Bankless - ROLLUP: The Fed Lowered Interest Rates: What That Means For Crypto

Episode Date: September 19, 2025

In this Weekly Rollup, we discuss the implications of recent Federal Reserve rate cuts on crypto markets, exploring their potential benefits for Bitcoin and Ethereum. We highlight the SEC's easing of crypto ETF regulations, Tether's new compliant stablecoin, and SEC Chair Paul Atkins' vision for clearer regulations. Finally, we touch on how global finance is adapting to crypto innovations in Ghana and Nepal. --- 📣0G | CRYPTO X AI https://bankless.cc/OGAI --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🎩DEGEN | JOIN THE COMMUNITY https://bankless.cc/degen 🌳KGEN | REQUEST A DEMO https://bankless.cc/KGEN-podcast 🏄 SURF | UPGRADE YOUR CRYPTO RESEARCH https://bankless.cc/surf --- TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 3:24 Markets https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS https://polymarket.com/event/fed-decision-in-october https://x.com/CryptoMalfoy_/status/1968357964906979484 https://x.com/joechalom/status/1968383138943361374 https://x.com/CryptoHayes/status/1968060229805019140 https://x.com/GarrettGoggin/status/1967905389321535779 15:52 Solana DATS https://x.com/zoomerfied/status/1967560072717869273 https://blockworks.com/analytics/treasury-companies/market-data https://panteracapital.com/helius-hsdt-building-the-preeminent-solana-treasury/ https://x.com/AltcoinDaily/status/1967645702429044799 21:34 New ETF Standards https://x.com/JSeyff/status/1968437645660352620 https://x.com/matt_hougan/status/1968432392726593686 26:00 Base Token https://blog.base.org/the-state-of-base-at-basecamp-2025 https://x.com/base/status/1967602096360063341 https://x.com/brian_armstrong/status/1967602534601875734 https://x.com/coinbase/status/1967609260667535463 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1968320893953933781 44:30 Tether USAT https://x.com/USAT_io/status/1966520959713620001 48:25 Banking Lobby vs. Crypto https://www.coindesk.com/opinion/2025/09/16/the-genius-act-is-already-law-banks-shouldn-t-try-to-rewrite-it-now https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1968392328474706285 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1968317057109287046 https://x.com/0xKofi/status/1968221311806718320 56:49 The Revolution in Nepal https://www.thestreet.com/crypto/markets/exclusive-nepal-turns-to-bitcoin-and-stablecoins-as-protests-rock-the-nation 59:50 Paul Atkins https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/speeches-statements/atkins-keynote-address-inaugural-oecd-roundtable-global-financial-markets-091025 1:01:23 Wrapping Up https://x.com/Polymarket/status/1967592719603429824 https://syndicate.io/blog/community-first-token-launch https://x.com/NasdaqExchange/status/1966512285465170265 https://x.com/BTC_Archive/status/1967960768264970690 https://x.com/afpost/status/1968426582764093740 --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Bankless Nation is the third week of September. It's time for the bankless weekly roll-up. David, this is rate-cut week. We got those rate cuts. It's a good week. It's also a green week, more importantly. Maybe those two things are related, actually. I want to discuss with you if this is bullish for crypto.

Also, I got a bigger picture take coming from Arthur Hayes talking about the third mandate of the Fed. You know how the Fed has a dual mandate? Well, Arthur Hayes says they just opened a third leg on that stool there. with the third mandate. This might mean yield curve control. You love your Arthur Hayes macro takes in the weekly roll-up.

He's great. Yeah. Yeah. We're also going to talk about a crypto-etf explosion, not when that's happening, but when we think that is coming because a brand-new announcement

out of the SEC, lowering the barrier for what it takes to make an ETF out of crypto assets. Speaking of crypto assets is base, getting a token. Jesse Pollock said that they are exploring a base token. And if I think that official Coinbase comms is saying they are exploring a base token, I think they've been exploring it for a while. Why would you explore if you weren't going to actually do it?

You know, what's the purpose of exploring? Why just tease us? Why would you just tease us without actually followed through? Also, Tether is launching a made-in-America stable coin. We'll discuss that. And speaking of the SEC, we've got to dissect the most bullish crypto speech to ever come out of a regulator. Okay, Paul Atkins was in Paris. And he said, Crypto's time will come.

Wait, I'm having Deja Ravru. I thought we already had a most bullish speech out of the SEC from Paul Atkins like a month ago. He just, he just did it? Did I say crypto's time will come? He said, crypto's time has come, even better, even more bullish than what I just said. That's even sooner. Also, David, I want to give you a round the world tour of how crypto is exporting freedom and how nation states and governments and banks are reacting.

We've got UK doing things and Canada doing things. Also, a revolution in Nepal that was partially critical. crypto-driven and what's going on in West Africa, it's kind of cool to peer around the world and see how crypto is affecting things. Is the word destabilizing the right word? Depends on your perspective, I guess. Maybe some things needed to be destabilized, David, unbundled. Maybe some freedom needed to go back to the people.

Before we get into all of that, a message from our friends and sponsors over at zero-g. Zero-G means at Zero-G-G-G-means-Zer-G. they are an AI dedicated chain that exists end-to-end to be decentralized and truly verifiable for an AI operating system. Ryan, I think you're a believer that there will be another AI crypto hype cycle in the future, right? Yeah, I do. I think the first one didn't make much sense.

The second one will probably make a lot more sense. Oh, do you mean the first one that was like January of this last year and it was like the AI agent meta? You know, I actually count that as like the third. I think there were two smaller bubbles that didn't really bubble up into capturing the entire cryptozachist. That was the first one that did.

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There's a link in the show notes. So you can get started, banklist.comc, slash zeroG AI. David, let's start with crypto prices now in the market section. Then we'll get to what old Powell was doing on the week. So what is Bitcoin telling us this week? Bitcoin's happy. $17,600 up almost $3,000. on the week.

So still below all-time highs, but man, $170,000 is like a very strong Bitcoin price. ETH still just below its all-time highs, $4,620 up $4.3% on the week. And then also, Ryan, a new all-time high in total crypto market cap. Wow. So down-market tokens got a bump. So $4.213 trillion is the new all-time high. I wasn't expecting that, David. to the numbers of a all-time high crypto market cap. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. I got a question for you, Ryan. Sure. What do you think about the four-year cycle? I am, let's see, I think it's a liquidity cycle. I think it's liquidity cycle. And I think that the liquidity cycle has possibly extended. And if you look at the liquidity cycle, global macro liquidity cycle, listen to me, I'm sounding like Arthur Hayes, huh, a little bit? If you look at that this time around,

it looks like it could be extended, though we are probably on the later part of the global liquidity cycle, but I think it stretches into 2025, 2026. And so pretty much I'm a believer in these cycles. I just think this one might be more like a five-year cycle. Why? What do you think? So if we went back in time, and I'm pretty sure I explicitly said this on at least a few roles, maybe you did too, that like if the four-year cycle plays out, late 2025 will be the the frothy blow-off top hypermania part of the cycle. That's right. Does not feel like that at all, obviously, right now.

