Bankless - ROLLUP: Robinhood's Announcement Sets off Stock Tokens Frenzy

Episode Date: July 4, 2025

Welcome to the Weekly Rollup, where we cover the latest news in crypto. ——— 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🟠 BINANCE | THE WORLDS #1 CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/binance ——— TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro and EthCC 5:30 MARKETS https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/bitcoin 7:30 Solana ETF https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1940436515798348195 https://www.tradingview.com/chart/V7YvdegA/?symbol=CBOE%3ASSK 12:20 MACRO https://x.com/TheStalwart/status/1940749966542360844 https://x.com/HadickM/status/1940754843838341559 https://imgur.com/uBt5LkP https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/1939684213672038840 https://polymarket.com/event/who-will-trump-announce-as-next-fed-chair 19:00 The Big Beautiful Bill https://polymarket.com/event/reconciliation-bill-passed-by?tid=1751541176019 https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trumps-big-beautiful-bill-clears-final-hurdle-before-house-wide-vote https://x.com/SenLummis/status/1939730903045218395 23:00 Robinhood Chain and Tokenized Stocks https://x.com/smyyguy/status/1939725345772470671 https://x.com/RobinhoodApp/status/1939701274217460047 https://x.com/BanklessHQ/status/1940054189914145198 https://x.com/RobinhoodApp/status/1939706469966135442 https://x.com/RobinhoodApp_EU/status/1939709899690098770 https://x.com/vladtenev/status/1939713633392480417 https://x.com/OpenAINewsroom/status/1940502391037874606 https://x.com/vladtenev/status/1940547859532612028 https://x.com/0xren_cf/status/1940077604939129253 https://x.com/vladtenev/status/1940308314144883074 https://x.com/BanklessHQ/status/1940468665235001656 https://x.com/RobinhoodApp/status/1939703096168362170 https://x.com/hosseeb/status/1940050920483823819 https://www.tradingview.com/chart/1CDu50yK/?symbol=NASDAQ%3AHOOD https://x.com/iamDCinvestor/status/1939711492397703307 https://open.spotify.com/episode/6XTj2K0YAtXIgYPpGrK0xg?si=ef33fb6a0e394acd https://backed.fi/news-updates/xstocks-are-going-live-tokenized-stocks-for-the-defi-era https://x.com/0xMert_/status/1939761568029225224 https://x.com/gemini/status/1938688845597577591?s=46&t=2ZINVXJQKx6xO_6Wiiu_2g https://thedefiant.io/news/tradfi-and-fintech/dinari-wins-first-u-s-broker-dealer-license-tokenized-stocks-667afe25 https://sbt.dinari.com/tokens?tokenSymbol=AAPL.d https://x.com/HadickM/status/1940018046833201168 https://www.theblock.co/post/360853/financial-industry-group-pushes-back-on-tokenized-equities-urges-sec-to-reject-crypto-firms-exemptions https://www.cnbc.com/video/2025/07/02/sec-chairman-paul-atkins-on-regulating-private-markets-rise-of-stock-tokenization.html 47:20 Tom Lee Bullish ETH https://www.tradingview.com/chart/V7YvdegA/?symbol=AMEX%3ABMNR https://x.com/CNBC/status/1939658101193322537 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1939686608254460283 https://x.com/sharplinkgaming/status/1940078442579644420 53:50 NEWS https://x.com/tier10k/status/1940133141546770454 https://x.com/coinbase/status/1940385699653652500 https://x.com/zachxbt/status/1940388827392344261 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1940480126925656343 https://www.youtube.com/live/zo72TWXrc3Y ——— Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Bankless Nation for all our American listeners out there, happy Fourth of July. Happy Fourth of July to you, David. How are you doing? You're not actually in America and the Fourth of July, are you? No, I am in France, where everyone celebrates Fourth of July every year, right? I don't know, man. You tell me I've never been there for Fourth of July. What are you doing in France?

Oh, it's ECC week this week. One of the oldest running Ethereum conferences, unofficial, like not thrown by the EF, just bootstrapped by the community. and it's been running ever since like, honestly, I think before I even got into Ethereum. Are you guys responsible for this 7% ETH increase on the week? Is that you? Is that ETH CC? I thought that was you. I thought that was you holding down the fork.

I'm happy to take credit for 7%, all right? We're going to talk about that. We got a lot more. Actually, I want to talk to you more about ETHC, but let's give them a tour for what's in store on the bankless weekly roll-up. Tokenization week? David, what's all this about? Three different companies all decided to launch tokenized stocks on different blockchains this week.

Not just Robin Hood, not just X-Dox on Solana, but also Gemini is entering the fray with tokenized stocks, both on Arbitrum and also on Solana. So just three different companies is coming in with tokenized stocks. I guess they chose this week to launch them all. Yeah, it was a good week to do it. Also, a big win for Ethereum this week. So that Robin Hood news that you mentioned, that's all happening on an Ethereum layer two. first Arbitrum and then an Arbitrum chain. So you got to give us a download on that.

And David, I want to tell you about Tom Lee. This guy is going on CNBC, and he is pumping our eth bags, my friend. And I actually think this is the most bullish thing I've seen happened to Ethereum this year. And I want to tell you why. I would agree. I actually met Tom Lee like three days ago at Permissionless. And I was like, oh, Tom, great to see you. And like three days later, he launches the microsatology for his version of MicroCrow.

Oh, I think it was under embargo, probably. Okay. I mean, yeah, he could have said something. I would agree. It was a very unexpected, extremely bullish surprise for Eath. Yeah, this is a Michael Saylor strategy. That's effectively what he's doing. He's building a public trade treasury strategy.

Also, Solana has its first staked ETF. So we'll talk about that. We'll see how it's going. And some big news in the U.S. this 4th of July, we've got Trump's big beautiful bill. All right. That may have passed by the time you guys are listening to this. And what's that mean for crypto? Also, is Trump trying to replace Powell?

He's got some names floating around in the ring, and he's kind of threatening in the background. So we'll talk about that too. But before we do, David, tell me a bit more about ECCC. Like, give me the vibes. How are we feeling? Yeah, it's in Cannes this year. It's usually in Paris, except for last year it was in Brussels because of the Olympics. But we're in Cannes this year, which is a beach town that's my first time here.

Extremely hot. It is like 95 degrees every single day. So everyone is just sweating. but since we're all sweating together, it's okay. Very well-received event. And so nothing is like too, no one's, like too crazy. No one's too euphoric. Everyone's like kind of getting work done.

ETHCC has been like the spawn of the side event meta in crypto conferences, but this ETHC was different. I think people said some very positive words about the main Ethereum conference. And I just saw a lot of, I have so many talks that I have saved that I have. I need to watch that I just haven't gotten to yet. I've been running around. The week was started off by Robin Hood's event, which they can throw an event. They were shoveling people back and forth.

