Bankless - ROLLUP: Memecoin Mania | Tornado Cash Win! | Pro-Crypto Trump Cabinet | Justin Sun & WLFI

Starting point is 00:00:03 Bagel Station is the last week of November. This is the week of Thanksgiving. So we're recording this on Wednesday, November 27, the case we get some of the prices a little bit delayed for you. You're probably hearing it on Friday. And the United States, this would be Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving, David. How you doing, man?

Starting point is 00:00:22 Good. Good. I'm back home in Seattle. Once again, in the room that I discovered Crypto Inn. It's always a little bit nostalgic to be back here. It was a different era back when I was assembling mining rigs in 2017. You're just telling me that that's what you're doing, just like over to the right of you, over your shoulder. Just to my right.

Starting point is 00:00:39 Yeah, just pulling my hair out, figuring out how to get six GPUs on the same computer to work. Jeez, those were the days, huh? That was hard when you had to actually mine to get your crypto. You can't just like stake it. You can trust buttons. Yeah, you had to assemble hardware. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:00:57 Well, we've got a lot to be thankful for on the roll up today. I think in crypto today. One thing I am thankful for is bankless. citizens. We appreciate you guys. I know we say this every year, Thanksgiving time, but you are the reason we do this podcast and have kept up. God, four years of straight roll-ups. I don't know how many that is, but 50 times times like four. I mean, we've got to be over 200. We should go count some time, but that's a lot. And you guys have been with us the entire time. So I'm thankful for bankless listeners today and bankless citizens. There's a strong contingent of bankless listeners out there who

Starting point is 00:01:30 proudly beat their chest whenever they like come up to me or you at permissionless or in real world and just say I have never missed a weekly roll-up. Wow. And I'm like, wow, that is a lot of content. That's a lot. Wow. And you know what? We have never missed a weekly roll-up.

Starting point is 00:01:45 We have never missed a weekly roll-up. Every single Friday. Every single Friday. We're just talking about. Big shout out to Anthony Susanna, who taps in every once in a while as needed to make sure that that streak keeps on going. But yes, Bankless has never missed a weekly roll-up. That's the only way we could do it.

Starting point is 00:01:58 You can hear Murphy in the background. dog. I'm just going with it because it's the holidays. Murphy has also never missed a weekly rollout. Yeah, no, he's, usually we edited it out. We're not going to edit it out. One other person I'm thankful for, David. You, my co-host, David Hoffman. Oh, thanks, man.

Starting point is 00:02:12 I was going down memory lane, actually, and I went up in our DMs to the very first DM, the very first time we exchanged a message. And here it is. Your first message to me, actually, in DM, Twitter DMs. I do not understand the resistance to Ethereum on behalf of so many Bitcoiners. It is utterly confusing to me. That was December 1st, 2018. So what is that?

Starting point is 00:02:34 Six years ago, pretty much, like pretty close to the day. And I replied, I said, I've been trying to figure it out as well. At core, the value system appears so similar. I don't know why. We spoke very formally back then. This is officially our first DM. Yeah, I think that's a lot of bankless is downstream of that vibe. of understanding Bitcoiner values,

Starting point is 00:02:59 cypherpunk ethos that Bitcoiners definitely espouse and put into their blockchain, seeing that same ethos in Ethereum, seeing that being disregarded in Ethereum. And now, like, I feel like there's, I bet you there's that same DM in two Salana people who are like, why do the Ethereum people just do not see what we,

Starting point is 00:03:20 I bet you it has continued down the fractaling like. I'm sure. There's multiple generations of this, But anyway, I'm thankful. I'm thankful. What we've said in previous during the bear markets is you've got to grab your bear market buddy during the bear markets. And during the bull markets is true too. Bear market buddies turn into bull market buddies.

Starting point is 00:03:39 You've got to celebrate with somebody. So, you know, celebrating the bull market with all bankless listeners today. Let's talk about what we're going to cover today on the weekly roll up. First, you know, last week we started the weekly roll up with, you know, dual-wielding middle-finger. a 13-year-old and we were kind of laughing at meme coin shenanigans. You remember that, David? How absurd it was. Yeah. It was absurd. Absurd and entertaining and like kind of funny. Yeah. Kind of funny, right? Well, like three days later, over that very weekend, things turned really dark. So it started with these ruggings from a 13-year-old and quickly spiraled into some deeply

Starting point is 00:04:14 disturbing content. We'll talk about this on Pump. Pump. Dot Fun. It got so bad that Pump. Fun actually had to disable their streaming service. So what's going on there? Also, also, I think related to this, Base and Farcaster have experienced the largest TPS and inflows, transactions per second and inflows ever, I think, on the back of some of this. So maybe the meme coin mania is shifting somewhere else. We'll dive into that. Also, in the world of politics, Trump picked a treasury secretary, Scott Besant. What do we know about him? What do we know about Scott?

Starting point is 00:04:46 What can we expect from him? He's said to be pro-crypto. What does that mean? And also, you'll never guess, Ryan, who became the largest investor in Trump's world. Liberty financial raise. The raise is still ongoing. So we're going to check in on that rage. And a huge win for crypto decentralization and privacy in the court's judges ruled that the OFAC overstepped their authority in the tornado cash case. They ruled that immutable smart contracts cannot be sanctioned. They ruled that smart contracts are not businesses and are not

Starting point is 00:05:21 persons and therefore cannot be sanctioned. Huge progress. Huge win. Can we use tornado cash now? Wait, wait, wait. We're also going to talk about that. So all of this and more coming up in the rest of the show. But first, a moment to talk about our friends and sponsors over at Uniswap. Uniswap V4 is something I'm very excited about, Ryan. It is going to be live soon, TM.

Starting point is 00:05:45 I think December is the rumor around Uniswap v4. They are launching a $15 and a half-million dollar bug bounty for anyone that can find a critical bug in, Uniswop v4. It's not just an update. We're not just shipping out Uniswap V4. Uniswap has had $2.5 trillion in cumulative trading volume in V2 and V3 without a single hack ever. This is why the Uniswap brand is the Uniswap brand. It is trusted. It is secure. People put their liquidity there because they trust it. We're doing that same thing all over again to make sure that V4 is just as trusted as V2 and V3, and they're doing that with a $15.5 million dollar bug bounty.

Starting point is 00:06:24 So find a bug, get generational wealth. There is a link in the show notes, banklist.c.c. slash uniswap, hyphen, bug, hyphen bounty. Link in the show notes. Guys, guys, 15.5 million dollars. That is nuts. I wish I had the dev skills to go like black hat, white hat. You think you could find the bug?

Starting point is 00:06:45 You think you could find the exploit? Oh my God. This is like the largest bug bounty I've ever seen, not in crypto, like anywhere. And I guess it's almost like a prediction market for Uniswop. It's like a polymarket of like, can you find a bug or not? And this shows how confident they are in their code too. Yes. It's a little bit of just like, hey, like we need to make sure that we put up capital to fund

Starting point is 00:07:05 bug bounties. But also it's a dare. It's like you can't find a bug. You can do it. You're not good enough. You don't have the skills. Wow. Okay.

Starting point is 00:07:14 So you can find out more about that link in the show notes. Speaking of big numbers, Bitcoin almost, but not quite hit 100K. I think it topped out at like $99.5,000, really given us the tease. Really giving us the tease. But also, like, you know, round numbers are this big psychological barrier. I think it kind of in hindsight makes sense for a bunch of traders to sell at $99.5,000. Because once it hit that point, it got down to $92,000 yesterday. But since this morning, it has back up to $96,225 where we are now.

Starting point is 00:07:46 So even though we bounced off of $100,000, didn't get there, We're still showing a pretty strong performance on the week. Bitcoin on the week up 2.2%, which after its stellar performance for like four weeks in a row, being up yet another 2.2%, you know, you got to give a round of applause. The momentum is still going good. Impressive. The momentum has gotten so good that it has attracted the attention of Jim Kramer, who publicly just turned bullish on Bitcoin. You got a question about micro strategy on a mad money episode. Let's just play the clip.

Starting point is 00:08:19 I don't have to read it. Let's just play the clip. Greg in Florida, Greg. Ooh, God, Jim, how we doing? I'm doing well. How about you, partner? I'm doing very well. All right, so here's the deal. I've owned this stock for a long time since 2023.

Starting point is 00:08:33 I'm up over 1,000% right now. I don't plan on selling it. In fact, after today's correction, I plan on buying more. But I love what the CEO does. He's a man, the myth, the legend, Michael Thaler. The stock is micro strategy. What do you? MSTR, we used to call that MNN.

