Bankless - ROLLUP: Solana ETF? | $Blast L2 Launch | Solana's Blink & ZK Compression | ETH ETF Next Week?

Starting point is 00:00:00 Solana is Solana getting an ETF? What's going on here? Bankless Nation, it is your last weekly roll-up of June. Man, this month flew by fast. We got a lot to talk about, including it is the week before the Ethereum ETF, the products, at least according to your prediction, David. My prediction and others. Not just mine.

Starting point is 00:00:23 Yeah, and others. Okay. Next week, we get to see if you're right. And, like, we'll talk about that. I mean, we should talk about flows as well. Not only that, David. I feel like Solana is maybe trying to upstage the Ethereum ETHF a little bit. This could be Solana Week on Bankless.

Starting point is 00:00:40 Right, right where the ETHETF is about to get the spotlight. Surprise Solana ETF filing is filed by Vanek. Definitely not what people expected. And we'll talk about how likely or not likely that is going to get approved, but nonetheless, an S-1 is getting filed. Yeah, I don't know whether that's a trust or an ETF or what that actually needs. I'll tell you all about that. They were also shipping some pretty big things over in the Salon of Land. ZK compression, we'll talk about that.

Starting point is 00:01:07 And these things called Blinks, which are like links on Twitter. Also, Blast, just dropped a token. We've got to talk about that, including the price. I don't know about the price of the Blast token. That's been a topic of conversation. And then over in the Ethereum land, we get our first Rust execution client. We'll talk about what Reth is and what it means for the Ethereum landscape. And lastly, what the hell is up with prices?

Starting point is 00:01:30 They're down. And they're up, but they're still down. We're going to talk about that. We're going to unpack that. And all the people who are selling Bitcoins, just like people finding Bitcoin, governments, just finding Bitcoin just to dump them. And a few of other things as well. But I would like to see all of you listeners in Salt Lake City, the best city on Earth, October 9th through 11th, 2020.

Starting point is 00:01:51 Wait, is it the best city on Earth? Well, it's up for debate. Well, it's up for debate. Well, for a few days, it will be the best city on Earth. Because Chris Dixon, Sri Rom, Kioni, from Monad, Nick, from Celestia, Ellie from Starware, Vance and Mike from Framework, Tom Emmer, are going to be there. And of course, me and Ryan are going to be there as well as Mike and Polito and Jason Yanowitz from Blockworks, because we are throwing the permissionless conference, best conference in America,

Starting point is 00:02:16 10% off if you want a ticket with bankless 10, 30% off. If you are a bankless citizen, you can get that link in the Discord or if your short notes is on your, on your cool little website. And yeah, this is going to be really, really sick. We have a pretty chat lineup. Mike Novagras is going to be there. It's very, very cool. October 9th through 11th, I think.

Starting point is 00:02:35 Yeah, Bloomberg Boys. Yeah, exactly. Basically, everyone, everyone is going to be there. And why is everyone going to be there? Because between bankless and Blockworks, the two media organizations who know how to coordinate and orchestrate content know everyone in crypto and they're like, hey, you came onto my podcast now go to my conference. It's the three Bs.

Starting point is 00:02:53 Bankless Blockworks Bull Market. That's what you need to know. Come to Salt Lake City. Price goes up every two weeks. Every two weeks as well. This happened last time, and I'm sure a lot of you were like, I keep hearing how David and Orion are telling me that the prices go up. And then you came because you bought a last minute ticket. You could just get ahead of that now.

Starting point is 00:03:11 Kind of like the price of crypto, all right? You don't want to wait too long. You got to buy when things are low because they have a tendency to go up and get way ahead of things. Speaking of that, let's talk about markets on the week. And thanks to our friends and sponsors over at Cracken for these beautiful charts. No, they're ugly. Well, they're beautiful, but they're down. Yeah, well, I guess we can only compliment them when they're up, David.

Starting point is 00:03:34 You're just a fair weather friend. Well, I guess we're down then. You spoiled it. You spoil the news here. How bad are we down? Bitcoin down 5% at the week currently at 61,800. It's coming up a little bit. We're doing a dead cat bounce thing, which could turn into a real bounce,

Starting point is 00:03:52 either doing something similar. Mount Gawks, we talked about this in an episode, midweek episode, but if you didn't listen to that, Mount Gox is finally ready to distribute the Bitcoin. We are finally going to remove this Mount Gox cell pressure overhang fud that has plagued the industry as long as I had been in crypto. So if you don't know, did you know Mount Gox is not a real mountain? I just on your Twitter feed earlier this week. How dare they? If it was a real mountain, I would have loved to climb it. But no, it's not. Instead it's just fun. Why is it called Mount Gox? Magic the Gathering online exchange. It used to be an online exchange for me.

Starting point is 00:04:28 Magic the Gathering cards and then Mark Carpellys who had that URL who had that like infrastructure was like well now I like Bitcoin so now I'm going to let it trade Bitcoins so there was never really a mount to it like the mount is never for magic yeah exactly M T gox yeah it was actually mtg colon oh X because online exchange magic the gallery not only not a mountain yeah you're just like not even named a mountain right it's magic gathering anyway what's the history here the information that people came for us. Okay, it was founded in 2010. It suffered a security beach in 2014.

Starting point is 00:05:03 People, like, longtime bitcoinsers who were here before the Mount Gox hack, experienced the Mount Gox hack. It was like, oh, well, there goes the, and that's the end of Bitcoin. That was the end of that experiment. Bummer. Like, Andrea Sanprenopoulos, like the OGS of OG Bitcoiners, like, well, that was fun, but oh, well. So loss of 850,000 bitcoins of which only 100,000.

Starting point is 00:05:26 140,000 bitcoins were recovered. 140,000 bitcoins in 2014 is actually not like a, it's not a low amount of money. Now it's a huge amount of money because Bitcoin has gone up. Hold on, hold on. So a loss of 850K Bitcoin. Yeah. To the Mount Gawkes. Okay.

Starting point is 00:05:43 Yep. And then all of that went to the Mount Gawks attacker. It was not recoverable. That's not what's in like bankruptcy. The 140,000 is what was left. Yeah. What happened to the 850K? I don't even remember.

Starting point is 00:05:56 Remember my Bitcoin lore. If you know, you should tell me. If anyone knows where that Bitcoin went. Michael Saylars got some of it, maybe. Yeah. Okay, so 140,000 bitcoins are going to be distributed. Not all of it, all at once. And so there are 127,000 creditors of Mount Gawkes, which is pretty big.

Starting point is 00:06:18 That's $9.4 billion in both Bitcoin and Bitcoin cash, mostly Bitcoin. There are some, like, nuances, some, like, D.EXX, which is pretty big. details about how it's getting released. It's not getting all released all in one lump sum, like some fudsters would like to have you believe. But it is going to, the majority, a bulk of it, a big chunk of it is getting distributed in early July, which is coming up next week and week after. People fear that that will be sell pressure because these people have been locked up

Starting point is 00:06:46 since 2014. Like, surprise, surprise, Bitcoin's got up very bigly since 2014. And so people think that, like, they're going to want to cash out on their gains. I think the answer is a lot more nuanced. so you can listen to our episode about that. Claims on Mount Gox have been a thing that you could have sold. And so it's not like sellers have been meaningfully locked up for a very long time. They could have sold their claims to Mount Gox if they really wanted liquidity.

