Bankless - ROLLUP: The GENIUS Act Passes | JP Morgan Stablecoin | Stablecoin Summer

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

Welcome to the Weekly Rollup, where we cover this week in Crypto. We unpack the implications of the Genius Act's passage, which positions the U.S. to lead in digital assets and spurs optimism around stablecoins potentially hitting a $3.7 trillion valuation by 2030. Also: JP Morgan’s surprising entry into the stablecoin market and Coinbase’s launch of new products, including a Bitcoin cashback credit card. ——— 🤌 BANKLESS SUMMIT | SEE US AT DEVCONNECT https://lu.ma/0ph1qg6c ------ 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 🌐SELF | PROVE YOUR SELF https://bankless.cc/Self 🟠BINANCE | THE WORLDS #1 CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/binance ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 2:55 Markets https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/bitcoin https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/ethereum 8:00 ETFs https://x.com/jseyff/status/1934591572710211587 https://x.com/cointelegraph/status/1933534615395815761 https://x.com/JSeyff/status/1933635898140192849 https://x.com/JSeyff/status/1935043249141322017 https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1932527239679095097 12:00 Macro https://x.com/NickTimiraos/status/1935397119772217715 https://x.com/scottmelker/status/1935382005866189003 https://x.com/elerianm/status/1933505682625417521 https://www.ft.com/content/0d175cad-db7c-4dc2-83a8-90736f96f198 https://x.com/thomas_fahrer/status/1934056640476770678 https://x.com/treenewsfeed/status/1934589597394084071 https://x.com/erictrump/status/1934665029866881155 29:00 The GENIUS Act Passes the Senate https://x.com/SenatorHagerty/status/1934942333859979279 https://x.com/SenatorHagerty/status/1935491670805754100 https://x.com/SecScottBessent/status/1935027160374210573 https://x.com/secscottbessent/status/1935404649718157691 https://polymarket.com/event/genius-act-signed-into-law-in-2025?tid=1750338903189 https://x.com/TFTC21/status/1935027661421822149 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1935371112403116518 https://x.com/intangiblecoins/status/1935095696454984027 https://x.com/intangiblecoins/status/1933583236778578274 https://x.com/pete_rizzo_/status/1933484989334659136 https://x.com/CryptosR_Us/status/1935475419286798505 38:30 JPMorgan Stablecoin JPMD https://x.com/tier10k/status/1934684065875284187 https://x.com/base/status/1935055475252543823 43:00 INK Kraken Token https://x.com/inkonchain/status/1934992073024823560 https://x.com/DefiIgnas/status/1935274751322435769 44:50 EigenLayer announces EigenCloud https://x.com/ethereum/status/1935010523776430587 https://x.com/ViktorBunin/status/1934969360851857532 https://x.com/sreeramkannan/status/1935028483044032921 https://youtu.be/P2PGQIe9U6g?si=Q6ZZPy9KzyPQLBaA 47:43 Blockworks Token Transparency Framework https://x.com/Blockworks_/status/1935321626788380714 50:10 Coinbase Product Launches https://x.com/brian_armstrong/status/1933290398799065459 https://x.com/tier10k/status/1933238313567080716 https://x.com/tier10k/status/1933238313567080716 https://x.com/CoinbaseBiz/status/1933228168783278110 https://x.com/vivek4real_/status/1933230638842232989?s=46 https://blog.base.dev/commerce-payments-protocol https://www.reuters.com/business/coinbase-seeking-us-sec-approval-offer-blockchain-based-stocks-2025-06-17/ https://x.com/luke_metro/status/1934061707158081538 https://x.com/KafiSq8/status/1934026011898683724 58:30 Roman Storm’s Legal Defense https://x.com/ethereumfndn/status/1933564840112435567 https://x.com/ethereumfndn/status/1894704611606385012 https://x.com/rstormsf/status/1933502107577168047 59:25 Stablecoin Summer vs The Plot https://x.com/mrjasonchoi/status/1935555875013538229 ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Bankless Nation is the third week of June. It's time for the bankless weekly roll-up. Man, an exciting week this week. We got the Genius Act. It just passed in the Senate. And is the Secretary of Treasury bullposting on crypto? David, he called for $3.7 trillion in stable coins by the year 2030. That's a pretty decent bullpost.

Did he call for a stablecoin summer? No. We got to get him saying it. That's next. J.P. Morgan is also joining in on stablecoin summer with her own stable coin on the base. network, but it's a little bit different from the rest. So we're going to talk about that. And then Coinbase releases not one, not two, not three, four bangers products that we're going to talk about as well. We're going to rank order our favorites. And overall, there's just a lot

of chaos in the rural. There's a conflict in the Middle East. And Black Rock has a take saying smart money is buying chaos. We'll talk about exactly what that means. David, I'm glad I got Usain stable coin somewhere now, too. It was not in our notes. That just popped in your head. The virus has spread. Some people on bankless discord actually sent me as a coin-based email. And you know what the title, you know what the subject of the email was? It was like the big newsletter they sent out to all their customers. You know what was? Stable coin summer. Stablecoin summer is here. I can't believe how sticky that has gotten. It was always going to be sticky. And I think we got prices to back at it. You're to show some circle charts later

in the episode, right? Yeah, we're going to show some stable coin summer charts. That's right. All right. Let's see that. First, we got a message for everyone going to Dev Connect down in Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires, probably the greatest crypto city, I think, on the planet. I'm going to go ahead and say that. We are doing the second ever bankless summit at DevConnect. If you don't know what Bankless Summit is, it's like TED Talks for Ethereum doing it at DevConnect. We're doing it on Tuesday. Uma Roy is our brand new Sparkly speaker.

She's joining the bench of all the speakers that we got at DevConnect, including Justin Drake, Dunkrad, Onsgar, Arjun, a returning speaker, and then Tamash from the Ethereum Foundation. So that's not until November, but let me tell you, you heard it here first. So if you're going to DevConnect, make sure you get your tickets. But it's going to be an all-day event. Again, no panels and performative panels, just talks. And then we have a wine bar rented out. Did I tell you about that?

Yeah, Ryan, we're renting out a wine bar. We're actually renting out FedEx. I don't know who Fedet is, but he's got a wine bar. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, he's got a wine bar and we're renting it. Just special wine, Argentinian wine? Yeah, naturally. Yeah.

Malbex is probably the word that you're looking for. Oh, man. This is worth going to just for that, huh? Yeah. The bar is really high on these bankless summits because the last one was like an absolute banger. I mean, I watched almost every presentation that came out of that. Remotly, of course. But there was just fantastic content.

So hopefully the speakers are prepped for that level of content, huh? I have told them that it is their job to take command over their session. And they all understand the assignment. Anyway, secure your tickets before price goes up in the future. Speaking of prices going up. It didn't. They did not. They did not go up.

