Bankless - ROLLUP: Strategic Bitcoin Reserve | White House Digital Summit | Saylor's $21B BTC Bid | HyperLiquid

Episode Date: March 14, 2025

This week, the U.S. establishes its long-awaited Strategic Bitcoin Reserve yet the charts barely move and questions remain about altcoins like ADA, XRP, and SOL. A high-profile White House Digital Summit draws big names but yields few concrete regulatory wins. Meanwhile, HyperLiquid got exploited? Not quite but we'll get into that this week and so much more. Follow Jordi on X: https://x.com/gametheorizing  ------ 📣 RONIN WALLET | YOUR WEB3 GAMING ECOSYSTEM  https://bankless.cc/Ronin_Wallet ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax  🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain  ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle  🌐CELO | BUILD TOGETHER AND PROSPER https://bankless.cc/Celo  ----- ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/coin/base:0x762ccdba41c88dbaf668c346519e09a4a9cfee8e?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E  ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES   00:00 Market Sentiment And Interpretation https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/12/cpi-inflation-report-february-2025.html  https://x.com/kobeissiletter/status/1899147239160693054  06:49 Crypto Markets https://farside.co.uk/?p=1518  https://x.com/BitwiseInvest/status/1899445386038620631  https://x.com/HHorsley/status/1899612285980880907  https://x.com/milesdeutscher/status/1899062184917000214  13:44 Trump’s Impact On Crypto https://intel.arkm.com/explorer/entity/usg  18:32 Bitcoin Strategic Reserve https://x.com/margomartin47/status/1897802829474955415?s=46&t=BK1udaJPJxPwz6RfE-m1iw  https://x.com/davidsacks47/status/1897802280738734236  https://x.com/nic__carter/status/1897837943106289967  https://x.com/ercwl/status/1897817161428541691  31:18 White House Digital Asset Summit  https://x.com/POTUS/status/1898162648962756970  https://x.com/nicrypto/status/1898180016459944350   https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1898200766315209050  https://x.com/RepNickBegich/status/1899494764682363136  https://x.com/jchervinsky/status/1899586234248499450?s=46&t=LIRWzlNRT68jap2P18vctA  37:49 Saylor to Buy $21B More Bitcoin https://x.com/saylor/status/1899068491409260639  48:32 HyperLiquid Exploit? 55:44 Interpol Red Notice For… Libra Creator 58:01 Unichain’s Explosive Growth https://x.com/nansen_ai/status/1899000536487403748  ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Bankless Nation, welcome to the weekly roll-up each week. I'm bringing on a different guest to help me go through the news. And this week, I have the pleasure of being joined by Jordy Alexander. Happy Friday, Jordy. Great to have you here. Good to have me here. I'm Friday. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's a pretty volatile week, I would say. Let me just run through some macro market, fax figures, and then we can kind of react to them once I'm done. S&P 500 has erased $5 trillion of total wealth since its peak. The Dow Jones has slid 500 points on Tuesday after Trump announced and then walked back new tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum amid ongoing economic uncertainty after closing down 890 points on Monday. So over a thousand point drop in the first two days of this week. On March 6th, President Trump suspended tariffs on USMCA compliant goods from Canada and Mexico until April 2nd, affecting about 38% of Canadian and 50% of Mexican goods.

however, on March 12th, that's yesterday at the time of recording, he imposed a 25% tariff on all steel and aluminum imports, which prompted immediate retaliatory measures from Canada and the European Union. Americans have flipped their sentiment views on President Donald Trump handling of the economy since the end of his first term, according to this new polling amid a moot-brewing trade war with America's neighbors and the stock market decline. So American investors not really feel in it anymore. kind of fed up. In addition to all of that market volatility in the traditional markets and in crypto have really almost never been higher. The VIX hit a 1.5 million contracts last week. That's the six highest record on reading. volumes have doubled over the last few weeks with

all of this rise in market uncertainty. So the markets are super volatile. In addition to that, investors, markets have kind of baked in some increased. of probabilities of a U.S. recession. Five-year treasury is now pricing in 52% chance of a recession within the next 12 months up from 40 to 45% in November. So market is looking at a recession. In addition to that, though, so there's some good news to February CPI inflation falls to 2.8% below expectations of 2.9%. So court inflation and CPI inflation coming down. In addition to all of that, though, NVIDIA is about 25% off. It's. all-time highs. The S&P 500 is down almost 10%. And really, investor appetite has swung very quickly

from extreme greed to extreme fear in just a few matter of days. There's a lot of different macro news happening all over the place. Like, Nvidia, 25% off the all-time highs, volatility super high, inflation coming down, investors just kind of fed up with whatever Trump's strategy is or lack thereof. Jordy, how do you even? even begin to understand or interpret or just really analyze everything that's going on in the macro markets? I mean, two separate things. One is like, are the prices now, you know, fairly priced, overpriced, underpriced? And I think even, you know, I'm not a technical charts guy, but something that we think about from first principles is like, what's the normal trend of growth for an

economy or for, you know, stocks. And it's pretty clear that we haven't had a draw down, you know, know, in forever. It's been, you know, a few years since the inflation spike a couple, a few years ago when it was the last one. And, you know, if you, if you zoom out and you look at like the trend line, we're kind of like at a more reasonable place. Like, if you kind of like just draw a diagonal that's avoiding the spikes, we're at a reasonably priced, which is good. I think we were a little bit over our skis. You know, the problem with like having decent inflation is that people stop using their savings account and using like bonds and they started going into especially in the US right like people treat the S&P 500 as like their savings account

and you know normies don't like to have a 10% drawdown on all their money it's it's not something that's good obviously Trump has told people to bear with him in this period the stuff now he's doing with fighting every country at the same time. It's very counterintuitive. It's certainly like from a games player perspective, like you usually like fight your battles one at a time. You can't beat everybody at the same time. And what we're seeing is it's given the Canadians and the Europeans and everybody kind

of more, you know, more courage to fight back because they're like, well, if we all fight back, then we can coordinate. Collectively. Collectively. So it seems like a mistake on his side. but I have to say like sometimes the chaos seems to, you know, he gets out of the chaos and things work out. So I wouldn't say that it's like a deathly blunder or anything like that.

