Bankless - ROLLUP: Uptober Green Light? | Robinhood Goes All-In | $400M Bitget Hack | Prediction Markets to SCOTUS

Episode Date: October 2, 2026

Bitcoin just broke its bearish market structure, but surging bond yields could still test the rally. Ryan and David unpack Uptober, Robinhood’s trading push, the Bitget hack, and prediction markets�...�� path to the Supreme Court. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔓 NEAR | TRADE CONFIDENTIALLY, GET 20% BACK https://bankless.cc/near2026 🎯 THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://thedefireport.io/bankless 👑 BANKLESS CONTENT MCP https://www.bankless.com/premium --- TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 0:09 Bitcoin Breaks Bearish Structure https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/bitcoin https://x.com/hariskhantrader/status/2104621748591403035 6:35 Bond Yields, Liquidity & Macro Risk https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2105337195884052870 https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-inflation-rises-less-than-expected-august-consumer-spending-surges-2026-09-30/ https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2105355997892239838 https://x.com/EpsilonTheory/status/2105345560064745548 https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/TVC-MOVE/ https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2105279482957369587 22:06 Robinhood Goes All-In https://x.com/fintechfrank/status/2105082039733305734 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/2105062331436966323 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/2105063773165818119 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/2105072369509257220 https://robinhood.com/us/en/agents/ 33:19 BitGet Hack & NEAR Permissionless Debate https://www.theblock.co/news/business/bitget-starts-phased-withdrawal-resumption https://x.com/AlexAuroraDev/status/2104554958754357482 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/2104955420401955273 https://x.com/kylekrason/status/2104562944457740481 https://x.com/near_intents/status/2105642219357241796 44:23 Prediction Markets Head to Court https://www.legalreader.com/new-york-sues-polymarket-over-gambling-rules/ https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/us-appeals-court-rules-against-kalshi-says-states-can-regulate-prediction-2026-09-25/ https://www.coinbase.com/blog/coinbase-receives-cftc-approval-for-coinbase-clearing-llc 48:29 Ethereum’s Cryptographic World Computer https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/2104160561374343176 https://x.com/cryptographicas/status/2104212366271390055 https://x.com/barnabemonnot/status/2104260847975707013 56:14 AI Agents & Bank Runs https://x.com/JasonYanowitz/status/2104213040937812262 https://openai.com/index/introducing-dots/ --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:03 Bankless Station, it is the first week of October and the bearish market structure broke the weekly Bitcoin candle. And in addition to that, the monthly Bitcoin candle both closed above the previous May high. I think the big question for the entire market to answer is that is this a green light for October? Ryan, do you remember October last year? Oh my God, you said it. You cursed us now. We're all doomed. We and I were very excited for October last year. And the first week of October last year was like a little bit green and we were kind of excited. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:00:38 And then we said October too many times and we cursed it and the rest of the month sucked. It became down tober. Yeah, it was bare market tober. It was bare market tober. But that was last October. That was last October. We still have October possibly on the menu for this month. Well, I think a question to be answered is what's macro doing and could that disrupt or I'm not going to say it.
Starting point is 00:00:59 Or October? because there's a little bit of a paradox going on in markets. Inflation came in kind of cool, but the 10-year yields are going sky high and they're not stopping. Ben Hunt said this week, something in the financial world is going to break when referring to these yields. We'll talk about that. Also, David, you went to the Hood Summit. That was in Houston, Texas. I want to know why you went.
Starting point is 00:01:22 What Robin Hood is shipping? I'll find out all about that because I saw a lot of announcements coming out, but you were on the ground. I want to get your impressions on that as well. Also, there was a $400 million bit get hack. We had an exchange hack on Friday of last week. And also, that has turned into a conversation around near intense and the permissionless nature of that system and whether crypto wants that or not.
Starting point is 00:01:44 Also, New York has sued Polly Market. A federal court has ruled that states can regulate Kalshi. And it seems like we're all taking this to the Supreme Court is just looking more and more inevitable these days. So we're going to cover all of this and more. But first, we're starting with the market. Once again, the Bitcoin weekly candle closed above the May high of this year. So the weekly candle closed was the highest Bitcoin price that we've had since like early January of this year.
Starting point is 00:02:11 That is also true for the October monthly candle as well. So in this is September, you mean? The September. Don't get out of yourself. September. Excuse me. September. We are now in October. Thank you.
Starting point is 00:02:22 Thank you. If you are a trader, if you do TA, the importance of weekly and monthly candles closes is. That's just what is going to be on the chart looking forward. And had we dipped below the may high, you would have seen a lower high, but instead we got a higher high for the year. And so the idea here is that the bearish market structure that we previously had has broken giving us potentially a green light, a runway for more bullishness in the remaining three weeks of this month. I don't know what your quaint is saying, David, but my quant, Michael Nato, has also signed off on what you just said.
Starting point is 00:03:02 He has said we are in the early bull and we got the confirmation this week because we got a second weekly close where you just said above the 50 week moving average which is 76.8K and we got a close above that 84.5K. So the last objection people had which was like,
Starting point is 00:03:22 Are you sure? Is the sustained? I mean, the chart is rejecting that. And if this chart doesn't hold, it doesn't, not to say we couldn't go down, we may still go down. But if this overall structure, the structure that you said has broken now in an upward direction, broken the back of the bear market, if that doesn't hold after these monthly averages are locked in, then it will be the first time ever it hasn't hold it. So that feels like a good foundation. from a crypto market structure to just say, we are in the early bull phase. Speaking of good foundations, I do kind of enjoy, I don't really enjoy it because it's financially painful, but nonetheless, we are seeing some weakness in some alts for the first time.
Starting point is 00:04:09 Lit is down 30% from the highs. Wait, wait, what are you enjoying about this? The buying opportunity is, are you getting like that? No, I'm fully allocated. I got no cash. But less, it's just like, this is... You enjoy the pain of markets.
Starting point is 00:04:22 I enjoy the pay. I'm a little bit of a masochist. You know, my financial era was born by buying like $1,000 ETH in 2017 and having that go to $80. And still believing. And still believing and then making that all back in 2020, 2021. And so it's just important that we just get a breather. Prices go down. There's some pain in the market for that to not be too frothy.
Starting point is 00:04:47 We don't want to have a blow off top too soon. And things had gotten really frothy in like those five assets. Like Zcatch, for example, down 20%, Morpho down 17%. You need down 17%. While all of these tokens had painted between like 50 and 300% gains in the last, like, two or three months. Kind of in the same way that like this Bitcoin bear market, if we are indeed at the very beginnings of another four-year cycle, there's bull market ahead of us, that was the easiest bear market of all time. If this is the only dip that we get is going to be one of the easiest dips in all coins in the last like three months,
Starting point is 00:05:20 I could see more pain being on the table. It feels about right, but also at the same time, there's just a new pattern happening in the crypto market right now. And so I think this is kind of something to pay attention to. It's like how volatile are we to the downside these days? Because so far, Bitcoin is saying not that volatile to the downside. Well, this is like just probably some mean reversion here, right? Because Altz, as you said, had been on the tear.
