Bankless - ROLLUP: TRON's Massive Win | Dems Ignore Crypto | The $20M McDonalds Scam | Vitalik's Bull Post

Episode Date: August 23, 2024

Tron has been on a tear ranking second in stablecoin supply, highest number of token holders at 143.5 million, and has the second highest TVL among layer 1's at over $8 billion dollars.  What's causing this big spike and... why? ------ 📣 GET 10% OFF PERMISSIONLESS TICKETS | USE CODE: BANKLESS10  https://bankless.cc/PermissionlessDiscount  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2    ⁠ 🦄UNISWAP | BROWSER EXTENSION https://bankless.cc/uniswap ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum   🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle    🌐 OBOL | STAKE ON DVs, SCALE ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/obol  🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT  https://bankless.cc/toku  ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 00:00 David's New Fighting Opponent https://x.com/Permissionless/status/1826245778098237923  05:35 Markets https://pro.kraken.com/app/trade/btc-usd  https://pro.kraken.com/app/trade/eth-usd  https://farside.co.uk/?p=1518  https://unchainedcrypto.com/blackrocks-ethereum-etf-surpasses-1-billion-in-net-inflows/  09:17 Tron Taking Over? https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/tron  14:57 Fear vs Greed In Markets https://x.com/Barchart/status/1825970627011817561  https://www.coinglass.com/pro/i/FearGreedIndex  19:53 Dems 2024 Platform Release https://x.com/BitcoinMagazine/status/1825571943891792289  https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1825620753783345308  https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1825625975528501711  https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1825619465339351144  https://washingtonreporter.news/editorial/scoop-kamala-harris-likely-to-nominate-gary-gensler-as-treasury-secretary-if-elected-senate-sources/  https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1825618904686739630  32:36 Trump Onchain https://blockworks.co/news/donald-trump-nft-royalties-memecoin-taxes  https://edition.cnn.com/2024/08/15/politics/read-donald-trump-financial-disclosure-forms/index.html  https://opensea.io/collection/trump-digital-trading-cards  39:02 Optimism Disabled Fraud Proofs? https://x.com/Optimism/status/1824560736657670314  42:47 Pump Dot Fun https://x.com/adam_tehc/status/1824994679265349802?s=46  45:33 McDonalds Memecoin? https://x.com/timo_bult/status/1826284191115530600  https://pump.fun/4BRummYdfvoEGQwYzTSmn5F6RyAFdrHUTFkeagobpump  50:02 Story $80 Million Raise https://www.story.foundation/  https://x.com/jasonjzhao/status/1826236451954286946  53:58 Sorella Labs $7.5 Million https://www.theblock.co/post/312222/paradigm-sorella-labs-ethereum-mev-problem?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social  57:20 Meme Of The Week https://x.com/vitalikbuterin/status/1826253901240431083?s=46    ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Bankless Nation, it is the fourth week of August. It's time for the bankless weekly roll-up. It's roll-up time. David, the Democrats dropped their 90-page policy platform. And they mentioned crypto. How many times? We're not going to spoil it, okay? We're not going to spoil it.

Everyone, guess your number. Think of a number right now. How many times was crypto mentioned? Yeah. And the question, of course, this week as well as the last was, was this the week for the Comla crypto pivot? Or here's the other side of this. Maybe she's going to nominate Gary Gensler for Secretary Treasury.

To pull their opposites. Yay. Which one is happening? Also, in the world of crypto, why optimism disabled their fraud proofs? Good, bad. Why is that even possible? What happens next? Why do they do that?

And the new meta in crypto this week, Tron. All the meme coin traders are bridging over to Tron. And if you are hearing that line right now and you're like, ooh, I better get on Tron. You're probably too late. Speaking of meme coins, we've got to talk about the grimace coin. is it a scam or is this something real that McDonald's has posted their Instagram? From McDonald's Instagram. Scam or real?

Everyone place your bet. Scam or real? David, these headlines, man, it's one of those weeks. But at least we got this and you're going to have to wait until the end of the podcast. Finally,

Vitalik makes an Ethereum bull post on Twitter. Maybe the E. Bitcoin ratio saved, David. Maybe there's some hope here. That's Vitalik doing his best to save the Bitcoin, Eith Bitcoin ratio. I'm also doing my part, announcing that me and Kane Warwick are fighting. Is this going to say, the series?

Like fighting, actual fight. Is it, this a theory I'm in a theory of fighting? Yeah, karate combat. It was once upon a time Nick Carter, but now Nick Carter, he's just like way out of my league. He's already killed a guy. Well, he has not killed the guy. And so I'm committing elder abuse by fighting Kane Warwick at permissionless. on October 11th, the last day of permissionless.

Yeah. So the fight's on, getting back out of retirement that I never got out of in the first place, to fight Kane Warwick. So if that interests you, if two crypto-Twitter people fighting at Permissionless interests you, you should get a ticket. I mean, that's another reason to go to Permissionless, of course, is to see you beat up Kane Warwick, right? Which is obviously going to happen. Let's get the Polymarketing for that one. To be fair, Cain has 30 pounds on me. He's like 6.2.

I'm like 5'10. He's got like 3 to 4 inches on me. He's a bigger human than me. Yeah. But he's agreeing to come down to, we're fighting at 175. So I'm going up 15. He's going down 15. That's going to be down 15.

It's all going to be like lean muscle by no cane. I mean, he's a competitive dude. Yeah. Yeah. When I was talking to him about potentially doing that, he was waiting for Sue's. to get back to him about potentially fighting, but Susu being the spineless fraud that he is,

just ghosted him. And so he gave Susu like 72 hours, and then Susu didn't say anything. And so then he's like, okay, now we're going to fight. Now down to fight. I'm just trying to, like, close my saga on the, like, two months of training

that I did with Nick. Like, I did that. And now I would like to put that to use, even though I haven't done anything since then. All right. And then Cain has much less, fighting experience, I'm assuming, but he's also apparently in really good shape because he's been like free diving for, he said he's in the best shape of his life in cardio terms. And so I've got

fighting experience. He's got he's got cardio like readiness and we've got seven weeks to train. That's not a lot of time, dude. And I know you're in Argentina. I'm so like it's going to take you while I get back to New York. I'm not going to join an MMA gym in Argentina. I got to wait until I get back to New York. So I have five weeks. Well, we'll see what the odds look like once the the prediction markets kind of release them, but okay, if who wins, which one's bullish for Ethereum? Or is it just like bullish for Ethereum that we're having this fight? Is that how you can say?