Yeah, they booked this massive chateau. They had this whole entire bit of like a James Bond flit, a bit of Vlad driving a sports car up the, like, chateau road. He was looking good, man. He was dressed to the park. He was going after Bond. Yeah, Casino Royale stuff. Okay.

Yeah, yeah. So that was the big excitement of the week. And overall, yeah, people are having a good time. Yeah. So it felt sober. It felt buildy. I mean, Robin Hood was the huge coming out of that event. It's sort of, like, it's weird in a way, seeing them come to ECCC because that's sort

of a off the beaten path. Traditionally, that's been kind of a dev-focused, nerdy. We're talking about ZK, you know, like stuff, you know, cryptography, deep cryptography, protocol research. And here is Robin Hood. What is it? a $70 billion company coming from the U.S. 85.

You would know, right? It depends on when you look at it. And they're like they're there this year, which is big in and of itself. Yes. Sponsoring the main event, right? Not just throwing the biggest side event here, but sponsoring the main event. Yeah. And like there were so many reporters at the Robin Hood event like kind of doing the live

coverage and they've just been throughout can all of this week. Yeah. Well, Vitalik appeared on a panel with. the Robin Hood folks, which is interesting. I also may have front run you on this, David, which is I watched the Vitalik. It was like a 20-minute keynote at ECCC. I haven't seen that yet.

Yeah, that's the benefit of being remote. You know, I can watch as soon as it drops. You actually have to attend the event in person. Why do I go to the conference when you're beating me to the content? Because I can't, because I don't. And we appreciate you doing that because obviously you got to talk, you felt the vibes you got to talk to the Robin Hood folks in person and Arbitrum folks. Anyway, we'll talk a bit more about that at the end of the episode.

I think first we got to talk about prices as we do at the beginning of these episodes. And it's looking more bullish on the week. Tell me about it. Tell me green. Yeah, Bitcoin up 2.6% on the week. It touched $110,000 currently coming in at $109,700. Eath up a little bit more this week. So Bitcoin up 2.6%. Eith up 6.7%. So I'm going to go ahead and call this a Ryan Sean Adams week when you do it. Both Bitcoin and Eath are up in dollar. terms, but ETH is up in Bitcoin terms. That's what I do. That's a Ryan week.

That's a Ryan week. Well done, Ryan. Did your job. So Eth coming in at $2,595. And so overall, pretty happy times on the markets this week. All right. Bitcoin, we're just touching all-time highs, right? It seems like we've been range-bound 100K to 110-K, but we haven't been able to break all-time highs,

but we're creeping close. I think the technical term for that is edging. We are edging right now. All right. When is our last all-time high, you know, climax? It was June night. It's like, June 9th. Yeah, you're nailing it, actually.

Okay. So less than a month ago, we were all-time high, and we might be there momentarily, I suppose. Maybe by the time people listen to this episode. $2,000 off of all-time high. Yeah. That's not the only thing that's moving on the week. Tell me about some movers of the week. It's always weird.

Look at it to be seven-day charts. What tokens do you want to call out? just if you happen to have Pengu Arb Arbitrum the Arbitrum token or FartCoin Congrats those are the big movers of the week all those are moving beyond 30% in a single week this week Don't know why Pengu did it but Arbitrum obviously did it because all of the All of the Robin Hood news and then Fartcoin you know is the greatest macro asset of all time We got some we got some great macro news this week which we're going to get into as well All right the triple point asset I mean all of those things maybe there's a theme

to them. Maybe the theme is just there's more liquidity in the market and numbers going up. Let's talk about the Solana ETF. So lots of folks in the Salana community excited about this. This is notable because it's the first spot Salana ETF, the first crypto ETF. No one was really watching this. Yeah. I mean, I heard some rumblings from the Bloomberg folks and then suddenly it's here. So it's notable because we have an ETH ETF, we have a Bitcoin ETF, and now we have a Salana ETF, nothing else. And also, David. the second thing is it's staking. It's full staking enabled.

So you're not buying the sole asset. You're buying the staked sole asset inside of this ETF. And so I think there's a couple questions coming out of this. One, how did they get the, how did Solana get a staked ETF before Ethereum? And then two, how's it doing? So update us on that. There's a weird nuance here. There's just an unusual structure as it relates to like how an ETF typically comes into

being. I don't know why this, how this is different, but this is a C-Corp. Is it a C-Corp under the 1940 Act? I don't know what that means. But it allows a staking rewards to be paid out as dividends. The taxes for this thing is not as kind as if it were more of a traditional vanilla normal ETF. And then, of course, how did it get passed? The SEC didn't like give this the explicit thumbs up. They just also didn't give it a thumbs down, which means that they just got to do it. So they just didn't say no. And didn't say no.

And then they were like, all right, I guess we get to do this. Yeah, I've never heard of this issuer is Rex Osprey soul. I don't know who this issuer is. This is not BlackRock. This is not BlackRock. This is way down market. BlackRock didn't even file for S1. I don't even know if Fidelity did or not.

They did. So 80% of the ETF is in Spot, Soul. And then half of that is actively staked. And then there's also a mix of like Gito, soul, a variety of other like sole. Oh, only half of it. Only half of it is actively staked. Yeah. Okay.

Interesting. And the fees on this are pretty high too. It's almost, you know, 75 bips here. I guess it's notable, though, that it did seep through. I get the feeling that the SEC doesn't want to be the no SEC. They don't want to say no to crypto. And so that's why this thing just kind of seep through. I mean any overall odd though

I would be somewhat disappointed if I was like I don't know if like bitwise filed for a solid ETF but there's like other issuers out there that have filed for a Solana ETF and I would be kind of bitter if I was them and I'm like an ETF issuer and there's like I don't know you know I guess there was with other ETFs it was a race for first right and there was a horse race you know who could be first who could get the most volume I feel like

probably all the ETF issuers are happy right now because this is an SEC that's not going to say no to crypto. And all of the things are probably going to get approved. I'm sure we see an eath staking ETF sometime soon in the fullness of time. The volume on this was pretty strong, according to Eric Balchunis, about $20 million. So that's top 1% of ETFs for first day launch. So pretty, like, I guess it met expectations or exceeded some expectations. A note here, it's still kind of peanuts compared to the Bitcoin ETF and even the Ethereum

ETF in terms of volume. So it's, you know, it's good for a down market asset. It's small, look at this. So actually on Far Side Crypto, you know these tarts we've been looking at? Oh, they've got the Solano one. Yeah, so they've got it here, right? So we'll be able to look at that and compare it to Bitcoin, which is absolutely massive. And then Ether's been seeing a tremendous amount of strength here recently as well. Yeah. I have just two comments about this. I think this is a pretty positive indicator towards the growing wave of down market ETFs that are definitely coming by the end of this year. So it's going to be the first of many. You're going to see a Dogecoin ETF. You're probably going to see a ripple ETF. We're going to see this far side

ETF charts just kind of populate. And then also my take is that the staking component of these proof of stake network ETFs is marginal. And I'm not like bullish. I'm not more bullish because all of a sudden there's like a staking ETF. I don't think that's going to create that much more. demand. I pretty much agree with you that it's marginal, although I will note. So the cost of just holding like something like vanilla Salana, for instance, is negative 4.5% dilution every year. Yeah, that's true. It's actually, it's much more critical for Solana at an 8% issuance rate versus ETH, which is like a 2.something% issuance. Salana is 4.5% issuance, actually. And so. But yields are high. Yields are higher because you're making money on MEV and fee revenue and that kind of thing.

