Bankless - ROLLUP: One Chart Determines if We're in a Bull or Bear Market

Episode Date: September 12, 2025

In the 2nd Weekly Rollup of Flat-tember, we discuss whether the crypto bull market is over amid rising unemployment and market uncertainty. We cover stablecoin competition for Hyperliquid partnerships, Justin Sun's frozen WFLI tokens, and Nasdaq's tokenized equities. With Ethereum leading in asset tokenization, they also reflect on lost SEC Chair Gensler's texts and the rise of DAOs, alongside major moves from Fidelity and Robinhood. —- 📣SANCTUM | STAKE YOUR SOL https://bankless.cc/Sanctum-report --- Bankless Weekly Rollup: 2nd Week of September, 2025 --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🎩DEGEN | JOIN THE COMMUNITY https://bankless.cc/degen --- TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 3:42 Markets https://www.reuters.com/business/us-unemployment-rate-near-4-year-high-labor-market-hits-stall-speed-2025-09-05/ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE https://www.reuters.com/business/cooler-us-producer-inflation-hints-softening-demand-2025-09-10/ https://polymarket.com/event/fed-decision-in-september https://thedefireport.io/research/markets-are-nearing-an-inflection-point#global-liquidity https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1965381497936117794 https://x.com/SharpLinkGaming/status/1965385468360741042 https://x.com/DefiIgnas/status/1965412886731538686 https://x.com/amitisinvesting/status/1965031182443139242 https://blockworks.co/news/samani-expected-chairman-solana-treasury https://x.com/smyyguy/status/1965054449212342629 https://blockworks.com/analytics/treasury-companies/market-data https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1965118547052695588 https://beincrypto.com/fidelity-tokenized-treasury-fund-on-ethereum/ https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1965152999963328571 29:30 Justin Son WLFI Frozen https://x.com/molly0xFFF/status/1963684142454894967 https://x.com/QuintenFrancois/status/1963882897909145937 https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/world-liberty-financial https://x.com/jconorgrogan/status/1963665497393975324 https://x.com/0xNonceSense/status/1963654615947514277 https://x.com/worldlibertyfi/status/1964081164408250558 https://x.com/jconorgrogan/status/1963665740109893656 https://x.com/justinsuntron/status/1963807543983263802 https://x.com/ASvanevik/status/1963761428445442341 35:35 Hyperliquid USDH Bidding War https://www.bankless.com/read/hyperliquids-usdh-bidding-war https://x.com/DefiIgnas/status/1965370023377248437 https://polymarket.com/event/who-will-win-the-usdh-ticker-159?tid=1757505856052 https://x.com/0xfoobar/status/1965445696032846173 https://x.com/hosseeb/status/1965520465172328717 42:15 MegaETH Stablecoin https://x.com/megaeth_labs/status/1965082874627199414 47:30 Ronin and Upbeat Join OP Stack L2 https://x.com/Ronin_Network/status/1965220031320793442 https://giwa.io/home https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/ https://x.com/hildobby/status/1965820218854486232 50:56 Robinhood Joins S&P 500 https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/1964078422050681221 https://www.tradingview.com/chart/1CDu50yK/?symbol=NASDAQ%3AHOOD 52:45 Gary Gensler’s Missing Texts https://x.com/EleanorTerrett/status/1963731865577127980 https://x.com/haydenzadams/status/1964471380403245525 https://x.com/NateGeraci/status/1963780017281765392 https://x.com/lex_node/status/1642242646931300353 56:36 Senate Clarity Act https://x.com/jchervinsky/status/1965465751122592119 58:15 Nasdaq Seeks Tokenized Stocks https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2025/09/08/nasdaq-seeks-nod-from-u-s-sec-to-tokenize-stocks 1:01:15 Robinhood Social https://x.com/RobinhoodApp/status/1965589746937446623 --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Bankal Station is the second week of September. David, downtember is continuing, I think, on the week. Actually, this is more like flat timber. Flat timber, flat timber. Down timber is ahead of us. Yeah. Still, we've got some more days left in the month, I guess. Things could be.

This is why people are wondering, is the bull market over? Actually saw Ansel tweet this over the weekend. He was like, I'm feeling like it's over. Why do people even bother asking that question? I don't know. And it's not to say it's not a valid question. But if anyone asked that question, the answer, the answer is always dubious.

No one knows. Not true. I actually have the answer. I have one chart in this agenda that holds the answer to that question of is the bold market over? Do you? I don't know what that is. I guess we'll just stumble into it in the middle of the agenda. We're also going to talk about hyperliquid somehow just getting every stable coin company to fight for its love.

Who gets to be the hyperliquid stablecoin service provider? That's been like the theme of the week. And Justin's son separately also woke up to a pretty nasty surprise of getting over $100 million of his WFLI tokens. Just yoinked, just frozen. Turns out that can happen. And we're going to cover that drama as well. The NASDAQ also wants to tokenize equities. What does that mean?

And I dug in this week, David. I was looking at the world of real world assets. And I've got some analysis here, okay? Yeah. Ethereum's actually doing pretty darn well on that front. And we'll talk about that. I'm just shocked. Also, David, the SEC lost Gary Gensler's text messages from 2022 and 23. How could that have happened?

That's real convenient. I have, I'm going to put on my conspiracy hat when we get to that section of the agenda. I'm just letting you a little more. It won't take much. I think that hat will fit like pretty nicely in that part of the agenda. All right, but we got to shout out our friends and sponsors over at Sanctum. What are they about? Yeah. Okay. So if you hold soul. If you choose to do that, you better be staking it because your soul just, you know, it just leaks. It's a leaky asset, you know? And so in order to make your soul not link, you should stake it with sanctum because they are perhaps one of the better, one of the best service providers out there for staking your soul.

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Bad news. Bad news. Yeah, downtown. Get the bad news over with. Yeah, it's down timber. The bad news is unemployment jumped in August, 4.3%. This is nearly a four-year high, okay? It jumped to two, four-point-three percent.

Yes. Yeah, it didn't jump a whole 4.3 percent. We'd be having a very different roll-up. That would be like, I don't know. what kind of down tober. Something else would have happened out there. Anyway, the U.S. economy added 22,000 jobs in the month of August. Let me show you a little chart in case you're not chart savvy on unemployment.

Is this the chart? This is the chart of unemployment over time. This is on the five year. This is not the chart that proves that we are still in the bull market. No, no, no. I don't know when that chart comes in the roll. You will know. So I have to ask.

Yeah, you're going to ask every single chart until we get there. No, you will know. No, it will be quite obvious. Anyway, okay, look at this COVID spike. Remember that? Okay, yeah, wow. That's an aberration right there. This is unemployment spike in 2020,

jumped all the way up to almost 15%. Yeah, wow. But then since then, after going all the way back down in 2023, it's kind of flat. Now I guess it's ebbing up a little bit, but like, I mean, look at this chart. It's not too much. That looks flat.

