Bankless - ROLLUP: Uptober Rally | Tom Lee $1B ETH Buy | Vanguard Flips to Crypto | Stripe Stablecoin Play

Episode Date: October 3, 2025

In this week’s Weekly Rollup, Uptober kicks off with Bitcoin and Ethereum surging toward all-time highs as Tom Lee drops another $1B into ETH and Vanguard finally opens its doors to crypto ETFs. We cover Stripe’s push to break the Tether–Circle duopoly with its new stablecoin platform, Cloudflare’s surprising entry into onchain payments, and Swift teaming up with Consensys on blockchain rails. Plus, Zcash rockets 200%, Ethereum’s Lighter perps exchange goes live, and Circle sparks debate with plans for reversible USDC. --- 📣0G | CRYPTO X AI https://bankless.cc/OGAI --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAXNET | MINT, REDEEM, EARN https://bankless.cc/fraxnet 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR L2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🌳KGEN | REQUEST A DEMO https://bankless.cc/KGEN-podcast 🐂BULLISH | U.S. EXCHANGE LAUNCH https://bankless.cc/bullish 💠BIT DIGITAL ($BTBT) | ETH TREASURY https://bankless.cc/bit-digital *We’re being compensated by Bit Digital (NASDAQ BTBT) for this segment promoting their company and BTBT. The compensation is paid in cash as a one time payment. You can find additional information about Bit Digital and BTBT on their Investor page at https://bit-digital.com/investors*  --- TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 3:38 U.S. Government Shutdown https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crrj1znp0pyo 7:13 Markets https://x.com/pumatheuma/status/1973717212025553313 - ZK Szn?? https://x.com/CoinDesk/status/1971565473218113771 https://www.strategicethreserve.xyz/ https://www.bankless.com/read/news/another-week-another-buy-bitmine-stacks-234k-eth https://x.com/Jrag0x/status/1972643353918677497 https://x.com/smyyguy/status/1971585912602796266 https://x.com/fundstrat/status/1972948825578131523 https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/us-regulators-probe-stock-moves-before-companies-made-crypto-treasury-2025-09-26/ 24:57 Plasma nailed its go-to-market https://x.com/Plasma/status/1972660468561965173 https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/plasma https://defillama.com/chains https://blockworks-research.beehiiv.com/p/plasma-s-defi-shockwave https://x.com/lemiscate/status/1972337762205339788 https://x.com/ajwarner90/status/1972823448897634648 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1973436365225468336 32:35 Everyone gets a Stablecoin! The duopoloy is dead! Phantom announced Cash stablecoin https://x.com/phantom/status/1973035201950617617 https://x.com/useCash/status/1973035307139477561 https://stripe.com/blog/introducing-open-issuance-from-bridge https://x.com/zcabrams/status/1973052207911129557 https://x.com/nic__carter/status/1973399535092171216 38:43 Cloudflare launched their own stablecoin on Base  https://x.com/CoinbaseDev/status/1970477072792592484 https://x.com/eastdakota/status/1971226533831582073 https://x.com/Kira_sama/status/1971237126378504230 https://x.com/Rewkang/status/1970782770805813392 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1973753405894992073 44:18 Lighter - Ethereum Zk Perps https://x.com/Lighter_xyz/status/1973508660061180363 https://defillama.com/protocol/lighter 50:06 More crypto TradFi mainstream! https://x.com/MorphoLabs/status/1972913932802421202 https://finance.yahoo.com/news/swift-teams-ethereum-software-giant-190506673.html https://www.theblock.co/post/372706/swift-blockchain-ledger-consensys https://x.com/Louis_Tellier/status/1973692818452337125 https://cointelegraph.com/news/circle-examines-reversible-stablecoin-transactions 57:36 With new Sora, the need for zk proving reality 100x-ed https://youtu.be/qeORiYlsEH4?t=374 https://x.com/pumatheuma/status/1973258262939312433 1:01:52 CEO of Polymarket gets flipped off https://x.com/shayne_coplan/status/1972675295564931242 https://x.com/nickpreszler/status/1972748902240780589 1:04:44 Closing, Disclaimers, & Moment of Zen https://x.com/coinbase/status/1972731382830072129  --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Bankless Nation, it is the first week of September. No, no. No, it's October. God damn it. We practiced this. Bankless Nation, listen to my voice. It's croaking, David.