Starting point is 00:07:11 And so claims have been like churned around. A lot of hedge funds have bought claims like VC funds have bought claims because it's basically buying discounted Bitcoin. If you're along from Holder, you might as well do it. I kind of think the sell pressure from this is overblown. It's kind of going to be cool to get like this Bitcoin kind of reintroduced into the supply. It's not necessarily bullish. Actually, it's just not bullish. It is bearish in the sense that, like, there can only be sell pressure from this. I just think the market might have already, like,

Starting point is 00:07:36 priced in too much cell pressure versus what's actually coming. On Monday, we had, see this can on the chart, we had an 8% down on Monday, right? Now's the market reacting to this, this news. But we're down 5% on the week. Or people front running the news is also a conspiracy. We're down 5% of the week. I guess that feels about right to me, though. Like 5%'s not crazy. I mean, that's, and like, just to give you some benchmarks here, we're talking about 142,000 Bitcoin. Just some context here. Since the beginning of the opening of the Bitcoin ETF, BlackRock has acquired two

Starting point is 00:08:10 Mount Gawksworth of Bitcoins, about 300,000 Bitcoin. So that's what we're talking about here. There is some sell pressure, right? Even if you take the full amount, I know you're talking about creditors and that sort of thing, but even if you took the full amount, I mean the big. Bitcoin ETF more than pays for it, right? This is kind of like a few months of Michael Saylor dollar cost averaging it. I mean, like can get as close to that.

Starting point is 00:08:35 So it's not all that much, I guess, in the scheme of things. I will also say it is more bearish Bitcoin and bullish the rest of the market because these bitcoins were lost in 2014. You know it didn't exist in 2014? Ethereum, Solana, like most relevant alt coins. Yeah. And so like any of these Bitcoin holders. have, like, become not, like, Bitcoiners, they could be selling their bitcoins for, like,

Starting point is 00:09:01 other tokens. Yeah. So, market doesn't like selling. Or dollars. Or U.S.C. is also another token. Gox is not the only thing dumping on us to. The German government is dumping on us to.

Starting point is 00:09:11 So every, every week, like, we see from a government address that, like, Germany owns, they're selling Bitcoin. And they acquired about $3 billion worth of Bitcoin in, like, seizures from various, like, nefarious legal exchanges and that sort of things. They're just selling it. They're not, they're not holding it. And this is, actually, another fun fact is not just the government of Germany, but yesterday came out that the U.S. government is selling some of its Bitcoin. It just sold. Also from criminals. Yeah, 240 million worth of Bitcoin to Coinbase Prime. So they are dollar cost averaging out with the seized Bitcoin. They're selling it. But here's a fun fact for you.

Starting point is 00:09:50 This comes out on Friday. So, David, this is a Friday fun fact. You ready for this? Okay, so the fun fact is the U.S. government owns the most Bitcoin of any other nation state. So it owns about 214 Bitcoins. That's like 1.5X amount of Gawks worth of Bitcoins right now. And that's the largest by far. So that's the first fun fact. The second is that's still less than Michael Saylor owes. Not by a lot, actually.

Starting point is 00:10:17 Michael Saylor owns 226,000 bitcoins and the U.S. government has 240,000 Bitcoin. I know it's like too complicated to do the interagency stuff like this for the government. Yeah. But they should just transfer it to the Federal Reserve. Back the dollar? Just why do they have to sell it? Just put it in the bank. I don't know, but does this get like, it feels like a nasty precedent.

Starting point is 00:10:37 All right? So, U.S. government goes and seizes this criminal assets and then you just put it on their balance sheet. I don't know. There's something kind of. Well, they're pocket and cash either way. It's not like where the dollar is going. It's not like they're donating it to charity. Yeah, that's true.

Starting point is 00:10:51 where are the dollars going when they seize property like this is quite quite the gain it was quite the incentive to go seize uh 13 billion dollars huh yeah got to find something wrong with the the bankless podcast guys and go like seize some assets huh let's not get any ideas all right moving on to ether ether starting the week at 3,500 down 2% on the week to where it is now $3,460 at the time of recording so down just a little bit uh but eith tail wins in the second half of the year from Matt Hogan. I would like to tell you about them. This is a list of all the reasons why you can be bullish,

Starting point is 00:11:27 and of course we put it in the roll-up. Significant new demand pending the ETH-E-TF approval, which we know is coming, we think is coming next week. Constrain supply, that's the ultrasound money meme. Improved regulatory clarity. I think that was bullish for the entire market, but especially for Ether after the SEC dropped his consensus lawsuit. But I would also say that's like equally bullish any other token

Starting point is 00:11:47 that was at risk of becoming a security like Solana, like anything else. like a centrally issued smart contract platform. So that's like bullish for the entire market. And then significant improved UX, thank you, base, institutional adoption, black rock, and then also cycle timing, macro conditions, and the election. So Matt, just kind of like listing out all the reasons to be bullish, which I appreciate that in these trying times. Yeah, I mean, I feel like I need that opium on the week because like we're making the comment that sentiment has switched very embarrassed, right?

Starting point is 00:12:16 Yeah. Not on bankless, okay? We're still bullish. Never. So inject this hopium right in your veins. I've never been bearish once. You've never? Yeah, you have.

Starting point is 00:12:25 You've been bearish. No, I haven't. Not this year in previous years. Okay. How about the global crypto market cap? We're at 2.14. How are you feeling about this? 2.41.

Starting point is 00:12:36 Nice try. That's why I do it. Come on. A decimal place. I'm going to find another decimal place and correct you. Okay, so here's kind of a comment. Just like zoom out a little bit. this is eric.eith saying you could have walked away 16 weeks ago and eith and bitcoin would be the

Starting point is 00:12:54 same price you're only missing a boring plus 15% and negative 15% range quit overreacting what is this market this is a sideways cool off just hold and chill people panicking like a lot of market sentiment and interweak emotions are just never worthwhile to listen to we are in a plus 15 minus 15% band it's like Not the end of the world. Like, I mean, look at this chart. It's like the third inning stretch of the bull market. Yeah. Like, okay.

Starting point is 00:13:24 So, like, I mean, like, let's look at this bull cycle from, I guess, a, you know, total crypto market cap perspective. This is what you asked for, David. This is like the stair step up and then kind of a pause and then another, hopefully, stair step up. And then maybe a pause. Like, it's nice and gradual. Remember we did this whole roll up where you're playing like slow and steady type of, you know,

Starting point is 00:13:47 like wishing your desires. the market. You're getting you wish. That's exactly right. Yeah. Honestly, like, I'm starting to get ready to call the four-year cycles dead. We need to, like, crab for longer, and maybe we won't do that if the ETH-ETF is as, like, good as I want it to be. Yeah. But, like, I think it would be great if the four-year cycles just went away. They have to go away because that's just a complete anomaly. Like, that's appropriate for when things are young and market caps are low. But if we want, like, the, before we want, like, all the tokenized stocks on Ethereum and all, like, all of these, You want crypto to take over the world.

Starting point is 00:14:19 You can't have four-year cycles. It has to smooth out over time. And so if this is what we're getting is smoothing out and eliminating of the four-year cycles, that's great. That's fantastic. I'm still a subscriber to the four-year cycle belief. But I will say, I think we will stair-step to the four-year cycle. I think that's a possibility all the way to stair-step to 10 trillion.