Starting point is 00:08:50 Mr. MSTR, I've got to tell you, it's a Bitcoin play. I prefer to actually own Bitcoin. I know that shit trying to put to some sort of a short line. All I can tell you is own Bitcoin. That's a winner. That's a winner. They curse us. That's what people are saying.

Starting point is 00:09:03 That's why we bounced? Yeah, at that point, we knew we would never hit 100K. That's what, uh. What if Bitcoin's momentum is so powerful that it just blasts through the curse of Jim Kramer. It's just like, nope, nope, nope. I'm not stopping. I mean,

Starting point is 00:09:22 who's going to win? Jim, Jim Kramer versus Michael Saylor's Infinite Money printer. Yeah, exactly. And we'll talk about that in a second. Like, I actually like that.

Starting point is 00:09:29 We haven't hit 100K because now we have something still to look forward to. What are you going to do if you're a Bitcoin and you already hit 100K? Wait for a million? Yes.

Starting point is 00:09:37 The answer is yes. If you're a Bitcoin or you answer, yes. I'm not going to happen this cycle. It's not going to, you can't, a million dollar Bitcoin this cycle. Don't even.

Starting point is 00:09:47 That flips gold. current prices, which is... Oh, my God. Yeah. A million dollars of Bitcoin is... So we still got 100. 100K. We still got that to look forward.

Starting point is 00:09:56 Do you think we hit 100K this year? Oh, yeah. I mean, we're just teasing it. We got five weeks for 100K? I don't think Jim Kramer. By the way, Jim Kramer said good things about ether this week, too. So, like, yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:10:08 I didn't want to tell you that, but... Oh, I go. We don't have the Michael Saler to help us break through that one. Yeah, we have the EIP, you know, 1559, David. Blob space. Yeah. Our Michael Sailer. Byrne.

Starting point is 00:10:20 Blab's burned almost a million dollars of ETH this week. Not quite. Yeah. Yeah. But they don't get the press that Saylor does. And, uh, you know, like for good reason. Look at this. Michael Saylor has acquired this week another $55,000 or sorry, 55,000, 500 Bitcoin, which is $5.4 billion, uh,

Starting point is 00:10:41 at a price just under $100,000 per Bitcoin. $97,800. $97,000. $97,000. And then like, right after this announcement. is when Bitcoin dumped. And so I think people were like, oh, the buying pressure has stopped. Like, we're not going to be able to get over $100,000.

Starting point is 00:10:56 Are we just depending on Michael Saylor to carry us to $100K to $250K to beyond? Obviously, he's not the only one in the bid side of the market. But, like, man, it's like, I don't know what percentage he is, but I'm concerned that it's a lot. Okay. Well, let me give you some stats on this. Microstrategie. This is actually a report from analyst at Bernstein. Analysts at Bernstein says Microstrategies on track to own 4% of all Bitcoin over the next decade.

Starting point is 00:11:27 4% of all Bitcoins is insane. Yeah, this is a projection based on right now they have 1.7%. Microstrategy has 1.7% of all Bitcoin. And if they do the thing that they said that they would do, which is like raised all of these billions to purchase more, they're on track to hit 4% over the next decade. And the $42 billion that they said that they're going to buy to buy Bitcoin over the next three years, they have accelerated. They are ahead of schedule. And so they've already bought like $7, $6, $7,000 since that announcement. So he's just like front running himself on his own timeline. Yeah. Now, as to whether this all works out, it depends on a few things, the analysts say, whether investors are structurally long Bitcoin. So obviously, Bitcoin has to go up for this to be a good idea. Also, keep in mind, Microsoft. strategy is not just buying Bitcoin. They're kind of levered buying it. It's like a levered play on top of Bitcoin. So you're sort of trusting Michael Sailor's ability to kind of like manage some of the leverage that he's doing here. And I don't know if you've gotten into all the intricacies of like what that

Starting point is 00:12:34 leverage looks like. I've scratched the surface. Not really. I don't feel like anyone fully knows unless you're like part of the micro strategy Michael Sailor machine as to like whether that leverage is quote unquote safe, but like leverage is leverage. So it's definitely depending on Bitcoin continuing to go up. And then of course, whether the firm, whether Micro Strategy can continue to get more of these bonds, these convertible notes, uh, in order to buy more Bitcoin. So if you think of micro strategy, it's kind of like, um, it's like a Bitcoin ETF, but with like more flexibility, but with like more leverage. So it's a levered play on a Bitcoin, uh, ETF essentially. Yeah. And There's so many eyes on micro strategy.

Starting point is 00:13:16 Everyone is watching what he's doing. And no one's really triggering any, like, flags of, like, this is too risky. He's, like, taking really low risk debt, low interest, zero interest debt, convertible notes. Like, I don't know the financial engineering, but, like, people that do know it aren't, like, overly scared about whatever he's doing. But he's adding more leverage to the system. Let's just say that. It's not just spot Bitcoin. It's, like, levered.

Starting point is 00:13:39 It's borrowed. It is borrowed money. on Bitcoin price go up. Anyway, that's the Bitcoin story. A good week, even at 2%, even though we're under 100K, and what a run it's been for Bitcoin. By the way, I saw like a legendary call

Starting point is 00:13:53 from Dan Moorhead, who were having on the podcast later in December, David. You know, Pantera guy? Yeah, of course. And it was an image of an email that he sent to everybody in, I think it was like June or July, 2013. And he was like, hey, I'm back in the truck up

Starting point is 00:14:07 at a $64 Bitcoin. And I don't care of everyone thinks it's stupid. I'm doing it. And yeah, like, that's how long. Because he was trying to get Pantera to buy it. And he was like, if I'm buying it with my personal funds, but Pantera doesn't buy it. That was like the end of the email. It's like, I'm doing this personally. Just absolutely legendary, like email. So there's been some people that have been playing this for quite some time. But let's talk about ether on the week. Give me some good news, David. I think we got green candles. Ether starting the week at $3,070. Up 16. Oh, 17%

Starting point is 00:14:40 on the week. We are about to break $3,600. 17% on the week. Is this it? Is this the pump that we were promised? Heath has been leading the market for about 10 days. 10 whole days. 10 days it's been leading the market. There were some days

Starting point is 00:14:56 last week, days this week I should say, where Bitcoin and everything else was selling off and either was still up. I don't even remember what that felt like, but then I felt it this week and it felt great. We have seen strength in ether. Don't one get too excited. Everyone calm down. We have seen strength in the ETH price. It might break 3,600 on this

Starting point is 00:15:20 episode. David, you said that's a 17% rise, a double-d-ge rise in one week. That's pretty good. Okay, so can we look at maybe the ratio first? We'll go back to the flow, ETF flows. But tell me about the ratio, some life, signs of life. Yeah, the ratio has been up since the 19th, since the 20th. And so we are at like six days. What is it? The 27th. So we have seven days a row of strength versus Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:15:47 It's still low, Ryan. Like, again, no, don't dance. But it has been up for seven days in a row. We are at 0.037. We hit the low of 0.032. We are currently at 0.037. And I guess keep in mind to your point, like we are higher on the ratio, like fairly, much higher in the ratio, November 9th.

Starting point is 00:16:07 So most of the month. But also we were much lower on the ratio, it was November 5th. That's true. We can get more signal. I think we'll get more signal out of this like next week. But like it doesn't, it,

Starting point is 00:16:18 there is reason to be optimistic a little bit. Don't dance. Don't get excited. I wasn't going to dance. Don't worry about that. I'll spare everyone this. That was mainly for the listener. This is a,

Starting point is 00:16:31 this is a chart that maybe we should take a look at. It's ETH Bitcoin ratio, but on a different time horizon. I think I know who put this together. But what is this chart? Big, fat, heavy, thick candles, some up, some down. What are we looking at? These are 12-month candles.

Starting point is 00:16:47 So one-year candles. So one candle is 12 years. Yep. And it just, there's a trend line. We touched it in 2015. We created it in 2015. We touched it on the bottom. When I sent you that message in DMs, Ryan, about, like, why we don't understand

Starting point is 00:17:01 the Bitcoiners don't see what they see in Ethereum. That was about when the ETH-BTC ratio was at the 2020. Way back in 2018 when we started. Yeah. 2018, 2019. Touched it then at like 0.015-17. Then we had a massive green candle, but then now we're back down to this trend light. So like the message here is like, don't overthink it on the 12-month candles.