They actually went down. Bitcoin price went down 3.4%, $104,000 is where we are. ETH price went down even more. It is not what I'm going to call a Ryan Sean Adams week. No, I don't. I take no credit for this. Ryan takes no credit. It's down 9% to $2,500.

What the heck? You know, things were looking so rosy. And then you said it about the chaos in the world, Israel and Iran. And that started happening, escalating even more. And then we did a tank, it seemed like, on the back of that. We did a little tanky. Is that the reason? This started happening Thursday, Friday.

I don't know. I don't know. I mean, Bitcoin actually started to really appreciate after the conflict. And, you know, it got its regular jitters. We're going to talk about this because Black Rock put out a piece about this. It got its regular jitters whenever uncertainty happens. But then it started to perform really strong. But now we're just like ranging again. We are ranging.

You know what? It has gone up-ed-u-d-up-dy-up. Let me tell you. Circle Price. This chart is the chart of Sabucoin summer. Last week, Ryan, we were talking about the Circle price. Do you know what it was roughly last week, roughly seven days ago? Yeah, I was thinking around 80, correct?

Yeah, which was just fine. You know, it was down from the $110 peak that it had like two days prior, but $80 for Circle is incredible. Have you been watching the price session? No, I've been seeing tweets about it. I've not looked at charge, but I mean, even the 80, that was way, I was up double, you know, like more than almost triple. You're right? From like, what was the IPO price? 30, something like this, 31, 32.

31, 32. Okay, what are we doing now? We are clocking in at $199 and $84. And it hit like an intraday high of like $230, which put Circle at something like a $55 billion market cap. The $199 price, that's a $48 billion market cap. But Circle is like almost a Coinbase. Coinbase is currently at $75 billion after having a 15% day the day before a recording. So Circle or Coinbase also had a pretty...

50% up. 15% up. Yeah, 15% up. Yeah, but Circle is just, it is starting to be completely Dululu price action right now. This is crazy. It can't continue, right? I'm not going to short it, but it can't continue. I thought about like, man, I know it's dumb to short and I'm not a short seller and I should not do that.

But man, I want to short it. And that I was thinking those thoughts are like $110. Just admire. Just admire. That's what you have to do. You brought some other charts, though. What do we got here? Okay, this chart is the Solana Ethereum ratio.

Salana is flat versus Ether on the year. On the year. On the whole year. On the whole year. So, I mean, it's June 19th. So six months, 19 days. Solana versus Eth is flat. So Salana has shown some weakness just over the last like couple months or so.

And over either over the last like six months has been flat. Obviously the six months before that were very bullish for Solana. But Solana has not made any grounds on the room. This is sole weakness or Eith strength? Or does the answer to that yes? Yeah, I think that's up for interpretation of the listener. But there's definitely some sole weakness, which is not to say that ETH has been strong. Eith did have that like 50% candle day, but so far that's kind of proven to just be just a one-off.

And it's really having a hard time. Yeah, it did not turn that 50% candle day into momentum as of yet. If you look at the next chart, which is sole BTC, does this chart look familiar to you, Ryan, at all? When you look at the shape of this chart, the Solana Bitcoin chart, sole BTC ratio. It just looks like an asset that is just bleeding out, lately anyway, bleeding out since 2024 looks like bleeding out to Bitcoin, right? To King Bitcoin, just kneeling.

It's just like kneeling. It's crouching down before the King and it's, you know, apologizing, kissing some feet, maybe. So when you look at this chart, like, oh, and let's go up the next chart, which is the ETH BTC ratio. No, this is painful. And this flip back and forth between the Salana Bitcoin ratio and the Ethereum Bitcoin ratio. Do you just notice anything? Yeah, it's bleed season. They're just bleeding to the Bitcoin.

They look like the same chart. Just Solana is just one, one and a half years behind Ethereum. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's the same chart. There's a little bump. It's a little green right here lately in the last, you know, two months or so. So maybe not all hope is lost. There's got to be some reversion to the mean here, right?

Overall, like the big common denominator I'm seeing is like Bitcoin strength is just so high. The other chart that's missing here is Bitcoin dominance, which continues to be very, very high. I mean, all-coin season is nigh, though, David. It's got to be because it's around that time. I don't even know what all-coly season means anymore. You'll remember. Once we get the first hints of green, the first green shoots for these charts, you'll remember. Sure, sure.

I'm still a believer. All right, let's get into the rest of the market's news. Trump's Truth Social has filed for a dual Bitcoin and. Ethereum ETF. This is in addition to their Bitcoin ETF. So now they have another one. The allocation will be 75% Bitcoin, 25% Ethereum, which will rebalance quarterly to maintain that ratio. T, T, Cossodian Crypto.com. They are, again, like they already, like I said, they already had their Bitcoin S1 filed like one or two weeks ago. So the SEC has a 45-day window to review this. Can stretch it up to 240 days. If greenlit, it could launch in later in 2025. Dual ETFs are

weird. Like, I can just buy, if I want to, I can buy 75% Bitcoin ETF and 25% Eath if I want to. I don't need somebody to, like, duel it for me and just, I don't know. Yeah, at that point, just like I'd prefer to have something like ARC, which is like an actively managed ETF by somebody who I trust. And speaking of ETFs, David, there's a lot more on the horizon. This might revive the alt-coin season in you. Okay. Except on, except as an ETF season in Trify. Maybe. Maybe. So this is, I believe this is a, a chart of the Bloomberg probability of approval for downmarket assets, non-Bitcoin, non-Eath assets of when they're going to get their ETF.

And the Bloomberg guys are pretty good at this. This is their job. Odds of approval in 2025, again, not next month, but this year for light coin, above 90% for Solana, above 90% for XRP, 85% for Dogecoin, 80%, Cardano even, 75%. We're just getting ETFs for all the things. Wow. Wow. This is just extremely favorable. Everyone is most more likely to pass than not pass. Yeah. I mean, I guess this is not surprising given we have such a crypto favorable administration in SEC. And we have kind of the, whatever the opposite of Gensler is, that's what to Paul Atkins is as the chair. So we're getting approvals for all of these. And there's also talk that some of these ETFs will include staking. Maybe the Solani ETF will include staking, for instance, which also begs the question. How about ETH staking ETF? That's coming as well?

What's that waiting on? If one gets the staking ETF, then the other will too. Okay. I think they'll probably come at the same time. Did you notice, though, look at the firms that have filed for the S-1s for all these other ETFs. What's missing? Which firm is missing here?

Okay, I see. I'm gray scale, bitwise, hashtags Franklin Templeton, coin shares, Van Eck, 21 shares. These are all, I'm reading off all the potential issuers. Yeah. Who are you missing? Who's the big multi-trillion dollar asset manager in the room that doesn't have a downmarket ETF that they want approved? Yeah.