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know, man. It's just something. Well, if that wasn't reason enough to come to permissionless to watch David beat up Kane, then we've got a lineup here, which is an incredible lineup. David, you should name a few guests. I know Chris Dixon is top of my list. Also, Abology, Shrini Vasson.

Who else we got, though? The permissionless lineup, I think, is, one of the greatest lineups of a crypto conference that I've ever seen. Keone from Monads, Rerom, of course, Ben, Ben Jones from Optimism, Nick White from Celestia, Harry from Arbitrum, Luca from Pudgy Penguins, Kane, of course, Vance from Framework, Tommy from Delphi, Santi from Empire Podcasts and previously Parify, Haseeb, Tom Schmidt, Dan Robinson from Paradigm, Lucas from Gito, Tushar and Kyle from multi-coin. Who else do you want? Oh, do you want Stani? Because we also have Stani. What else? Who else do you want? Samara Cohen from Black Rock, like the queen of the

ETSs, like we got everyone. We got everyone. It's going to be really, really cool. Three days. A lot of content. There's somebody else in this list too. I'd rather see you fight. You should go fight Mert, David. Was that not an option? I do not. I will not be fighting. Well, of course, guys, if you don't have a ticket for permission list, you can go grab one. There's a link in the show notes. And if you're a bankless citizen, you get, what is it, 30% off that ticket? 30% off. Bankless. Bankless. Bankless listeners, non-citizens get 10% off, bankless 10. Bankless citizens get 30% off on your guys's perks page where we put all of your guys's perks. Amazing. All right. Well, let's talk about markets

this week, David. The Bitcoin markets, what's the price point? Are we above 60K? Looks like we are. Yep. Holding head and shoulders above 60K, 60,600, up 2% on the week. ETH price started the week at 2,640, ending the week, 2,610, down 1% on the week. Call it flat for both, I would say. ETH Bitcoin ratio. Not doing great at 0.043, but we won't talk about that. The ether flows, the ETHF flows, are terrible. They're pretty bad.

They're not great. They're not great. They have been negative since August 15th. And so negative 40 million on the 15th, negative 15 million on the 16th, negative 13 million on the 19th, negative 6 million on the 20th, and negative 18 million on.

on the 21st. Wow. Oof. Yeah. Toteling of all time since inception, negative $458 million. Yikes. This was a bad week for net outflows of Ethereum. So like in so when you say inflows, outflows, like not great, I mean, historically they've been pretty good. I mean, if you look at all of the ETFs, ETH is like number five in terms of, your best top performing ETS. Total new inflows, yeah.

Yeah. The problem is, particularly this week, we got absolutely slammed with a whole bunch of outflows. All of that, of course, coming from grayscale, Ether E. So you could say, it's all going from gray scale. Yeah, you could say, look, it's just, you know, accelerating. This needed to happen anyway. But the net of it is, like last week when we were saying these numbers, we were at, you know, 360 net outflows, right?

We want to get that to zero. And then we want to get that positive territory. This week, we're at 460 million net outflows. So that's not feeling great. Do you think some of the bears were right that, like, institutional investors don't care about Ethereum? Well, I will say granted the amount of time that we were all surprised about the Bitcoin outflows from the GBTC with the Bitcoin ETFs launched. That was like that was about two weeks of outflows and like dashed expectations about the Bitcoin ETFs and then things reversed.

And we are at two plus like a little over two weeks, two weeks. We started on fifth. We were at the 22nd. So like it's about the same amount of time before things reverse for Bitcoin. And also when the GBDC whole really got plugged. On the bright side of things, ETHA from BlackRock passed a billion dollars in total inflows. That's big. So $1 billion, $4 million of total inflows into the Black Rock ETF.

Fidelity doing great at 375. BitWi is doing great at 310. And then like almost like no third, fourth place. Vannack is in fourth at 60 million. But it's really those three contenders here. I guess I would say it's probably still too soon to tell would be the TLDR of whether this has been bullish or bearish, but it hasn't been bearish yet. I mean, I don't think the date is fully in. We just had a bad week, let's say on that side of things. Total crypto market cap, 1.2 trillion, about flat from last week, I think. David. 2.2 trillion. That's why I do it. Oh, did I get it wrong? It's 1.1. It's 1.2 trillion? No, it's 2.2 trillion. I was looking at this. What is this? Oh, this is Bitcoin. Yeah, that's why you do it, David. I was looking at Bitcoin is $1.2 trillion. And total crypto market cap is $2.2. I can't believe I just like lost a trillion in there. I didn't even know. I didn't even know. Temporary Bitcoin maxi. Everything else is shit coin. There's only Bitcoin. Okay. Well, I'm doing this section for you, David, because I know you are an enthusiastic Tron Schiller and, you know, like pumper. And so.

And this is not, like, I'm being a little facetious here. But like, David, actually, lately you've been, you've been DMing me. And you've been like, hey, do you see what's going on with Tron? Like, well, you should buy some Tron. Like, we should get some Tron. And you've been doing it on justifiable reasons, which is, you say the fundamentals are great. I don't know if your experience in Argentina is also confirming this. Like if people in Argentina are actually using Tron.

But here's Tron on the Seven Day, 20% up. one of the top movers, number four, just behind AVE, which also had a great week and Polygon. Well, let's talk about Tron. Okay, in your words, explain to me why is Tron doing things in the market? This week or this year? Like, pick a time frame for me because there's two different answers depending on the time. Well, are you bullish on the week or are you bullish on the year, David? I'm more bullish on the year than I am on the week.

Then there you go. Let's pick that time. Tron on the year is doubled. It started, and even, so going back two years, so like, call it January, 2023, so a year and a half. Tron was at five cents. It's currently at 15 cents. So it's three X in 18 months. Strong outperforming the market.