Starting point is 00:17:25 The longest of time horizons, the ratio has bottomed. So maybe Eth's not dead after all. Maybe Eth isn't dead. This line reminds me of kind of like Ben Cowan's like logarithmic lines. And basically it's pretty similar, I guess, right? I'm telling you so much story. Okay, how about flows? Should we check in on our flows?

Starting point is 00:17:43 We're up. We're positive. Flows. Ether. Ether. $40 million of flows yesterday on the 26th. ETF flows, we're talking. ETF flows.

Starting point is 00:17:52 $91 million of inflows on the 22nd. The seven days prior for that was pretty ugly, but that was last week, so we already covered it. And also, interestingly, if you go to the Bitcoin ETF flows, on the day that Ether had $40 million of inflows, Bitcoin had $200 million of outflows. Excuse me, $120 million of outflows. Wait, that's never happened. You never got a reverse? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:18:18 Yeah, yeah. It's almost like these inflows just follow whatever the market prices, David. Yeah, I think that's largely the case. I think that's actually the case. Also, total crypto market cap, all-time high this week? All-time high. Another all-time-high week. All-time-high total crypto market cap.

Starting point is 00:18:34 3.48 trillion. We are not at 3.5. We are right below it. But there has been some down-market coins that have materially pumped. Ripple up 50% this week. Stellar Lumens, if you remember, that coin doubled in market cap over the last week. And these are like, these are multi-billion dollar market cap things. And so we have seen some like down market cap tokens really adding to the total crypto market

Starting point is 00:18:58 cap here. I mean, have you seen the joke? The joke is that like retail is back now, but they're not buying your bags, crypto-native. Sorry, they're going to ripple and they're buying them stellar. stuff like this. And we've seen some of that. I think Cardano's up this week. Yeah. Uh-huh.

Starting point is 00:19:10 Yeah. Do you believe that meme? Is that what accounts for this stuff? I don't think anyone knows what Ripple of Retail is doing. Other than pumping chill guy on TikTok, we do know that. Wait, is that, that's a different cadre of retail, I feel like. It's not like, I feel like the cadre. Are there different groups of retail?

Starting point is 00:19:26 Yeah. The people who are buying like XRP and stellar and some of that, that's like retail from the last cycle who had some of these assets, watched them pump last cycle. and then been sleepy until now. And then that's what I imagine in my head anyway. I was talking to Igor from synthetics about how, you know the meme about like sell or buy whatever, like the Uber drivers or the taxi drivers are shilling.

Starting point is 00:19:52 Yeah. The taxi drivers, the Uber drivers have not moved on from Ripple and Cardano. Really? That's still. That cohort of people loves the same coins that they have always loved. They have not moved on into like the whole meme coin meta. Yeah. They just love their Cardinals, they love their Ripples, they love their Doge coins.

Starting point is 00:20:11 That's just like the taxi driver Uber like coins that they just really like. All right. Well, there's something for everyone in crypto. Another all-time high in the week is an L2 update brought to you by our friends over at Mantle, which is a fantastic L2. You should catch. Helped with this all-time high. Yeah, they helped. They helped a little bit.

Starting point is 00:20:30 So this is an all-time high in total value locked inside of layer twos. We're just a hair above the all-time high at 50 billion in total value locked. So some inflows coming to our layer two. Great to see that number. Great to see. 50 billion in layer twos. That feels great. You know, another number we should call out, which I noticed on the week.

Starting point is 00:20:49 I think you probably saw this too, is AVE, just hit $30 billion in deposits. That's awesome. Okay? AVE. DeFi Blue Chip. We've been excited about AVEA since probably the time, like you and I just started DMing on Twitter, you know, 2018,

Starting point is 00:21:05 2019. It was that class of OG D5 protocols. And they've just been steadily building this like money market,

Starting point is 00:21:14 money Lego, primitive inside of Ethereum and inside of crypto. And they are now at 30 billion deposits. So that's larger

Starting point is 00:21:22 than thousands of banks. If it was a bank, David, Avey would be the 64th largest bank by deposits.

Starting point is 00:21:30 That is fantastic. Look at how far we've gone. That's so cool. Looking forward to the top 10, it might happen this cycle. You know, AVE is a fantastic place to put your crypto assets for yield.

Starting point is 00:21:41 A lot of the risk has been kind of like burnt off of it. Just like a big, big number for Avey that's happening in the background. It doesn't get a lot of credit all the time. But, you know, they've been building very consistently. Yeah. Speaking of tokens that have had stellar performance, Avey has just crossed $200. It hasn't been this high since April of 2022. And Avi, I would say, is definitely leading the Defi pack.

Starting point is 00:22:06 Avey Performance sent, like, in May, it was under $100, May of this year, it's under $100. And now it's at $200. One of those tokens, it's, it was an old ICO token, fully diluted, fully liquid. Remember, ETHLAND? Remember ETHLAND? Yeah, fully liquid in the market. Like, I think this is a big, Avey itself is like a big shelling point of just like defy strength. So when Avey goes up, I think DFI is leading DFI, in my opinion. Yeah, I agree.

Starting point is 00:22:31 A defy Renaissance, right? And it's like, but, so it's a market cap of 2.7 billion. All time high was back in 2021 in those heady days where it hit very briefly. It hit almost $8 billion. Yeah, that was a stupid high valuation. I mean, this is a cash flowing token, though. It's like it's pretty cool. You can do a discounted cash flow and come up with a valuation.

Starting point is 00:22:55 There were some fundamentals there. So cool to see that perform. All right. We got a lot more. What else we're talking about, David? Pump. had to pause their streaming future because of just a bunch of shit that I just do not want to be even like verbalize. It's not crypto.

Starting point is 00:23:11 We found, yeah, it's not great. We found a clip that I think will play to really just illustrate the point because we're not going to show any of it on screen. What will they do now? And what does this mean for meme coins as a category moving forward? And now also, since meme coins are getting so big, it's partly the consequence of meme coins getting so big. is it now flowing into other chains? So did base just catch the meme coin influenza last week? We're going to talk about all of these happenings on all these different chains.

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Starting point is 00:26:11 So last week when we were talking about pump. dot fun, it was, you know, that 12 year old rugging like a bunch of on live stream, a bunch of listeners. And of course, we talked about pump. Dot fun is a meme coin launch place. It's been incredibly popular this cycle. It has been the focus point. as the showing point. And so we've seen various, you know, shenanigans, but like most of them

Starting point is 00:26:32 somewhat innocent D-Gen types of things. However, yeah, absurd, absurdist. Aburdist funny. There has been a darker side and to, to pumped off on all along. And because there's a live streaming service, like there's live streaming associated with the token launches, anyone can stream whatever they want, suddenly this weekend, it felt like it turned real dark. Yeah. And it got, Real crazy, real fast. Yeah. So let's just play this clip from, I guess he's a crypto influencer, Bitlord. He kind of is a synopsis.

Starting point is 00:27:05 Maybe parental advisory warning. Like there's some dark material that's covered. We're not going to show anything. But here's what Bitlord illustrates has been going on at Pump. Up Fun. Guys, they cut somebody's head off on Pump Fun today. They've kidnapped dogs, cats, children. Somebody's holding a gun to a goldfish.

Starting point is 00:27:22 Someone's holding a gun to a dog if the price didn't go up. He was going to execute it. They ended the live stream. I think they shut it down, they caught it. And right now today, somebody is on a 24-hour live stream of crime. He's going around, he's jacking cars, he's jacking scooters, he's broke into a bank, and he's doing that. He's live-streaming the whole thing now, and he's trying to say that he's doing it until he gets arrested. That's the coin of the day, a 24-hour crime spree live stream.

Starting point is 00:27:49 I mean, guys, this is, this is wrong. This is getting out of control. This is beyond what we dreamed of. This isn't mass adoption. This isn't crypto. I didn't envision this shit. He goes on and talks about it more. But that gives you a flavor for like what was going on the streaming service.

Starting point is 00:28:05 Like I guess it's all attention, economics. I think it's there's the addition of the streaming service into the chart with the dev. I think just really creates a bad mix of features to really incentivize this. You can see why Pumptop Fun did it in the first place. Like meme coins, they're very social. Like you're in the trenches, you're usually doing it with friends. Like, it's just a very social thing to do. And adding on a live streaming feature just really leans into that element.

Starting point is 00:28:37 And it also kind of incentivizes some of the most like attention-grabbing behavior, which, you know, it just kind of converges on like crime. And that's what that's what was happening. So obviously some dark things. So there's a, there's a huge sentiment shift. This is a Cato AI. and they monitor kind of like Twitter sentiment, social media sentiment for Pump. Dot Fun, and they're showing an all-time low earlier this week on kind of like the sentiment for what's going on and Pump. Dot Fund.

