Bankless - ROLLUP: Rate Cuts Price Savior? | Trump’s DeFi Project | Vitalik’s Documentary

Episode Date: September 20, 2024

The Fed just cut rates by 50 basis points for the first time since the pandemic, how is the market reacting, should we be excited?  Trump revealed new details about World Liberty Financial. We’ll break down why they’re building it, who’s involved, and what’s going on with the token.  We also have a Tale of Two Chains: Bitcoiners watching Trump buy a burger with Bitcoin in NYC, while Ethereans premiere an Ethereum documentary down the street.  ------ 📈 INDEX COOP | LEVERAGE TOKENS  https://bankless.cc/IndexCoop  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2    ⁠ 🦄UNISWAP | BROWSER EXTENSION https://bankless.cc/uniswap  🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle    ⚡️ CARTESI | LINUX-POWERED ROLLUPS https://bankless.cc/CartesiGovernance  🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT  https://bankless.cc/toku   ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/66?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E  ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 00:00 Start 02:36 Markets https://x.com/ledgerstatus/status/1835473538028814667  06:09 RSA Finally Cracks https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1836779556998459436  10:55 Total MKT Cap https://www.coingecko.com/en/global-charts  11:09 L2 Update https://www.growthepie.xyz/fundamentals/transaction-count  13:36 Fed Rate Cuts https://x.com/SpecialSitsNews/status/1835699786785136703  https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/18/fed-cuts-rates-september-2024-.html  18:57 Cut Reactions https://x.com/TimDuy/status/1836154346045870391  https://x.com/coinbase/status/1836470341063053572  https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1836795960321585388  https://www.coindesk.com/business/2024/09/18/arthur-hayes-if-they-go-50-that-will-be-a-nuclear-catastrophe-for-financial-markets/  https://x.com/intocryptoverse/status/1836471892674302430?s=46&t=2ZINVXJQKx6xO_6Wiiu_2g  https://x.com/Jamie1Coutts/status/1836192104722370930  https://www.tradingview.com/chart/1RYLG2gC/?symbol=NASDAQ%3AQQQ  https://youtu.be/b6O-lHr-D0s?si=7uiJPAxPibmCTLsz  27:03 Trump's Liberty Financial https://x.com/EricTrump/status/1834322630721122521  https://x.com/worldlibertyfi/status/1835748701534404945  https://x.com/alexandergrieve/status/1836006655223275904  32:06 Takes On The Project https://x.com/iamDCinvestor/status/1836006290125987860  https://x.com/worldlibertyfi/status/1835300402163503260?s=46&t=dmRhP54bJmHi0Ppb8BT30Q  34:42 Trump Pays With Bitcoin https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/1836510214482284545  https://x.com/crypto_condom/status/1836512092503077146  36:39 Vitalik Film Premiere https://ethereumfilm.xyz/streaming  https://x.com/EthereumFilm/status/1828192695095042429  https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1836737714223210638  https://x.com/dimabuterin/status/1836701356565922006  https://x.com/ViktorBunin/status/1836556640734085478  https://x.com/jessepollak/status/1836607456497275028  https://x.com/jessepollak/status/1836607456497275028  https://x.com/EthereumFilm/status/1835973354995499061  41:36 SEC Sues Rari? https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024-138  https://x.com/dcfgod/status/1836488126744924299  43:03 The Flyfish Case https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/admin/2024/33-11305.pdf  https://x.com/HesterPeirce/status/1835757603860681141  https://x.com/FinancialCmte/status/1836124400695021654  https://x.com/RepFrenchHill/status/1836420981310542092?t=KbWMCpEacfkVWgSADJSgQg&s=19  50:41 Token 2049 https://x.com/justinsuntron/status/1836330985706918253  https://unchainedcrypto.com/buterin-at-token2049-were-not-early-to-crypto-but-were-early-to-crypto-being-usable/  53:36 New Zora App https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1836399083482742814  56:19 New Fastest Rollup https://x.com/atlasxyz/status/1833880969251524973  57:39 Permissionless Party https://lu.ma/yj5pdeqe Bankless listeners - 10% off tickets with BANKLESS10  Bankless citizens - 30% off tickets with link: https://bankless.cc/PermissionlessDiscount  59:26 Moment Of Zen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71DtEk1cFdg  ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠ 

Bankless Nation is the third week of flat timber. It's time with the bankless weekly roll-up. We got some Fed rates to talk about, David. What did the Fed do this week? What are we talking about? The Fed rates, also the jobs report. So big macro numbers coming in this week. How is the economy responding?

Because the markets did not initially move to the Fed BIPs cut that we got. How many bips did we get? We cut some bips. How many of them? So we'll talk about all the macro news that we got this week. Also, Trump family introducing the detail. around World Liberty Financial. Why are they building it?

What is it? What does it do? Who's on the team? And what about the token that I think even like CNBC talked about, the World Liberty Financial token that is being released? Well, they have to talk about these things because it's a president. And speaking of Donald Trump, maybe this is a tale of two chains here. So Bitcoiners, we're enjoying watching Donald Trump's purchase something in a Bitcoin bar with Bitcoin.

We have a clip of that. And also, down the street, Ethereum's were having a different type of party. They were celebrating a movie release that I think you've seen. I'm going to catch the details on that. And then we also have Big Bad Gary Gensler. He's back at it. He's got a few enforcement actions. But he's going to be on the hot seat next week, David.

It's actually going to be in front of Congress, Gary Gensler and Hester Perth at the same time. We have never seen that showdown. I'm almost more excited to see that than I am you in the cane fight. David. Here's how I think this is going to go. It's going to be like, it's going to be the Republicans just grilling Gary Gensler playing Gary Gensler. Can you please explain yourself? And then Gary Gensler is going to give some bullshit. And then they're going to be like, Hester, like, what do you think? And then Hester's going to be like everything right under the butt. Everything that Gary Gensler just said, I also think is bullshit. I think that's how this is going to go.

I can't wait. Next week is going to be Hester purse week on the roll up for sure. But we got wait for that. Also, I'm going to throw out an apology. So you are back in New York City, right? Yeah. Okay. So last time when I was like, David's on a flight, he's in Lisbon. I said Lisbon, Spain. When I meant Lisbon, Portugal. You didn't get, okay, a bunch of YouTuber comments did. And so my apologies for that, confusing cities and their locations, new software update, that will never happen again. Okay. Add that this one and we'll add it to the Grenwich, Greenwich, Greenwich, what did I say? Grenwich, Connecticut? Greenwich, yeah. Yeah. Something terrible. All right. Well, this is how we. learn, right? This is how the models improve here. We got some market updates. We got to thank

Cracken for these. Are they beautiful market updates? They are beautiful markets. They are beautiful markets. Oh, look at that. Green, green, green, green, green, green, green across the board. Bitcoin, start of the week, $58,300, up 9.2 percent, almost a double-digit green week currently coming in. Sixty-three thousand $800. When's the last time Bitcoin has been up over $5,000 on the week? That's great. What's the percentage then? 9.2. 9.2? Almost double digit?