Going from 3.5% to 4.3% over three years. I don't care about that. Yeah. Well, you haven't been fired, David, or lost your job, okay? So that's, you know, some privilege talking. But, you know, I guess 4% is pretty good historically. It's maybe the broader point. Okay, so that's the bad news.

You know the good news. It's right in the agenda. Tell me the good news. The good news is I'm looking for PPI numbers, which I don't know what PPI stands for. Yes, you do. It's CPI. It's producer version of CPI. Okay.

Wait, you don't even know what it is. Yeah, well, whatever. You know what it is. PPI numbers have indicated that the numbers are cooling. The numbers are cooling. They unexpectedly fell by 0.1% in August of 2025. That's the first decline since April. Over a yearly basis, year over year,

PPI has risen 2.6%. But that was a, it has come down from being at 3.1% in July. So this is just another way to measure inflation. It's a different, it's a different... The producer side rather than the consumer side. Yeah. And it fell by 0.1%, which is not a lot, but it's in the right direction.

So we feel good about that. All right. But we're all wondering what's going to happen. This is why it was kind of a week where these decisions are at play is because next week, by the next roll-up, we will know what Fed Chair Jerome Powell is going to do to the Fed funds rate. His September decision. The policy says it already knows. Yeah. Well, you know, it's probability.

So it's probabilistic. So the prediction saying it's still at about 86% of a 25 basis point decrease. Everyone thinks it's going to be a decrease. Imagine if he showed up and he's like, I'm going to keep a, It's flat. Imagine what would happen. We'd have down, down temper for the rest of the month. Yeah, we don't want that.

So that's the, that's the probability. There's still some probability that's going down that we might see a 50 basis point decrease. That's at around 12%. So market's pretty convinced he's going to cut rates no matter. But like be moderate in his cuts, you know, only 25 basis point cut. Yeah. Yeah. But I think the direction is more important than the magnitude of cuts.

Yeah, because it's been flat for. a long time, right? Yeah. So the fact that we are just going down, I think, is a bigger deal than the size of how we are going down. I like it when the Fed goes slow. Yeah, you like, slow and steady wins the race. I like, I like, like we said, we have been in a bull market since Bitcoin had its

ETF be announced, not even approved. Yeah. And that was a long time ago, dude. That was like two and a half years ago. Yeah. We have been up since then. And I don't want it to go any faster. I just keep going just.

just this current speed, please. We've said some things about Powell on the show, I'm sure. Everybody says things about Powell, right? Yeah. I think I'm going to miss him when he's gone. Dude, I think he's done a pretty good job. Like, we all, it's easy to hate on the Federal Reserve, but like everyone was at the end of COVID is like, every, there was so inflationary, they waited way too long.

Yeah. Now they're going to crash the economy. I think, I feel like we gave him the hardest time when he was on the transitory inflation path. Totally. And we were like, no, it's going to be a new normal. I guess he can't say that, right? Yeah.

The Fed has, whatever tight rope that the Fed has had to walk, by insofar that there is not a recession and jobs are doing fine. And inflation is like sticky at 3%, but 3% is a totally fine new normal to me. Like the Fed has done a great job. To you. Like, I don't know how else you cut it. Yeah. Anyway, he's going to be gone.

Who knows who's going to replace him? It's going to be a new era. So, yeah, we'll see what he does. This is a big moment, I suppose, for Jerome Powell. David, the chart you've been waiting for, okay? This is the chart. Okay. Oh, that is bullet.

Wow. I know I wouldn't have to pre-announce it, all right? There are two things that I need to look at on this chart. The word liquidity at the title and it's going up and to the right in a very big way. Okay, so for people who can't see this on their screen, this is the chart that to me, the one chart I look at to tell whether the bullmark it's over or whether we're still going to have a bull market remaining crypto. This is the weekly global liquidity chart. And David, you see the point of direction here.

It goes all the way back to January of 2024. So it spans one year, one and three quarters years. Yeah. Pretty good amount of time. And this is about, we're at about 185 trillion in global liquidity. And this is all time high. This is an all time high number. And it is continuing to increase at this point time.

You saw a dip. earlier in the year. There was a dip earlier in the year. We also saw a dip in crypto prices, didn't we? Yeah. Here's another chart. So we know that crypto prices lag liquidity. Oh, that's what you're showing here.

That's what it is. Yeah. That's what it is. So this is, the price of Bitcoin is a proxy for all of crypto and global liquidity. And you can see historically the price of Bitcoin, I don't know, it's in black. It should be in orange. But anyway, global liquidity is in orange. Price of Bitcoin is in black.

You can see there's always kind of a little lag of whatever global liquidity does. It's a little bit of a lag. September lag and then up global liquidity chart, man. This is the thing that puts juice and energy into all of crypto markets and it's still going up. So I think we got some runaway ahead. Yeah. Liquidity to me also is just like, yeah, the denominator is just getting larger as in the dollars devaluing. It's almost the same thing.

Yeah. I mean, it's not just the dollar. It's all fiat, right? It's like everything. We're printing money. And that's been the story of this asset class. Which counts as liquidity. Does that count as liquidity?

Yeah, man. More money, more liquidity out there. Yeah. Yeah. That's what's happening. Yeah. It's like more nominal liquidity, which counts. Yeah.

So get through September, guys. And I think, I think bull market will resume. That's my prediction. Now there's the financial advice, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Tell me about Bitcoin price in the week, David. Bitcoin price. It is up on the week. We are coming in at 140.

$14,500. That means it is up. How much is it up? It is up a 4.5%. 4.5% ETH doing something similar, $4,4,430 up 3% on the week. And also the total crypto market cap, Ryan, we're back above 4. Oh, that feels good. We like that.

We like that. We like that. Yeah, we had a little venture below 3. We did. Kind of checked out the weather down there. Didn't really like it. Now we're back above 4. Weather feels nice of here.

Yeah. ETF launched this week. Actually, it is launching this week. Launching. Yeah. This is, we're in the ETF meme coin. A brand new coin. A brand new coin.

One of the oldest and most beloved coins in the crypto industry is getting its first ETF. What is it? What is it? What is it? Everyone placed your bets. Lock it in. It's Dogecoin.

Doge coin is getting the ticker sign, D-O-J-E from a service, a service bribeer and an ETF service that. It's not really sure who it is. It's not Black Rock. It's not Black Rock. This is Eric Balchunis. announcing it and he follows it up and he says this, pretty sure this is the first ever USETF to hold something that has no utility on purpose.

And I would say, Eric, not the first. Bitcoin was the first, my friend. That's a good point. Well, okay. Well, then also gold. Actually, no, gold has utility because it's in electronics. Yeah, it does. Yeah.

But with Bitcoin has utility because you can use it to move Bitcoin. around. Yes, certainly. It's a little bit. There's a tiny bit of utility, so I take that back. Let's take a look at, let's go check in on our crypto treasury stocks, David. That's been a running theme for the entire summer, let's say, and now into September. And part of it has been MNAVs are down. Okay, MNAVs are bleeding a little bit. We talked last week about S-Bet being probably below one from an M-Nav perspective, and they are striking back. So this is Sharpling gaming, they have started a $1.5 billion share buyback. Why are they doing this, David?