Starting point is 00:29:05 And so there was a call from the crypto Twitter community to just like stop live streaming. There had been some moderation, I understand. Pump. Dot Fun was like kind of like moderating some of these streams. So it was just like too much at once. They couldn't keep up with it. And so things were slipping by obviously on the app. Pump. Pump.com.

Starting point is 00:29:24 Fun is not set up to be a social platform like Facebook or Instagram. And when Pump. Dot Fun had a couple, like, very viral moments, like, chill guy and also the kid, the kid we talked about last week, it just brought in a complete influx of new people and just kind of changed the meta of, like, people realizing what it takes to really get a token to pump. And so, like, it's really this, there's this hot ball of money going around, and there's, like, different strategies to get that hot ball of money to come to you.

Starting point is 00:29:51 And so they have since paused the live streaming feature. And they set out a statement. On Monday, right? They paused it. Yes. On Monday, they paused it. Yeah. Good.

Starting point is 00:30:03 Definitely the positive outcome. Had this gotten any worse, definitely would have been a very bad mark against crypto in the public sphere. Like, I don't want many people to, like, associate my industry with that. And so this is definitely done in the best interest of the entire industry, I would say. Yeah. I mean, it's Thanksgiving weekend. I mean, this was like on the cusp of hitting mainstream attention. There's obviously an article on Bloomberg, but like you heard what was going on, right?

Starting point is 00:30:30 And it's like there's already some animosity towards crypto and DGen like token behavior. A lot of things people don't understand. And so there's already that as the bedrock. And then if you start to associate this with like kidnappings and like, you know, people stress against their family. Like whatever. Like, yeah, I think most of this stuff was like. Fake stage. But it doesn't matter.

Starting point is 00:30:52 Like one out of a hundred is real. And like that's what like we don't really want to move that over to Schifto there. Probably the worst thing I've ever seen to be like to be associated with in crypto. Like DGEN's making money from somebody doing something terrible on live stream. And like kids are getting involved here. Like this isn't this is happening in like a far off distant land in the Bahamas. Like these are just happening in people's homes. Oh yeah.

Starting point is 00:31:18 Could could be a neighbor. Can you imagine the headlines? Like, what is your teenager doing on, like, laptop and crypto? Yeah. You talk about a moral panic. Yeah, moral panic, I think, yeah, for sure. Anyway, would be a stain on our industry where this to continue, this is the point Chainlink God makes.

Starting point is 00:31:36 Pump fund is going to be a massive reputational stain on crypto industry on par with FTX. It's devolved into a complete unchecked degeneracy and unmoderated streaming site that enabled kids to gamble and get scammed at scale, not seen since the loopboxes. not cleaned up, I foresee the feds taking the site down. Negative mainstream articles being written. The slonic community increasingly distancing themselves from the platform as they should. Stuff like this is why I'm telling people I'm not involved with crypto. It comes across as a massive grift. So this was the take, right? And so. Yeah. I don't know what he has said. Chainlink God

Starting point is 00:32:10 has said post the disabling of the streaming service. But of course, let's remember, this is the app layer, right? So an app like Pump. Pump.com, dot fun, gets to moderate. permission whatever they want on top of a permissionless blockchain, they can choose to moderate things if they want. And like that's a good, that's, from my perspective, at the app layer, that's a good idea. That's their responsibility. Yeah. I mean, I think it's yet to be seen how much of a silver bullet just simply disabling the live stream feature is. Hopefully, hopefully it is a silver bullet because there's like meme coin and meme coin trading and like that level of like however amount of degeneracy that people might be okay with. And then there's a

Starting point is 00:32:52 live stream feature. And like you can actually like separate these things. And maybe you can say like, well, the meme coin trading does incentivize attention. But like the whole original point of meme coins is like incentivizes attention by making really funny memes versus like live streaming, which creates a different set of incentives. So maybe the mechanism of live streaming was all of the evil here and just simply turning that off fixes this. I think we're going to see how this unfolds over the next few weeks. It's so wild to me. It's so wild to me. because I also, it seems pretty dumb to me. Like, just like, they're recording themselves online, like doing, like doing crime, right?

Starting point is 00:33:25 And it's like, in exchange for what? It's a pump a token. But that's all, like, trackable on chain as well. I mean, I don't understand. I don't think the people who are doing this. They're not thinking about it. Yeah. The funniest one that the late livestream feature that saw was no hands, no rug, dev.

Starting point is 00:33:43 And so this dev just pretended like he had no arms. so he wouldn't be able to rug you, which doesn't really make any sense. But that was his big claims. Like, I don't have any arms so I can't press the cell button. And so he was, like, holding that piece of paper

Starting point is 00:33:55 that said that under his chin. And then, like, and then you just see him bring his arms out, press the cell button, dumps. And, like, lost away. And, like, I was looking at the chart. The guy dumped for, like,

Starting point is 00:34:07 $20,000, which I know he's like, that's a lot of money to a lot of people. But also, like, in the meme coins that, like, I'm very aware of with, like, the billion dollar market caps. That's like nothing.

Starting point is 00:34:19 Well, my question on the back of this was like, is that the top, like has pumped up flying and meme coins in general kind of like jump the shark this cycle? And I think that remains to be seen. I don't know that that's the top or not. But I do know that some attention has been moving, some meme coin energy, let's say, has been moving to the base ecosystem at least on the week. And you've been pretty actually active in the trenches over there. But one thing that's-

Starting point is 00:34:44 I have pressed more buttons on my leisure. in the last seven days that I have pressed all year. Okay, so you got to tell us about that, but like a few things. One, we could look at kind of like inflows onto base, but this certainly was worthy of attention. So this is a tweet from Phantom. So Phantom, the big wallet, it's been huge on Salana thus far. It's basically the way people are buying pumped up fun like meme coins this cycle. Today we're rolling out to base, base chain.

Starting point is 00:35:10 We're rolling at the base chain to everyone on Phantom. You can now swap tokens, access your favorite defy and NFI and NEOC. FFT apps and buy Ethan USDC on base. So Phantom didn't have, didn't support base before, and now it does, which is a pretty major thing, I would think. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Phantom supports the Ethereum Layer 1, Polygon, and then also Solana.

Starting point is 00:35:33 It started off as the main Salon wallet, then integrated Polygon, because that was, that was like the other kind of like DGen chain for a while when Phantom was getting started. And now they are rolling out base. And also there being a conduit between tokens on base and. Solana. I don't know how they're doing this, but you can swap between tokens on base and Solana, which is kind of pretty crazy. And this is a UX that users care about, as in like, they don't care about whatever chain that they're on. They just want to swap tokens. The Phantom wallet is great. I mean, the UX has really nice. It's been fantastic.

Starting point is 00:36:05 So there's like a short story that I put together in a tweet that is putting a bunch of pieces together, that being Phantom Wallet opening up base activity. It's a big one. TVL in base, the flows into base has just been rocketing up for like two or three months straight now. We were at a little over $2 billion just last October, and we are now beyond $3 billion in base, all-time highs. $250 million of inflows came into base just on November 24th, just in one day. And also, Jesse put out this tweet, all-time high in daily transactions on base by a lot. a big jump from like 7 million daily transactions on base up to up to 10 million-ish, 11 million.

Starting point is 00:36:52 And so we're hitting 11 million transactions per day on base. And then also fees have not moved at all. So base is hitting like new levels of adoption, new levels of stress performing pretty damn well. And I think it all kind of begs the question. Like, why now? Base has been in an uptrend, but it has really hit an inflection point in the last seven days or so. And I've personally felt it because I'm playing around on base. There's like things. There's things to do there. Dan Romero, the founder of Farkaster, he's calling

Starting point is 00:37:22 this programmable social. And so this is coming on the back of an announcement from this one app called Anoncast. And we talked about this last week. Actually, this was the Anon app. This is ZK, ZK app where if you have a certain sufficient supply of the Anon tokens, like 5,000 Anon tokens, you get to go to the website, connect your wallet, and it will let you tweet from this ZK app, and it'll come out of this AnonCast, Farcaster, and Twitter account, and no one will know, including the operators of Anoncast, no one will know who wrote the tweet because of zero knowledge proofs. So that's kind of cool. And you have to have the Anon tokens. You have to have the Anon tokens, yes.