Almost double digits. Wow. So, you know, it prices up, but did we deserve it? I'm going to say yes, we did. I think, oh, for sure. For sure. We deserve a lot more globally across the board about prices. I agree.

Especially Ether, starting the week at 2340, up 5.5% on the week, currently at $2,450. You're at the one-day chart, so you're really zoomed out. Oh, I'm zoomed out. Yeah, that's why it looks, it still looks bearish when you zoom out. And when you zoom into the week, it's a little bit more bullish. But nonetheless, ether is that it's 200 week moving average line. This is a tweet that Ledger status put out. And that means that it's low.

That means that ether, the price moving average, yes? Or the 200 moving average has caught up to ether, which hasn't really moved all that fast. And so basically, it's saying that eth hasn't moved over a long period of time. Bitcoin, if you put Bitcoin at its 200-week moving average, Bitcoin would be $39,000 instead of where it is at $63,000. Okay. So if you are a Bitcoiner out there, you're just a Bitcoin, like Maxi, you're just insane, crazy for Bitcoin. Imagine how you would feel right now if Bitcoin was less than $40,000. Right, right. That's how either people feel.

Okay. It's real bad. And imagine if, you know, Ethereum was like $10K. while Bitcoin was lingering, you know, around in the $40,000. That's how we feel. So, David, tell me about your feelings. This is the ETH Bitcoin ratio. It's lower than it's been in three years.

In recent memory. Yeah, I never thought that I'd ever see three again at the Bitcoin ratio. But we are at 0.036. It was at 0.039 when I was looking at this earlier. But, man, it hasn't been this low since, like, 2019. Is that right? Early 2020? Not 2019.

All right. So here's where we can start scrolling back here. Okay. So we are below 0.04. And the last time we were here is where, look at this. Right. May 2020. Where, yeah, man, that's where ether rocketed from like high 1,000's, low 2,000, up to like $41,000 in a very short amount of time. May 2021. I remember where I was in May of 2021. Look at this chart. Look at this chart. The difference between January, 2021, where we also hit that on the ratio and then May. So we dip, we dip below. We did blow that in the ratio. But you're thinking of like, you know, how the sentiment we've claimed feels like 2019 in Ethereum Land and it really does? You want to go look at 2019? Look at the ratio.

2019. We got like down to 0.023, I think. Oh, 1.016. Jesus God, we were dead of and dead. So it's been a lot worse. It was so low at then. Oh my God. I mean, to actually kind of think we're only like double that.

This is about the time we started. we decided to start an Ethereum That's where we started We started a podcast You know? Yeah, that's where we started We thought that'd be a good time to do it.

Yeah, it was a good time. Yeah, so I guess feels bad man And for me, I kind of like, I had like a crack this morning. Like I just like, so I saw this tweet.

This was from Chow, whom we've had on the podcast at token 2049. I don't know if you have FOMO for missing that event. Not at all, but that's a separate story. All right, all right.

But this is Chowell saying literally every person I talked to at 2049 is bearish Eath. It's so consensus. It makes me uncomfortable. And I saw that in my timeline followed up by this. Laura Shin reporting that Kyle Samani was giving a talk at token 249, a sole on course to flip ether. Yeah, I'm sure Kyle believes that. I saw this back to back in my timeline.

And I was like, okay, this is it. It's ridiculous. Enough is enough. I am feeling like going full. bull mode again on ether the asset and i don't understand how we're back in like 2019 with respect to sentiment where the entire industry is chow says it's consensus fading eth is now consensus because my perspective the bankless perspective has been eth is the most important asset in crypto without ether the asset there is no defy okay i know other platforms are like working on this

trying to get to decentralization, but nothing else is close. Bitcoin is a store of value. But if you want to lend, if you want to borrow, if you want to trade, you have to move off of the Bitcoin blockchain. You got to go use a Coinbase or Celsius or some sort of banked platform. So I don't know. I'm drawing the line here, man. We can't go any lower, okay?

I mean, we could definitely go lower, but like we're approaching some sort of just like, it's getting silly. It's getting silly. It's getting silly. We're approaching clown world. territory. I mean, we've been in clown world in the crypto space for the last, like, I would call it 18 months.

Clown World and meme coin mania, I would kind of call synonymous. And like, trading meme coins and appreciating the roll-up centric roadmap are on, like, direct opposite ends of the spectrum. Like, these are been diagrams that do not overlap. Well, remember how last week you were like,

just dump hard around me. Like, I want to see that ratio, like, more pain. More. More pain. I'm fine. I'm fine with a pain. And now I'm just like, come at me. Like, come on. Yeah, point zero three. Point zero three zero zero. I don't care. I don't care.

Don't at me, bro. Bring it on. See the replies. See the comments. I've got, I've got cash. I'm bidding. I can find some cash.

I can find more cash. Mortgage my house. Do some Michael Saylor here. I mean, this is kind of like it's conviction territory for ether right now. So now that you've cracked, Ryan,

I think there's a product for you from our friends and sponsors over at index co-op. Oh, nice. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. This is right. Yeah. So the products that I would use that.

I've bought leverage tokens like this before. So they're making 2x and 3X long Ether tokens by simply just using AVE and Uniswap in the background. And, you know, taking these two money Legos, smashing them together into a unified product. That is a single token. So you can just buy a 2x or a 3X leverage token. So if ether goes up $20, your token will go up $40. And the idea here is actually you pay less in fees by using AVE than you would some Perps platform. because the perps platform, like, you pay a pretty high carry.

But since AVE has lower fees, you can create a leverage position with lower fees and perp. And you can hold leverage. The idea is like this is a little bit better to hold for long-term leverage than some sort of like short-term perps trade. So 2x or 3x long ether with a simple ERC 20 token. In theory, these like 20 ERC 20 tokens could then go like be integrated into the rest of defy, but that's up to the rest of defy. But you could just, you know, buy leverage token since we're since we're so close to the bottom somewhere huh yeah you want me to back up my beliefs the only thing that's unfortunate david is um as a u.s citizen i of course live in a financial prison oh yeah this is uh not available if you are a u.s. so if you do not live in the

u.s i'm sure you can partake in this index co-op goodness but um not if you live in the u.s. okay well some version of you that's outside of the u.s. the ryan instance Rhyant TBT instance that's outside of the United States. The forked option. I would like to blame Gary Gansler for this one, but this is actually the CFC's fault. Let's just blame. We could still blame Gary. The rest of the episode will shed some more blame on Gary.