Starting point is 00:05:44 Do you ever look at the Glass Node Altcoin Season Index? Look at this. we got into almost like full altcoin season zone and we're taking a spin down from that. The last time we got here was like way last summer when things pumped and you could see some other phases when that has happened in the past. So this is a little bit just mean reversion after this, these massive leaps. And, you know, Bitcoin has been up so much, what, like 44% since the June lows? 96% of the top 50 crypto assets actually actually.
Starting point is 00:06:18 beat Bitcoin over the last 30 days. So Bitcoin's already up. All of them other than one. Pretty much. The following 48 tokens by market cap beat Bitcoin in the last, how long? That's right. 30 days, the last month. Wow.
Starting point is 00:06:34 Yeah, last month. One other thing that might be weighing a little bit on alt-coin markets or in general, we have to weight this into where crypto is going from here in the early bulk case is inflation and yields. And there is a story emerging that is somewhat of a paradox. So firstly, we got inflation numbers in this week. And the print was actually better than expected. So annualized inflations, that's CPI, 3%.
Starting point is 00:07:05 Whereas expectations were about 3.3%. So below expectations, also the numbers were revised down from previous numbers in July. So July was actually revised down. down, and most of this was driven by high energy costs. So it was, you know, price of the pump, gas, oil, that type of thing that was really the driver. So inflation numbers good. And in a normal world, in a normal market, what you'd expect to see is as inflation cools, longer or lower long-term yields on bonds, right? And the reason for this- If the monetary asset is stronger over longer time horizons, people will accept less yields over that time.
Starting point is 00:07:51 Exactly. So if you get a good inflation print, a low inflation print, you'd expect yields to fall. That's typically what happens this time that didn't happen. So this week, yields rose more than they had in all weeks previous. Like this was the fast acceleration of yield to the upside this week than like the last four weeks we've been reporting this. Exactly. And so here's a tweet. So yields continue their rise, even on the back this inflation news, not even budging from that. The 30 year is up to 5.64%. It's highest since 2022. 2022. In the 10 year. To 2000 and 2. Oh my God. Sorry. Yes. 2000 and 2. Dyslexia on that. The highest since 22. A little dyslexia on that readout. And the 10 year is back to 5.3%. So yield's going crazy.
Starting point is 00:08:42 Wow. What do you think is happening? You know, and crazy. Well, that is crazy. This is the biggest, like, market in the world. This is the risk-free rate for capital around the world. We haven't seen these rates and this velocity and trajectory since before 2022.
Starting point is 00:08:59 Right. Yeah. Yeah. Basically, our financial lifetimes, because I was not paying attention to the bond market in 2002, Ryan, let me tell you. Yeah. Well, so I saw some tweets in the week, including this one from a friend of the show who's been on before. I haven't had him on in a while though. Ben Hunt. He said this, not to be alarmist or
Starting point is 00:09:16 anything, but this move in the 10 year, in the 30 year isn't oil or Iran related. He says that because oil was actually down in the week. Something in the financial world is going to break. That's what he said. Not to be an alarmist about things. If there's one thing I know about having Ben Hunt on the podcast is that he's kind of an alarmist. Sometimes he's right though, right? Yes, yes. Not to discredit him in any particular way. He's just, just like he's a bit of a, yeah, alarmist. Well, the mechanism here, the thing that he's worried about isn't necessarily the raw number yet, although that is, you know, something to be alarmed at.
Starting point is 00:09:53 It's the speed at which this is happening. This is like yields are going up so quickly. We haven't seen that, as you said, in your entire investing lifetime and a lot of investors feel the same. So he thinks something could break. What do you think? Do you think this is like the sign of, um, something going really wrong, and this is why maybe Besson is panicking
Starting point is 00:10:17 and he's trying to buy the long end and do all the intervention that he's been talking about lately? Why else would he be doing that if we were, if everything was normal? When something as large as the bond market moves this violently, something is going to break, like somebody somewhere, business, head fund, whatever, is positioned in a way where this really fucks their shit,
Starting point is 00:10:37 to use a technical term. Does that mean like catastrophically, this messes with every, in the whole world. I'm not totally convinced. I was listening to Jim Bianco on his recent podcast. He just started a podcast. I think he's like five or six episodes in.
Starting point is 00:10:51 He's a bond guy. He knows bonds. He's a big bond guy. Big bond guy. And he was like, he was talking about how like the whole world is freaking out because we haven't seen these rates in so long. Like 5.6% is such a high number.
Starting point is 00:11:03 And he's like, unprecedentedly high. He's like, no, no, no, no, like if you go back into the history of bond market yields,
Starting point is 00:11:10 of yields and interest rates, like five. 5.6% is a totally normal number. You know what's an absurd number? Anything below two. And so granted, ever since... That was the weirdness. Not now, right?
Starting point is 00:11:21 That was the weirdness. The whole Zerp era, post-2008, even pre-2008, that whole thing has been distorted. And finally, the clock has run out on the era of low interest rates. But that was the weird stuff. And 5.6% is a totally normal number. I think that's right.
Starting point is 00:11:39 Other bond people I'm listening to are saying the same thing. you know, I mentioned Howard Marks last week. Also, Michael Howell is someone who covers this fairly well. And he made the point that 5.3% it was normal in the 90s. In the 80s, yields were 10 to 15%. And for huge periods during the 80s, the U.S. economy is growing like gangbusters. It was like boom times.
Starting point is 00:12:00 The economy is growing right now. And it's also outside of AI as well. Like consumer spending is up. There are plenty of healthy indicators in the economy. There is a take here, though, that you see this is in the move indicator. This is something else that Howell follows. He calls it kind of the heartbeat of bonds and sort of his heartbeat metric for a global liquidity. And it's almost like the VIX.
Starting point is 00:12:24 Do you know the VIX for stocks? Yeah. This is what the move index is for bonds, right? So it's a marker volatility and jitters. When the VIX spikes, everyone is glued to TV screens to Twitter because something happened. Something big happened. And you could see some spikiness. It's like here's the ultimate bond spikiness on the move index back in 2008.
Starting point is 00:12:45 You remember what was happening there? So we've got some spikiness right now. And Michael Howell's conjecture is he's watching that because if you get further spikiness, it is an indicator that liquidity conditions are shrinking, basically. So global liquidity is shrinking. As the spike spikes. As the spike spikes, liquidity shrinkage. And liquidity shrinkage is bad for our bags.
