitcoin. Yeah. Like FMSCR, Stretching Bitcoin. The strategy barbell is stretching Bitcoin, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I don't know.

I can't hate the product. I don't agree with coffee so let's take here. Hating the product is going back to my original point, just downstream of how willing they are to hammer the ATM and issue a ton of shares that they can't. It could get out of him. It's good get out of hand. And so this is up to the discretion of the management company. Let's talk about Ethereum's Michael Saylor.

That is Tom Lee, because he just hit a milestone on the week. He now has 4.1% of all ETH total supply. It wasn't that long ago, he came on bank list last summer, and he told us he was going to go for 5%. He called it the alchemy of 5%. And we were astounded. It was like, 5% so high. I thought maybe in the fullness of time in some universe he could hit it.

Terminus, right? He's hit it in less than a year. And he plans to hit 5% this year. He made it look easier. Yeah. And this means, of course, that he's made 60% of that is now staking. So they're making about, you know, between 250 and 300 million per year on staking. If ETH hits 10K at some point, David, that's over a billion in revenue every year, just from letting the ETH sit there and stake.

I will say that there is a tale of two cities going on here. You have the strategy for Bitcoin. You have BMNR for ETH. you know, two Dats doing kind of similar things, buying their respective assets. Strategy is doing stretch issuing a crap ton of debt. Bitmine? No debt. Hasn't yet.

No debt. No stretch to buy, however, obviously. That's true. But like still no debt. So like there are divergences and strategy, no pun intended, happening here. One thing I do think it's safe to say is that Bitmine has won the Ethereum debt horse race. And that was not clear last summer. I mean, there's a lot of contenders there.

Not to say there isn't some other strong contenders here, but the ether machine, they're no longer going public. So they're staying a private company. ETHZILA has kind of dropped. They are pivoting their strategy from Ethereum DAT. So the big Dats are Sharplink, Sbet, and Bitmine. And BitMine has, you know, 4X more than Sharplink than Sbet right now. So they've definitely pulled ahead in this race.

Coming on next, we're going to talk about World Liberty Financial, the Trump family Defi projects and some of the shenanigans, the ways that they are cleverly making a lot of money at World Liberty Financial token holders expense, question mark, and was Justin's son a victim here? Poor guy. We're going to talk about this. And we're also going to hear from the SEC's statements about defy interfaces and how they are not broker dealers, which is great for our industry. So we're going to get to all that and more. But first, a message to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show

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His cycle analysis has been absolutely on point. I've been following him for years. And this year, we started recording weekly podcast episodes. Each one we get into his portfolio, what he's holding, the market structure, entry targets, fair market value of Bitcoin and Ether. and where we are in the cycle, there's new episodes that are released every Wednesday. They're 30 minutes. They're short. They're punchy. I think this crypto cycle is harder to navigate than most. So let's do it together. Go subscribe to this podcast. Search the DeFi report. Wherever you get your podcast, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or find a link in the show notes. There's a new episode waiting for you now. Okay, so the question this week, did World Liberty Finance, financial, I should say, just rug a DFI protocol and was Justin's son a victim? Here's the allegation, a tweet. They're pointing, to a screenshot of the World Liberty Finance website. It's saying the World Liberty Financial it's on their about page, why they exist. It's to break barriers for the unbanked.

Our mission is to unlock financial access by replacing the limits of the traditional banking system with an open-on-chain infrastructure. Are those a bunch of stock photos from developing countries? Wow. It seems like it, David. Yeah, it seems like it.

And, of course, World Liberty Finance is the Trump-Sons crypto project. It was kind of their brand to do some sort of lending and borrowing protocol in DFI because they had been unbanked in the past and they were bringing, you know, basically, you know, bringing the Trump brand to DFI. So the allegation is that they minted this week millions of tokens out of thin air. That would be the WLFI token. They then used them as collateral to withdraw hundreds of millions of dollars and then they've now distanced themselves from the project. So taking their name off the website. That's what this tweet is alleging.

