Bankless - ROLLUP: Post Election All Time Highs | Beam Chain Announcement | Devcon Recap | FBI Raids Polymarket CEO

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

Bitcoin keeps going higher… What about Ethereum? On this weekly rollup we not only cover markets and its election aftermath, we also vibe check on Devcon week, Justin Drake’s Beam Chain Announcement and Polymarket’s CEO being raided by the FBI?  ------ 📣 LEGION | MERIT BASED ICOs  https://bankless.cc/Legion  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2    ⁠ 🦄UNISWAP | BROWSER EXTENSION https://bankless.cc/uniswap  🪄 MAGIC EDEN | HOME OF WEB3 https://bankless.cc/MagicEden  🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle    🤖 dYdX | UNLIMITED LAUNCHING SOON https://bankless.cc/dYdXUnlimited   🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT   https://bankless.cc/toku   ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/95?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E   ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 04:08 Markets https://x.com/intangiblecoins/status/1856146168746479673?s=46     https://x.com/robustus/status/1856015427106701675   https://companiesmarketcap.com/assets-by-market-cap/   https://x.com/tier10k/status/1856720083684372950   11:28 ETF Flows https://farside.co.uk/?p=1518  https://x.com/NateGeraci/status/1854882220407701661  https://x.com/woonomic/status/1854910141067673631  https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1854281747082477696  https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1856346407856112115   16:15 Coinbase Number 1 in Finance Apps  https://x.com/JasonYanowitz/status/1856745020230877668   17:58 ETH/BTC Ratio https://pro.kraken.com/app/trade/eth-btc  https://www.coingecko.com/en/global-charts  https://ultrasound.money/  https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1857068158281998357   21:59 Memecoins https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/peanut-the-squirrel  https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/dogecoin  https://x.com/TrumpWarRoom/status/1856500025037037606  https://imgur.com/362Df5M   29:50 FBI Raids Polymarket CEO https://nypost.com/2024/11/13/business/fbi-seizes-polymarket-ceos-phone-electronics-after-betting-platform-predicts-trump-win-source/   https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/investing/2024/11/13/polymarket-investigated-by-doj-for-allegedly-letting-us-users-bet-on-platform/   https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1856817245441401143   https://x.com/shayne_coplan/status/1856808022481539192   https://x.com/shayne_coplan/status/1856838409861386722   https://x.com/jespow/status/1856891151875268974?s=46&t=2ZINVXJQKx6xO_6Wiiu_2g   38:24 Devcon Vibe Check https://x.com/EFDevcon/status/1856359485029445677  43:18 Devcon Announcements https://x.com/brantlymillegan/status/1855813557323178067?s=46  https://x.com/EspressoSys/status/1855973751982309624   https://x.com/bioprotocol/status/1856707895590846812   https://x.com/sjdedic/status/1856649048318464349   44:18 Justin Drake’s Beam Chain https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1856276664877010968   https://imgur.com/a/AKOzd8M   https://imgur.com/a/DzWFeh3   53:15 Blackrock’s BUIDL Goes Multichain https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/blackrock-launches-new-buidl-share-classes-across-multiple-blockchains-to-expand-access-and-potential-of-buidl-ecosystem-302304035.html https://www.coindesk.com/business/2024/11/14/franklin-templeton-expands-410m-money-market-fund-to-ethereum-blockchain/   54:15 Deutsche Bank Launches ZK Chain https://x.com/Memento_Bc/status/1854126014261272727  https://x.com/gluk64/status/1855480434706260146?s=46&t=2ZINVXJQKx6xO_6Wiiu_2g  56:18 Blur is Voting on a Fee Switch https://gov.blur.foundation/t/blur-improvement-proposal-1-bip-1-blur-fee-switch-veblur-tokenomics/1040  https://x.com/mikeippolito_/status/1856147009927033316?s=46   57:09 Bitwise ETH Staking ETF? https://x.com/bitwiseinvest/status/1856698856336969778   58:40 MicroStrategy Acquires 27,200 BTC https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20241111351255/en/MicroStrategy-Announces-BTC-and-ATM-Activity-Raised-2.03-billion-Purchased-27200-BTC-Now-Holds-279420-BTC-with-BTC-Yield-of-26.4-YTD   59:32 Phantom Update Cleared Users Wallet https://x.com/mememe69696969/status/1856518115947110780  https://x.com/0xFiyopi/status/1856728042225480139?t=tYq8LUbRdtswq_dAEjusIQ&s=19  https://x.com/phantom/status/1856796137665245455   1:01:42 Aave Launches a Wallet https://family.co/blog/launch   1:02:32 Meme of the Week https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1856523237208797221   ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠  

Bankless Nation, happy second week of November. It is time for the Bankless Weekly. Roll up the Bangkok edition, or maybe I should say the all-time high edition because, David, we are at all-time highs again this week. How are you doing, man? You're over in Bangkok. So we're doing this with a 12-hour time zone difference. It's very late for you.

It's like still in the morning for me, but it's very late for you. How are you feeling? Pretty good. Yeah. I have in the existence of Bankless, Ryan and I have never been as far apart ever in the world as we are right now. We are literally on opposite ends of the earth, which means there's only a small time window

for us to record the weekly roll up because Ryan's got to wake up and I got to go to bed. And why am I in Bangkok? It's because it's DevCon week in the Ethereum community. DevCon happens every once in a while. Two years ago was the last DevCon in Bogota in November. It is now DevCon week once again in 2024 in DevCon. So 20,000 people, Ryan, 20,000 plus people came to Bangkok.

Yeah, quite a lot of people. There was a post on our Bangkok on Reddit saying, don't be alarmed about the invasion of crypto bros. There's just the Ethereum Developer Convention in town. That was like the top post on our Bangkok. Yeah, I'm sure that's kind of alarming to some people. So, David, I got to check in with you because you've been on the ground at DevCon. I've seen some things popping out of DevCon, including Justin Drake's Beam Chain Plan. This was a proposal.

Some folks were pretty excited. Some folks were not. So we'll talk about that. Also, all the other announcements. that you've heard at DevCon. And David, I don't know if you've noticed or you've been checking prices, but crypto markets have been on fire this week.

I have been checking prices quite a lot. I have checked my phone's prices at least a few times per hour at the very least. Okay, so we got Bitcoin all-time high, like seven days in a row. This is unprecedented. The ETS are absolutely flooding, and they're even buying ETH.