Starting point is 00:13:08 It's bad for debasement. trade. It means there's less fiat money supply in the market. And so he's watching this because he thinks there's the case where things could get bad before they get good. So basically, Vicks spikes. And then in response to that government's Bessent, Warsh, everybody has to respond with some policy. That policy is going to be money printing. And on the other side of that is launched the next global liquidity cycle. So he thinks that we're somewhat in a cycle wind down as far as global liquidity goes, and the next cycle will begin when there's some sort of jitteriness and crisis. So that could cause crypto assets to still dip, even though we're talking about this as
Starting point is 00:13:49 if it's an early bull market. And that's one possibility there. I'm not saying it's the only possibility, but it's something that some of my quads are saying, David. Yeah, yeah, I can kind of see it where the, what do we call this? Not the vid, the bond market fix. The move. The move.
Starting point is 00:14:05 The move. So the bond market Vix, I like that name better actually. the thing to watch is like how spiky that's going to get or is something going to like break is a seal going to burst per what Ben Hunt is saying we're all glued to the news because some bank went over third bail out of the banks or whatever liquidity disappears because everyone has to cover their debts you know bitcoin crashes crypto crashes but then there's a flood of liquidity after the fact like that's the pattern that we've all seen i feel like that would be the worst case scenario there's probably a much easier case scenario. Like either way, when the VIX for bonds stops being so spiky and it eases out, the process of it easing out has got to be bullish just because great, volatility is leaving the bond market, stability is coming back to the markets. And Bitcoin has seemingly done acceptably well while the fix of the bond market has been
Starting point is 00:15:02 spiky, which would be the time where you would expect it to not be doing well. Yeah, and it's going to continue to do well because definitely. to mount. The U.S. fiscal policy continues to not improve, just get worse, of course, and that's the debasement trade. So maybe investors are seeing kind of the long-term picture here. And another simple explainer for yields in addition to kind of the fiscal situation is just what we've been talking about. What Howard Marks pointed out in his memo last week, which is AI CAPEX, AI debt is competing against treasuries for those yields. The economy is booming. and so yields are going to go up the way they went up in the 1980s,
Starting point is 00:15:40 and this is not actually in that context, that alarming, except for the fact that the whole world is now based on the AI trade. And, you know, that could be alarming. Again, if we have all the eggs in those baskets, and something happens with that. There was also this other minor point, David, that Kobiasi I saw made, which is it did something sneaky on the inflation methodology this month.
Starting point is 00:16:05 So they actually changed it. They changed how inflation was calculating. There's some details here. They revised it back. But they basically, according to Kobiasi, they recategorized some things like portfolio management, investment advice, put in a different category. Is this like gerrymandering for inflation? It's gold post moving.
Starting point is 00:16:25 It's gerrymandering for inflation a little bit. And he said that alone could have knocked about 20 basis points off inflation. That could be the explainer. So the other reason yields could be up is just the market's not. buying these inflation numbers because there's a little bit of gold post moving. That's some Soviet-style accounting is the idea that comes to mind. That's never good. I mean, it's good in the short term because we can all trade on paper and hot air.
Starting point is 00:16:51 But, yeah, over the long time, markets need truth. And if the government's not giving us truth, that's like a terrible, terrible thing. I think the bond markets are really good at sussing out truth. Right? Like, there's nothing. There's no escaping bond markets. Soviet-era accounting. but in the United States of America
Starting point is 00:17:07 doesn't actually work. That's right. That's right. So, I don't know. Are you bullish? How are you feeling about things with this macro context? Can I, I want to throw a few things your way. We haven't talked about oil.
Starting point is 00:17:20 Oil is actually still at wartime highs. So there was the war, the height of the Iran war conflict. Oil spiked up to $90 to $110. It came down to like 60. It is now back up to $93 a barrel. So oil is at wartime highs. the bond market yields are cratering up. That's scary.
Starting point is 00:17:40 The midterms are coming next month, and the markets never really like midterms. And like the Hormuz situation is as resolved, unresolved as ever. But if you take all of these things into account, like the resolution of all of those things is bullish. Bond market yields are one day going to stop cratering to the upside. Oil prices are high.
Starting point is 00:18:04 They can't really go much higher. because there actually is a secret oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz. The Iran War, the Iran and the Trump administration, are in tension, and that's unresolved, but that could get resolved. Any way that this falls out is bullish. Like, the status quo is all of these things are bad. Like the oil is high, yields are high, midterms are coming up. That's giving the market the jitters.
Starting point is 00:18:29 And Bitcoin painted a higher monthly and weekly candle despite all of those things. the default path seems to be that Bitcoin is like bullish despite all of those things. But then all of those things could fall one by one like dominoes. And so I'm kind of seeing like, okay, Bitcoin has done well in a very hostile market environment for the last like two months. Each one of those things could clear up. We will get past the midterms. Bond yields will stop accelerating to the upside. The Iran war and the Hormuz will eventually resolve.
Starting point is 00:19:01 and all of that's, those are each one of those things are catalysts that I'm seeing, can see happen in the next like quarter to a year. I think what you're saying is like given the debasement that's on the horizon we can clearly see given crypto market structure has fundamentally changed to the upside, right? And given some of these other things could get resolved,
Starting point is 00:19:22 it's riskier to be offside. Yeah. Right now. Yeah. You want to be allocated. This is me, I'm trying to be bullish, Ryan. This is me trying to be bullish. I think it's never not allocation.
Starting point is 00:19:31 Pretty good. I think it's a pretty good perspective. Yeah, I do too. And coming up next, David, I want you to give me the perspective, get bankless listeners the perspective on Robin Hood's conference. What did you see over there in Houston? What are they up to? AI agents controlling portfolios, are they doing anything crypto? Also, there was a $400 million crypto hack last week, has some implications for a lot of things, and there's a bit of discussion going on about it. I want you to fill me in, all this and more. But before we get there, we will. want to thank the sponsors that made this possible. I've been trading crypto for almost a decade,
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Starting point is 00:21:53 and all of a sudden, your crypto queries to your AI LLM, whatever you use, will get a thousand times better. So go check it out. There is a link in the show notes. And once you become a bankless premium member, you can hop into the bankless Discord and let me know how you like it. Cheers. This is Frank Shapiro. Big news out of the Robin Hood's Hood Summit today.
Starting point is 00:22:09 He mentions a few bullet points. 24-7 stock trading, including weekends, corporate earnings prediction markets. I guess corporate earnings, you can open up prediction markets on that. Perpetual futures for U.S. customers. It says eligible U.S. customers, by the way, AI trading and also a social trading platform. It's kind of reminded me of like, you know, the FOMO app that's picking up in crypto, Robin Hood's version of that. All of those were some of that highlights that Frank mentions.