There's a link in the show notes to that, right? Bankless. Yes, there is. Bankless.com. That's C-O-O-P. I should also say, of course, if you're using leverage, be responsible kids. Be responsible with that leverage. Leverage is a bitch.

And if you haven't learned that lesson yet, you are learning and you're using leverage, then you will eventually learn that lesson. He definitely will. I've learned that lesson. All right. So, we talked about prices. Give me the crypto market cap. What are we on the week? You up really healthily. 2.29 trillion, almost at 2.3 trillion. So staying away from that one trillion dollar handle, 2.3. 2.3T. All right, I got another chart for you that's moving up. This is a layer two update brought to you by Mantle. That is this blue line here. You know what that is? Wow. That's nuts.

This is base transactions. So what we're looking at is a chart of the transaction count for all layer two. So we got all our faves over here, Arbitrum, OPE, Lenea. We've got blast. There's just no limit on the base transactions. Yeah, we got mantle here. And the outlier line is base. So it is a straight lineup.

4.6 million transactions a day. What the hell? It's shattering all previous records on transaction. Every single day it's right. You know what's going on over there? What's going on over there? They have an... On-Change Sama, baby.

Okay. Well, we're back to school. This is what happens when, like, we have DA that we have so much more DA than we know what to do with. And so base is like, well, I'll just consume that for free. Thanks. Yummy. Eating that's... Yeah, yummy DA.

This is active dresses, too. It's holding up. The blue line's holding up. So active addresses and tons of transactions. People going on chain. Look at that. This is a good sign. When people have cheap transactions, they use it.

They use it. Do you think this is, like, a lot of business? bought some bot activity too? Oh, I think so. Well, yeah, because I think if you are using Defi on a layer two, like one Defi user will bring in like three bot transactions for every transaction

just to kind of like snibble up that the MEV that they create. Snipple is a technical term. Simble, yeah. But like, yeah, so like there's kind of like a leverage effect here. So like one human transaction creates three bot transactions. I just made that number up, but that's like

structurally correct. because that's just how defy and mbbts for every human according to day and and defy on layer two is are fundamentally better than a defy on layer one because of low transaction fees yeah uh it's more efficient it's faster it's cheaper uh and this is to like it's a sign of fitness i would say so you don't think there's a need to build a snibble resistant protocol here uh well i mean i think that gets into the conversation on base rollups which are sibble resistance you get at app i love that you're just going with that dude. App chains, based app chains, I think, are the snibble-resistant mechanisms to prevent app-M-E-V leakage, so your Apple and that won't be snibled at. Well, let's talk about the rate, shall we? Let's move on. Let's get out of there. Let's get out of here. So let's talk about Jerome Powell. Did he bring us some gifts on the week? There was speculation earlier this week. This was the week. Remember we said a last roll-up? This was the week that Powell was going to deliver us some news. Was he going to decrease the Fed fund rate?

And the question, everyone said yes. The question was, how much? And going into the week, earlier in the week, the speculation was 25 bips. You know, I said bips because I know you're a BIP guy. I like BIPs. Yep, big BIP energy here. Snivel the Bips. Snivel the Bip.

We have 25 basis points. Or would he be more generous with his BIP reduction? Would he give us 50 basis points? Well, Elizabeth Warren put out this, like, fantastic. cited, well-resourced, REL researched, a letter. All of these,

all of the economists, Elizabeth Warren. Everyone knows her as the economist, with like citations on citations on citations, asking for 75 bips, a huge snibble out of the Fed Funds rate. More snibling. Honestly, it was actually a pretty impressive document. Like, I mean, I fundamentally disagree on Elizabeth Warren

with most things, but I was reading this. Impressive document? This was like a pretty compelling case. impressive she's like look at these sources she's citing her previous letters here some of these sources were pretty good some of these sources are pretty good I enjoy anyway what she asked for what she was asking for 75 stipples 75 stimples on the bits I think that's not too much to ask is that too much to ask that's kind of a lot that's kind of a lot but to me like when I don't know what the hell Jerome Pyle was thinking but if he was deciding

between 25 and 50 bips. I don't know which one am I going to do. I'm undecided. And then he gets this letter from Liz Warren who's asking for 75. He's like, oh, I just have the freedom to do 50 now. I have the, she just gave me permission to do 50. She was doing the classic bargaining thing where you like, you over-ass.

Maybe she actually wanted 75. But like, yeah. She wanted it. Yeah. So anyways, the day came. That was what, two days ago? Yeah, two days ago. The Fed lowered the funds rate by 50 bibs to now it's in a range of 0.475

to 5%. Powell commented, we're trying to achieve a situation where we restore price stability without the kind of painful increase in unemployment that has come sometimes with this inflation. I think you can take today's action as a sign of our strong commitment to achieve that goal. So how did markets react? Right when, like everyone wanted 50 bips. Like people with assets want 50 bips. We got 50 bips. We would have been disappointed with 25 bips. We would have been disappointed. If you only snibbled 25, that would not have been enough. Yeah, we want a larger snibble. We got 50. Then Marcus just like were totally whelmed. Totally welled.

They didn't go up, didn't go down. Like nothing really happened. I felt nothing. Did you feel anything? Well, I mean, like I got a sense of relief that it wasn't 25 snibbles. But it was the first rate cut since the pandemic. So outside of the emergency rate reductions during COVID, the last time that the FOMC cut by half point was 2008 during the global financial crisis. Yeah.

Yeah. that was the last time. Okay. Let me give you a mirror image. Okay, so the question, of course, is what does this mean for markets? What does this mean for our crypto assets, right? So shortly after, Coinbase tweeted this. They say history doesn't repeat.

It's time to break the cycle. It's time to update the system. I'm glad they said those two lines, but they say history doesn't repeat. And they were referring to a CNN headline from exactly 17 years ago. This is the headline from September 18th to the day. September 18th, 2007, remember 2007, the Federal Reserve cut the target rate on short-term interest rates by half of a percentage point Tuesday to 4.75. Did the same thing 17 years ago, David, and they're saying that they say history doesn't

repeat. The reason is because this was pre-cash. This was pre-2008. This was on the precipice of being on the precipice. Of the great recession, right? So this is kind of a question, right? you can interpret the Fed move as bullish if you want. Right.

Okay. Okay. Now we have slain the inflation dragon. This is Powell's soft landing. Now unemployment numbers are starting creep up a little bit, but he's getting ahead of this with a, you know, 50 basis point cut right now. It's like perfect. This is the soft landing asset.

Like the cycle is resumed. It should be all good news. Or you can interpret this and say, uh-oh, what does he know that we don't? You know, 50 basis point. That's not your average, that's not a small time move. That's like pretty large. And maybe there's something rotten in the underlying economy that he sees that we don't. It's like a choose-your-own-adventure with this type of macro data.