I'm not going to be able to get through this rule up. It is the first week of October. Yes, that's right. Prices are high. How are you feeling, David? Prices are up. How awesome was it that, like, I looked at the prices. on the first. I was like, oh, hell, yeah, we're green.

We're moving up. We're moving up. And I'm like, oh, it's the first. It's October. Yeah. The prophecy is fulfilled. Of course. And now we're recording it on the second day of October.

Which is also green. It's also green. So what can we conclude about the third day of October and the fourth day and the fifth day? 30 days of green, baby. 30 days of, wait, 31 days of green. 31? It's a long month. All the way.

Thank God is 31 days. Oh, green. Is that what we're calling? This is how Ryan and I do analysis on prices. We got a lot to talk about. And forgive me, bankless listeners for my voice. I'm a little crokey on the week. I got a cold going on.

He's just so excited. We got to talk about Tom Lee. He caused a flippeting with a $1 billion eath buy, another $1 billion eath buy. Not the flippening I was hoping for, but a flippening of one sort or another. We'll talk about that. What else we got?

Another flipping from Vanguard, the previous crypto haters to now crypto capitulators. So Vanguard is now allowing opening up crypto ETFs. So what caused them to flip from anti-crypto to pro-crypto. We're going to talk about that. And then also, Stripe has released a product that could just kind of just blow open the doors of the USDC, USDT, duopoly. Between Tether and Circle, they have like 92% market. share or something very dominant. Stripe wants to change that.

So what do they release this week that's going to change the game? We also have Swift, you know the big juggernaut of global payments? Are they finally coming to crypto because they are teaming up with consensus on some kind of an EVM blockchain. That's been in the headlines. Also, you know that tetherbacked plasma chain, that layer one? Yep. Focused on stable coins for tether.

They had a massive launch this. Plasma. Plasma is the name. Yeah, plasma. Yeah, what did I say? They had a massive launch on the week, all right? And the only question I have is, which we can discuss, would it have been even better as an L2?

Or is that some Ethan Maxi C. Cope? The perennial question. Before we get into all that, we've got to talk to our friends and sponsors over at 0G. That is an AI dedicated layer one. It's just got a bunch of features to help build the supply chain, the end-to-end supply chain of building an LLM in a decentralized fashion.

So all of the AI labs, OpenAI, Google meta, centralized black boxes, building LLMs, very valuable, very valuable, but black box. ZeroG is how you build an LLM and then just have inference in those like a marketplace of LLMs, all these that, you know, the app layer, app layer around LLMs, the whole end supply chain for open source AI. They've already trained 107 billion parameter model fully on chain. Pretty cool. There's a link in the show notes to learn a little bit more about zeroG. It's pretty incredible some of the partnerships these guys are racking up too. Alibaba, Google, also some

crypto-native companies like Chainlink and optimism. It's really cool to see that fusion. All right, tell me about prices. Actually, before we do that, can we talk about this is the first U.S. government shutdown that we've ever seen in the course of doing this podcast, all right?

The government is shut down right now at the time we're recording. The U.N. United States government. What does that mean exactly? Like, are, what rules have gone away. Okay. Just mass chaos out there. Do all the rules still apply? No, okay. So important stuff like Medicare, right?

Seniors receiving their health care checks, stuff like air traffic control. That's still happening. That's all still running. But the non-essential programs are effectively closed. So 900,000, almost a million federal employees were just sent home without pay. Just being like, sorry, guys, the government shut down. You don't have to come in. Federal employees. Yeah, federal employees. Okay. So not like state police. We're not doing a purge. No, no, that's a state. No, that's a state. It's federal employees. I'm sure the military is still operational. At least I would hope so. They got to be some of the essential workers here. Military is asleep quick in the United States. Anyway, so this shutdown happened on Wednesday due to a deadlock in Congress. So this is Democrats basically have the ability to kind of like shut down the government. There's disagreement on spending levels. Democrats want more for health care. There's some, Affordable Care Act stuff. There's some Medicaid stuff. Republicans don't want to give it to them. So the Democrats are digging in and saying we're going to shut down the government until you give us what we want.