We got some good numbers to report on that side. out of the hole? It's out of the whole. It's into positive land. And Coinbase, the app, is trending on the app store. So that is a sign of which is to come. Our first cell signal. Start counting them. Because I remember last

ball market, it was like infinite cell signals for a year. And this is our first one. We first go our first bell. Don't say it. The clock has started. The cell clock has started. All right, fine, fine, fine. We're just getting started, though. But still the cell clock has started, according to David. And I got to update

you on this. So the FBI raided the house of the polymarket CEO, Shane. We're just talking about Shane last week. What is going on here? An FBI raid? We'll talk about all that and more. But before we do, we got a shout out to our friends over at Legion. What's Legion building, David? Yeah, as we are in the world of making crypto great again, Legion is trying to bring back a very tried and true mechanism for distributing tokens. We all know the ICO kind of had this weird face in 2017 where it got very popular a little bit too quickly. Legion is trying to make merit-based MECA compliant ICOs a thing. Public token sales. We like public token sales. I like to, that's my opinion. But now we are trying to make them great again in 2024. And with the Legion

score, which is the thing that Legion is bringing to the table for all of you, individual investors in the world of the EU or accredited investors in America, if you also want to join, you can get to have a Legion score, which will tell a project that you might be interested in investing in your worthiness for being included in such a project. So you can get graded on your on-chain D-Genness, your developer chops, your clout to rate you as a potential angel investor in an ICO that is run on Legion. And so startups can pick and choose. And hopefully you get selected. So you can go to Legion and get your Legion score and potentially invest in some Legion ICOs, MECA compliant ICOs at banklist.cccc slash legion.

And everybody should go do this. Even if you're not an accredited investor in the U.S., you could still get a Legion score today, and you could share it on Twitter. See how you scored. See how compared to David or myself or somebody else in your community. Just clouded up here.

David, let's talk market prices. We've got an all-time high for Bitcoin. The highest Bitcoin has ever been. What are we looking at on the week? What's the growth here? Yeah, we started the week at the so low, low price of 76. thousand dollars and we are up 16% on the week almost 17% on the week we started the week at an all-time high we ended the week 17% up also an all-time high this like to think an asset that's over a

trillion dollars could grow by like 17% in a week is like absolutely mind-blowing Bitcoin is just like crushing it is this all in the back of like the Trump news and everything going on there yeah it's got to be and I think there's conversation out here that are alluding to this, but people are starting to think that, like, the war of the nation-state fight over Bitcoin is, like, starting to happen. I don't really, I don't really know anything. I don't know any federal or governments. What that means is that, you know, the Togo War, there's only how many bitcoins are there,

21 million. I see. Donald Trump, the man who just got, you know, elected for the next president of the United States, has said that we're going to make a Bitcoin treasury. Like, some of the writing is on the wall that some people are alluding to, that, well, what if this kickstarts the nation state tug of war over the 21 million Bitcoins? Not that much of Bitcoins. What happens?

Price goes up. But what's the price happening this week? Well, it's all the D-Gen's front-running that. And probably, you know, hedge funds, people coming in externally. A lot of external capital, I would assume. The new all-time high price, $22,450. Excuse me. $92,450.

That was hit on November 13th, which was, again, pretty incredible. A 16% day for Bitcoin is a good day no matter what, but when that was on the backs of another like 10% week prior to that, it's pretty damn crazy. Yeah, it's actually, so Bitcoin on the 11th of November had its largest absolute value daily move in terms of like a total number of dollars price increase up. In one single day, it moved $8,343 in one single day. And that's the highest ever. the last record was set in 2021 when it had a $7,576 day. Okay, so these are really big moves. I mean, we're talking about hundreds, tens of billions of dollars in like potentially

hundreds of trillions in kind of a week time. And all of that in one day. I remember when the price of Bitcoin was like $8,000, David. And it just did that in a single day. Another flippinging actually happened, which people like Dan McArdle have been waiting for, which is the Bitcoin flippinging. which is the Bitcoin flippinging of the asset silver on the charts, David. Deserved.

Deserved. Honestly, what is silver even doing there? Silver, in case you're tracking this, which the top assets by market cap certainly is, silver weighs in at about $1.7 trillion. And of course, this has been a store of value, a monetary unit of account and store of value in the past with previous civilizations. It wasn't too long ago. You know, the end of the 1800s.

The U.S. was even, yeah, it was, it was by metalism. They were, they were having kind of like debates about whether the U.S. should be on a silver or gold strategy or kind of like, you know, split the difference, do a little bit of both. Anyway, Bitcoin has now flipped silver at a $1.7 trillion market cap. It is the eighth largest asset on the list of all top assets. It's still got a ways before it hits gold, okay? So gold is clocking in at $17 trillion. Perfectly a 10x away from gold. We are at $1.75 trillion Bitcoin market cap, and gold is $17.3 trillion market cap.

We are a perfect 10x away from gold right now. Okay. Do you think it happens this cycle, David? You want to call a gold flipping this cycle? Bitcoin doing a 10x. Bitcoin's got a lot of weight, dude. The eighth biggest asset in the world doing a 10x from here, that would put it at $900,000.

Yeah. to flip bold in this cycle. $900,000. It's extremely expensive Bitcoin. It feels like that would take some central bank buying in order for that to happen to some big nation state buying. How do you think gold got to be the number one? It's because it's on the central bank's balance sheets. 100%.

What did I just say? The nation states are starting to do the whole nation state tug of war. But David, that took thousands of years. We're talking about this playing out in like two decades. That would be absolutely insane. Anyway, we're accelerating. Mike Novigrats. Mike Novigrats is feeling so good.

He is on CNBC. No, he's on Bloomberg, open interest, looking like Steve Jobs here. You see Novo right there looking in the black rim glasses and the black turtleneck? So he is predicting not quite a million dollar Bitcoin, but he's predicting $500,000 Bitcoin this cycle. So a little bit short of flipping gold, but 50% of gold. Within range. Within range. Let's hear what he said.

Here's his clip. I think Bitcoin heads to 500,000. Again, it's a whole different paradigm because it forces every other country in. Countries you're already buying it. I've got a dear friend, the guy that actually turned me onto Bitcoin in 2013, who's in the Mideast right now. And he said he's never seen anything like it. He's convincing more people to avoid Bitcoin in the three days he's been there than any time

in his whole career and there are huge pools of capital. And so we're seeing something globally when Trump advocated in Nashville that he was going to be a crypto president of that. Bitcoin president. And now he's the president. Let me tell you, other leaders heard that. There you go. He's making the same case that you were making. Other leaders heard this. Do you know the country of Bhutan has a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin? They've been stacking in the background. I just saw that this week. It just crested a billion dollars. So there are some countries that have been... Bouton, El Salvador. You know, what do you think is next after those

countries? What country comes up to that? I think it could be the United States of America, David. at least they're probably not going to be selling the what you know 200,000 Bitcoin they still own at least post-January. Okay, let's check in on the silver to Bitcoin's gold, maybe, second place anyway, which is our friend Ether, the asset. How little ETH doing on the week, David? Hey, you know, we broke 3K, buddy. Ether starting the week at $2,850, got all the way up to prices, seen plenty of times before currently clocking in the week at $3,150, hit an interweek high of $3,400. Like I said, we've seen that price, we've seen that price at least 800 times,

up 10% on the week. Do you want me to give you the bold take on this? Sure, yeah, fuck yeah. It's room to grow, David. We got lots of room to grow, okay? It's room to grow. Bitcoin did like an 8K day, one day last week, okay? Yeah.