Because their MNAV is below one, I'm assuming. Why else would they be buying back shares? I mean, my big question is like, okay, how are they buying back shares? Where did they get the money from? Are they selling ETH? Or do they have cash on hand? They're not selling Kish. They're not selling Kish either. They're not selling ETH. How do you know that? Do we know that? Yeah, they're not selling Eith because They're either doing, I think it's cash that they have already, probably from minting some of their shares. Yes. They minted shares in the past, which is what they do when Mavs above and now MF's below.

It's like, okay. Well, like, so the book value of your share is at least, you know, $1, right? That's the $1 book value of your share. If MNAV equals one, then that's what that means. So if it goes below, then it'd be silly not to buy your own shares. I guess you're just like, if you minted above MNAV and buying below MNAV, that's just a good trade? Yeah.

And what you're doing is you are, if you're buying back your shares, you're getting that off of the supply and you're increasing the outstanding kind of share holder, ETH per share, essentially. You're increasing ETH per share, which is the mandate. Yeah. You're concentrating. So why wouldn't they do this? And that's what they've seen.

And so that's what they are doing. I think Joseph Shalum has a quote here. He said, he explained that this is a reaction to S-Bet trading below. It's M-NF. He said they believe S-BET is significantly undervalued. And they're going to do this any time that it's under one and significantly undervalued. They're just going to buy back their shares. Yeah.

So the sentiment around the whole DAP market, I think, is kind of depressed in this moment because MNAVs are like low. And there's been tweets going around that people like, oh, yeah, these are all Ponzi's. They're unraveling. It's over. I got one. This is back and forth I had with D5 Ignis. And he was like, hey, that's make me nervous already. And now we got MNAVs compressing.

they're trading below one, I don't feel great about these. There's already Ponzi economics at play. What do you think about this? Not feeling great and feeling nervous is a fantastic thing to feel in a healthy financial market. And so I'm totally okay with this.

I replied to the suite, you had it back and forth with him. I replied to the suite, and I said like, dude, these things could just totally be cyclical. Yeah. And if everyone's feeling depressed right now, that's because we were all feeling

pretty euphoric a second ago. Yeah, yeah. And like, we're depressed now, and I think we can be euphoric in the future. Yeah, your take was the rubber band. It's going to go back and forth. Yeah, we just go back and forth, back and forth. Like, all it takes is that, like,

Heath is creeping up. All it takes is to, like, have a momentum in the whole crypto market over the next two months. And then all of a sudden, MNAV goes back up, and we just read and repeat this whole cycle. Yeah. Is a possible future. I think that's a good take.

I also think, like, so this take, he said, we all know these Ponzi's will collapse, but we think it's still early. Calling them Ponzi's is not quite right. That's technically incorrect. Right, unless you think Eiff itself or Bitcoin itself is a Ponzi, which, okay, fair game. Which then begins to be unhelpful use of the word Ponzi. Sure, but like when, like, no, Ponzi means it's not backed by anything.

It's just backed by confidence and there's actually nothing like underlying here. In these dad cases, there is an underlying asset, right? So at one or below one is definitely not a Ponzi. I think as you coil up and you get higher, yeah, sure. There's some like, greater. fool theory at work above one, but it's not a Ponzi in the same way that, like, use of the word Ponzi is not quite right for Dats. Yeah.

Is my take. I get the vibe, though. I get the vibe. Things above point one require greater fools. It requires momentum. It requires a bunch of stuff. But, yeah, inherently, they are not Ponzi's. So Tom Lee actually made a move outside of buying Eth this week.

Okay. Actually, he made a bot some of meh. Raised my eyebrow. Did you buy some meat? Probably. Last September 11th. Oh, he just bought Eth this morning. That's today.

Hey, thanks, Tom. That's another 10, what, how much? Did he buy? Oh, a lot. Almost a billion. Let the record stand. Tom Lee is so bullish, how to eat? A billion.

How come we didn't see that on Twitter? Because he does it every week now. We've come to expect it. M and a half of 1.13. That's good. Yeah. Okay, but anyway, he bought something else. What did you buy?

He bought a World Coin dat. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And there's like $20 million of it. He bought it in Bitmine, we should say, in that structure. In Bitmine.

In Bitmine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So like if you own Bitmine, then you own like $20 million of this World Coin debt, which then went up like 6,000 percent and turned into like $600 million. Yeah. Which I would imagine.

I would hope he has already sold and converted that into E. I kind of thought it was like, I raised an eyebrow out of this. It's just like, oh, wait a second. You can just buy anything. Yeah. So, time. Tom Lee loves a good photo op. This is Tom Lee and Michael Saylor.

You're like buddies. Bitcoin and Ethereum are friends. Which. Dude, this photo, man. I actually love this photo. Man, I didn't appreciate it when I saw it in my timeline. There's like so much you could look into and comment on this photo. You know, I think from Michael Saylor, that's a genuine smile.

I think that's a genuine smile. Yeah. And it's definitely a genuine from Tom Lee. Now, Tom Lee is showing a bit more, I think, affection with the hand over the shoulder. But Michael Sailor's happy to be there. I can tell that. He's very happy to be there.

I will say, it is very obvious whose idea it was to take this photo. Anyway, as I say, Tom Lee likes a good photo op. So he was getting photo ops with the orb. I don't know if you saw that. The World Coin orb, right? In celebration, I think, of this WorldCoin dat, it's doing well. You were just like, oh, you know, if you're doing an Ethereum dat, you should only do ETH.

Yeah, kind of. Otherwise, these are just hedge funds. I know, but he's got, look, dude, he's got a lot of ETH. He's got $10 billion worth of ETH, and then he's got $20 million worth of World Coin. If this becomes a thing, a trend

of him doing all sorts of other things, I'd agree with that more. And I understand your spirit, which is you're a purest, right? You just want, give me the ETH expression. It's just like, what's the mandate here? The mandate is to grow the amount of ETH, and which he did with that precious. Yeah, he did.

But he could have missed. He could have swung and it might have been a miss. Give him a break. He's buying 10 billion Eith, David. Give him a break, okay? It's not just Eith in the debt story this week. We should also talk about Solana's Michael Saylor, okay? Maybe a photo op with this guy.

Salana's Michael Sailor has popped in and his name is Kyle Samani. Kyle Samani will chair a Salana dat. This is set to be the biggest one. This is called, what's it called? It's with Galaxy Digital, Jump, and of course, multi-coin capital, and the Datt's name is, what is this called? I don't know. Unnamed Salonadat shared by Michael, by Kyle Simani. Yeah. Okay, so unnamed. That's why we couldn't find it. This is going to be a big one because it also, there's some cash. In addition to the pipe, the pipe is generally where these investors just,

they take the existing soul that they have, they deposit it in kind, right? So big deal. That's not net new buy pressure. Yeah. They also raised, it looks like, 1.65 billion potentially to buy net new soul. At least that's what I think is happening. The notes that I have, it says the pipe raised led by multi-coin galaxy jump attracted $1.65 billion. But this says $1.65 billion in cash and stable coin commitments. Oh my God, wow. So that could be net new buying pressure.

