Bankless - ROLLUP: Markets Spooked? | MegaETH & Monad Mania | New CFTC Chair | Base & Polymarket Tokens? | Circle Arc Backlash

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

Markets got the treat they were waiting for with a Fed rate cut and pause on quantitative tightening, but prices still fell. Why? This week, Ryan and David break down why the markets got spooked, what Powell really said about December cuts, and what it means heading into November. We also cover MegaETH’s oversubscribed ICO, Monad’s airdrop, Polymarket’s confirmed token, and JP Morgan’s $34B Base token estimate. Plus Solana’s new ETF, Western Union’s stablecoin, Circle’s controversial L1 launch, the X402 payment boom, and the latest on Consensys and Securitize IPOs. ------ 📣BANKLESS SUMMIT 2025 | SPONSORED BY M0 https://bankless.cc/devconnet-2025  https://bankless.cc/m0  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAXNET | MINT, REDEEM, EARN  https://bankless.cc/fraxnet 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR L2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🌳KGEN | REQUEST A DEMO  https://bankless.cc/KGEN-podcast 💠BIT DIGITAL ($BTBT) | ETH TREASURY  https://bankless.cc/bit-digital We’re being compensated by Bit Digital (NASDAQ BTBT) for this segment promoting their company and BTBT. The compensation is paid in cash as a one time payment. You can find additional information about Bit Digital and BTBT on their Investor page at https://bit-digital.com/investors ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 5:03 Markets https://www.tradingview.com/chart/1RYLG2gC/ https://www.tradingview.com/chart/1RYLG2gC/ https://x.com/fundstrat/status/198307855327420049 https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/1983595486259950049 https://polymarket.com/event/fed-decision-in-december?tid=1761832318180 https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/1983613170691535094 https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/1983606477479899214 https://x.com/TKL_Adam/status/1983560866436927875 https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/1983855569996861631 https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/10/28/solana-etfs-could-draw-over-usd3b-if-bitcoin-ether-etf-trends-repeat https://x.com/ETHZilla_ETHZ/status/1982901255782445420 https://www.strategicethreserve.xyz/ 30:32 3 of the most exciting tokens this year & new valuations! It’s token launch season! https://x.com/megaeth/status/1983188518756339906 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1982831157491184073 https://x.com/megaeth/status/1982502453515071847 https://x.com/kunalgoel/status/1983304334835077425 https://x.com/0xd1namit/status/1981661321101009388 https://claim.monad.xyz/ https://app.hyperliquid.xyz/trade/MON https://app.hyperliquid.xyz/trade/MEGA https://www.theblock.co/post/376134/coinbases-base-token-could-be-worth-34-billion-jpmorgan-says 44:36 Circle’s Arc EVM L1 goes to public testnet - RSA triggered https://www.arc.network/blog/circle-launches-arc-public-testnet 47:00 x402 gets its first signs of traction - 200,000% growth week over week https://www.x402scan.com/ https://dune.com/programmer/x402 52:27 Trump names Michael Selig to chair CFTC https://x.com/CoinMarketCap/status/1983262571277762907 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPdqwebmJzE https://x.com/davidsacks47/status/1982009725110600145 https://x.com/cdixon/status/1981834098932167131 53:41 Trump Media is about to launch a prediction market https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-28/trump-media-plans-to-enter-booming-prediction-markets-business https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/1982976302803234955 56:46 Western Union is building exclusively on Solana  https://x.com/solana/status/1983215174883430839 https://x.com/DegenerateNews/status/1983265904348803569 https://x.com/camillionaire_m/status/1983506060343185571 https://x.com/0xMert_/status/1983517171234861273 https://x.com/calilyliu/status/1983386544271704528 https://x.com/vibhu/status/1983568810360643945 1:03:21 3 themes this cycle: Acquisitions, Banks, IPO https://aave.com/blog/stable-acquire https://x.com/farcaster_xyz/status/1981398124242620852 https://www.wsj.com/finance/regulation/zelle-stablecoin-cryptocurrency-7ef515e7 https://www.coinbase.com/blog/coinbase-and-citi-collaborate-to-build-the-future-of-payments https://x.com/brian_armstrong/status/1982850023718105337 https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/securitize-the-leading-tokenization-platform-to-become-a-public-company-at-1-25b-valuation-via-business-combination-with-cantor-equity-partners-ii-302596208.html https://app.rwa.xyz/platforms https://www.theblock.co/post/376845/metamask-parent-consensys-pursues-ipo-jpmorgan-goldman-axios 1:09:55 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Bankless Nation, it is the last week of October, and we should tell everyone, happy Halloween, because it is Halloween day. I missed the costume, David. Yeah. I had some ideas. Costumes were tough this year. Didn't come together.

I know you had a fantastic idea. Why didn't you tell me what you were planning to be so I could just imagine it in my head for the rest of this roll-up? Well, I was very excited to do the costumes, but then when I discovered that my co-host did not have his costume, I took my costume off. and I packed it up. Yes, he did.

I was going to be wearing all my mountaineering gear, so you could imagine a climbing helmet, my two ice axes, a harness, some rope slings, my jacket, yeah. I actually really want to see that. That would be a sweaty podcast, though. Like, you would have been overheated by the minute.

Yeah, there would have been a lot of like Goretex going on. So I ran downstairs to see if I had anything, and all I had was Sam Begman-Fried wig, believe it or not. Which is your costume from like two years ago. Yes. You've already done that one. And a Gryff and a wand is my kids. And I don't know how those go together.

Yeah, so we couldn't make it work. But what I wanted to be, what I thought of this morning was actually just like bald. Just like the bald is bullish. Just for the market. Just bald. That would have been good. That would have been good. You could have.

Anyway, happy Halloween to everyone who's actually dressed up. We got a lot to talk about today. It's time for the Bankless Weekly roll-up. Of course, we got a glimpse of October earlier this week. I thought it was action. The month was green. Between the days of Monday through Wednesday of this week. Yeah.

Yeah, I thought we were back, baby. But Powell, then Powell's speech happened. And it seemed like he gave us everything I thought we wanted, but the markets hated it. We've got to talk about that. What's spooked markets? Why are we going down? We got some crypto-native tokens to talk about. Mega-Eath hit its ICO target within minutes.

It is now 28 times oversubscribed to the Mega-Eath ICO. We also have the MonEd token to talk about. We got valuations for both of those. And from the words of a polymarket executive, we have a polymarket token to talk about as well. Hmm. Yeah, and the CFTC got a new nomination finally. They've got a chairman coming in.

Also, J.P. Morgan tells us exactly how much the base token would be worth. Stay tuned for the answer there if, of course, Coinbase launched a token. And Solana racks up two wins on the week. They got an ETF, their first staking ETF in size out there. also Western Union launching a stable coin exclusively on Solana. There's a bit of controversy about that. And lastly, Circle Arc, layer one, remember they were doing that? They went to TestNet right now. And they're marketing? Dude, they're marketing. Pissed Ryan off. I was a little chafed. It kind of triggered me. So we'll talk about all that and more. But David, before we do, we got to talk about

20 days until the bankless summit. This is the bankless summit. Where is this happening? Where is this happening? What is it? Why are you so excited about it? This is in DevConnect. So this is the second day of DevConnect, the Tuesday. So if you're going down to Buenos Aires for DevConnect, this is, we are taking over the whole Tuesday, which is the first really day, because the first day is all of the EF day, Ethereum Day. So second day is fakely summit day. So many speakers, Tamash from the EF, Ansgar from the EF, Luca from Layer 2B is talking about native rollups. We got Mariano Conti, Arjun Buktami, a second Toluca from M0.

Donkrad, who was previously on the EF, he previously had a little Eith logo. Now he has a Tempo logo. And we're going to get some of the first words from Tempo about the relationship with Ethereum. That's going to be Donkrad's talk. I'm pretty excited for this. This is going to be the last time you are going to hear from me about the bankless summit because Ryan and other people in the crypto ecosystem are taking over the roll-ups because I'm about to be traveling. And so you have no further warnings to go get your bankless summit ticket before we sell

out. We are close to selling out. We are going to sell out. If you get yourself down to Buenos Aires and you haven't got a bankless summit ticket, you might not get one. So this is your final warning to go get your bankless summit ticket. And then we have an after party after the fact. If you buy your ticket, you'll be also emailed another link to go sign up for the bankless after party, which is happening at Fedes from Lande class, his wine bar. It's a great wine bar. Love Fedet. So we have a whole bankless day of first content then wine. It's going to be great. Sponsored by M0. Thanks for sponsoring as well. I mean, that's going to be a very high talent per capita room. You know, some L1 recruiters should probably go get there and pick themselves up some Ethereum researchers, huh? Maybe Tembo should go.