But yeah, but for, yeah, I guess that makes sense that you would include all of yields because that's missed opportunity. Yeah, so we've got some other commentary on the SEC here, too, about tokenized stocks that we'll get to. But David, I want to ask you a question. How are you feeling about your job, man? You feeling good job security right now? What? Dude, we're business partners. This is to cue you up to talk about the jobs report because you should feel great about your job.

The jobs numbers are looking good. The jobstombers are looking great. I keep my job? Yeah, I guess so. Okay, I keep my job. Unemployment is only 4.1%. And these are estimates higher than what analysts were expecting. So they had expected 4.3%.

It was actually 4.1%. So good macro indicators there. Here's a commentary. Strong unemployment report. Interesting initial market reaction. So what happened on the back of this was stocks went up rates. So bond rates got higher. Crypto went down.

And so this analyst is saying tells you the market believes crypto prices are more dependent on liquidity, whereas stocks are trading on fundamentals and the chance of a July rate cut, Fed rate cut, just got killed. So stocks on fundamentals and crypto prices liquidity. That's kind of a take here. It does feel like the stock market is the center of attention right now and the crypto markets are kind of just trend following. That's what it feels like to me. Yeah, I could see that. And here's a chart that Mike Nato pulled up for me yesterday when we were going through sort of our monthly fundamentals episode.

This is cross-border capital puts this up. I like those, by the way. Those are really great. Yeah, you like those? Okay. Do you listen to it? You guys have only done, yeah, I've listened to first like half, but you guys have only done two, right?

Yeah, yeah. And toward the end, he gets to this chart, which is a weekly global liquidity. There's all sorts of different indices. This is one from cross-border capital. And you can see kind of an ebbed up to 180 trillion back. just, you know, I guess, you know, that was probably May, and now it's back down again. But this is the measure of if you believe that crypto prices go up when there's more liquidity in terms of, you know, dollars money printing, all of these things, then you look at this chart.

And I'm a big believer. I'm a subscriber to the idea that all of these markets, especially in crypto, are all driven by this chart right here. Because it's the denominator. Global liquidity is the denominator of especially crypto assets, which are commodity money assets. I'll add one more nuance that a lot of the Bitcoiner macro, like an analyst that I pay attention to will all say that Bitcoin price is a two-year lagging indicator of global liquidity. So global liquidity shows up and then two years later that shows up in the Bitcoin

price. And this global liquidity indicator has been going up straight since December of 2022. And Bitcoin has been following that trend. The bull hopium that I will happily dish out here is that we have like another year plus of Bitcoin up and therefore crypto up because of global liquidity. I think that's true. And you can chart it as a straight line, but there are, you notice in the chart, these dips, right? It goes kind of like up and then there's a little dip down. Yeah, it's a sawtooth. Yeah, it's a sawtooth. I like that. Man, you're a charter, aren't you? Okay. So here's the thing that could affect global liquidity coming from the U.S. It's a one-two combo punch. So you got to look at monetary policy, of course, and what's Powell doing? What's the

Fed rate doing. And then you have to look at fiscal policy, right? Because Lynn Alden told us, nothing stops this train. So let's look at both. First, we'll talk about monetary policy on the week. So Powell has been, people call him hawkish. I don't know, maybe he's just being normal, but Trump wants him to be very, very much more doveish. He wants him to cut rates. And he's looking at, he says, unemployment's, you know, doing very well. That's a indicator. You know, inflation CPI is kind of down. So he's like, Powell, why don't you cut rates? And this week, the conversation coming from Scott Bessent and also Trump, I mean, he's always talking about this, is that a Fed chair Powell's successor is coming in as soon as weeks from now. So indicating that Trump is going to name

Powell's successor, okay? You imagine that if your boss was just like named your replacement. It was like, you know, well, you still have a job. Yeah, you suck and I hate you. and we're going to hire this new guy, and I wish you weren't here, and here he is. And his name is Rady McRate Cut. Yeah, exactly. So I don't know. The successor has not been named, but the successor could come. According to Besson, weeks from now, so there's a polymarket, of course, for this.

Who will Trump announce as the next Fed chair? Guess who one of the answers is? You'll never guess. Scott Bessett? It's Scott Besset. It's Scott Bessett. Oh, he's at 21%. Yeah.

He's the second highest. So, yeah, that's one of the chief candidates is, you know, Scott Besson, 21%. You can just, but the Federal Reserve is supposed to be a non-political organization. And Scott Besson is a member of Trump's administration. What's going on here? Yeah. Well, you just take the Treasury guy and you move him to, you know, Fed chair and you could do that. We all know what Scott Besson would do.

I mean, he's very much with Trump. He was with him with all of the tariffs, even though the rest of Wall Street thought that was a good idea. He's very articulate. He's a good communicator. I mean, you could totally see Scott Besson. I enjoy Scott Besson. You enjoy his. He sounds so reasonable.

Yeah. I enjoy him. I think he's better than any Democratic, like, economic advisor that I've ever listened to. So whether it's Scott Besson, whoever Trump names, what do you think he's going to do to rate cuts? Is a cutty, McCutty face? Yeah. It's going to be cutting McCutty face, all right? So now Powell's, you know, tenure goes to May of 2026.

All right. And so there's technically there seems like there's no way to fire Powell, right? And no one has ever done this. So no president in the full Fed history has actually named the replacement before while the guy was on the job. Right. So this is all unprecedented territory. But this points to we're just looking at the liquidity charts. What do you think in the fullness of time, whether it's in that, you know, coming

months and Powell capitulates and starts cutting rates or whether it's his replacement, rates are getting cut, right? Am I wrong here? Crypto prices are going up for the remainder of the Trump presidency if he gets his way. It feels very much the case. All right. So that's the monetary side. And let's check in on the fiscal side. So we've talked about this before.

The big beautiful bill. The point I've made about Scott Besson being on the Trump admin moving into the Federal Reserve is the fiscal side. penetrating into the monetary side. So it's really fiscal all the way down because nothing stops this train. Yeah, kind of. Exactly. And you know, you're civic. So Congress is supposed to hold the purse strings of the entire U.S.

government on, you know, the U.S. government layer one in monetary policy and fiscal policy and all of these things. And they are looking at a bill. Probably by the time people listen to this, that bill will have passed the house. But we don't know. Bankless listeners are living in the future. currently for David and I, it's up for vote in the House and it passed the Senate. Passed by one vote.