There's no. Say it. Black Rock. There's no Black Rock. Yeah. Which like you would wonder, Black Rock, they're not dummies. So why not issue anything below Bitcoin and Ethereum? As we know, both Bitcoin and Ethereum had massively successful ETFs.

It's like incredible demand compared to any other type of an ETF that came before it. And, I mean, we've talked to BlackRock people before. They would say that they would issue an ETF if they had consumer demand for it, if their clients actually demanded for it. And so my indication, understanding those statements that they've said, that they don't think that there is demand down market beyond ether, which is a hypothesis is an idea that we will be able to test. If all of these things are more likely than not to get approved by the end of 2025, we will be able to see exactly how much demand there is for a Dogecoin ETF. or a Solana ETF. Yeah, I wonder. You really have to wonder how much demand there is going to be for Dogecoin ETF, right?

The thing that was like, I just wanted Dogecoin in my 401K. I wasn't going to buy Dogecoin before now, but now that it's in my, now it's in Robin Hood, I can get it. Yeah, so maybe BlackRock. Oh, it's already in Robin Hood. Yeah, it is. Yeah. So, like, maybe Black Rock has kind of the right idea. Maybe the market's just too small or maybe, like, and that's the thing that would push this

over to 100%. Because if Black Rock was on the one of these, you know, then probability is 100%. because Black Rock always gets what they want, right? Do you want to talk about the Fed this week, what they're doing with interest rates, David? I would like for you to inform me about what happened. Yes, please. It's pretty simple. The answer is nothing.

They're not doing anything. So they're keeping the rates the same. Target range 4.25% to 4.5%. This was completely expected. This was in script. And much to Trump's dismay, did you see some of the clips coming out about Donald Trump? It's just like entertaining. Okay, it's just entertainment.

I'm going to play you one. Here it is. Doing well. Well, and as a country, the Fed would ever lower rates, you know, would buy debt for a lot less. It's a shame. This guy, I have a guy that's not a smart person and you're dealing with him and you have to deal. He's not a smart guy. He's worried about inflation. I said, that's right. If there's inflation in six months or nine months, you lower the rates,

so you raise the rates. You can do whatever you want, Brian, right? So let's say there's rampant inflation, which there's none. You know what, there is a success. I got a call from Congress last night. Sir, there's a problem. I said, what is it? money is pouring in. We don't know how to account for it. I said, check the tariffs. $88 billion came in from tariffs. No inflation. And it's going to get even more so. I know what I'm doing. So we have a stupid person, frankly, at the Fed. He probably won't cut today. Europe had 10 cuts, and we had none. And I guess he's a political guy. I don't know. He's a political guy who's not a smart person. But he's costing the country of fortune. So what I'm going to do is,

You know, he gets out in about nine months. He gets fortunate and terminated. That was Donald Trump. Speaking of Fed chair, Jerome Powell. Just being a total bully. That clip goes on for three, five minutes. We only played a bit of it. But the whole time, he's just calling Jerome Powell a stupid man.

He's like, oh, man, you have to deal with a stupid man. He just makes stupid decisions. Like, if inflation goes up, you just raise rates. If it goes down, your lower rates, as simple as that. It's all ad lib. It's like, this looks like a standard. up routine to me. He's got, you know, the background, these, like, kind of, I don't know, their construction workers, they're just like laughing, chuckling along with everything he says.

Anyway, the Fed is supposed to be independent, making some decisions. We'll see how long that lasts right now. They're holding the line here. Something else that's been happening in the chaos, of course. Israel, Iran, conflict. You'd expect investors to flee to the safe haven assets, right, David? Right. Yeah, conflict in the Middle East with one of the world's largest oil producers where there's a fight tug of war over nuclear weapons. That's the, that's a conflict. That's a That's scary for markets. That's uncertainty for markets. And what is the safe haven asset of safe haven assets?

What sets the risk-free rate for all capital? My favorite assets on the world in the world bonds. Bonds, that's right. Treasuries, okay? But a curious thing happened when this conflict was breaking out, all right? Which is treasuries didn't look like safe haven assets at all. So their yields barely budged after the Israeli attacks on Iran. and that was pretty chaotic for markets.

Instead, what happened was... You'll have gone up. You'll have gone up since then. Yeah, exactly. Instead, what happened was gold and silver took a run, and they started appreciating. So are investors fleeing to gold rather than treasuries? I mean, seems like it looks like it from the charts, and that was a pretty instant reaction here. Yeah.

Downstream of that, gold has now eclipsed the euro in market cap. So, I mean, I'm kind of surprised that it hadn't already. But it turns out because of the appreciation of gold and also just net buying of gold by European countries as well as China and Turkey, non-European countries pushing up the price of gold, gold is now larger than the euro. Yeah. So gold on central bank balance sheets is about 20% of all central bank reserves, right? And so I guess the dollar is still at 46%. So Treasury says 46%, but euros is only 16%. You know, BlackRock is trying to do this thing. We had them on last summer, and they keep saying that Bitcoin is not a risk on asset. It's a risk off asset, okay? And they're continuing trying to reinforce this.

And they put together this chart, David. What do you see in this chart? This is a chart of major catalyst. This is a table, really, of major catalyst, you know, kind of catastrophic events, things that are destabilizing. You've got in 2020, U.S. Iran escalation. You've got COVID outbreak. You've got the election challenges of 2020. You've got the Russia invasion of Ukraine.

And what they're charting here is 10-day return for S&P 500, for gold, and for Bitcoin. And you look at the 10-day return and you look at the 60-day return. You see all the green here, David? So Bitcoin is green. It's green on the 10-day for a number of these events, three out of the, I guess, six here. And on the 60-day return, it's green. in all of the events, basically. Almost all of them, yeah.

Yeah, so what they're making the case is, hey, 60 days from a destabilizing event, something like Israel and Iran conflict, what tends to happen is first Bitcoin, maybe it goes down, but six years later, it's back up. So they're saying it's actually a risk off asset. It's not a risk on asset. Yeah. And they've been saying this for over a year now. And I think with the Israel-Iran conflict, you actually really just, it's one thing

to make a prediction, you know, looking at that. data retroactively, but then something after that prediction happens that would test that hypothesis and Bitcoin performed right in line with that hypothesis. So it's growing in confidence that that's exactly what Bitcoin does. It gets the jitters just like all other assets, but then after that, it just comes out stronger. So what that means is if this follows the trans 60 days from now, we're going to be well into the green. Granted, if you zoom, the longer you zoom out, the more likely Bitcoin is going to be green. So at some point, it's also measuring that at the same time. All right, so in addition to

stablecoin summer. It's also SPAC summer. So Justin Sun's Tron group is trying to go public in the United States with a special like acquisition vehicle for TRX. The Wall Street Journal or maybe it was in Financial Times, they reported it as Justin Chun's like Tron trying to go public. That's not what's happening. It's basically a micro strategy for TRX. And this happens just a number of months after US regulators paused a fraud probe into Justin's son and his companies under his control, which is after Justin Sun makes a major investment into World Liberty Financial and the Trump meme coin and does a like a video blog of Justin Sun's attendance of the meme coin dinner. I don't know if you saw that that blog.