That's a lot. Seems like it is. That's a lot. Yeah, that's a lot. Okay. So comparatively, BitMobile. Initially raised $250 million, and they are just at the starting gun of 1.65. Yeah.

I would like a second new source to say that that's $1.65 billion of cash. I don't know. I don't know if the filings are always clear. And you kind of start knowing it after the fact. But a couple things that are happening. Look at the crypto treasury share of percent supply of the network in Seoul's creeping up above 1% in DATs right now. So, ETH is almost caught up full.

solely with Bitcoin, almost above 3% of all ETH supply is in Dats, same as in Bitcoin. Bitcoin's a little higher and Seoul's catching up. Also, Seoul on the last 30 days, David, up 25%, okay? Whereas ETH is down 1% on the 30 day. So maybe there's that story here. That rotation, like first Bitcoin, then Ethereum, then Salana. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah. I have a bearish take about Kyle Somani's Salana. Wait, why? You don't think he's going to be the Michael Saler? So what did Michael Saylor do? He was a net new buyer of Bitcoin and a net new espouser of Bitcoin to a net new audience.

Yeah. What did what did Tom Lee do? He was a net new buyer of Eath and a net new espouser of Eth to a net new Tradfai audience. Yeah. Kyle Somani has already saturated his network of the Salana narrative. He has already been a buyer of Solana and his network is the same. It hasn't changed anything because he's got the dat. So the whole idea is like you need to pass on a torch to a bigger figure

and Kyle Simani has already been that figure. I feel like Kyle Simani is maybe equivalent to Joe Lubin and the two cancel each other out. Because Joe Lubin has that position in Ethereum. He's kind of always been here, has a bag of Eath, you know, he's going to be supportive. Whereas Tom Lee was like net new buyer. And so Joe is more like Kyle.

And there is no Michael Saylor. yet or there's no Tom Lee yet for Solana. Position is still vacant. I think, I think Kyle actually kind of has an edge over lubing because like Kyle can like dress up in a suit and walk amongst like that by way better than Joe can. Wait, you think so? Joe is plugged in. He just doesn't.

Okay. Joe's plugged in, but like he's a little too. Kyle is way more bombastic. So he has that in common with like a, um, he is product market fit with like the all in like zeitgeist. Oh, that's right. Is he speaking there or has he? He spoke at the All In Summit

about internet capital markets, yeah. Which is basically Salon, right? So like Kyle, Kyle can schmuse with like the all-in types, which are, it's like a large part of the financial world. Kyle's bringing it. That's what's happened there. David, one area I was looking at this week, you know, we've done a lot of episodes on tokenization.

We've been talking about the tempo stripe blockchain. That's been in the news. And the question is, well, our real world assets on Ethereum under threat, right? This is some of the debates even that we've been having. I decided in preparation for our conversation with Ando to actually look at some numbers behind this. And what I found was, ETH is actually doing pretty damn well from a dominant. Yeah, from a real world asset perspective. So just a few stats. Stable coins, ETHL1 has 57% of all stable coins. But if you add EVM, so all the change with EVM, that increases to 95%.

And before someone goes, wait, stop, you can't do EVM, that doesn't count. I think that Ethereum's network effect is kind of like threefold. So it has the best network effects if the real world assets are on the layer one. That's best for Ethereum, best for E. Better. Network effects. It's just the network. That's, yeah, it's the thing.

Better if it's like, well, liquidity is a network effect, you know. Better if it's on Ethereum L2, but still good if it's an EVM. Why still good? because all the EVMs can become L2s, can become L1s. They're all much more interoperable. You get the tooling. I'm not saying that it's the same level of network effect, but it's still good to be on an EVM.

It's much more proximate to Ethereum. 95% on either Ethereum or the EVM. That's stable coins. Treasuries, Ethel1 has 70%. You add the EVM, it's 86%. Gold? It's crazy dominant. 78% of all tokenized gold is on Ethereum L1.

If you add EVM, it's 99% and stocks. This is the most nascent. So there's only like $500 million worth of tokenized stocks right now. And Ethereum has about, let's see, if you ignore some of the big ones like Algarand, which has just like one stock on them and it just seems like it's kind of a beta experiment type play, Ethereum L1 is 44%. And this is where Salon is actually doing fairly well, at least right now. It has 30% in comparison to Ethereum.

So anyway, but that's before Robin Hood has entered, E. Toro has entered, and we know that these, and Coinbase has really entered, we know that these are all going to be Ethereum Layer 2's, and Robin Hood alone has like 170 billion in equities that it could tokenize on top of an Ethereum layer 2. So if you, like, zoom out and you take like market share of real world assets, Ethereum's at like in the 70% range right now for everything on the L1. And then if you add EVM and you say that's also Ethereum now. network effect, it's 93% of all real world tokenized assets are actually on Ethereum or the EVM. It's kind of doing well on that score. And it was surprising because I feel like the crypto Twitter,

like I was surprised. It felt almost like in areas Ethereum was losing its edge, but it looks like Ethereum is actually gaining some things. Now it's all still early. I get that, but pretty well positioned from a market share perspective right now. Yeah. My take on why you like, were surprised or, like, didn't know that Ethereum had this level of dominance about real world assets is that, like, no one is really responsible for, like, beating the drum of Ethereum's dominance in any particular regard. And so, like, wait, isn't that us? Doesn't Bayless do that?

That's what we're supposed to be doing. So here we are. So we're not doing our jobs. Well, now we are. Oh, good. But like every leader of a respective chain is going to be like, yo, we are the real world asset chain and they've got like 3%. But like no one is like doing because it's open source.

The open source doesn't have an inherent voice. Doesn't have a marketing. Doesn't have a marketing card. Yes, Ethereum is actually the real world asset chain and it's not even close. Doing pretty well. And on that, David, Fidelity, stealth launched a money market on Ethereum. The first that Fidelity has launched. They have about $1.4 trillion in money markets and they launched this on Ethereum L1.

It already has over $200 million. That happened in stealth last week. It's just so cool to see fidelity on EtherScan. Look at them. FDIT. Kind of cool. The combination of Tradify Financial Institutions and EtherScan, I think, is just like exactly what we are here for.

Yeah, I know. It's like, Inspec source. Let me just go pop open the hood of my financial institution without their permission. Well, speaking of that, something that Justin's son probably regrets is not popping up the hood on the World Liberty Financial tokens that he bought. So we're going to talk about that when we come back. Also, it's been Hyper Liquid Week. Everybody's competing.

All the Staplequins competing for Hyperliquids love. We're going to talk about all that more. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Uniswap. It is a browser wallet, a mobile wallet. It's an exchange. It's an L2 chain. They do it all.