Okay, so they had to call in, it was really tight here. The vice president. They had to call in J.D. Vance to pass it. So pass the Senate. Looks like it's going to pass the House. The reason I know that is because we've got some odds here, 92% odds on Polly Market that will have passed by the time bankless listeners are listening to this. So let's assume it does.

That's about $4 trillion to the deficit in the next 10 years because it's a combo of pretty big tax cuts, no tax heights, hikes, and, you know, some expense cutting as well, right? So it's a deficit bill. It's caused some division in the Republican Party. Elon Musk has infamously or famously said, like, you do this. I'm going to launch a whole other political party, you know, so, but it looks like it's going to pass. And so the U.S. is essentially deciding to double down on its deficit and double down on its

debt. This is the one-two combo punch, David, for global liquidity. How much is the current amount of U.S. debt? I mean, 36 trillion, something like this. 36 trillion. So we're just adding four more trillion. So we're adding, what is that? 10%.

Yeah, we're adding 10% onto the debt. Wow, that's a large number. You think that's a large number? I mean, it's all a large number, right? And I mean, the question is, what do you think? How do you think this ends? We're adding four bitcoins to the debt. That's one way of looking at it for sure.

Excuse me, only two Bitcoins. I forgot Bitcoin and how high Bitcoin is. Bitcoin's $2 trillion. There are some bulls on the back of this that say, look, you tax cuts, you stimulate the economy, we just grow our way out, right? And there's maybe some case out there that AI tech, the frontier here is so bullish. Look, man, I just got off a podcast earlier this week while you were out. Kathy Wood was telling me we're going to grow at 7 to 8% GDP, okay?

the U.S. is going to be on the back of AI and the full innovation side. If that's the case, maybe this doesn't matter so much. All right? So you could bet on that. I cannot imagine ourselves growing out of $40 trillion of debt, accruing 4.5% interest. Well, that's what the strategy is. And unless something drastic changes, we can't grow our way out. So this means that God help anyone holding U.S. treasuries and bonds right now.

now. I mean, that is just slow motion exit liquidity for doing that. And I think this is bullish for gold, for Bitcoin, for Ethereum, for commodities, for capital assets. Oh, God. When you went there, David, what do we have coming up next? Coming up next, not one, not two, but three different companies launched tokenized stocks all across the blockchain ecosystem. We're going to talk about all of them leading with Robin Hood. That's the event that I went to, so I can tell you exactly what that Robin Hood event was like on the ground. In addition to the tokenized stocks products, just a slew of other as well, very aggressively getting into the crypto space. You know, Robin Hood and Coinbase were kind of in their own lanes for a good long while

for the small section of like, you know, that you could buy Bitcoin and a few other cryptos on Robin Hood. Now they are very much breathing each other's air, so we're going to talk about that. And also, the Robin Hood layer two on Arbitrum, using Arbitrum tech, we're going to talk about all of that and more. But first, a message to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that makes this show possible. Like Uniswap, it's a browser wallet, it's a mobile wallet, it's the best place. to do defy. Let's go hear from Uniswap right now. Uniswap is your gateway to a more efficient

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This is big, big, big stuff. And David, you know how I know is this is Vlad, the CEO of Robin Hood. And he is armed with a smart guy chalkboard here. And he's doing some smart guy drawing on the chalkboard to diagram what I think he's describing, which is tokenized stocks on Robin Hood. You were there for this presentation at ECC. Tell me what was going on. What is Vlad describing in this video? He's just doing a good old, like, whiteboarding session, chalkboarding session of like drawing the diagrams of here's Bill.

Bill wants to buy tokenized stock. Bill sends his money to Robin Hood. Robin Hood sends its money to like the broker dealer. Broker dealer goes to the marketplace, buys a stock, stock goes back. And then, like, that's the basic, like, pretty normal. But then he was like, okay, but here's what happens when it's after hours. And Bill wants to buy a stock because then it goes to the after hours exchange, which is our exchange, BitStamp that we bought.

But then also, if it's a better price on Arbitrum, where we're deploying these stocks, it's going to go to Arbitrum. And so he was just, like, you know, drawing all the lines to, like, connect everything. I mean, really enjoying your voiceover about what he's doing. He did a great job. I was like looking at him and he was like, okay, he's using the correct amount of space on the chalkboard. He's not graining his letters.

Clearly, he's done this a few times. Overall, their whole entire presentation was like one gigantic bit, which was like, it was pretty scripted. It was kind of cheesy at times. But I enjoyed it. It was fun. Yeah. Okay.

So this presentation or something like it, yeah, to catch a token, the presentation, 22 million clicks on Twitter, I think. A lot of people watching Vlad on the chalkboard. They were streaming it directly on Twitter on X and yet 22 like as an X view is pretty like cheap. It's just like one click and one person watches it for one second. But yeah, 22 million people like clicked in and looked at it for at least momentarily. Oh, well done.

I mean, that's just like smart guy vibes when you're drawn on a chalkboard in front of, you know, well done here. Okay, tell us, I know you interviewed him, you talked to him, you also talked to the Arbitrum folks. What are the highlights of what Robin Hood announced here? Tell us about the tokenized stock thing and anything else you want to cover. Yeah, overall, when I was talking to everyone, I was like, all right, like did this event and all of its announcements, did they meet your expectations, was it under your expectations, where were all the announcements as it relates to your expectations? And almost everyone said it exceeded their expectations, specifically because of the tokenized

private equity, which is a derivative of their tokenized stock announcement. So we'll start with the tokenized stocks. They are doing tokenized stocks for EU citizens. So this is only for European Union citizens. And they just have the broker-dealer relationships. You can buy Apple. You can buy all the regular stocks. And now they are deploying them as tokens on the Arbitrum One blockchain.

Like 200 stocks, like a pretty good selection, right? U.S. capital stocks, yeah. Indeed. And like I've been talking to some EU people. And they have, they express that like, apparently this is actually a difficult thing to do in the EU is access American stocks, which I was surprised to learn. Somebody was telling me of a story.

of like they wanted to buy Nvidia and they had to go to their brokerage and they had to go like, please, I would like to buy Nvidia. And they were like, no, it's too risky. And that's what it was. Yeah, I was surprised. That's like when you and I complain about going to our banks

and we have to like wire money and they're like, what is the wire for? So it's even more nanified over there? Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Like Nvidia, which is something that's on the publicly traded

on the U.S. stock market, their brokerages don't allow, I don't know if this is pervasive. So maybe this is just this one individual story. I don't really know how pervasive this is across Europe. But apparently accessing U.S. equities is not trivial in the EU. And even for us, right, there's benefits in being on chain.