Starting point is 00:22:38 I'm not sure if he was there. You were there in person. I was there. Give me the context. Why did you decide? I know you don't go to every conference, of course. There's lots of things you don't go to. I've been on to very few conferences this year, actually.
Starting point is 00:22:50 I think this might have been my first. You prioritized this one. Why this one? And what was the news coming out of it? Was the vibe, the news? What's your feeling? I mean, Robin Hood has. just had captured such a center piece of attention in the crypto industry seemed worth going.
Starting point is 00:23:06 They also invited me to speak with their two kind of like crypto leads, Nicola White and Hillary Skeffington. One is the like VP of products who's doing all the crypto product stuff. And Nicola White, she she leads a bit stamp. So Robin Hood bought Bit Stamp a while ago. Nicola was doing market making in crypto. Now she leads the Bit Stamp and like the crypto integration. So this was actually their trad conference. They kind of do this on-off thing with the Hood Summit, which is their normal Robin Hood Equity's brokerage TradFi conference. That's what you were at, the Hood Summit. Which is what I was at. And then next and also previously, they did their crypto event. The most recent one, you'll remember,
Starting point is 00:23:46 was in London with Johan Kerratt. And that's when they launched the Robin Hood chain and all the other stuff. This was their trad conference. And so we were not, I was not expecting crypto things out of this conference and that is what we got. It was mostly Trad stuff. And yet it's all fusing together, right? Because even Bitsdam is a crypto thing, isn't it? Yeah. So that's kind of like, well, then David, the crypto podcaster,
Starting point is 00:24:08 why were you moderating a panel at the Trad Robin Hood Conference? Well, because perps, tokenized stocks, morpho, these things are now all in the main Robin Hood app. That's kind of cool. That's why they brought me in. And so... What are they up to then? What are the highlights for you?
Starting point is 00:24:23 So the highlights, you had to rent through him with Frank Shapiro, they opened up with 24-7 markets. So you can kind of see the priority and emphasis that they had. I thought it was pretty funny. They showed a bunch of Donald Trump truth social posts and tweets about the Iran War conflict. And they're like, wouldn't you have liked to trade these things? Because they happened over the weekend, well, now you can. I thought that was pretty funny. Product market fit in this crazy era of tweets.
Starting point is 00:24:50 Wait, but like, how are they able to do that? Why couldn't we do that before? How come we can suddenly do that now? I would like to actually, so I explore that a little bit more. Part of the answer does come from having tokenized assets trading on BitStamp because it's a 24-7 365 marketplace. And so part of that answer is that they also have just extended their own brokerage services to beyond hours.
Starting point is 00:25:13 And so like if one Robin Hood user is buying an asset and another Robin Hood is selling an asset and they both happy to be doing that at 8 p.m. on a Tuesday, they can just clear those things. and so they're just pushing the left and right earlier and later on the day. That seems so obvious and such a product market fit for how people want to trade these markets now. Yeah, yeah. It was very clear that like if you were,
Starting point is 00:25:34 the Hood Summit and all the products they were releasing is for like speculators. It is not for the investor. Robin Hood and their like their words that they use is like, we are for the day traders, the speculators, the people on margin and leverage. Like this is, these are for you. The passive investor was not.
Starting point is 00:25:51 really a target audience here. But yeah, anyways, okay, so that was one of them. The 24-7 trading was like definitely the headline thing. Prediction markets for earnings reports, I actually thought this was pretty interesting. They opened this section up with, hey, isn't it really frustrating when you're bullish on earnings? And then you are correct, but then the price of the asset goes down in price. Isn't that annoying? Well, now you can just have exposure to an earnings report with a predictions market.
Starting point is 00:26:18 Nice. And so I actually think of all the prediction market, that society hates, I feel like this one should not be included in them because it's a financial derivative about a financial company. It's just so finance coded. It's not like, it's not sports gambling. It's not betting on the weather. So I kind of, I really like this category of prediction markets because it's a financial product about finance. Well, even Vitalik would approve. Yeah. Yeah. The crypto element was the perpetual in the main Robin Hood app. And so this was the big, wait, wait.
Starting point is 00:26:51 For U.S. users? For U.S. users. Eight markets. Bitcoin, Eth, Seoul, XRP, Doge, Cardano, Link, and hype. And so for some U.S. users, they're rolling this out
Starting point is 00:27:04 to a few select users. They're going to get feedback. They're going to roll it out to even more. They're going to get feedback. And then one day, they'll roll it out to everyone. I thought the interesting thing was they asked the audience, like raise your hand if you've ever traded a perpetual or you know what a perpetual is.
Starting point is 00:27:18 And like, less than one-fifth of the, the audience raised their hands. What? I thought that was really interesting. What are they doing? Options? Options, yeah. This is a trade.
Starting point is 00:27:28 You're telling me this is a traitor, tradfai crowd, and they hadn't, like, four-fits of the audience had not used a perp. Yeah, that's what they said. Yeah. And maybe the audience
Starting point is 00:27:38 doesn't really raise their hand. That's always kind of a bias. But they asked earlier in the show, like how many people are you guys going to buy an iPhone duo because they are building out a custom Robin Hood app for the iPhone duo,
Starting point is 00:27:50 like the two-fold one? And like a third of the audience raised their hands. So it wasn't the audience being shy. Okay. The audience was willing to raise their hands. So more of the audience is interested in buying an iPhone duo than has traded a perp before. So this is also, the perpetual is also being offered through their BitStamp exchange. And so they bought BitStamp.
Starting point is 00:28:12 It has this CFTC license that allows them to offer this to U.S. customers, U.S. users. And so when somebody on Robin Hood main app goes and does a 10x Bitcoin long or a 10x Bitcoin shore, it routes it through BitStamp. One of the big news on the week was lighter. The lighter token was down like 20%, 30% on this week. It was from disappointment that this was not lighter being the service provider in the back end. Wait, so I know you've been following lighter. You're a lighter bowl. Robin Hood does have a partnership with lighter.
Starting point is 00:28:44 In the Robin Hood wallet, which is their crypto app. It's like the MetaMask or Phantom. It's the Robin Hood wallet. Okay, so they're doing both plays. It's BitStamp for the main Robin Hood wallet and kind of the whole buttoned up version. And then the lighter for the more crypto-native wallet. And also non-US because Leidder does not have a CFTC exchange license. Got it.
Starting point is 00:29:07 So Leiter's still in the picture, but I guess there was some hope out there, market. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the distribution difference between being in the main Robin Hood app versus the Robin Hood wallet is massive. And so there was like a lot of disappointment from the lighter bowls on the timeline. The answer as to like why did Robin Hood not put in lighter is lighter doesn't have a CFTC exchange license. You have to have that.