Starting point is 00:38:03 And tweet this, this private tweet, basically. Exactly. Yeah. And so there is, it's just this, by the way. Like, fun fact, like, I tried this out. Yeah, yeah, it was really fun. So I don't know if you saw my tweet. I don't know. I don't know which tweet it was. Oh, really? You don't? Well, it was funny.

Starting point is 00:38:17 I said something to the effect of like I have an Ethan Maxi podcast, but I'm secretly by you? I saw that one. My podcast co-hosts. You re-tweeted it. And I was like, that could have been anyone. Like, I didn't even think that. Oh, you didn't know it was me?

Starting point is 00:38:32 No, I didn't. It was me. Okay, what did the tweet say? It said something like, here, I'll read it to you. It said this. Confession. I'm the. host of a successful Ethereum Maxi podcast.

Starting point is 00:38:43 We're not Maxi podcast, by the way, but people think this. And I secretly own millions of soul. And then I said, I'm just kidding, David. I would never do this. Anonymously. Okay, but also, when I read that tweet, I was like, this is somebody else masturbating as Ryan. Not Ryan masturbating as Ryan. No,

Starting point is 00:38:59 it was fun. And you have, so you have to have the annon tokens in order to do this. Okay, so that is Farcaster app, number one. And this app is a farcaster account. So, like, we're seeing, like, an integration of apps and accounts. So that's kind of cool. And that's just number one.

Starting point is 00:39:16 The second one is this thing called clanker. And clinker is an AI agent. It's also a farcaster account. So you can tag it and talk to it. And if you tag it, you can request clinker to make a token. And you can say, hey, here's the ticker that I want. Here is the picture that I want. Can you please make a token out of this?

Starting point is 00:39:33 It's an AI that just spins up a token for you. It'll reply to you and kind of like this, like, snarky way. And then also talk about like how this token, I, I hope this token like entertains you for a moment while you like distract yourself from the void. Like very existential like Nietzsche like level of response from from Planker. But like aside, aside is this bot. Wait, so you just like I've not done this.

Starting point is 00:39:57 I've seen it done, I think. Like so with for Clanker you have to be on Farcaster. What? Yes. You're on Farcaster. And Warpcast is kind of the client for Farcaster. And you tag Clanker and you're like, hey Clanker, make it. make me a token, you know, make it like,

Starting point is 00:40:14 make the ticker this, here's the photo, and then here's the photo, and then do you give it a theme or a vibe, or like do you set the, like, supply parameters or anything? No, it does all of that for you. I think this is currently in development, so I'm, they're going to open up more, like, expressivity to it. And it does all the on-chain work? It spins up a token, everything else.

Starting point is 00:40:34 It spins up a token and it spins up a Uniswap V3 pool. And so it also spins up. It also spins up liquidity. And then it takes some fees, I think like 40% of the fees. Clinker does. Clinker does. And then the token deployer takes 60% of the fees. And so there's like regular payouts to token deployers.

Starting point is 00:40:54 And okay, so that's app number two, which many people are like using Clinker to issue their, like create their token, request their token. And so this has kind of turned into the pump. dot fund of base of Farcaster. And so because it's like you don't actually have to go. with PumpTon Fund, you have to go in and you have to like fill out this form of this token to fill out. And kind of like filling out a Google form in order to make your Pumptot Fund token. With Clanker, you just at the thing on Farcast or on Warpcast and be like, hey, make me a token, here's a picture.

Starting point is 00:41:23 And then it does it for you. Do you think Pump. Fun will just create that now? We'll just do an AI agent version of Pumptop Fund. So there are other, there's already a derivative out there, a Clanker derivative that's on Twitter. And so you can tag it on Twitter. and it will make you a token and also spin up a uniswap v3 pool.

Starting point is 00:41:42 So like this is also like going out into like other corners of the world. Okay. So that's app too. So Clinker is app too. What Dan Romero is talking about programable social is this thing called Anon Fun.

Starting point is 00:41:55 And so you can using Anon write a tweet anonymously that talks to Clinker to issue a token anonymously. And so now we have this third competitorial thing of these two apps are now combined together to make Anon fun, which is you can anonymously create Clanker tokens.

Starting point is 00:42:14 And so this is why Farcassar were Dan-State. Hold on, hold on. Okay, so Anon, by the way, was a token created by Clanker as well. And On itself was a token created by Clinker, correct? Okay. Yes. But now you can ask Clinker to create an anonymous, like, token? If you have Anon tokens, you can,

Starting point is 00:42:36 you can anonymously, it looks like writing a cast via anon. You can anonymously call the clinker account and get it

Starting point is 00:42:45 to create the token through anon cast. So like, rather than me... So I could, I could like create, you know, RSA as a moron

Starting point is 00:42:53 if I want, and it could be from me, but like, like my, my, um, you know, ETH wallet or whatever,

Starting point is 00:42:58 but, or my base wallet and no one would know it was me because it's all anonymous. Yeah, correct. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:43:04 Uh-huh. And so this is just, Now this is creating this like new third thing, which is like the anonymous creation of clinker tokens. And so my imagination goes back to 2019 Defy Summer, put out a tweet that said in 2019, Ethereum discovered money Legos. You can combine Uniswop with Maker and Avey, and we would have these financial primitives that could combine together to create net new on chain financial products. In 2024, a farcaster discovering AI Legos. I don't know if that's the meme that's going to stick, but like call AI Legos for now. That's cool.

Starting point is 00:43:38 AI agents or just like even just bought accounts because Anon's not an AI agent. It's just more of a, it's an app in an account. AI agents are talking together, offering services, building new gadgets. And so this is this is kind of like the meta that I'm seeing of like people are building apps into these forecaster accounts that are allowing net new things to like kind of be combined together. That's pretty cool. And it happens to be the case that many of these net new things are like, expect with me. meme coins, right? It's like...

Starting point is 00:44:07 Many of them so far, yeah. Although Anon is not. It's... Anon is not. It's a meme coin, but it also has some... Like some function, right? It enables you to create like anonymous messages and tweets. That's right.

Starting point is 00:44:19 That's right. I think this is also just the normal order of progressions. Like Ethereum, when we created the Ethereum blockchain, the first thing you could really do on it was make tokens. And then people learned how to like make apps out of those tokens. And this is what I think happens first. First, Clinker has this primitive... of we just make tokens first

Starting point is 00:44:37 and then we figure out how to make apps. Somebody, Cheryl, from Seed Club, made blonde using Clinker. So she made this blonde token. I think the way that this started is I think there was already a chat called Blonding Curve with a bunch of just like women in Web3 who named their group chat

Starting point is 00:44:56 blondeing curve. And so I think they made, they've already had some like pre-existing lore about blondes in crypto. But Cheryl decides to go to Clanker and Mintz Blonde and then all of the Web3 like women who are on base and Farkaster just thought it was a great meme. And so there's like now there's like 500 people in this blonde telegram. And it's just like a good story of like beepcords.

Starting point is 00:45:17 I have previously cast off the idea of meme coins because they're all over the place. You don't really know what it is. It's a grab bag of what you get. But like I've always understood Dogecoin to be like really good example of like a good meme coin of like a bottom up community. And then seeing it happen like firsthand of just like. a bunch of women who identify with a meme and they get really excited and they get into a group chat and they just have fun. It was like, yeah, it was hard. It was similar to the NFT energy from last cycle of community and FTFT energy.

Starting point is 00:45:47 Like, and it's just all a vibe and seems like that's coming back. The interesting thing about this or the tech breakthrough to me is like the AI agent piece, which yeah, now it's dabbling with meme coins, but I don't think it'll stop there. I think it only starts there. I think it starts there. Okay, not just on Farcaster, but on base. speaking of AI agents, have you heard of AIXBT, Ryan? No, okay. Okay. AIXBT is an AI agent spun up by the virtual's platform.

Starting point is 00:46:16 We talked about virtuals in the podcast previously when we did our episode with EJazz. And also Matt Stevenson, Luna is the virtual's AI agent that they made on the platform as them dog fooding their own platform. Virtual is just an AI agent like as a service kind of thing. AI XBT is now surpassing Luna the most valuable AI agent on the virtualist platform and it is an AI bot on Twitter that just tweets out really just useful stuff

Starting point is 00:46:44 this is a really great follow is just like modeled off of Zach XPT at all? XBT is just kind of like this addition of like three letters. I don't know where our XBT comes from. Okay. But no, not Zach XBT.

Starting point is 00:46:58 It just spits out just data and metrics and you can engage with it on Twitter and it's a really useful account. And it has become the number two influencer on Twitter by engagement stats behind Ansem. Wait, is this it? Number two? Yeah, yeah, that's right.