Starting point is 00:14:38 That sounds good to me. Okay, well, where's the next stair, Mr. Stere-step? After the summer, September, late August, September. How trillion? How many trillions? How many trillions? You want me to actually predict every single stair step? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:14:51 Actually, I think what will happen is, to be honest, I don't think it'll starestep. Now that you call me out. You go from 2.5 to 10. Yeah. It's been stair steering right now. We're taking like four steps. Yeah. Like, it's stair steerspe because it's just crypto natives, right?

Starting point is 00:15:06 And I still think that we'll get to some euphoria. It won't be as extreme as previous euphoria. Just what I like about this setup and why I think Eric's right is because in, despite like, the sentiment on crypto Twitter, right builders are continuing to build like there's so much going on and it's just like nice to just let that set in so uh and then like

Starting point is 00:15:26 get real retail interested when we have like the stuff fully built speaking of that this is a quick L2 update brought to you by our friends over at Mantle um it was actually rollup wTF well this is a cool chart of like TPS in real time right like updates every like I don't know microsecond some kind of a micro

Starting point is 00:15:45 really fast for Ethereum and we're at like right now about a 307, 305, 306, yeah, adjusts, as I'm speaking. TPS, transactions per second. It's a measure of megagas as well. It's just a measure of total transactions per second across the Ethereum ecosystem. And it, like, updates all of this

Starting point is 00:16:04 across all roll-ups in real time. And I just love it. Like, I started at this for, like, a good 90 seconds. Probably an embarrassing, like, long time. Just like transfixed. Yeah, just transfixed. It's pretty cool. of us to see all the roll-up activity happening in one place. You can see, you can see Ethereum,

Starting point is 00:16:21 like, flex up and down. It's going to be really cool when we have some, like, gas-intensive day where, like, prices are super volatile. Either we're going up a lot, we're going down a lot. People are getting liquidated or whatever. I want to see, like, the activity on that day, because, like, this is, like, watching the pulse of Ethereum. Like, I'm watching a circulation system happening right now. And I'm watching, like, because, like, TPS can flex up. M-Gas, milligas can flex up. And so I remember watching, like, being like in my young neophy days of Ethereum, I remember like, oh, like gas is up today, gas is down today. That's so cool that you can watch gas go up and down.

Starting point is 00:16:54 But now we have TPS, milligas, kilobytes a second. We can watch all of these different metrics. Like you can watch the internet of value, like flex and change. Yeah, like a living organism almost, right? That's why it's so fascinating. And imagine this chart, David, or imagine this screen when you have like thousands of different roll-ups, right? and you have like thousands of TPS and then tens of thousands of TPS and the spikes are that high. Like it feels like the birth of something new.

Starting point is 00:17:20 That's, anyway, I don't know if bankless listeners will spend 90 seconds thinking about it. They should do more. They should. They should. David, give us an ETF update. Let's start with Bitcoin and then we'll get to Ethereum. Spot Bitcoin ETF flows are not changing. They're still flat.

Starting point is 00:17:36 There's no update. We had a spiky update in the beginning of June. towards the end of June it's kind of just been very slowly leaking outflows. We had kind of a negative day where we lost 4.5,000

Starting point is 00:17:49 bitcoins in the ETS. Yesterday was a positive day. But we are just not doing anything, really. It's not going up. Well, yesterday was the first positive day in a week, right? Because we had like a week

Starting point is 00:17:59 of negative days. Yeah, the first positive day since the 13th. But like all the negative days haven't been like big. Yeah. Except for the 25th. The 25th was pretty big.

Starting point is 00:18:09 That was a negative. 4.5,000 day. Today so far, we are up 700 bitcoins. Well, let's talk about the new kid on the block that's about to enter maybe next week. I'm sure we'll have some podcasts about this if it happens next week. So give us a status on the Ethereum ETF filings. Right now we are entering the fee war era of the ETF S1 amendments. And so all of these different S1 filers are jostling for fees. So far the fees of the ETH ETFs that we know of. Franklin Templeton coming in at 0.19%. I believe that's 19 bips.

Starting point is 00:18:45 Vanek's got 20%. I believe that's 20 bips. But I think Vanek is going to come in feeless for a really long time. This is what Matthew Siegel says. Vanek to waive fee initially on spot Ethereum ETFs. He doesn't give a time. I would imagine maybe up to six months for zero fees. and then a take from Nate Gerasi who says,

Starting point is 00:19:09 for the record, I expect a gray scale to meaningfully undercut everyone on fees with the ETH mini trust, which is what they're doing with the Bitcoin mini trust, trying to reserve, trying to hold onto the ETH in the Grey Scale trust. Because they'll be bleeding from the... Because they'll be bleeding.

Starting point is 00:19:24 Unless, yeah, well, they want to bleed from their trust that has like 2.5% fees, and they want to bleed it into their mini trust, which will have something very low. And this is the other take on timing. All spot, ETH, ETF, S1 amendments are in. They're in. And it seemed like over the last couple of weeks,

Starting point is 00:19:43 there's like some mild corrections, but like not that much. So it feels like the setup maybe before the product release. Right. And even Gary Gensler this week made a comment saying, like the ETH ETF process is going smoothly. Which was like the weirdest thing to hear out of Gary Gensler. I'm just like, was that, do I align with that statement?

Starting point is 00:20:02 Yeah. Why? Yeah. And by the way, the issues are Bitwise, Fidelity, 21 shares, which is like ArkInvest plus 21 shares, Grayscale, of course, Franklin Templeton, Vanek, I shares. I shares is Black Rock, yes? Yes, that's correct. Invesco, so some biggies there.

Starting point is 00:20:19 All right, let's talk about flows. So Matt Hogan from Bitwise put together an analysis. I think we'll do an entire episode on this because there are some people that are doubting the Ethereum ETF in flows and some people who are very bearish. Like I saw some estimates of just like a billion dollars. Half a billion dollars of demand for ETH. Not very much. What does Matt Hogan say?

Starting point is 00:20:40 What's his estimate? Matt Hogan's estimate. And this has been corroborated by other people that I know are in the know. He says the Ethereum exchange traded products will attract $15 billion in net flows in their first 18 months. So a little bit less than $1 billion a month. And then he gives out a big thread as to how he got to that estimate. and that this whole thread, which I don't have enough time to go through,

Starting point is 00:21:04 is linked in the show notes. But the TLDR is about a billion dollars a month coming up to 18 months, which is pretty strong. That'd be nice. That's a lot. That's a lot. David,

Starting point is 00:21:15 one other thing in the market section before we move on to other things is air drops. So over the weekend, you sent me this tweet. I was like not paying attention to... This tweet kind of like made my blood boil. Yeah, and you were like, oh, man, I forget what you said.

Starting point is 00:21:28 Like, look at those asshole or something. I think, I said like fuck this guy. Okay, who is this? What are we looking at? I don't know. It's some loser. And on account. Who says, hey, ZKSink and on account. Hey, tag ZKCasing. Just let you, just want to let you know that I finally finished transferring the tokens from my 350 wallets, averaging 18,800 ZK tokens per wallet. Shame, I didn't have enough money to buy Lambo and a decent

Starting point is 00:21:51 villa in Beverly Hills. I expect a lot more. You failed. This is a guy just flexing that he farmed the ZKSink airdrop with 350 wall. A screenshot too, right? And screenshot. Yeah. Yeah, I guess there's no actual proof here. But, like, you can't, we know that these, there are accounts like this. And, like, the audacity just to go on Twitter and, like, brag about it. I mean, there's no cost to doing so other than people like me thinking you're an asshole. Well, he, actually, I think there's more, too, to substantiate this. Like, he goes through the detailed process of, like, how he, yeah, like, he was, I saw some of the details.