So there's a little bit of like what's going on over here because not only that, but Justin Sun is going to be an advisor to Tron Inc. the company, of course. That makes sense. But so will Eric Trump. The Trump family will reportedly have a position on the board of this like special acquisition vehicle for Tron. The special acquisition vehicle is like a micro-examination vehicle.

It's like a micro strategy for Tron, right? And so Justin's son is depositing. It's like 1% of all TRX supply into the balance sheet to just start a treasury company. And then there's some, there was some questions as to how involved Eric Trump was. I think it first came out that he was like actually active in the project, like one of the, you know, leadership team. And then Eric Trump said that he's not. He denied he's having that legal rule in the new firm. He said, I'm the biggest fan of Tron and love Justin's son.

He's a great friend and an icon. in the space. That said, the below isn't accurate. I don't have public involvement in this company. There's been like three things that have come out of the Trump orbit where like the Trump sons are like, I do have involvement in this one. I don't have involvement with that one. And they just have to make clarifying statements all the time. It's every week. Honestly, it's been every week since I've gotten back here. This is a tweet commenting on this effect. Am I getting this right? Number one, Trot investigated by the SEC for market manipulation. Number two, Justin Sun becomes top holder of Trump and World Liberty Financial.

Number three, investigation is dropped. Number four, Trump goes public via reverse merger with Eric Trump taking a role at the company. Crime season is here. Crime season. What do you think of this? Yeah. I mean, this is what it costs to get Trump into presidency. We have the Genius Act.

We have Ross Oldbricht going free. There are some really nice things about the Trump presidency. And then we have this. This is Molly White, who's obviously a permacritic of everything going on in crypto. She's taking log of all of these things. I thought this tweet was so weak. I'm usually able to give Molly the benefit of the doubt on most things. Like I accept her points at times.

Like she's a valuable critic. This one I thought was uncharacteristically weak of her. She tweeted out, Let's describe what it is. Quid pro quo between cryptocurrency firms, the Trump administration, and the Trump family's crypto ventures. And so she tweets out a picture of a chart. and she lists the company, the benefits that they are getting because of Trump being in office,

and then the contributions that they made. So like Cumberland, DRW, Ripple, Coinbase, A16Z, Gemini Cracken, Circle, Robin Hood Consensus, Binance, Crypto. Are all listed, and she like labeled out all the benefits that they get. Like Circle, the SEC approved the Circle IPO. The Circle's also getting favorable stable coin regulation with the Genius Act. You know, Cumberland, DRW, SEC Enforcement case was dismissed with prejudice. Ripple, SEC enforcement case pending revolution, right? And so all of the benefits that

crypto companies have gotten now that Trump is in office. And then there is also Justin Sun, SEC enforcement case, stayed criminal investigation possibly paused. Like, I just thought, like, she's just using the Biden, the Biden choke point 2.0 oppression of the industry as this benchmark of what ought to have been. And then now that anything different has happened, that's positive towards crypto, she is alluding to being a quid pro quo. of the crypto industry to the Trump administration, which is just like totally unfair. It's like the benchmark that she's using is completely unconstitutional. Yeah, I mean, I guess some of this is, would you say some of this is fair, but most of it's not?

Which is, it's convenient that she listed him first and then all the other, like coin base. Like, how is circle going public quid pro quo to the Trump administration? Yeah, and also you look at kind of the SEC enforcement against Coinbase and, you know, on down, Cracken and Robin Hood. I mean, that was unjustified in the first place, right? I mean, it's like that should never have happened. And the SEC and as well as the FDIC was completely weaponized against crypto. And so what choice did some of these crypto companies have?

What I hate about this is you're forced to pick a camp, right? And it's like that's why I feel like everything forces us into. You're either pro-crypto or you're against, you know, crypto. Either crypto is kind of bribing its way into relevance or it's, you know, surviving for its life against a brutal government, right? This is a problem with government. There's no nuance. If you don't pay the government tax, then you get stamped out as an industry.

Crypto is not the first or the second or the third industry to learn this. Every industry just learns that you have to bribe government to make your industry illegal. And so it's not fair for her to single out the crypto industry. This is just the way that things are. You know, Elizabeth Warren came in with a hammer against the big banks, and now the big banks are her biggest donors. I don't see the Molly White tweet about that relationship between Big Banks and Elizabeth Warren. Like, go tweet about that. You're just criticizing the notion of money in politics, which I'm also a critic of. But you don't get to say that this is a uniquely crypto thing that we are

doing. We are just playing the game shoulder to shoulder with all other industries. Yeah. I will say the Justin's son thing. That's pretty unique. Yeah, it's really unfortunate. The Justin Sun is really fucking all this up for us. But what do you think of the overall soul of crypto right now. As you kind of like look back. So this is Zach XPT, right? And he is the sheriff of crypto, good guy, white hat has helped so many in the space. He said he put out a tweet this. He basically said this. The crime super cycle is indeed very real. He's talking about crypto. Whilst true the industry has historically been ripe for abuse as noticeably increased since politicians launched meme coins and numerous court cases were dropped further enabling behavior. He goes on. He

talks about the laundering, money laundering that's going on with OTC brokers. He talks about KOL's facing zero repercussions, basically scamming their communities, a court siding with smart contract exploiters, so basically like criminals. Can we fix the system of the vast majority of people still do not care unless they lose money? There's kind of a feeling of like some OGs in crypto that we're losing something, that this, you know, crime season is kind of rotting out the soul. What's your feeling of it?

Yeah, it does kind of feel like the Overton window of on-chain crypto markets has drifted farther to crime than like any of the OGs really hope that it would. And then you have like serious companies, Robin Hood, Coinbase Circle, going public on the public stock market. And like we're like, oh, we're left with like leftovers. And we don't really get any cool, valuable tokens. We only, all the tokens that are like interesting investments are all problem childs. We'll talk about that with a Blockworks Transparency Report. that comes later in the show because there's the whole idea that like as crime permeates and becomes normalized, then the whole sector becomes uninvestable. And so tokens are like becoming

uninvestable, which is problematic because we want tokens to become the new way to issue equity. But if if you're just issuing your equity shoulder to shoulder with crime, then like maybe it's better off to be in the public markets. Like I think that's a pretty logical train of thought. I mean, have we swung too far on the other side of this, right? It's like now everything's permitted and so you know, criminals are coming in at I mean, previously. A year two ago, it was Operation Choke Point. Nothing was permitted. They were trying to choke at the industry.