And I've seen smart people who I consider good analysts on either side of this. I think the Fed has been outplaying most people, I would say. And so far, if you are believing in the soft-landing scenario, the soft-landing scenario is what the scenario is, we're getting. And this has all been happening in slow motion for like the last two years. Like slowly the soft landing has been coming. While some people are always saying like, well, there's a recession looming. And sure, maybe there is a recession looming. But it's still looming. Still out over there somewhere. Not here. You want the ultra bear scenario? You can get it from Arthur Hayes. So he was actually interviewed that morning like just prior to the Fed rate cuts. And they asked him the difference

between 25 bips and like 50 bips. He goes, he says this. If they cut by 25, not much is going to happen with prices. But I think if they go 50, that will be a nuclear catastrophe for financial markets. This is what he predicted pre this. And his reason for this. That's two very different outcomes from a very small change in interest rates. Yeah. His reason for this, though, is he says it's a signal. I actually think it points to a deeper rut in the global financial system. And that will come through in much more depressed prices after the fact. That's his take. It's the deep rot.

Who knows what trades Arthur Hayes has on. Of course, it's just one person's opinion. But that is the barest scenario. Okay, but there's only going to be a nuclear catastrophe for financial markets if there is some sort of like hidden leverage like in 2008. Like just because they're cutting 50. I guess Arthur is saying that like, oh, Powell does see something that we don't see. Yeah, as evidenced by him cutting so much. I don't know, I'm not on board on that one.

Not on board with Arthur Hayes there. But I guess we'll see and time will tell. I think one thing that we know is going to happen eventually is the money printer will resume printing. Now, this was something else that's significant that we should be tracking. It's not just rates that we need to take a look at. We also need to look at quantitative easing versus quantitative tightening. So we got some indication that quantitative tightening, which is what the Fed has been doing the last 18 months or so, is going to continues. So this is a quote, the committee will continue reducing its holdings of treasury securities

and agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities. So they're going to continue to constrict the Fed balance sheet while at the same time lowering rates. Now, we will really know. So those are, those are in opposition to each other, right? Like lowering rates is easier money and then restricting the balance sheet is harder money. Ish. Yeah. That that's kind of it. I think the big question is when is this going to like uh this is m2 money supply we could also look at like you know the fed balance sheet and it kind of has this shape look at this all the way from the 1980s it's been basically like hockey stick uh upwards until about your 2022 we got to cutting yeah yep yep doquan uh you know lunatera exploding it's so funny that like the fed pivots interest rates

and three seconds later doquan blows up like he did not laugh Last one second of high interest. But tell me, look at this start and tell me, what do you think is happening? We got a little bit of a bending of the curve here on M2 Money Supply. I mean, Fed Treasury looks similar. Returning back to the trend. Looks like it. We escaped from the trend in COVID and now like since we started cutting interest rates,

we've been going back to the trend. But the trend is nonetheless accelerating upwards on a parabola. Exactly. Not TA. Full disclaimer. This is another take. That was TA. That was TA.

All right. This is a golden cross. God damn it. Jamie Coot says this. Ultimately, liquidity is what drives everything. And this has now turned decisively bullish. So this is a liquidity indicator here of global money supply. It's got Bitcoin price charted and kind of this blue line is liquidity.

Liquidity, global liquidity is going up. Going up. So that's going to be good. That's going to be good. The other thing, though, we got to look at is jobs. Okay. This is the thing that actually move the markets. So when we got 50 bibs, like I said, didn't move the markets.

but you would all go and look at your prices. Bitcoin's up 9% on the week. Ether's up 5.5% on the week. Like, prices are green. So how do these things square? As soon as we got in, this jobs report in yesterday, or maybe even this morning, yeah, this morning. U.S. job list claims came in at $219,000 in this week of September

when it was estimated to be $230,000. So we had, what is that, 11,000 less jobless claims than expectations. And this is the recession indicator. if there are less jobless claims than expectations. We are less likely to be in a recession. So what did we get? We got 50 bips, snibbled, and then we got 11,000 jobless claims also snibbled.

So we got more jobs and 50 bips of easier free money. And so that's what caused the markets to go up. The combination, that one-two punch of bullishness is why the markets are up, which is pretty cool. Yeah, so be gone with that 2007 talk, okay? Don't want to hear it. Not on bank list, not this week. We're just enjoying our BIPs reduction and good unemployment numbers.

Enjoying our Bips reduction, our unemployment numbers, and 0.038 on the ETH ratio. God, you got to accept the buying opportunity, my man. Well, no matter what happens, you remember we did that episode with Robbie from BlackRock, who's like, hey, you guys are pitching Bitcoin all wrong. It's actually not a risk-on asset. It's not even a risk-off asset. It's a little bit of both. And what it is is a money printing resistance asset.

He promised that BlackRock would put a report out that covers this topic. And they did. There's a link in the show notes. It's worth a read from my perspective. But basically, their take is Bitcoin is an uncorrelated asset that does well when there's money printing. So it may be affected by the recession in the short term if a recession comes. But in the long run, it's correlated to, you know, as a non-sovereign store of value. to kind of the money printing story, which regardless, I mean, let's go back to that chart.

What do you think is going to happen here? M2 Money's Talk. I think it goes up. There we go. Yeah, yeah, a pretty nuanced take actually on what Bitcoin is. And Black Rock would know a thing or two about how to actually both position and understand Bitcoin. Definitely worth the read. Coming up next, one day after his second assassination attempt, Trump did an interview about his brand

new Sparkly Defi Protocol. That's crazy. And then also went to a Bitcoin bar in New York City called Pub Key. been there a couple times. It's pretty fun. And then also, why were a bunch of Ethereum's gathered just a few blocks away? What were they doing there? And why were hundreds of Ethereum's gathered a few blocks away, including myself, completely ignoring the whole Trump thing at the Bitcoin bar? What were we doing over there? So we're going to get through all of that and more. But first, I'm actually just to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that made the show possible.

Special Cracken, our preferred place for longing the ratio. If you do not have an account with Cracken, consider clicking the link in the show notes getting started with Crackin today. If you want a crypto trading experience backed by world-class security and award-winning support teams, then head over to Cracken, one of the longest standing and most secure crypto platforms in the world. Cracken is on a journey to build a more accessible, inclusive, and fair financial system, making it simple and secure for everyone, everywhere, to trade crypto. Cracken's intuitive trading tools are designed to grow with you, empowering you to make your first or your hundreds trade in just a few clicks.

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one of the bigger Twitter spaces in the crypto world. And that's where he talked about actually not World Liberty Financial. he didn't really actually talk about world liberty financial. He mostly just talked about the crypto industry. He said, crypto is one of those things that we have to do, whether we like it or not, Donald Trump said. Whether we like it or not. Yeah. He shared that his NFT projects have opened his eyes to the crypto world, quote, because so many people paid with crypto, I was blown away.