It's just it's a bit of chaos. I think that's what people have really coalesced around and when it comes to an interpretation of what Trump is doing. And the analysis is, well, he's just being chaotic. There's no genius behind the curtain. He's just being Trump. He's just being chaos. He's flip-flopping all over the place, and that's just because he's reacting kind of instinctively, just reflexively to what countries are responding to him about.

And there's no long-term plan. There's no master plan. And I think investors are kind of just fed up about that. Markets hate uncertainty, and Donald Trump is being very uncertain. But maybe markets are just repricing themselves back down to just like what would, what prices would be expected to be found if we had a very chaotic leader. Yeah, you know, I think he's good in chaos. Like he naturally thrives in it and he has good instincts. And so I wouldn't like put it as like, you know, Trump is, is being completely insane.

There's no clue what he's doing. Right. He can navigate it. But, yeah, like the people who I see on Twitter are like, oh, this is 4D chess and this is a master plan. And I think those people are maybe like a bit too polarized and can't see clearly. Maybe one way to interpret it because you said he thrives in chaos. So maybe there is no 40 chess. Maybe there is no master plan. But if we understand that Trump does well in chaos, maybe his plan is to just create chaos because that is an environment that he has, he feels like he has an advantage in. That is very well put. I think so. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Let's get into some crypto markets because crypto markets definitely don't feel good right now. Again, I'll just kind of read off some facts and figures. Total crypto market cap is down to $2. $2.8 trillion. That is a total of $1 trillion from the all-time high of $3.8 trillion, where we were just seemingly so recently in maybe January, November of last year, right after the election.

Bitcoin has fallen to a new yearly low, hitting $76,000. ETH yesterday fell down to $1,160, which is just crazy. The ETH BTC downtrend looks pretty terrible. It has been going, as we know, it has been going down for coming up on two and a half, almost three years straight now. But recently in the last one or two quarters, it seems to have really accelerated downwards. We are currently at a 0.022 on the ETH-BTC ratio. It has not been this low since, like, May of 2020, even in the middle of DFI summer. ETH is not the only one. If you actually kind of, I was looking at these charts, this is the ETH Bitcoin ratio that I was talking about, but then also if you look at the ETH, the sole Bitcoin ratio, you kind of see the

same pattern showing up. Soul Bitcoin has lost a ton of its gains since that it got in like late 2023. The trend looks the same to me. So I just put these charts up on Twitter just because I think it's interesting to flip back and forth between them and see how they look pretty similar. And maybe one more take to add is I thought this tweet from Travis Kling was pretty good. He tweets out, important part of what's going on crypto right now. One, we brought very few new entrants into the space this cycle relative to the prior to cycles. Two, the new entrance that we did get are mostly the worst kind. And then he just named some market influencers over the last cycle or so. Three, crypto cannot attract new top

talent right now because our reputation is truly atrocious. And four, the multi-cycle veterans that are still left are mostly very tired and very jaded. Tough setup, but those are the facts. Do you agree with this interpretation? Market sentiment is terrible. Twitter sentiment is terrible. What's your overall like autopsy of the current state of the crypto meta? I think like these are broadly correct, but there's a few things that are exaggerated. You know, one, I think on the top talent part, no, I mean, if there's like something to build

and there's money to make, the top talent will come. You know, if they move to some other industry, it's just because, you know, the bank for their time is more lucrative there. But I kind of disagree with that. And I think that even the AI talent is starting to dabber in crypto and look at it for being a piece of the puzzle. So yeah, I see Mike here.

He disagrees on number three. And yeah, I don't think that's relevant. And number two, like in terms of like the influencers, There is, that's, that's part of the, every cycle, I feel like. That's not a new thing this cycle. We always have, you know, people telling, whenever you write a long thread, there's always somebody who's like, just give me the ticker. Give me, you know, I just want, I just want to gamble.

Let me tell them. Nothing new. And like, to be honest, like, Anson, the thread guy are like, you know, these two examples I think are definitely far away from being the worst of anything. I think they're both kind of not so bad at all. Yeah, look, the jadedness, I think, is there. And I think a lot of the jadedness is like one of Travis's earlier posts around the lack of pretense that any of this stuff does anything. You know, there's a little bit of concern around.

Are we sort of like building castles in the sky? And I think some of it is true. Some of it's not true. But, you know, the L1 trade, which is we saw Eif, Solana, obviously, Alt-L-1s fall in that category extensively. I think the L1 trade is due for like a philosophical reckoning. And I've talked about this a little bit during the bull market. I realize in the bull market, people don't want to talk too much philosophy.

They just want to pump. But when things cool off, they do want to reflect and see, like, hey, what's happening? And, you know, what is a layer one token? Like, we try to fuzz it around when it's a bull market. And we say it's gas and digital gas or whatever it is. it's MEV extraction amount or something. You know, these are L1 tokens, ultimately,

I've called them community tokens and where the community is strong, community money is very good when the community is weak and it's sort of being pulled apart because of dissent and, you know, you know, the Ethereum community, unfortunately, has been facing some of this where, you know, there's talks about the leadership and direction and this stuff.

So, yeah, I think now is the time where people start caring about this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, wouldn't a lot of community dissent be reactive to the decreasing prices, not a cause of the decreasing prices? Or maybe it's a little bit of both. It's definitely reflects it, right, both ways. Like, if things are going well, people think the community is doing well. It's the same with country, nation states.

You know, like if the economy is doing well, then everyone is, like, patriotic and happy. and the economy's not doing well. So you're right. Like you said, the economical, those numbers, they matter because that's the most direct reflection if the collective is doing well. And in crypto, it's even clearer because the number is there every day. You're not waiting for the quarterly GDP figures or whatever.