Starting point is 00:47:13 Yeah, you should follow it. Yeah. And so, like, it's just cool to see as like a KOL in crypto Twitter mindshare metric, we have an AI agent in the number two position flipping a bunch of humans. And so that is coming also out of the base ecosystem as well. AIs are coming for our job, David. This is pretty useful.

Starting point is 00:47:30 It's really cool. Better than my Twitter feed. Very cool stuff. Yeah, this is very cool. All right. So to answer your question about why base transactions are at all time high and why inflows are coming in, it's because people are like me are playing around in like the AI.

Starting point is 00:47:47 It's like this AI utility meme coin trenches. We haven't really like come up with the right words for it. But there's like a lot of cool stuff happening for it. And like it's, I haven't been more on chain in the last like week than I have all year. I've seen some of it. You've been making some bets. You've been pressing some buttons, which is a good time to mention our disclaimers, bankless disclaimers, disclosures, I should say.

Starting point is 00:48:08 So we disclose all of this at bankless.com slash disclosures. We update this monthly. So we have a, you know, a disclosure policy. And since David, it seems like, and me a little bit, and you've wrote me into some of this. I have purchased some, I have sold some ETH to purchase some tokens. Dang. Why?

Starting point is 00:48:26 How could you? But getting a bit more active. And like, what I should say is so. You guys can see that, track that activity. We'll keep it updated. What I should say is the way I know you do this type of thing in these cycles is you allocate a percentage of your portfolio to go play these kind of like whatever the meta type game is, meme coin game, whatever the newest token game type is.

Starting point is 00:48:51 It's actually a fun way to like experience chains to see how good they are from a UX perspective as well. and but but I do want to flag this is not the type like not everybody should be in the trenches and certainly like the percentage if you are in the trenches the percent of your portfolio that you allocate to this stuff like I recommend that it's small like do not denominate in this type of thing so this was a good tweet from a DC investor that I feel like kind of sums it up right because we're talking to all sorts of people with different like time horizons and different risk preferences and he said this. This place, he's talking about crypto, is absolutely insane because

Starting point is 00:49:30 you have people trying to turn $5 into a million, alongside people trying to turn $100K into $10 million and $10 million to $100 million and $100 million into $10 billion. It's often hard to tell who's who. It's no wonder each group for the most part thinks the others are absolutely insane. And that's kind of like, you know, what it comes down to. So obviously in crypto for the long term, you should be stacking blue chip assets, the monetary assets, the things like Bitcoin, the things like ether, we would say over-allocate in ether, but that's like kind of the bankless thing. We think eth is money.

Starting point is 00:50:03 You may or you may not, but the D-Gen games are being played by other. And I think you, you, hopefully, you're doing it in a healthy way, David. I don't know. I'm just checking in on you, brother. I'm your bull market buddy. So you're not gambling with, you know, 95% of your portfolio. With my savings? No.

Starting point is 00:50:19 Well, the goal is always to take, like, my personal goal is to take like 10% of your portfolio, try to flip it into being coming 50% of your portfolio. Yeah. And then, and then reallocate it, put it into the savings, the piggy bank, and then do it again. See how many times you can do that inside of one cycle. If you can do it more than once, it's pretty good. But yeah, don't. Only 10%. You got a big smile.

Starting point is 00:50:45 You must be up on the week. Yeah, it's fine. All right. What do we got coming up? Coming up next, a huge win for crypto in the courts. Two wins, actually. Everyone is already talking about tornado cash, but there is a second big win in the courts that you might not have heard about. Treasury just back and down.

Starting point is 00:51:00 And then Trump announces Scott Besant will be his treasury secretary. What do we know about him and why is this role so important? And then Justin's son, oh, I just leaked it. Justin's son invests $30 million into Trump's world liberty financial defy product. What is Dustin want with that? We're going to get to all this and more. but first I'm going to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible.

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Starting point is 00:53:10 Here it is. The big victory in a tornado cash case as a judge says that Treasury has exceeded its authority. Okay, we got to zoom out and talk about this because there's multiple tornado cash cases going on right now. This was a specific one, I believe, sponsored by Coinbase. With people that we know in crypto, one of which is Preston Van Loon, who is a Heath Cordev, right? You know, responsible for the PRISM client. And he is like, I guess, a name on the case, along with some others, going to Treasury and bringing Treasury to court because Treasury has, of course, made the smart contracts, the actual immutable smart contract code, they have sanctioned those eth addresses. It's like on the OFAC sanction list. And Preston and some others associated with this

Starting point is 00:53:59 case have claimed, you can't do that. You can't, it's not property. You can't just sanction code. You have overstepped your authority. And it seems like the courts have agreed with that interpretation of the law. So what's going on here, David? Exactly what you said. So the tornado cash contract addresses are on the OFAC sanction list. Their place, their existence on the OFAC sanction list has been deemed by the courts to be unconstitutional. So this begs the question, does this mean that you can just go use tornado cash now? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:54:33 And I tweeted this out asking some lawyers and they said, oh, hold your horses. Like, let's wait for this to also propagate out down into the lower courts. But the answer wasn't and absolutely not. So my interpretation of this, and I'm not a lawyer, is that tornado cash is still on the OFAC sanctions list. So therefore, you shouldn't go use it. Because Treasury put them there, right? Because Treasury put them there. And that action has been deemed unconstitutional.

Starting point is 00:55:00 But they are still on the OFACC sanctions list. For now. And so hopefully in the happy case, OFAC removes them from the sanctions list because the course of them to be unconstitutional, but as of right now, they are still on the O-Factations list. And so we are in this kind of mushy gray area where we need this court ruling to propagate outwards. And so, like, hold your breath. We might get this.

Starting point is 00:55:25 Very cool. Peter Van Valkenberg tweeted this out. I'm loving reading through this opinion. Smart contracts are not contracts, nor are they smart. And that makes all the difference. Contracts in the legal case, as in a contract between two people. while the Van Loon case is all about statutory authority is also secretly a constitutional law case. O-FAC tornado cash sanctions were an unconscionable stretch of the limited powers granted to them by Congress.

Starting point is 00:55:51 Our constitutional separation powers does not allow executive to simply make up the law, even where there are extrinsent circumstances or national security demands. It's what makes America great. I think the really important thing that got ruled here in the constitutionality of this is that humans and businesses, persons and businesses can be put on the OFAC sanction list. As a result of this ruling, smart contracts have been ruled to not be persons nor businesses. They are something else. They are a new thing.

Starting point is 00:56:24 That's huge. Which is huge. An important distinction that we did not have before this case. Like Treasury just thought that they could sanction code, sanction autonomous smart contract, a decentralized protocol code living on Ethereum. And this court case says they can't do that. They don't have the constitutional authority to do that. Okay.

Starting point is 00:56:43 So question to you, Ryan, we recently just had Roman Storm on to advocate for his defense. He's going to court. He was threatening to potentially going to jail. What has changed with that case? Is anything different now? Is he going to walk free? Roman Storm, as you guys will recall, is one of the developers of the autonomous smart contract code, which apparently now, a court has.

Starting point is 00:57:05 has decided treasury is unable to sanction. So, and he goes, like, for his court case and trial in April. So will this make any difference to him? According to some of the crypto lawyers we've talked to, it's slightly helpful, but it's still separate. It's still kind of an apples and oranges thing. Because what the DOJ is alleging in the Roman Storm case is that Roman Storm is operating a service, right?

Starting point is 00:57:32 So he was essentially one of those. the autonomous smart contract code may not be sanctionable, but the service, the UI layer over top that he was providing or like maybe the torn tokens or other elements of things that he were doing were breaking sanctions law. So it could be slightly helpful, but it, you know, unfortunately it's a completely separate case. So Roman Storm still needs to raise fund for his defense. We tried to help a little bit more with that like last week by, you know, drawing some attention to his case. and for folks to hear a story. But just a reminder, that case could use some donation. He's trying to raise $1.5 million in order to protect himself.

Starting point is 00:58:14 And it's great. Like, when we win these cases in court, all of crypto wins. We all win. All U.S. citizens win. And this is like the way to do it to curtail the administrative power to try to prevent our decentralized use of these public goods. We need to win in the court system. This is part of how the system was constructed.

Starting point is 00:58:34 So we just got the tornado cache removed. We got smart contracts protected as neutral technology. Yeah. What we did not protect is developers' freedom and ability and right to write open source software. That has not been protected. That is a separate issue. So we part of, we are chipping away. And just as bad, right?