I wasn't overly interested at first, to be honest, but I was surprised by the massive amount. And so over 100,000 live listeners were listening live, 2.5 million people. have listened in total to this two-hour-long Twitter space with Donald Trump, Faroak, who hosted Rug Radio, and then a bunch of stuff. A bunch of people were there. What's crazy about this, David, is this is the day after a second assassination attempt.

I guess it's pretty safe to be inside of your own home on a Twitter space, though. Right. But this was, I think, the first interview that he did, really? And it was about Donald Trump's DFI project? Yeah, crypto thing, yeah. What world are we living in? Dude, it's kind of nuts.

It's absolutely crazy. Should we play this? This is some of the founders. Zachary Folkman and Chase Hero actually talking about World Liberty Financial and what it's here to do. So what's the main goals of World Liberty Financial? Let's go to both three, right? Zach and Chase, it's all go to your first, Zach? But what's the goal?

But most important, like, how do you patent actually like accomplishing these goals? Yeah. So I think rather than trying to, you know, rebuild the wheel, it's to take what's the best of D5. and basically bring it to the everyday person who isn't already interacting with DFI platforms, build products that are really simple and intuitive and easy to use where you don't feel like you need to phone a friend to get a walk through, you know, and to just onboard as many people through, you know, simple products where they can actually start to earn yield on their assets, not take a ton of risk by speculating on, you know, the next meme coin, but instead being able to use stables

that are pegged to the U.S. dollar to be able to generate yield or unlock liquidity in assets that they're already holding, such as Ethereum or whatever other tokens they might have. And for you, Chase, I mean, it sounds like a pretty typical collateralized lending and borrowing defy protocol. Okay. So last week when we were talking about this, I said this is kind of sounding like Kane Warwick's Infinex. And I think that's what this is.

I think this is a easy-to-use front-end that uses defy in the background, and they just make it, like, super sexy smooth for people who are neutral about crypto but love Donald Trump and who want some access to financial services. Yeah, what users are inside of that Venn diagram that they're crypto users and just like passion, super passionate about Donald Trump enough to use this platform, I don't know. I think if they are competing against some sort of a defy front end, then they really got to bring it in terms of like feature set and user experience and all of these things. And another question coming out of this is, is the thing going to have a token? What do we know so far? Yeah, the thing is totally going to have a token. Even that fact was broadcasted by CNBC. So on the CNBC team, World Liberty Financials, WLFI tokens, equity structure 20% to the founding team, 63% for public purchase.

doing an ICO. Donald Trump is doing an ICO, which is absolutely nuts. So there's a few things about this. So one is it's tokens making CNN, right? And they call it equity structure. These are actually tokens. So it's not actually equity. That said, I believe this is limited to accredited investors only.

So the token is basically frozen and only accredited investors can actually purchase it. So 63% are going to be sold to accredited investors in this public sale, ICO-like, but not ICO in that it's accessible to everyone. It's basically a accredited investor vehicle. And they're using, you know, these regulations, one of that, you know, Reg D or something like this. They're using one of those regulations. And also the CNBC broadcast. It doesn't provide any dividends or distributions. Also, no official date set for the sale.

I think demand for this token, it's going to be pretty interesting. Like, do people want to own like the quote unquote equity of World Liberty Financial? Or is this going to turn into a Donald Trump meme coin? Yeah. So, I mean, it very much trades like, you know, kind of like a Trump-affiliated brand might trade based on memetics, let's say. And, yeah, Trump fandom, I think largely, rather than like discounted cash flow. What is this company actually worth? You know, how's it performing all these types of things?

So I think this could be similar. Some takes from around the community. DC investor says, love it or hate it. CNBC is talking about defy right now, thanks to the Trump Crypto project. Could this be a moment which rekindles Ethereum DeFi and renews interest in its value proposition for Wall Street types and normies?

God, I wish we did it under our own steam personally. I hope we can do it for reasons that we deserved and have earned rather than an external. Glass half full, though. Glass half full. I mean, so on the Twitter spaces, David, I mean, Eric Trump, like the Trump, like the sons of Trump are using Ave.

And they were just talking about how, you know, various aspects of it are difficult. Other aspects are sort of easy. But they're like using defy on the main stage. And like every news agency is like reporting this. So glass how full is kind of DC investors take, right? Yeah. I'm just worried about it becoming just such a partisan thing. Like Ethereum is credibly neutral.

And I hope that it is perceived to be a neutral technology platform and not like Donald Trump's, technology interests. Well, but that's just like this one particular, you know, defy application could be again, just like, you know, the Trump fans. My big hope is that it's not a scam. And, you know, good that it's locked, good that the tokens are locked from that perspective. Right. Sandy Peng from Skroll has joined as an advisor to World Liberty Financial, which is pretty interesting. And then some other advisors as well, Luke Pearson from Pauley Chain, Raphael Jacobi from a crypto law firm in Ogle, a Crypto Security expert and co-founder of glue.

Ogle is an interesting name. Turns out that's a pseudonym. He went on Laura Shin's podcast, masked behind a hat, sunglasses, and a handkerchief. So this person is an anon. And I find it weird that anon who's representing Donald Trump's World Liberty Financial Defi Project cannot just like disclose who he is.

I find that odd. Yeah. I mean, I guess that's odd. or maybe that's just the way crypto is. These advisors are pretty interesting. Like Sandy really surprised me that. Motley crew of people, dude. But they are, like, many of them are defy natives.

Like, okay, so if it's not a scam, the other thing that, bad thing that could happen is it could be hacked, which is a worry. Because the previous manifestation of this Doe finance was actually hacked. And Lorishian actually asked this anonymous developer and advisor to the World Liberty Finance Project, whether he had reviewed the code. He said he had not. It's a little bit concerning on the security side of things. The security advisor has not reviewed the code. Does the code exist? This could go either way, David.

We'll have to see. All right. Meanwhile, in a different corner of crypto and Trump, Trump went to this Bitcoin bar in New York City called PubKee. I think great name for a Bitcoin bar, PubKee. Like, get it, public key, pub key, and bought burgers with Bitcoin. And so this is the owner of the pub key on the right.

Thomas helping Donald Trump out scanning a QR code. I think he's paying with Lightning Network because it's like probably the one place in New York that you can use Lightning Network. And Bitcoin, yeah, so Donald Trump used Lightning to buy a burger at a Bitcoin bar. That's very cool. The Bitcoiners are very excited about this as the first former president, you're transacting, purchasing something with Bitcoin. So history in the making here.