Like, you can just see it. So we have two tweets pulled up. One is the Travis Kling tweet that I just read. But then Mike at Bolito's tweet, he is saying what he agrees with and doesn't agree with. He disagrees on number three. which I'll read again in a second. He says, disagree on three. People have short-term memories and they will be back.

And three from Travis Klingh was, crypto cannot attract top new talent right now because our reputation is truly atrocious. It's pretty interesting to me that we have, quote unquote, a Bitcoin president, a crypto president who created a Bitcoin strategic reserve. He named a crypto czar at the same time that crypto sentiment and crypto reputation is the worst that it's ever been.

and whenever I talk to someone like my high school college friends, like once every two weeks or so, like the last time I talked to them was right after the Malay coin and the time before that was right after the Trump coin. And they're both times they just brought it up to me. It's like, David, you know, like, what is, what is, what do all your, your crypto friends think about the Trump meme coin because we think it looks terrible? And I'm like, no, like most of my friends also in crypto, like think that it looks very, very

terrible. And so there's a stark contrast of like if you had we reroute wound us back to like, you know, five years, five years ago and said, hey, there's a, we won't name names, but there is a crypto president. And they just made a Bitcoin reserve. And they named a Cryptozar. You would think that we are just winning the whole entire world, that we own the world, that we everything, everyone loves us. Cryptos finally mainstream. And yet like, ETH is $1,700. Bitcoin's doing well. The rest of the industry is not doing well. And sentiment and reputation around crypto is the worst that it's ever seen. It's not the reality that you would have expected. Yeah, I mean, the decoupling of the different categories and different coins is also quite evident. And there's

different factors for each. I think, you know, Bitcoin holding up decently as competitor to gold is, you know, its own kind of thing there. This like KOL game that we've tolerated in the space for many years and the KOLs just make all the money, you know, shilling random stuff. Trump just brought that to the next level. I mean, he's the, he's the God tiered KOL. You know, he brought like a big stick and, you know, all the little kids are like upset that all their Solana meme coins are dying because he kind of just, you know. Yeah.

If the name of the game is like, who has the most visibility, who's the most, you know, branded KOL, it's him by like a factor, like, you know, maybe, Kanye is like there is no second best yeah it's very very distant right so he's won that game and then it's not a surprise that you know them taking billions of dollars out of the market of this hot money market has kind of killed it very quickly and even you know pump fun the most resilient of apps i think was down to 100k of daily revenue which 100k revenue is not bad but you know right you know it was It was $15 million at one point. Correct.

Yeah. Yeah. The Trump token, the Trump coin, when it launched, it just resumed right up to $70. It's currently at $10. And I think vesting starts pretty damn soon. I think the first wave of tokens start vesting this month. So it's Jan 18, so plus three months. So it'll be April 18.

We have about five weeks to go. But this is a coin I think about a lot. I've created this a bunch. trying to be, you know, very active trading pair for me, mainly on the short side, generally, and it's obviously done well. Given that he's the president, he can't really talk about it and have been thinking, like, throughout the last month, like, what could possibly make this turnaround? So I've been short, short.

I was waiting for the up-it listing. I think that's one of those, like, little spikes there, maybe, maybe, like, the one that went to 24. That was maybe, like, the last exchange that really was left. And then it's back to down only. I think there was a hack that just happened on one of the news Twitter accounts, the tier 10K account. And the hacker decided to use this coin as the thing to pump.

And he said, if you look at the 24-hour chart here, you'll be able to see it. Oh, right here, huh? Oh, this happened this morning. He said, there is utility to the trump coin. That was like the news, the fake news. And then it said it's hacked. and then now there's no utility. Proceed on your journey to zero, please.

Wow. Yeah. So adding the fake hacked Twitter account that said we're adding utility to the Trump coin, pumped Trump coin from $10.50, momentarily up to $11.13 and is now down to $10.60. And there's no bid in the market for this coin. Five weeks until investing starts. I mean, it's still coming in at a $10 billion valuation. So in terms of ROI, it's he's going to make hundreds of millions of dollars inside of three or four months. So it's still like a pretty good trade for Trump.

I mean, I don't think Trump himself is making most of it. I'm sure the people who organized it. Yeah, right, right, right. Yeah, like all the advisors and the NFT collection people. You know, the fees have been insane on this thing. I'm sure like the fees are over a billion and, uh, Gigi. but all right let's get into the strategic bitcoin reserve which was the big news that came out last week but before we get there a quick message from our friends and sponsors over at the rononon

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Turns out these words are very important. So a strategic Bitcoin reserve, the Bitcoin gets the reserve word, and then everything else gets a U.S. digital asset stockpile. So we have a reserve and a stockpile. This is Donald Trump talking to David Sachs

while he assigns this executive order establishing the Bitcoin Reserve. David Sachs tweeted out after it was signed, just a few minutes ago, President Trump signed an executive order to establish a strategic Bitcoin Reserve. The reserve will be capitalized with Bitcoin owned by the federal government that was forfeited as a part of criminal or civil asset forfeiture proceedings. This means it will not cost taxpayer a dime. It is estimated that the United States government owns about 200,000 Bitcoin. However, there has never been a complete audit. The executive order

directs a full accounting on the federal government's digital assets holdings. The United States will not sell any Bitcoins deposited into the reserve. It will be kept as a store of value. The reserve is like a digital fort Knox for the cryptocurrency often called digital gold. So basically, we are not buying any Bitcoin. We are not costing taxpayers any money. The government has a supply of Bitcoin

that has got from forfeiture, and we are just deciding to hold rather than sell, which is like a pretty small change of operating rather than selling Bitcoin. We are holding Bitcoin. But I think it's a pretty big deal that the largest, not the largest, but one of the most powerful countries in the world, economically speaking, is deciding to be a Bitcoin holder rather than a Bitcoin seller.