I don't think so. If you go look at the Bitcoin price, there's always the phase, according to the four-year cycles, if you could just look at patterns, there's the phase in which Bitcoin kind of just like marches up. And at the end of the year, like typically the third of four years, you look back on that year, like, oh, Bitcoin is up 300%. And then the blow off top happens. Yep. We are in the longest extended linear price increase in Bitcoin's history.

Bitcoin has been going up for almost three years now, just modestly, not too fast, not too slow, but it's been going up for three years in a row. Bitcoin has never gone up for three years in a row from trough to peak without a blow off top. So this is the longest, most mellow price increase that we've ever seen in Bitcoin, which I think is great. I think that's fantastic. I think that's very healthy. I think that's very mature.

VAL is down. Price is up. There's seemingly a sustained bid under Bitcoin. ETH isn't there yet. It's got some lag because we had some, you know, intra-market jitters in ETH, but it's continuing in that same trend, like a year behind Bitcoin.

So I think the four-year cycle, we can start to wave goodbye to it. Oh, you think it's over. Like the there are no more four-year cycles were just on some other you know like some other track. Yeah. I think we've never goes down. I think we've escaped the boom bus cycles of crypto is kind of what I'm saying. I wouldn't go that far.

My personal take is we still get boom-bust, but they're less violent and more moderate. They're less volatile. One explainer for why we're a little bit less volatile in these institutional grade assets, in particular Bitcoin is just what we were talking to James Saferd about, which is the institutional capital. coming into ETFs is a little bit more disciplined than the retail capital. For instance, if you're in RIA, RIAs are the largest holders of Bitcoin ETFs, for instance, you might have a mandate that says 5% of your portfolio is in Bitcoin, right? And on a monthly basis, if Bitcoin goes up and that

becomes 7%, then you sell the 2%, and you readjust it back to 5%. Or if Bitcoin goes down, you know, it becomes 3% of your portfolio, you sell other stocks and other assets, and you make a buy some Bitcoin, yeah. Yeah, it's these kind of algorithmic sort of disciplines that I'm not sure that retail is thinking about so much, but institutional capital tends to follow. Speaking of discipline, the other thing that's not present right now in this boom bus cycle or the lack of the boom bus cycle is over leveraging on credit. Credit usage in the market is modest.

So there's just not a lot of leverage in the system right now. Yeah, not as much as there could be. We got some room. We got some room to run. That's what we're saying. We can wind this thing up even more. Well, speaking of that, we got the first Fed rate cuts in almost a year. So the last time they did this.

So credit is even cheaper. Let's do this. Thanks, Powell. December 2024 was the last time they did it. They cut it on 25 basis points. So it's pretty much as prediction markets predicted. I want to look at the Fed fund rates over the 10-year time horizon. We'll go even longer.

So remember, we've been up in the five range. all the way from 2023. And then it sort of started to drop in the end of 2024. And then we've been hovering at this like 4.25% range. And now we're down another 25 basis point. So it's not the 50 basis point cut that I think maybe some were hoping for, but it is pretty much what markets expected. And markets are optimistic on that.

Like, have you looked at stocks today? Yeah, they were like jittery yesterday right after the, news, but this morning stonks are green, or at least the stonks that I pay attention to, which is like the finance tech sector. But yeah, market pretty happy right now. Okay, so they're happy. And then we also have some other Fed rate cuts that people predict are coming. So, of course, we just got our first.

So it's not just the 0.25% that we got cut yesterday. There is going to be another 25 bibs in October, or at least is what the Polymarket is predicting, with an 80% chance. Yeah. that we're going to get another 25 Bips cut on October 29th and another 25 Bips cut on December 10th. So it's not just about getting 25 Bips now. It's about the trend of we're going to get 75 Bips cut

by the end of the year is what the polymarket people are predicting. So, of course, this probably means good things for our risk on assets, good for crypto assets. I got a Bitcoin Biltake, Bitcoin Bulltake and an ETHBall take, which one you want, David. You can only pick one for the tweets. Wait, if I pick one, I don't get the other? Yeah, sorry.

This is, you know, scarcity. ETH. ETH, ETH. ETH, this is Joseph Shalom, of course, you know, S-Bet. He said the Fed's rate cut marks the start of an easing cycle with another 50 bips, that's what you said, expected this year. Momentum for growth assets will only get stronger. Ethereum is the productive, yield-bearing digital asset pried to capture this momentum.

Yeah. There you go. Joseph is bullish. on this. Yeah. Wait, I don't get the Bitcoin one? I'm not going to show you the Bitcoin one because you picked the ETH one, so we only get won this episode, David. I actually want to turn you to, sorry, man, sorry. It's bullish for Bitcoin too. Okay, we will put it in the show notes. You really want to see this. It's not that great of a take. Okay, so here's the bigger picture here, which is somewhat interesting. And this came out shortly before the rate cut news. This is a take from

Arthur Hayes, my favorite. With Fed board member Mirren now confirmed, the Main Street media is preparing the world for the Fed's third mandate, which is essentially yield curve control, LFG, Bitcoin to a million. Okay. What do you think this means? Yield curve of control is kind of like price controls.

That means that they're going to just, in this circumstance that yields are higher than what they want it to be, they will just mint treasuries out. of thin air to dampen yields or something like that. But why? I'm going to need more help. A few things that Arthur is saying. One is he's saying the mainstream media is preparing the world for the Fed's third

mandate. When he's saying mainstream media is preparing the world, he's referring to articles like this. So this is a summary by Bloomberg AI talking about the Fed reserves dual mandate, becoming a third mandate. Okay, we'll talk about that. Anyway, there was all of these articles that made reference. to a speech from Stephen Mirren gave in front of Congress saying the Fed didn't just have two mandates.