So you've got fractional ownership. So you can buy a portion of a stock, right? With our tokenized stuff, you can buy any micro fraction of any of the tokens you want. In traditional brokerages, you have to buy the full amount or basically nothing. So it's more divisible in that way. Also, it's 24-7-365. It's like crypto markets. It never shuts down.

That's a benefit. This is a really cool thing that showed me that Robin Hood had done a very good job creating a pretty elegantly integrated ecosystem. So they have their normal brokerage, which gives them the stocks. Then they make a token. And that token can now go trade on BitStamp. Their exchange that they bought like two years ago. And so when the stock market is down,

Pop quiz, Ryan, about what percentage of time is the stock market not trading? I haven't quantified it, but it's got to be more than 50% because he got holidays and then you've got just, you know, all of the non-business hours, right? Is it 60%? It's 81% of time. Oh, God, that's stupid. 81% of the time markets are closed, which like the notion of a closed market is insane to me. Markets are a phenomenon.

They are an emergent phenomenon. they don't in theory close. The fact that we just close our markets are just, is just silly. And so with tokenized stocks that can trade on a crypto exchange, we now have stocks that can have like 24-7, 365 price discovery. About time. Because that's just this, that's just the speed of the world that we live in 2025. And then also, Robin Hood can like order a route if the price is preferable on BitSamp

the exchange or if the price is preferable on chain, like on arbitram uniswap or wherever. Like, they can just. go source the best price. So it's worth noting how impactful 247, 365 price discovery is. You can always kind of tell when something is happening in the world because Bitcoin will move on the weekend and that will inform the stock market on Monday. But now the stock market has a venue, which is Robin Hood, to trade 247, 365. Also, say, for example, some crisis, some global crisis did happen. And Robin Hood's the only place to get price discovery there. They get all all those fees on BitSamp or on or on their chain, which they announced, which I'll get into

in a second. And we'll talk overall, pretty cool. Let's talk about, we'll talk about the structure of these things, you know, in a little bit. But the other thing I want to get to is it's, I had FOMO already. I'm like, I'm not, you citizen I can't access these on-chain stocks yet. But then also my FOMO just skyrocketed when I saw actual private shares of companies that I'd really like to own, like open AI. It's SpaceX here too.

So it's not just the public companies. Robin Hood also threw out some private company tokens as well. You can't access in USMort. You just can't access anywhere. What is this and how did they do it? If you dry really, really hard, you can go find a way to go get SpaceX shares OTC or OpenAI shares OTC. Just because they are not publicly traded does not mean that they are not tradable or sellable.

It's just a little bit of a different dynamic. Like some peer-to-peer OTC desk type thing. Like you got to find the seller, you know, and it's an employee somewhere. Right. Mm-hmm. And companies can approve those sales or not approve those sales because that's just the nature of what happens when they're still private. But like, oh, SpaceX shares do trade with some amount of like frequency and volume that's not unheard of. Open AI is the new one.

Vlad said that they somehow had this relationship with some private wealth manager hedge fund that had access to some of these shares. and that's how they got a hold of these things. But they are now tokenizing private companies. Starting with Open AI and SpaceX, so they're doing this big campaign where they're going to just airdrop these tokens to EU citizens who sign up over the next seven days. Airdrop for free.

For free, yeah, but it's probably going to give me $5 or $10, but it's still pretty sick. Yeah. But, man, like, Open AI, I would smash by on that up to a very high price. It's just pretty cool. Sure. And there's other companies out there.

Open AI, SpaceX, also Stripe. These are some of the coolest companies. And the world of like, you know, private venture backed trad companies, they're just staying private for longer. They are. They don't need to go public, which is kind of a bummer for people like me, you, the listener who wants to get our hands on these things. Yeah. That's the part that remains to be seen is how much access they actually have to this pipeline, whether it's just kind of a one-time thing for promo purposes or whether that's sustainable and durable. There's actually a little bit of drama around this as well where OpenAI actually tweeted this out.

These open AI tokens are not open AI equity. We do not partner with Robin Hood. We're not involved in this. Do not endorse it. Any transfer open AI equity requires our approval. We did not approve any transfer. Please be careful. What's going on here?

Yeah. So like I said, if you're a private company, you have the authority to approve or not approve sales of your equity, of your stock. And so it really, the how Vlad and Robin Hood came to acquire these tokens really matters or what the nature is between the investor ownership over those tokens. I don't really think we know that story, but it would be a pretty big blunder for Vlad to just say that they have these things and then not actually have some amount of assurance that they do actually have them.

So I'm going to lean with the benefit of the doubt. Like, yeah, Robin Hood, Vlad does have a real claim on these things somehow. Maybe they're a derivative of a token. Maybe some market maker is just agreeing to set a price. I don't really know. But he tweeted out saying like, yeah, they're not technically equity. you're right, but they are one to one of the value. I think we're all kind of looking for more clarity as to how this works.

Well, that's the thing. Okay, so these tokenized stocks in all cases that we're going to talk about them aren't sort of like one-for-one equity. At least this is my understanding. So in the scenario with the Robin Hood stocks, for instance, you're buying some sort of vehicle IOU. You're not buying the stock directly, right? You're buying a vehicle that is almost like a derivative

to for the actual shares that Robin Hood owns. And they're kind of issuing this derivative on chain. And there can be weird things that happen with that, right? So when you're trading the market 24 hours a day, that sort of on-chain asset can change, like can not mirror exactly the price of the actual asset in real life because there is a different liquidity profile effectively. So there's some downsides to these assets.

They're not as good as only the actual, you know, token I stock in an exchange. I think there are a lot of people on Twitter who are pointing that out as well, that this is almost like a beta version of the thing. You don't actually own the equity itself. Yeah. It's likely a pretty convoluted process as to how a user will actually come to own these things. And like you said, the investor protection is probably not as strong.

It's just not dissimilar from like opening eye as like the Federal Reserve. and then they're looking at all the dollars in the offshore tether bank account, and then they're saying those aren't really dollars. And technically they could make them not really dollars. But would they? And then also there's like another entity, middleman entity, like making this whole thing work. So it's just a little bit convoluted.

We'll see how good of a product these things are based on how much trading volume there is and how much like true price discovery there is. And like, you know, there's a bunch of things to iron out. But my big takeaway, we're going to get into the, the remaining other two tokenized stock companies. But there's just a big foot in the door. Like the Overton window is moving here. And the notion of accessing these companies and tokenizing stocks on chain is like very real.

This is a very real thing. And Robin Hood, we should let everyone know, is a broker dealer for stocks already in a way that Coinbase is not, in a way that cracking is not. I mean, that's their whole shtick. They've been selling stocks for, you know, not a decade, but like many years. That's the thing that they do. Robin Hood has been selling stocks for a decade. They came out for a decade, 2013. Okay.