And I think it's worth noting the second order effects of that. I think any other country that also likely did not have a long-term plan with any Bitcoin they might hold or might come to hold, they are probably also now holders, or excuse me, holders instead of sellers too. So I think as a broad stroke, all countries in the world are. are now Bitcoin holders, not Bitcoin sellers, which I think is a pretty big deal. Jordy, what's your interpretation of all this? Yeah, and this is like Bitcoiners dream. Like if you said this some years ago, I mean, this is amazing.

All the news, though, was that they were going to find some way to potentially, like, there were rumors, right, that they would buy Bitcoin somehow and not just hold. And so, like, the market still sold off on this, even though, because, you know, expectations are high and the economy is doing poorly. So we still sold off. But the question will be like, do they stop here? I mean, yes, promises made, promises kept. They can just stop here and say that they did something.

And they did. And then there's this vague language around budget neutral strategies for acquiring additional Bitcoin. They're very sensitive to American taxpayer costs. And they keep repeating, there's no cost. There's no cost. Now, what exactly are these budget-neutral? neutral strategies.

How do you buy Bitcoin without spending any money, I think is a big question. Yeah. So, you know, usually in the past when we've had some of these lending markets and stuff that hasn't turned out well, I'm sure everybody remembers. So, you know, they may just ignore this and feel like it's too difficult and just stop here. But I think what you said is the key is that other countries, might have to buy if they don't have any. We're already seeing, you know, the Middle East is buying and, you know,

countries like Norway and Singapore and some of these wealth funds are potentially going to look at this as well. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's actually a good nuance to really emphasize here. The United States government is in this privileged position of it actually just happens to have 200,000 Bitcoin. Out of the total 21 million, that's a pretty good share of Bitcoin to be able to just like start on. That's like, you know, they are just starting the game and they are starting at a place of owning 200,000 Bitcoin. And so I said like, okay, now it's likely that all other governments are also now holders of Bitcoin rather than sellers of Bitcoin.

But actually, most governments don't own any Bitcoin at all. So if they are even interested in any Bitcoin exposure, it's not just, it's not enough to just be a holder and not a seller of Bitcoin. If you have no Bitcoin, you actually have to buy Bitcoin in order to be in the game at all. Yeah, exactly. So I think that's the most important part is what the other countries will have to respond to it. Obviously, like gold has been doing very well. And we see that even in this market downturn, gold is near the all-time pie right now. Still, like, you know, knocking on 3,000.

So there are countries that are looking to diversify out of the dollar. And I think if gold continues to do well, there's no reason why Bitcoin won't as well. Part two of this executive order is, is a digital asset stockpile, which this is from David Sacks tweet, again, consisting of digital assets other than Bitcoin forfeited in criminal or civil proceedings, which actually kind of seems pretty similar. He again follows up. The government will not acquire additional assets for the stockpile beyond those obtained through forfeiture proceedings. The purpose of the stockpile is responsible stewardship of the government's digital assets under the Treasury Department. What is the difference between the Bitcoin Reserve and the digital asset stockpile? Because they are both acquired via forfeiture from things that just happen in the United States.

But if it's Bitcoin, it goes in the reserve. And if it's a digital, other digital asset, ETH, Seoul, USDC, or whatever, it goes into the stockpile. What's the difference here? I think the keyword is probably the most strategic with Bitcoin, you know, you can treat it as a macro asset. And you can say this is like the strategic petroleum reserve, you know, when we need to have some so we can affect the price if we need to make it cheaper or more expensive, we have some lever. It's not really going to be, I think, like, you know, when they announced Cardano and XRP,

like, there was, they probably got too much pushback. It's like, how is this strategic for the government to own these things? Like, this makes no sense. But they probably still wanted to do something just to show that they're very pro-crypto and, you know, willing to have some things on a balance sheet, maybe. but you can't really claim that this is a strategic asset to hold for the national security or you know like it doesn't make any sense so that's probably why they differentiate them okay uh Nick Carter I thought it pretty pretty pretty well his take here was the announcement

of the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve and Digital Assets stockpile could not have gone any better. First campaign promise kept second Bitcoin Reserve clearly distinguished from all coin stockpile. Three, Bitcoin gets official. USG seal of approval. No other coin does. Fourth, no taxpayer money spent to acquire coins, so no backlash. And then lastly, future acquisition of coins likely left to Congress, as it should be. And just as a reminder, Congress controls the purse strings for the United States. So if we want to ever buy crypto, it has to go through Congress.

And Trump isn't, like, violating that due process in the law. Is you align with this take as well? I mean, this is definitely a Bitcoiner, you know, like a, I don't say McMachy, but like, you know, a strong Bitcoin or take. And, you know, I am glad that they, they haven't done anything that would, you know, cross lines of what, you know, Congress should do and what is like customary for executive orders to do. And I agree that spending taxpayer money to acquire, you know, some of these digital assets should go through more formal process. That's for everyone's sake. Like, imagine the next election comes. And you got, you know, Elizabeth Warren back on top because she's like, they took all

our money and they spent it to buy these stupid coins. You know, like, it should go through some process. I think for everyone's sake. Yeah. So in an interview on Bloomberg, David Sachs talked about why Trump mentioned Solana, XRP, Cardano in his announcement. And Sachs just said the president just mentioned the top five cryptocurrencies by market cap. So I think people are just reading into this a little bit too much.

Ultimately, a decision on which assets to include and the stockpile will depend on a government-wide audit. So we actually have some answers as to what crypto assets the government currently has. In addition to the Bitcoin, $16 billion of Bitcoin, there's also UST, so $122 million of tether. We have $115 million of ETH, $62 million of wrapped Bitcoin, $20,000. $3 million of BNB, $13 million of BINC, $13 million of AVE wrapped USDC, and $12 million of wrapped BNB. So really, in comparison to the $16 billion of Bitcoin, it's, you know, $150 million of Vieth, $122 million of tether and some change, some pocket change after that.