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that belonged to Justin Sun that contained over $100 million in unlocked WFLI. That's just the unlocked, by the way, David. If you add the lock to, it's like $420 million. Remember when we were talking shit about people who are investing in the WFLLI-I-I-I-C-O? Not me.

Turns out that was an okay thing to do. Financially speaking, and just purely financially speaking. Okay, so as a result of Justin's son's investments into Word Liberty Financial, He owns 3% of the supply. 3%. And so all investors have 20% of their investment unlocked at launch.

Justin said, Justin said he would publicly that he wouldn't sell. But then he transferred $9 million of his tokens to HTX. That is an exchange that he owns. And this got flagged, suspicious for some reason, by a variety of different service providers. The transfers to the exchange were flagged is suspicious. And once they're inside the exchange, it's in a hot wallet. It gets all commingled with other depositors. Justin's son announces that he is encouraging, he's giving out 20% yield for other WLFI

depositors. I think he's kind of encouraging like a mixing. Everyone just mix up your tokens in my HTX hot wallet. Sure. And then this is what causes the FLI team to freeze the tokens. We don't really know like what the justification was for freezing the tokens because I'm assuming that the unlocked tokens are truly unlocked and the locked tokens are still locked

according to the smart contracts. But nonetheless, when their tokens were frozen, the FLI price pumped. It pumped downstream of the tokens being frozen. Wow. Yeah. Not like a crazy amount,

but like price stopped going down and started going up instead. The sellers disappeared. Sellers mysteriously disappeared. WFLI tweeted out. We've heard community. concerns about recent wallet blacklist transparency. First, WLFI only intervenes to protect users never to silence normal activity. They said 272 wallets were blacklisted over the past few days. They said that

this is a very small segment of total holders and was done solely to prevent harm while to investigate and help impacted users. Some were fishing attacks. Others were wallets that reported compromised ownership, et cetera, et cetera. But overall, Justin felt very upset. He denied any sort of allegation. of any sort of wrongdoing. If he has liquid tokens, I think he gets to sell them. And he makes a tweet, a plea to the World Liberty Financial Team in the global community and just says, as an early major investor in WFLI, I have contributed not only capital but also my trust and support for the future of this project, blah, blah, blah.

I call on the team to basically unlock my tokens and let's move forward together. Do we know why his tokens were frozen? I mean, I don't know that World Liberty has commented on his tokens specifically, but they said that the tokens we froze were fishers were tokens that were compromised, misappropriation, things like that. So I guess maybe they're sort of saying that he was in that bucket. Yeah. I guess when you do commingle your funds with a bunch of other people, you kind of do run that risk.

There was another person who stated that their tokens were also frozen and he emailed WFLI compliance and saying, yo, WTF. And then he tweets out, I just got a reply from WorldOBody Financial. TLDR, they stole my money, and it's because it's the POTUS at POTUS family, that's the President of the United States. I can't do anything about it. This is a New Age mafia.

There's no one to complain to, no one to argue with, no one to sue, it just is. And so they are claiming, kind of like racketeering, you can invest in World Liberty Financial, but then when you get your tokens, we freeze them. I don't think anyone truly knows what's going on. Well, okay, we do know one thing that's going on.

Okay, so one thing that's going on is that the WLFI, project is a project that started according to Trump's because of defy because they were frozen out of their the u.s banking system and they didn't want that to happen to other people and thus we get defy molly white was like one to obviously like uh you know comment on that irony on that association yeah and okay so like one thing that is crazy to me right is looking at it's a token on Ethereum. How is it getting frozen?

It's on Ethereum. Well, the WLFI token specifically includes a blacklist address function, a Guardian set blacklist status function that allows them to essentially blacklist tokens. This is not normal. Yeah. Most tokens do not have this property. No, we don't because we actually want tokens to preserve the property rights of their users.

Ethereum, right? So this token had a backdoor in it. from day one, and that's an opt, that's a design choice. It doesn't have to be like that. It has a debanking button on it. Yeah, we can extinguish your property rights with a function call, basically. And so that's what happened to Justin's son. But there's definitely some irony to it, I think.

And one thinks about, like, what are they trying to build here? World Liberty Finance. They're trying to build a stable coin, which, of course, that's going to be blacklisted. I understand that. And then also, like, a defy lending and borrowing protocol, okay? and this is their first move, we're gonna just start blasting. We're gonna start freezing stuff.

I don't know where you go from here. I mean, maybe it's a great meme coin, but like, how defy is this? Like, what advantage are we actually getting? So that would be my critique over it. Just you, Vave. Just you Jus Ave.

We're back full circle to actual DFI. Speaking of that, let's talk about what's going on with Hyper Liquid on the week And they had like a, I don't know, it was like the bachelor for stable coins. Everybody trying to apply. That's a great way to put it. It was the bachelor for stable coins.

Okay, so hyperliquid, just the darling of the last year, Perps Exchange, doing more revenue, more volume, not more, making more money than NASDAQ is. Definitely like the number one revenue generator in crypto at this very moment, followed by Ethereum, I think. There is $200 million worth of annualized yield from the American. amount of stable coins, USC specifically, that is on hyperliquid. So there's, there's billions of dollars on hyperliquid in USC. And because of that demand for USC that hyperliquist product has created, Circle is getting basically $200 million of profit from the yield of the USC that's on

hyperliquid. And hyperliquid, yep. Yeah, that 200 million, we should say half of that is split with Coinbase, who also has a perps exchange and is kind of a hyperliquid competitor, right? So it's $200 million and half goes to your competitor. Yeah, so because Hyperliquid uses USC, Coinbase is making $100 million a year, which I would imagine it's just like bad. That's just bad for Hyperliquid versus what could be the alternative. Right. So what's the alternative?

The alternative is they host the Bachelor for hosting the native stable coin on the Hyper Liquid blockchain. And so they are auctioning off basically a ticker, very valuable ticker. us d-8 on hyperliquid and they are auctioning this off to whoever wants to come and be the external service provider to provide hyperliquid with a native stable coin. So it would be natively minted on hyperliquid,

but really the mechanics of how the stable coin would work would be up to whoever wins this proposal. It's kind of like when the government just makes a contract in like Northrop Roman or... It's like an RFP, right? Yeah, exactly. Request for quote, request for whatever.

And so a bunch of Sablecoin projects all came to bat. Like kind of all of them, actually. Athena was in there. Native markets was in there. Wait, wait, wait. All of them? Was World Liberty Finance in there?

I hope they were, David. Is there Sablecorn alive? I think so. What is it? USD-1, whatever? No, that one wasn't in there. They would have to promise to not freeze. Anyway, that would need it first.

So who entered? Who in the? Athena, Sky, formerly Maker Dahl. Frax, Agora, Paxos, Bastian, and native markets. And David C from the Bankless Seep did a fantastic job just putting a chart together. If you just kind of want to compare and contrast all of the different properties or strengths, weaknesses of all of these different proposals. And this is what the theme of the week was on crypto Twitter. It's like everyone was kind of talking about all the different pitches that Sablecoin service providers.