Yeah. This is how all cycles start like this, right? Yeah, first Bitcoin and then Ether. This is what we saw in 2020. First Bitcoin broke all-time highs. It took Ether like three months to hit all-time highs, and then the ratio did something crazy. Right around the corner. We've totally seen this before.

Well, yeah, like we're just waiting for our 8K day when Ether moves 8K in a single day. Exactly. That'd be great. Yeah, that's like in 2025, right? Okay, well, actually, there is some good news on the ETF front with Ether. In fact, why don't we just lead with Ether on this? Because it is actually fantastic news. You know that thing we've been tracking, which is net inflows into the Ethereum ETH,

and every single week we've been tracking since the summer. And it has looked like dog shit. It has looked terrible. Okay. So it started off like there was a crest of hope, you know. It started off okay. And then the flows just kept on coming. The flows are out of gray scale.

And the flows into Ibit and fidelity was like, okay. But like, okay. Okay, okay. So just to recap this, like I remember looking at this bottom line number of like net inflows on ether. And it's been ranging basically, mostly negative 400 million to like negative 500 million it got up to negative 600 it got up to yeah I did oh my god that was ugly saw yeah we kept checking it every week and we're like like like making grimace faces and I guess we have to report on this okay and and and some some context

for this of course is eith just like the bitcoin ETF so bitcoin had a trust gray scale trust product it had to outflow into the the lower cost ETFs that was part of the outflow process but it's inflows have more than compensated it, right? So there's been net buying pressure on Bitcoin. Ether is the same thing happening. Basically, there was net inflows out of the gray scale ETF. You knew that bleed was coming. But the hope was that other inflows into the other ETFs would more than compensate,

and it's been net negative to this point. That's what we're talking about with the inflows. Okay. Now, the good news. Okay, for the first time, this is the first weekly roll-up, we can report that net inflows into the Ethereum ETF are now positive and not just positive. Very, very positive. Very positive. Bigly positive. Read out these numbers, you. We just wiped out the entire hole in a single week. Okay. When was the election on November 5th? Yeah, November 5th?

Yeah, something like that. Yep. Okay. The day after the election, the 6th, 52 million. The 7th, 79 million. The 8th, 85 million. The 11th, 295 million. The 12th, 135 million. The 13th, 146. million dollars for a total positive net inflows of all time in the Ethereum ETF's positive 241 million you did it ether all it took was one week one week four months of digging that hole and it all's got a race in a single week there you go now we expect that number to stay in the black for like like this cannot go right again we're not going back we're not going back we'll quit the roll-up if this happens we'll quit reporting it if this happens yeah quit by But also, we also have to give us credit to the Bitcoin ETFs. Also very large.

Can we flip over to Bitcoin ETFs? Interestingly, on the election day, the fifth, Bitcoin actually had $116 million of outflows, but $620 in flows the next day. Wow. $1.4 billion the next day, $293 million after that, $1.1 billion after that, $800 million after that, $500 million after that, paying in some numbers. $1.4 billion on a single day. is pretty incredible on November 7th. Wow.

These are pretty big days. One of those days, Ether may have had like about 30% of that inflow volume. So, but like, but just nothing to compare. There's measuring. Yeah, this is cute. This is measuring the billions here. Okay. So now go compare it.

The I shares Bitcoin ETF, that's the BlackRock ETF. It's now surpassed I shares gold ETF. Okay? Wow. It did this in 10 months. The Bitcoin ETF is bigger than the gold ETF. 10 months. The I shares gold ETF.

from Black Rock was launched in January 2025. That's how fast it's happening. We already got the ETF flippinging on the Bitcoin side of things. So again, you know, Bitcoin just can't let Ethereum have any glory here. It's just like stomping these numbers. Well, the Ether ETF flows will start to beat the Bitcoin ETF flows when the Ether price ratio starts to also beat the Bitcoin price ratio. That's just logic.

Yeah, of course. Yeah, that's logic. When's that happening, David? When's that going to start happening? I don't know, man. I don't know, man. We almost had it this week, but then got erased. Well, this is, so Baltunis, you know, chiming in saying Ether ETFs had the best day ever in flows yesterday in the week, almost above water in the year to date.

That's what are you saying. Now we are above water, trending in the right direction, he said. So, you know, that is cute, as you say. Meanwhile, the Ibit, BlackRock, Bitcoin ETF, just had its biggest volume ever with 4.1 billion traded. not only in flows, David, we're seeing some heavy volumes. This is like more volume than stocks like Berkshire, Netflix, or Visa saw. And if you're noticing a sense of jubilence or euphoria, that might be true. And that will be noted by the fact that Coinbase is now the number one app and finance

and the number 13 in the entire app store. The Coinbase ranking in the Apple App Store has been one of these stronger sell signals that we've had in cycles past. Now, Coinbase stayed in the top five of the Apple App stores for many months in 2021. But if you had sold during any of those months in 2021, that would have been an advantage selling point. I mean, I feel like, sure, it's a sell signal kind of later. But like, we just entered this. Like, what this signifies really is, like, the question that we've been asking for a long time, is retail here?

Is retail here? Are you getting texts from your, like, normie friends being like, oh, it's crypto? Are you still in crypto? Like, let's meet over coffee. Like, those kind of text, that's an indicator that retail's here. And this kind of data set, which is, like, how, you know, trending is Coinbase the app in the App Store. And I think that, like, we have to get this to number one in total apps. And then you start to see, okay, this is like, this is a FOMO territory.

This is like hype territory. Retail is really here and they're buying in size. Well, look at the number of the apps. Number one, Coinbase. Number two, Robin Hood. Number three, Cash app. number four, crypto.com.

Like, those are all crypto apps. That's in the finance category. In the finance category. In the finance category. Yeah. Yeah. Overall, though,

Coinbase is just like one slot below McDonald's overall. So I don't know what that tells you, but we're coming for you. That's not a sales signal. That's a bicycle. Yeah. At least above McDonald's.

If Bitcoin ratio, we got to be down on the week, right? Yeah. We got, okay, we started the week somewhere around like 0.05. got above 0.04. We are currently back to 0.05, sad. At least we're not below, though. If you're below, that would be... It's flat. It's flat with a big old Christmas tree in the middle.

Okay. I'll take flat then. That's fine. Total crypto market cap is $3 trillion, above $3 trillion? All time high. All time high in the total crypto market cap. How's that feel? All time highs. Look at that. Look at that. That's good. It feels great, David. I'm feeling pretty good. I'm feeling like we got some exciting months ahead, quite honestly. I don't see signs of this stopping. I mean, not to say there won't be retreats, there always are, but no signs of stopping. Another indicator that I'm keeping an eye on, and I know you are as well, is like how much ether is actually burning. So, you know, last week we talked about these cycles where ether is kind of like on a net positive issuance cycle or it's on a burn cycle. And these things kind of happen in phases. And during bull markets,

when Ethereum block space demand goes high, then eth, eith tends to burn. And it. ETHs tends to And it's started to burn. So a few days this week, it's into kind of like the burn territory. And I'll keep an eye on whether this like continues. It has been a while. Yeah. And it's burning. Remember it has two burn engines, which is interesting.