Starting point is 00:22:22 He was talking about, like, the complicated way he sort of made his footprint on chain look like a real human. and like the extent he, like the lengths he took to do this. It was so fairly sophisticated and made like $1.1.1.1 million. Yeah. So if that was like your full-time job for the like 18 months of time that ZK Syncera has been up and running, like $1.1 million over 18 months, like that's a payday. It's just like, hey, look, I ruined this for everyone. Cool.

Starting point is 00:22:50 I mean, this is a take that we had, I don't know, six weeks ago. This cycle is cooked. There's a podcast episode about this. We were mainly talking about air drops. And it's like if it was cooked then, right now it is like charred. It is like you left the meat on the grill like overnight. And it's like burnt is just black. It is charred.

Starting point is 00:23:11 To me, this is kind of like the end of the lastirdrop meta. Do you agree with this? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there are still going to be some air drops because people made the choice to do that like many, many months ago. And so they're just going to have that momentum is going to carry them forward. But new companies who are starting.

Starting point is 00:23:27 to think about this now are not thinking about air drops. They're thinking about a different distribution mechanism. Yeah, they have to think about it in a different way. It has to be more civil resistant, maybe slower easing into the drop, like maybe some sort of of making, like, putting in steps to quest for the community to earn it, something like that has to, you know, like

Starting point is 00:23:43 take over here. Because it seems like right now the surest way to get even crypto Twitter to hate you is to drop a token. Like that, yeah. Right, even this guy was like, he's clearly who got paid by ZK. Sink the most. Yeah. And he's He's not thankful.

Starting point is 00:23:57 ZKCCC chumps. He's like, hey, morons. I scam from you. Yeah, exactly. Speaking of air drops, David, you got to give me an update on the blast token, which just dropped last week.

Starting point is 00:24:06 And, like, seriously, we got to talk about price because that's been interesting as well. Also, Solana, is Solana getting an ETF? We didn't mention it when we were talking about Bitcoin and Ethereum, but like, what's going on here?

Starting point is 00:24:20 It's getting the filing. Yeah, so we'll talk about all that and more. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this possible, including Our recommended crypto exchange, Cracken, go create an account. If you want a crypto trading experience backed by world-class security and award-winning support teams,

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Starting point is 00:28:03 price discovery, like price discovery happening on the futures ETF and then have spot to futures correlation be proved. Once it's proved, then you can legitimately go to the SEC and get your ETF. That has been the hurdle that the Gensler administration has said exists. And that's why the industry has been like, well, there's no new ETFs coming for a long time because you first need years of just price on a futures ETF first. Nonetheless, they have filed this S1, which is an application for a Salonet ETF, which is the first part of the process. James Safert here says early thoughts are that this only has a shot to launch sometime in 2025 if we have a new administration in the White House and the SEC. Even then, it's not guaranteed. And so I think James

Starting point is 00:28:53 is saying maybe in 2025 if Trump gets elected and also replaces the SEC with pro-crypto people, then we can be kind of optimistic about this ETF. He also continues and says, there's no deadline yet for this ETF because this filing is just an S-1 at the moment. I don't see a 19 before filing yet, which would give us an idea of timing, a deadline timing. If they were to file a 19B4 today, the deadline would be sometime around mid-March 2025. Eric Palatuna says, the knee-jerk reaction here to this is, oh, this will never be approved because there aren't Solana futures. I agree, but if change at the President of the United States, I think anything is possible. Just imagine Hester Purse or someone like that running the SEC.

Starting point is 00:29:36 So Hester Purse won't be running the SEC. She just wants to move on. This is known. So it would have to be someone else running the SEC. But nonetheless, it's a shot on goal. It's an attempt to get Solana ETF. Overall, Solana is up 7% on the news today. I mean, I think those takes are right.

Starting point is 00:29:56 I mean, there is some conceivable way this could happen if you had like a Trump presidency, let's say, and he followed through on this promise to like dismantle the anti-crypto army and he gets Gensler out in some way and to like brings in. someone who is a super crypto favorable, and they just start stamping things, like doing favors basically for the crypto industry. So you could see it happen in that way. And it is possible to bypass the like commodities CME traded ETF first, right? It's just like...

Starting point is 00:30:25 That's a matter of policy by the SEC. The current SEC policy is that, no, you can't do that, but that's a matter of policy that could be changed. One question I had for you, though, when I first saw this, I was like, oh, this isn't an an ETF filing. this is a trust. Like, Grayscale has a Solana trust in the same way that they had an Ethereum trust and they had a Bitcoin trust.

Starting point is 00:30:44 They have an Ethereum classic. They have trust for like a lot of different assets, even defy assets, right? And I thought it was that. Is it that? It's not that. It's not that. I asked about like what the hell is this trust word doing in here then? And apparently it's just like a technical detail.

Starting point is 00:30:58 You're safe to ignore the fact that that trust is here. It is the same exact structure as the Ethan Bitcoin's ETFs. Last take on this for me is just, I think this is partially. symptom of all the competitors. You know, we read all the competitors out, like Franklin Templeton, Fidelity, to know, Black Rock, Fannack, all of them. They're now in this race to get ahead of one another in terms of marketing. So like, this is Fanax, say, me first.

Starting point is 00:31:21 I'm doing this first, right? Right. So it's kind of like healthy competition. It's healthy competition. And I think it'll push ETS forward as well. I think really this is kind of like opening up the war of like the many versus few ETFs. Like, will BlackRock ever

Starting point is 00:31:37 issue a Dogecoin ETF? Like, no. They probably will not do that. You think so? They probably won't do that. I can't even say that now at this point. But like, Vanek will probably do a Dogecoin. And so there's going to be some issuers who's like, yeah, we're just going to ETF everything. And then there's going to be some issues for like, I'm not going to play in that game.

Starting point is 00:31:53 Yeah. And so I think this is Vanek saying like, yeah, we're going to, we're going to ETF the shit. Like you guys like tokenization? No, we're going to ETF these things. Yeah. Securize, is that word. Yeah. All right, I said it was Solana Week in the intro, David. It is.

Starting point is 00:32:06 We got some more stuff on Solana. So Blinks and ZK compression. These are two things hitting the Salana ecosystem. Can you first start with Blinks? Explain this. What are blinks, David? Blinks, blockchain links. Put that together.

Starting point is 00:32:21 You get a blink. This is something that was introduced into the Solana world. This is kind of like, if your frame of mind starts with a farcaster frame, that's the place to start. It is an embedded. It's a link. It's an embedded link that you can paste over the internet that will allow action-aware clients, which is like your browser extension, like a phantom, for example, or anything who is like integrated with this, to display additional capabilities for your user.

Starting point is 00:32:49 So on a website, a blink might immediately trigger a transaction preview in a wallet so that you like don't have to go to your app that would be on Talana. So you don't have to open up Jupiter, but a Jupiter blink inside of a tweet would make a little frame. that shows Jupiter and maybe some token that you might want to buy or something or some like Solana NFT. And so the idea is that just pushes the ability to interact with Solana to like websites just via a URL.