So let's talk about the second thing that moves the Overton window and is kind of a big shift, which is the Robin Hood chain. So at first, my understanding is they're issuing these tokenized stocks on the Arbitrum chain itself, the Arb1 chain, right? The one that you know that's been in Maynett for a while. In the future, though, they're going to have their own official Robin Hood chain that uses Arbitrum Tech, but is its own separate chain, one would assume completely integrated with Arbitrum 1, but an official Robin Hood chain, the same way that Coinbase has the base chain. Is that right? That is exactly right. And the way, like, it was a huge deal when Coinbase made the base chain because it was the largest company, traditional company, equity company to make a, make a blockchain. It was very validating

of some of the things that we've said before is like, oh yeah, financial entities will all use their own chain. They'll use the blockchain to have their logic run on chain. It's going to be great. But the difference here is Coinbase is crypto-native. Robin Hood is firmly in Tradfai. Robin Hood doesn't have to do this. Coinbase needs to like invest in the ecosystem for their own benefit, right? They need to like spawn products. They need to like really expand growing on-chain. Robin Hood doesn't necessarily have to do that. Robin Hood is Tradify. They sell stocks. They sell, you know, crypto represents 30% of their revenue, but not 100. And so, like, this was very optional for them to do.

And they did it. And I think that is a huge vote of confidence to the notion that financial entities will make chains and they will put assets on those chains. Big win for Ethereum here. And it's also nice, too, with, you know, like that we have multiple competitors entering the fray. We got base, we have arbitrum. Or sorry, and we have the Robin Hood chain. And as you said, this is a traditional company going on chain, which is a big deal. Okay.

So, by the way, the hood shares were. up like 11% on this. The data announced. Arbitrum's been catching a bid. We talked about the ARB token earlier in the episode. ETH completely flat. Well, I guess up 6% on the week, but not directly as a result of this announcement. So how this plays out in the market remains to be seen.

What else did Robin Hood announce? Just go through the list. Yeah, they launched perpetual futures for EU citizens. And so they have this very slick perps interface, which, God, retail is just going to love. retail already loves options on Robin Hood. Options is where Robin Hood makes a lot of their money. Perps, I think, is just options, in my opinion, but better. Maybe you can do some funny things with options, some more expressive things,

but Perps is just like, it's a leverage slider. Retail's going to love it. And they've built out the slickest perp interface. Again, only available for the EU, but you would imagine as soon as the CFTC greenlights this for the United States, they're going to just open this up in the United States. So Perps is a thing. And then also just a few other things as well.

Cryptostaking, so you can now stake your Eath, stake your Solana inside of Robin Hood and also a crypto credit card. So they already had, Robin Hood already had a credit card. You get like 3% cashback. But now you can get 3% cashback that goes and buys your preferred crypto asset. Yeah, I should mention all of this is integrated in the slickness of the Robin Hood app, right? It doesn't even feel like you're on chain.

Remember, we talked to Vlad like three years ago when he came to a permissionless conference. That was our first conversation with Vlad. And it was clear that they were new to crypto. but he was telling us about the user interface and how important haptics were. You know, like a little buzz. You got a buzz feedback in your mobile phone when something good happens in the app.

I'm sure they're doing all of those things, which is pretty cool. A mobile wallet with haptics to tokenize stocks. Robin Hood, you guys have done great. We need more dopamine hits. This is DC investor. In case it isn't clear, Robin Hood and Coinbase are going to full-on compete

head-to-head against each other to drive on-chain adoption on Ethereum via optimism and arbitraim, and they're not going to be the last ones to join the fray either, bullish. I think the community sees this as pretty bullish. I think the Robin Hood versus Coinbase take is the pretty easy take to have. I just did an episode with David from Blackworks, Ritcher from Dragonfly, Omar representing Robin Hood and David representing Coinbase. And we kind of like sussed out this conversation of like,

how competitive are these two entities? And like the big takeaway from everyone there was like actually the swim lanes are pretty distinct. Like they're mostly sticking to their own lanes. Coinbase is really trying to go to like crypto as a service and plug into like TDM Air Trade and like fidelity and like all the boomer brokerages who are just never going to build their own crypto exchange. They're just going to plug into Coinbase and have crypto exchange via Coinbase. And so Coinbase is going to do a little B to B stuff. and they're also going competitive with Visa to do payments with base and USDC. And so Coinbase is actually leaning to be more of a service provider towards Tradfai financial

pre-existing entities, whereas Robin Hood is strictly just we are retail, retail products, retail finance. And like the swim lanes are pretty distinct. And like, yes, now there's base versus Robin Hood chain. They're both trying to do tokenized stocks. So now they are starting to actually like, you know, interfere in each other's air. but for the most part, there was consensus about like these two entities are definitely going to coexist pretty well.

That's interesting because when I look at this at a higher level, it just looks like pure convergence, but maybe there is some different place here. A few other points of convergence, that was not the only tokenized a stock thing in the news this week. X stocks on Solana, which is a partnership from backed finance. Okay, this is the issuer of X stocks and Cracken and some others launched a similar tokenized stock offering this time on the. Salana. And the way this manifested in my feed was tweets like this, this one from Mert, where I think

Mert is swapping some fart coin for SMP 500, all right, which you can now do on Solana using this vehicle. I feel like you should go the other way. You should sell your S&P 500 for Sala. I guess if it's liquidity season, and you definitely have the option to do that. So not only this, but you also mentioned Gemini is launching tokenized stocks. I think we really need to dig into what these things are. We actually have an episode we're recording with one of the issues, Denari, and they power partially the Salana X-stocks, tokenized stocks, and also this Gemini tokenized stock offering. And they were just approved as the first platform to be able to get their broker-dealer license and to offer tokenized U.S. stocks to domestic investors.

So, David, I don't even know what all of this means yet. And I feel like you and I need to do an entire episode to figure it out, like what these different tokenized stocks offerings are, how good they are compared to existing stocks that you buy in your brokerage, and what the future is here. This is a tweet thread from somebody who is kind of bearish on the- This is Rob from Dragonfly. Okay, yeah, what's Rob's take here? Why is he bullish on these offerings in general, or bearish, I should say, in these offerings?

Yeah, he's basically saying there's just a lot of hurdles that these things need to get over in order to be effective products. Because when tokenized stocks trade during after hours, then because there actually is not one-to-one backed, they're more of a derivative product. Then there's market, there's pricing risk that market makers have to account for. And overall, it's just a blunt tool.

Denari is one-to-one backed, but there's just a lot of details that I think everyone's trying to understand about these things. Like, for example, how does Denari not have a white list? Those are a freely transferable blacklist tokens. Whereas the Robin Hood tokens, those are whitelisted. So, like, you need to have KYC in order to get your hands on those things. So how these work is going to be really interesting.