They did it all out in the open, right? They did it all out in the open. So every single like Frax, Sikina, all of them just made public. proposals to this public auction. And we all as a community kind of all got to put our eyes on it and talk about which one was the best one. And so I'll just kind of quickly run through some of the different, some of the different competitors. 12 total teams actually versus the ones that I said, there's 12 total teams.

Paxos offers 95% revenue sharing. So Hyperliquid gets 95% of the revenue of the profit of the supply of stable. In buybacks. Like they buy in high tokens or something. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Frax proposes cross-chain redeemables, stable coin structure, 100% of a yield goes back to hyperliquid. Athena Labs backing USDAH entirely by USTB, which is basically Black Rock's Biltl Fund,

returning 95% of reserve revenue to hyperliquid and pledging at least $75 to $150 million in ecosystem incentives. So just like a bribe, which is fair game. Incentive. I understand it. Incentive. Yeah. Agora Sky, USDS.DS, built on the Hyperliquids Risk Framework.

yield split. 4.8% return on all USDH held on hyperliquid, which is like, it's not, they're giving most of that, that yield back to hyperliquid. So a bunch of different competitors, polymarket can basically tell you what it thinks. And it's coming in. It's not even close anymore. It's not even close. Native markets coming in at 94%.

Again, I had never really heard of native markets. Turns out it's been founded by like a pretty good team. They're plugged into the hyperliquid community, I believe, right? Yeah, founders. The one person I do know is MC Lodder, former CEO of Uniswap, Uniswap Labs, who came from Black Rock, so she knows a thing or two. And so Native Mark is just like the big favor to win by 96%. Yeah, so this was like a bidding war.

It was just like a public RFP process. So all the proposals and all of their replies, almost felt Dow-like in governance forms, right? That's where these proposals were essentially submitted. That's why it was so noisy on crypto Twitter. Everyone's so much to comment on, so much like content, basically. Now, Haseeb, his take was basically the RFP process was a little bit of a farce to begin with. So he had heard this is like venture capitalist rumor mill, I'm sure, but he had heard from sources that perhaps it was always going to go to native markets all along.

And hyperliquid had always intended this. And so issuing a public RFP and having kind of, because the hyperliquid validators were going to vote on this was sort of a farce. Like they already knew who they were going to pick. And by the way, this is how RFP processes work oftentimes in governments and other RPs. Like you already know who you kind of want, but you have to issue the RFP anyway. So that was his take. Whether that's true or not, you know, not sure.

The final vote, though, is scheduled for September 14th. So we should know next week who's going to win the bachelor and have USDAH as their stablecoin. Do you know what else happens on September 14th run? No, I don't. This incoming September 14th specifically is Bankless's fifth birthday. No way. Really? Yeah.

What do you celebrate by when the LLC was born or like when we were given back the approved LLC from the state that we filed in? So many birthdays because we started the podcast before that, right? We started the podcast well before that. Yeah. Then we started writing together way before that. So we have multiple birthdays. Well, that's a great day.

The legal entity was formed on September 14th. I kind of regret we didn't launch a stable coin company, though, rather than a podcast. It's a big business here. Should we have launched a token? We could back up for our birthday. Speaking of stablecoins, though, we should end the section with this. Mega-Eath introduced a stable coin on their platform. And this is kind of cool.

It's more embedded into the Mega-Eath chain, right? Does the yield go to validators in some way? Tell me about this. Yeah, okay, so they are trying to figure out a way. So Mega-Eath, hyper-scaled, the most-scaled chain that perhaps will ever exist. Because they're not made that yet. We should specify. Theoretically, the most hyperscale chain that will ever exist in theory.

Conceptually speaking, they will be the most scalable chain, which means, Ryan, that they can't really take chain fees because the whole concept of a hyper-scale chain, which is like, you can't pay fees. It has to be, every fee has to be zero. Oh, is everything's going to be free. Every. Basically. Yeah. Yeah, super free. So how do you fund this?

Exactly. How do you make money as a mega-eth org if you can't sell, you can't make revenue selling block space? And? One solution that they have is minting enable stable coin and they just collect the yield and they back into the stable coin. And so they're doing the same thing that hyper liquid is, which is they are using an external service provider to supply them with a stable coin.

And the supply of the stable coin will give them an ongoing supply. revenue that is not block space sales that they get to actually fund their operations with. So it's an alternative way for a blockchain to make money, having a naval native stable coin and collecting so that yield. So they are working with Athena and they are making USDM. So Athena's a back end service provider. They are going to mint USDM natively on Athena. And that is what allows megaEath to grow revenue because they get the yield and they have a native stable coin to help grow the supply of on their chain. I like that. So I think that, the three business models that we've seen for chains or the way that number goes up basically,

right, is you can sell your block space, either the ordering of that block space or the actual, you know, space within the blocks for transaction fees. L2s can do this, L1s can do that, business model. And there's this model, which is you get a percent of total assets on the chain effectively, right? So they're getting, you know, 4 percent treasuries, they get 4 percent of all of the stable coin assets that they have on Meghe. That's the second. And then there's the OG business model is you just meme yourself into a store of value. I like that one.

The special snowflake status, right, that Bitcoin has. And we would say on bankless, ether is getting and has to some degree. And I think all L-1s are in a competition to get that. Those are the three business models for chains. I feel like we've, we're trying them all, aren't we? Coming up next is NASDAQ tokenizing U.S. equities? What does that mean? Are they tokenizing U.S. equities on chain?

or are we trading tokenized U.S. equities on NASDAQ? What's going on over there? And Gensler lost his phone. Oh, no. He lost his phone. How could that happen? I don't know.

And what was on his phone? Yeah. And why did it so coincidentally conveniently get deleted? And also just two big wins for optimism and the O.P. Stack. Two new chains are now O.P.

chains. We're going to talk about them. But first, we're going to talk about another O.P. stack chain, and their fracks and their fracks still layer two is an opie chain. Just juice up for massive

the throughput when that's where they put all their yield on and their stable coin and all that kind of stuff. Let's go hear from FRAX right now. In the wild west of DFI, stability and innovation are everything, which is why you should check out FRAX finance. The protocol revolutionizing stablecoins, DFI, and Rolex. The core of FRAX finance is FRAX USDA, which is backed by BlackRock's institutional biddle fund. FRAX designed FRAXUSD for best in class yields across DFI, T-Bills, and carry trade returns all in one. Just head to FRAX.com, then stake it to earn some of the best yields in Defi. Want even more? Bridge your FraxUSD over to the Fraxtal Layer 2 for the same yield plus Fraxtal points and explore Fractyl's diverse layer 2 ecosystem with protocols like

Curve, Convex, and more, all rewarding early adopters. Frax isn't just a protocol. It's a digital nation, powered by the FXS token and governed by its global community. Acquire FXS through Frax.com or your go-to decks, stake it and help shape Frax Nation's future. Ready to join the forefront of defy, visit Frax.com now to start earning with FraxUSD. and staked FraxUSD. And for Bankless listeners, you can use Frax.com slash R slash bankless

when bridging to Fraxel for exclusive Fraxel perks and boosted rewards. 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

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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. Ronin, the gaming chain that was the scaling solution towards the AXE Infinity. Okay, so remember, let's go through history really quick, Ryan. Axi Infinity blew up crypto gaming in 2021. So cool. Got like a billion people on chain using AXI Infinity.