Yeah, Tempo should go. Come recruit. Yeah, I also forgot to say, Vlad from Leiter, also just signed up to speak. That is actually the first time that has been released. But Vlad is coming in all the way from Europe to hear to talk. I'm so bullish about Leiter. Like, I think they're doing L2's god's voice. way. It's Vitalik's way, dude. Same thing. Let's talk about prices first. Let's give the picture before the

FOMC meeting before Powell's speech, okay? So this is, actually, no, this is not a crypto price chart. Yeah, I was like, that's way too awesome looking to be a crypto chart. The S&P hit a high. It hit a high on Wednesday earlier this week, all-time high. So stocks are all-time high. Nasdaq similar, all-time high this week. Actually, the NASDAQ and the S&P are like pretty similar right now. It's all Mag 7.

You're looking at one trade here, which is the AI trade, of course, that dominates the markets. All time high. And then it went down. And so did crypto. So crypto is not all time high, but it was doing well up until Wednesday. So Bitcoin had recovered above 115K and Ether had recovered a little bit too. It was above a 4,000. So 4,232. And then we had recovered above 1,000. and then we got Powell's speech. And where are we right now on prices for the week? We are down on the week. Like I said earlier, we had nudged green.

So there was a moment in time where we are green on the week. And also on the month, we are now down. Both Bitcoin and Ethereum are down 1.5% on the week each, $108,000 for Bitcoin and $3,800 for ETH. Okay, so what happened? We're going to talk about that. One thing I want to say, though, David, is there's still some hope out there lurking for the gold,

catch-up trade. And this is none other than Sir Tom Lee saying it's worth keeping an eye on what happened with the gold top in 2020 and Bitcoin following that aggressively after gold topped in 2020, Bitcoin had its top just mere weeks and months later. And that same thing could be playing out right now. So we still got some gold catch-up trade. It's not happening in October. Okay? There's still a chance. We could save that for November and December. So why were we up originally? Well, it seemed like we just had some good news, right? So stocks were, you know, performing well.

CPI. There was a CPI report earlier this week for September, and it came in at about 0.3% for the month. So that was 0.1% lower than expected. So CPI was doing well. I think markets were anticipating a Fed rate cut and going in. So the week was getting bullish. and then Jerome Powell came in

and he gave his speech and what did he say? This is the tweet. He said Fed rate cuts by 25 bips second rate cut in 2025. That was according to the plan the Polygum market predicted this. There was Mirren who dissented

in favor of 50 bips that always happens. He wanted more. That's Trump's guy. Yeah, he always, he wants that. There's another one who dissented in the opposite way for no rate cuts. And then the Fed says it will stop shrinking its balance sheet on December 1st, which I'm like reading that.

I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We're going to stop shrinking the balance sheet. That means we are going to, that's like, that's effectively by pressure or the removal of cell pressure. That's right. The removal of quantitative tightening. The removal of quantitative tightening. So like QE-ish, QE adjacent.

So that's bullish. And then the Fed says downside of risks to employment has risen. so that's kind of like scary. But otherwise, it feels like an aligning of the stars. So like what's going on here? Doesn't that feel like everything we're hoping for? Yeah. I was like, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang,

let's fucking go to the moon. I thought what was the plan? How's the plan? All right. Well, I think one question before we get to why markets reacted in the opposite direction. Maybe we'll flesh out some of the things you said. So of course, the rate cuts is fairly straightforward.

25 BIPs rate cut. So that happened. But this whole quantitative tightening thing and that stopping, like what exactly does that mean? There's a question posed to Lynn Alden. They asked, is this basically money printing? Is this QE now?

What is this? Lin-Alden says it's money printing. Whether it's QE or not is more semantics. That part doesn't matter. The Fed won't ever call it QE. Of course, they won't since it's not duration and it's not for explicit economic stimulus. To take a look at the Fed balance sheet, which is what we're talking about, and QT, which

has been happening, you have to look at this chart. So this is the Fed balance sheet since 2008 or so. And you can see the regime that we've been in since 2022 is basically quantitative tightening. So the Fed balance sheet, believe it or not, I mean fiscal stimulus, fiscal dominance, U.S. debt has been skyrocketing. but the Fed balance sheet has shown some restraint since 2022. They've been tightening the balance sheet. So the balance sheet has...

The AIQ way to articulate this chart is when the line goes up, it means the Fed is buying our bags. And when the line goes down, it means the Fed is dumping on us. Well, yes, it means when the line goes up, there's money printing. They're literally printing money out of thin air. And when it goes down, they're actually burning money. So they're actually destroying money. Yeah.

Okay? This is a really interesting chart. So it was your total assets were about 8.9 million near the peak. Billion. Excuse me. Trillion. Wait, what denomination am I in? Trillions.

8.9 million millions or something like that. Yes, that's trillion. 8.9 trillion, okay, in 2022. And then we've been going down. So now we're at about 6.6. So what the Fed is basically saying, we're no longer going down. So this line will no longer go down. We'll no longer go down.

It won't necessarily go up, but it will stabilize. And if you look at this chart throughout history, David, you go back to before the great financial crisis, we were in the millions on the Fed balance sheet. This was like normal times. And then what happened you can see after the great financial crisis, we started to get, do you remember QE1, QE2, QE3? You could see that in the chart.

That was like, money printing one, money printing two, money printing three. we went from $800 billion on the Fed balance sheet to $4.4 trillion by 2014. So in the course of that was the great financial crisis. And then things smoothed out for a bit. And in fact, we got into a quantitative tightening regime. So showed some discipline, showed some constraint up to about 2019. And then there was some rockiness in the markets.

Yeah, the repo markets did not like that. That's right. And then look at this spike. What does this spike happen? COVID. COVID spike. And COVID was just the excuse of just like, yo, we need to react hard and fast

and also our constituents are going to love it if we helicopter them money. This was unlimited. Let's go to the money printer. This was unlimited QE. And basically we did it in a hurry. And then we shoot from like $4.1 trillion all the way to let's see where we were

at the top in 2022. So that's the story of this line. Where we're actually going to see the money printing is Probably not in this line. This is going to stabilize, but it's probably going to be on bank balances. All right? So what we'll see likely in the months ahead into 2026 is some additional additions to bank reserves,

which is the equivalent of Lynn Alden saying it's money printing. And that's going to go on the commercial bank balance sheets. Money printing with extra steps. Yes. So this chart will not necessarily go up, but this one probably will. And that's more money printing. So Peter Schiff has some words about this. What's he say?

He says that despite rising inflation, that's 50% above target and 4K gold. The Fed made the mistake of cutting rates again. Also, with a $6.7 trillion balance sheet, the Fed is prematurely ending QT in December. This proves Bernanke was wrong like a banana republic. The U.S. did monetize debt. Actually, can you help me understand what he means? Well, he's just saying, you know that. 6.7 trillion. That's on this chart right here, right? It's no longer going down. And if you think of

the 6.7 trillion, that's money the U.S. owes itself. Kind of weird, right? Yeah. That's money that effectively, you know, like the Fed owes treasury. Yes. And so if you add that 6.7 trillion, and then you add the 40 trillion or so, I don't know, 38, 39 trillion in U.S. debt that we have, that's our total debt. So he's just saying, like, this is the Peter Schiff talking point, right? He's just saying, now we've switched to an easy money regime. Like, we're not ready to take any of the pain that it would actually require to be more disciplined in this line over here. That's what you say. Yeah, the Bitcoin argument is that we're never, ever going to take that pain.