The two traditional mandates, of course, are low inflation and unemployment, maximizing, you know, full employment, right? That's the dual mandate of the Fed. Those are the things that they're supposed to do. Well, Main Street Media is what Arthur is saying, is preparing the world for the third mandate in writing articles like this. And the third mandate in a speech, Steve Moran, who is on the FOMC, Miran, yeah, excuse me. He's one of the 12 FOMC governors that decide what rates actually are,

and he's newly appointed. He's been appointed by Trump in August, so he took over from someone who resigned. So he's new. He's a Trump pick. And, you know, as you've said before on these episodes, who's Trump going to pick?

He's going to pick the, you know, most rate-cutting people he can. Yeah. Rating-Rate-Cut. That is Steve. By the way, was general unanimous support of the 0.25 BIPs cut that the Fed just gave, except for one guy who dissented and wanted a whole 0.5 percent Bips cut, didn't get it, but it was Rady McRate

cut, Steve Miron. Yeah, exactly, exactly. All right. So appointed by Trump. Yeah, so Steve Buren in front of Congress, he gave a speech and he said, in addition to the inflation and full employment mandates of the Fed, there's actually a third that's incredibly important. He said it's this, moderate long-term interest rates are within the Fed's charter. That is the third mandate. So the Fed actually has to make sure that interest rates are moderate to low. So they're in control of interest rates. The reason for this is, of course, interest rates are the rate that the federal government has to pay on its own debt. And that amount has exceeded the amount that we spend on national defense every year, that the U.S. spends on national defense.

So at a 4 to 5% rate, that's much more costly than if it's at a 2 to 3% rate. So this is Steve Miron saying effectively not, it's part of our mandate to actually make sure that this rate is low. What that is is that's yield curve control. That's the type of thing that we were doing in the 1940s. That is currency debasement effectively. That's where we do the Bank of Japan thing, where we try to control the interest rates. and we adjust the money supply accordingly.

So that's the bigger picture of what's happening with the Fed and how the conversation is turning. And of course, Arthur Hayes links this to the price of Bitcoin, where there's yield curve control, where there's the Fed duty to do this, then all commodity, scarce, store value type assets must go up. My uninformed reaction to this is two mandates, which kind of represent opposite polls,

kind of like a dipole mandate is all you have to do is walk the line between those two things. And like, yeah, you have to balance, like, you have to pick where on that line you want to be. But you just pick a point on the line. A third mandate, I think, is overly chaotic. Like a binary star system, stable. A trinary star system eventually ejects one of the stars. That's right. And I'm worried that having a third mandate, it makes it fundamentally at odds with being able to balance

harmonized between all of these things. And I'm like under this, if this is a at all a correct pattern to match to, one of these things just gets ejected. And it's got to be inflation. Because if you're going to have, it's got to be inflation. Inflation is leaving. And we're going to have full

employment and you'll curve control. You can't do all three. You have to pick two. It's probably the case, David. It's probably you know, Central Bank Trilemma, if you will. And you've got to pick you got to pick two of the three. we've got some salana dats that have come in pretty hot on the week so what's going on here

multi coin has completed the purchase of seven million salana so multi coin has spun up a dat they somehow amassed like 1.5 billion dollars in cash to buy salana and then they did it and they bought seven million salana and so now this Ford is the ticker this um why is it called forward Forward Industries is the company. And so they have just an absolute ton of Solana on the balance sheet. Right now the MNAV is clocking in at 1.85. So not only do they have a bunch of soul on the balance sheet, but they have MNAV to now leverage to go buy more.

And so this thing has just like rocketed in size up very, very quickly. It's impressive how much they spent basically right out of the gate, right? I mean, he wasn't dollar cost averaging in. They were just like buying everything that week. He was smashing market buy. Yeah, you could see Salana in the purple in some of these charts. Actually, you can't really see it in some of these charts. Like the trading volume by asset, Solana stocks, Treasury stocks are just like not on the radar at all.

But they're doing fairly well from an aggregate market cap perspective. You can see it in purple down here. What is this? We're at about $4.6 billion worth of Seoul inside of Dats right now. And that wasn't the only one, David. Also, Pantera capital put together a Salana Dada. called Helius. So this is a $500 million debt.

It could be up to a $1.25 billion debt. And Dan Moorhead from Pantara was on CNBC, Bloomberg, wherever he could go, talking this up, of course. Doing the thing. I was a little confused by the name because I thought Mert might be associated with this. Helius is like the infura of Solana.

It's like the RPC messaging transaction. Yeah, validator. That whole thing. Yeah, exactly. Which is like, it's like MERS company. So like, I feel like they should have. Yeah, they should have talked to him.

But like, hey, can we, I should talk to him. Yeah, I don't know. Anyway, so it's basically the teams have assembled here. Dan Moorhead is on Team Soul at this point in the cycle, it seems like. And then you also have Kyle Simani from Multi-Coyne. And you also have Galaxy. What's that? Are you serious?

You also have Galaxy who Mike Dovergast is making appearances because they're involved in the Ford. So that's kind of them against some of the other KOLs and Tradfai thought leaders. The pieces are on the table. People are making moves. And we will see how the game unfolds. All right, coming up next, we're going to talk about all of the ETFs. They're about to come online. There's going to be an ETF waterfall coming.

All of our tokens are about to become ETS because of this new announcement, this new thing that got approved called generic listing standards by the SEC. We're going to talk about what that actually means. And it's base launching a token. The network that doesn't have a token is now getting a token. Or at least they are looking into it, I should say. And then Google. Exploring.

They're exploring a network token. And also, Google is adopting crypto for AI agent payments. Not Stripe, not Web 2. They're using crypto. So that's pretty cool. We're going to talk about that and more. But first, we're going to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Like Uniswap, it's a browser wallet, it's a mobile wallet.

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For M&T holders, every economic activity in UR drives value back to you, embodying the entire stack and future growth of this super app ecosystem. Follow Mantle on X at Mantle underscore Official for the latest updates on blockchain for banking. That's X.com slash mantle underscore official. The SEC has approved generic listing standards for ETFs. Okay, what does this mean? Right previously, for the Bitcoin and the ETH ETF,

you had to go through this very meticulous process where you would file an S1, the SEC would review it, they would give you a comment period, they'd go back and forth. You had to like jump through all of these hurdles, basically a very permissioned, gate-kept process. bureaucratic process. Allowed Gary Gensler to have a lot of control. The SEC has a proof-

It took a long time, David. It took like a year. It took a long time, very expensive. You might have gotten sued, you know, all that kind of stuff. That's gone. That's changing. The SEC has approved changes that allows certain exchanges, NASDAQ, NYSC, mainly, but others, too,

to listen trade commodity-based ETFs, including those based on crypto assets without needing a separate product-by-product subject SEC approval under section 19B. 19B is like where all the bureaucracy comes in. Okay, so how does this impact ETFs? What does it mean? What does it mean?