I think this is also broadly, more broadly, some political posturing, right? Yeah. Republicans have been pretty much in control since Trump took office. And they were just like dominating the political agenda. And it's felt like Democrats haven't really regained any strength. And so I think the left is basically saying, Democrats, you got to stand up. for Trump to Trump. You got to do something, this unchecked executive. So I think there's a little bit of political posturing going on, which is this is the Democrats standing firm against Trump and his agenda. This will all play out in the court of public opinion, of course. Like, does the public blame the Democrats or the Republicans for this? How does this get resolved? The last time this happened was in 2018. So again, before the podcast, I think probably another

I was in the crypto bear market of 2018. It was the longest shutdown in history. It was 35 days. So that could happen here, hopefully not. Hopefully it's shorter. I mean, crypto prices just started moving, like going up as soon as the government shut down. Yeah.

Coincidence? The market doesn't care, I think. Like, even stocks, they're not down on this news yet. My stocks are up. I don't know about yours. Yeah, they're doing okay, right? And crypto is like way up. So the market is just brushing this off.

Yeah. It could shave about $1 billion off GDP per week as long as this lasts. But when the shutdown is back on, basically governments open, all the payments that were furloughed get repaid. So I think the market is basically pricing in that this gets resolved. It's just political posturing and it's like no big deal. Okay. So that's the shutdown, David. All right.

Congrats. Cool. We're doing a shutdown again. We can't, again, we just can't, there's nothing we can get away with while the government is down. Like, what can we do here? I don't know, man. I don't, I guess, I guess it's maybe it's good news. Like, for government employees, you get to have a little like early holiday, fall holiday.

Yeah, but it's unpaid though, right? October, October with us. It's unpaid, unpaid holidays. Yeah, unpaid. That's not as fun. All right. Bitcoin price on the week. Give us the good stuff.

Yeah, Bitcoin up 8% on the week to $119,800. dollars. It's kind of remarkable. I'd like to take a moment and just like pause and say when something as large as Bitcoin moves 8%, that is $200 billion that gets added to the Bitcoin market cap. Wow. You say it like that. Bitcoin is like what? It's like number, I don't know, five biggest asset in the world, something like that. And that is just, it just moves by 8%. That's huge. That's so much. It's $200 billion, just minted out of thin air. ETHER, up 13%. to $4,450 also looking very good. So yeah, blue chips are green on the week.

Very, very green, very green. We're close to all-time highs on both, right? So the all-time high Bitcoin price is what? $125,000, $124,000. Really? The thing is, $123.5 is what this is telling me. There you go. So, yeah, we still have $4,000 away.

And Eith has never broken 5K. That will be a milestone. Thank you for reminding me. Anyway, it's looking good on the week. Of course, and we'll see how that progresses. We've got a mover of the week, Ryan. Oh, okay. Before we do that, though.

Yeah. You know, we're pretty close on all-time high for total crypto market cap, too. Yeah, we're basically there. 4.2 feels good. 4.2 feels good. Very strong. And that's pretty much all-time high crypto market cap.

Do you think we get to five before the end of the year? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I do. Wow. I definitely do. You really do. Yeah, I really do.

I think this is, wait, do you not think this is going to be a, do you not believe in October? No, no, no. I totally think five is within striking distance. I think it's within striking distance by next roll up, David, by next week. We could be at five. We could have one of those weeks. You're totally right. Do you not think that this is going to be the most bullish quarter of the cycle for crypto?

Yeah, I mean, seasonality suggests so. Like October and November and December have historical. especially when you pair them inside of bull market years, of which this is one. Yeah. October, November, December is historically like the best time. So, like, we potentially have the best time ahead of us. But nonetheless, I would still like to slow cook as long as possible. Not me, man.

I'm ready for it. I'm ready for, I'm ready for, I'm ready for 10 trillion. I'm ready. This is the quarter, man. This is if it's going to happen. You want to have the blow off top? That ends it all. I don't I don't I still don't think we blow off top this quarter I know I was talking to Michael

NATO you know the crypto fundamentals episodes we do he thinks that we're going to get a Bitcoin all time high this quarter and it's going to be the cycle high as well oh this quarter okay so cycle and you guys are calling for the top that's you guys are bears that's that's that's that's that's Michael nato okay I am still kind of a believer I think that's a possibility give that 30 percent odds, I think that we'll still get an extended bull cycle into 2026. And that's kind of my base case, at least into Q1, into Q2 as well. And we'll get the Bitcoin cycle high sometime there, and then we'll have eth highs, cycle highs, and all coin, you know, cycle highs and that kind of thing. Anyway, I'm personally going for quarter million dollar Bitcoin by December of

2026. So five quarters from now, a quarter million dollar Bitcoin. Wait, really? Does 2026? I think the cycle could be over by then. Well, I don't want that. I want to slow cook our way up to a quarter million dollars over the course of 15 months. I know. You don't want it, but what do you think is going to happen? I think that is totally reasonable. We've given bankless listeners, you're like just about every, you know, possibility under the sun here. So we should just just like leave them with. We don't know what's going to happen in the future. But we do know what has just happened with the mover of the week.