We're just going to inflate because it's the least painful way to solve that problem. How dare you call that? This is Peter Schiff. That's the gold argument, sir. It's not the Bitcoin argument, okay? This is the gold argument. I listen to Peter Schiff on Thread guy, and we've, we've, on an episode with Peter Schiff, and I go over to Thread Guy, I'm like, all right, thread guy,

let's see what you got. Can you get Peter Schiff off of his algorithm? Off of his gold stump, no. You can't get Peter Schiff off the stump speech. No, of course not. He's just like, he's got one mode. Yeah, I heard there was going to be a Peter Schiff, uh, uh, CZ debate. Yeah. Maybe to talk about that?

That's like pure entertainment right there. Dude. Although, we did have that episode earlier this week recorded with Luke Roman. Did that make you more bullish on gold? because that was his whole platform. It did make me more bullish on gold. Yes. Right.

Yeah. I feel that for sure. All right. Let's get back to the main thread, which is like, why did the markets pay? We still haven't answered the question why the markets went down because like we said, we're getting everything we have said so far is bullish. Why do the markets go down? Let me tell you why. Let me tell you why.

Okay. So in addition to all of the things that Paul was doing with easy money, he said in the committee's discussions in this meeting, they were strongly differing views about. how to proceed in December. Remember you mentioned those two different governors having differing views? And he said this, a further reduction in the policy rate at the December meeting is not a foregone conclusion far from it. Okay? Okay, wait. So the last time we brought up the polymarket to talk about Fed rate cuts, we were like, and then we can go to the next one. We are currently at the next one, and that, when we checked in on it, it, it was like 90% chance. The October one, one. It was a 90% chance we were going to cut 25 bips. And then we even went to the December one

and the December one has something like an 85% chance that we were going to cut 25 bips. You're saying what Powell just said is the December one. He's like there is less consensus about cutting in the December meeting than there was previously, which is actually what you're showing on the chart with Polly Market. So the odds kind of like plummeted from almost a sure thing to now just a mostly likely thing. That's exactly right. So they plummeted from 90% certainty that we'd get a 25-bip decrease in December. So this would happen December 9th and 10th, all the way down to a 70%.

And so the markets jittered that much? Yeah. It's because I'm calling shenanigans. No, it's for guidance, right? That's what the Fed is effectively given. And so everyone like reads these lines, like, listen to this, David. A further reduction in the policy rate in December meeting is not a foregone conclusion. Don't you price that in, market?

Far from it. That's what you said. And so the markets didn't like that. Yeah, I'm calling shenanigans on the market. I think the market's just being jittery, and I will stay convicted in my bullishness. I'm unfaced. I'm unfaced. I think the Fed knows exactly what it's doing when it says, hey, we are not totally sure about, like, hey, market, don't be so sure that we're going to cut.

And then in the background, they might be like, we're totally going to cut. I mean, if Powell doesn't cut, he gets fired by Trump, right? There's some immovable forces out there. I mean, and to say the market coughed up, like, it didn't really that much. So after this, S&P fell 1%. It's just we felt that a lot harder in crypto. I mean, 1% and the S&P is kind of a lot. That's a lot, but I mean, what, it's like 4% or 5% in crypto.

So it just hurt us more, didn't it? Because the markets in crypto were already jittery. Yeah, we're already in like a compromised position. Like, there is fear in the crypto markets right now, which is also kind of why I'm bullish. Okay, so somebody asked Powell. They were like, hey, Powell, is AI in a 1990-style tech bubble? What do you think he said? I don't know.

You know what he said? This is an actual quote. This is different. This time is different? He didn't say this time. He said, this is different. You said, in the sense that these companies, the companies that are so highly valued, actually have earnings and stuff like that.

Stuff like that. So Powell's like, no, there's some earnings here in contrast to, the 2000s tech bubble, it was all just like business plans and eyeballs and advertising. Yeah, you could spin up a website and IPO for like a billion dollars. That's not what's going on right now. That's what we would like to believe, right? Yeah, I don't know if anyone truly knows they're in a bubble when they're in a bubble. I actually don't like that Powell is saying that. It makes me feel like we're more likely to be in a bubble if he's saying we're not in a bubble. Yeah. Anyway, you were in crypto in 2017. In November, December of 2017,

Did you know we were in a bubble? No. Like in, well, because that was the frothiest bubble of all time. In crypto, you're talking about. In crypto, in crypto. Yeah, for those that were there, for those that remember. It was insanity. Yeah, but in those moments, everyone's so kind of like drunk, right?

I was so drunk. You just drunk on the markets. Yeah. And that's maybe why we're not in a bubble. But although so, do you see Open AI raising at one trillion, like potentially going public at one trillion? Yeah, that one. That one was like. There's some drunk people out there.

It's not in crypto. There's some drug people out there, though. Yeah. Okay, so that's the story about markets. I guess maybe one additional story that's kind of good and should be bullish, but whatever, it wasn't on the week, is their major news, Trump and President Sheev in China, the 100% tariff on China is no longer live. Apparently, they had good talks, and this is the taco trade, right?

Trump boys, chickens out. He didn't chicken out, Ryan. He was negotiating. Yes, he was negotiating. But this is the conclusion from the Kobayasi letter, this round of the U.S. China trade war is over, basically. President Xi will be visiting the U.S. after an amazing meeting that had just such a great amazing meeting, David.

And this is the thing. The whole China trade war thing was the thing that jittered the market and now people in crypto still have fear that the cycle is over. And the trade war is over. But then some crypto people are like cycles over. Yeah. Well, you know what? This was also some news on the week that didn't make me feel great,

which is like Amazon. It felt like out of nowhere, but they're like, yeah, we're going to cut 30,000 positions. 30,000. 30,000. That's like more jobs than are in crypto. I think so.

It's probably a lot more, honestly. 30,000 positions. And this is Morning Brew with some other job cuts like Target cutting 1,800 rolls, Paramount, cutting 2,000 jobs. So there's some cost cutting. And what all of these have in common, or at least this is the narrative,

is automation and AI adoption, that's the reason that some of the labor forces are being cut. This goes back to Powell's comment that, like, labor markets, I don't know, like, they're looking a little unsteady, so that's something to watch too. And I think goes into the jittery feeling, just like in general. Even though, oh my God, we're only like,

we're just off all-time highs in the stock market. Yeah. I mean, the stock market climbs a wall of worry. Like layoffs, I don't think, are that crazy, but that's a big one at the same time. I would like further analysis and information to come out about some of the reasoning behind it because like I think it's easy to say like, yeah, it's AI. But I don't know if that's really the complete truth.

Yeah, probably not. I mean, but Jeff Park makes the point. Amazon laying off 30,000 people is all you need to know of why the Fed is in this paralysis right now. And why Powell toned down some of his comments, I guess. Because they don't wait. But if there are big layoffs, he would want to cut rates though. Right? Yeah, I guess he would

So I don't know This could push them in one direction Layoffs plus a like a strong market I think it's actually It's actually kind of bullish because he's You have even more reason to cut Oh, okay You want to get to the Powell speculation game too

Huh David? Yeah, yeah yeah okay So I was wrong about the number of people that are employed by crypto I mean I don't know if anyone really knows I just asked chat GPT thinking about it thinks a decent amount. And it says what's likely today, 200 to 250,000 total jobs. What?

Yeah, wow. No way. That's big, yeah. I can't believe that. I don't believe that. Yeah. Maybe. I mean, what are they counting?

Who knows what they're counting? I have no idea. All right. I have no idea. Speaking of financial markets, I guess, in general. The Salama ETF went live. Actually, this is the big one that people were waiting for. And how did it go?

The real non-janky Solana ETFs, the one that's existed prior to this. I think technically the technical term is called Jankey. But no, we have some real ones. B-Sol has started with BitWise's Solana. $56 million of volume. Sorry, is that volume? Yeah, that was final tally of day one trading. So that's net inflows, I think.

Net inflows. Okay, so that's buying revenue. Actually, I have updated numbers. So 70 million net inflows for B-Sole. That's BitWise's one on day one. And then day two, actually 72 million. And Eric Balchina said, this is the strongest ETF launch this year. Of course, like, you know, Ethereum and Bitcoin were last year.

There's only been this one. No, there was light coin. I don't know. There's been some others, haven't there? It's kind of. I guess he's saying ETFs globally. Yeah. So, like, with a gangbuster Bitcoin and Ether ETFs,

I would expect that the Solani ETF would also have similar momentum. Yeah, and it kind of has done that, at least at first. So Bitwise, Grayscale, Franklin Templeton, those are some of the big names. Notably, EBSon is BlackRock. They're not doing a Solana ETF at this point. But James Saferich said, you have to remember, Salinas market cap is 5% of Bitcoins and 22% of Ethereum. If they keep the flows that we've seen for ETH and Bitcoin ETS. So again, we're just a couple things into this.