Which is funny because he's also building a Defi app on Ethereum. You would think that like the. Ethereum community would be a bit more excited about the traction. Some of them are. Dude, huge tale of two communities right now. Like, most of the Ethereum community is completely indifferent to Donald Trump's World Liberty Financial thing. And then Bitcoiners are just so effing stoked that he's at Puck to be, like, using

Lightning Network to buy a burger. Well, it's because Bitcoin is a simpler story. All you have to do is be bullish on it and buy it, right? I mean, even sort of paying for something in Bitcoin is mostly ceremonial. I mean, like true Bitcoiners do not want to use a Bitcoin as a means of payment. They just want to stack their Bitcoin as a store of value. But this is the high level from Cryptoondom, our friend here. A former U.S. president is...

We've actually used Cryptoondon's tweets on the weekly. Fantastic content. A good handful of times. Like, actually a really good account. So the condom says, a former U.S. president is buying a burger with Bitcoin, launching a lending app on ETH, and promoting tokenization, and you're bearish anon. Maybe don't make sense it. As long as it's not a scam.

I mean, this is good attention to the space, hopefully. Yeah. It just has to not be a scam. And I think it's probably not a scam. I think it's quite a scam. Meanwhile, and David, you kept alluding to this. Some of the members of the Ethereum community were doing something completely different. So you guys were gathered, what, like coping over the Ether ratio, David?

No, not at all. Like, while Donald Trump was buying his burger with Bitcoin at Pubkey, me and like a couple hundred other Ethereum community members were like four blocks away at a movie theater to watch the world premiere of Vitalik the Ethereum story, which has been a movie that has been being in production for the last like three plus years. First ran into this crew. It was originally called Ethereum the Infinite Garden. Carrie and Zach, I ran into them in 2021 at ECC. And they had already begun filming throughout COVID. And then I ran into them at Zuzalo and Montenegro, again at Bogota. They even came to my apartment in

San Diego. They have been around. Yeah. They have been, they have filmed so much. And so much of this has been just like this long story arc. This movie has been funded by the Ethereum community via NFTs. And so they sold NFTs from People Pleaser who made the Uniswop X times Y equals K NFT way back when Uniswap V3 was announced. Mariano Conti is an executive producer because he like donated some crazy amount of ETH to the financing of this movie. This movie is finally out. So on Wednesday, the 18th, this last Wednesday, this last Wednesday, this film released in theaters across 23 countries and 30 cities, all at once.

All of these different cities, we're all watching the movie at the same exact time. New York, London, San Francisco, Toronto, Singapore, Lisbon, Istanbul, Kiev, Los Angeles. They called it a one-of-a-kind decentralized theatrical release, sponsored by bass, Macha Pleaserdow. And the cool thing is, because there's like middlemen here. right like there could be Netflix there could be Amazon but they are distributing it directly to people who want to watch it at ethereumfilm.xyz and you can buy an nfti that unlocks access

to watch the movie on the website so there is no middleman you're going straight to consumer which is pretty cool uh and it was pretty cool to also to see the the showing of the ethereum community there dima buterin vitalik's dad tweeted about it there's victor bunin who uh he was at the the New York showing. Jesse Pollock tweeted out, this is probably one of the most important movies in a decade. And Linda Z, the co-producer,

I thought her take was pretty cool. She says, well, I didn't personally join crypto for any one person, and there are countless members of the Ethereum community that are what make it special. I've repeatedly heard tonight

and in audience testing from non-crypto people that seeing Vitalik was inspiring and help them understand and navigate the crypto space further. Seeing a mission-driven person who cares about what this technology can do for society

makes this space so much more accessible to newcomers. This is something that I've learned about storytelling over the years as someone who's brand new to filmmaking learning from my teammates. I personally just want to know how it was because you saw it. So how was it? What's the Rotten Tomatoes review here? I loved it. I thought it's great.

The way that the movie opens up with Vitalik giving this like two minute long rant about the origins of the word tea in like China and like Portugal of stuff while he's like drinking tea, kind of like sitting a little bit nervously because he's about to go all into, I think, DevCon Bogota to give his talk. So is it more about Vitalik or is it more about Ethereum? Or is it sort of like Ethereum through Vitalik's eyes? Or is it telling the Ethereum story via this character named Vitalik? Yeah, I would say that one, that last one is the most accurate.

I would call it 50-50. So this movie started off as Ethereum the Infant Garden focusing on Ethereum. And then it eventually pivoted to being Vitalic and Ethereum story. It's one-half Vitalic. It's one half Ethereum. How can you separate Ethereum from Vitalik? How can you separate Vitalik from Ethereum? But yeah, it walks us through.

It does some very old archival footage from Vitalik when he was like six or seven with some commentary from his dad. You know, Vitalik made an encyclopedia of bunnies. And he made this whole like world building universe around like this bunny universe. When he was seven years old, he made like grabs and charts and stuff. It was crazy. Then it also took us through the merge. and the NFT mania was like a big role in this. It also, the Ukraine invasion by Russia

and Ukraine Dow was a big role in this. A lot of characters were there. Danny Ryan had a very strong role. Justin Drake. You, Ryan, you gave the intro to the bankless. Welcome to Bankless. We're exploring the frontier of internet money and internet finance.

That was part of it. Yeah, it's pretty cool. All right, well, I'm going to go watch this. So I think it's live as of today at the time you're reading it. And it's like $20 to mint this. I'm going to go watch this tomorrow afternoon. I guess, like on my own, because I don't have anyone look like a much. Highly recommend.

It was an absolute treat. So thank you for the movie Ethereum film team for producing this and getting us out here. Let's talk about Gary. He's being Gary again this week. So we'll burn through this because, you know, but Gary's been dropping enforcement. Same movie over again. We know this movie. Who did he try to prosecute this week?

Well, the answer is Rari Capital. Remember Rari Finance? Basically, this is like, they were kids doing this. They were kids in college. College kids. Freshment dorm college kids. 19, 20, 21. They stopped the protocol in 2022. There was a hack. Anyway, they kind of also just stopped the protocol. So the SEC had, has settled with Rari Capital and the founders of Rari Capital. Basically, they claimed not only the Rari token was a security, big surprise coming from the SEC, but all of the, like Rari was sort of a borrowing and lending protocol with different pools. It was kind of like an AVE, except it had isolated pools for all of the, liquidity. SEC is actually claiming that all of those individual liquidity pools, like the LP positions, LP tokens, those are securities too.

Okay? The good news is they... That's a security and that's a security and that's a security and that's security. Yeah. So the good news, I guess, for the founders of Rari is they basically settled with a kind of a slap on the wrist. There's not a fine associated with this because Rari, after the hack, restored funds to anyone who is affected.

It was all good. but again, a precedent. And I don't even know why they're wasting their time on this. I mean, the protocol's not even been active for a number of years. So that was the first enforcement case, Rari Capital. The second is this flyfish case. Can you describe what the flyfish case is, David? Yeah, so this is something.