Starting point is 00:29:28 It's just like the conversation stops there. Robin Hood bought BitStamps so they could do stuff like this, trade 24-7 tokenized assets and do perpetuals and they have the CFTC exchange license. That's why they did this. I think the question is, is in the future, if and when lighter does get its CFTC license, will then Robin Hood also route orders to lighter,
Starting point is 00:29:53 or will it actually just keep it for itself and only flow it through BitT stamp because why would they share it with anyone else? Like they will just route it through their exchange. Maybe Lighter does give better execution, and Wind will always give better execution than BitStamp, but Robin Hood doesn't care because they get the fees. So, like, that's the fork in the road.
Starting point is 00:30:11 You can interpret it things both ways. the CFTC license to coming to lighter, which I think is coming to lighter inevitably. I think we will know this inside of two months because what are you laughing at?
Starting point is 00:30:23 I'm just laughing because I think I saw your tweet where I was like flew all the way to Houston for Robin Hood to bud my bags. Yeah, to Robin Hood for my lighter bags to be down 20%. Yeah, that's great.
Starting point is 00:30:35 I'm sorry, man, but maybe it's only a matter of time. It just takes some time. We are going to find out whether or not lighter gets a CFTC license inside of like two months because they've been they've been talking about it for a while and the CFTC has 180 days to give a response well we know the Vlads are very tight so that's great with
Starting point is 00:30:54 there was a couple other things I want to ask you about one was the social trading element so somebody described this to me as like it's almost like the crypto phomo type of experience there's a social trading thing that they were talking about and then also um agents AI agents what you can get an AI agent to like manage Have you heard about agentic trading, Ryan? That's been all crypto's talked about for the last like 18 months, I feel like. Have you ever used it?
Starting point is 00:31:21 I would not trust. Like right now, no. Like, actually, I would like to. I would like to give an agent like, you know, a couple hundred bucks and just... See what happens? Yeah. Okay, so during this section,
Starting point is 00:31:31 I'm like, Agentsic trading, you can now get the power of hedge fund's brokerage information advantage inside of Robin Hood using agentic trading. And I just turned to the guy next to me. I didn't know him. We were just strangers. And I just asked him, he was like,
Starting point is 00:31:45 who the fuck is doing agentic trading? And then he opens up his phone to the agentic trading tab. It was like me, I'm doing it. He had given his agent like $2,000 and his agent had done a bunch of trades. And I'm like, okay, fuck me. Wait, what do you do? So like, how does this work? Do you just like, hey, agent, you know, generate overperforming, like, you know, performance over the next 90 days.
Starting point is 00:32:10 Make no mistakes. Go. I think it's one of those things. where like the quality of the output is downstream of the quality of the input and so you need to prompt pretty well and be like, okay, like I am interested in this kind of exposure be cautious about this.
Starting point is 00:32:22 I don't know. I still haven't used it. I feel like any input I would give would make it like dumber. Probably. I just, I don't want to give the input to the agent. You know what I mean? I want the genius super smart agent working for me and to figure it all out.
Starting point is 00:32:38 But then I feel like someone has already front run me on that is some of their hedge fund is using a much more powerful agent better data. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe you could just kind of if you set a strategy,
Starting point is 00:32:51 maybe you could just like automate a strategy. In that context, I would be okay with it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's see. Anything else? Yeah, Robin Hood Social, they launched, you said it was like FOMO.
Starting point is 00:33:02 It's like FOMO and FOMO and FOMO. It feels a little bit more like, a little bit more trad than FOMO because this is definitely built by millennials and FOMO is built by Zoomers. but it's very similar. So like verified trades, verified PNL, it's like a Twitter kind of form factor.
Starting point is 00:33:18 Yeah. Very good. That's the conference. There was also a hack that we should talk about, a $400 million hack of the BitGet exchange. Did that happen earlier this week or late last year? That was Friday of last week. Friday of last week.
Starting point is 00:33:33 Bitget, if you're not familiar, it's offshore exchange. So outside the U.S., it's one of the biggest offshore. exchanges. Top five, let's say. It's definitely not of the scale, Binance. And it was a $351 million hack. What are the details behind this and what was the conversation it spawned? Yeah, so not a crypto or protocol hack. This is just a kind of a hack of Bit gets internal security. So attackers spoofed, right? Not the cold wallets. Yeah, just the hot wallets, not the cold wallets.
Starting point is 00:34:03 So attackers spoofed internal transfer data and drained hot and warm wallace across multiple chains. private keys were not stolen, private keys were not lost, but the total sum of the losses came to about $387 million, which is the largest exploit loss of crypto in 2026 so far. I'd have kind of explain the technical terms of like how it all worked, but I don't really understand it, but it was an internal Bigget security thing. There is a $464 billion protection fund from BitGet,
Starting point is 00:34:34 and so users are whole, no user will lose any money. withdrawals were paused and then they resumed. And so kind of nice that no users were harmed in this exploit. I think it's probably North Korea, I think is the assumption here. That's the Lazarus Group that did this, but I'm not sure if that's actually confirmed. A lot of the assets moved through Thorchain. Thorchain said they can't do anything about it. I'm sure Taylor Monaghan.
Starting point is 00:34:58 After they were stolen. So the assets were stolen by, let's say, it was a hacker like Lazarus Group. Then the next thing is the hacker has to then launder those funds in order to get liquidity on them, right? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Thorchain is a pretty common place for these funds to go. A bunch of Bitcoin did go through Wasabi Coin Join, which is a Bitcoin mixer. And then about half a million dollars tried to go through Near Intense. And this is when the story moves into the Near Intense space. So Near Intense is an application on top of the Near Blockchain that does cross-chain transfers. $500,000 about dollars tried to go through Near Intense. And Near Intense has this shield. thing. It's like an intense security. It's like a security filter, like a bouncer that checks every swap before it goes through near intense. Alex, the general manager of near intense, he kind of describes it as like a risk intelligence layer. Kind of like, yeah, a bouncer, cops preventing firewall almost, I guess. Firewall. I think that's a good term. Yeah. So $166,000
Starting point is 00:36:00 did get through, but it blocked about $503,000. This spawned kind of a conversation. These aren't really the biggest numbers, but it spawned a conversation. These are tiny numbers in the context of $350 million, right? Yeah, but really the conversation was around the permissionless around near intense. Near due to the crazy price action going from like $2 to $5 is now kind of the center of attention. And so the, you know, the hardcore cypherpunk nature of some of these systems is being, you know, we're kicking the tires here.