Starting point is 00:33:17 And so just want to emphasize you need to have an extension that opens up this portal to Solana. And so Phantom is one of these things. They are integrating this. And so if you have the Phantom on your browser, in your browser, and then you have a blink and a tweet,

Starting point is 00:33:32 then this frame will show up inside the Twitter, which it will let you do something. It's pretty cool. I think this is really cool. Big fan of the frames functionality in Farcaster, and I wonder if this functionality is just basically borrowed that idea and just brought it to other places. This is basically how it looks.

Starting point is 00:33:49 So if you're writing a tweet and you format the tweet in kind of a certain way that conforms to kind of the blink standard, then it can be expanded into like just kind of a mini-embedded app inside Twitter. for those that have the wallet extension that is required and also the functionality turned on. So here's how it looks in like a phantom. You own to phantom and you enable Solana Actions on X.com.

Starting point is 00:34:14 So it's not all websites, but right now it's on X.com. Of course, like these things can be risky in the same way they are in Farcasters. I'm going to be asking for some transaction simulation to come alongside with this. I would like to know exactly what I'm signing first. Yeah. And that's very important. and this is important on Farkaster as well. But this is just a great place to get like a crypto native money verbs out there, basically.

Starting point is 00:34:37 Like, you know, pay, mint, claim, all of these different money verbs that we've created embedded inside of Web2 experiences. So it's a cool move. I do think that Ethereum Layer 2 will be moving on this too. And they should be moving. Now it's Ethereum Layer 2's, you know, a chance to go copy something from Solana. Jesse? I'm sure base is looking at this right now. Like OP stack, Arbitrum, they're all looking at this.

Starting point is 00:35:04 And they're like, hey, this is pretty cool. And it's like, well done to Solana for pushing the envelope on user experience. Here's a take out of Nader Dabbat who says, having built many farcaster frames, I've also checked out Solana Blinks and see a lot of similarities, but Blinks meets users where they already are, which is potentially much more powerful and viral. This is an example of an ecosystem coming up with a great idea that will also benefit everyone outside of that. ecosystem. I'm sure. I'm excited to see more chains support this in the future. Yeah. So it's really like a primitive. It's a, uh, that like many like, the reason why I like this is that it's the

Starting point is 00:35:37 opposite of like whatever chaney is. Like you're not exposed to chaniness. You're exposed to Twitter. And then like, like, Solana is like happening in the background. Oh, you mean the blockchain is abstracted basically. Exactly. Yeah. Like abstraction. Yeah. I like I like I'm trying to make my cheney word happens. I get it. We're making things less cheney. Yeah. And like having like financial action inside of like via some client that's aware inside of your Twitter, inside of your tweets, that's very not chaney. It's not chaney. It's more powerful.

Starting point is 00:36:05 It's potentially more viral, right? It's how we start onboarding more people. Not the only release coming out of Solana that was notable this week. Also this, ZK Compression. Can you explain this one to me? ZK Compression, this is a collaboration between two different Solana ecosystem companies, Light Protocol and Helius Labs. Helius is an RPC provider.

Starting point is 00:36:23 ZK compression allows Solana State to scale. We all know what ZK compression does. Like start with a ZK roll-up as your mental model. But the idea is you compress a lot of Solana activity, a lot of bundles, and you only post the proof in Solana active state. And so this is kind of similar to how ZK roll-ups on Ethereum would post proofs to call data before Ethereum had blobs. Solana has active state and it also has inactive state.

Starting point is 00:36:50 And Solana charges rent on the amount of data posted to active state, I believe. And so if you make, if you do a lot of transactions, you bundle them up and then post the data, which is the big expensive part, into inactive state. And then you just post the proof to active state. You can get a cost efficiency that's improved by up to 162,000 times, which is a lot. And so it's somewhere, it's not exactly. It's not a layer two because there's not an off layer one blockchain that holds state on its own. All of the data is held in the Solana layer one. It's not exactly not a layer two because it is like off-chain compute using ZK compression.

Starting point is 00:37:31 It's somewhere between a mix of a layer two and like a stateless client. Yeah, almost, I also think about a co-processor is maybe a term of the adjacent to this. Yeah. That is also adjacent to this. And the net of it is, it's basically Solana using ZK technology to support more throughput and at lower fees, which is very cool and pretty impressive. Now, I still have some questions on this.

Starting point is 00:37:53 I want to do a deep dive, but here's a. conclusion tweet from from sigar number one account data is mostly stored off chain that's something i'm not sure about and find out more about that my my rule of fun for a layer two is if there is data that you need to reconstruct the state to have like full trustlessness full banklessness and the data isn't on the layer one and it's held somewhere else that's a layer two it's a layer two you're coming down on this argument huh yeah i mean if there's data that's stored that you need to process this in order to make this work and that it's So isn't stored on Salana, then it's stored somewhere else and whatever that somewhere else is, is a layer two?

Starting point is 00:38:30 Yeah, all right. It's a validity. Is this a semantics debate? Is this kind of a taxonomy, nomenclature type debate? This is a debate that was being held on crypto. Like, is this a roll-up? Maybe. It depends on what your definition of what a roll-up is.

Starting point is 00:38:43 But if there's something off-chain, it's a layer two. All right. Well, David, you might like this meme. We've renamed roll-ups to ZK compression so that our marketing team doesn't have to delete old tweets. making fun of, I think, Salana's reluctance to say layer two or roll up or be associated with them. We'll never say layer two's.

Starting point is 00:39:01 Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. What's a layer two anyway is kind of a question. I do want to dive further into what the limitations of this system might be as well because that's unclear to me. So more to discover here, but still a really cool ship by Salana.

Starting point is 00:39:15 All right. Last step for the big news of the week. Blast finally launched their air drop. The blast token is out and about in the wild. 17% was dropped. to two different categories of people, split 50-50 down the middle, points holders and gold holders. Gold was one of the growth campaigns out of blast. Coming in at a whopping, $2 billion in fully diluted valuation, which is a one-to-one ratio

Starting point is 00:39:37 of its $2 billion of TVL, which is actually like kind of meaningfully lower than what other layer twos are being valued at. 2.3 billion dollar valuations, excuse me. 50% of the total distribution will go to quote unquote the community. is like incentives that will get like spun out over time. That's also probably some sort of like Dow community run Dow, 25.5% to the core team, 16.5% to investors and 8% to a foundation. Also, Blur, which was a Pac-Man's first project, was also allocated 3% of blast,

Starting point is 00:40:11 who they say will go to blur traders and blur holders in season three, and even more in season four as well. A take out of Olympio here says, AirDrop quota, 17% is far above the standards, and that looks very good. but these vesting mechanics, although good for the chain to keep usage in TVL, are detrimental to top users who are the most responsible for the TVL used to boast metrics and receive funding, aka, this is an important part of this. For the top 1,000 wallets that received the airdrops, the top 1,000 airdrop recipients who got the most,

Starting point is 00:40:42 they are locked up. Oh, really? They are vesting. They are vesting. And so there's like a friction here that Olympio is siding. It's like, well, these are your most committed, loyal people who really boosted your metrics the most and you locked them up. Well, if they're loyal, then do they have a problem with being locked up? Maybe.