Hasn't outperforming Solana, but it's outperformed basically everything else on like just very strong network-based activity, largely stable coin transfers, and a lot of TRX being burnt. $271 million of Tron was burnt over the last year. How much ETH was burnt in net, Ryan, over the last year, would you say, do you think? What's the number for Tron? $271 million of Tron was net burnt over the last 12 months. How much ETH was net burnt over the last year? 400 million. We issued $12 million.

Ether was net inflationary year over year, whereas Tron burnt $271 million. On dominantly stable coin transfer volume, Oh, you're saying? All over the world. And so this is like not really activity in Europe. Maybe it's a little bit in Europe, not actual activity at all in the United States. But like Eastern Europe, South America, Africa, like in Argentina, Tron is like the dominant blockchain for stable coin payments.

I was like, I think I mentioned this on a podcast, not the weekly world, not too long ago. Tarun Chitra was in the country of Georgia not too long ago. And he said the whole country of Georgia just runs on tether on Tron. And so this is how Tron has just like performed an outsides amount of just burning from network activity. Yeah. And you're saying burning, right? So it's just fees and then they burn a portion of that fees. That's why I was getting a little wrapped up.

But it's actually just like total fees is impressive. So here's the chart for you on token terminal. David, Tron is in pink here. So Ethereum in kind of this aqua type color. And Ethereum was crushing Tron in terms of total fees generating. Generating. Yeah. Well, during the bull market.

Was that a bull market? During March, you know, kind of April, earlier in the year. Yeah, the ghost market. Well, you can see. It's all Ethereum, right, in terms of fees generated. And then Pink starts to take over for the past like three to six months. And now pink is like dominant. So let's see.

At the beginning of the last 90 days, Tron was pulling in just 44% of the revenue. Now Tron accounts for a staggering 93% of the top five chains revenue. 93% Bitcoin, Solana, finance chain at Tron. Tron accounts for 93% of the revenue. All right. And so this is why I've been like, I've been like pinging bankless ventures being like, hey, we should just like buy, guys, we should buy some tron. We just put some tron.

We don't got to tell anyone. We don't have to, we don't have, we don't. No one needs to know. Fundamentals is your use case here. And then also, let me give you another explanation for why Tron is up, maybe on the week or maybe this is more than one. Okay. The weak news is very different.

Okay. this is sunpump. meme. You remember pump. I do remember. Solana has that going on. It's still going. Well, Justin's son, not to be outdone,

has sunpump dot meme. And it's doing some activity here. Look, here's a din board. It's incentivizing. They are incentivizing memes on Tron. So there is like over $200,000, $300,000 of a prize pool based on performances of specific coins.

Yeah. There's also a partnership between SunPump. Fun and Polonex, a centralized exchange. So if you launch a meme coin on Sun Pump, and it maintains a million dollars of trading volume for three days in a row, it will get listed on Poloniacs. There, David. Do you feel good about that now?

You feel good about Tron. It's just all meme coins and pumps. Damn it, dude. I was really having fun with my stable coin, like, fundamentals. And then we get meme coins. I mean, like, at Pocetron on the level of decentralization, etc. Like that's all, you know, and Justin's son, you could say all sorts of things about him. Of course.

You could say all sorts of things. But one thing that is impressive. You are right as the fundamentals. Like people, users are actually using it. It's actually generating revenue. So you can't take that away. That's all on the on-chain data. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. And like, I think the meme coins are actually like the much less dominant price mover. It's the local price mover for this week because like it's getting some marginal new capital, marginal new users. Say what you will. Like there has been 250,000 new. address is and not 24 hours on Tron. And so that's that's kind of responsible for the short-term price action. But really the big iceberg under the water is just like the fact that like Tron

is like the world's stable coin payment provider. Well, David, the meme coins aren't enough to restore investor sentiment in crypto, at least not yet. But, you know, the stock market's doing pretty well when it comes to sentiment. So it was just a few weeks ago earlier in August, was that August 4th, August 5th, we got that, like, massive drop on a regular Sunday and then into Monday in the stock market. And the markets, the NASDAQ, S&P 500, all swaying into extreme fear territory. Well, we are back to neutral in the stock market on fear and greed index market sentiment. So stock market's kind of feeling good, willing to let the yen carry trade shenanigans just like, you know. gone. It's gone. It's gone. We forgot about it. That's gone.

Resume the bull. And Jerome Powell, you know, it looks like he's cutting rates in September. That has not been the same with crypto. So we are still in the fear territory in crypto kind of lagging behind. Not extreme fear at this point in time, but still kind of fearful. I think people are kind of just worried that like crypto just doesn't have momentum and we're losing momentum. And if we don't have, if we don't, if we can't continue to go up, then like, then therefore we go down. at least like, does it have to be that way, but traders might make it become that way. Like, oh, we stopped going up and let's sell. And then you have like another like liquidation candle. Like sometimes that's how crypto markets work.

Do these people not see progress that we're making on sunpump.meep? How dare they deny the innovations that we have? All right. We got more coming up. The Democrats had their national convention this week. So did it include a crypto? I hope you have that number in your head of how many times crypto was mentioned in the policy. Also, the Harris campaign did say something about crypto on the week.

Was this a pivot? Or is Gary Kensler going to be the new secretary of the Treasury? Also, some metrics for you, David. Do you know how much ETH Trump holds? Do you know? A very much not zero amount. Well, yeah. We're going to give you that not zero amount in the next section.

He's also like this on-chain entrepreneur with tons of recurring revenues. We'll talk about that too. We'll get to all of that. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including our recommended exchange, which is Cracken. If you want a crypto trading experience backed by world-class security and award-winning support teams, then head over to Cracken, one of the longest standing and most secure crypto platforms in the world. Cracken is on a journey to build a more accessible, inclusive, and fair financial system,

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seamless synergies with the Uniswap web app. So go and download the Uniswap extension today by clicking the link in the show notes. Just another way Uniswap is helping you swap smarter. Democrats had their national convention this week. News media was a buzz and they released their 94-page policy platform. I've got the index here, David. So the answer to how many times? Yeah, I'm sure you read every single word, right? Between you and I, you're the reader. I read a few words. Not every single words, but I did do a nice, you know, control F to search for a keyword, which is crypto.

So how many times, David, did crypto, was crypto mentioned this policy paper? Drum roll. Zero times. Zero times. It was zero times. Yeah. Zero times. What about Bitcoin had zero times.