Starting point is 00:36:29 And I think people are learning that near intense is not like a completely permissionless, censorship resistant, cyphorpunk. protocol. And this was the first time a lot of people learned about that. So when it comes to a hacker, steal some funds and they try to kind of, you know, launder it somewhere, uh, those different protocols for this, right? One is tornado cash, which cannot be turned off. Right. Another is Thorchain, as you said, which has operators, but their stance at Thorchain is basically like, permissionless, credibly neutral. We can't do anything about it. Yeah. Yeah. That's always been confusing to me about Thorchain is like, there is an off switch and they're like, we're not, we're not messing with the
Starting point is 00:37:06 off switch. Right. And Taylor Monahan is among those who've called them out and saying, no, you actually do have an off switch. You could do something about it. Now, this is near, has an automated sort of firewall bouncer at the door that sort of flag these things as stolen funds, transactions, and paused it, almost automatically. And so what's the debate in the crypto community as to whether you should have the authority to do this, or was it a debate around neutrality? A little bit. I think really the reason why this is a bigger debate than it really needs to be is that there's some of the words that NIR is using. Like they're using the words like, uh, we are permissionless infrastructure, but we're not neutral. And somebody is saying, well, then, then you're not actually permissionless. Like,
Starting point is 00:37:49 don't use the permissionless word. Then there's other people who are saying, you shouldn't have this ability at all. And I'm throwing a flag at that of like, we have some of the hardcore cyphor punk protocols, the, the permissionless ones, we've got that stuff. Uh, exchange hacks and bridge hacks have lost the most funds in crypto ever, like over $8 billion combined on those two things. So like now we have this cross-range infrastructure that also the news of as of this morning got exploited today for $3.8 million. And the reason why it wasn't worse. Wait, a separate hack. This is a separate thing. A separate hack. This is the near intense application also got exploited for $3.8 million. The reason why it wasn't worse was this same shield mechanism detected the
Starting point is 00:38:34 transactions and prevented the loss of further funds. And so all of the people that lost money in this near Intense exploit will also be returned the money because Near Intense makes $3.8 million in like a week. So it's like not really that big a deal. And so my take is like we have this system that is like discerning between bad and good and we've had the previous systems where like, you know, code, not kings, you know, we've had the previous systems already. and like now this new system is more discerning.
Starting point is 00:39:06 Sure, there is trust. There is custodianship for a moment in near intense. These have historically, at least with my vernacular, been bad, but then also at the same time, you know what else is bad is losing like $9 billion of user funds. And so like my stance is like, hey, man, like, this is a new strategy. Let's see it play out.
Starting point is 00:39:26 Yeah, I guess maybe it's a semantics debate over like definitions of words, right? So there's a person quote tweeting. permissionless doesn't mean neutral. Yes, it does. And so calling out near for using the words, I guess, permissionless. And also, you know, saying we're permissionless but not neutral. Now, Ilya on the near team had a response to this. Crypto space really has a choice.
Starting point is 00:39:47 Grow the F up or get sidelined with random regulation. So he's making the point, hey, we're building a product. We don't want the product to have, you know, money laundering capability. We're, you know, we're actually, we have the ability to do this. and therefore it's a good user experience. Like, we should be doing this. It's kind of the right thing to do for our users. It's what everyone wants.
Starting point is 00:40:09 And I guess your point is, like, that's a fine experiment to run. We already have the super credibly neutral infrastructure, the tornado cash is the Ethereum's, the Bitcoins of the world. And so, like, why not everything has to be like that, especially when you're a layer up and you're on kind of the intense layer. So. Yeah, I think people are also confounding near with near intense. Near is a blockchain.
Starting point is 00:40:34 It is permissionless. It is censorship resistant. It has all of those like same properties that we know and enjoy in crypto. Near intense is an application that has no technical dependency vice versa with near the blockchain. And the near appellate, the near intense application is a little bit more trusted, has a little bit more opinions about it, is not fully like cypherpunk. And that's also true for any bridge whatsoever. Cross-stream bridges have dependencies in them. That's just the nature of how they are.
Starting point is 00:41:02 Yeah, I mean, there's another thing that happened this week, which is base, so Coinbase. They have a protocol. It's not the ERC20, but it's a base standard. So you can run something called the B20. It's a token protocol standard on base. And you can also do ERC20s, but B20 now added a seize function on top of it. So that the author of the B20 token standard has the ability to actually seize assets if they are stolen in a hack like this. And this is not the full cyphor punk,
Starting point is 00:41:35 crypto punk version, but it is product market fit for something like equities. If you're the issue of an equity, and North Korea steals your capital essentially. Your Apple shares, yeah. You're not just going to be like, oh, I guess that, you know,
Starting point is 00:41:48 North Korea is on my board now. I guess they have a seat on governance, right? Let's send them the Zoom call. Yeah, you just like won't issue your tokenized shares in that format at all. So we have space for fully cypherpunk, you know, store value assets. We haven't lost that. And now we're getting, you know, other product market fit for different use cases.
Starting point is 00:42:14 I mean, I think it all makes sense and this is much ado about nothing. Yeah, totally. Speaking of near, we also got a near ETF this week out of Bitwise. So this is ticker NR, the Bitwise near ETF. Pretty notable launch. if you compare it to Solana, we have some pretty healthy numbers, something like over half a percent of the total near supply flowed into the Bitwise near ETF on day one, which is pretty crazy, half a percent of the total supply. If you look at like the bitwise narrative as like what near it is, because bitwise educates to the next marginal circle of investors outside of crypto. Yeah, how are they selling it?
Starting point is 00:42:53 Intersection of crypto and AI. Okay. Near Intense, which is a primary near product, is seeing rapid growth. nearest quantum resistant and private, highly scalable, low inflation with revenue funding buybacks. So I'll make sense. Good time to launch an ETF when you're on the upswing like that. Let's talk about what's next.
Starting point is 00:43:12 New York says prediction markets are actually illegal gambling. What's the news there? Is this going to go to the Supreme Court? Also, Vitalik with a post on the week. He says Ethereum isn't a blockchain anymore. Actually, not just a blockchain. It's something else. and it has the words world computer in it. We'll talk about all that and more. But before we do, we want to
Starting point is 00:43:34 thank the sponsors that made this possible. Some exciting news. We are launching a new podcast to help people figure out the crypto cycle, how to navigate it. The best crypto cycle investor I know, his name is Michael Nato. He runs the Defi Report. This is the guy that sent me a sell alert before the 1010 price drop happened. His cycle analysis has been absolutely on point. I've been following him for years. And this year, we started recording weekly podcast episodes. Each one we get into his portfolio, what he's holding, the market structure, entry targets, fair market value of Bitcoin and Ether, and where we are in the cycle, there's new episodes that are released every Wednesday. They're 30 minutes. They're short.