Like last bull cycle, it didn't have these burn engines. The first burn engine is just like block space on Ethereum L1, right? The second burn engine is blob space. And both engines have been actually firing and burning. More on the L1 side of things, but also blobs have been burning. So L2s are doing. doing their part to contribute towards the burn as well. And I guess my base prediction is, you know,

everyone is in sort of the ETH has no value accrual. L2s are parasitic, right? And what it will happen is in the months to come when the burn starts firing and like L2 gas fees get more expensive, that narrative will switch to like, ETH holders, ETH is just a rent extracting asset. Do you know, like it's just like...

The Ethereum layer one blockchain is extracting rent from its layer two blockchains. Oh no. Exactly, exactly. So this is what typically happens during these burn type cycles, and I sort of anticipate the same. So we'll keep an eye on that too. Just by way of recap, though, if you're keeping score, since the Ethereum merge, over the last

two years and 61 days, Bitcoin has inflated by 56 billion of Bitcoin, at least in today's value. Ether has had negative issuance, $328 million. So you'd think that would matter. This, again, is the first bull cycle that ETH is. like not issuing very much. It's like still net deflationary, at least over the past two years. And issuance is like way down.

You'd think that would matter at some point in the price. But so far like, even though eth has had a couple of weeks, it's not keeping pace with Bitcoin. And all of that burn, like you said, is largely due to layer one block space burn. Blob space has gotten just underway. The blob fee market is slowly creeping in. We have burned $400,000 of ether in the last 30 days, which is an, a whole lot, but when you compare it to the 30 days before that, which was zero, it's on, it's starting to get priced in.

I'll take it. And again, when like many layer twos are still just getting themselves like stood up and there's also hundreds of layer twos that don't even exist yet, the plan for many, many, layer twos is to all incrementally burn a small amount of blobs and because there will be many layer twos. I actually expect in the not too distant future blob space burn to surpass block space burn. That is the Ethereum roll-up-centric roadmap in my mind. His blob space burns more than block space.

The funny thing about everything you just said is I think far less than 1% of all people in crypto actually understand what you just said. It's part of blob space burn versus block space burn. It's going to like one's going to flip in the other. I mean, this is deep stuff. Like it still remains a more difficult asset to understand. Well, moving on to the extremely easy assets to understand, meme coins put in some absolute numbers this week. This brand new meme coin, or newer meme coin, at least, called

Peanut the Squirrel was up a whopping 1,500 on the week. So congratulations to anyone who put a mere $20, $50 into Peanut the Squirrel. Why it went up this week? I'm unfamiliar. I'm not in these particular trenches. Oh, you don't know? I would imagine this is the squirrel like swinging the election type meme, right? It's got to be something to do with that. Yeah, but it happened so late. Yeah, but that happened like a week ago. go. Why did it magically like start pumping on November the 11th? I don't know. I guess the and this is the number 55th asset, largest asset in crypto? So it went from a market cap of $128 million to $2 billion in three days. So any of the holders of peanut squirrel

just collectively made $1.8 billion in three days. Dana, or David, what do we do? Wasn't you. Wasn't you, whether, Ryan. I bet you were not in this. Why are we wasting our lives I'm talking about Heathburn and like fundamentals and like issuance and all this stuff? We should have just bought peanut the squirrel. Hey man, I'm buying meme coins.

I don't know about you. Okay. I want a meme coin trenches. Are you buying Doge? Because I had an exceptional like week as well last seven days. I did buy Doge going into the election. So I'm going to pat myself on the back.

I bought Doge trying to long the Trump victory and also Elon being the meme guy that he is. Doge is up 100% in two weeks, going from like 18 cents to 40 cents. It won't be long before we see a dollar. And this is all, of course, on the back of Trump tapping in Musk to lead the Department of Government Efficiency, aka Doge. Also with Vivek's, it's weird that like two people are leading up the Office of Government and Efficiency. That doesn't seem totally right. But because this is happening, Doge has pumped bigly.

But those are not the only meme coins. that have pumped. Coinbase has been listing the meme coins. So Coinbase tweeted out, man's best friend with a hat. Whiff is now available for trading. And that was after they also allowed Pepe to trade on Coinbase. So both Pepe and Whiff now trading on Coinbase for those who are owners of those.

As a result, WIF added a casual $1.25 billion in its market cap up 30%. Pepe adds $3.5 billion to its market cap up 45%. It's so crazy. It's so crazy. You know, like, I think the Overton window has really shifted in crypto where, like, meme coins are totally within, like, acceptable range, right? You have Coinbase listing them.

It's just basically, like, they're all pumping. You got people like Maraud saying, like, this is the meme coin cycle. It's like, it's all going up and, like, get in now. And so no one even bats an eye anymore. There was a time where a coin base listing meme coins, people would be like, what, really? Like, this delegitimizes the. thing that we're doing. But like, think about it from Coinbase's perspective.

They don't want to miss out on fees. And also, like, these are not securities quite clearly. Pepe is not a security. They're very safe. Yeah, very safe. Have you seen that meme of, it's that girl watching a guy put the shaped blocks into the correctly shaped block like receptacle. And there's like a circle block and you put the circle.

And you see like, okay, he puts the first one in and it's like a square. The square is a square go. The square goes in the square hole. and he puts it in square hole and she gets it right. And then he's like, here's a circle one. But the problem with this device, I'm explaining a meme. I know I'm doing it terribly. He picked up the circle one and then he's like, oh, you put the circle one in the circle

hole. And he goes, that's right. You put it in the square hole because they all fit. For some reason, whoever designed this device, everything fits into the square hole. Doesn't matter what the size is. The triangle fits into the square. You can just rotate everything and it fits into the square.

And so there's this one meme where it's like, oh, what cycle? What are we going to rotate? into next. Did you guess meme coins? That's right. We're all going back to meme coins. And then the other like circles are like ones like defy tokens, one's NFTs, ones like gaming tokens. And then like keep on picking up new shapes. I was like, oh, it's meme coins. It's always meme coins. It's always meme coins. We never get any rotation out of meme coins. And meme coins just rotate into other meme coins. Can we make it, can we spare just a little bit of liquidity for my 2021 NFTs that are like way underwater and like have lost like 98% of their value.

Dude, just a little bit. I'm not asking for a lot. Punk's got the bid. Punks got the bid this week. I don't know if you know if you know. Punks were over $100,000. Yeah. I like,

well, I told you you should have bought a punk in the bear market. Oh my God. I should have done it. I should always follow your advice. What NFTs do you even own? I could show you some things, David. You don't know about my like some of my 2021 wallets. We don't talk about those.