If anyone was curious, that is what is in the $16.8 billion government crypto holdings. Yeah, obviously we're missing, you know, some of the other. L1 chains that are probably not being tracked by Arkham because no one's really tracking whatever's going on on Cardano or Ripple. I don't know. But like you said, the far and away is the Bitcoin, that that's a certain amount of money that is meaningful. You know, you could call it strategic the rest.

You know, maybe not so meaningful. All right, Bankless Nation, we're going to get into the Digital Asset Summit, not the one from Blockworks, the one at the White House. We're going to talk about everything that happened over there and kind of just unpack what it means to have. have industry leaders in the White House. And then we got some micro-sailor to talk about some interpol red notice stuff to talk about Unichain and Hyperliquid.

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house. So different industry leaders all came together. So Michael Saylor was there. Brad Garling House from Ripple was there. Brian Armstrong from Coinbase. Sergei Navaroff from Chainlink, Vlad Tenne from Robin Hood. Cracken had a representation. Matt Huang from Paradigm from Maloney from Multi-Coyne. And then also some of the Trump appointees like Treasury Secretary Scott Besant and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik. I think this is a pretty interesting point in crypto's history because I would like to kind of just go back to the day crypto as an industry was created when the message in the first Bitcoin block ever was written Chancellor on the brink of the second bailout for banks. To me, these are just polar opposite

like ethos here. We have industry leaders of centralized companies, centralized projects, pseudo centralized projects too, in the White House, in this like pro-crypto political administration, whereas all of crypto's downstream of this one block, the first ever block of Bitcoin, where it's written, Chancellor on the brink of second bailout for banks. I thought that juxtaposition, I think, is kind of interesting. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but overall, Jordy, what's your take about crypto industry leaders in the White House? You know, this was like a great photo op.

I don't know what anything substantial got decided or that, you know, this kind of forum, made some strategic policy decisions. But I mean, you know, obviously like the cytrane thing has being replaced with a, you know, it's much bigger industry, like you said, we're still, you know, close to $3 trillion. And at this point, you know, it is government level important. Like we can't act like these trillion dollar assets are not, are not relevant on the government level. So, you know, I think this is okay. I agree with you that the juxtaposition of, you know, the white paper, if they had started, like, acquiring Bitcoin and just, like, started buying up all the Bitcoin, that would make no sense. Because, you know, it's supposed to be a counterpart and then they just start, you know, taking it over.

But this seems like a truce. It's more like a piece between the two sides. And I think that's what we all want. Yeah. I definitely think it's inevitable for something like this to happen. the creation of crypto doesn't prevent the creation of centralized crypto companies or even, like, leaders like Serga Nazarov of like semi-decentralized ecosystems like chain link. So like, it's not like this is like barred from pot. This is within the reason of how, you know, the laws of

physics. We can totally see this happening. And, you know, for the industry to get appropriate regulation, maybe this is what this looks like. Because, you know, despite Donald Trump's chaotic actions as it relates to crypto generally speaking and his like weird tweets about putting cardano in a digital reserve digital whitehawk uh united states digital reserve we are getting very real progress out of organizations like the cfTC and the SEC and the SEC and it's not just like it's progress and work and effort creating clarity for crypto that we have dreamed of by leaders like hester purse that know exactly what to do and exactly what needs to be done and And so it's hard to understate the magnitude of the wins that come out from that.

And I guess this is just what that looks like. Like if you want good leadership from people like Hester Purrists and the SEC and the CFTC, then like you're also going to expect industry leaders to be in these circles, in these rooms, having these conversations because that's what that looks like. So I'm not like resistant to it. But I do think that over time, we are seeing like a loss of emphasis on like the cypherpunk vision or what cypherpunk means to crypto. And I think maybe as revolutions increase and progress in scope, they just kind of get moderated.

And that's just how revolutions go. And that's what it means to have mainstream adoption. To me, it's a little bit, it's like an end of an era in crypto, but it's an era that's been slowly ending for a couple of years now. I think it makes me a little bit sad, but I think it's also like necessary for crypto to take its next steps. Yeah, like you said, the revolution happens. You know, some heads get chopped off. You go to war. But like at some point, you know, people want to live back in normality.

the only people that were happy in the last year are the lawyers that had to fight all these cases and get like the lawyers and like maybe like the liquidation estate, like all those estate people, you know, taking over all the FBX and all the other ones. So hopefully less of that and more of this, you know,

straightforward regulation. And going after like all these coin base and crackens and all this stuff, you know, it just caused so much unnecessary. inefficiency, I would say. So bankless system, if you are curious as to what was discussed at the digital asset summit, a handful of things establishing regulations for crypto exchanges, stable coins and defy,

the strategic Bitcoin Reserve was discussed proposals for zero capital gains tax on crypto sales and tax breaks for long-term holders, a ban on CBDCs, and also support for crypto innovation to position the United States as a global leader in digital assets, kind of everything that you would expect. but I think you said it right, Jordy, and here's a tweet that I think sums it up. Looking at the charts, I can assume that nothing groundbreaking came from the White House summit. So it was mostly a meet and greet. You're totally right.

It was cool to see all the industry leaders all in the same room. I'm sure there was some cross-pollination between everyone who and their representation, the company or project that they're representing. It's cool to see. It was more of a signal of support rather than it is anything fundamental. It's like the NBA All-Star game, right? And you get all these guys that you normally see in different cities and get them all together and you put them on TV, but the game doesn't really count for anything.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, Jordy, are you ready to get into some news that we have definitely heard before and is a nice familiar site and makes you feel very comfortable? Are you ready for this one? Okay. Michael Saylor announces $21 billion at the market program for purchasing more Bitcoin. I think markets actually did pump on the news because people were very sad when Michael

Saylor stopped buying Bitcoin when it was like $90,000. And then people realize like, oh, the biggest buyer has exited the market. Turns out he was just loading up some more ammo. So micro strategy has announced a plan to buy $21 billion more of Bitcoin. I don't know what flavor of this. This is a new type of financial engineering by Michael Saylor. I don't really know how he does all his financial alchemy, but I have learned to take him at his word.