We don't know. But that would equate to $3 billion in flows in the next 12 to 18 months. I think that's possible. That's also a big if. Like if there is Bitcoin Ether level institutional demand, it could do this. Slauna traded down on this. This is fully anticipated. The market is priced in.

It's just down. Just the way everything else is down. Yeah. Interesting that BlackRock, of course, has Bitcoin and Ether ETFs. We've talked to the BlackRock team. They're like, yeah, we're not launching this whole ETF because we don't see sufficient demand to justify it. which gives Bitwise a way they don't have to compete with BlackRock in the Salon Market.

So I'm sure Bitwise is very happy about that. Yeah, that definitely must be nice. David, Ethereum, Eithzilla. So this is a dad, I think they were number four, number five. They sold some ether on the week. Yeah, this is the first time an ETH dat has sold Eith. And they did that after the ETHZ, which is the ticker for ETHZ, was materially under Nav for a sustained period of.

time. And so they announced that they are buying back $250 million of its shares with capital funded by selling ETH. And then that brought the premium to NAV much higher. So to be clear, they have $250 million buyback authorization. They only did $12 million. Oh, wow. But the point is they sold some ETH in order to buy back their shares. And a lot of ETH bulls were like, Dats, Ethereum Dats aren't supposed to sell. They're only supposed to buy. How dare you? That's what Tom Lee does.

He only buys, like, so far, right? Yeah. What's your take on, like, why they sold? Is this a big deal? What do you think? Yeah. I mean, if you're, the whole, in theory, as a purchaser, as investor, into one of the dats, if you buy a debt below one MNAV, you're like, well, I'm buying discounted ETH.

And because this company is totally going to sell their assets to return the MNAV to one. And so it's kind of like rational layer because in theory the stakeholder, the shareholders of Adat ought to be the first class citizens rather than the asset underneath. And the Ethereum people are like, no, no, no, no, you guys, you're supposed to just buy and hold ETH forever. You're supposed to never sell.

And so like, yeah, and so the E to Z holders, the shareholders are supposed to be the first class citizens. And so this is aligned with that, which makes sense to me. And they were happy about this. Price was up 14%, right? Closer to MNAV of 1, they're still under. but the NF was like, I don't know, 0.6 or something or 0.7? It was ridiculous.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, like, that makes sense. I think the bigger question is like the game theoretic question is like, what does this do for forward momentum of ETHSILA? Does this bolster investor confidence and lead to more people buying the ETHZ asset? Or does this make ETHSELA seem weak because they had to sell ETH, and now the total amount of ETH on the balance sheet went down.

Even though ether per share went up, total. That's the thing. Total ETH went down. You want EF per share. You want volume of trading in the stock. And you also want Total ETH to all go up. And some of those things are in conflict right now. So I don't hate it.

Whatever. What's coming up next? Coming up next, we're going to talk about the Mega Eath public sale being materially oversubscribed. We're going to talk about the Polymarket CMO confirming the Polly token. We're also going to talk about the Monad incoming token and the valuations for both Monad and Mega Eith and the base token, which is. you know, they didn't confirm the base token, but JPMorgan is. We can speculate on how valuable it is. JP Morgan is speculating on how valuable it is.

And so we're going to talk about that and more. But first, a moment is to talk about so many fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Like Uniswap, it's a browser wallet, it's a mobile wallet. It's the fastest chain in crypto. It's the best place to do defy. Let's go here from Uniswap right now. Ethereum's layer two universe is exploding with choices. But if you're looking for the best place to park and move your tokens, make your next stop Unichain.

First, liquidity. Unichain hosts the most. liquid uniswap v4 deployment on any layer two, giving you deeper pools for flagship pairs like ETHUSDC. More liquidity means better prices, less slippage, and smoother swaps, exactly what traders crave. The numbers back it up. Unichane leads all layer twos in total value locked for uniswap v4, and it's not just deep.

It's fast and fully transparent. Purpose built to be the home base for defy and cross-chain liquidity. When it comes to costs, unichane is a no-brainer. Transaction fees come in about 95% cheaper than Ethereum main net, slashing the price of creating or accessing liquidity. Want to stay in the loop on Unichain? Visit Unichain.org or follow at Unichain on X for all the updates. Imagine a world where traditional finance meets the power of blockchain seamlessly. That's what Mantle is pioneering with blockchain for banking, a revolutionary new category at the intersection of Tradfai and Web3. At the heart is

you are, the world's first money app built fully on chain. It gives you a Swiss iBan account blending fiat currencies like the Euro, the Swiss franc, the United States dollar or the Rimini with crypto, all in one place. Enjoy real world usability and blockchain's trust and programmability. Transactions post directly to the blockchain, compatible with TradFi Rails, and packed with integrated defy futures. UR transforms Mantle Network into the ultimate

platform for on-chain financial services, unifying payments, trading, and assets like the MI4, the M-Eath protocol, and functions FBTC, backed by developer grants, ecosystem incentives, and top distribution through the UR app, reward stations, and by-bit launch pool. For M&T holders,

every economic activity in UR drives value back to you, embodying the entire stack and future growth of this super app ecosystem. Follow Mantle on X at Mantle underscore official for the latest updates on blockchain for banking. That's X.com slash mantle underscore official. Introducing KGen, aka Verify, the world's largest verified distribution protocol or VDP. If you're trying to grow a real protocol or app, you need real users doing real actions. If it's not verify, it's just noise.

At the core of Verify is Poggy, KGen's identity and reputation framework. It helps you reach humans, not bots, and proves what your users actually. did so your budget goes to the right people. With Verify, you can run verified user acquisition with confidence, keeping people coming back with retention tools like loyalty rewards, quests and achievements, and even power AI training and evaluation using trusted verified user groups, ensuring your models learn from clean data. And when it's time to reward your community, there's the K-store, a global rewards marketplace where users can redeem perks that connect directly back to your app. Put simply, when growth is built on real users, you grow faster.

And that's exactly what Verify delivers. If you're building a Web 3, AI, or gaming requested demo to grow your protocol at www.kagen.io slash demo. That's www.kGEN.com. I got three of the probably most exciting tokens launching this year to talk about Mega-Eath, Polymarket. Or maybe soon to be launching. Soon to be launching? Yeah, we'll see. Yeah. Well, I said three. Mega Eth Polymarket, uh, Monad. Oh, right. Yes. Polymarket might be next year. But whatever. We're going to talk about them right now. So Mega-Eaths. ICO reached their target within minutes. So they sail for Mega-Eath hit its $50 million limit inside of just a few moments of it being launched.

And then the allocations continue to flow in. So it was like a three-day-long sale or whatever. We are now 28X over subscribed. How is the sale conducted? This wasn't like a 2017 ICO, right? Was this on Kobe's platform? Yes, this was on Kobe's platform Sonar, which is the more public version of Echo, which is where Echo started.

So this is a public ICO. So you had to be an accredited U.S. investor or a non-U.S. investor. And then you had to kind of go through a K.Y.C. process. And you had to pass a test of investor sophistication. So there were some frictions. You know, the ICOs of old were like, send ETH here and get back tokens. And I don't care who you are. It may have been illegal.

It may have been slightly illegal, but it was fun. Well, you think this is fun, too, right? Like you think this is a good thing. I saw you tweeting on this. I seeos are back. I seeos are just like, you remember when we did the whole like air dropping farm meta? So like we had air drops, which are great, but then they got abused. And then we had the points and that was okay, but then they got abused.

Everything has gotten abused. Yeah. And I feel bad for some of the orgs that like had to deal with this like being the brunt of the abuse because they had to deal with inferior token distribution mechanisms because that's just the environment that they were created in. Thanks, Gary. ICOs are just an ungameable token distribution mechanism. And they just ask retail investors like, hey, put your money where your mouth is.

Like, are you bullish this thing? Or are you just farming the token on Twitter and on Discord? It is cool. I mean, it does kind of suck that we have accredited investor laws though, right? Yes, agree. Because that's just like that totally limits it. But that's the law. That's the law.