I may be exaggerating, maybe exaggerating, but like a lot of people. A lot of people. A lot of people. And then they were like, oh, we need our own chain to scale. And so they built the Ronan chain. And that is where things have been so far. Ronin actually has more activity today, like meaningfully more activity today than they had at the height of the Axi mania because they have like way more gains now.

And they just have always been an independent layer one. They took the permissions off of Ronan chain like roughly a year ago, maybe nine months ago, six months ago, something like that. and now that the chain is like pretty mature, they want to come back to Ethereum. So they are coming home. So they have chosen the OP stack to build their chain and they are becoming a layer two.

And so what are they getting? What are they getting as an Ethereum layer two? I actually asked to Gio this when I talked to him recently. One of the big ones is just like the code reuse in Ethereum is just so big. They love the OP stack because so many other chains are using the OP stack. And so there's just like an ecosystem there. Yeah, exactly. They just want the same code

that everyone else is using. But they get 15 times faster block times. So they're going for 100 to 200 milliseconds, which is like faster than I thought possible. Thruput of a million transactions per second. Inheriting Ethereum security. Ron is the token for the running chain. That will remain the gas token.

Okay. And then they also get $7.000-ish million dollars in milestone-based grants. Also a bribe. Nice. Also a bribe. Also a bribe. Yeah, yeah.

that they're not the only one. A second big win for the OP stack was Upbit. So Upbit is a crypto exchange in Korea. Maybe bankless listener. You have not heard of Upbit. It's actually a pretty big deal. I was looking at the volumes here. They are consistently number four.

Look at this. Just like a hair behind Coinbase in 24-hour volume. So Upbit is a pretty large exchange. Dominates Korea as far as I understand. And they have chosen the OP stack. and Ethereum Layer 2 to launch what they're calling Gaiwa. Is this a Gaiwa? So what we know about Giawa is a stands for global infrastructure for Web3 access,

one second block times. Okay. And they want to focus mainly on dominating on chain in South Korea. I kind of think this is the base of South Korea. You know, if up is the coin base of South Korea. So this is by proxy the base of South Korea. Yeah. And so more chains, more L2s, two big wins for the OP stack.

on the week, and we are seeing actually blob space get consumed as well. Yeah, and this is before a lot of chains are actually online. So last hard fork, we increased blobs, the blob target from three to six. And slowly that is getting saturated. If you're just like deep nerd Ethereum economics, this is kind of what this subject is. So we are up to five blocks, a block, every Ethereum block being consumed. So Ethereum blob space consumption is healthy. And of course, bankless listeners know that L2's,

Use blob space, right? So when this goes up, it signifies that more L2s are using, you know, Ethereum effectively. That's right. That's right. Okay. David Hood just joined the S&P Indycee, which is great. Okay? So when you join the SMP 500 Indycee, you get that nice, sweet passive bid.

Yeah, you kind of, you're just done. Yeah, you can retire. You win. As in equity, you are just very happy. You get some sweet premium, right? Because a whole bunch of people, passive investors, right, Vanguard group type investors, they jump, what do they do? They buy the S&P. They buy. They buy persistently. So all of that's going into these 500 companies that have joined these ranks. And now Robin Hood is among them. Coinbase, actually. Was that earlier this year? They joined the S&P. Yeah. And so this is almost the second crypto company to join the S&P 500. Yeah. Robin Hood jumped like something 15% on the news. Woof. There are a bunch of companies were eyeing this one slot. Because like there's, like, there's a second crypto company to join. And there's, a churn in the S&P 500 had a decent click, click rate. You know who was also eyeing this

spot but didn't get it? Who? Micro strategy. Oh, no. Micro strategy wanted, well, okay, that would be, that that's always been the goal of part of the goal of micro strategies, right? Is you can kind of like bid yourself and like win enough that you get into the S&P and then you get that nice, sweet passive bid. Yeah. It's an even bigger deal for micro strategy, I think, than it is from Robin Hood because like Robin Hood has to fight to get there and all Michael Saylor has to do is just leverage up on Bitcoin. Huh. Okay.

Well, I'm sorry. Robin Hood took your slot. I'm sure he'll get it. You think he'll get it eventually? I don't know. I would actually like to dig into the criteria by which the S&P kind of, it's a committee that decides this and I wonder what the rationale is. That's a very powerful committee.

It's a powerful committee for sure. There are many powerful committees in this world, David, including whoever. runs the SEC in that committee. So let's talk about the mysterious case of Gary Gensler's missing text messages. All right. So this was an entire report that actually came out of the SEC. And I'm going to eat you to describe it. But I think the summary is nearly a year of Gary Gensler, formature of the SEC, text

messages were lost. So this would be the time period of October 2022 to September, 23. they were permanently lost due to a series of avoidable errors within SEC's IT department. There's some description as to how this happened. But notice those dates, October 2022 to September 2020. What was going on during that time? Generally, I would just call that the height of Operation Chokepoint 2.0.

Oh, yeah. It was Gary Gensler's reign over. Like, we still had more to go. Yeah. Like, I don't think we really got out of that until, Actually, wait, no. The Bitcoin ETF was sub-filed right around then and then approved a little bit later.

So, yeah, I would call that the height of Gary Gensler's terror. That's when he was, reign of terror. That's when he charged Genesis and Gemini. That's when he set like a $30 million fine with Cracken for staking, dropped all the coin-based lawsuits. Like, he was going wild. Dropped to the lawsuits as in made the lawsuits happen. Yeah.

And you always hope, okay, new administration comes in and you, you kind of, that's a check on the previous guys. You get to go through kind of their, their text messages and their email and you say, what were they up to? I mean, there's a lot of allegations of Gary Gensler being kind of unfair and being just. Gary, why did you do this? But unfortunately, we can't do that because this text messages have gone. They're gone.

They've disappeared. According to avoidable, unresolved software errors. Yes. Okay, so 38 of the 1,500 messages have been recovered from colleagues and related logs that were mission related. Okay. So conversations around enforcement actions or against crypto reform. Texts from May 2020, show Gary Gensler and his staff discussing when to take action against big crypto trading platforms and their founders. But nothing material, I think, has really, really been found.

This is Hayden Adams. He said, shaking my head, brosapena, the text of every founder. in crypto and then deleted his own before leaving office. Yeah. Can I bring something up? Sure. Do you remember Gary Gensler's what he did on April Fool's Day, 2023? Was the Just Deal With It?