If Denari continues to offer stock, but, like, say Lazarus Group hacks a smart contract and then all of a sudden, Lazarus Group owns Apple. Sure. It's a tether. It's not going to be good. It's not going to be good. Yeah. Yeah.

So all of those kings need to be worked out. I mean, at the end of the day, I think Rob is bullish. But sees these as kind of like, you know, early stage beta type versions of what will the future. Everyone's very excited. He's putting some cold water on it, okay? But you know who's actually, you know who actually hates it is traditional finance. This is the financial industry. They're pushing back on tokenized equity, urging the SEC to reject crypto firms exemptions

because they say this is going to cause liquidity fragmentation. You're going to lose investor protection with these things. They're not real stocks. And this is all like risk to market structure. and by the way, to your point, you know, North Korea compliance, AML KYCs, price discovery is going to suck.

Don't let this happen, SEC. So this is old traditional finance, not new traditional finance like Robin Hood pushing back on this whole concept because their entire business is at stake, David. These banks do not want, you know, new entrants to go and chomp and, you know, software to eat their entire business.

So the big question is, what does the SEC think about this? You can imagine if this was, the Gary Gensler regime, you'd already, like, none of this would be happening. Banhammer. Banhammer. Just like speeches and tweets and all sorts of things. But this is Paul Atkins, who was asked on CNBC this very question by the interviewer.

And here's what he had to say. This is Paul Atkins, the new chair of the SEC. What do you make of these sort of tokenization efforts? I mean, it seems to me that we have rules. We could debate whether the rules are the right rules and maybe they should be changed. But given the rules that are in place and the intention of the rule today, it seems to me that the effort to sort of, quote, quote, tokenize something, you know, an underlying asset and to sort of use this structure is really effectively just a workaround to what the actual intent of the rule is. Well, I guess I disagree with that a bit because tokenization is an innovation. And we at the SEC should be focused on how do we advance innovation in the marketplace.

And so I would argue here over the last, you know, several years, the SEC has been standing athwart efforts to innovate in the marketplace because things have been unclear. The rules have not been clear. We've had regulation through enforcement. That day is over. We are now, my whole goal is to make things transparent, you know, from the regulatory aspect and give people a firm foundation upon which to innovate and come out

with new products so that they know what they're doing. David, this is not an SEC that's going to say no. Wow. Yeah. That is, this is truly a Overton window being pushed. It's one thing for them to, like, get their boots off of our neck, but to give not a green light, but like a keep going, like wordage to tokenize stocks is huge. Andrew, like, made a very good point.

Like, these things are workarounds. Yeah, they are. One of the reasons why I'm in crypto is, like, some of the things that we do, the new things that we do in crypto are all kind of slightly illegal, and that's what makes it exciting. They're workarounds, okay? They're work around. You know, great.

It's all gray areas. It questions a lot of the rules that we have in how we operate in the world. And now that we have workarounds, we have alternatives. And I see Paul Atkins being like, you know what? Why are the old ways the ways to do it? Let's do it in a new way. And I am a huge fan of that. So am I.

We got more bullish stuff after the break. Tom Lee, I call him David, the Wall Street Whisperer. He set up a micro strategy for ETH, and he's calling ETH the next Bitcoin on CNBC. We'll talk about that. Also, Coinbase tucks in an acquisition. And is your crypto co-worker secretly working for North Korea? My God, that sounds like a BuzzFeed headline. We'll talk about all that and more.

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deep list liquidity in the market, is no surprise why over 275 million users trust Binance for everything crypto. Download Binance today and get started in minutes. Binance is not available in certain countries, including the United States. Check its term. for more information. All right. I think this is the most bullish thing to happen to Ethereum this year. And we've had a number of bullish things, but this tops them all. This is Tom Lee.

He is starting a Eith Treasury company. He's going on CNBC. He's saying things like ETH is the next Bitcoin, all right? And he's basically pulling the micro strategy play. So he's taking a publicly traded Bitcoin mining company. It's called BitMine. and he's announcing a 250 million private placement to buy ETH. So he's basically taking the shell of an entity.

They're stopping the Bitcoin mining, and he's announcing a treasury strategy. It's very similar to, we just talked about Joseph Lubin, what he's doing with Esbet, different business, but similar strategy. The raise is backed by major crypto traditional finance investors. You know, you got your Pantera, you got your Galaxy, you got your founders fund, you got your Cracken. But the difference between this, and I think Esbet and Lubin, is almost, like the difference between where we're talking about base and Robinhood. All right. So like,

Coinbase is a crypto-native company. Joseph Lubin, he's crypto-native. Of course he's going to do. Of course he's, is it a surprise that he's bullish on Eith and wants to stack more in a public entity? Tom Lee is not one of us. Okay. He is from traditional finance. He is a Wall Street guy. He's one of them. He wears a suit. Okay. Look at him. He wears a suit. Okay. Look at him. So he is now starting this Treasury Fund. It's the first of its kind for ether the asset. And I think he is like a, he's a Tradfai KOL, David. And he's got a, the other thing is he's got a history of success.

He's on CNBC almost every, all of the time, every week. And he started talking about Bitcoin in July of 2017. And do you remember him during the bull run of 2017, that whole era of crypto? He was like, the only guy on CNBC. saying things like at the time what Bitcoin was, you know, trading in the thousands. He was saying that Bitcoin could cannibalize gold and it could be worth as much as 55,000. And in 2017, that was batshit crazy. That was a 55X.

Yes. That was a 55X. And it was crazy. And he was saying it to Tradfine CNBC. And they would be like, okay, Tom, whatever, but tell us about stocks. All right. So he's got that history, almost 10 years back, of. of saying, hey, the Bitcoin, you remember when I made those calls?

When Bitcoin was trading in the thousands and now it's 100,000, now he's like... I'm doing it again. I'm doing it again, except I'm going to, like, do this in a treasury fund, and ETH is going there as well. And you know what? We should just play a clip. Let me tell you, like his pitch. It's different than what our pitch would be for ether of the assets.

Let me guess. It's for Tradfai. He calls stable coins the open AI for crypto and Ethereum. Anyway, this is what he says. This is how he pitches it. Underneath the stable coin industry is Ethereum. That is really like the backbone and architecture of stable coins. So it's important to create a project that essentially accumulates Ethereum to essentially protect and have some influence on the network.

So that's why we're creating this treasury vehicle to buy Ethereum. The more Ethereum that's accumulated, the more secure the network is. And I think it's also sort of the architecture that future banks will have. You know, when Goldman issues a stable coin and JP Morgan doing it on Ethereum, as a layer one blockchain, they're going to want to secure it by staking Ethereum. So we're trying to get in front of that by creating a treasure. That's the pitch. You guys are already bullish on stable coins, right? Most of the stable coins are issued on Ethereum.

Okay. Most of the banks will issue stable coins. Those banks will want to have a stake in the network and buy ETH. And I'm just front running that. That's his entire pitch. With Robin Hood and Coinbase, like, like, both of Robinhood is at all time highs. Coinbase is very close to all time highs.