Starting point is 00:58:57 It's just as bad. And so like, like Ryan said, this has, this might be able to bolster Roman Storm's defense a little bit. but it is materially a separate issue. He is still under threat of going to jail. He still needs funds. And we still need to protect Roman Storm and open source software devs everywhere. We got some donations in post episode.

Starting point is 00:59:17 We did a Twitter space. We still need a lot more. How insane would it be if the OFAC, we got tornado cash off the OFAC sanctions list and Roman Storm went to jail? I would feel terrible. That would be insane. That would be the federal government

Starting point is 00:59:32 using Roman Storm as an example. example as a scapegoat when he ought not to be. And we need to donate. We need to donate. We need to donate more money to make sure that open source software devs stay out of jail, including Roman Storm. Well, can you imagine if we ended up in this place where like sure, the autonomous to central code couldn't be sanctioned, but basically if you're a developer, you know, deploying it and writing the code and then you go to jail. I mean, it's kind of the same type of like effect, right? The same chilling effect as if we lost this case. So like definitely more work to be done. And speaking of more work to be done, and court wins, we got another court

Starting point is 01:00:09 win. The U.S. court struck down the SEC broker-dealer rule. And so what they were trying to do, what the SEC was trying to claim is that uniswap automated market makers, these type, if they're controlling more than $50 million, or even liquidity pools, if you're an LP and a un-swap pool, there's more than $50 million. You are a broker-dealer. And this was one of those side issues like we talked about with some of the crypto lawyers, but it's going on in the background. What do it would de facto do is like make all the uniswap pools, everything in DFI, kind of SEC controlled, broker-dealer, AML KYC, everything that goes along with that. Anyway, the courts struck that down too. So another win on the week.

Starting point is 01:00:47 This is a blockchain association CEO Kristen Smith. She said, today's court ruling is a victory, not just for the blockchain association, but for the entire crypto industry. The dealer rule was an attempt by the SEC to advance its agencies, anti-critical. to crusade, unlawfully redefining the boundaries of its authority granted by Congress, and following this ruling, we've rolled it back, essentially, protected from this unlawful rule. So another win this week, we're just stacking them up. Can't stop winning. It's can't.

Starting point is 01:01:15 Where does the winning left and right? Oh, man. I'm so tired of winning, Ryan. I'm so tired. I was telling you before this. It's like one of those Disney movies at the end where the villain is defeated and, like, the land was enchanted with like the darkness or the cold, the freeze, and it's just like all suddenly left away. The evil is like, that's what it feels like very much.

Starting point is 01:01:35 Okay, so someone else who will be influential. Oh, by the way, you got your court case against Treasury. So, like, the beautiful thing about this whole Treasury thing is like we had two shots on goal here and the first shot on goal went in. So, great. I still get my shot on goal. I have, mine's still coming. But, I mean, we already got the goal. And so it would be nice to really drive this point home.

Starting point is 01:02:00 For people who don't know that, David is actually involved in a similar lawsuit to the one. Very highly similar. Highly overlapping, yeah. But the coin center is sponsoring it and paying for it. And it's like basically Hoffman and some others against Janet Yellen and Treasury, right? And so like that would be a second opportunity to kind of win and further cement this precedent. Right.

Starting point is 01:02:22 Don't lose, man. You can't lose now, right? No, no. Okay. So the T is that the coin-based case was given a more favorable search. My case was given a less favorable circuit. Okay. You have to work for it.

Starting point is 01:02:35 TBD. Yeah. Well, it's not you. It's, you know, all the talented lawyers over at Coin Center doing the work, right? Yes. Thank you, Coin Center. God's work. God's work, for sure.

Starting point is 01:02:44 Okay. So things could be different under the new Treasury Secretary. David, you gave us the name earlier. Should we just actually play the clip and get Scott Bessett? He's been named as the new Treasury Secretary. I want to hear his take on crypto. And this is the only thing we've publicly heard. him say about it. So let's just hear it in his own words.

Starting point is 01:03:03 I've been excited about the president's embrace of crypto. And I think it fits very well with the Republican Party, the ethos of it's crypto is about freedom. And the crypto economy is here to stay. The Democrats are running from it because they're trying to wash off the stench of Sam Bankman freed. and his family's donations to the Democratic Party. So they're willing to take down a whole industry because of bad behavior on their part, bad behavior, one actor. And I think that everything's on the table with Bitcoin.

Starting point is 01:03:48 And to me, one of the most exciting things about Bitcoin is for a generation of investors who maybe, post the great financial crisis, have been looking for investment opportunities, or maybe they'd soured on markets. Crypto is bringing in young people. It's bringing in the people who haven't participated in markets. And having a market culture in the U.S.

Starting point is 01:04:18 and people believing the markets work for them is a centerpiece of capitalism. David, that is... That's pretty bullish. Yeah. That's pretty bullish. That is the person probably second to the president of the U.S. who has kind of the most executive authority sway.

Starting point is 01:04:36 So this is the new Janet Yellen. The current Treasury Secretary of State, Janet Yellen. This is the man who would replace Janet Yellen. Yeah. This does not sound like a guy who would like go and put a ton of smart contracts on the OFAC sanction list. Yeah. I don't think so anyway. This is Jake Chavinsky on this pick.

Starting point is 01:04:57 Scott, the next. Treasury Secretary will make crucial policy decisions for the future of crypto in the U.S. For example, Scott Bessent could undo OFAC's unlawful sanctions against tornado cash. We have so many bullets in the chamber. Right? You know, it's very good. A broader question is, of course, like, you know, Treasury's responsibilities far beyond crypto.

Starting point is 01:05:19 So what is the new Janet Yellen, the new Treasury Secretary, what's his position on all things like monetary policy and financial status? of the U.S. And this is Raul Paul's take. Scott Besant, the new Treasury Secretary, is in favor of a weaker dollar and lower oil prices to drive U.S. and global growth. Okay. That is all you need to know.

Starting point is 01:05:40 That sounds like inflation and put money to stock market and buy assets. That's what that sounds like to me. Well, Rao Paul says, TLDR, Scott is good for your bags. He comes up and says, I've known him for a decade and he gets it. So there you go. That's the new Treasury Secretary's selection. All right. Not done with Trump yet.

Starting point is 01:05:59 Trump media files a trademark for TruthFi. They want a trademark for computer software for use as a digital wallet, payment for processing crypto, fiat, and trading in digital assets. And it also mentions that it wants to cover market analysis data and statistics for financial research and financial custody services, like maintaining possession of financial assets for others for financial management purposes. So this is TruthFi. This is the TruthFi trademark. So these are potentially the things that World Liberty Financial is getting into. So there's your alpha from that trademark. Well, this is actually different than World Liberty Financial, David.

Starting point is 01:06:39 So this is from the truth social. The truth social. Oh, excuse me. Yeah. Yeah. He's also getting into a truth social? Yep. Yep.

Starting point is 01:06:51 Very much. Truthfy. Oh, is he going after like a polymarket kind of copycat thing? I don't know. I mean, he's just doing, it's a trademark. Social FI, truthfai. Who knows, but it's separate. But the news for World Liberty Financial.

Starting point is 01:07:05 He's trying to do an ex. He's trying to do it. Polymarket, I don't know. Baby, who knows? He's trying to do more in crypto, or they are, the Trump empire is. Speaking of that, so this is your lordship, Justin's son, who's tweeting this up. We are thrilled to invest $30 million in World Liberty Financial as its largest investor. The U.S. is becoming the blockchain hub and Bikki

Starting point is 01:07:27 owns it, owes it to Donald Trump. Tron is committed to making America great again, leading innovation. Let's go. It's like not one to piss an opportunity. Yeah, not to be outdone.

Starting point is 01:07:40 Not to be forgotten. To grift his way into power. Sorry, Justin. Hopefully you don't drop a lawsuit on me. I mean, this is, Caitlin Jenner, by the way.

Starting point is 01:07:49 They wanted to sponsor the Bankless Summit. Did they really? Yeah, they reached out to me. And I was like, I don't think that's appropriate, guys. Sorry. Um, Caitlin Jenner replied to Justin's son's tweet and said something to the effect of, oh, great move to Justin's son. So, um, Justin's son is always one to try to like buy legitimacy.

Starting point is 01:08:08 You know what I mean? Like so this is an attempt to do that, I'm sure. Um, yeah, oh, by the way, he also named as an advisor. I should have mentioned that. That was the news this morning. I think if you donate, how much millions of dollars? Donate. It's an in our donation.