Starting point is 00:40:59 Maybe. I don't know. I'm not one of those people. You have 30 days to claim. That's actually a relatively short claiming window. There you can definitely use bankless claimables. Don't click any scary links. That's why we have bankless claimables.

Starting point is 00:41:12 There is a link in the show notes. Can I ask you a question, David? So knowing that TVL was about $2 billion on blast, it was like one of the top five, at least layer two's. I don't know where it sits right now. I could go check that. But it's like a big layer two. What did you expect the fully diluted valuation to actually be?

Starting point is 00:41:34 I would say two billion is lower than my expectations. Knowing that like arbitram and optimism are coming in at $8 billion, though. Like, it's not that much lower. Like $3 billion maybe. But like we're in the ballpark. It's all surprising me, actually. We're not doing like big valuations these year. Not for layer 2s in particular, right?

Starting point is 00:41:55 So like 2 billion DVL and 2 billion FTV. Wow, that's low. Even like last week we were talking about ZK Sync coming in at like, what is a 4 billion FDB? Yeah. I mean, not big for these layer twos right now. Not massive, yeah. But like honestly, like a lot of like TVL like or excuse me, a lot of valuations have always been insulated in crypto. So I don't mind that we're like doing less of that.

Starting point is 00:42:17 Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Stairs stuff. Yeah, we're not. Yeah, we're starting low. Start low, go high. I promise it's not cope, guys. We promise it's not cope.

Starting point is 00:42:27 All right, coming up next, we're going to talk about Reth client 1.0 and this new client, this new highly optimized Ethereum client going live. We'll talk about what that means for the Ethereum landscape. Ryan is going to talk to us about Micah while I scroll on my phone. And Gary Gensler takes three L's, three L's, two Ls. Gary Gensler takes them when we get there. Yeah, but first I'm going to talk about some sponsors that make this show possible, especially Mantle, layer two, with plenty of yield and dapps.

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Starting point is 00:45:23 Head over to Cartesey's grant application page to apply today. And if you're not a developer, those with staked CTSI can take part in the governance process and vote on whether or not a proposal should be funded. Make sure your vote ready by staking your CTSI before the votes open. Releasing Reth 1.0. This is a tweet out of the Georgios-Continopolis, the CTO now partner at Paradigm. He tweets out, after almost two years of development and a successful audit by Sigma Prime, we are finally releasing Reth 1.0, the first production ready release of our blazing fast Ethereum

Starting point is 00:45:55 execution client. We invite our PC providers and stakers to run Reth. Reth is Rust Ethereum. There's Geth, which was Go Ethereum, which was the first execution client for Ethereum. Now there's Reth. Georgios has been on this, like, Reth mission. There's the Rustations for all the people working. on Ethereum Reth for, and that's kind of like their meme.

Starting point is 00:46:19 That's why the Reth is a symbol of a crab for the Rostation is out there. Reth is just, REST is just a really highly optimized coding language to what I understand. People love Reth. Reth developers are in very hot demand. Now Ethereum has a Reth client. This is probably going to impact the Ethereum layer one not that much, although it's always cool to add clients to our client diversity. I expect Reth to become the dominant client for layer two's.

Starting point is 00:46:45 because it's an execution client. Yeah. And so this is really going to allow base to, like, turn up the juice, every single layer, too, to really turn up the juice. You put the execution client on the execution layers. And now we got the execution client to do that. This has been, like Georgios' like Pet Project for, like he said, two years now.

Starting point is 00:47:03 We finally get 1.0 out the door. And really, this is actually where the game starts because now people are going to start to use this client, and now the Peloton can start to grow. Like, Georgios and a few other people have been, I don't know if people understand the Peloton metaphor. Do people understand the Peloton metaphor? I do.

Starting point is 00:47:20 I've heard you say it like, you know, dozens of times. I love it. I love it. Okay. The Peloton is the line of bicycles that when you're watching the Tour de Fonts. Yeah. Like it's very efficient because everyone is drafting in this one mob of people. So like you takes you almost no energy to bike in the Peloton and you are going like max speed.

Starting point is 00:47:38 The Peloton is fast. You cannot keep up with the Peloton if you are sprinting solo. So Georgios and a very few number of people have been building. building Reth, but now, like, optimism gets to use Reth. Like, Base gets to use Reth. And so all these people are going to love it. Are joining the Peloton and it's going to increase in its, like, usefulness and utility.

Starting point is 00:47:56 This is how you optimize for it. You know how Jesse came on from base and told us they're trying to get to gig a gas? They're going to do this with the help of Reth really, right? Like, that's core to Reth's roadmap. And by the way, on the venture side, David, we've seen so many different projects that are trying to build, like, parallelized EVMs as well. Right? So like run multiple, like compute resources in parallel and, you know, challenge the SVM, I guess, on that dimension, bring that to the EVM.

Starting point is 00:48:25 A lot of them are basing it on Reth as well. So this is like infrastructure to supercharge the execution layer of Ethereum. And I think it's like underhyped right now. It's going to be huge. It's all open source to your Peloton metaphor, MIT license. Anyone can, you know, like snag it and use it, build on top of it. I was really excited about it earlier this week. And speaking of excitement, let me tell you about Mika, David.

Starting point is 00:48:48 Oh, boy. You ready for this? All right. What do I need to know? Give me excited about Mika. Actually, not too much. Honestly, I'm not that excited about it. In fact, I have a countertake that's just not too excited.

Starting point is 00:48:58 But what you need to know is Mika has gone in place just for stable coins that has just like now happened. Some of the requirements are, this is EU legislation, by the way, if you're not familiar with this. For all the European listeners out there? Some landmark crypto legislation that happened in Europe. Some folks in the U.S. were kind of like praising it. It's going to be interesting to see how it's implemented because this is what they're doing with stable coins.

Starting point is 00:49:19 So it's going to prohibit any stable coin that does not adhere to a one-to-one reserve ratio. Okay. Prohibit it from like the exchanges, like anyone in the real world. I guess they can't touch defy. I don't know what that means. But also banning algo stable coins. So sorry, Doquan.

Starting point is 00:49:35 I don't know what this means for MKR. Like is that a Algo stable coin? I'm actually not sure about that. also you have to obtain a license for your stable coin right from the electronic money institute whatever that is also you need regular audits some of this is good right i think some of this is good but like some of it could be a bit heavy-handed in particular the reserve requirements so one of the challenges here is that some staple coins might not fit check all of the boxes on mika at least from day one like tether tether's huge and so tether is at categorize right

Starting point is 00:50:11 right now as an unauthorized stable coins. You're actually... Unauthorized stable coin. What a word set. So you're actually seeing Tether delisted on some major exchanges, or not completely delisted, I should say, but just like only available for certain products. Okay? So like really diminishing.

Starting point is 00:50:27 This is a comment from the head of research at Outlier Ventures. Because the majority of all stable coins are USD pegged, it is unlikely that many of them will be able to comply with Mika in the short term. So, European citizens might face limited access to trading, poor liquidity, and no access to more exotic crypto-native investment opportunities. I mean, in the end, there's a question of, like, well, maybe Europeans just don't have access to stable coins on exchanges. And to like, is that what Europe is trying to do here? Here's a take from Seth Hurtling, who's actually, like, bearish on a lot of this Mika legislation. He's been involved in the trenches.