We're going to get a faster path for crypto and commodity ETFs. So like I said, before this, every ETF had to be vetted case by case under listing, rule filings, public comments. That would take months. This generic standards has shortened that timeline. There's more predictable rules. So there's just clear criteria about creating an ETF. Either the asset already has some level of surveillance

and futures history or is tied to an existing ETF with sufficient exposure. If you just check a certain number of boxes, you just got a green light for an ETF. More crypto assets are going to become eligible. Previously, only Bitcoin and Ethereum had really cleared the hurdles for spot-based ETF so far. Now that this generic listing standards is here,

these rules have opened the doors for many, many, many more coins to be just approved. Things like Dogecoin, my favorite, light coin, polka dot, avalanche chain links, stellar,

all of these things are potential candidates for getting an ETF. It's just going to be a lower cost and much less complexity for issuers. And then as investors, we're all going to have

much more choice. And so we're kind of just like opening up the doors of what could be. And we're also throwing it to the market rather than to the regulators to be able to approve

and list ETFs. It's kind of cool. Yeah, this listing process is going to get a whole lot faster. And so the criteria are you have to be a commodity. So you still can't be a security. All right. So there's still that. And I know there's still some ambiguity of what's a commodity, what's a security.

But some proof of that is if there's a future contract, there's a future contract in operation for six months, then you're kind of eligible to be on this fast track. So if it's a security asset, it still can't be an ETF. But where I think about this is it's almost like an ERC 20 for TradFi, where it just gives Tradfai kind of a token wrapper for our crypto assets, right? That they can easily, fairly easily spin up. And this is going to give them a process for spinning them up. So, man, we're going to see so much here.

Like, here's a list of all of the possibilities way we might see. You mentioned a number of them. I also think we're going to have, we had James Seyford on the episode from Bloomberg. He's kind of an ETF specialist and has been covering this from day one. He's most excited about these blended ETF assets, right? Things that track, you know, the top 10 crypto assets and into C of some type or even,

you could imagine like a 2X long, ETH or a 2X long, you know, leverage, shib. Yeah, you probably. 2XOge. Yeah, yeah, sign me up. So it's great. I mean, I guess it's great. great for investor choice, which is something that, uh, you know, we're advocates of.

And this will get more assets to market faster. And then the market can just decide what it wants to buy and like what it doesn't. So there's not kind of the gatekeepers in the way. I think my favorite takeaway from that episode of James. Again, it'll come out soon. Uh, he called it, uh, this spaghetti cannon. Yeah. So there's going to be a, tip cannon of spaghetti and it's going to shoot all the spaghetti at

the wall and something's going to drop off the wall because the market just doesn't want it. But some things are going to stick. And we kind of just have what we call the ERC 20 version, but in TradF, which is the ETF. These are all just money legos. There's just ingredients. Put them in a pot, mix it around, see what the consumers want. Yeah, exactly. The bottom line is this is more free markets, and that's important.

The old process, we didn't mention, but we should probably add, it had to go through kind of the five commissioners and chair for approval, right? And if one of them or two of them said, no, it wasn't getting through. And this is much more permissionless. David, tell me about the base token, okay? They're exploring it, is this official? What exactly did they say? The first thing that you should know about the base token, Ryan, is that it's early and that they're exploring it.

That's what they want you to know. But the existence of a base token was formally incepted by Jesse Pollock at Base Camp. Base camp is like kind of this retreat for the base ecosystem happening in Detroit. So I think it was like a three, four, five day kind of like festival, based festival, which I think is pretty cool. I actually appreciate the in real life manifestation of like a network in real life so all the builders can come together and hang out. And so during a presentation, Jesse Pollock says,

we are going to be exploring a network token. And he said it's still early. They don't have any specifics to share about timing or tokenomics or governance or what the token does or anything at all, really. but they just verbally stated, confirmed, that they are beginning to explore a network token. Now, my first reaction here was, okay, Jesse, who is a executive

at a Fortune 500 company that is publicly traded at very large, if you say that you are beginning to explore a network token, you have already explored a network token. Your lawyers have already given you the thumbs up that you can say this. But as I listened to him more, and we'll play a clip.

I kind of think that they are actually closer to being truly on the early stage is not just live service. They are doing it in this way that's like, we're going to do it with the base community. Let's go listen to this clip right now. We're going to be exploring a network token for base.

And I will be up front with y'all. It's early. And I'm a little nervous, like my heart's racing sitting here on stage. And as we thought about sharing this like early exploration, you know, I got all sorts of advice. People tell them you don't share it.

You need to keep it close to your chest. You know, it's too early. And I sat back in myself and our team sat back in ourselves and we said, what's the base way to do this? And the base way was we do it in the open. We don't have all the answers. We really don't. But we're going to figure it out.

And we're going to figure it out together. Because we think this could be a really, really powerful tool for building the global economy that all of us believe in. All right. So there you go. I mean, Jesse gave three big, like, guiding commitments, maintaining deep ties to Ethereum, strict regulatory compliance, obviously, and open community collaboration.

So don't really know what this looks like going forward, but I think if you're just like a base stakeholder, if you're in the base ecosystem, your voice matters, which is kind of cool. We'll see how, like, unconstrained base actually is with the token and with lawyers from Coinbase, because there's going to be the big topic issue to figure out, which is how do you give the base token away to the base community?

How do you use it as a tool to incent adoption? How do you bake economics into that base token based off like the $70 million a year or whatever, whatever revenue base makes without offending the coin equity holders? Well, yeah, I am one. I think that that's partially why they're using this kind of hedging term. Like we're exploring it. Like we're doing this in the open. Like, you know, we'll figure out what the good idea is.

ideas are in case it wasn't clear that they're exploring this this is brian armstrong to be clear there are no definitive plans we're updating our philosophy as of now we're exploring it's this is even brian armstrong saying like hold on we're just like exploring it okay but there is a big question of what would the value of the base token be if it was put out there and david you mentioned uh some of the revenue that base is driving right now on their token just from like running the sequencer um it's about million, I believe, annualized in terms of revenue. $75 million annualized, yeah. Yeah, $75 million.