The law should go away, but that's the law that we have. Yeah. So this is better than that. And your experience was good with this. Were they underpricing these tokens in the ICO as well? I mean, you tell me. They priced the sale between $1,99 million valuation. And so the idea is like when you submitted your bid,

you could submit up to $186,000. The speed of light was the fun fact. It was like the speed of light was like the limit. Of how much you could invest. Of how much you could invest. And you would also price. You would also price it. And then enough people priced it at $999 million that likely anyone below that is not going to have their bid accepted.

Oh, okay. So that was basically everyone bought it in at a billion. I'll round that to a billion dollars. Yes. Yes. The reason why it's $999 million is because they wanted it to be not a unicorn. So retail investors could buy in a pre-unicorn valuation. Oh, technical.

Technical. Technical for unicorn, yeah. But this is probably under valuation, right, considering that kind of the futures markets right now that are valuing this higher than the billion? Correct. We'll talk about the futures markets after we talk about Monad. But yes, you are correct. This is coming in undermarket, which is why it's oversubscribed so much, because everyone's

like, oh, the futures market are pricing this way higher. This is at least a 3x. So I'm going to go max bid. Wow. This participation is blowing my mind. Is this true? 100,000 users, KYC, over 70,000 Twitter users? 100,000 participated in this?

Yeah, I think crypto is bigger than we're giving it credit for, dude. Maybe we do have 260,000. I mean, this is inclusive of Asia, too. So, like, Mega-Eath has pretty good Asia connections. So, like, all of Asia is getting involved with this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 5% of the tokens were sold, of the total supply. Okay.

And so, yeah. And then if you accepted a one-year lock-up, you got a 10% discount. And if you were an American citizen, you had to accept the 10-year lock-up, or, excuse me, one-year lock-up. Yeah. And so right now the ball is in the Mega-Eath court, so they have all the bids. And so now they are manually,

going through and like approving or denying people based on who they are, their on-chain activity. And so if you were like, for example, a depositor into the Caps program, shout out to anyone who listened to that bankless episode, you got favorable allocation. Wow. Because it's a mega-Eath project, yeah. It's a mega-Eath project.

Yeah. So there were some criteria to boost your chance of having an increased allocation. That's great. I saw some estimates of what the FDV could end up at. But of course, it's probably bullish people who are looking at this. But this one account was trying to project actual revenue. So this is supposed to be a rev generating token, right? And I don't know, you could read all the details.

We'll include a link in the show notes. But in the base case, this person says about $300 million a revenue per year is what Mega-Eath could off put, which means 10 billion FDV. So if that's the case, people got to steal on this. I don't know how he's backing into that valuation. Might take some time to play up. Let's just say that. Okay.

Next up, talking about Polly Market. So this is an interview on a podcast with Matthew, the Polymarket CMO. Let's go hear what he said. There will be a token. There will be an air draw. And look, I think, I think, you know, we really proud ourselves on being the most thorough company. We hope to be in the world, right? That was it.

That was it. We didn't really need to listen to this. second half of that is like there's going to be a token, there's going to be anirdrop. Like, okay. Confirmed. Sounds good. I mean, it was tweeted out by Shane last week, but now we have somebody who just said, yeah, there's going to be a token.

The most nonchalant token announcement I've ever seen in crypto, yeah. You know, this will probably be, I think our notes are correct about this. This is probably going to happen at the similar time that Polymarket officially opens to U.S. users. That would make a lot of sense, right? That sounds like this year. That sounds like this year. There's also going to be an app.

The Polymarket app is coming. Yep. A lot of cool things happening in Polymarket. Yep. We'll see what that one trades for. I was writing the New York subway. Ryan, just going, because I live in New York. And Colchiettes are everywhere.

Oh, really? Yeah. They're doing the whole Mom Donnie versus Cuomo. Oh, yeah. And it's actually kind of cool to be riding the subway and see Mom Donnie at like 87% in Cuomo to be at 13%. I mean, those numbers aren't cool. cool, but that's aside. The fact that

that I'm riding the subway and seeing a polymark where are you seeing this? Are these like digital updated? They're digital ads on the subway. Yeah, and so it's like, oh, I'm in this, my city and like there's a prediction market data in my subway. That's actually kind of cool. Welcome to the future. Yeah, it feels very futuristic. Oh, shoot, I'm showing, I'm showing

my box on mod ad. How many tokens? I've seen the tokens. Let's see the tokens. It's not, I mean, it's okay, right? I don't, I open these things. I got 88,000 mon. Okay, I don't know if that's good or not. Well, you can open yours. This is the third token, right? The third token? The third, yeah.

So Monad is doing like three days of Monad or something, like three loop boxes. It's like it feels like very much like a lottery or loot. Yeah, like. It's a fun. It's a video game. It's a scratch off. Monad scratch off. I'm pretty sure the numbers of Monad that you're getting were determined pre, like, preemptively, but like you do your little like loopbox.

So it's a PSA for that. Go check. Yeah, PSA, go get there your Monad air drop. People are people who were not expecting. to get the Monad AirDrop, got the Monad AirDrop, so go get it. So are we ready to compare these two things? Because we have perpetual futures for both Monad and Mega-Eath. Which, Ryan, do you think is coming in higher?

Well, I already know the answer to this. Which listener do you think is coming in high? Everyone place your bets. It's the one I would have guessed. Oh, really? Interesting. Yeah, I would have guessed Monad. Okay, so $5.62 billion fully diluted for Monad. and $4.3 billion fully diluted for mega-Eath.

So pretty close. And these numbers are so preliminary. Futures markets are not accurate price discovery mechanisms. It's not much liquidity up there. It's something to go off of. It's fun to talk about. It's kind of a high, like I think it's much higher than the actual spot markets are going to be.

You think so? These things launch. I do think so. Yeah. But the reason I said Monad hires because I still think there's a little bit of that L1 premium in the air. Yeah, the pendulum between L2 and L1 premium is on the L1 side. That's right. I think so. It gets a little boost from that maybe so. But I mean, they're comparable. Should we talk about the base token? All right? So hypothetically, remember Jesse? We played that whole clip a few weeks ago and he was like, they are looking into exploring and network token.

Yeah, we're exploring. Well, I guess JPMorgan has been exploring what the price might be for the base token. And they have some numbers for you. All right? Have you seen, can I get you to guess what the number is or have you already seen it? I've already looked at it. All right. I'm not going to make you guess then. All right. Let me guess. Let me guess. I'll guess.

Is it $34 billion? Yes, you're right. J.B. Morgan says the base token could be worth $34 billion. So they forecast it could go from 12 to 34. So 34 is on their high side. Over time, let's say. This is based on the current base network usage and some token economics assumptions.

Their thesis is that Coinbase would launch this, that they would, Coinbase would take 40% of the supply, and the other 60% would be, I don't know, airdrop given to the community, like who knows, how do we do these things? And as a result, analysts at JPMorgan have upgraded

Coinbase's stock price to 404 from the current price at the time, which was 355. So a lot going on here. Like, will base have a token? If it does, how valuable would it be? $34 billion would be a lot

considering arbitram is like, I don't know, $4 billion, something like that, that's a layer two. We just talked about Mega E, the layer two price is like $4 billion as well. So that would be a lot. Coinbase gaining 40% of that. But then Wall Street, like looking at layer twos and being like, oh, my God, this is adding massive value to the stock price. And they're learning about it too. So a lot going on there.

What do you think of those estimates? I mean, so if it's $34 billion, that puts it at number seven in the FDV of the crypto market cap, right behind Solana at $113 billion. Excuse me, sorry, seven is USDC, 8 is Lido-staked Ether at $32 billion. You got to ignore the staple coins, I feel like. Yeah, so yeah, well, then tether's also gone. So it would go Bitcoin, Ether, B&B, XRP, Salana, base. Wait, wait, wait, are you sure you're doing this by FDV or are you done this by market cap?

Oh, I might be doing this by market cap. So it would go Bitcoin Ether, XRP, BNB, Salana. hyperliquid and then base and then tron that's how we go there yeah at the fdv yeah 45 billion dollar ftv yeah okay okay how does that feel that feel right yeah it feels a little expensive you a buyer i'm not i'm not i'm not i wouldn't be buying that token all right well good news is you'll have time because they're just exploring it so you have time decide whether you're buying not coming up next we got trump about to watch a prediction market because of course, but Democrats are trying to block him in all ways, crypto. Also, the CFTC got a new chairman.