You know, Bitcoin would be crypto. What about blockchain? What about blockchain? Also zero. Do you want to give you some more? Digital assets. Zero. Fuck, man.

I'm out of ideas. It's all of them. No tokens. Nothing bad about crypto. Just like nothing at all. Just complete silence. Well, okay, inside of the Kamala campaign Democratic status quo, bad, like nothing is bad. I mean, that's how we have to interpret it because, I mean, nothing means, yeah, more of the same, which is bad.

Now, some people are saying, look, this is, you. A party platform document that was created before Kamala Harris took the nominee position. So this is under Biden, basically. So it doesn't include all of the changes that Kamala might make. So maybe there's some opportunity for refresh. But they touch on a lot. They talk about corporate greed, housing education, foreign policy, nothing on crypto. I'm a little jealous, though, because there is an AI section here.

Look at this. Seizing the promise and managing the risks of AI. This is one of the sections I did read. I got to say, it's not necessarily great. Is it positive towards AI or is it more like AI safety stuff? There are some- Is it D-cell or A-Sel? It feels more D-cell than A-Sel to me. Okay.

Yeah, that's basically the first line is AI holds extraordinary potential for both promise and peril. See? Promise and peril. So they're trying to split the difference here. But then the remaining focus, paragraphs mainly focused on the peril part of things. So definitely a little bit different. I so okay, I interpret that as the bellwether for tech in general. And if they have a biased decel towards AI, they're going to have a biased decel towards crypto even more so. Yeah. There was somebody who said, okay, well, point me to the

Republican platform before you get upset, start in pearl clutching around this. And the Republicans actually do have a platform on crypto. They have a paper. Yeah, that's the whole thing. Yeah, there's, I mean, not long, but it is good. So what Republicans in their platform on crypto, they say, we will defend the right to mine Bitcoin and ensure every American has the right to self-custody of their digital assets and transact free from government surveillance and control. So nothing versus this statement. Compare contrast. It's a little bit better. And I got to say, I was actually expecting something. I was actually expecting something. Oh, you were. All right. You were expecting crypto to be in here. I was expect. I mean, it's 94 pages, dude. Like,

Right. AI got a section. I was expecting something like the AI section, promise and peril, to be stated about crypto, some good, some bad, but like something. So the silence has been kind of unnerving. And here's the context, David, is crypto has never been more politically active than this year. Right. I feel like we've shown Democrats votes. I think we've shown money. We've educated many of the policymakers on crypto policy. And this feels like, again, the silence does feel like a doubling down on anti-crypto. I, you know, so that is what it is. I do kind of, I do kind of think.

Okay, so some, to put my head inside of like the Kamala campaign for whatever, I can do that, they, like, they still want Kamala to be generic Democrat. They want to be, like, they kind of want to position her as, like, as normal as possible. Same thing with the vice president Tim Wall's pick, like just high school football coach, just be normal. And so the policy that they have is like just middle of the road Democrat stuff. Just like, hey, Democrat party. Like, here's our party stance.

It's what you guys expect and want. And I think if I was like generic Democrat, like active politically old person, and I saw like crypto in there, I'd be like, what's that doing there? Like, that's weird. Like I don't think she's trying or the whole campaign, the whole party is like sticking their neck out about anything. So like adding anything new crypto or not would be like a weird move. for them because they are just trying to be very like no sharp edges just like generic democrat and so that kind of fits in that whole thing i don't think we're going to see anything we're

not going to know anything about Kamala until if she gets elected and then we're going to see what she does about crypto and then i think everyone is like rightfully worried that like yeah it's probably not going to be good yeah i think this is a sign that this is going to be status quo right the fact that like i can see that case for why she wouldn't say anything about crypto or anything big but like in a policy document in like 94 pages of the Democrats policy. It's not they can't feign ignorance this time. I mean, Trump has made it a major political issue. There was the SAB 121 veto that Biden, like they're very aware that crypto is a subject in public consciousness. At least they're aware of this kind of like single issue crypto voter force and everything the industry is is doing to kind of like

push back on these policies. And they say nothing. to me. I mean, you could, I sort of interpret that as a spit in the face. Like, I interpret this as like, we're keeping the status quo policy and like we're just totally ignoring what's going on on the other side. So, I mean, everyone can interpret this differently. And there was also this rumor floating around, which just like fits too perfectly, I think, with the narrative here, which is Kamala Harris is likely to nominate Gary Gensler as secretary treasury if elected. Okay. So if you think crypto, if you think Kamala Harris campaign is kind of spitting on the face of the industry, this is definitely a headline that sends you to full fear, panic.

Oh my God, our arch nemesis, Gary Gensler, as the Secretary of Treasury, isn't this what he always wanted? Imagine that. And so my first question on this, this is a publication called the Washington Reporter. Dot News is, okay, is this true? This was a rumor circulating all around crypto Twitter. So I asked this publicly on Twitter. Breaking.

Kamala nominates Gary Gendezer. Gensler as secretary. It's the truth. Don't, like, no source. Here's a picture. Yeah, yeah. From the insiders and people I talk to, David, it doesn't look like this is likely at all. That this is probably one of those things.

Yeah. The quote in here says, in an interview with a reporter, Tom Emma previously warned that Harris may pick Gensler or Senator Warren to serve as her secretary of treasury. That's the news. Yeah. That's not, that it was the rumor. Like, it's not that like we heard anything new. It's like one time this one guy said that she might do this.

Yes. And that's what turned into a breaking tweet or on Twitter. And then every like crypto Twitter being very viral and like knee jerky was like Kamala is the worst thing to ever happen to crypto because she's going to nominate Gary Gensler as the Treasury Secretary. It fits the narrative perfectly. It fits the narrative so well. It's it's fake news. It's just right up. It seems like it's fake news.

And it's probably the type of news that's put out by a like political campaign injected in the media. so that it goes viral. So now there's that seat of doubt. It's malicious fake news. It's not like, targeting the virality of crypto Twitter and people's wanting to confirm their own bias. Yeah.