But now, this is Taylor Monaghan. She's saying, crypto right now is in a rough spot. It's attracting and retaining more anti-social, selfish, corrupt people, while excluding demoralizing and wrecking those who are good faith, cooperative, selfless. Is there an element of that? Yeah. Yeah. I think people have a hard time, like, parsing the good guys from the bad guys in crypto.

My take is, you know, the bology corkscrew of progress, right? Or sometimes you kind of go too far on one side and then you go too far on the other. but you're always corkscrewing up into some progress here. I feel like that's what crypto kind of is. We went Operation chokepoint. Now we're probably going a little too far in the crime season. We'll balance back out. Yeah, hopefully sooner rather than later.

All right, coming up next, we're going to talk about the genius stablecoin bill that the Senate just voted yes on. It is almost done, but we got some hurdles left over. We're going to talk about that. And then J.P. Morgan, who's CEO called Bitcoin, a pet rock, and said if he would the government, he would shut it down, is now launching a tokenized deposit. token on base. Interesting.

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Sellow Camp, and Proof-Ship will put your mini app on Farcaster and Opera MiniPay. Tokonomics leveled up to the great cello happening cuts inflation from 2% to 1% aligning the chain with its ambitious Vision 2030, a trillion-dollar on-chain economy where regens, cypherpunks, and D-Gens create prosperity for all. Follow at Sellow on X and start building at cello.org today. The Genius Act has passed in the Senate. The vote was 68 to 30, like overwhelming bipartisan support. happened roughly six weeks after Senator Bill Haggurty, who we just had on the podcast,

go listen to that episode, introduced the legislation in the first place. We also got some Trump commentary. The Senate just passed an incredible bill that is going to make America the all caps, undisputed leader in digital assets. Nobody will do it better. It is pure all caps genius digital assets of the future and our nation is going to own it. The House will hopefully move lightning fast, pass a clean genius act, get it to my desk, ASAP, no delays, no add-ons. Trump wants that bill on his desk. He doesn't want the House to add anything

because if the House adds anything, then it has to go back to the Senate. So Trump's saying, House, don't do anything other than vote yes so I can sign this bill into law, which bullish, very bullish. I was speaking of bullish. This is Secretary Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary of the U.S. He said recent reporting projects that stable coins could grow into a $3.7 trillion market by the of this decade. Yeah, it's increasing his price targets. That's kind of some bull market top signal of activity right there. It's fantastic coming from a Treasury Secretary. He said a thriving stablecoin ecosystem will drive a demand from the private sector for treasuries, which back stablecoins. This demand could lower government borrowing costs and help rein in the national

debt. He gets it. He's looking at stable coin holders and he's saying, oh, these are customers. These are people who will buy my bonds when maybe countries won't. He's getting the full picture. everything we've been saying. And to have the Treasury Secretary behind it is something else. There's also an interview. I think this is really going to change the conversation. If there's anyone left in government who is saying, a, crypto is bad for the U.S. Maybe it's bad for the U.S. dollar. This is the Treasury Secretary in response to a reporter who used that line. Because crypto, I mean, that seems to be a threat to the dollar, doesn't it? I think it's the opposite. Oh, really? I think stable coins could reinforce dollar

supremacy because with stable coins, stable coins could end up being one of the largest buyers of U.S. treasuries or T-bills. So all of a sudden, if you are using a stable coin in Nigeria that's backed by the U.S. dollar, you don't actually have to have dollars. It's on your phone. You can transact. So I think there's a very good chance that crypto is actually one of the things that locks in dollar supremacy. Isn't that crazy? He was so ready for that question. Yeah.

He was like, I'm so glad you asked. He's smiling the whole way through. What's interesting about this? You know, the big concern all the way back, the genesis of crypto, is that it would be choked off by the world governments, in particularly the U.S. Okay. So if Bitcoin crypto is starting to threaten the U.S. dollar, what's the U.S. going to do?

It's just going to choke it off. This, to me, is signal that we have completely. neutralized that threat. And this is surprising to a lot of probably people who, you know, back in 2015, if you told them, look, the U.S. is actually going to use crypto rails to export dollar supremacy and they're going to love crypto. That would have been surprising to them. So I feel like we've completely, at least in this cycle, neutralized the attack from the U.S. government on crypto, and that's a big win as well. Okay. Question. Hypothetical question. Democrats get elected next election cycle. Blue House, blue Congress, blue, blue, Congress, Blue, Blue,

it, blue president. How far back does the pendulum swing or is crypto, like, well-embedded and Democrats learn their lesson? And they're like, you know what? We're just not touching it. We're just going to let it go. I think there's going to be a backlash. I think there is going to be a, like, a Thor hammer smacked on the head of... Oh, a bad backlash. Yes. In certain sectors of crypto, but not all of it. In the next two to four years, it's going to become so embedded that you won't be able to kind of completely... You won't be able to strip it out? but there will be some sort of backlash, right? It's like, you know, in the state, in the genius bill, there was, they called it,

Democrats called it the Trump blue pole. All of Congress was not able to issue a stable coin or make profits based on the issuing of a stable coin. No member of Congress could do that, but you know who could? The president of the United States. All right. Well, if that's where the backlash goes, that's totally fine. There's things that was circle going public and I hope many more crypto companies going

public. Yeah, it's something that does cement stablecoin position. Yeah. And so at least with stablecoin. I don't think there's going to be much blowback. I agree. Maybe other parts of the market. Yeah.

Yeah, maybe other parts of the market. There are still some threats here. Will this bill pass? That's the question. Polymarket's giving an 82% chance right now, which is pretty good. I mean, there is some question, though. What does this mean for some established stable coins? Obviously, this is very bullish for a circle.

How about tether, though? Because tether's kind of the stepchild of stable coins, right? It's like offshore. It's got this reputation of maybe, like, being used criminals. and is, you know, a bit maybe nefarious. It's certainly not a domestic asset. So what happens to tether in this bill? I would say just kind of reading his body language

and some of his answers when we asked him about the Genius Act. Paulo is indifferent. I think Tether is... That was your take? I think Tether is so large that Paulo's like, I don't care. I'm the 18th largest treasury owner.