What actually happened is they did borrow 150 million in USDA from a lending and borrowing protocol called Dolomite. And the collateral that was pledged was their 400 million in WFLI tokens. Which they had just minted. Those would be the tokens they minted when they started the project. So the idea is they mint tokens, right? And then they get real money, which is USDC, pledging these tokens as collateral. David, you know what Dolomite is? I remember learning more about Dolomite when we learned that the co-founder of Dolomite,

Corey Kaplan, was an advisor to World Liberty Financial. And so as it seems, they advise them to use the Dolomite protocol, which is their protocol, to say, hey, there are people who are lending USDC to Dolomite. You can mint WFLI tokens, put them in Dolomite. and then you can have all the USC. You can get the money, yeah. You print the fake token, you know, the easy to print token to get the dollars. It's a real token.

It's a real token. It just might not be worth real money. Right. Yes. Especially when they can mint them at their discretion. That's right. So Dolomite, it's on arbitram, by the way. And so the problem here is, of course, W.L.5 can mint their token, zero cost basis.

If the token goes to zero and the collateral goes to nothing, they still get to keep the $150 million. It's the lenders who, get the bag. They're the exit liquidity. And the problem is, even right now, David, if you try to sell 8 million in WLFI tokens, that's a 72% slippage, just an 8 million. Okay? So it's like, it's already underwater. Right.

So that's the problem here is there's no risk to world liberty and they could just keep the 150 million. And who are the Dolomite lenders? These are probably regular defy farmers. People with USC depositing for yield. Yeah, that's right. So they were getting 10 plus percent yield. Most of them had no idea the risk.

The 80% of this pool was in one entity's position. So these are retail farmers, really, that might be on the receiving side of this very bad debt. When we saw WIFI World Liberty Financial, the defy app on chain as a project created. I would say that this outcome was pretty close to a worst possible outcome. I think you're right. Where innocent USC lenders to an otherwise previously neutral defy app are not going to get their, if this happens,

are not going to get their money back because of improperly balanced and poor risk managed accounts because Dolomite whitelisted the WFLI token and didn't account for or were paid off. or something about how you could just mint that out of thin air and then drain the, this is a, as far as I'm concerned, this is an attack on the protocol. Well, does it remind you a little bit of FTX in 2022? You remember that Alameda, so this was Sam's fund that was supposed to be separate, they had held a massive amount of the FTT token.

You remember FTX had an FTT token that they basically invented, they minted, and they used FTT as collateral to borrow billions. Now, they did this off-chain. They did do this in D-Fi. So we didn't, like, discover everything that was going on. It's crazy that we can see all of this activity just in plain sight. And then what happened is FTT price dropped after Coinbase exposed that, you know, Sam was using customer deposits in improper ways. The collateral was worthless as FTT price dropped and all the loans were called.

And then Alameda couldn't repay as part of the downward spiral of this thing. And so this is smaller scale. but it's still a similar play, it looks like. It reminds me very much of the FTT case. It's quite blatant. One of the potential victims of this is Justin Sun. Justin Sun was an investor in World Liberty Financial. In 2024, 2025, he invested $75 million.

He moved $9 million of that to an exchange. And then because maybe for some shenanigans, for some reason, like it was... They didn't want him to do it. His telling is they didn't want him to move the money, and so they froze all of that. It froze all of his tokens. Yes. Fros all of his tokens.

Because they could do that. In the smart contract, they had that ability. They basically have total control over the smart contract. So Justin Sun, I think, is, like, trying to, like, sue them or something to, like, get his tokens back. And now this is also happening. And so it kind of adds fuel on to the fire. I don't know if Justin Sun was uniquely harmed in this particular instance. Why, actually, why is Justin relevant here?

He's just relevant because he's complaining about it again. And there's back and forth with the, uh, he's the guy. with the WLFI account and you like this. Does anyone, this is WLFI. The World Liberty Financial Twitter account. Yes. Does anyone still believe Justin's son? Justin's favorite move is playing the victim while making baseless allegations to cover

up his own misconduct. Same playbook, different target. WFLI isn't the first. See you in court, pal. That's why he's relevant. If there's going to be a court case where we get to see, I'm bringing my popcorn. God. And that's going to be great.