Is this same news as before? Is there any new takes that you have here? Or is it just Michael Saylor buying Bitcoin? I mean, yeah, he's always trying to squeeze what he can out of his stock, you know, whether it's the volatility and the convertibles or whether it's just, you know, the stock being overpriced compared to the Bitcoin and selling some at the market. So I don't know that he's going to be able to do the full amount.

I think this is, you know, the aggregate amount that he's looking to do. We'll have to see if he actually gets someone here this amount. But like you said, in his absence, the market's dealing the gap. You know, there's a void left. Okay, so if you think Michael Saylor actually called it good, as in like, all right, cool, I own like 1.3% of all Bitcoins. I'm going to just, I'm going to call that good. I don't need any more Bitcoins.

Do you think, like, I think the market would, like, move to the downside because that's a, that's a trade that traders would make. It's like, oh, Sailor's out. Everyone's going to kind of sell because of that. But then after that trade happens, would markets resurge? Would they stay depressed? Like how important, how critically important is Michael Saylor to the health of the Bitcoin price? I think, you know, obviously he's had a huge impact.

I wouldn't say it's been like super critical. There's going to be a point and I've been predicting this for years in which, you know, supply like really, really starts to run out. And then things get parabolic. So he's kind of like inching us closer to that point where, you know, maybe there's still like a million Bitcoin left that are willing to be sold, you know, around like $100,000. But as those run out, the price at which you have to get the next million Bitcoin becomes exponential. And he's kind of like inching us there. So he hasn't gotten us on the hockey stick curve. I wouldn't say that his absence is going to crash the market.

We're not there. We're still pretty flat. So him being out, I think we don't, you know, we don't. fall back to a 40k or something. Yeah. That's an interesting illustration. You think that really the bet that Michael Saylor is making is not that Bitcoin is going to 2x or 3x or 4x. He's like, I'm going to suck up as much liquid Bitcoin as possible until it's not liquid anymore. And then the price of Bitcoin becomes infinite. And I have 1.8, 2% of all Bitcoins and their price at infinity. Do you think that's how he thinks? Yeah, I think he's a lot more

than that. I probably have like over 2%. I think it's like, isn't it like close to 500,000 Bitcoin or something? I mean, he's, he's quite a lot recently. You know, in the last like months, it's really being, I'm buying a lot. 2.4%. Wow. Excuse me. Yeah. Okay. So his cost basis, only 33, only 33, oh, wait, no, that's the 33 million. Excuse me, he has put in 33 billion dollars into Bitcoin. He is up one. And, he is up one. point 2425X. He's up 1.25X. What is his cost basis? His cost base is like around 6066. That is pretty high. It's gone up a lot. That is pretty high. He's bought a lot of coin and got 100. But that's fine. You know, I think he's likely to win. I think he probably works unless we go into some multi-year recession and you has to start paying back debt before things move on. But the funny thing is, and I realize this a few years ago, talking to some of the sovereign wealth

fund managers. They don't want to buy cheap Bitcoin. They specifically want to buy expensive Bitcoin. Like they can't touch the asset class unless it's worth, you know, trillions of dollars. And so funnily enough, like if he gets the price to $250,000, that's when the new buyers come in. And those are the serious buyers because they have like the, you know, the real money.

So he's just trying to push it there and then it sort of takes off. Is this like the VEbbling good idea? Maybe this is an imprecise comparison, but VEbbling goods are goods which demand increases as the price increases. And this has been one of the early Bitcoin or bullcases that I heard back in like 2018, 2019. It's like, oh, yeah, Bitcoin, it's only $2,000 right now. And so it's just too small for central banks. It's too small for treasuries. It's too small for sovereign wealth funds to even consider.

But once it's actually sufficiently liquid, once it's worth. Once Bitcoin is worth $5 trillion, we can actually start to think about owning a share of that. And so as price goes up, it actually unlocks further liquidity. And I think that is actually what we have seen, judged by the fact that, you know, you would never have seen a Michael Saylor with $2,000 Bitcoin. You needed $20,000 Bitcoin to unlock Michael Saylor. And maybe Michael Saylor is just the stepping stone to some, I don't know, Saudi oil money to buy $2 trillion of Bitcoin or something like that. I don't know if $2 trillion is the right number. Is that kind of what you're saying?

Yeah, and this is not theoretical. I mean, I've actually had these conversations with people running, you know, the trillions of dollars. And they say, you know, yeah, we have a gold allocation. I say, why don't, you know, Bitcoin is the new, like, you should have a Bitcoin one too then. There's no reason why you wouldn't. And they just say, yeah, it's too cheap. Like, they want to buy, like, they want it to be expensive to buy it.

So he's trying to help them. So, I don't know. Why wouldn't they just buy a smaller amount of cheaper Bitcoin? Is it just not that worth the hassle? It's, yeah, exactly. It's like they can't bring it up. You know, it's not a, it's not a big enough thing. And, you know, to a certain point, I understand that like nobody, so like, you know, like that's saying, if you own like, you know, 1% of the Bitcoin, that's very valuable.

But if you own 100% of the Bitcoin, then it's worthless, right? Worthless. Like, you want to have the right amounts. If these people are going to allocate, you know, like a normal check for them, which is a very, very big check, they don't want to own 10%, you know, 20%. they just want to own a little bit like gold. I don't get it. Bitcoin is the ninth largest asset by market cap. You know, gold is coming in at basically $20 trillion as the most valuable asset market

cap in the world. Apple is number two at $3.25 trillion, followed by Microsoft at $2.8, Nvidia at 2.8, Amazon at 2.1, alphabet at two, silver at 1.9, Saudi America at 1.6. And then Bitcoin, also at 1.6. And you're telling me that nine, the ninth largest asset by market cap is still not high enough for the sovereign wealth funds. Well, I think now it's getting there, right? So 1.6, I mean, you know, it's almost 10%, maybe. But like when it was at, certainly when it was like, you know, 25K, it's just like a play thing, you know, for people to mess around.