Now, I should say it's probably not a 0% probability. I mean, anything could happen. Certainly not. You never know. But the idea that this is a serious contender for this position, I don't think that's ever been true. And certainly hasn't been true this week, at least according to everything that we're seeing.

In the wake of this, though, David, there was there was a bright spot. So there's this news headline here. This is in Bloomberg Crypto. Vice President Kamala Harris will back measures to help grow digital assets, a policy advisor to her campaign said, highlighting efforts to court an emerging cryptocurrency industry. And the headline here is, if I can get past the paywall, the headline here is something to the effect of Harris supports policies to expand the crypto industry. So this is like a breaking of the silence.

This is not happening from the Kamala campaign. And this happened, like, it's Wednesday, Wednesday the 21st. Yeah, it's a real statement. Real statement, a real post in Bloomberg. The question is, what does it mean? You have any takes on what it means? Is it real, though? Like, what's going on here?

Yeah. So the guy who made this statement, his name is Brian Nelson. Actually, by the way, David, do you ever use perplexity. I have started to recently use perplexity. It's so much better than Google. Right. It's like you asked the question of like I asked who is Brian Nelson. That's this, this aid to the Kamala Harris campaign.

So he's formerly in the Biden administration. And then what's his position on crypto? And the summary was just fantastic. Nelson's position appears to be one of cautious engagement with the crypto industry, focusing on addressing potential risks and illicit activities while recognizing the need for clear regulations. He's the type of guy to come to crypto conferences, to take crypto calls. This is a source from him at Consensus.

This is Brian Nelson, and he gave a talk at Consensus in the wake of Tornado Cash. It was very much like we don't want to destroy crypto innovation, but look, AMLKYC is necessary, and all actors need to play by those rules. It's that type of. So it's not like comforting, okay, but he is not someone who has previously ignored crypto. He tends the events and, like, as kind of the cop on. conference is like a huge like gold star from me. I guess.

He's an aide to the Kamala campaign? Yeah, he's an aide. And he's former Biden administration on the, um, on the treasury side of this. This is our fucking guy. This is how we get him. This is our end. It's not.

I don't think it is at all. I think he's actually kind of, um, an AML K Y C, maxi, kind of a, you know, um, that type of person. He's not, he's not a foot in the door. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

Maybe they're so. I got to say. we've seen no evidence yet again another week that's gone by of a Kamala pivot and of course even these statements are just statements there's nothing really substantial behind them so that's the story man oh this do you want to get a nick carter tweet on all this he says uh from vp harris look i understand that i'm currently in power and have the ability to change literally anything regarding our max hostile anti-cryptop policy but instead of doing that i'm going to make an extremely vague promise about potentially changing things later maybe.

That's his cynical take on what the Kamala campaign is doing here. Okay, the anti take to that is that like Kamala's the vice president, not the president. And as vice president, you only have as much power as the president lets you have. And so like the, but there's still a chance, but there might be a chance take is that like, well, Biden's not going to do anything because like why would he? Like he's in his whatever few months left. And then Kamala might actually. truly pivot, but Biden isn't, like,

the Biden administration is the way to go. But, like, if this is what I'm saying, if Kamala gets elected and we, and it hasn't been with the support of the crypto industry, she's not going to then pivot. I know. Like, well, she's already in power.

The point of maximum leverage is right now. It is right now. Which is so, which is so extremely disappointing for anyone who has hoped and dreamed of making crypto bipartisan, where you have both parties, fully support.

Both parties. So as a credibly neutral, like, open democratic technology for the world and for the United States. And that doesn't look like that's happening. Maybe there's a sliver of a chance. You and I are talking to Rokana tomorrow. So he is a crypto positive Democrat in Congress. I think that's going to get us the best insight as to like what we can do here, what the status quo is. What are the state of things?

I think that's the best conversation we're going to be able to have to get a peek into like what's going on. David, you want to know. And like if you're if you're a believer of just like, hey, in order to like truly reform the Democrats to be pro-crypto, they need to lose this election and so they can rebuild. It's going to be the Roe-Conna Democrats that like rebuild the Democratic Party into the party that we want it to be in the crypto industry. That is true. Yeah. So you got to maintain that dialogue.

I mean, that's why we're having Roe-Connor on, obviously. David, meanwhile, Trump is doing things on chain. He's making a lot of money on-chain, okay, Donald Trump. And stark contrast. He's the on-chain entrepreneur of the year, maybe. I'm not sure. If you think of this as, you know, good. But this, apparently he released his financial, at least some of his financials publicly.

I'm not sure that this includes tax returns, but blockworks put together this chart. This is how much Trump currently earns on both NFTs and on meme coins. I actually didn't know. Meme coins were actually paying Trump. I thought there was like a bunch of fake meme coins. But apparently there are some meme coins. meme coins out there in which every time they're traded, he gets 2% to the Trump wallet. And they're not his meme coins. He didn't launch the meme coins. It's other people's meme

coins that in order to gain legitimacy, pointed the tax to his wallet. Yeah, it took me, it took me a second to realize that. I didn't realize that. We have the Trump NFTs. These are not official Trump meme coins then. These are not, these are not official Trump. There's, there's, there's, I think there's three or four of them. One of them is called save America. Another one is called Trump bucks. There's a few others as well. They pay a 2% tax on all transfers, not trades, transfers. So if you transfer it, it goes to the Trump wallet.

These meme coins have generated $354,000 in Eth over the past four months for Donald Trump. Donald Trump, yeah. Yeah, that's a lot. And then in addition to his meme coins, he's got $2.14 million of Eth from sales of his NFT collections. His three NFT collections, his three Trump cards. along with two more million dollars of royalty fees from secondary sales of these NFTs. These are the NFTs. These are the ones that he gave kind of name, you know, image license to and gets royalties from this. These are official Donald Trump NFTs, yeah.

The meme coins are not. But what's the total of that? So apparently in total, all of his assets. The supply is huge. Yeah, not crypto assets, but in total, he has 635 million in assets according to this. So not a billionaire according to this. How do we know that? How do you do that? Well, that comes to the, these things right here. Financial disclosure for him? Yeah, some financial disclosures. I thought he like was trying really hard to not give us that.