I am sitting shoulder to shoulder with countries. Like I already won? I was in the fifth largest treasurer. repurchaser in the last 20 in the last 12 months I don't care like I'll the genius act is interesting to me I'm going to issue my domestic United States flavor of tether just to be in that market but like I'm so large that I'm bigger than the genius act that was my take away from he's just completely unaffected I I totally see that interpretation I mean like mechanically in the genius act what it means is that if if us DC does nothing right now okay within three years it will be completely banned

from the U.S. So no crypto exchange can list it. All right. No bank can kind of service it. It's out of here. It's out of here. Now, there is an opportunity for Tether to acquire an OCC license. And Paolo told us, yeah, we're planning to do that.

And he also told us they're planning to do a domestic onshore U.S. based stable coin, too. So they still want to have, they do both and pursue both at the same time. And it seems to me he thinks that the big use for stable. coins is actually not in the U.S. banking. It's not domestic at all. It's not the U.S. banking system. It's foreign. Yeah, it's foreign. It's for everybody that doesn't currently have access to a U.S. bank, right? And so he thinks that Tether is best positioned to capitalize on that market, whether it gets through the OCC license under the Dienous Act or not. It does kind of buy for Cake Circle from Tether in the sense that Circle is for domestic payments and Tether is for,

foreign like crypto dollars like a euro dollar it is the new euro dollar market and that's not necessarily for payments is for reserves it's for as like a savings vehicle it's for bank deposits in foreign banks it's for individual deposits in the tether bank account on whatever blockchain they use and so very different outcomes i think even though the end up product is kind of the same it does strike me though that there are some losers on the back of this bill again assuming it it gets approved, and that's got to be the visas and master cards. That's got to be the incumbent payment system that charges 3% on every single consumer transaction in the U.S.

That's a tax. I live in Virginia. State tax is like 5%. Okay? The master card and visa tax is 3%. It's almost as high as my state consumption tax, which is absolutely crazy. And it feels like if stable coins really take off in the way that, we think they can, that run seeking is going to be eroded.

Yeah, which is a fundamental promise that the crypto industry started writing in like 2010, 2011. So it's good to finally see that actually kind of show up in reality. Like Visa MasterCard stock prices reacting to this is finally indicative of this is actually here. And there's also other news in this rollup that we'll talk about with Shopify and USDC and base, which is again, just again, going right after these payment networks. stepping the credit cards, right?

Base is the new visa, Shopify is the new endpoint. You promised to tell us about the JPM coin. So what's this? A stable coin from J.P. Morgan? Yeah, not a stable coin, a tokenized bank deposit. What's the difference? I'm not too sure, but this one is also permissioned. It's like an intra-network for J.P. Morgan,

and it's supposed to just be for J.P. Morgan and his permission clients. How a JPMD token is different from a stable coin, at the end of the day, I think we aren't totally sure. But first of his kind on a public blockchain, it'll be issued on base. And for, you know, 24-7-365 settlements between J.P. Morgan accounts, like, why permissioned? Unsure, I guess they're just using base as like back-end bank account infrastructure for themselves. But using a public blockchain, I'm, I, doesn't really impact me. I don't really know. What's your take? It's interesting, right? So there's this, the word that J.P. Morgan has filed a trademark for something called JPMD, okay, which appears to be a stable coin, right?

So that happened. And then also their base, Coinbase has announced that JPMorgan put the tokenized deposits, as you said, on chain, on base, using that as a settlement layer. And that's called JPMD. It's the same, it's the same JPMD, right? But this is, as you, like, it's not like a stable coin because you can't move it from one address to another. It's just for institutions.

And it's so it's on chain. It's unclear, like, why it's on chain or what you can do with it. It's on chain. And I'm really not sure why JP Morgan is pursuing this rather than the Genius Bill Bill Act stable coin strategy, which feels like, okay, why does your JP? You just got the green light to do an actual stable coin. Just make an actual stable coin. You are a bank.

Go do a stable coin. Go do it. You can now do it, basically. So maybe this is a stepping stone to that. It probably is. That's probably the future. And it's pretty significant because the guy who said, like, if I was the U.S. government, I'd kill Bitcoin.

I banned Bitcoin. Right. Now his bank is issuing a stable coin on a public blockchain. So more from them, I'm sure. I'll read a quote from Alex Lawrence newsletter, which goes out today. It's very possible that this is Innovation Theater with an announcement timed to benefit from the glowing coverage of stable coins. And not much more than that. Oof.

Ah, ooh. Maybe so. Deadly. All right, coming up next, we're going to talk about all the big Coinbase announcements that came out of their Coinbase state of crypto event that they held last week. and then also Cracken launches a token for their layer two. And we're going to talk about all this and more but first a message from some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible.

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why over 275 million users trust Binance for everything crypto. Download Binance today and get started in minutes. Binance is not available in certain countries, including the United States. Check its terms for more information. The Inc Foundation, which is the foundation that supports the Inc. Layer 2 blockchain, which is the blockchain supported by Crack and the Exchange, will launch its native token, Inc. to bootstrap the marketplace through a liquidity-first strategy. They tweeted out, most tokens launch with a vibe and a prayer. Inc. is launching with utility, a single token model designed for usage, not speculation, no fluff, no governance theater, just aligned incentives from day one. So what's good the token going to do is primarily for usage in Defi. It sounds like it's going to be. be incentives for TVL and DFI. They are getting a version of AVE. AVE is deploying onto the Inc.

Network. And so they are going to mint a fixed supply of 1 billion ink tokens. And there will be an airdrop to early users of the Inc. Network. So if you've already been on Inc., congratulations, you're probably getting an irdrop. What was your big takeaway? What was your response?

What was your thoughts about ink? It seems like it's a liquidity mining token, which you've seen before. And so it's unclear what the utility actually is. I mean, zooming out, though. So Coinbase has its layer two base, which is absolutely massive. Three point, almost four billion in total value locked at this point. So Cracken has been out for seven months now. All right.

And their TVL is only seven million. So it's like a massive delta there. So it feels like Cracken is struggling maybe with adoption of ink. And I'm not sure that the ink token is going to spur that adoption very much. I mean, liquidity mining can help. Do you think this is coming from a place of strength or strength of weakness? it sounds like it's coming from a place of weakness. It's definitely coming from a place of weakness at this point.

Maybe it'll help. I mean, token incentives have kind of helped the unichain, bootstraps and liquidity. You definitely need that. But this has to be part of a broader strategy that Cracken needs to deploy to increase the total value locked and the usage of its chain. Another announcement this week comes out of eigenlayer. They launched eigenCloud. What is IgenCloud? It is basically eigenlayers as a product, is the passive.

packaging up in this very accessible package to developers. And so it's kind of like AWS, but with all of eigenlayers of services built right into it. And so there's all these different AVSs that build little modules on eigenlayer. There's a couple of these components. Everything in eigenCloud is just all of that wrapped up so that developers can go access what eigenlayer sells, which is basically cryptoronomic security, trust, you know, slashable trust. And so that got launched this week. That also came with an announcement of a $70 million token investment token purchase from A16Z. I listen to your podcast with Sri Ram.