Starting point is 00:44:09 They're punchy. I think this crypto cycle is harder to navigate than most. So let's do it together. Go subscribe to this podcast. Search the DeFi report. Wherever you get your podcast, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or find a link in the show notes. There's a new episode waiting for you now. The state of New York has filed a lawsuit against prediction market company Polymarket saying that the platform,
Starting point is 00:44:28 platform is operating an unlicensed gambling business in New York. State officials have asked the judge to stop the company from operating in New York and are also seeking financial penalties and payments to users who took part in the platform. Also, additionally, users too? Yeah. Oh, no. Got to protect the users, you know. A U.S. Appeals Corps on Friday ruled against the prediction market operator Kalshi saying Ohio and Tennessee can regulate its so-called event contracts under their. gambling laws. So two blows to prediction markets this week.
Starting point is 00:45:03 Polymarket getting sued by New York, Kalshie losing a case against Tennessee and Ohio. The outcome of this, the current state of, there's like a game of risk being played by the prediction markets teamed up with the CFC versus the states. And it's pretty split. And so there's different like circuits with the court. The states have won the sixth circuit, that's Ohio and Tennessee, and the ninth circuit, that's Nevada. Cal She won the third circuit with New Jersey, and New Jersey's attorney general already asked the Supreme Court for a review. And so there are still some circuits to play out, but it seems kind of inevitable that this is heading to the Supreme Court. David, actually, the writer David from Bankless has been
Starting point is 00:45:49 writing on this. So if you want to follow, I think he's actually the person producing the best content about the inevitable conclusion of prediction markets in the Supreme Court. So you can subscribe to the newsletter. I mean, it's definitely going to the Supreme Court, right? Because like, well, states want their cut. They've had their cut on other sports gambling in the past. And so they're going for the cut. I guess that's what the judges are ruling.
Starting point is 00:46:11 The CFTC is on, you know, team, these are just markets, any event contract markets. And so the Supreme Court, I guess, is going to have to decide. That seems pretty existential, not existential, but incredibly important. That ruling will be incredibly important for the future. of prediction markets. And it's sort of a binary type ruling, right?
Starting point is 00:46:33 Yeah. Yeah. Meanwhile, Coinbase has received a CFTC approval for Coinbase Clearing LLC. This is the third of three licenses that one can get out of the CFTC. And Coinbase now has all of them. So Coinbase can now be the exchange, the broker, and the clearinghouse for fully collateralized derivative. So this is not margin. This is not perpetuals.
Starting point is 00:46:57 This is prediction markets. And this is also crypto binaries and fully paid options. So just getting a little bit more options in the derivative space, which includes prediction markets. This is what Coinbase needed to do to fully ignore Calci. Kind of in the same way Robin Hood did previously. Robin Hood first had Calci as his prediction market supplier. And then Robin Hood just gave Calci to boot for its own prediction markets platform. or Coinbase now has the ability to do this as well.
Starting point is 00:47:28 Do you think, do you wonder if, like, Polymarket and Kalshi will kind of fight back in the form of launching a crypto exchange? So if Coinbase and Robin Hood are going to come into their territory, then what's to stop Polymarket from, say, becoming more an exchange and kind of, they all, we're seeing this with the AI labs, right, you know, the frontier labs. They're all somewhat circling around and launching the same thing. Mm-hmm. Sure.
Starting point is 00:47:54 I mean, they're going after Coinbase's gargantuan business. And like Robin Hood, too, for example, honestly, that's why I'm kind of a hood bowl is because the best thing to have in all of this debate. If everything is going to become the everything finance app, the super finance app, then like you want to buy the one with a distribution, which is kind of why I'm bullish Robin Hood. Because Robin Hood has all of those things. And then it also has the 50 million customers or whatever.
Starting point is 00:48:19 Product skills, too, right? They have the ability to stitch it all together in a pleasing user experience. and that is a cut above. A delightful user experience which is ringing in my ears by the end of the Hood Summit. Well, speaking of a delightful user experience, are you ready for the cryptographic world computer, David?
Starting point is 00:48:36 What the fuck is this, that way? This is, I think the point is like, this is Vitalik, and he put out a post this week, and he said that Ethereum is not so much a world computer anymore, and he's going with a phrase, It's more like a cryptographic world computer. And he's basically talking about the original genesis of blockchains
Starting point is 00:48:58 back in the 2010s and what they were, what Ethereum really was, and what they're going to be soon. They're starting to become now what Ethereum is going to be in, say, 2030. And the big difference is you go from a world where you have to, if you're Bitcoin or early versions of Ethereum, you have to reprocess every single transaction. That's how you get verifiability to a world where all you have to do is verify it. He's talking about a world that has been unlocked with ZK Proof Technology,
Starting point is 00:49:33 ZK Snarks, ZK. Snarks, ZK. Starks, that sort of thing. And he calls this a fundamentally different world. In fact, do you even call Ethereum just a blockchain at that point? Or you're kind of limiting it if you just think about it as a blockchain. It's really a cryptographic world computer for the verification of whatever you need to verify. And so a lot of the computer, a lot of the things can happen somewhere else. Ethereum is just used for verification purposes. One poster put it this way.
Starting point is 00:50:04 Ethereum does not have to be fast enough to do everything only to verify it. And he said practically with ZK, the unlock, you know, we're doing some of this today. Pure Das was a test of this, of course, snark proofs. Decentralization goes from being sort of a cost that we pay to being an advantage, right? Because we can have parallel compute, parallel storage. It's sort of like the magic of snarks that I think we've previously been very excited about at bankless. And what you actually get, the guarantees you get are guaranteed inclusion. This is a fossil.
Starting point is 00:50:40 This is censorship resistance that really can't be tampered with. and I think Ethereum, once a ship's fossil, will be best in class there. He promises base layer privacy, quantum safety, four to eight second latency. I think you'd like to see that even lower, but at least four to eight seconds,
Starting point is 00:50:58 and then light nodes that verify instead of trust. You can run everything in the light node. So it's kind of packaging the entire Ethereum roadmap, but in this term of not just a blockchain going off of paying homage to Ethereum the World Computer, the cryptographic world computer. I loved your impressions of this. I'm not even sure if you read this,
Starting point is 00:51:20 but I read this, and I was simultaneously incredibly bullish and also bearish. And that's how I kind of feel about Ethereum these days. It's just like, this is the most bullish thing I've ever read, I think. Or maybe it's like a road to Erbit? and like because we're not talking about use cases at all in this post, which always worries me.
Starting point is 00:51:46 Like I'm always like, you know, that goose meme of like, you know, it's chasing the guy, like, I'm like, world computer for what? For what? What are we building it for? Just tell me. And I think the thing we're building it for is store of value for money assets, for censorship resistance store of value. That would totally make sense to me.