I don't, I don't know all the details here, but I think these financial disclosures are here, but like everyone's asking for the tax forms and we don't have that. We do have these financial disclosures. So in summary, Trump has about $5 million in crypto. Most of that looks like it's ether, at least the stuff we could see on chain. And it's a steady stream of revenue at this point. So it's like daily. He's getting like four to five K a day at this point. And it's more than the amount of revenue he's doing for the apprentice.

You know, the royalty to the apprentice or the acting gigs he's done in the past. Like, you know, he was in home alone. So you get some royalties on that. It dwarfs all of those revenue sources at this point. Yeah. So he gets 10% of royalty fees for his trump cards. I actually think he gets Polygon. I think he gets Matic token.

because they're on Polygon. Yeah, I don't know, man. He's just the on-chain entrepreneur. Donald Trump officially a Polygon bowl. What do we got coming up, David? Coming up next, optimism and disabled their fraud-proofs, rut row. What does that mean? Why is that a big deal?

Should you be concerned? McDonald's, the Instagram was hacked. Or maybe they just really wanted to launch Grimmis coin? I don't know. Was Grimmis coin a scam? I don't know. Place your bets. And also a $140-40 million raise for a new.

blockchain. That's not the valuation. That is how much cash went into the bank account for this new layer one blockchain that you totally need to know about. Haven't heard about these in a while, but we're going to get to all of this and more. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. New projects are coming online to the Mantle layer two every single week. Why is this happening? Maybe it's because Mantle has been on the frontier of Layer 2 design architecture since it first started building Mantle DA, powered by technology from EigenDA. Maybe it's because users are coming onto the Mantle layer two to capture some of the highest yields available in Defy and to automatically receive the

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and ensure that you as a founder and your team and your investors get the most tax-efficient outcomes. The Toku team understands the crypto space inside and out and will ensure your token launch is fully compliant while maximizing tax efficiency. Toku can connect you with the best attorneys if you need them to make sure that you have the best advice and Toku can help to optimize your taxes

so you pay the least possible amount of taxes while still maintaining legal compliance. With Toku's guidance, you can concentrate on building your company while Toku handles the logistics. Token launches don't have to be complicated. Talk to Toku today to get a free initial token valuation. The Optimism Foundation disabled, permissionless fraud proofs. I thought they just enabled them.

What happened here? What's the story? There was a bug discovered in them. No funds were ever at risk. No funds were lost. A bug was discovered. And so they turned off the permissionless fraud proofs just so they could go and patch that bug. And why are fraud proofs important? Fraud proofs are the mechanism in which a layer two becomes like totally user-soven, totally decentralized.

If the sequencer is doing something that you do not like, you can use fraud proofs to prove fraud if they are trying to push forward at like an invalid state transition. So if they try to steal your money, basically you have a fraud proof backup to be like, nope, I can prove that that was fraud. and I actually can exit my funds on the layer one. Exactly. So like because of all the state in a layer two, it gets like marcoized and then using a fraud proof, you can trace the Merkel on the Merkel tree. And then you can prove to the system,

the fraudulent state transition happened on a particular leaf of a Merkel tree. And then you can, you know, take like actually either slash the sequencer, withdraw your funds, some technical stuff. But it's what it takes in order to have like fully autonomous layer two's that preserve user sovereignty. They are brand new technology.

Like optimism was one of the first ones, is the first one to ship permissionless fraud proofs. Arbitrum has fraud proofs, but it's not permissionless. A committee can submit a fraud proof, but not like the general public. But fraud proofs are really hard. There's like a lot of edge cases.

There's a lot of permutations. There's a lot of weird, weird attack vectors. And so this was the first one. So kind of rolled back a security measure so they could patch it and then release it. I don't even know if like perfect fraud proofs are without a secondary measure are like an actual possibility.

Like you can have multi-client fraud proofs. Like you could have a ZK proof, do a validity proof and a fraud proof. Both work. And if one fails, then the other one is the fallback. You could also have a third fallback as a multi-sig. So there's multiple ways of like kind of solving this. But I think people are kind of currently investing. like can you actually really do perfect fraud proofs and this is kind of the first hurdle the first like

trip in the system that we're kind of like going through as these things become ready for prime time so there's a there there was a bug in it that doesn't feel great the part that does feel good is that the optimism team was able to kind of like push a fix and so right now permissionless fraud proofs are disabled in a few weeks like I think in early September they're going to push a patch and reenable them but this does bring into the the conversation of, well, the optimism team, they have the ability to upgrade the code for optimism. And isn't that a centralization vector? And it totally is a centralization vector.

And the reason you need it is because of situations like this. If we had hands off, if the keys were burnt, if there's no way to upgrade the optimism code, then basically this bug would be kind of like out until you had, you know, like, I guess, I don't know, a fork of the entire system. it would be a lot messier. So I think it's going to take a long time to fully get these training wheels off. And when you have bugs like this,

you kind of like remind yourself, wow, you know, bad stuff can happen. We have to give this years to sort of mature in the ecosystem without issue, without hack, before we like make this fully decentralized with no ability to push an upgrade. Yep, that's right. So the upgrade process will take about three weeks.

And then a new hard fork scheduled for September 10th will be the first phase of this getting fixed. And that's that. Ready for more pump dot fund metrics? Yeah. Yeah. I've been waiting for it. Yeah.

Holding your breath. Okay. I know we kind of did a bit like this last week, but some even more data about pump dot fund metrics of meme coin traders success. Full meme coin traders have come out. Okay. Say like, say you make like $1,000 on pump dot fund.