Now it's a bit more serious. Okay. So you're saying it's on the cusp. What else, what other assets do these sovereign wealth funds own then? They do have tech stocks, obviously. So, like, you know, those big tech stocks, they have a ton of those guys. And, you know, things like oil, these kind of like big commodities as well. So it's mainly like global equities that they have.

That's the main thing they have. And bonds, like a ton of bonds, so many bonds. Oh, I guess, yeah, sovereign wealth. Okay, so they just own, they own chairs of countries at that point. Yeah. All right. Well, that makes sense. All right.

All right, there's a few more things we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about the hyperliquid exploit. We're going to talk about the Interpol red notice that got issued just this morning. We're going to talk about how Unichain was the fastest growing blockchain in its debut month. But first, before we talk about those things, we're going to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible, like Frax. And the FRAX and the FRAX and the FRAX gives you some of the best yields in DFI. It's like if Circle, Athena, MakerDA, if they all had a baby. But they also have a layer two called Fractyl.

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actually explaining what happened here. But apparently there was, as this tweet says, not a bug. There was no exploit, just a brutal game of liquidity mechanics. But ultimately, one trader pulled off I think what is technically called in this industry a highly profitable trading strategy to get $4 million out of Hyperliquids vault. Can you explain what happened and what's the controversy here? Yeah. So there's a few ways that people have generally exploited derivatives platforms. One is, you know, the Oracle because there's a fair price.

And if you can trade against that fair price, well, if you change the fair price and suddenly you get a lot of volume done at the wrong. price and you can win. So we've seen a lot of that previously. This was not that, though. So this was not an Oracle attack, which is the most common one. This was more of a liquidation attack, in essence, a trader, you know, longed on super high leverage and created some short-term, let's say, P&L, right, because he was up.

And he was able to withdraw that P&L and then just let the position crash. So this caused a problem for the high price. the liquid vault, which had to liquidate that position. And it was such a large position that just the slippage from getting out of that position was very costly. And, you know, usually liquidations are profitable when they're small amounts. You know, exchanges charge 10% or something. They take your money and then they make some profit on the difference.

But when the size is this big, it's so hard to liquidate it. And, you know, they've reacted. I mean, they have to do it slowly. And if the price is moving against them while they're doing it, because everyone's front-running, they're seeing that, you know, there's hundreds of millions, 271 million of ETH to liquidate, so everyone is getting out the way. So the vault, which is, in essence, you know, the exchange,

it's a combination, you know, hyperliquid has this vault, which is it gets the fees and it shares them with, you know, people who put money in there, but it also gets the liquidations. And, you know, usually it makes money on all the fees and everything. But in this occasion, it gave back about a month of profit, which was $4 million. Okay, one month of profit. So I guess one month of profits is a pretty good chunk of time. But in the grand scheme of things, like hyperliquid, I think the token is valued at $20 to $25 billion, maybe a little bit less now.

So why is this a big deal? Like, it's just $1.8 million to profit and the hyperliquid lost $4 million. dollars. It doesn't seem that crazy. Yeah. I mean, the token now has come off quite a bit and it's around, you know, in that 12 to 13 FTV range and the market cap, of course, is quite a bit smaller, given that most tokens are not out. 12 billion FTV, yeah. Yeah, 4 billion market cap. But, you know, it's more around like what it says around the architecture and like, is this something that is sustainable or is this exploitable? And is there a fix? Because there's things.

there's no fix and this can keep happening. Once somebody, you know, figures out how to take some money out of the piggy bank, they're going to come every day. As long as there's money in there. So, yeah, we saw this tweet by Ben, the CEO of Bybit, and, you know, he talks about

how centralized exchanges have similar problems. You know, they have to sometimes take on large liquidations. And they have fixes on the centralized side where, you know, you, KY, CEP, And then you can also stop them from withdrawing. So if they're doing this kind of games, you can, you know, who they are. And you can also prevent them from withdrawing versus, you know, decentralization sometimes has the advantage.

It's essentially if you're resistant. But then also if you're trying to do these type of strategies, you can, you know, hope not to get caught and then be able to withdraw your money more easily. Okay. So the worry here is that this is a structural imperfection in a decentralized version of a perps exchange. Maybe it's only really exploitable at size, but hyperliquid has gotten to be size in terms of volume and kind of liquidity that it can happen. So it can attract larger and larger exploits.

Is this kind of the issue at play? Why this is a big deal is because the fix for this is unknown. And so now kind of the ball is in the hyperliquids court to add some patch, create some like new architecture in the system that prevents this from happening on a systemic level. Right. So centralized exchanges because like we said, they have these position limits. Position limits matter when you have stable resistance because you can put a $2 million limit and then that's it.

But when you can just spin up a million wallets and then they can each do $2 million, that's not going to save you. So they've tried to reduce leverage. I think ultimately they might need to prevent people from like unlocking the unrealized profits and withdrawing them. them or using them too aggressively.

So the same attacker has been added again today. And they are targeting the EFPTC pair, apparently. They're going wrong one and then make the profit and short the other one. They're doing a few things. They've also started attacking GMX again, which I guess they remember that project. So whoever this is is like, you know, they just had a taste of it. And now they, you know, they want more. We have no indication as to who this is.