Starting point is 00:52:05 But that's not in the post. We're talking about abstract verification cases that are hard to wrap your arms around. So Ethereum is just this really interesting project, I think, right now, where it's like, in some ways it's the most ambitious thing that exists in crypto. And in other ways, like, we're still, like, Vitalik anyways, we're still trying to find how to use it.
Starting point is 00:52:28 Well, Vitalik's not the champion of describing exactly how it's used in the real world. And so there's a lot of layers that have to happen in between that. Yeah, yeah. I think our kids are going to find some really, cool things to do with the theory. And I kind of think that what I'm saying was like that same thing is what you're saying is like, I do think that this is going to be incredibly useful as we accelerate as a society as the future is going to be so weird. This is something I've been saying on this podcast
Starting point is 00:52:58 forever. The future is going to be so weird. It's going to move so quickly. If you extrapolate some of the conclusions of the sovereign individual, which is a book we've decided a handful of times, like the role of governments just kind of gets nerfed to the power of the internet and technology. And in that world, we need some society ordering system like Ethereum. Some truth
Starting point is 00:53:20 machines. Some verification machines. Some global truth machines that exist that transcend nation states and are even higher and more powerful than nation states. And I just don't know what to do with that right now. But like I think in the future we're as a society, we're really, really,
Starting point is 00:53:36 really going to need it. But the, but now it's just like, yo, let's do, let's do like subsecond blockchains to trade tokenized assets. I feel like bankless from inception was sort of built around answering a bit of what to do with that. And our answer has always been like decentralized finance. It's been monetary use cases. Money, finance. Then we were really hopeful on like the next layer, which would be like decentralized identity. And alternative systems that other.
Starting point is 00:54:07 otherwise the government would give you. And maybe we were too accelerated in our timelines, but it's just like it seems further than ever today. That's the bullish piece, right, of all of this. It's still like an incredibly radical revolutionary, massive TAM potential thing, world computer, cryptographic world computer. And then the bare side of it is like,
Starting point is 00:54:28 all right, like connect these to the actual use cases. And I feel like crypto is very much pivoted into use cases season, right? where's the revenue you're throwing off? Who's using it? What's actually happening on these systems? And the biggest use case to me for Ethereum is still the Bitcoin-style store-of-value-type use case and defy associated with that.
Starting point is 00:54:49 And that's not in the world computer, cryptographic world computer. I mean, that's not the branding of that. So somebody else is going to have to add that. Barnaby from EFLABS added this important kind of pushback. agrees that this is incredibly bullish, except for one thing. needs to make sure that state,
Starting point is 00:55:08 the valuable state remains on Ethereum's L1. It's not just verification, not just settlement. He says this, I don't want a liquidation resolving on some other server and AVE server. That valuable state has to stay on Ethereum. And I think that is an important piece that previous renditions of the Ethereum roadmap,
Starting point is 00:55:27 like the L2 roadmap, have missed. So hopefully people like ETH Labs can add that layer to it. Hopefully people like Tom Lee can come in and give a narrative as not the cryptographic world computer to investors, and maybe it all comes together into something really beautiful here. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's 2026, so we don't need to beat a dead horse, but after Vitalik talked about all these amazing Ethereum properties,
Starting point is 00:55:51 like quantum resistant, verification on your phone, like verification of your account balance of ether, the asset on your phone, and dot, dot, dot, that's why ether is the best asset of all time. Yeah, that would be awesome. Wouldn't it be great if you had said that? It feels like it's very sayable. It's just like say why it's good for ether the asset. Oh my God.
Starting point is 00:56:15 Oh my God. All right. Last thing to close this out, this was a tweet I saw circulating. I saw it a number of financial publications actually. Yano from Blockworks calling out a Financial Times piece. This is a chief economist at Apollo saying that AI assistance, like, Muse, which was released, I believe, in the last week or so, instinct. Also, chat GPD's dot, they could be used to cause a bank run.
Starting point is 00:56:44 Because consumers, they start using these AI agents. They say, hey, AI agent, optimize my finances. The very first thing an AI agent is going to say, after they say, cancel your whatever subscriptions that you don't use, is, hey, look at your savings. You have $5,000 in savings. Hey, that $5,000 in your Wells Farager account, why don't we take that and put that somewhere else? Yep. Put it in a SOFi app and you can get four or five percent. Put it in stable coins. You get it, you know, five percent. Why not do that? And then,
Starting point is 00:57:12 oh, you want me to do that for you? No problem. Click here. Click. And then the AI agent will go do that. Well, the problem is, David, banks aren't set up that way because they love to extract rent on consumer savings. From those who don't want to get five percent on their savings deposits. Yeah, it was the big issue that they, the flag that they threw with the Clarity Act with Stablecoin yield, right? It's just like, oh, no, this will drain all the deposits out of the banks and this will collapse. the U.S. lending system, right? Well, AI agents may also deliver that in the form of an instinct or a muse or a dot that is working on the user's behalf instead of for the banks. So to me, all of this is great news, but maybe the banks will get alarmed and try to block these AI agents in Congress. I mean, they certainly will because that's their one job is to protect their margins, and this is how they get the margins. I mean, overall, if this thesis does play out. I'm incredibly bullish on just the world because of all the AI agents that are making
Starting point is 00:58:08 like my money more capital efficient. If they can do this, think about all the other things that they can optimize. Like the world's just going to get better a lot faster. And part of that is that money is going to leave the banks. That's a move. The world's going to be a better place as a result. Yeah. I mean, I agree with that. It's bad for rent extractors, but yes, good for rent extractors. Everybody else. But by the way, are you using any of these AI agents that have come out? So chat, DPD just released their dot yesterday. I don't know. It's two, soon if you've even seen that, but there's muse, there's instinct.
Starting point is 00:58:38 It's basically like shrink-wrecked versions of open claw. You remember the whole open-claw thing? You set it loose. You connect it to your stuff. I've heard positive things. It works for you in the background. It wakes you up or whatever. Sometimes it will give you a phone call and it'll just be like, hey, David, you're like, you've got to get to your meeting.
Starting point is 00:58:54 You know, you're late. Can I get it to check my email for me? 100%. That's table stakes. That's table stakes for these things. Okay, cool. Maybe I'll get that. I don't know if it's worth the privacy tradeoffs for you, but it is interesting. I'll be your guinea pig. How about that?
Starting point is 00:59:11 All right. That sounds great to me. David could be the guinea pig for the bankless community too. So we'll wait his experience. Bankless station, that has been it for the first week of October. We'll see you back here for the second. In the meantime, crypto is risky, but not risky enough. This is the frontier.
Starting point is 00:59:29 It's not for everyone, but we are glad you were with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot. Thank you.

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