That is true. Yeah. Yeah. Some nasty JPEGs going on. We got a lot more to talk about, including this. The Polymarket founder just got his home rated by the FBI, like 6 a.m. in the morning. Like, what is going on? Even Brian Armstrong is like saying WTF is this administration.

Yeah, he did. First time I've ever seen it. Also, Justin Drake proposed the beam chain. I saw some reaction on the mind side. You were there for it. So you got to tell me. And you got to give me that update on DevCon as well. All this and more.

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You can get there at Magic Eden.io to get started. All right, Ryan, so I read this headline on Twitter in the middle of DevCon, and I couldn't, like, dive into it because I was in DevCon. FBI raids polymarket CEO's Shane Copland's house Apparently while he was like in bed Just chilling I'm assuming So great 6 a.m.

The perfect time to be rated Can you download me please? Yeah, okay So I saw this breaking By route of a tweet And it linked to this New York Post story And the New York Post story goes like this FBI sees a polymarket CEO's phone electronic

After the betting platform predicts Trump win According to a source, okay? So it goes through and it says what happened. So, of course, we've talked about Polymarket this entire cycle. We've talked about, you know, Shane last week was kind of a glory week for Polymarket. Massive success in terms of predicting election outcomes in real time.

Like, praise everywhere, highest volume week, like so many things we've talked about. Okay. So this is the guy, the co-founder. He's 26 years old. And I don't know if they knock on the door or they bash it in, but he was awoken from his sleep at 6 a.m. And the FBI, I don't, the details aren't out as to whether they presented a short. search warrant. I assume they have to in some way. I don't know all the details of this, but the net effect is they took his phone, they took his electronics. According to this article in The New York Post, they didn't tell him why. And according to a source as well,

listed, the source is not named, that there's some speculation that this was political retribution. Of course, we can't confirm that. We don't know. This has to go to trial. I have no idea why this is happening. And my first reaction to this, David, was like, that's weird. We don't have all of the facts, but it looks really, really bad. It looks, I'm not telling you this is what it is, but it looks like as in it could be perceived as like political retribution. Okay, again, I'm not saying. The Occam's razor points there. Okay.

I'm not saying this is the case, but we're talking about after four years of arresting and seizing property and threatening crypto founders. take it like knocking out their banks operation choke point one week after trump gets elected now is the time they decide to go raid shane's house the polymarket co-founder like why now this seems very weird even if this is not political retribution even if they had a very very good reason for this the optics here are absolutely insane the optics are like oh you just discovered polymarket the four days after the election like weird timing exactly And according to another Bloomberg follow-up post, really the reason why is the Justice Department is investigating Polymarket for allegedly accepting trades from U.S.-based users, according to a patient familiar with this.

But it already knew that. It already knew of that issue because they settled with the CFTC forever ago. So again, bringing up that issue just a week after the election is also super-sus timing. Yeah, doesn't it seem like, of course they were going to give a convenient reason. They're not going to say, this is political retribution. They're not going to tell you explicitly. Why? They'll find a reason here. And to your point, you remember, it was two years ago that the polymarket settled an enforcement

action with the CFTC and paid $1.4 million in penalty in addition to agreeing to block U.S. users. That's why we have the geo block. That's why, you know, we have a VPN block and sell of this. So what is going on here? Like, what's, again, tinfoil hat couldn't be like we could get two conspiracy theory with this. And of course, we don't know all the evidence. we're just observing something that's happening like a week after the election on the back of

massive attacks on crypto and it seems pretty suspect what's your take on this i don't know shane coplin personally i've never met it never talked to him uh but from what i've heard is that he just wants to build polymarket he has a grinds on polymarket what is it what does he do last year he built polymarket what he did the year before he built polymarket so the idea that there's anything extra that's nefarious again i don't know i don't know i don't know Shane but like doesn't check out. He's as a founder who grinds. And again,

timing super suss. Like, what do they want to know? The only time that we've seen this also happen was, is like the tornado cash. So like, maybe there's money laundering through a ploy market. Is that possible?

Maybe. But anyone can charge anyone for anything. It's, I don't, and I also, again, I don't know the exact, you like,

you know, way that this came about, buzz you can get a judge to allow FBI court order with a very low sort of threshold, I would think, right? It's just like these could just be charges. And again, it could be enough that like, oh, we think that some U.S. citizens are using polymarket, you know, like, and evading the geoblock and like using polymarket. And maybe they're acquiring his computer and this information to like find U.S. citizens

who have bet on these markets. taking a blind eye is like one possible answer. Dude, it's wild. So this is what prompted Brian Armstrong. By the way, the tweet was since deleted to say, like he said, WTF is this administration doing? Right? Because it looks like it's something coming from the administration.

Again, we don't know for sure, but the optics aren't good at this point. Shane had like one of the greatest responses to this that I've seen. So hours later, after this news listed, he tweets out, new phone, who dis? He was like, he's like, he's got a new phone. He's got his phone sees and he just goes in tweets with his brand new phone. Congrats on the iPhone 16 chain. Well done. Yeah, his comment, it's discouraging that the current administration would seek a last

ditch effort to go after companies they deem to be associated with political opponents. So he's like calling them out here, specifically. Yeah, we are deeply committed to being nonpartisan and today is no different, but the incumbent should do some self-reflecting and recognize that taking a more pro-business, pro-startup approach, maybe what would have changed the fate of this election. Polymark has provided value to tens of millions of people this election cycle while causing harm to nobody. We're deeply proud of that. You know, there's pictures of Shane with like Tim Wals. Have you seen this? Yeah. Yeah, I did see that. He's gone to the campaign. I think he was like, I don't know

Shane's politics, but like it was definitely not a, you know, kind of like full bandwagon on kind of the Trump side of things. I think Shane was trying to be politically neutral and like Right. Just provide a prediction market to everybody. Which is a good position to have for a Pollymark, for a prediction market founder. And it's also, well, okay, so we have four years of Trump who is like grateful to Pollymarket. Polymarket heavily allowed the conservative right to get their voices elevated through the mainstream media because the mainstream media wasn't going to do it. So we know that the Trump administration favors Pollymarket.

And they're in power for four years. So at least he has four years of being in the clear here. The Democrats, I get if this is political. you're going to see people like Elizabeth Warren. I bet Elizabeth Warren hates Polly Market. I bet she doesn't like it at all. I bet she's going to start to come out and start talking negatively about prediction markets and there being a threat to democracy.

Well, imagine if this came in the week after Kamala Harris won. And let's say there was like a blue wave. That would like that would really freak me out, honestly. I mean, because what I felt post... Well, I mean, it matters because like now it feels like post-January, this type of thing is going to be alleviated from crypto founders. We're no longer going to have a hostile chokepoint regime, right? It's like, I don't know how you felt, David, but on the back of like two, three, four years of this, having seen our friends, builders in the space, get like Wells notices, some get arrested, get their property seized, get harassed, get attacked by the administration, right? It felt like last week I felt like, oh man, this feels like a boot off my neck or off our neck.