Starting point is 00:51:06 He works over at Ledgers. He says this. Many Americans who don't understand Europe still point to Mika and suggest that the U.S. is falling behind. But I'm a big proponent of beer systems theory that the purpose of a system is what it does. And what it's doing is making the EU uncompetitive in yet another emerging tech sector. So he cites BitStamp. Do you know, like, Europe does not have any major exchanges at this point. BitStamp just got like snapped up by Robin Hood. Any native major exchanges.

Starting point is 00:51:36 Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Cracken is the biggest exchange in Europe. And they're based in the U.S. Coinbase based in the U.S. USA, that's good. Robin Hood based in the U.S. He's basically saying that like this type of legislation regulation like chokes it out and Europe has a history of doing this.

Starting point is 00:51:52 So like don't make the same mistakes in the U.S. So there you go. There's your Mika update. Great. It wasn't very optimistic at all. It's kind of bummer actually. Yeah, I guess there's maybe a double-edged sword, but it could be more negative than positive,

Starting point is 00:52:06 at least for Europeans who just want access to stable coins. Speaking of negative regulators, we got a tweet to talk about with Gary Gensler, who says, actually, let's just play this clip, let's just play it. This is a clip about Gary Gensler talking about the crypto industry. He's talking about us. This is a field that the leading lights from a couple years ago are either in jail, about to go to jail

Starting point is 00:52:27 or waiting extradition. Think about it. This is that field. That's the field right now where the public has really been harmed. And there's significant non-compliance in the field. He's just like, he's on doubling down

Starting point is 00:52:45 on like the public's like lack of awareness of crypto. Like most people don't pay attention to crypto. And they're like, oh yeah, like that SBF guy, he went to jail. He was a fraudster. And maybe, maybe this Terra Luna thing that they might know about. Otherwise feels like it's a scam. Yeah. So he's like direction and correct. He's calling the leading lights of this industry.

Starting point is 00:53:06 I don't know who he thinks is the leading lights of this industry. My leading lights of this industry are Brian Armstrong, Vitalik Buterin, Jesse from Base, like, Crackin. Anyone who's, like, fighting, anyone who's fighting the SEC, honestly. Hayden from you to swap, like, who are all extremely compliant. And he's just, like, throwing shade at, like, all of our, all of our, like, leaders who are doing things extremely nobly. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:53:33 Like, Eric Forge's his comment, like, the Uniswap deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for having like orderly and efficient and fair markets. Did you hear him say? I've heard him say something like this before. This is totally a prep take. You know, the leading lights are either like waiting extradition and like in jail. Like he, this is a canned take from him and he is like propagating this narrative wherever he has an opportunity. Catherine Minerick, who's the chief legal officer over at Uniswop Labs, the new chief legal officer over at Uniswop says, this is an irresponsible way for a regulator to characterize the leaders of an entire industry, which includes so many individuals deeply committed

Starting point is 00:54:07 to making the world a better place for everyone, not to mention multiple U.S. public companies. Anyways, moving on to other Gary Gensler-Ls, the Supreme Court has just ruled in a 6-3 vote that when the SEC seeks penalty for fraud from someone, when they go after someone for fraud, a defendant is entitled to a jury trial in federal court as opposed to being subjected to the agency's in-house,

Starting point is 00:54:35 legal proceedings, aka you got a win in the wild. You don't get to just like hire your own judges to do your own legal proceedings. Kind of like crazy. It wasn't like that in the first place. But either way, like Gary's like, no, Gary, you're going to have to, you have to fight on fair terms. This is great. This is the courts like slap them back a little bit and just like rogue regulators that,

Starting point is 00:54:55 you know, over-express their power and just, you know, like restoring some balance to the court system, I think is incredibly healthy. And that's what this does. Remember that court case, a debt box or something where the judge just got furious with the SEC lawyers for like lying to the judge? Yeah. This might be like blowback from that. This is a meme out of Miles Jennings, which is the say the line, Bart, Twitter format, except Bart is actually Burns, who looks a lot like Gary Gensler. And the line is, I unlawfully exceeded my authority.

Starting point is 00:55:29 And we're not done yet. We're not done. But yeah. Coinbase is suing the SEC. and the FDIC for, quote, crippling crypto. So Coinbase has filed a lawsuit against the SEC and the FDIC. The FDIC is in part of the Treasury Department, alleging that these federal regulators are attempting to undermine the cryptocurrency industry.

Starting point is 00:55:48 The lawsuit claims that these agencies have pressured banks to deny crypto firms access to the federal banking system, which Coinbase argues is a deliberate effort to cripple the digital asset industry. Sounds like 2.2.0. That's exactly what this is. As a result of this suit, Coinbase seeks to obtain internal documents through a freedom of information act to shed light on these regulatory actions. So basically, Coinbase is suing to be able to see documents to see what the conspiracy was. See if we can like see anything.

Starting point is 00:56:19 What skeletons do they have in their closet is basically what's going on? It's so good to see crypto going on the offensive. It's not just doing it in kind of like the courts. It's also doing it with respect to political races. Like you're seeing the super PACs being active that are. that are crypto funded. Also, I don't know if you saw this this week, David, the WinkleVos twins donated $2 million in Bitcoin to the Trump campaign. Now, it turns out that, you know, they went over the donation amount so you can only donate 844,000 according to like the law.

Starting point is 00:56:52 But they max it out. They maxed it out. They donated the maxed up. And this in general is like the Winkle Voss has been super active in the 2024 election campaigns, a whole bunch of crypto people have. This is why Trump has come out as the pro-crypto president against, as he says, like, Biden's anti-crypto army. One question I had, so we're recording this on a Thursday. Apparently, I just learned about this. I don't know where I've been, but there's a presidential debate going on tonight. Biden and Trump. What do you think the odds are that there's a crypto question in there?

Starting point is 00:57:23 Like, given Trump's rhetoric, given kind, like, maybe we are overly focused on this, and it's like no one else cares about crypto and it won't be asked. Like, what are the odds do you think that there's something to do with crypto in this debate? I'm going to go on the minority likelihood on that one. I, because... So you say no. I don't think Trump will... It's not smart to hang crypto over the head of Biden and say, I'm the crypto president

Starting point is 00:57:49 because, like, the people watching that, like, we are... The industry is already watching Trump be, quote, unquote, the crypto president. The marginal viewer who's watching that, I don't think it's going to be swayed by Trump, like, built, like, boasting his, like, crypto-ness. And I don't think it's going to, I don't think it's going to come from the moderator. The moderator's not going to ask a crypto question because they probably don't care. That's a good take. However, I'm going to say that there is a question.

Starting point is 00:58:17 And I just think that... Can I get my bragging rights and FTA back if I win? That sounds fair, actually. So, first, you have to, in order to do this, though, you have to mint the NFT, give it to me. I have to go do that. Because I won the pitch. Do that. But let's make an official.

Starting point is 00:58:31 let's make an official bet. You can get that thing back. I get to keep it for some period of time. You can't just. You need to hold on to it for a day. As long as I forgot to mint it and give it to you. So let's set the rules. So if crypto is mentioned in some form of a question or Trump or Biden mentioned crypto, then I get it. And you're saying that it's not mentioned at all.