And of all the L2 gross profit, right, you have Arbitrum, you have ZK Sync, you have all these L2s, bases about 70% of that. Okay, and they have $4.4 billion in stable coins. So it's pretty big. Now, if you took the comps of maybe some peers, like an L2, like an Arbitrum or an optimism or ZK Sync, and you look at the price. price to sales ratios that they're trading at, you get, and you took the average of that, if you took a price to sales ratio of 900x for base, which is around the midpoint of those three

others, you get the base token being worth between $65 billion and $70 billion, okay? Just have a similar comp to its peers, right? Which kind of doesn't feel like it makes sense. Coinbase is that? $45 billion, I believe. So that's the coin stock. Okay? Again, who knows if these types of comps will last, but that's what peers are trading

at right now. So it is a big question as to like, will, how do you even parcel that? Does the, does a base token holder actually get some of that revenue that is genuine from the L2? If it doesn't, what's the purpose of the token? And then to your point earlier, like, how does this, accrue to a coin stockholder because Coinbase has a fiduciary duty to coin stockholders as well. I mean, there was talk that the token of base is coin shares.

You go buy in your brokerage account. It's just coin. So how do they parse this out? How do they parse this out? What do regulators say about this? These are all TBD questions. And I think that's probably why, David, they're exploring it in the open. Okay, so I just got a little bit of a sticker shock when you gave me the $65 to $75 billion.

network token valuation. But if I go to Coin Gecko, Solana is at 136 billion, fully diluted. Dogecoin, which is the next blockchain below Salana, is at 43 billion. So that puts base squarely

between Dogecoin and Solana, which I think is completely reasonable. Yeah. It's reasonable place to be. It's reasonable if you comp it to other, like crypto, I guess, native assets. But it doesn't seem reasonable at all when you compit to like coin-based shares.

To coin-to-coin-based shares. To coin-to-le-com. To like, yeah. Yeah, and we comp into the amount of revenue that it's generating. So what does this say? There's some sort of wild premium for being a crypto asset right now is one interpret. Yeah, there always has been. The token premium is real, whether it's the layer one premium or layer two premium or whatever.

Yeah. How this gets divided up between the coin shares and the base token holders, I don't know. But you would imagine as a coin holder, if something of like nearly equivalent valuation gets minted off to your left and you don't have any of it, but you had. owner technical legal ownership over it you'd be kind of pissed sure i mean but they could just mint you know give 30 percent whatever to the community i guess via via air drop and call that you know marketing 70 percent maybe it belongs to coin shareholders and you know if they say worth 50 billion everyone's happy they should they should do something like that like 10 10 20 percent to

the base community based developers base builders base incentives and then like 80 percent is claimable on chain if you register your brokerage that you hold coin in to your basic address. It would be the biggest onboarding event of all time. Interesting. I mean, that's probably why they're thinking about this creatively because there's a lot of growth marketing mechanisms and reward incentives to do that.

That's not the only thing they announced as probably the biggest thing they announced at Basecamp. They also announced a base to Salana Bridge that got a lot of attention. And so this effectively allows you to port base tokens into Salana, like natively, so they could be used in Salana. And vice versa. Mainly vice versa. They kind of want the salana tokens to go on to base.

Yeah. So that brought the question of like, oh, is this a vampire attack? Who's vampire attacking who? Or is this just like trade relations? We're opening up trade relations between the chains and kind of an interchange. Like obviously there's... I think if you build the bridge and you govern the bridge and you govern the bridge. bridge, you get to kind of have some control over the flows.

Okay. Like, you can sense directions. If you're the one in building the bridge, that probably means you also want it more, doesn't it? So it seems like base probably wants Salana's liquidity. I mean, Solana maybe they benefit from base as D5, but there's just a lot of retail, Dgen, liquidity going on at Salana that I think that base is looking over and be like, oh, we could use a bridge over here.

It'd be great to have some of those assets here. in our ecosystem. I'll wait to see how Phantom leverages this, because they have both base and Salonah in their wallet. And I'm sure they would love to have just a faster, better bridge to transfer user's assets between. Yeah, I agree. There was also some progress with the base app.

It has a wait list of a million people, so that's going well. But here was actually one of the most exciting things. This wasn't at Basecamp. This was actually a Google press release that I saw. This is powering a. AI commerce with new agent payment protocols AP2. AP2 is a library that Google is incorporating for AI agent payments.

Anyway, buried in the press release, you could see a link to a GitHub where Google is actually implementing a Coinbase and Ethereum Foundation metamath standard called X402. And we've discussed this on bankless before, but what X402 is it's actually in the original web specification all the way back. from the early 90s, it was a payment specification that really never got filled in. It was sort of a machine-to-machine type of payment standard that never got filled in. Coinbase developed the standard further, crypto-enabled it. What this allows, David, is Google AI agents to actually pay each other via crypto. And you can imagine the use case here. You're in Google Gemini. Maybe you query something,

and you hit some sort of server, but rather than scraping all the data, that server says, no, in order to get this data from me, let's say it's a, you know, I don't know, weather data or something, you're going to have to pay me in micro-transactions. So Google AI, Gemini, just says,

okay, here's a few cents, pays them in stable coins, completes that transaction, brings the data back into your Gemini chat box. I think that's like an architecture that is going to be massive in how the way AI is going to rewrite the entire internet, these tiny micro transactions from agents to agents,

from agents to other services, and X402 is the standard that does it. And Google has adopted it, which is kind of exciting. We were talking just before we hit record about how some websites that we like news websites are just totally broken when we go and log into them. We're talking like mainly Forbes was the one we're talking about, but other ones too, even that some of the crypto-native ones like, you know, Schmoin desk, when you log on to them, it's just like there are are 13 ads and then they interact with my ad blocker so they turn into blank space but then I'm like where's the words? Oh yeah. If I just have an embedded wallet that's connected to the same protocol, I don't have to be an agent, but if the website is like, oh, in order to read this article,

you need to pay me five cents on USC payable on base. And that can just happen in the background and I can just have my wallet be like, yeah, like once every time I visit this website, this website is allowed to take five cents for my wallet. Don't even give me a pop-up. 100%. And then all of a sudden, I can be presented a beautiful website designed how the designers wanted it to be designed. That would just improve internet UX. So much better. Or I don't know if you're like me, but I don't even, I barely go to websites anymore. I just, I do a lot more. No, I do a lot more through the, like, chat interface, right? It's basically like, I'll do a query inside of my chat. But the problem is, um, the websites are becoming ad slums because they don't have a

revenue model aside from like your eyeballs and all the eyeballs are going somewhere else. And so this gives like a new business model to creators, which is just microtransactions, which I think is incredibly important so that we don't get dead internet basically, where it's just AI, creating AI content. You actually have a mechanism for like a revenue model for creators. David, speaking of really interesting revenue models, we have an update on hyperliquids pick for their stable coin. Remember the ticker

we were talking about last week? USDA. So who won? Native markets, the organization that was the favorite by the validators have secured the USDAH ticker

that gives them the rights to manage an issue USDA. Native markets beat out Paxo, Sky AthenaFRAX, all the other ones just because their proposal was accepted. So what happens next?