What we're doing is no longer illegal, right? It's like, okay, it's fine now. And this kind of brought me flashbacks to like, wow, people are still getting raided by the FBI, like legitimate founders. This is our most successful company this cycle. This is our most successful project. Will we ever find out why they did it? I'm sure. I'm sure this is going to court.

I'm sure Shane has kind of like lawyers looking into this. So more details will emerge again. Maybe, quote unquote, maybe there's a very good reason for this. But wow, the optics on this. I guess we'll have to see. All right, let's go to some better news, David. Give me the update on DevCon. So I've been watching from afar, but you're on the ground.

So you've been attending the events. Like, first of all, let's do a vibe check. What's the vibe like in the Ethereum community? DevCon. DevCon is one of two events that the Ethereum Foundation organizes. The other one being a DevConnect. And DevConnect is kind of like the mini version of DevCon anyways. And DevCon is always just, it's the deepest nerds of Ethereum who like see Ethereum as like this thing shepherding this future.

It's like a lot of futarky stuff. Robin Hansen was actually here this week. I met Robin Hanson this week. And it's a pretty like price agnostic conference. I remember going to DevCon Bogota when Ethan was like in the 1,000 digit range. You know, right after three hours capital, like still right ahead of FTX actually. prices were bad, but no one cared at Bogota. And now price is actually a lot higher.

This is the highest ETH price that we've ever seen at a DevCon. And once again, like no one really cares, actually. It's just like all these different like corners of Ethereum, which you kind of forget about who are just re-churching in a hundred different directions, a lot of cryptography things, a lot of EIPs, protocol upgrades, things that you kind of forget that Ethereum, the Ethereum Foundation is investing in, a lot of DSI, progressive cryptography. which I'm guessing most people don't even know what that is, but it's like this very futuristic version of cryptography

that only Ethereum is really investing in. And I think my biggest takeaway is like I'll frequently forget when I'm at home. Like Ethereum, EF is doing like these 10,000 different venture bets on research in very futuristic technologies that are taking somewhere between five and 15 years to have like fruition, but only the Ethereum Foundation is doing it. And that is like their whole process of like growth by subtraction where the Ethereum Foundation wants to get smaller. But they're trying to like grow these little like movements in different directions. And it's all this is the festival, the cultural festival of Ethereum to kind of all see that hell will happen at once.

And the vibes are always just super good. Everyone's just super optimistic. Ethereum is this optimistic technology. Everyone gets to come and hang out and be in the same spot. I think my favorite thing actually, this is like kind of a side quest. but there was this music stage that was coordinated in like the lunchroom, so everyone can kind of go hang out and relax. And the EF put in just like music instruments,

connected them to the speakers, piano, like saxophone, trumpet, drums. And they didn't get a band intentionally. I saw you tweet this, yeah. They just like put up the stage. And then people who knew how to play music just went there and started jamming. And it sounded like a real band. But it was just like this very emergent coordination of like musicians. And I thought it was like pretty emblematic of like kind of what it feels like to be at an Ethereum of conference.

That's so fascinating. Yeah. Like I've never gone because as you know, I only go to one conference a year. But like this is this would be the second one. Like I would love to go to. And I put, you know, if it wasn't so far away, you would have. You would nerd out. It's like a quarter of university classes crammed into four days.

Because you can go, like there are eight, there are eight stages. And they are all going out. all times. And they're like, you can just fill your day with like talk after talk after talk. I mean, I saw some of the talks to you, super high quality stuff. I'm like learning things. Like we do this all the time, the podcast, I was learning about a new rollup improvement proposal that will like improve interoperability across like rollups without settling to the layer two, RIP 7755, which I deep dove into this after one of the talks. I'm watching this from afar. But yeah, it seems great. I guess one criticism of it from the.

the outside has been like, okay, but these are all dreamers. It's pie in the sky. It's research. They're very disconnected from the app layer and from like the builder. So it's all like deep cryptography, ivory tower, academics, but like where are the apps? Where are the users? Like, you know, did you get, what's your take on that kind of critique? DevCon has always been about protocols and standards and like kind of the deep tech stuff that is supposed to foster those things. I guess you could make the critique that like, yeah, it's about time to look a little bit higher up the stack. But there's still a lot of, like the investments I was saying,

in like these more futuristic technologies that are still many, many, many years out. Like, cryptography still has a lot to go when it comes to, like, what it can truly do. And so that's kind of the, it's kind of the gigabrain stuff that, like, I wouldn't even know existed if people like Barry White Hat or Gubb Sheep or Vitalik weren't talking about it. And it's not all that. There is some app stuff. It's just like there's just a lot. left to grow. There's a lot of technology left to squeeze the juice out of.

Number of things were released as well coming out of this. So, E&S, the dot-eith domain names, are going to be building their own L2. So name chain, it's called, not a lot of details about there's. There's some speculation. It might be a based roll-up. There is to see. I actually looked into that. I tried to ask around. I didn't get a clear answer because apparently it's like 80%-ish of a base roll-up, and I don't know how that works or what that means, but I'm looking more of the details. also espresso network is launching and um espresso is kind of a shared sequencer technology that is also working to defragment all the chains and unify all the chains so that's cool and then decide decentralized

science getting a little bit of attention this is CZ and Vitalik in the same room talking about decentralized that's interesting some people you wouldn't expect right but um you know CZ at devcon is like something I didn't expect have you has he given any talks or was he just attending side events I think it was just these D-SI side events. I didn't know if he was actually here at the actual DevCon conference. I did not see him. The big thing, David, that escaped outside of DevCon was this Justin Drake proposal, proposing the beam chain.

So I'm going to get your take on this. Let's talk about this. So prior to DevCon, Justin Drake tweeted an announcement of an announcement saying he had his personal biggest project ever that he was getting ready to announce. So there's a lot of speculation as to what that. might be. I will tell you from my perspective, I was kind of hoping this would be some sort of like native ZK rollups on Ethereum type of play because to me that's like the best representation of end stage Ethereum. So like expectations were high. These were even my expectations like going

into it. And what he what he talked about was something called the beam chain instead. We'll talk about maybe the reactions on the back of this presentation. But first of all, You were there and you live tweeted it. What is the beam chain? What is Drake proposing here? The beam chain is an alternative way of looking at the Ethereum roadmap, where there have been an R, a bunch of things on the Ethereum roadmap that Justin Drake is packaging up into what he's calling the beam chain and proposing that we build and ship this thing all at once. So we are building a bunch of different features, like a single slot finality, four second block time. snarkifying the layer one,

which is the very big, hard thing to do. Moving Ethereum into being quantum resistant, also like a just very big upgrade. And there are these things that we know that we have to do, packaging all of these upgrades, once we figure out how to code it up, how to engineer it.