Where do you think if you've made in profit, $1,000 from Pump.com, where does that place you on like the continuum of successful to not successful traders on Pump. Dot fund? Like better than 55%. Assuming like, you know, like base case, 50% of people have lost money, 50% of people have made money, if that's a possibility. Where do you think making $1,000 places you? I mean, a thousand isn't a lot. And we talked about this a little bit last week. So I feel like I'm more like prepared to make a guess. But it would definitely be under, you know, 1%, but still, a thousand is not a lot. So I would just say, like, I mean, that's a pretty low bar, pretty low threshold. I mean, like, you just, you just hold a

crypto asset for like, I don't know, a few weeks. You can make, like, you can make that kind of money on just like something like Toronto. Yeah, exactly. Okay. So what's the answer to that? Making $1,000 or more, what's that hurdle? If you make it, if you are in profit on pump dot fund by $1,000, you are in the top 3% of all people who have ever played on pump dot fund. If you've made over $10,000, you are in the top half a percent. If you've made over $100,000, you are in 0.037%. And if you've made a million dollars, you are in the top 0.0028% of all wallets. Which I think people have started to realize, like, Pump. Dot fun is not an even playing field. It is a lottery ticket. Like, it's not, it's not roulette where, like, you know, you'll lose some. You

some. It's not blackjack. It is the odds are just like, you know, it's not investing. The odds are like buy and hold. But there's a very small chance that you make a lot of money. And that's actually, I think people are coming to terms with like meme coins are kind of like that. It's also different from a lottery in that if you are positioned to make a lot of money, it's probably because you have some information arbitrage or you're an influencer or you're like, like one of the devs in the project. Right. So it's not even like. You created the token. Yeah, it's not even like a lottery, which like, hey, the odds are bad and it's gambling. Everyone knows this.

But at least it's like credibly neutral. I mean, there's some randomization of like who wins the lotto ticket. There's not that here, which kind of feels bad, man. It's like, you know. You never hear anyone about like rigging the lottery numbers. Like, that doesn't happen. Right. But I guess, you know, the hope that you're going to make a million dollars on meme coins is just like not happening for a lot of people.

There was a notable release on Pump. fun though this week david and that is grimace coin what i have to assume is macdonald's official coin for their lovable mascot an official legitimate meme coin from from macdonald's what's what's grimmis the word grimace have to do with macdonald do you remember do you remember this character this is like early 90s lore i think like this guy this the big purple fuzzy guy purple fuzzy creature like no one's really sure what sort of creature he is or what he's supposed to be this is grimace You know, he used to team up in the early, like late 80s, early 90s with like Ronald McDonald's. Yeah, his name's grimace.

It's part of like ancient McDonald's. I don't know. So this is, and what we're looking at right here is the official McDonald's Instagram account. And it says this. A McDonald's experiment on Solana with the eyeball emojis. And then they link to it. A salina address. Yeah, it's a Salana address.

And it is the, what appears to be because this is the official McDonald's Instagram. account. This appears to be the official McDonald's Grimmis coin. They even got picture, have pictures of Grimmis with Ronald here and, you know, people are excited, right? So if this is real, this is insanely bullish, is one of the top comments here. Okay. Okay. So it was launched on Pump. Dot fund because, of course, the token went up to $20 million market cap before nuking straight back down to below $650.5.5.000. $50,000. The hacker of the, obviously, because this is not actually McDonald's. Oh, thank you for saying that. Okay. This is not the official grimace coin.

Yeah. It's not the official grimace coin. There is no official grimace coin. The hacker of the McDonald's Instagram account, not even the Twitter, the Instagram, got about $700,000 out from this scam. They used pumped up fund to snap up 75% in the total circulating supply and then spit it out between 100 different wallets and then sold those wallets into the the pump that happened. Okay, here's my question. I'm sure both are correct, but what is more correct?

People saw this on Instagram, and they were like, oh my God, McDonald's is launching an official grimace meme coin, I have to buy. Okay. Or people saw this on Instagram, and they saw, oh, the Salana Instagram

was hacked. I'm going to go buy this before everyone else, and then I'm going to dump it. Which is more correct. Are you asking me whether innocent people got hurt in this? Yes. Yes. I have to believe very few innocent people actually got hurt in this. Maybe there's a few out there that are like, hey, I've been waiting my whole life for

the grimace coin on Salana. And they also know how to use like a crypto wallet and are experienced enough to go like from this salon address, go buy that on like in the salon exchanges. So maybe. Okay. So you've got the chart pulled up. Can you zoom into the. charts. Okay, so we've zoomed into where this token was launched. It's green candle.

This green candle is a spike at 11.15 a.m. And then it goes all the way back down. Like most of the way back down, it's kind of hard to tell because it's not in log, but like by 12 p.m. So this happened, most of the activity happened inside of 45 minutes. Like, are normies who don't know what's up with meme coins and pump. dot fun buying this thing inside of 45 minutes because they saw it on Instagram? Or is it people with their finger on the trigger because they're like in the meme coin trenches? Then they're just like ready to go. I think it's the latter. I do not think any sweet old ladies got hurt in this like fortunately. Although I will say I mean that's quite the price. You go and you hack a corporate social media account and you make a cool 700K. It's putting quite the price tag on like for all of these hackers.

Exports. Yeah. To make this amount of money. So so on the way at L. the door after this is all just had a done, the hacker of the McDonald's Instagram page edits the Instagram bio and says, sorry my N-word, you have just been rug pulled by India X crew. Thank you for the $700,000 on Solana. Ooh, just asking for it. That level of hubris, huh? Just asking for it. Right. Yeah. There you go. That's the legacy of grimace coin. Maybe we'll have a real official grimace coin at this point, like at some point in the future, but it's not, and we're all just We're all just going to let it go by because we're going to be like, that's a scam.

Yeah. And we'll really miss out on the opportunity. All right. Let's talk about some raises of the week. This was an absolutely major one, massive one. Monster. It feels very, very bully. Largest of the year?

Yeah. So this is announcing $140 million from the Story Protocol. That's the raise amount. That's not the valuation. This is a layer one blockchain called Story, which is the world's IP. blockchain, okay? And some notable investors here, A16C. The world's IP blockchain? Yeah, Bala G, Sri and some notable investors here. The actual, this was actually a series B, so it was 80 million. So I think they're announcing their bigger amount, which is 140 million total. This amount specifically

was 80 million, but they've raised 140 million total. So it's an IP. It's a layer one IP blockchain. I have to admit. What is an IP blockchain? Did they just make that up? They just made that up? It's programmable IP. So I imagine it's, I don't know, it's things like trademarks. Programable IP. Things like, I don't know, what other IP, they just different copyright licenses, I suppose, could be patents, you know, programmable IP. Okay. If you don't have something nice to say, David.