The first hyperliquid improvement proposal for US will get created and then assumingly approved. USCH will launch an Ethereum, so this will be a stable coin that's around the Ethereum ecosystem, and it's the first natively issued hyperliquist stable coin with a brand new liquidity and yield source. Circle, still relevant here because they have 7% of all USDA supply on hyperliquid. They're not necessarily losers here because they have also made a deal. They are partnering with Hyperliquid to launch Native USDA and their Circle Bridge

all on hyperliquid. And so native USC will be directly issued on the hype EVM. The CCTVV2 bridge, that's Circles Bridge, will just be deployed straight on hyperliquid. So they will have native minting on USC on hyperliquid,

which just gives better on ramps off and on hyperliquid. It's like probably one of the bigger things that plagues hyperliquid is just like difficulty in on ramping. And so this will help allow Circle to maintain some of that USC supply that they have on hyperliquid, which is large, very large.

Worth a lot to them, right? Some numbers like worth 100 to 200 million per year at least and one of their highest growth segments. We got more stablecoin news coming up. We've got tethers made in America stablecoin. We'll talk about that. Also, I want to give you some quotes from the most bullish speech we've seen from a regulator, Chair Paul Atkins, Crypto's time has come.

That was the theme of that episode. And then we'll go around the world and talk about. UK capital controls, Canada, losing some of its bank customers, what's going on with Ghana and how they're using crypto to flee a predatory banking system, and also Nepal. There's like an internet crypto-led revolution that just happened over there. And I think it's probably one of the most important things that's not being talked about in mainstream media today. All that and more, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including fracks, some of the best yield in defy. It's a fantastic stable coin. Like,

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www. k-g-en.io slash demo. USA-T is the ticker. It's a pretty chat ticker. USA-T, that's Tether's version of their USA stable coin. USA was TU2 lines in it to get the currency symbol in there. So this isn't unlike how Binance had once upon a time, finance, and then Binance U.S. There's Tether, and now there's Tether, you know, U.S., U.S.

Oh, you mean I had a separate exchange basically just for. for U.S. customers. Yeah, exactly. And it was a separate legal entity, which is what this is as well. And so USAT has its own CEO who is named Bo Hines, who is a previous White House crypto advisor

who left recently to go do this. So it got a little bit of a revolving door. And why do we need USAT when we have USDT? It's because USDT is not genius compliant. It's not compliant with recent genius to ask for stable coins. USAAT is. And so it's just tether's version

of a genius compliant stable coin. They're keeping the existence of USDT uncompliant so they have some of the freedoms that they want to have offshore. I think many, many, many countries prefer tether to be very offshore. Yeah. And this one is going to be a competitor

with FECC circle and all the other onshore stable coins. Yeah, also something that we've mentioned before is with USDT, they can have other things in their treasury that backs USDT aside from just beta tetheries, which they have. Who would want to give that up if you're tethering? Not them.

Very pricey. Yeah. So they're just kind of doing both. It's interesting that you mentioned the revolving door here, right? So this is Bohinds, very, like Mr. USA crypto, very plugged into the White House, of course. And then he comes to tether to kind of run this. And you could kind of like question that like, oh, revolving door, that's not great. At the same time, David, this is how like political systems.

work. And if crypto isn't doing this, then the bank lobby is. Something that has risen on the profile this week is a fight that the banks are waging in DC, their lobbyist groups, against the genius bill act. So we've talked about this a little bit, which is there is a, the banks consider this a loophole in the genius bill that actually allows exchanges, other protocols to give yield from staple coins back to the stable coin owner. Okay? The Genius Bill tried to shore that up by preventing issuers

from giving the yield back to customers. So again, with stable coins, it's the Fed fund rate, you get the treasury rate, it's about 4% up for grabs. In your checking account, the bank takes that. The banks continue to want to take that.

They don't want stable coin yields to go to actual customers. So they're calling for a redo. They don't want customers to have money. Yes, they don't. They want to keep it. So they're actually going to Congress, and they are really, you know, ramping up their lobbying efforts to have Congress passed. They're asking for a do-over.

Yeah, they want to do over. To pass. They want an amendment to the genius bill that prevents any owner of a stable coin from actually getting that yield. So it's really heating up. And I feel like it's a clash of the Titans going on right now. This is the banking lobby is super strong in D.C. David, they have been forever. There's almost 700 million a year.

I believe spent by the banking financial services type lobby. And then suddenly crypto over the last two years, it just ramped up. It's a new kid on the block. And it is punched way above its weight class. So it's the tiny crypto lobby right now that has made some incredible gains recently that is in favor. And I think the Trump administration against the entrenched bank lobby that is still incredibly powerful. And these two forces are fighting it out right now. I think actually this is the biggest, like, quest lines, like issue of crypto right now. Like, this is the most interesting thing, the most interesting fight against the banks. The fact that the banks were out lobbied by somebody, by us, by the crypto people, I think is very notable. It's also worth realizing that, like, okay, the banks haven't really had any adversaries to lobby against. Exactly. They've just been just controlling. They've had them normally.

They've had the control. They own a town. There's no adversary that they have. Crypto shows up on the scene, and all of a sudden, they do have a huge adversary. And we have been chewing glass for four years. And so, yeah, we punch above our weight class, but because it was a matter of survival, and the incumbent bank lobbies, like, they got caught flat-footed. They caught flat-footed.

I don't even know if they're good at this. And so, yeah, they have the size. They have the money. They can brute force this. But I mean, crypto, we're modern. We're young. We're hungry. We have upside here.

And I think, like, yeah, we punch above our weight class because of all of these things that we have. Well, we're also on the right side of the population. I mean, what American citizen when you're like, hey, the banks are taking 4% of your money and crypto actually wants to give you that 4%. Whose side are you on? Who's going to be on team bank? Like, crypto in this case, is on the side of the people, which is a big. deal. But David, I think these types of crypto versus the banks, types of fights are just heating up.