Staking too. I noticed this one. This is like lowering the, lowering issuance and actually like making it so that validators can stake with one eave. Yes. And so packaging this all up,

doing this all at once, and then kind of doing something like we did with the merge, where we pop out the beacon chain and then we pop in the beam chain and all of a sudden we have the faster, efficient, more performant consensus layer

for Ethereum. And again, all of these things are already on the roadmap. Justin Drake is saying like, hey, there's a lot of this incremental stuff that's on the roadmap, things like centers to persistence, things like execution auctions,

smart decisions, all this kind of stuff. And we're going to let all that stuff be and it's going to progress incrementally like we always do. And then also all the stuff that we can tackle at once, let's package this up into one big thing and just ship it all at once.

And so it's kind of a way to, I guess, to unbundle a part of the Ethereum roadmap and then re-bundle everything that can be done all at once and do it again all at once. I think the thing that really tripped people up was the biggest thing was the timeline that he proposed for this, which was a five-year timeline. And so there's like testing for a year. There's like, you know, sinking and coordination amongst the consensus clients for a year. all the parts that you need to do in order to make this happen. It adds up to like 20, 29, 2030.

And then also the packaging for it, Justin Drake did this announcement of an announcement about something he's been working on very hard. And inside of the context of the ETH, BTC price being low, meme coins being on Solana, everyone's like, oh, the devs are going to do something. Like, we're going to fix Ethereum. It's Ethereum 3.0. It's Ethereum 3.0. Yeah, everything's going to be fixed.

Like, we're going to have super strong execution on layer one, one second block times. And so that's what the anticipation was. The room was absolutely packed for Justin Drake's talk. Like, you couldn't, people couldn't get in. And so everyone was kind of expecting with this announcement and this hype to have this, like, the devs did something announcement. And we got this, like, five-year update of, like, things that are already on the roadmap and we're just going to package it up and chip it all at once.

It wasn't exactly what people were hoping for. Nonetheless, it is very cool. It's, like, just adjacent. It's, like, kind of removed from what people were looking for. for this like present context of crypto. It felt more incremental. And I get the timeline up here. Of course, the full beam implementation

would be sort of over the five years. But every single year, there was like work towards that, incremental work towards that that would be like deployed into Ethereum. The other thing that I think trip people up is this was, and even me, this is not like the full Ethereum 3.0, like the next gen Ethereum type of vision. This is just the consensus slayer.

So this had nothing to do with the execution layer, right? And so, like, ideally for me, when I'm thinking of the Ethereum that's five years away, it would be encompassing not just the beam chain and consensus, which I think Justin did quite well, but also, like, where's execution going? Where am I enshrined ZK EVM roll-ups? You know, like, that's also what I want as part of this. And just because it was only the consensus layer, I think that left people, like, this did not play well on Twitter is something I'll say. It's like really hard to kind of like package up.

No, yeah. A lot of people are like, why the hell does Ethereum have to have five years to ship a product? Like what the hell are you guys doing? Just build it and ship it, which is like in my mind, like a very naive take. This is a consensus layer upgrade to Ethereum. How many consensus clients does Ethereum have? Five, which means five consensus clients needs to build and ship this independently. And then they need to sync with each other because the consistent. consensus clients need to have consensus. So they have to test the connections between all the permutations of all the consensus clients.

The reason why people are expecting like, why can't we just ship this in like, you know, a year, two years? Well, maybe that's coming from the perspective of people who are working on a blockchain that only have one consensus client. And so that's why they're thinking this. Like, this is what a decentralized system looks like. If we want this thing, it's going to have to have, you know, rounds and rounds of testing on the blockchain with the majority of users and the majority of assets and the

majority of TVL and smart contracting systems. And so, like, we're going to go slow and it's going to be careful. And so, yeah, the people who are like, deliver the product. It's like, join a Web 2 company. One thing I think to note about this presentation is it's just a proposal. This is how Ethereum works. So Justin was not, you know, staking out the roadmap. He was just, like, making a proposal. So there'll be some commentary on this and some back and forth and, like, maybe some merging with other ideas. Overall, I felt like it wasn't a bad proposal at all. It was bullish to me. It's not what people were really looking for in this present moment.

Like, sure, it's cool. Great. The meme packaging was just like not ideal. We will be having Justin on bank list to actually talk about that. Maybe we'll talk about the reception and maybe the broader idea of like, is Ethereum 3.0 a thing? Could it be a thing? If it was a thing, what could it include? So we'll be doing that soon as well.

All right, moving on to what's coming up next. Deutsche Bank has dropped a test set to a ZK roll-up settling to Ethereum. Who ever would have predicted that banks would. use roll-ups to settle to Ethereum. Whoever said that. I have never heard that before. Blur is also voting on their fee switch, which is just giving more and more credence

to this D5 renaissance and how Phantom update, the Phantom wallet, cost some users, some phantom users, millions of millions of dollars. Yikes, make sure you write down your seed phrase, people. All that coming up and more, but first, I'm going to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that makes this show possible. New projects are coming online to the mantle layer two

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Biddle is being shipped on all of these different blockchains. Carlos Domingo, the Securitai, CEO, said, with these new chains, we'll start to see more investors looking into leveraging the underlying technology to increase efficiencies on all things that we do now. The Black Rock Bill Fund, of course, on the Ethereum layer one is now moving to its layer twos. And also, Aptos. Interestingly, that they added Aptos because Arbitrum, Avalanche, Optimism, Polygon, all EVM chains. Yeah, one of these are not like the other.

Aptos is a move chain, a move layer one. So they decided to go out of the way to support a completely different execution environment. That's like custom code. They couldn't just copy and paste their code. So congratulations to Aptos, I guess. That's a big win. Also, Franklin Templeton is expanding. Did you know they weren't on Ethereum? Now they are. So they had a money market as well,

similar to the Biddle Fund. It was a started on Stellar, I believe. It's available on some other blockchains and they are expanding to Ethereum as well. The big news that you were talking about before the break was Deutsche Bank. So they have launched a ZK chain test net on Ethereum. Deutsche Bank is one of those big banks, David. They've got one and a half trillion dollars worth of assets. Okay. So these are big banks. So some key features here. A sole bound token-based digital identities. They get the AML K-YC via Soulbound NFT, paymaster functionality.

They're going to have their own block explorer. And also, it's going to be private as well with Interop to other private chains and, of course, the rest of the Ethereum ecosystem. So this is on the ZK Sync stack. It's a pretty big win for the elastic chain. Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

Yeah. So, can we go through some of this stuff? A Soulbound Digital Token Identity, so they're going to have users on chain. that they are going to have KYC, they're going to know their users. Paymaster functionality. What does that mean?

They're paying for gas for their users. Custom-built Block Explorer, like that's just a front end for their users' like assets and accounts and all of that stuff. Tokenize fund creation and issuance. Okay, they're going to put the funds on the ZK chain and then interoperability capabilities.

I don't know what that means. That's like a whole entire bank ecosystem. Well, on a chain. Do you remember this idea? And it's like, we've seen many blockchain bank projects in the past that just like didn't make sense. Now they're starting to make sense. And do you remember that mean from like, I don't know.