Starting point is 01:08:21 It's investment, my friends. If you invest 30 million dollars, he might be able to finessexed that. his way into becoming it. Oh, boy. I got to admit, I don't love all of this. No, I'll just put that out there. It's definitely a little bit of a pay-to-play type game over there in D.C. Yeah, I mean, is this what it costs to win as much as we're winning?

Starting point is 01:08:41 We're winning quite a lot. We're winning quite a lot. Is this what the pound of flesh that it takes? Well, speaking of that, you know, the guy that we're just talking about, Howard Lutnik, who was elected as Secretary of Commerce, right? He was in the running for Treasury. Didn't get that, but he's Secretary of Commerce. So he is from Cantor Finst Gerald.

Starting point is 01:09:03 It was reported this week that Cantor Finstallel has acquired a 5% stake in Tether for up to $600 million. You know what, so you know what this is. I didn't know Tether was like, I mean, I guess everything is available for the right price to the right buyer. Well, it's interesting because like what this gives Tether is basically, in my opinion, is just reading between the lines here, this gives them insurance that the U.S. government's not going to come after them, right?

Starting point is 01:09:28 You're the Secretary of Treasury, Cantor-Fence-Gerald. They now own 5%. You know, Cander-Fins-Gerald gets to somewhat front-run the opportunity around stable coins because now they own a portion of tether, you know, so that's the way it's played, I guess.

Starting point is 01:09:45 So you tell me if this is the cost of doing business over D.C. I like this one. This is okay with me. It's like one thing I will say, now that it feels like we've won this kind of battle, I feel like we're almost setting up the lines for the next war. Like crypto has very clearly, at least corporate crypto, has infiltrated DC. And so I think the good part of that is I don't think crypto will ever face existential

Starting point is 01:10:12 risk in the U.S. again. I just don't think so. It's already become too powerful. And so I think we can celebrate this win because. The previous regime was trying to choke off crypto in the U.S., right? It really was. Like, we had to do something. But now I'm a little more wary of, like, this new class of crypto banking elite

Starting point is 01:10:34 that could slowly try to close the door on the bankless type things that we care so much about. And I'm already seeing like- The people that protected us and, like, advocated for us, turn into the banks that become too big to fail. Regulatory capture, maybe. Regulatory capture, yeah. Like, I could totally see it. I could totally see it.

Starting point is 01:10:57 Like, this is what I'm saying. This is what it costs in order to get out of the hole that we got into in 2020 and 2023. Now we're out of that hole. And now we're like, like, hey, Coinbase is great. They're aligned with our interests. Don't become evil. Don't become evil, everybody.

Starting point is 01:11:13 But Coinbase is a bank, incentivized by the shareholder model, which we did in time. year of podcasts about the toxic relationship of the shareholder equity model and why tokens and dows are better. I mean, like that we've seen this movie before. Yeah. So just eyes wide open. I mean, let's celebrate this win, but like let's also remember we're not totally free.

Starting point is 01:11:37 The mission's not complete until we're bankless and have the right and the ability to go bankless. Yes. Speaking of that. Okay. So it is Thanksgiving. We open with this. Do you know today bankless listener, you're hearing this on blackforkman. Friday, which is a holiday in the U.S. where everything is discounted if you're international. And so

Starting point is 01:11:52 bankless citizenship has also been discounted. This is the biggest, the best deal we've ever offered. I think we've, previous Black Fridays, we've done like 30% discounts. Right now, you can get a bankless citizenship on a yearly basis for a 40% discount. What does this get you, David? You can listen to this podcast as you have. Add free forever. Well, for one year, for one year, 40% off. You can also get into our Discord and come and hang out with us. You can get the token hub. You can get the AirDrop Hunter. There, you can get bankless claimables. There are a bunch of things all in this package. Something that we have is definitely fit for you. The debrief episodes, people have told me, Ryan, that sometimes they skip the Monday episodes and they just listen to

Starting point is 01:12:38 the debriefs to the Monday episodes because they enjoy this more. So if you want the extra podcast content that we put out on the premium feed that doesn't make it to the, to the, to the free feed, you can get that as well. Did I miss anything? I only listen on Bankless Premium now. I don't know. Yeah. Like, I listen to your episodes.

Starting point is 01:12:54 I listen to your episodes. I record the ads. I don't need to listen to them. You don't want to listen to the other feed. Anyway, that is available for you guys right now. There's a link in the show notes. And it's a Black Friday only deal. So make sure you do it now before it expires.

Starting point is 01:13:08 All right, let's close this out. David, do you believe in top signals, my friend? Because I feel like we're starting to get into that territory. Dude, I remember seeing a year of top signals. all throughout 2021, and at no point in time did any of them actually cause. The only top, the only actual signal was the Fed reversal of interest rates. All the top signals of 2021 did not create a top. Hawk to a girl. Tell me if this alarms you. Hawk to a girl is apparently launching a meme coin and mentioned it in an episode, podcast episode with Mark Cuban. I'm giving

Starting point is 01:13:41 a meme coin and NFT communities 100 free plus whitelist each. Who should I pick? Hawk Tua with a meme coin. Is that not a top signal? No, I think it's fine. I think it's fine. See, that's the problem with top signals. Once they come, you're so, like, you know, enamored by the bull market.

Starting point is 01:14:00 Like, again, we saw a year of top signals in 2021. So, like, what I think you can do, and this is why I think it was last week that I said this is maybe two weeks ago, start the cell clock. Okay. You're going to be hammered with cell signals for the next year. And so they're like, the clock has started. You're not bull market drunk yet, but you're one, like maybe you're one beer in?

Starting point is 01:14:21 We're taking, oh, I don't know, maybe you're one beer in. I'm definitely two or three. Okay, so you got to have your plan, got to have your designated driver. And this was one in more sober times. I actually tweeted out. This is from March 1st of this year. I said, let's agree in advance. The minute we see a crypto project on the Las Vegas sphere, we sell it all.

Starting point is 01:14:40 Okay? On the sphere. And I saw this this week, David. there's apparently Bonk, Slana MemeCoin Bonk, is maybe teasing a Vegas sphere ad that might be coming. They're finally doing this? It might be coming. So I'm just saying in very sober times, I said that. And if we actually see a meme coin on the Vegas sphere, it doesn't mean good things.

Starting point is 01:15:06 But are you actually going to sell though? Are you actually going to do it? Because you can talk about doing it, but actually doing it is a different story. actually doing it as hard. There is something to note about all people who maybe have not gone through their first complete bull market. I will not count. If you came into 2021, you are the class of 2021.

Starting point is 01:15:26 I do not count as you having seen an entire bull market. In order to have seen an entire bull market, you would need it have been at the very beginning, which started in 2020. Practice pressing the sell button. Everyone wants to hold onto their crypto as long and as hard as possible. because that's, we create, collectively we create FOMO. Sure. When you have a material amount of money, practice hitting the sell button.

Starting point is 01:15:52 Just practice. Put that into USC. Send it a little bit. Send it to Cracken. Send it to your bank account. Practice pressing the sell button and then putting the money in your bank account. Just do it. You don't have to, you don't have to do a lot, but you do need to make sure that your psyche is aware that that is an option.

Starting point is 01:16:13 It's an option. And that you need to carve that behavior. It's real money. It's real money. It's not real until it's in your bank account. Wait, wait, wait, wait. This is a bankless podcast. What are you saying?

Starting point is 01:16:23 I still have a bank account. I did. Sell to a fiat sometimes, right? For your daily. Also sell to a denominator that you appreciate. For me, that's ether. It still continues to be against maybe the impulses of the bull markets. For some people, it's Bitcoin.

Starting point is 01:16:40 So that's kind of the long-term storage. stash. Yes. But if you are thinking about all of these, like, lambos that you want to buy or this house that you want to buy, if you're going to buy a house, you need to have cash in your bank account. And so you have to get cash in your bank account in order to do that. And so, like, this is how you don't F up the bull market and, like, round trip it and have to wait for the next one, because then you're just become a bare market, like, you know, then it just sucks. Like, we have seen, we have seen this movie before. Everyone does this. And so get into that mental space now. I don't know, guys. It felt like David was talking to himself a little bit in that,

Starting point is 01:17:19 in that speech. Very good. Well, and with this, of course, as we usually do, got to let you know that crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but 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.

Bankless - ROLLUP: Memecoin Mania | Tornado Cash Win! | Pro-Crypto Trump Cabinet | Justin Sun & WLFI

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