Who is it? Is this person good for crypto? And some impressive traction. I want you to tell me about, David, on the X402 payment standard, which we've been supremely bullish on. And we'll tell you why we're excited. So all this and more. But before we get there, I want to thank our sponsors at Frax for giving you a decentralized central bank. Stay tuned to hear more about FACs. And we'll be right Introducing FraxUSD, the genius-aligned digital dollar from Frax. It's secure, stable, and fully backed by institutional-grade real-world assets, custodyed by BlackRock, Superstate, and fidelity. It's always redeemable one-to-one, transparently audited,

and built for payments, defy, and banking. The best of all worlds. At the core is FraxNet, an on-chain fintech platform built to align with emerging U.S. regulatory frameworks, where you can mint, redeem, and use FraxUSD with just a few clicks. Deposit U.S.DC, send a bank wire, or tokenize, treasuries and receive programmable digital dollars straight to your wallet. Fraxnet users benefits from the underlying return of U.S. Treasuries and earn just by using the system. Whether you're bridging, minting, or holding your FRAX USD works for you.

Prax isn't just a protocol. It's a digital nation, powered by the FRAX token and governed by its global communities. Join that community and help shape Frax Nation's future by going to frax.com slash R slash bankless. FRAX, designed for the future of compliant digital finance. Bit Digital, ticker BTBT, is a publicly traded ETH Treasury Company that combines the two biggest metas of our time. Ethereum and AI compute. Bit Digital believes that ETH will power finance and AI compute will power everything. Bit Digital gives you direct exposure to both.

Bit Digital holds more than 150,000 ETH with institutional grade staking and validator operations. On top of that, the company owns roughly 73% of white fiber, an AI infrastructure business that runs high-performance GPU data centers that adds a meaningful exposure to the growth of AI compute with over 27 million shares. This is an ETH Treasury backed by real operations designed to capture staking yield today while positioning for the future of intelligent computing tomorrow. The ticker is BTBT. This ad is not financial advice.

Do your own research. Learn more about Bit Digital and try their MNAV calculator at bit-digital.com. That's bit-hyphen digital.com. Bankless is being compensated by Bit Digital for this ad. You can find out more information by clicking the link in the show notes. More chains to talk about. We're going to talk about Circles Arc, the EVM Layer 1, that is going to public test, Net. So if you don't know where Arc is, that's a circle's dedicated payments chain, which they described as the economic operating system for the internet, fostering a platform shift as profound as the launch of the internet itself and subsequent revolutions of social, mobile, cloud, and AI. So no, it wasn't Bitcoin. It wasn't Ethereum. It wasn't Salana. It wasn't waiting for this. It wasn't. It wasn't hyper. It wasn't hyper. It wasn't hyper.

It wasn't hyperliquid. It is ARC. Arc is going to be the economic operating system that's going to be equivalent to the subsequent revolutions of social mobile cloud and AI. Wow. I found this marketing speak, just like you, David, supremely annoying and slightly triggering.

Okay? This is like, okay, so ARC, they're doing a layer one. Fine. Do a layer one. Tempo's doing it. Like EVM. Maybe you need that because of stable coins because layer two's lack some functionality,

maybe it's not a skill issue. Maybe you really do need a layer one, and it's not about getting an L1 premium. But then when you come out and your marketing speak says the economic OS for the internet as profound as the launch of the internet itself and social media, mobile cloud, and AI all combined? Wow.

I don't know. Where's that South Park if of them smelling their own farts? There's an element of that. And I don't know. Like this could be just a marketing guy like running ahead of, you know, just running it hot here. But it's just kind of annoying to me

because Circle's been in the space forever. USDC has been in the space forever. They're not like Stripe. They're not Johnny Come Lately's. They know about decentralization. They know about property rights. They know about public chains. And to just be like, guys, we solved it.

We got the layer one. That's going to be the economic OS for the entire internet. Right? Like, we figured it out. it out and like launching with like a permission validator set i don't know i like on the section they they have the section on the road to distributed governance they don't even say decentralized they're just saying yeah just distributed or that's distributed is good enough that's good use that terminology okay yeah that can be your word yeah you guys be distributed tell me about

x402 there's there's word on the street that there was a 200 000 percent growth in the x402 standard this week. That is a true statement, Ryan. You have your facts correct. Yeah, so that's what happens when the X402 payment standard, maybe we can speed run through history. X402 was this like, like, what would you even call it? It's mainly for agenic payments, but so. But it goes all the way back to the creation of like the web browser. You know how you load a website and it fails? You get a 404 error. Right, exactly. That's a standard in the internet. X402. Or 402 was supposed to be the payment standard. Never got implemented.

PayPal never got around to it. So right now it's like 402 payment not satisfactory, like payment not satisfied. Yeah. Because we didn't have payments. You can't put a credit card in there. Well, technically you can, but like, not, you can't really. We didn't have micro payments. We didn't have the building.

Because are very important. That's right. But in the year of our lower 2025, we have stable coins and we have micro payments. We have fast, cheap blockchain. So now we can actually fulfill the missing niche in the Sudoku puzzle of the Internet. internet with X402. So X4O2 is this payment standard that's being developed by Coinbase to use stable coins on base, but also Solana or any other EVM chain to like if you are loading up a website, you might be requested like, okay, to finish loading all of this data, you've got to pay me some

money. Yeah. And the big thing is agent's use of this, like AI use of this because it's all just machine to machine microtransactions, right? Yes. Yes, there's going to also be human use of this too, but I think it's the automated agenic use of X-R-O-2. That's really the new thing. That's the net new thing. So how did we go 200,000% growth? It's because we went from 25 historical X-402 transactions just a few weeks ago. No, no, no.

Nope. 25. Okay. 25 transactions to 3 million transactions and $3 million in settled volume in three weeks. That's cool. Okay, so maybe I said week over week. Maybe it was month over month or something, but whatever. After this one website launched called X-Fur-O-2 scan,

an X-Fer-O-2 scan is something like the kind of doing like the Google thing of like indexing all of the X-402 compatible websites and resources and all that kind of stuff. So it's archiving all the, yeah. So he called it resources, he being this guy that I interviewed, which will be about on the bankless podcast shortly Sam from Merit Systems. And so I'm sure you're asking, right, how did it grow 200,000 percent? week over month over month.

Yeah, that's one question. Mem coins? Okay. Of course, of course. 99% of the activity was meme coins. But the story behind that is like, it's a bootloader. It's a bootloader. Like people don't know what to do.

So they're like, you know what? What resource will I have people buy if they load up this website? And like, I'll make them buy five cents to my meme coin. And so like that was dead. It was just tinkering around. But then also like once some person said like, oh, there are meme coins here? Let me go buy them for real. and then it got then the flywheel started happening and so this is to me the shot across the bow the

the firing pistol the starting pistol of an actual real x402 agentic payments system because before this whole meme coin mania in the f x402 ecosystem there were something like you know five or 10 like different economic resources and i'll talk about what those are that you could call and now there has been an influx of actual real new resources that you can call with X402. And so here's here's some of the things that you can do. There's like AI and LLM inference and enrichment. And so you can now call things like ChatGBT,

like Claude, and you don't need to sign up. You know, you can just call their API. And you just pay microtransactions. And you pay micro transactions. Yeah. The guy that I interviewed Sam, he was really a big fan of just like, call the Chatubt LLM, get them to generate a generative image. at the same time call the Stripe API to get that image put onto a shirt

and then have that shirt sent to me. What? Yeah. And by the way, so a human could initiate that call or an AI agent can initiate that call. So you're typing into your AI browsers like, hey, make an image of like whale doing something and then put it on a shirt and then send it to my friends. Yeah, so if you type that in a chat, DIP, I'd be like, of course, David, I just need access to your crypto wallet, right? And then you give it access to like $5.

or whatever, and then it would just go buy all the stuff and make it happen. Yes, you pay for the resources, yeah. And like data and APIs, weather markets, prediction markets, other things, anything you can think of. And that was really the exciting thing of, like, the amount of developer creativity here is limitless about what they could do with X402. So I think I'm going to get you on board with me, Ryan. We are calling for an X402 summer.