That's burned into my memory banks. He put on the Just Deal With It sunglasses on his profile picture. Yeah. Can we go to that? So here's Gary Gensler sitting at his chair in it on, this is on Twitter. His Twitter profile pictures wearing the Just Deal with the Glass. when I saw this, Ryan, I can count on like one hand the number of times I've been mad in like the last decade. This pissed you off.

This pissed me off. This was one of them. Yeah, quite. It just shows how intentional and blatant it is. To me, this is an admission of guilt. This was a very clear admission of guilt. It was kind of like a and you can't do anything about it. And you can't like, and it's so subtle.

It's like, it's a dog whistle is like, just fucking deal with it, you crypto bros. And like, I can't take, I could never take. No one could ever take this to court and be like, he's guilty. Look at this what he did on April Fool's Day, 2023. But we know, don't we? We knew. We know. He knows what he did was illegal.

That's the whole point. He deleted his sex messages. He put on the dust and just deal with the glasses. Hey, we don't know if he deleted it. It could be an IT accident, David. Like, IT accidents happen all the time. I feel like we can't conclusively say that. Accidental boat accident or whatever.

Yeah. Meanwhile, in the Senate, you remember the Clarity Act. So we got the Genius Bill. and the Clarity Act, we got the Genius Bill Stable Coin done. Now we have clarity, what's a commodity, what's a security,

who gets to decide. That passed the House. Remember that? Now it gets kicked back to the Senate for a Senate version of it. So the Senate has not reviewed all the Clarity Act of material. They're in the process of doing this.

We don't know fully what it's going to look like. But one thing that's kind of cool in the Senate version of the Clarity Act is there is some language explicitly clarifying that non-custodial software developers

are not criminal money transmitters under Section 1960. You remember 1960? That's the Roman Storm. That's the Roman Storm. Yep. Okay. So the Clarity Act says,

that's not illegal. And here's some clarity on that. That's great. So hopefully that makes it to the final revision. There's some other things. Can we retroactively apply that, please? It would be nice.

You'd think it would, I got to, this has got to make it in the court case, right? Yeah. guys, the U.S. just passed laws about this, right? It's got to help his court case. Another thing that was great. It is a nice, I'll just remind people that Roman Storm is back home with his daughter in Washington, and he has been. And that's just great.

Maybe he's listening to this episode. Maybe he's not thinking about crypto at all. Yeah, hopefully that one. Anyway, also this, validators are exempt from AML, KYC, and anti-fraud requirements. So they specified this. And they also said, NFT transactions aren't automatically. security. So just in case you were worried about your Pokemon cards, David. They got that. I was. I was worried about those. The NASDAQ thing that you mentioned, let's dig into this, because I saw this,

NASDAQ is tapping into tokenized equities. The headline here is NASDAQ seeks nod from US SEC to tokenized stocks. Then I also saw the CEO, Edina Friedman, the CEO of NASDAQ at the All In Summit. And here's what she said about this. So this morning we announced that we're going to be bringing tokenization into our markets. So making sure that equities are tokenized and traded on market, in the markets, not in a side, a side sleeve, but actually in the core markets. So the eventual goal? It goes on and asks, like, eventually, are you going to have, you know, 24 by 7 exchange? And she says, not yet. It'll take a while.

Anyway, they go on. But that was the news. Nasdaq. tokenizing, it's providing the option, if you want to listen to NASDAQ, to either go the tokenization route or the kind of the normal route. So it's an either or. Yeah, you could do either. Either or.

And these would be native, by the way. So it's like native property rights, right? It's actually like NASDAQ level property rights. So at first glance, that sounds kind of cool, right? Yeah, that sounds like they're just doing the thing that we want them to do. Yes. Is there, is there a catcher? I just, I dug into it a little bit more because the headlines were cool.

It's all flashy. Unfortunately, it's not as cool as it sounds. So they're still settling on the DTCC, right? Which is the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation. And so when they mean tokenized, they're talking about tokenizing it on the DTC's private instantiation of a blockchain. Okay. Do you remember R3 Corda? Do you remember that?

Was that like IBM or something? Yeah. I remember this from years ago. They have one of those instances running. The blockchain, not Bitcoin era. It was the institution blockchain that bought like an audio codec for some ridiculous amount of money. And I was like, why the hell did you do that? We should do some crypto trivia sometime.

That would be good. I actually do have like 50 on, you know, Cahooots is an app called Getsons or something. Yeah, I have like a 50. Crypto trivia? It's like, do that as a fundraiser sometime. We just host a whole bunch of people for crypto trivia. Anyway, okay, so it's just on R3Corp. So it's an enterprise blockchain. So it's kind of like little more than a database.

This is not permissionless validators in any way. Who the hell cares? No on-chain composability. No public wallets or bridges. I don't even know how to get there. You can't. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know either.

Anyway, so it sounded cool, but it's not so cool unless they go to the next step. You can't use the tokenization word on a private blockchain. That's not, that's our word. That's not, that's our word. Yeah. They can't use that. It has to be public. It has to be public.

It has to be public. Or there's not a token. Exactly. It's our word. They don't know what they're doing. Anyway, last story of the week, David, give me this. Robin Hood, they're doing something? Yeah, this is pretty cool.

Robin Hood Social. So what's going on right now is a Robin Hood Summit in Vegas where they announced a bunch of things, like Robin Hood banking is coming, which I know we're not supposed to like banks, but I would at least like to trade Wells Fargo for Robin Hood. I'll take that trade. They introduced a Robin Hood Social. And so a social app, so you like traders, I think, are really, we're going to be like first class citizens here.

Let me social. Like Instagram? Like screenshots of my portfolio? I'm imagining it's something like, did you ever go on to FinTuit back in the day? Or I think that still exists. What? Is this a subreddit? No.

It's like a finance version of Twitter. And so you like you can tweet out your trades and your thoughts about stuff and charts. It's just like Twitter but with more finance features built in. It's kind of like this. So it's like it's very much like a Twitter feed. But there's like embedded tickers embedded by sell buttons. on tickers and then you can write stuff. And then you have a profile and your profile can like disclose if you're up or down.

Interesting. And I kind of think it's interesting that like this is happening at the same time that base is going social in their own particular way and they're in their consumer crypto way. Robin has just going way more into like the financial end of things where as you coinbase is always trying to be consumer crypto. And then we also know that Sam Altman wants to make a social app as well. And so there's like a new generation of social apps coming online. And that's kind of cool.

Yeah. Do you use any of them? Is there anything that's kind of now? I use Twitter. I mean, but that's the old social app. Has any social app kind of made it to your daily active user? You know, David Hoffman, are you a daily active user of anything new that's come about in the last like five years? I kind of would like to go the other way.

I'd like to get off Twitter, but I can't. Especially this week, huh? especially this week. We're going to talk about that. Yeah. Let's end it here. You guys know none of this has been financial advice. Even that chart that I showed earlier is not actually financial advice.

All right. We don't know if downtown... I already hit the buy button. Crypto is risky. You 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.