We have no idea, I'm assuming. no okay they're just stress testing decentralized purpose exchange and trying to eke out any sort of like arbitrage opportunity market manipulation opportunity uh maybe at the end of this go ahead yeah we're past the stress test i mean they're like on full kind of exploit mode now i think they've been playing around with it and now they're just doing it at an industrial level because obviously they have millions and millions of dollars to be doing this with so they're not just playing around now they're they're doing it for real right okay yeah yeah well okay so if the category of decentralized perfect perp exchanges are going to exist,

then they are going to need to solve this, you know, yesterday. And if not yesterday, then today. Otherwise, they're going to all go to zero because this one exploiter is going to take all the money. And so I guess in the happy scenario, which I think is the default scenario that we're going to figure out a fix for this. I think there is some pretty, it doesn't really sound like this is an overly complicated fix.

We just need to actually like figure out what those are and implement them pretty damn fast. Yeah, I think what Ben is writing here is that probably they have to reduce some of the leverage settings and, you know, make it a bit less D-Gen. Maybe the centralized exchanges will have an advantage in offering the higher leverage, you know, like a roll bit used to have a thousand X. Like, you might not be able to do that in an unexploitable way in a decentralized way. Okay. Let's get into the Interpol red notice. So Interpol is the international police, basically.

they issued a red notice for the Libra creator Hayden Davis, according to Argentine media reports. And so this is an Interpol request that came out of Argentina to arrest Hayden Davis, who I think has finally stopped talking to people. And last we checked was living in Los Angeles, United States, a United States citizen. So he is inside of the loki of where Interpol red notice operates. I don't know how international geopolitics works when it comes. comes to a United States citizen and an Interpol red notice from Argentina. I think that's to be seen. But right now, the guy, and this, just for out of context,

this is the guy who created the Libra meme coin or is the mastermind behind the Libra meme coin. And so basically, very reductively, Argentina is requesting the arrest of Hayden Davis. And I guess that would also assume the extradition of Hayden Davis to Argentina. I don't really know if the United States is going to allow a United States citizen for that to happen. But this is just breaking news as of this morning. I don't think there's really too much more to go on any reactions to this, Jordy. Sorry, I'm just bench-pressing. I got to get my chest like Aden.

I need to have that same. You know, look, it's a big deal in Argentina, apparently. Like, it's still a big crisis. It's not a, you know, for our new cycle, we've moved on to the next thing. Right. I think over there, this is kind of caused the crisis, you know. and they still want someone to pay. And I feel like this is too big for nothing to happen.

We probably haven't heard the last of this. Yeah. Yeah. The last I've heard is he still has the $110 million that he got from his own shenanigans of the token when it was launched. So I'm sure that that is a very relevant factor here. That's why one of the reasons why the Interpol Red Nose went out was because because he has substantial funds, he is a flight risk.

And so with $110 million, you can kind of fuck off and go anywhere. And so if Hayden is that bold, which he seems to be, I think people are kind of concerned as to like where he can go next. Where in the world is Hayden Davis? One of the last bits of news that I wanted to talk to you about this week, Jordy, is Unichane, is the fastest growing chain over the past 30 days, which is the first 30 days of unichane's existence. Also, Bear Chain is up there as well.

22,000% growth in active addresses. I think that comes out of from zero, though. So growth out of zero is pretty as close to infinite. But nonetheless, we are seeing some pretty strong growth in unichain with a debut month of $220 billion of trading volume. That's the third largest trading volume for any chain and surpassing the Ethereum Layer 1 with its $91 billion. Any takes here, Jordi? You know, we never know. who's real people, who's not real people,

and I think it was an incentive program that was announced or you speculated upon, there's probably a lot of Sisyphus-like characters are playing around with the chain right now. But, you know, it's good that they're trying different things. And ultimately, all that matters is, will there be liquidity that is, you know, you to transact on?

And then maybe a lot of real usage problems as well. Maybe, maybe. Jordi, that is all the news that I have for us to talk about. Just leaving it open-ended, anything you're excited about, what do you think is cool in crypto? I think sentiment is down in the gutter right now. Maybe you can either give the listeners some optimism or just maybe talk about what's peaking your interest these days. Still, you know, AI, crypto AI is a category that I think as the technology is being getting better and better. We'll find more paths where crypto makes sense.

And I think those technologies are very naturally symbiotic. and I like that you guys are, you know, doing these AI updates and AI roll-ups. So that's the glimmer of hope that I'm having. Yeah, my general take about that is that AI is going so incredibly fast that it's only a matter of time before the value that's created over there finds a way to show up in crypto tokens, as it did just like three months ago. And now people are kind of done with all those toys. and those were pretty like dumb, short-term toys.

But I think it's just a writing out of the wall for what's coming next. I think so. It's the warning shot. You kind of get this like first warning shot and then, you know, the second wave is going to be even bigger. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jordi, thanks for going through the news with me this week. If people really liked your takes or just like the sound of your voice,

you've also got a podcast called Steady Ladd's. Maybe tell us a little bit more about what they can expect on your podcast and where they can go and find it. Yeah, we do it once a week. We often have a guest on that's very relevant to what's happening. In fact, I think right now, earlier this episode is going to be with Jim Bianco, who I know you recently had and had a great episode with. It's a very chill, casual conversational style and we like to have fun.

So hopefully people can check that out as well. Three hosts and then an occasional guest. That's the structure. Yeah. Kind of like a round, Robin, a little bit like the chopping block just with three of you and then I guess. Yeah, yeah, rotating rotating forth.

Yeah, yeah, I was listening to you guys as I was coming back from taking a trip upstate. Just great, great commentary, great loose commentary, pre-chill. I don't have to, doesn't stress me out. You guys are keeping it casual, but then also talking about what you guys are interested in in the trenches. So we'll put a link in the show notes

if people want to go listen to that. Check it out. At the end of each episode, we have a pasta of the week. We kind of compete to see who finds the best meme on Twitter. So that's another fun part at the end. All right. We'll put a link in the show on us to go check out, study, lads. Thanks, all right, Bankless Nation. That was the second week of March. Thanks for bearing with us through all of this news. Hope you're doing well out there. Crypto is risky. You can lose what

you put in, but we are head west. This is Frontier. It's up for everyone, but we are glad you are with us on the Bankless Journey. Thanks a lot.