Supercycle. X4A2 super cycle. This is a starting pissing. It's only going to get crazier if you're here. And I think it's going to be something to pay attention to. It's a big deal. It's not just crypto. It's just like, so a lot of the...

It's the internet. It's the internet. It's happening on base right now, which is really cool. But Cloudflare, remember? They got involved. Google has integrated into their AI agent toolkit. This is going to be a big deal. It's something I think we're going to track.

Bold, bare market, whatever. The devs are going to build on top of this thing. Mike Selig. Congratulations to Mike Selig. We had him on bankless, actually. So we know who this is. I had him on talking about securities law back in like two years ago. Former chair of the CFTC and then he went into work in law in the crypto space.

Now he's back at the CFTC. And so now he is the CFTC chair for crypto oversight. So that's huge news for us. Crypto-native guy, very smart, very savvy. And yeah, this is like a big win. The alternative was Brian Quinn-Tens, also crypto-native, also savvy. Also on the bankless podcast. Also on the bankless podcast.

They actually only went through. They were like, which previous podcast guest on Bankless can we hire in this position? And that was our selection. That's right. That's right. Could have been you or me. No. No, no, no, no, no.

This is bullish for crypto. Brian Selig is bullish for crypto. He knows the space. Mike Selig. Mike Selig. Mike Selig. Sorry, Mike. Yeah, I think this is great.

Very exciting. Excited to see what happens as a result of this. David Sachs tweeted out. President Trump has made an excellent choice in Mike Seleck, which will lead the CFDC. Mike is deeply knowledgeable about financial markets and passionate about modernizing our regulatory approach in order to maintain America's competitiveness in the digital asset era. Speaking of passions, David, Trump is passionate about doing every single thing he can in crypto these days.

So this week, Trump Media is entering the prediction markets business, okay? Competing against Kalshi, competing its polymarket and doing their own thing through Trump media. So that's the news on the week. There's no app behind this yet. There's no kind of substance behind it. Well, I think it gets, I think it gets integrated into truth social. So this is, truth predict is the, is a platform about democratizing information and empowering everyday Americans to harness the wisdom of the crowd, turning free speech into actionable foresight, embedded it into truth social. So users will be able to bet on sports, politics, commodity prices, and more directly within the platform. So I think this is a part of his already

pre-existing social media platform. Is there anything in crypto Trump doesn't have right now? I guess he doesn't have his own layer one. Maybe he should. Doesn't have Trump chain. Trump chain. Could happen. Should we produce the Trump crypto bingo card?

Oh my God. We totally should. It's already got a lot of dots on it. NFT collection. Let's see. He's got the ETFs. What else? He's got the borrowing lending protocol.

Yes. Yeah. He's got the prediction market. He just doesn't have the chain. He needs the layer one. Where's the EVM layer one? That's what we need. No, no.

We need a new operating system for the internet. That should be in the polymarket is does Trump launch of layer one or layer two? Oh, layer two. Imagine if he was like, no, it's, you know, layer ones are scans. I'm going to go with the layer two. Well, speak of scams, U.S. Congressman Rokana, who is actually a very... Another big his podcast guest. Yes.

But he is crypto-favorable. He's a Democrat in Congress. He's always from pro-dropto. He actually has had kind of enough of this stuff. of Trump launching things in crypto. And so he's introducing a bill that bans the president. Well, I don't know if the prediction market. I actually don't know if that's true or not.

Well, ignore the prediction market. All the other things that we have been talking about, like the meme coin on the bingo card, right, that bans the president and elected officials from owning or creating cryptocurrencies. I haven't read the details of this bill, but this is a Democrat, a backlash that was like obviously going to come. Somebody who's crypto favorable. It's interesting coming from that. I don't agree with not owning crypto.

I don't agree with that. If that's the case. Creating crypto, I can get behind that. Maybe. It depends on how you, I mean, I don't know. Creating a meme coin. I don't know. There's some squishy area that.

What do you mean to creating mean coin? That's the thing I don't want. A president should not pay a meme coin. I agree with the way it's been done today. But like, I don't know, your creator coin on Sora. Like, there's some weird blending that I just like, I just think that the president. I think you are finding some exceptions. But I think the broad rule is that, yeah, don't make cryptocurrencies as the president.

It definitely don't trade them. It just should be put all this stuff in a blind trust. If you hold crypto assets, put in a blind trust. Anyway, that's some of the backlash that's coming down the pike there. Pretty predictable, I would say. David, Western Union. Okay? This is the group that, what you call it?

Western Union, you go to a Western Union, right? And it's all about, you know, moving funds. What's the word I'm looking for? Remittance. Remittance, of course. It's all about remittance. This is how people have done remittance for, I don't know, 100 years or so. Well, they're getting into cryptocurrency.

So they're doing a stable coin, and it's on Solana. So big Solana victory lap around that. It's actually kind of a big deal because Western Union remittances were always a thing we wanted to do in crypto, right? Yeah, Western Union is like one of those boogeymen about like why we need crypto. And it would actually make sense that like, well, well, if Western Union's going to get disrupted by stable coins. Maybe they should have just adopt stable coins.

So that makes sense to me. Okay. So this seemed like a big win for Solana. And indeed it is. Western Union. The CEO says like, look, this is a clip. We're not going to play the clip. But he's like, we looked at all the alternative blockchains.

It came to one conclusion. Dot, dot, dot. The Salana blockchain was the right choice for us, right? You know, speed, all the things that Solana preaches, it's the right choice. All right. On the back of this, I noticed my timeline in Crypto-Twitter. I didn't get involved. I don't feel like getting involved with this.

I don't know what you know about this, but there was some allegations. Here's a deleted tweet. I can't even if I. There's some allegations that the reason Western Union went with Solana was because the Salana Foundation wrote a check to Western Union, in the form of an investment or something, to just incent them to partner with Solana

and be exclusive on Solana for some period of time, six-month period of time. Again, this is a rumor, but this caused some back and forth. Do you have, pick up the story from here. Yeah, yeah. So it seems to be that there's a pretty clear level of detail that has gotten circulated around crypto Twitter. And the details that people are saying

was that the Salana Foundation paid Western Union $25 million for like the development of this program. So like if you guys do this, we'll pay you $25 million to do this. And then in addition to that, another $25 million to bootstrap the stable coin that Western Union is producing the USPT stable coin. And so then people see that clip from the Salana person and be like, we looked around all the blockchains and we chose Solana because it's the best.

Yeah. And then Western Union guy. Western Union said this. And they're like, did you do that or did they just pay you $25 million to do this? So like there's a little bit of dishonesty around that. If that's the case, again, we don't know the details here. We don't know if there's a payment or not other than the fact that there seems to be pretty clear specific details of like the $2.25 million payments.

A couple people on Twitter went out and said, well, here are the terms of the details, again, without, like, explicitly having the actual deal. There was much thing. Yeah, there was, like, chain muslinging. And so, I'll make a few statements. This is rational BD behavior from the chains. Optimism did this with Coinbase and B. Arbitrum did this with Robin Hood. These are smart BD things that chains are doing to grow themselves, and that makes sense that we do them.

What's irksome about these types of deals globally across crypto is that we as the market don't get to know about the details inside of these deals. Instead, they just kind of emerge from the whisper networks as crypto and then we're kind of left to speculate on like what's true and what's not true. All the chains are incented to pretend it's all organic adoption, right? Pretend it's organic.

And look, the Western Union person said, we selected Solana. It's like that's not what happened. And you got paid for it. You did select, yes. Yeah, you got paid 50, million dollars to select salana. Allegedly, allegedly, we don't know the numbers.

Allegedly, if this were Web 2, the announcement would look something like Western Union is building its payment system on Solana alongside a $25 million investment from Solana to build out the development and also another 25 million investment from Salana into the USPD stable coin. Yeah. But this is where Web 3 chains are like incentivized to make this appear as organic as possible. What's uniquely frustrating about this one is that it seems like the details have been sufficiently leaked.

And the Salana representative leadership are saying, like, that's just completely fabricated and false. Like who? So the one person that you just had on the screen, who's a Salana exec said, both made up entirely fictional, that guy. Yeah. Yeah. Entirely fictional.