Yeah, it's brutal. Now, WLFI calls all of this fud. It's wrong. Here's what's actually happening. They basically describe theirself as an anchor borrower. So they're doing this maneuver so they can generate yield. That makes the protocol more attractive for their depositors. Also, they claim that their tokens were nowhere near liquidation.

That's true. You know, it's 400 million collateral on 150 million. So liquidation hasn't technically happened yet. It's kind of a shreddering your cat type scenario. And if it got close to liquidation, they just put more WLFI tokens in. Okay. Now, the problem with all of that...

Print more shit coins. Sure. The problem with all of that is, of course, if you hit a downward spiral, none of that works. You have thin order books. Only, you know, 8 million liquidity, sends the books down 70%. Right?

That won't work in that scenario. So, but that is their retort. I guess all of this brings about the question of, what do you think, David? Has Trump been good for crypto or bad? I mean, we could talk about the meme coins. Bankless listeners, no, there's been meme coins. There's this project in Defi.

Do you remember, was it a, you know, the Saudis that bought 500 million? Was it a stable coin? Well, it was WLFI token? Yeah, that did this. The Saudis, I think that's right. That was a journalist coverage that happened in February of this year. There's just a lot of scandal and corruption, it seems, and grifting activity. And yet, at the same time, we have.

We have Paul Atkins. We have the Genius Act. We have some definite positive moves for crypto. So what's the net? What's the net? There's been two distinct phases. The first half of Trump's presidency has been overwhelmingly good. And then the second half has been like, okay, I did all the good stuff.

Now I get to grift. Now I got to pay the grift tax. And so like if I think when you ask this question, the zeitgeist is like, oh, now, now it's bad because he's doing the bad things. So I think the momentary pulse is people will say that it's net bad. It's like to me it's like close enough where like it's kind of a toss up. My, I asked this question on crypto Twitter and at least my followers, 70% net good at this point in time. Or 30% net good, excuse me, 70% net bad. Yeah.

And I'm saying that's the expected outcome because he's done all the bad stuff recently. There's like recency bias in here. Let's talk about something good he did, which was a point. Paul Atkins as chair of the SEC, they came out with guidance this week, which is great news for Defi. The SEC said defy interfaces aren't brokered dealers. So all of this guidance comes down to what the SEC defines as a covered user interface. What is a covered user interface?

Thank you for asking. Website, browser extension, app, anything that assists with making a blockchain transaction in a self-custodial wallet. And so if things assemble code for you to make a transaction, that is a covered user interface. It goes way further than that. It actually carves out, Ryan, a pretty granular definition of what a covered user interface is. It has 12 points of what a CUI is. It makes nine points about what a CUI isn't.

If you go and read the report, the line that is drawn is basically down the principal agent problem. like is a covered user interface trustless or is it's trusted? And if it's trustless, it's a covered user interface. If it's trusted, it's a broker. It's very smart. Yeah. It's very intelligent. It's doing the right job.

And so like some of the big questions it has is like, does the interface route transactions fairly and neutrally or does it bias certain exchanges? Do they sell transaction order flow or are they making opinionated choices on behalf of of the user? Or are they giving the user maximum choice and autonomy? And if it's always, like, the user has the maximum choice and autonomy, it's generally a covered user interface. And if it's not, it's a broker dealer. But what does this cover? Things like Uniswop and sushi swap are covered, Metamass Phantom Coinbase wallet. These are our opinions. This is not stated. So like this isn't like a legal opinion, but like this is what it seems reads to me. Like Phantom, for example,

order routers and aggregators like 1 inch and cowswap might be a little bit unclear because they might be a little bit more opinionated. So like TBD, but overall, it's like very well-defined lines between what is a broker-dealer, what's not, and how an app or a project or company might be in that criteria or not. And this is a big deal because Gensler's SEC, of course, was claiming that D5 front-ends were broker-dealers and therefore all of them were illegal, you know? And so we've come so far from that. I remember, actually, remember Sam Bankman-F Fried in 2022?