And they're going to go international. They're going to go into the central banks. I caught this tweet from Brian Armstrong. He said this. This was on September 16th. You're speaking to Canadians. So this is Canadians, Coinbase, you know, Canada users. He said the interest rate for most checking accounts is 0% in Canada. That makes zero sense. So from today, all Canadians can earn 4.1% uncapped rewards on USDC on Coinbase and up to 4.5% with Coinbase 1. Okay, here is a outside of Canada company CEO saying, hey, you can convert your Canadian dollars into US dollars,

which many would say is a advantage in it of itself. It's a better currency outperforms at times Canadian dollars. And we'll give you 4.1% on top of that. David, I think if he is successful in this, and there's no reason why he wouldn't be, that is going to drain the checking accounts of Canadian banks. Essentially, retail is going to flock to this service. I certainly would if I lived in Canada. And so what do you think the reaction is going to be from the Canadian banks, from, you know, the central bank of Canada? Something like a frantic grasping for straws to retain power and money.

Something like that. I think it's probably going to come in the form of capital controls. There's actually another story from the UK. So we moved to Canada to the UK. So the Bank of England already has a plan for this. So the Bank of England plans to put a cap on individual stable coin holdings. So you can only have 10,000 to 20,000 pounds per person. Okay.

And this isn't even the threat of a foreign currency. like USDA, they're just talking about pound stable coins, like hypothetically, I'm not sure how many pound stable coins exist, but individual citizens couldn't own more than 10 to 20K in pounds per person because basically they think that their banks are under threat if individuals hold more than this, okay? This is a form of light stablecoin capital controls, isn't it? And then there's the greater question of, well, how do you surveil that? Okay, like, how do you know how much I own. Oh, okay, so you're doing surveillance in the entire like blockchain. Am I not entitled to any privacy? Surveillance and capital controls go hand in hand.

Okay, so that's that's the UK. We talked about Canada. Let's go to Ghana. So West Africa. This is Kofi. He's, I believe, a senior data nerd at base. So he works at base. He's plugged into crypto. He said, stable coins are better than banks in West Africa. Last week, the bank of Ghana announced a five percent fee on dollar cash withdrawals from dollar. bank accounts. Okay. So if you have a bank account in Ghana, denominated in dollars, you try to withdraw those funds, five percent fee, five percent wealth tax, right? You said some banks have even stopped allowing dollar cash withdrawals altogether. This is a massive blow for both businesses and regular people. He said the Ghana, uh, seed eye, I believe, trades like a shit coin. That's Ghana's

local currency. Or the past two years has swung from 11 to the dollar up to 16, back to 10, Now it's sitting at 12. So there's a fee for cash withdrawals. The local currency in Ghana trades like a shit coin. So stable coins are way better. I keep USDC in my self-custody wallet, he says. When I need to spend, I swap stables for C-Dye straight into my mobile money account at the real street rate, which is far better than what the banks give.

Okay. This probably hasn't saturated enough in West Africa in Ghana for authorities to really take notice, or maybe they're starting to. Don't you think there's going to be some capital controls put on stable coins in crypto in West Ghana as well as a reaction to this? Oh, I think it's going to happen across the global south and then it's just going to move up the market cap

of fiat currencies. Do you remember when we did our dollar milkshake episode with Brent Johnson? Yeah, that's right. His general thesis is the first, there is going to be a sucking of liquidity to the dollar and then eventually into Bitcoin as fiat's collapse. And the existence of stable coins give fiat currencies, holders of fiat currencies,

savers of fiat currencies, an alternative. And so why would they hold the Ghanian Sedi CD? And so why would they do that when they can just hold dollars? And so they're going to use stable coins as the cleanest exit ramp to hold dollars. And this is what we are seeing. This is like the early stages. of the dominoes of low-quality fiat currencies, and they're all going to go on-chain onto dollars

and get savings accounts on Ethereum. And when they do, nation-state banks are going to crack down, create tighter, more strict capital controls, and that's going to push more citizens, global citizens, into crypto assets, particularly as decentralized as they need to be. They're going to constrict and they're going to control, and it will also incent people to get out at the same. time. Exactly. And I think we saw an example even last week of this going to the far extreme.

Have you seen what's going on in Nepal? I know that they did a governance vote in Discord. Okay. Yeah. So, okay, there was a revolution in Nepal. I haven't like looked at all of the details here, but it's basically a youth movement where the Nepalese government has been authoritarian, very unpopular, and they literally forced the prime minister of Nepal to resign. And they held it Discord vote, by the way. This is kind of like young internet native citizens of Nepal. So one was ahead of this time. Yeah, they voted for the prime minister. But what they were doing while this crackdown, the government against some of the revolutionaries was happening is revolutionaries, the only sort of like money that they could actually use was crypto.

This is a quote from one of them. We can't rely on banks. They serve politicians, not the people, said a 25-year-old protester in Nepal speaking under a pseudonym for fear of arrest. USDT is the only money that moves when everything else is blocked. So they were using VPNs, decentralized wallets, peer-to-peer apps, stable coins, cryptocurrencies, that's the way they actually had to move capital during these protests. And it led to an entire revolution, which is wild. Like, this is the stuff that's going on outside of the U.S. you know, on crypto rails.

Every time I hear sort of like this, I just give a mind about how incredibly prescient the book Sovereign individual was. All of this was predicted in 1998, whenever that book was written. Yeah, I guess it's just getting to the point. I mean, I think stable coins are really shaking things up, right? Because, yeah, it's just exporting the dollar worldwide

and that's going to shake up the banking system. Yeah. Yeah. It's like we use the word destabilizing at the beginning of this episode. And like to some degree it is as in it like it's disruptive towards the governments. But also during a revolution, people, individuals still have access to money. And so while it's destabilizing, it's also like still giving some notion of stability because everyone still has their money. And so it's creating change.

It's creating change at the top. But everyone has this foundation of like, well, the finance system still works. Yeah. Well, it's a it's a freedom technology, right? Individuals can marshal this. It almost reminds me of like, you remember 2011, Arab Spring, some of the revolutions that happened by route of like Twitter. People had access to it. It almost reminds me a little bit of like what's happening there. Let's go back to the U.S. though and talk about this speech that Paul Atkins, the SEC chair, the anti-Gensler gave in Paris this week. So he was speaking to an OECD roundtable. So this is kind of an economics roundtable. David, I pulled out some quotes from this speech. Okay, here's a few. Number one, he said, crypto's time has come. He said, it is a new day at the SEC. He said, our policy will no longer be set by ad hoc enforcement actions. We will provide clear, predictable rules of the road to that innovators can thrive in the U.S. He said, President Trump has tasked me with making America the crypto capital of the world. He said, using Project Crypto, we're going to enable our markets to move

on chain. We're going to allow entrepreneurs to raise capital on chain without endless legal uncertainty. He said, we're going to provide the minimum effective dose of regulation and not overburden entrepreneurs with additional rules. He said, public blockchains, which are inherently global, offer a chance to modernize the foundations of payments and capital markets. And we have, Three more years of him. Oh, wait. No, we have five more years of him. Because he lasts for six, six years, right?