So the response is 25 million plus 25 million in liquidity. And he said both made up entirely fictional. from the Salonet Foundation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, like, Lily Lou, who's the president of the Salonah Foundation, responded to the claim of, like, a $50 million investment into the project with, like, the $1 billion Austin Powers Giff. Okay.

I'm just like making a farce of it. Sure. And then like Mert, who replied to the person who put out this accusation in the first place, he says, the details of this are extremely off. And I'm like, okay. What are the details? Then what are the details? What are the details?

I mean, can we please? know what the details are so we can know as the market. And like, this is me pointing at Solana. I would also have liked to know the details of the arbitram. Do we know the details of that? No, we don't. We do. We know through inference that there was a deal. We know, we do know the details of the optimism-based deal, actually. Those were actually made public because it was nice. It was nice to know that. That was nice. The idea of there's not a deal or the details are extremely wrong and not actually being informed

of what the deal is. And then also being made to appear that this is organic is kind of what, like, that's what I don't like. Yeah, I don't know. I don't have a strong take on any of it. I guess I just, I saw some Solana versus Ethereum like back and forth.

And there is an element of the L2s do this as well. Yeah. I will say, like, if the Ethereum Foundation ever did this, that, like, I don't, like, that is not a, to me, you're at, when you see, start doing this sort of thing, you're acting much more like a fintech company. Yes. Right. Which is why I said this is smart BD work from these chains. For a fintech companies. For a fintech

company, which is what Solana is. And so are the layer two chains. They're basically, their fintech companies with Ethereum grade property rights is what they are. And so in my, like, you know, way of looking at crypto, I see a layer one do this and I'm like, that's a fintech company. You know, whatever. What a boomer take, huh? What a boomer take. David, we got to finish out this episode with a few, maybe just, we'll go through a drive-by. There's six things, but acquisitions, banks, IPOs, some news on the week. Okay, first, on the acquisition side of things, Avey acquired stable finance.

If you've not heard of stable finance, this is like Avey, which is interesting, started as a defy protocol, moving into consumer-friendly defy. So stable is a stable coin savings app. It makes it super easy to go from your bank to AmeoBank. Kind of a neobank. And so this is a little bit of an aqua hire, getting into consumer tech. One of the themes this cycle has been acquisitions. It's interesting to see crypto-native companies starting to do these acquisitions.

This is another one actually, Farcaster and Clanker. I mean, you brought put Clanker on my radar. What is this? I was an early Clanker bowl. Clinker is an account that you can add on Farcaster saying, hey, Clanker, make me a token with this ticker and with this image. Yep. And then it will give you some sort of like,

kind of like existential dready response. It's like, ah, another token. I hope it entertains you in this brief moment. It's a mean coin launch pad via like chat bot, right? Chia bed, yeah, but it's a Twitter account or so it's a Farcaster account. It's kind of funny. Yeah. Yeah.

So Farcaster bot clanker, basically. It's kind of the new. It's been interesting to see, I don't know if you're looking at Farcaster, but doing great things in their wallet. They're evolving into a sort of a crypto native social media. more doubling down on that. Doing all the token stuff, doing all the NFT stuff. Makes sense.

Okay, so acquisitions happening in crypto. Banks, all right, banks entering crypto. This time it's more than PR. We're going to drive by this, but Zell, okay? I know you have a Wells Fargo account. I know you do. You ever use Zell? Yeah, like, unfortunately, it sucks.

It's like pay landlords and pay, you know. Not even. My landlord. Actually, my landlord takes a check, and I actually just prefer that. Okay. It's better UX than Zell. That's how much David hates Zell. Well, they're doing a stable coin.

Okay. Zell is, Wells Fargo is. Zell is used by a bunch of banks, including Wells Fargo, 150 Americans on Zell. So no details on this yet. 150 million Americans? Yes. 150 million.

I mean, I could go either way. 150 million. So banks, I think they're actually serious about it. I think banks are like, we're not going to get left behind from stable coins. So let's put stable coins. let's put stable coins inside of Zell. That's how fake is getting catch up.

I didn't say it would be great UX, okay? This is another bank. What's this? This is a Coinbase and City partnership. Coinbase and City are working data to create a new digital asset payment solutions for institutions. They plan to use City's payment network and Coinbase's digital asset expertise

to offer these services worldwide. So they are focusing on enhancing Fiat on and off ramps to allow city's institutional customers to switch between fiat and digital assets through Coinbase's infrastructure. So, City in the front, Coinbase in the back. There you go. Brian Armstrong says,

Cryptone stable coins are the tools. It's not a debate anymore. We're going to update the financial system. So there you go. Okay, so that's acquisitions, banks, now IPOs. Actually, two interesting ones. This was, I didn't think about this one, but it totally makes sense in retrospect.

So Securitize. Here we had Carlos on, CEO of Securitize. They're doing Biddle Fund. They're doing all the real world asset stuff. In fact, if you go on the real world asset analytics platform. They're like the leading platform. Oh, that's a good looking chart, dude.

I like that chart. Yeah, 4.5 billion in real world assets. Anyway, Securitize is IPOing. Cool. It's a good time for them to IPO, right? Yeah. They might get some of that love from TradFi that went into circle, right? They're like, oh, stable coins.

The Securitize can be like, well, we have the next thing, which is real world assets. $1.25 billion dollar IPO. Nice. And yeah, do you have any predictions on this? You think this is going to launch hot? I mean, in the same way that, like, institutions want access to, like, some investment themes or narratives and they need the right vehicle to do it, like real world assets is one of those narratives. Like, we saw what happened with Circle. Everyone in crypto was like, I'm bearish circle.

The revenue doesn't justify it. And then at 5x because people need exposure to stable coins. And now if people want exposure to real world assets, they can do this. And I was snooping around on our YouTube metric backend of Ryan. You know what is a sleeper video that's actually? actually in like our top 20 most popular videos. I have no idea. I never go there.

I'm super curious. We recorded it a year ago with Robert Leschner and we titled it tokenizing real world assets. Oh, yeah. And the SEO on that is what we need it to be because that thing, the chart on that thing is just has ground. It doesn't go flat. It just grinds up because people are typing in real world assets into YouTube. I think as people like get comfortable with stable coins, they're going to move down the line.

They're going to go into real world assets. I think we found the title. of the roll-up today, tokenizing real-world assets in October 2025. That's one IPO. Interesting. Also, upcoming consensus IPO. So this was more formally announced. That is interesting. Goldman Sachs, the big guns are coming in for this one. It don't have a date yet, but that's happening. JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, all right? And when I think about consensus and their core assets, it's like really three to me, right? Metamask, for sure. In Fuera for some of the infrastructure and Linnea, they're L2.

Those are kind of the golden eggs, I guess, of that Joe Lubin laid in consensus. With some love from S-Bed, of course. It's backed by some of the Lubin Capital in the S-Bet, Sharp-Link gaming, Ethereum Treasury's strategy. That's going to be an interesting one to watch for sure. I don't know what the financials look like. Yeah. Consensus has...

They've been bloated at times. Cleaning up the consensus books to get ready for IPO. Must have been a gargantuan effort Because, dude, they were paying people in ETH As they should have been back in the old days. They were building up a company that was not thinking about going public. And I'm sure whoever was their accountant

to make their books make sense at all had to rip their hair out for years to make this happen. But the trend here, David, is, we can't just look at crypto-native assets anymore if we want full exposure in crypto. We've got to have some brokerage accounts, I guess, stocks. until our equities come on chain for sure. So that's happening right now.

Ripped to all the consensus equity holders that never got their equity from 2016 to 2020. That's a deep, that's a little bit of a deep cut. Wish David well because he is going to Patagonia, I believe, in just a few hours' time. David, come back to us, man. Go find a bull market somewhere up in the mountains. I'm looking for it.

It's up to us, please. We need some help in November. and you'll be there. So, well, we'll see you. I guess a little bit later. I'm gone for two weeks. I'll be back to the third week of November. And then I'm gone again for one more week.

And then I'm back. Gotta let you know, of course, climbing mountains the way David does it, is super dangerous. Crypto is also risky, though, in a different way. You could lose what you put in. I hope David doesn't lose anything. We are headed west.

This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.