There is more information about like the thesis behind this from one of the founders here, Jason Zau. And then he actually goes through why it happens. to be a layer one. Apparently, they tried with optimism first. So they wanted a smart contract protocol. Again, like, here's a bullcase maybe. IP is just another type of asset. You know, you're a believer, aren't you, David? Aren't all of us that all real world assets will eventually be on chain? So that obviously includes IP patents, this kind of thing, licenses to songs, all of this. And they tried to do it in a layer two at first. It turned out they couldn't kind of get that working wasn't as programmable as they needed.

They had to build it from scratch. And then you have a layer one, the world's first IP blockchain. So you should read the entire. I have not read this. Some of these premises do not fit inside of my model for how blockchains work.

Yes, I know they don't. The layer two is as equally as programmable as anything else. Like there's no loss of programmability due because maybe I misstated that. I'm like I've kind of skimmed it. I need to give this more more thought to you. but that's what's going on.

I think your model, it doesn't fit in your model because you're probably reminded of, as am I, like chains like Flow, for instance. Remember, flow is going to be kind of the gaming, NFT, collectible.

It's like the NFT layer one. And that really just hasn't amounted to anything. It was an absolutely massive raise like during the peak of last cycle. So I think you're probably getting flashbacks or something like that. That's right. I don't know.

Open mind, I suppose. But that is a massive. raise. And we haven't seen the likes of this for a very long time in crypto. Okay. Since we are talking about IP on the blockchain, this is not the first time that this has been worked on. This is not the first idea of bringing IP on the blockchain. People out of the D-Sy space have just contributed this open source standard called the IPNFT, so intellectual property, non-fundable token to provide a secure and immutable proof of ownership for intellectual property on chain. These tokens ensure the details of IP on

ownership are unique transparent tamper-proof, enabling researchers to asset ownership, raise funds, and monetize IP. This is from like this open source document out of the DSI community for like a legal smart contract structure to host IP inside of an NFT. And this is an open standard, uh, that people have worked on. People in the get coin community have worked on this. Um, uh, Vita Dow, the Dow trying to build like longevity tech in the space, uh, has, has worked on this as well. Uh, So I would also like, since we're talking about IP, I'd also like to point over to that open standard, which exists and is maybe worth your attention as well. Second raise on the week, Sorrella Labs raised 7.5 and a seed round to solve MEV on Ethereum and also specifically Uniswap. Yeah, obviously, like solving MEV is a pretty large design space here.

But they're doing it in a cool way. What are they up to? So this is specifically around Uniswap in Uniswop v4. they're building a hook to kind of solve the like impermanent loss, the just arbitrages eating away at liquidity inside of Uniswap from largely sex decks trading. So like since Ethereum has 12 second block times or just any block, any even layer two has slower block times than like say Binance, which Binance doesn't have block times.

This is like real time. And so because blockchains lag Binance, LPs and Uniswap get their liquidity nibble away from sex dex arbitraub. It's a very big problem. It's one of the reasons why, like, LPNSwap has not been able to be as profitable as it could be because they're getting eaten by arbitrage bots. So Sorella Labs is building a hook on Uniswap V4 that LPs can deposit their liquidity into Uniswap through the hook. And then traders, if they want to access that liquidity through the hook, have to trade through the hook. And the hook is an extension of Uniswap.

It was discussed when Uniswap before was announced. It reorders the transactions. It does the M.E. but it points the MEV back into the LP positions rather than giving it to the LP bot. So rather than the LP bots capturing 99% of the arbitrage, the MEV, the hook captures 99% of the MVV and points it back into UNISWP liquidity providers with a goal of trying to make LPing and uniswap great again. Yeah.

I mean, I think this is an example of like in the background, the builders are continuing to build and solving some big problems. You remember we were looking at Dex volume a little while ago as a percentage? of a total market volume. And like when we first got into crypto, you know, at least defy was launched, you know, 2019, 2020, there was nothing. There was no activity on Dexas. There's just like it was below zero percent.

It was below one percent, right? And now we're at about 15 percent. So 15 percent of crypto market trading, volume, activity now happens on Dexas. But that still leaves 85 percent happening on sexes. That's where the price discovery is. That's where the deep liquidity is, all of that. If we want to get that to 30% on chain or 50% on chain or completely invert that and get this to like 85% on chain, 15% on sexes, then you need to make it attractive for capital to locate here and

liquidity to locate here. And solving this type of infrastructure problem does that. Anyway, it's bullish. I think we're going to get beyond 15% in the coming years as we solve problems like this, like towards 20%, towards 25%. And then the majority of our trading at some point in the future will be bankless on-chain transparent. That's kind of how we solve this, right? incremental gains like this.

Getting price discovery on-chain is like one of the most important landmarks that we can claim as an industry. Right now, decks trading, like on-chain price discovery, lives in the shadow of Binance. We need that relationship to invert. We need Binance to respond to what is happening on blockchains, not the other way around. And mechanisms like this, designs like this are crucially important to making that happen. All right, we got the meme of the week, David. This is not only a meme. It is a Vitalik bullpost.

Quite literally, what are we looking at here? Vitalik says, I have been told on Twitter, I have been told that I need to do less philosophizing and do more Ethereum bullposting. Hence, here is an Ethereum bullpost courtesy of stable diffusion and in painting plus Gimp. And there's a picture of a bull with a sign around its neck saying Ethereum is good. Do you see the traction that this got? Like, I just like so many retweets, so many likes. You know, just so much more than a...

2.5 million views. Yeah, he said it defeated. He wrote an essay this week, too. I don't know if you got caught up on that. It's a long one. It's like 10,000 plus words. And this just... I read about 3,000 of them.

Yeah, this destroyed the engagement of that long post in like just like three minutes, he said. So there's your Vitalik bull post. That's all he's willing to do. He never comments on price, David. Does he? Like, very rarely. the last time I saw him comment on price was when Solana was $8 and then he tweeted out like I hear there's a lot of really good builders on Solana and that that tweet perfectly marked the bottom of Solana in 2020 yeah

was that other famous tweet was this in 2017 have we earned it tweet that was the other time I'm recalling of Vitalik commenting on he top ticked Ethereum and he bottom ticked Solano with his two price price tweets get this guy head The power should take up trading. Yeah, for real. All right, got to end with this. Of course, you know crypto is risky, including meme coins. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us in the Big List Journey.

Thanks a lot.