I think so, unless something happens. Five to five more years, Ryan, cheers. This is in Paris to an international community, right? U.S. equities markets are like 60 to 70% of global equities. Okay? Like, the SEC is the juggernaut when it comes to equity's tokenization. So what the U.S. does and what the SEC says will propagate to the rest of the world. And this is that CC chair saying we're going to tokenize all of our securities.

That's so wild. That's awesome. I just can't believe we've come this far. Yeah. Yeah, it was a big. It's some whiplash, honestly. It makes it kind of hard to believe, like, how bad it was just like 18 months ago. And then how good is got it now.

Yeah, I know. Yeah, knock on wood. Knock on wood. But still, five more years. All right, we're going to burn through the rest of the news this week. Polymarket has launched the trading of earnings. And so you can trade different companies' earnings reports with Do you think they're going to beat or miss on earnings?

Which is notable because when you buy, when you own a company and they beat earnings, sometimes the price goes down, which is frustrating. But if you want the price to go up, you can trade earnings on polymarket if you think companies are going to beat or miss earnings. So that's pretty cool. That's worth noting. There's this thing happening in the aerodrome universe this week, Ryan. There was a new mechanism for distributing, for issuing and distributing a token.

So this one organization called Syndicate, they made the D-Gen chain, if you remember, Ryan. They have launched the CIND token. Don't know what it does. It's not the story. The story is that they ceded the Aerodrome liquidity pool. So Aeroom is a kind of like a next generation AMM. Right.

They ceded the supply of the CIND into Aeroom. And they allowed VE AeroT token holders, which is kind of the same thing as like the current. of wars, same tokenomics as the curve system. And so if you wanted to own some of this token, you as a VE arrow token holder would, using your governance rights,

point incentives towards the SINs token, which would give the SIN token its initial liquidity, and therefore its initial market price. And then as a result of doing that, as a VE arrow holder, you got some of these SIN token as reward. So if you wanted the SIN token, you would use your governance powers to point stables,

point liquidity towards the SIND token, and then you would get SIND incentives as a result. So this happened like two days ago, three days ago, SIND is trading at a $1.5 billion valuation with a $700 million market cap, so a 50% float. The thing, Ryan, floated at $1.5 billion. You know all the IPOs that we're about to talk about in a second

on all the crypto IPOs that have happened in the last like two months or so? Yeah. And like Circle floats at $20 billion. and then three days later, it's like at a 6x because it was mispriced. This thing just launched smoothly with no snipers, no sniping bots, no like gas wars, just smoothly launched at $1.5 billion. I need to know a little bit more about the mechanics here and how this all works.

I'm going to talk to the syndicate guys about what happened on a premium feed podcast episode. So congrats to premium subscribers for getting all that alpha. I think it's a pretty cool mechanism. I'm excited to learn more. But the idea of launching a smoothly launching in an orderly and an efficient way, a $1.5 billion token is pretty cool. Yeah, it's also, AirDrome is on base, right? So this is available inside of Coinbase retail and the app. Right.

And in that Coinbase, the centralized exchange, but inside of the base app, which is just, I guess, one and the same thing, isn't it? No. It is available on the centralized exchange. It's both. It is not listed. There's not an order book on the centralized exchange, but the centralized exchange you can buy it as a coin-based retail customer. And then when you're buying it, though,

behind the scenes, you're buying it from Aerodrome, right? You're buying it from the liquidity board. It's Defi and C-Fi. It's all mixed together, right? It's Defi-Mullet. Love it. Somebody made this Defi-Mullet from forever ago? Wow, they were really smart.

Really quick. Gemini was listed on the NASDAQ this week. So, of course, this is a U.S. exchange. Did pretty well, I believe. So this is the Winkleweye. Yeah, it pumped. Gemini prices shares at $28. The IPO was oversubscribed,

by 20x. The first day had a 32% jump. So the market likes crypto stocks, that's for sure. Also, speaking of that, there was Trump. Trump's family's American Bitcoin just went public on the NASDAQ this week as well. So there's Eric Trump on the NASDAQ. He's cheering for their launch. This was like a Bitcoin mining company, Bitcoin Treasury company, like all combined

about $7 billion market cap. and 20% of this is owned by the Trump brothers. How do you feel about Donald, the president's son, ringing the bell for his newly launched company on the NASDAQ? How do you feel about that? I think the Trumps have fantastic deal flow right now. Let me just say that. I will say not everyone liked it, right?

This is a Virginia Cantor. She's with the Democracy Defender's Action Groups, I think, probably obvious. There's no question there's a conflict of interest here. Trump could appoint regulators overseen crypto and potentially disadvantage other crypto businesses that don't align with his interests. Which, to be clear, is bullish for this company. It's bullish for this company.

I'm not sure that corruption is like bullish for crypto or bullish for America, David. And speaking of which, we end with this. Have you seen the Trump statue? Have you seen this, David? Oh, my God. We used to make so much better statues 500 years ago. All right. So this is a Trump statue. This is a terrible statue. This is Trump in gold, holding a

ginormous Bitcoin facing the capital buildings. This is right in D.C. This is a 12-foot golden statue. It was unveiled on September 17, 2025. I looked into this. I was like, is no way this is government funded. Like no way this is government funded. It's not government funded. Okay. Okay. Yes. Thank you. So this was a private group of anonymous crypto investors. So there you go. With a DGTGST project, it's a pump.fund meme coin and they did this to get attention

on their project. So that's what's going on. This is the future. This is what the future looks like. There's no official commentary from Trump about it, although, I mean, you know, maybe if he sees it, you might appreciate this. A Trump statue in gold looking like not bad,

looking, I'm not going to say good, but like he's probably, I'm sure he's plenty fine with it. How bad do you think crypto is going to get wrecked when Democrats and Trump adversaries game on which Democrat? It depends on which Democrat. I guess we'll see. But potentially high.

Bankless Nation, got to end with this. Of course, none of this has been financial advice. Crypto is risky. You could lose which we put in, but we are headed west. It's the frontier. Not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless Journey. Thanks a lot.