There's actually this interesting intersection between like NFTs and restaurants. There's a couple startups and companies and projects working on this. This is a members-only private dining club where membership is purchased as NFTs and owned by the token holder to gain access to restaurants and their associated experiences. The utility token. Utility token, yeah. Set up, this is a Gary V product. Yeah, startup product.

Base in Manhattan because like the restaurant scene in Manhattan is super large. So the SEC accused Flyfish for conducting an unregistered offering of crypto asset securities by selling 1600 NFTs to U.S. investors. So Flyfish agreed to settle while it didn't admit or deny the accusations and also destroy all the remaining NFTs and pay a separate. $750,000 fine and will also not accept any future royalties from the sales of the NFTs. Of course, whenever there is inane enforcement filings, as, you know, like there often is, Hester Purse writes a dissent. So this was Hester Purse's take on the Flyfish case.

She said, the commission with the many demands on its time and resources, has inexplicably decided to focus on membership and an exclusive dining club. She says this is not a case where there's alleged fraud. It finds only that Fly Fish Club should have registered its sales of membership NFTs as securities transactions. And she goes on. She says, in our view, the NFTs here are utility tokens, not securities, and the statements by the founders and the NFT purchasers that a successful restaurant would cause the NFT price to rise. Do not change that. She goes on. She says, the securities laws are not needed here. And their application is harmful, both in the present case and as future precedent. The Fly Fish NFTs were simply a different way to sell memberships. Why shouldn't a chef be

able to sell memberships to eat at her kitchen table and to collect royalties on resales of these memberships? NFTs are a promising way to allow creative people, such as chefs, musicians, or visual artists to monetize their talent. And she says, experiments like Fly Fish Club are not a threat to the American investor. So like, why are you doing this? Gary Gensler and the SEC, that's good old Hester purse. I love how the SEC is gatekeeping art and club memberships. And utility. I mean, like what? They just want useless JPEGs, I suppose. Once you associate any real world utility, then it's suddenly illegal. So some good news pushing back against this, Chair Patrick McHenry and Whip Tom Emerson, Gary a letter in which they accused the SEC of putting a thumb on the scale

and required clear answers on the how the SEC views air drops in the crypto industry. So, quote, by prohibiting Americans from participating in air drops, the SEC is preventing crypto users from fully realizing the benefits of blockchain technology. And so really great letter, which was basically saying, hey, air drops are an important way for these protocols to decentralize themselves.

Stop making them illegal? Is preventing these protocols from becoming decentralized in the first place by preventing air drops from happening at all. And so just really putting in a lot of the pressure and they asked for responses from the SEC for three specific questions. The SEC's posture is that certain transactions

in which digital assets that are given away for free without payment satisfy the investment of money prong under the Howie test and therefore are securities transactions. In recent court filings, the SEC has taken the position that digital assets in and of themselves are not securities. Does the SEC believe that giving away non-security digital assets for free implicates the Howie test, if so, under what circumstances and arrangements. There's actually five sort of questions.

I think that's a very good question. Can I read my favorite one? Yeah, go for it. My favorite one is, has the SEC ever considered the potential for loss of economic growth and tax revenue caused by its treatment of airdrop digital assets as securities? You make air drops illegal and Americans can't claim them. And you stop collecting taxes on them. And so, you know, no tax event.

Attention IRS. I would love to pay you guys the taxes that I would have collected. had I been able to receive all these airdrops, but I can't because I never collected them. So you don't get any money. This is what's crazy and this is what's cool, the timing of all of this, the setup for next week. As we mentioned in the intro to this entire episode is the entire, all the commissioners of the SEC will be in front of Congress, including Gary Gensler, which he has visited Congress many times, but also people like Hester Perce, the dissenters at the SEC.

And so they are going to be asked, I think, these same questions by members of the Congress who are very informed on this. The hearings have already started, not with the commission, but with kind of like, I guess, some preamble type cases. So we've been seeing some glimpses

of that this week. But next week will be the main event. And I, for one, am looking very forward to the clips that come out of that. Yeah, there's going to be a lot of content to cover.

Hopefully some hot clips of Gary's sweating next week. So we'll talk about that. But before that, coming up next, Vatalek delivered a keynote in song form at Token 2049. The Zora app taking us mainstream.

I know Ryan was playing around with Zadora app, so I want to get his takes. And then also another SVM on Ethereum, another Layer 2. So we're going to talk about all of that and more. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that makes the show possible. New projects are coming online to the Mantle Layer 2 every single week. Why is this happening? Maybe it's because Mantle has been on the frontier of Layer 2 design architecture since it first started building Mantle DA, powered by technology from EigenDA.

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of taxes while still maintaining legal compliance. With Toku's guidance, you can concentrate on building your company while Toku handles the logistics. Token launches don't have to be complicated. Talk to Toku today to get a free initial token. in valuation. many people are at token 249. No, it looks like an insane number, honestly. There's some like barricane side event at token that had room for like, I don't know,

like 200, 300 people. And there was like a 1,000 person line out the door to go into the barricain side of it. Yeah. Like I think because the United States, the SEC, our government, choke point 2.0, has just pushed so many users to Singapore. And also Dubai, where token is also. held. So like there's been this massive shelling point that the East has like

all of the crypto users now because we're pushing him out of the United States. And so it's like, this is like, I've called this, I've heard this be called like the Super Bowl for BD in crypto. So so many people are here. Ben Lakeoff from Ben, Banklet's Entress is there taking a bejillion meetings. Everyone's over here. And Fetalc goes up

to deliver the keynote and starts singing in both Japanese and English. Yeah, we just played the English part. He's stuff, right? He has a Japanese song. He's also singing in Japanese. And in front of thousands of people. Thousands of people and then, like, hundreds of thousands, if not millions who saw these clips like go viral online, right?

I just saw this everywhere. Okay. So that was not, was that just the start of the keynote? It was the start of the keynote. It was not the either the start or the end. I don't know. He also gave a keynote. Okay.

Which I think will be summarized as we are no longer early to crypto, but we are early to crypto being usable. That's a line from him. He said hefty transaction fees have ended up killing at least the original wave of exploration by those seeking to use Bitcoin that's currency. Ethereum has suffered the same problem with users in recent years paying as much as $50 to transact using ETH. Fast forward to 2024. Ethereum transaction fees have dropped to almost nothing, thanks in part to several major upgrades, such as EIP 4844.

You hear that, we need to satisfy the needs of mainstream adoption. We need to hold onto open source and decentralization values at the same time. So he's basically like we can have both. We can have mainstream and we can also have decentralization. his message was like, there's, eat both pills, right?

Blue pill, Redpool, eat the both, do the purple pill thing. We can have it all. That was one of his main messages. It's not a binary option. Right.

And like he... That's always been the Ethereum perspective. It's like we can do, we can have everything. We can do everything. It just takes a little bit of engineering to get there. Yeah. So it was great.