What of SBF remembrance today? He was saying, part of his core claim, is that the SEC and the U.S. government would never allow defy interfaces to exist without being registered as broker dealers. And he was going to go to D.C., Washington, D.C., and go lobby and fix this for us, of course, because they would never allow it. Now, here we are in 2026, and we have some of this guidance, some of this clarity. Alex Thorne makes the further point that this is another example of the SEC showing that it can just move crypto market structure along without Congress. It's giving the clarity that we need in crypto without the actual clarity act. So I'm glad of that because I'm not sure if that act is actually going to progress farther this year.

It's probably a 50-50 at this point. Yeah. Are we freezing some bitcoins? I don't know yet, David. But Jameson Lop has put out, he's a Bitcoin developer. sorry, he's a Bitcoin community member. I'm not sure if you wouldn't call him a Bitcoin developer, but he's got some developers behind him,

have proposed BIP 361 to freeze all the quantum vulnerable wallets. So here's the website with the full description, but as we've covered, you know, about 30% of all Bitcoin has an exposed public key that could be taken if a quantum computer is powerful enough to go take it. This could happen stealthily. We wouldn't necessarily see it coming. We would just start seeing keys get yoinked. That's a 7.1 million Bitcoin that's at risk. And over two million of that are probably Satoshi keys, are probably lost keys. And so Jameson put together a three-phased

plan. Okay? I'm going to spell this out and you tell me if you like this. The first phase would be three years after act was activation. So say this BIP gets active. activated in 2027. No new funds could be sent to that 7.1 million Bitcoin in exposed public addresses. So those would be kind of locked out. You couldn't push new Bitcoin into them. Then phase two, which would be about five years after activation, all the signatures would be invalid. So all of the coins essentially would be frozen. So you'd have five years to move. You'd have five years. your Bitcoin from one address to a quantum safe address. And then phase C, which wasn't completely defined,

is there might be a way to do a ZK proof where you could actually prove you had the C phrase and unlock some of that Bitcoin. So that's the plan. It's tangible. Remember we were asking about like, oh, of the $7 million, how do you decide what's gone and what's not? Well, Jameson's proposal is just you lock them all

and you force everybody else to move. Yeah. And then those that haven't moved are, you know, coins that can't be spent that are permanently lost, that are Satoshi's coins, that sort of thing. What do you think of this plan? It is pragmatic and doesn't ring bitcoinsery because of that fact. It's like in order to solve this problem, Bitcoin. It's the part C that's pragmatic to you. I think this is just, if you look at just A and B, it's basically what Nick Carter was saying, which is it's burning. Yeah. Yeah, it's the burn. It's the C part. It's the extra. Ignore C.

That was kind of the TBD part. Anyway, sure, sure, sure, sure. Yeah. It's the burn. Yeah. You just burn it. Yeah. I mean, you listened to my conversation with his Steve last week.

He was like, yeah, the social contract's not violated here. And I kind of take that point. I understand that point. I think it is somewhat violated and the property rights are somewhat violated, but I also take that point. And Jameson said, look, I don't, I don't, even like this proposal. I wrote it, but I don't even like it. Because the alternatives are worse. Because the alternatives are even worse. Yeah. Yeah. Like it is going to be something like this. It's like it's not going to make

anyone happy. Exactly. So it's a straw man. He put it out there and now the Bitcoin community can comment on it. Actually, there's a new post Nick Carter just put out about this and the three paths. But it's basically burn, let quantum treasure hunters go find it. Or Nick Carter's favorite approach, which is, you know, the U.S. government goes and claims it. Salvage. Yeah. Yeah, he would like that. He would like that. It is fun, Ryan, I will say. I do enjoy. Maybe there's a little bit of Chaudenford. Maybe in Chaudenford is not the perfect word, but just like watching Bitcoiners have to flex this muscle that is so weak, like coming to consensus about stuff. On a governance thing. On a governance thing. On a government that has no governance. Yeah, exactly. It's like watching an infant learning to walk

for the first time. Yeah, it's good. I do think they'll figure it out, though. I mean, proposals like this, this is the Overton window shifting. This is how you do it. This is how you do it. Nice job, James and Law. Yeah, I agree. And also Nick Carter. You guys have been in the forefront of this.

All right, well, let's end it there. Guys, you know none of this has been financial advice. Cryptos risky. You could lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. Not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.