Starting point is 00:58:53 Nothing new with crypto. It's not mentioned. All right. We'll see. Now you're going to get me to watch a presidential debate. I guess I have to. No, if it does get mentioned, Twitter will just blow up. Perfect.

Starting point is 00:59:05 David, some raises on the week. First, Mega-Eath. What is Mega-Eath? Mega-Eth is a pretty hot deal that's been going around the VC space. Mega-Eth is a layer two on Ethereum that is kind of uniquely different. They are trying to take, they're trying to just go the hyper-centralized sequencer with, like, decentralized provo-rout. But just like, the whole point of layer two is, like, you get to actually be, like, meaningfully decentralized just to have your powers checked by Provers. Sure.

Starting point is 00:59:29 So they're just cramming. everything into data center memory. So maybe even if it's like put it in a big data center, put it all in memory, have the way to be able to check the validity of it via proving and it is going to be the most juice layer two of all time. So that's why it's been like pretty hot in the in the VC space. Led by Dragonfly. Dragonfly has just been kind of killing it this year

Starting point is 00:59:52 with participation from Figment Robot Ventures Tangent. Credibly neutral, that is Victor Bunin's Fund and a bunch of angels including Vitalik Buterin, Joseph Lubin, Sri Ram, Santiago, Kobe Hazu, Mert from Salana, who loves Lairtoos. That's funny. Yeah, right. 100,000 TPS, David. You believe it? 20 million dollar seed round.

Starting point is 01:00:14 They raised $20 million in a seed round, which is a juicy, chunky seed round. I think it's cool. I like the architecture. I think it's cool. That's not all, David. A bankless venture's disclosure is Conduit just got their series. A. What is Conduit? What's the context here? Conduit is a roll-up as a service provider. This is their second raise. They host a bunch of

Starting point is 01:00:36 roll-ups. They actually built the roll-up.wop.wtf website that we were looking at earlier on the show. We were talking about all the networks being alive. That's their website. They host so many different roll-ups that you probably are aware of. They host mode. They host Avo, Zora, D-Gen network is them, proof of play. They've got $1.2 billion in TVL on the roll-ups that they host. It's basically like a easy button to deploy a roll-up. And you can literally go to their website and deploy a roll-up. You don't even have to talk to them. There's a form you can fill out a pretty cool business model. They handle 20% of all Ethereum transactions. And so if you think that Ethereum will have infinity roll-ups of which I do, you would need

Starting point is 01:01:18 something like Conduit, roll-up as a service provider. And like I said, they just raised their series a co-led by Paradigm who led their seed round a couple years ago. And also Katie Hahn, Ventures, Han Ventures. Other investors, us, bankless ventures, coin-based ventures, also credibly neutral. What's Up, Victor, and Robot Ventures. And then Angels Hayden, Adams, Tim Beko, Zaki, Mustafa, Nick White, Sri Ram, and Tarun Shetra, as well as others. As we close the thing out, let's talk about a few bankless citizen updates. The first is we put a call out to bankless citizens for podcast suggestions. David, I haven't looked at this. I looked at this once, but it looks like we've got a whole bunch of dozens of submissions here. 34 suggestions, submissions for a suggested

Starting point is 01:01:57 Bankless podcast episode, one of which we will do. Yeah, okay, so what happens now? So I'm seeing Vitalik and Gavin Wood as a suggestion. I'm seeing Jordan Lyle, prohibition, what's this? Prohibition. Dot art. I think I remember base. I want to see Jesse in Bankless. I did see someone suggested Mert.

Starting point is 01:02:18 Someone's really going to have to vote that up for us to do. Mteam. Dot lens suggests the great sequencing debate with Justin Drake and a few other sequencers. That's my favorite, but I only get one vote as a bankless citizen. Okay, so what happens now? So these are all the suggestions. Is there like a round two now where bankless citizens go and vote on what podcast episode we're going to do? So yeah, there was a one week submission period, which is coming to an end by the time bankless listeners listen to this, that it will have ended. And then there will be a one week voting period. So if you have, if you're a bankless citizen and you

Starting point is 01:02:51 have your 22 or 23 or 24 POAP, go to that wallet. and that wallet will have one vote in it and you'll be able to go vote for one of the 34 podcast episodes and then we will do whichever podcast episodes come first. Well, I mean like somebody wants Ray Dalio did they put Ray Dalio as a vote?

Starting point is 01:03:11 I also want Ray Dalio. Honestly, I hope to get you that no matter what. That'd be really cool. So we're going to do our best and then if we if the number one is like Ray Dalio but we just can't get him we'll just go down to number two. But one of these podcast episodes is getting done

Starting point is 01:03:26 in order of votes. Also, David, we've got some travel schedule. At least you do. You've got some travel scheduled in July, including a conference at HeathC and a bankless event. What's this? Oh, yeah, so Monday of ETHC, if you are in ETHC in Brussels, and you are also a bankless citizen

Starting point is 01:03:42 or a previous bankless podcast guest or a bankless sponsor, hit us up because we got drinks on a rooftop bar. It's going to be sick. That's Monday, July 8th. That's 4 p.m. Brussels time. So if you are in the Discord, hits up for the link or DM me or something. There's not that many spots left.

Starting point is 01:03:58 We're coming on down to like 30 or 40 spots left. And so, yeah, it's going to be cool to hang out with all of you. It's good to see everyone in person. And then, David, you were going to go climb a mountain the following week, right? That's right. In protest of current prices, I've decided to do something. And so right after Euth-C, I'm going to go over to Sharmony and climb Mount Blanc. Let's ignore the fact that I misspelled Mount.

Starting point is 01:04:20 Mount Block. It's a 15,000-foot mountain. It's pretty cool. Have you done this one before? No, but I've done the Matterhorn, which is actually. harder than Mountplog. Also, it's harder but shorter. This is longer, taller, but easier.

Starting point is 01:04:33 Okay, so what was easier, David Matterhorn? Like, training for that or training for the David Hoffman, Nick Carter, fight. Oh, God, training for the fight was way harder. Really? The fight that didn't happen. Broken ribs? Yeah, I've never got a broken rib while climbing a mountain. All right, David, well, we wish you well on the mountain climb and good things happen to

Starting point is 01:04:53 crypto when you're gone. I hope to bring back higher prices. Yeah, I think you will. I think you will. Mem of the Week. What are we looking at, David? This is another Bitwise commercial. We all know the Mac and PC commercials where now we're doing Big Finance and Ethereum. And so let's go ahead and listen to the commercial.

Starting point is 01:05:10 Big Finance. Did you change? What? No. I'm always like this. You want to hang out? When moon, man. Do you even know what that means? No, I do not. That's kind of helps of D-Watching it on the screen. But yeah, Big Finance is wearing a blockchain.

Starting point is 01:05:28 t-shirt and he's holding a pudgy penguin, which is... Do you notice his hat? Yeah, an Ethereum hat? Yeah, Ethereum hat. He's just like totally posing as a, you know, a block team. It's like, how do you do fellow kids kind of thing? That's good. I mean, they keep rolling them out on Twitter and I love them.

Starting point is 01:05:42 Yeah, they're great. All right, guys. And with this, of course, you know crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. Not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us in the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

Starting point is 01:06:13 And also, just what's going up? Shut up, Brian. Ah, good.

Bankless - ROLLUP: Solana ETF? | $Blast L2 Launch | Solana's Blink & ZK Compression | ETH ETF Next Week?

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