And those are the two big crypto companies as it relates to TradFi. And you have Robin Hood making a chain, issuing tokenized stocks. People are very stoked about stable coins, circles through the roof, whereas all of Circles USC is on Ethereum. And so like previously,

your and my like bulk case would, for ETH would be like, uncensurable money, uncensurable defy, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, he's definitely saying any of those things. The most pragmatic, the most effective bull case for ETH that I'm seeing, like, evolve is just like, ETH is where stable coins are, ETH is where asset tokenization is, ETH is where all the institutions are making layer twos on. It's just the, like, there's been like an effort to try and have this like rigorous ETH value

capture conversation from the John Charbonneos and all those. And I'm like intellectually interested. in those conversations. But then there's just the, ETH is just proximate to the bejillions of stable coins and to like the Robin Hood chain and the coin base chain

and to all the other like players that are doing it. And it's just ETH. It's just, that's the ETH is the institutional asset. And I see like a growing amount of energy. Oh yeah. It's very,

it's very left and right of the curve, which makes sense. It's not an over complicated narrative. And the stock price is doing pretty well on this, as you might guess. BMNR is the ticker. It jumped about a thousand percent. on the back of this news.

So doing kind of well on that. Also, Sharp Link, of course, which is Joseph Lubin's treasury. Every week they're doing kind of the micro-strategy plays. It jumped like 38% yesterday. Did it really? Oh, that's nice. Yeah, it went up big. I guess I didn't see this announcement,

but I guess when you announced that you're going to buy 200,000 more ETH, you go up 35%. Well, it also helps when the ETH price jumps, you know, 7%. And then you get an amplifier. effect on top of that. So they're just buying every week. We have just been completely Stockholm syndrome as to ETH price movements. We are like, East went up like seven percent. We're at $2,600 now. Like, hang on, we're going to go up like $300 in a day and we're going to remember what a true pump is like.

We had it not too long ago. But like we forget what frothiness can look like in ETH price. Oh, I know. I mean, I made this comment. There's an entire generation lost in crypto who's never felt an actual ETH bull market. And that's why none of them believe that it's happening. And because the last four years, right, from 2022 up to now, if you entered crypto, it's not been great. Heath goes down is what ETH does. Heath goes down.

Still on the Tad-Fi side of things, the design app Figma, it has files to go public. This wouldn't otherwise be news, but they are doing so with $70 million of Bitcoin on the balance sheet, just moving the Overton window of Bitcoin as a Treasury Reserve asset for public companies. so that's pretty cool. I surprised people, right? It's like they're going public and, oh, we got 70 million

on the balance sheet in Bitcoin. Kind of nice. Oh, yeah, by the way, we own a ton of Bitcoin. And then on a crypto-native news, Coinbase has acquired their fourth company in 2025. Liquefy is just a token management platform

for early stage like tokenization process. So if you need, if you're going to issue a token and you need compliance, you need token ownership, tracking, vesting, distribution, all that kind of stuff. It's just a compliance platform for token creation. Uniswap Foundation uses it.

Opelabs uses it. Athena Zora, they use it. And now that's integrated into Coinbase. So Coinbase is expanding their suite of offerings. And lastly, this is Zach XPT saying there might be as many as 900 workers in crypto. Like maybe some of your coworkers, bankless listeners, that aren't who they say they are that are actually working for North Korea. And they might do something nefarious with your code base, steal your assets.

Who knows? And these workers have somehow gotten through the interview process. Yeah, between 345 to 920 possible jobs are actually done by North Koreans. Zach alleges that crypto firms have paid at least $16.5 million in salaries to North Korean IT workers since the start of the year. That's wild. Monthly payroll of $2.75 million. Is it really an exploit if you're just working a job?

If they're doing good work. They're just working. They haven't gotten fired. Is that an exploit? I mean, they're definitely looking for exploits. They're definitely looking for exploits. But it seems like they might also just be clocking in to work every day.

I don't know, man. But you know how we always talk about crypto's front running the opportunity? It's front running things in general. Okay. I think like this type of thing, it's starting to happen with the AI companies. Do you hear about this Indian worker who was like working for like four or five different firms at the same time? Why was he doing that just to collect salaries? I assume so probably I don't know that it was as nefarious as what we might expect from the North Korean regime but yeah that kind of thing we're just front running things I mean this is going to happen all the time I mean yeah do you really know who you're working with if you haven't met them in person we've met it's that yeah I haven't seen you in a while you've been off the radar for a while am I still me am I still me

I like we need to do a yearly checking you know technology's adapt really quickly. Yeah, some proof of humanity is required. I'll just, look, man, I'll just do Sam Altman's World Coin thing. I'll get my eyes encoded and we can, yeah, we can work from there. All right, one thing I did want to talk to you about is I do think you should go check out this Vitalik Buterin keynote that he gave at ETHC, David. So I know you missed it, but he had this great line in here, which is talking about the purpose

of decentralization. He says, look, the purpose of decentralization is to make users free. And it really brought me back to like, man, he's really good on that subject. He's fantastic on talking about the why we're here type of a subject. And he basically said this. He put up this meme. He's like, in the first area of crypto, we're decentralized because we have the top decentralized KOLs as advisor, right?

We're decentralized because others believe we're decentralized. And then the next stage is we're decentralized because we use decentralized tech. You know, we have ZK's tech and we have cryptography and we're a layer, whatever. and that makes us decentralized, all right? And that's kind of the next level. But now crypto really needs to move to this third level, which is we're decentralized because we make our users free. We have actual like property rights guarantees that if the things disappear, users still have the ability to access their assets. Users still have the ability to move assets from one place to another without any third party interference, right? And he's like, this is the thing that

crypto really needs to focus on now, it's kind of a message to like, hey, the decentralized theater kind of like that got us here, but there's still a lot of that. Now let's actually do the thing crypto was meant to do, which is make our users free, sovereign individuals of the internet. And I think sometimes we're talking about at least this year for me, there's a lot of exciting things going on with stable coins and real world assets and all of these things that are exciting. I, every once in a while, I want to get back to the why we're here, like why we're going bankless, what this is all about and what the unique thing that crypto is bringing to the world, no one better to talk about that than Vitalik.

So I guess I'm just, I'm shilling this episode. Maybe we'll put a little clip from, yeah, I'm shilling the talk. Maybe we'll put a clip from Vitalik in the talk in the moment of said, but you got to check this out. Yeah, the link to the talk will also be in the show notes so you all can go watch it right now. There you go. You all know that crypto is risky. 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.

So, basically, level one, we're decentralized because we have the top decentralization, KOLs as advisors. Level two, we're decentralized because we use decentralized tech. Level three, we're decentralized because we make our users free. So if you're building something, the first question to ask is, are you making your users free?