The whole concept was like it's a verifiable compute, right? It's like AWS for verifiable compute. I still found it hard to wrap my head around. It's hard to imagine. Yeah. It's hard to imagine. Yeah. I understand why verifiable compute is important for blockchain.

It's all about property rights and assets. And you need to know that the supply is what it says it is. And I need to know your address has received my funds. And I need to know how much like it's that verifiable. compute in the asset property registry space, like I understand that now. I can't really imagine use cases beyond that. And maybe that's a limitation that I have in my thinking. Yeah, I think if you are like a eigenlayer bear or a ball, it really rests on like how easy it is to imagine that future. And from the bullish side, it's like, well, yeah, it's because this is a net new thing. There's no

comparable to really illustrate what eigen layer eigencloud is trying to do. But there are some things that you can kind of like understand. Like say, for example, we, wanted to govern over something, like a company, a very large company using an AI LLM. And we needed to have some assurance that the computation of that LLM is done by the right code and there isn't like a man in the middle attack or any other sort of just like spoofing to verify that computation. And so, yeah, I think whether you're an eigenlayer-Bayer or a bull kind of rests on, like, how easy is it to produce the future that eigenlayer wants to produce?

And, you know, the bullish side of things will say, well, this. This is, eigenlayer is a net new thing. There is no comparable. And that's why it's hard to imagine. And Sri Ram gave a few examples. And I could probably list off a bunch of examples. And it would still kind of just like kind of feel the blind men feel the elephant. But now the thing is, is like now this access to what eigenlayer is selling is as easy as a developer going to AWS and getting like an S1 bucket or something like that.

And so the, whereas eigen layer and the smart contracts and like I can compute and all that kind of thing that are like kind of these components inside of. the car. Well, now we have like the actual product, the actual car. And so you don't have to actually understand how a carburetor works to drive the car. And we just now have the fully seam stitched together package. And maybe the eigen token will join what Blockworks has just put out, which is the Blockworks token transparency framework. So this is a 40 point grading rubric basically on token. It's like token supply, various, you know, stats, who holds what? And it's self-reported. This is almost not, I shouldn't say what the SEC should be doing in crypto, but there's an of it. It's kind of ground up opt-in

regulation. Layer 2B for token disclosures, token transparency. That's a great take. That's exactly what it is. And I'm very hopeful that our tokens adopt this type of a standard, and it's great that Blockworks is propagating this and putting it out there. Yeah, so there's about 18 different criteria

with three points that you can score per criteria. So there's like supply schedules, market maker agreements. Like if you've signed a deal with a market maker, that deal is made public, then you get a point. Exchange listing agreements, these are all trying to make these things public so that the average investor can go look at what the actual details of the market maker are. And there's also things like, well,

is there equity token misalignment like Uniswap Labs or is it more like morpho where there is no equity, there's just a token things like this. And this was all downstream of some efforts from Felipe, who we've had on as a guest. And his notion of like lemon markets, this is what I brought up earlier where like, well, if we have a bunch of markets, if a bunch of tokens, for example, say say 50% of the tokens that are potentially investable are kind of shitty because of bad disclosures, bad market maker agreements. Well, it really taints the remaining 50 that are potentially good. And so we are trying to just illuminate.

Give people who have put their best foot forward with their token a way to advertise the fact that they have put their best foot forward. Transparency. There's a transparency. Yeah, there's a page on Blockworks where you can go look at the tokens that have gone through this report. I think there's like six of them right now. Morpho is one of them.

Stride is one of them. And so the call to action here is if you have issued a token and you would like to flex your transparency and your good intentions, the Blockworks Works transparency report is a place to do that. And then also in theory, like you can imagine if there was like a hundred tokens that have gone through this process, you can imagine like a Blockworks version of Coin Gecko that only lists tokens that have gone through the transparency report. And so it's kind of like a trusted place to get token information.

Yeah. And I think that the good tokens will go do this, right? Yeah. Because what do they have to lose? We're not afraid of transparency. And so you get a market that will form on that too. David, there was some major Coinbase product announcements here recently. Can you rattle a few of them off?

Yeah, the Coinbase 1 credit card, a metal American Express card launching in the fall of this year. 4% Bitcoin cash back, 4% if you have enough assets on your Coinbase account. And then some boosted USC yields as well. So credit card. Perpetual futures. CFTC. compliant perps for United States traders. That's a first, right?

Yes. Purps, onshore, Perps is a first. It's a very big deal. So they are going after, of course, what is Hyperliquid's non-KYC volume. In-app access to dexes. So base dexes are going to be baked into the main application. That's pretty cool. Coinbase business, a small, medium enterprise suite for global pay,

custodian and trading services, API automation, USC rewards. And then Shopify tie-in. So merchants can accept USC on base with 1% cashback straight into Shopify. Yeah, that was a big deal, that Shopify thing, right? Shopify is a $142 billion volume company, and they've got 5.5 million merchants. And one of the things Coinbase rolled out, too, was this concept with Shopify of commerce payments protocol. So one of the problems with crypto, I guess when you compare it to a network like Visa is that the payments, are immutable, okay? And this is, this is great for a lot of things, but for every day, like,

you're buying a coffee, you just want to refund. I don't know, there's some fraud. There's, you want to cancel something. Credit cards are way better than just an immutable blockchain. So, Coinbase has provided a service in Coinbase Commerce that's deployed on base to just use a smart contract as escrow. So think of it as like there's a step in between I mean, if I send a merchant some funds, I'm paying with stable coins on base, then the money actually goes in a smart contract escrow. It's like money in the lockbox, holds the cash. So I'm not actually sending it.

I'm just signing approval of it, right? And then once the merchant ships their product, maybe does some fraud detection or something to that effect, then the funds are released by the escrow. And in the meanwhile, both sides can kind of cancel the transaction. And if the transaction is canceled, nothing leaves. my wallet in the first place. So it's basically giving you some of the same capability that credit card networks have had. They're big feature is like, we're not immutable. You can, you know, we got fraud detection. We can refund if there's like something that needs to be refunded.

We can cancel. And now you can do that on crypto too. So you really see Coinbase leveling up payments and that meshing well with stable coins and doing that in a programmable way completely on chain. There was one announcement that was not in the Coinbase state of Crypto Summit, but was more kind of behind the scenes. This was reported on Rooters. Coinbase seeks SEC approval for on-chain stocks. So they want to create, if it's on-chain, I'm assuming it's a token. They want to tokenize stocks or support tokenized stocks. Maybe they don't want to do the tokenization themselves.