It was like 10 years ago or something like this, which is the basic idea that, yeah, private blockchains. All the banks, all the financial institutions would have their version of a local area network, like a land that connected to the wide area network, the internet, right? And so each of them would have their own private blockchains that were connected to the public Ethereum network. Now it's actually in the early stages of maybe no sense. Because they all tried to do layer ones. It makes a ton of sense when they are layer twos. Yes. A decade later, it's starting to make sense now.

And also when they don't have to build their own blockchain tech and they let people like Alex Glucasie do it for them. Blur, the NFT platform that came and ate open-sease lunch, has a proposal to turn on the fee switch and VE Blurtokonomics. So a 0.5% fee on trading is potentially being turned on if the Blur token holders wish it so, which is pretty cool. And again, it's a big plus one to the idea of a Defi Renaissance. So congratulations to Blur token holders if you guys do decide to turn that thing off. You got to imagine, too, OpenC is looking at this.

They're waiting for their Wells notice to evaporate before they issue a token. I mean, that's got to happen. Oh, yeah, they got a Wells notice. Yeah, like, but anyway, all of, like, this is why there's going to be a token, and Renaissance, some sort of D5 renaissance, is because just like Gary Gensler is going to be gone. No, no, no, meme coins again. It's meme coins. Meep coins, all right. It's meme coins.

This is some interesting news. Bitwise is planning to expand their business. They just acquired an ETH staking service company called Attestant. Attestin's been in the space for a while. You remember Jim McDonald from Attestine. He was talking about ETH staking like years before the beacon chain actually launched, and ETH staking was a thing. He was kind of an early thought leader. He was one of the co-founders of a testant.

They provide non-custodial staking services. Okay? So if you stake with a testant, you're not giving them custody. You're not giving up your private keys. You still have all the withdrawal credentials, access to your private keys. All they do is they just run the boxes rather than you running the boxes out of your house. So they've been providing the service for a while. Now, bitwise, again, issuers of an Ethereum ETF have acquired this self-custodial staking company.

And you got to imagine, David, that they are. just looking and they're seeing the potential for an eth-staked ETF that could be coming in the future. That's the only kind of math that I see. An ether-ETF issuer buys an ether-staking organization. I can't imagine any other outcome. What do you get when you put those two things together? Exactly.

This is Steve Barryman from a test in saying staking is a major selling point for Ethereum. It would allow ETF investors to earn about 4% per year by half. having exposure to ETH through a fund. So even the testin folks are kind of alluding to this possibility in the future. So more infrastructure being developed there. Ryan, guess what happened this week? Well, I know prizes went up, but what else? Micro Strategy acquires another 27,200 Bitcoins.

They bought more Bitcoin. Micro Strategy bought more Bitcoin another week. Bought $2 billion more of it. Is this part of his $34 billion plan or however much $42 billion? I can't keep track of it. Just like if there's Bitcoin available in the market and Michael Saylor has money, he just goes and buys the Bitcoin. Like, how can any token compete with Michael Saylor's infinite money? He has infinite money, bro.

I don't know. He's just like the bull of all bulls. He is like a Bitcoin burn engine in and of himself, right? Bitcoiners don't have the burn as a mechanism. They have Michael Saylor instead. He's just like chomping on all of that, you know, additional issuance. So I don't think he's going to stop until he's, until he's, you know, like, done. I don't know when he's going to be done.

Did you see this, though, this week, David? This was very unfortunate, okay? So, looks like, here's a tweet. Looks like a new Phantom update cleared everyone's wallet in the app. Retail cooked. Okay, so this is a screen. This is welcome to Phantom, as if you're installing it for the first time. So what happened is a whole bunch of people have the Phantom wallet.

Many of them skew retail because they're doing meme coin stuff on Solana, that kind of thing, right? and when they set up the wallet they don't back up their seed phrase you know you get that 12 24 word seed phrase and what surprises me of some wallets apparently phantom it doesn't have a required option

to like back it up on your device or like back it up into iCloud or something like that apparently you can bypass that and it's just like hey did you write it down and you're like yes i wrote it down and then you know it proceeds anyway yeah what happened was there was an update an auto update so if you had your auto updates

on Phantom, it sort of reinstalled the application and, like, deleted your private keys. A fresh copy. No, didn't score any of the data. So if you didn't have your seed phrase, again, these are bare assets. This is cryptocurrency. This is what it means to have the responsibility to go bankless. It was just gone. So there are reports of people losing a million dollars. Again, this is skewing meme coin. So who knows, when the person set it up, maybe they weren't thinking, maybe they were early on crypto. maybe they just put $1,000 in, didn't expect it to grow as fast, and just didn't get around to the seed phrase thing. But people lost a lot of money like this. Reports of 50,000 and reports of hundreds of thousands.

One guy said a million that was gone as a result of this update. Can you imagine just like waking up looking at your phone? Getting a million dollars, yoint. God, that's so painful. You don't have to pay taxes on that, do you? It's kind of a boating accident type of incident, you know, with the IRS. It's like, yeah, prove it's. You know, like prove you don't have the private keys?

How do you do that? How do you prove you don't have the private keys? Yeah. Wow. Yikes. Nightmare fuel, dude. Yeah, this is a call to action. If you have a wallet that you use on your phone,

go just double-check that if you've written down those private keys. Just make sure you've done that. Yeah, go do that. And hopefully wallet providers, like, require this a bit more moving forward. One of which does, which launched last week, is a new wallet called Avera. This is in the Ethereum ecosystem. This is from the Ave family of application. So AVE building out its third product.

First, AVE, the Defi Protocol. Second, Lens the Social Protocol. And now, Avarra, the wallet. I love, like, Stani and team just don't stop shipping. Don't stop building. Actually, I downloaded this. It's really good, David. Like, complete chain, abstraction, crossed all chains.

Like, it's a fantastic user experience. Very easy to set up. It does, like, back up seed phrase, again, like, automatically doesn't let you go through without. It stores it through like a passcode on the phone, or you could also back it up to iCloud. So it doesn't have the issue that we were just mentioning. It's a pretty good U.S.

Well, David, I know you're tired, man. We're going to let you get some sleep, but I've got to show the meeting a week. I've never done a podcast at one in the morning before. Yeah, dude, I'm sure you're exhausted after a week of conferences. By the way, for bankless sisters, this man just had food poisoning, okay, in Thailand. I don't know if I was supposed to share that. I should, okay, but like, I want them to see the dedication.

We do not miss a roll up. Okay? The number of people that had food poisoning at DevCon is like kind of too high. It's like everyone kind of gets their turn. Well, me of the week, we just have Elon Musk's tweet with the Department of Government Efficiency, Doge. He actually has a logo. It's a cute like Doge icon. I can't believe this is real life.

Elon Musk launching a- If you're wondering why Doge is up like 40% on the week or whatever. This is why. This is why. Anyway, meme coins are risky. but so are Bitcoin, so are Eith. You could lose what you put in. 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.