I'm waiting for like the entire produced version of the keynote so I can like watch it all. But we're just clips around now so far. Rather than people's like like smartphones. Yeah, that's right. Actually, you know, up an app experience I had this week. That thought was absolutely fantastic.

That was an example of everything that Vitalik was saying is like purple pill, is maintaining decentralization and also being like as mainstream ready as I've seen, which is Zora. So you know Zora is a layer two. They released an app. I'm not sure when they released it maybe like a week ago. iOS only, so iPhone. And for me, the experience that uses privy in the back end,

the wallet experience felt very much like Web2, right? I just sign up with email. I didn't need a seed phrase. It felt very like Venmo-esque. When you do transactions in the Zora app too, instant. So it was fast. There was no gas fee. And the main function of Zora, of course, is like buying, like minting things.

And so it's like, think of an Instagram, except every post is something that you can mint. So Zora's hoping a creator economy like springs up out of this. And so the verb is ownership. the verb is minting, the verb is trading, and also the verb is if you're a creator earning inside of this economy. And all of this, the great thing is because it's a layer two, it is secured, not, you know, once it gets to stage two,

but is in the process of being fully secured and having the same property rights as ether the asset. And the denominator for all of this value, all the money that's being created, is actually ether. They call it a subunit of ether. So one millionth of an ether, a micro ether, if you will, in the Zora app, they're trying to meme sparks into existence,

whereas they're like trying to, you know, dollars have cents. Well, one millionth of an ether in the Zora app is called a spark, and these are the atomic units you can kind of earn. Anyway, they put it all together in a way. I don't know if the creator economy, people will actually want to buy, like JPEGs and crypto and this sort of thing. But this is the first time we actually have a mainstream ready app where we can try these things.

And that was exciting to me. And I think it's an example of what Vitalik was saying is where you get the mainstream accessible capability where this just feels like a regular app, but it's all secured on top of Ethereum. There's not decentralization tradeoffs. I think also earlier in the show we were talking about if you want to go watch the Ethereum film, you go buy the NFT and then you can access it. Well, I mean, NFTs to watch a movie at JPEG, same same, same format. And so ticketing has always been like this ancient use case of crypto. that we've never really been able to unlock. And you can kind of see, put those two pieces together.

Like, you get a ticketing experience. We're here. We're ready. I do think we're not early to crypto, maybe in terms of price appreciation for everything, but we're definitely early to crypto being usable. So second Solana virtual machine chain has arrived to Ethereum. It's a layer two. This is Atlas out of the Elipsis team.

Elipsis has been building this in stealth for like a really long time now. And everyone's known about it. It's like the worst kept secret in crypto. Elipsis Labs. This is a Solana defy team that has been. built a Phoenix, which is an order book Dex on Solana, and now they're building Atlas, a Solana Virtual Machine Layer 2 on Ethereum. So they call this a custom hyper-efficient implementation of the SVM, native bridging, data availability, and an enshrined Oracle.

Yeah, that was cool. I was pretty cool. I was wondering if you were to pick that out. So an enshrined price oracle, is that what we're talking about? I mean, if you're going to have an on-chain Dex optimized platform, then an enshrine Oracle kind of makes sense. It's coming in with block teams at 200 milliseconds, which is 50 milliseconds faster than Arbitrum 1. So Arbitrum is now not the fastest roll up on Ethereum. It is now this Salon of Virtual Machine roll up. Well, they're not main net yet. So we should say that.

Also, not main net in Q2, 2025. So Arbitrum still got that title for a while. Yeah. The private test net is live, public test net available later this year. And of course, this is going head to head with Eclipse. So we have these two Solana Virtual Machine layer 2s on Ethereum. I'm both trying to grow adoption using the SVM. May the best SVM win.

Love it. So, David, I hate to be the countdown guy, but now permissionless is just less than three weeks away, which means your fight with Kane Warwick is less than three weeks away. Three weeks and one day away. Have you seen pictures of Kane lately? I mean, he's looking strong. He's looking like Wolverine.

Well, he's looking, he's looking skinny because the guy's got to come down 15 pounds. That's true. Yeah, dude, my day. lately have my days have been doing podcasts going and doing as much sprints as I can and then eating until the days that's right that's because I have to go gain well don't you have to spar too don't you have to fight like yeah I got sparring practice tonight yeah I got to go not break a ribat well if you bankless listener want to wish David good luck not farewell but good luck then and you're going to be at permissionless you got to come to the permissionless party this is on

Wednesday, October 9. So that'll be like, what, two days before your fight? That's the two days before my fight. Be buying David, you know, drinks, like whatever you want, David. I will not be drinking. You will not be drinking. Okay. But you can if you're there because we're going to, it's going to be held in a bar. We will be paying for your drinks.

There will be free drinks at the bankless party for bankless citizens, only for bankless citizens. So if you are listening to this on the bankless premium RSS feed because you're a bankless citizen, you get into the party because the party is for you. And so come hang out with me, Ryan, the rest of the bankless team. previous podcast guests that are going to be at permissionless. It's going to be fun. It's going to be great. There's a link of the show notes.

So you can go and sign up for that party. Bankless goes to permissionless. Moment is end this week. We're going to show you the trailer for the Ethereum film that we're talking about earlier in the episode. And got to end with this. Of course, you know, crypto's risky. You could lose what you put in. But we are headed west.

This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot. Our lives are increasingly on the internet. The way that these companies are abusing us is messed up. We have to change the trajectory. Okay, that's probably the bravest I've been around bugs in years.

Metallic Boutheran. He's the engineer recognized as the inventor of Ethereum. Blockchain movement's biggest celebrities become something like philosopher-cated. Oh, God, why are people listening to me? I'm just a guy. Petalic has been on a global campaign. The theory it has a potential to disrupt.

the giants of the tech world. It could be used to build this new internet. They're saying this is the way the internet was meant to be, because no one person can control it. We're building infrastructure that the whole world can enjoy. This internet garden. Technologies very rarely stay the same as they are envisioned by their creators. It's just bad shit crazy out here.

They want the fucking janitor to be at the same level as the person at the top. Not everyone in the group of the group. space that just is in it for the ideals. A lot of people really do just want to make lots of money. Currently, Ethereum uses something like the energy consumption of Argentina. You know, financial incentive is like a fire. You can use it to keep yourself warm, or you can use it to burn your house down. And anyone who thinks they understand exactly what it's all going.

They're lying to you or lying to themselves. This is an important set of upgrades that fundamentally improves what Ethereum can do. People seeking a deeper kind of democracy. democracy in this digital space. We need to be involved. There are some things that are worth making us dance over. Food, medicine, I think you guys. It's this next evolution of coordination for humanity.

There are hundreds of thousands of people across the world that are building things. We're seeing the resturgence of idealist dreams of the cyberpunk world in the 1990s. There is no off switch. You've created life.