But they want those things. And they're asking the SEC for either a no-action letter or a regulatory exemption so that they can do tokenize. stock you would presume on base. And so just reading between the lines, we have a Coinbase 1 credit card, perpetual futures, an in-app Dex Shopify tie-in, and then also approval for on-chain stocks. Coinbase is going for a financial super app.

And then you know who else is also going for? All on chain. Yeah. You know what else is going for a financial super app? Robin Hood, which has many of these things. They have stocks. They have the credit card. They are going for banking services.

The Robin Hood Banking announcement. I think banking comes. in like Q3 or Q4. And then Robin Hood, I don't know if they're doing this on purpose, but Coinbase had their State of Crypto Summit. And then Robin Hood has their big crypto day at ECC in a couple weeks, which they've been hyping up in a very big way. And so, yeah, like, I'm just seeing these two financial clash of the Titans.

I mean, Titans in the grand scheme of things, like, they're both-ish $70 billion right now. So like small in the grand scheme of things. Oh, it's similar market cap. Similar market cap. Yeah, yeah. Well, Coinbase had a 15% day. last trading day, it's June 10th, so the markets are closed today. So, like, Coinbase took a little bit of lead.

But I think the Coin versus Hood story is going to be a huge story. Because imagine if you are a zoomer, even a millennial, you're coming of age, you're, finally getting some wealth. What are you going to use? Yeah, it's one of those two. You're going to use Fidelity, Charles Schwab. Yeah. No, you're going to use Coinbase or Robin Hood.

You're going to do one of those two things. Yeah, and Coinbase doesn't have stocks, but they want stocks. Robin Hood has just starting the crypto, they want to be more on chain, so they're kind of converging, aren't they? Yeah. I do wonder at ETHCC, do you think Robin is going to roll out like a layer two? I think that would be the easy guess. Yeah. I think that'd be the easy guess.

Maybe it's a stable coin, David. Get some of that circle stablecoin premium. You talk about that. You know, if it wasn't all good news for Coinbase, let's say, or good press, there was also this thing, a little thing of the U.S. Army parade. Do you see this? So, this went mainstream. So, of course, there was on Flag Day, I believe, this was Saturday. I was not watching the parade.

It was also Trump's birthday, was it not? In Washington, D.C. It was a military parade. I've never seen one of these in the U.S. in the capital before. I never seen a United States military parade now. Yeah, first time for everything, I guess. So we saw a military parade.

What was surprising to me in looking at this was it was sponsored by, in part by Coinbase. No, Coinbase was not the only sponsor, but you saw a lot of images like this, like two big tanks, a whole U.S. Army kind of platform and Coinbase branding. And so the crypto world kind of reacted to this. I saw some good reactions to it, some positive reactions, we'll get to that. Some Coinbase employees with positive reactions. Coinbase employees thought this was sick. Yeah, a lot of negative reactions. What was kind of the negative reactions that you saw? I mean, generally that this is completely antithetical to what crypto was supposed to be.

Yeah. Which I very much resonate with. Like the cool thing about Bitcoin proof of work and Ethereum proof of stake is that we can create a money without a military. And so the notion of a crypto company sponsoring a military is like, wait, what? Many people I think got disillusioned because, and I would, can resonate with this. Like, I'm here for the counterculture. I'm here for like the revolution that is antagonistic to nation state powers and

nation state overreach. And I think the military is the symbol of. like nation state overreach at the reason why it can't overreach in the first place. Did you ever read one of my favorite OG articles in the space is a most peaceful revolution from Nick Carter is a 2019 piece. Do you remember that one? I do. Yeah, yeah.

What was the theme of that? Basically the TLDR is that like as nation state fiat just print and, you know, people lose their savings in fiat, they're going to use Bitcoin as a savings vehicle. And that's going to force government to be more fiscally responsible because it's going to collapse down to the value of the services that governments can provide their citizens. It's giving the value of their fiat. And so they're going to not be able to support their armies of their armies. It's a sovereign individual type of thesis, right?

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's just like completely antagonistic to just sponsor the army. I mean, here's the other side of this, though. It's Coinbase's, I mean, members of the army on board to crypto. What are they going to use?

Maybe there's some, you know, affiliation here. Maybe there's some, you know, eyeballs on this that wouldn't be otherwise. this is all part of crypto going mainstream in that and that story. And Victor Bunin says, he was very excited about it. He said, hell yeah, this is great. The men and women defending our nation and our way of life deserve our culture and respect. And this is just Coinbase, you know, giving respect to the military. Well, Victor Bune is the target market for this.

As a coin base employee who was a huge Trump fan, like, of course Victor Bune is going to be like, I love this. This was great. Yeah, well, there you go. I mean, maybe alienating some crypto-O-Gs, but maybe picking up some eyeballs. David, Roman Storm is short on his legal defense. What's the update here? Yeah, so the Ethereum Foundation donated $1.25 million matching fund to Roman Storm. First, he needs more money because his court case is coming up very, very fast.

July 14th in New York, and he is short $750,000. And so the crypto, we've raised a decent amount of money for Roman Storm. Remember, if Roman Storm wins his case, the precedent that open source software developers can't go to jail is set in and we can just feel good about the fact that we protected one of our own. And so the big call to action is that the EF is matching your donations. So you donate one dollar. The EF donates another dollar. And then we need to get Romanosurum $750,000 more so we can win his case. Make sure he doesn't go to jail for writing open source software. Yeah, big encourage. It was great to see the EF step up and go do this. And this is the second time they donate it. So absolutely huge.

Well, that's it. We got to wrap it up. David, I got a question for you. And the midst of stable coin summer. It's a question about, you know, crypto in general. I saw this tweet from Jason Choi. He said this. The irony is not lost on me that crypto went from, let's replace the banks to let's provide an alternative to fiat to let's strengthen U.S. dollar dominance. What's your take on this overall? With our excitement over stable coins, you know, going mainstream, all of these things, is crypto starting to lose the plot as to why we're here? I mean, aren't we here to go bankless? I don't know if it, so Jason, he brands this as crypto went from. Let's replace banks to. Let's provide an alternative fiat to let's strengthen the United States dollar dominance.

It's not either or to me. It's yes and. And crypto has always been about replacing banks. It's always been about providing alternative to fiat. And now with the innovation of stable coins, we're like, actually, we can, we can do all of these things. It's a yes and. So we're going to strengthen the United States dollar dominance for those who want that. We're going to, provide an alternative to fiat for those who want that. And for those who want it, they can replace banks. I think it's all of these things together. I agree. I think staple coins are a big step towards that. Actually, I mean, the banks don't like it. We no longer need their savings accounts, right? We can keep the stable coins in our non-custodial wallet. All we need is the yield. And hopefully

that comes at some point. So we are making progress on this. Got to end with this, guys. Of course, you know, none of this has been financial advice. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we're headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.