You were just telling me, what is it? What year is it? Zcash, the privacy coin from Zucco, which is both a transparent and a privacy coin. So you can have the shielded side of Zcash and the unshielded side. So you can disclose your transactions to the public or you can hide them. It's a little bit of both. That's hybrid.

Hybrid. It's up 42% just in the last day. If you scroll down, and I'll tell you exactly how much is up over the last like 14 days, which is 30 days, 230% over 30 days. That is nuts. That is crazy. Now look at this, man.

This is a God candle. This is really impressive. What it happened? What animal spirits happened where everyone was like, it's time to bid Z-cash? It's kind of surprising, right? Have you ever tried to use Zcash? Yes, I have. It's hard.

It's a little hard, yeah. It's not. Well, has it improved much? I mean, it's been a long time. The last time I used it was when we had Zucco on the podcast. And he was like, please use Zuckech before I come on the podcast. I was like, okay, I will. And I haven't recovered any of those tokens that I have on that chain.

Do you screw something up? No, it's just so cumbersome. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I remember the wallets were difficult. Like, it was very difficult to use. But when we're talking about that kind of a gain, we're still pretty low as far as market cap, right? 2.1 billion. Yeah, I mean, that's why it can go up 230 percent and 30 percent.

30 days is because after going up 230 days, 230 percent, it's at $2 billion. So it was like at $600,700 million prior to that. But still, it's a big move. I was looking into this. So Zcash is currently listed on Coinbase, finance, Cracken, and Gemini. But it's been delisted in a number of places too.

So notably OKX, delisted Zcash. Bitrex delisted it. Whobe back in 2022, Chinese Exchange, delisted it. Binance actually flirted with delisting it in 2020, in part due to some EU laws. About privacy? Yeah.

So the threat for privacy coins like Zcash that don't have defy ecosystems is that exchanges can delist them if governments get hostile on privacy. I mean, Zcash is basically an app chain for privacy. Right. Yeah. That can only use privacy around a very, volatile asset, which is Zcash, the asset. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. I mean, I think it's your and my stance that, like, privacy is not an asset. It is an app. And so they are privacy apps on Ethereum, tornado cash, privacy pools, veil, that can give you privacy on your assets rather than make you buy an asset. But also, nonetheless, the cryptography behind Zcash, top-dotch, Zucco, very normal. Like Zcash was birthed before Ethereum was really a thing. Yeah, it's a great project.

It's, if you are a supporter of crypto, like values and crypto values, you got to love Zcash. You're a supporter of Zcash. We like Zcash. Yeah. I mean, do you think this continues? You think we're going to get... I have no idea why this happened. I have no idea why this happened.

It's kind of funny. Actually, Um, uh, Um, actually, Um, Um, Roy says this is, um, this is getting ZK back on people's radar. So maybe she's calling for a ZK season. ZK, uh, Zcash running. And the lighter. mainnet, which we'll talk about later, institutions coming in. This is bullish ZK, right? So Zcash is really the first at-scale chain to ever use ZK technology, and maybe this is a sign of

more that's come. Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. Let's get into some Choddenfroid. Vanguard is finally offering some crypto-etffes. So Vanguard, the world's second largest asset manager after BlackRock, BlackRock, notably crypto-favorable. Vanguard has always been crypto unfavorable. They've been like, no, sorry clients of we are the paternalistic protector of, you guys are not allowed to buy crypto ETFs. We are not offering them to you. And everyone in the cryptocurrency is like, why are you guys doing that? Like no one, you're not winning any new clients by doing this. You're actually just losing clients that want access or crypto ETFs. Anyways, they've just been like a holdouts, like crypto holdouts.

They are changing. They are changing. Due to a, rising client demand for digital assets, obviously. B, the SEC recently approved approving new list. frameworks for ETFs. We talked about that last week or the week before. And then also a new CEO who used to work at BlackRock and helped launch their Bitcoin

ETFs is now making Vanguard reportedly to rethink their digital assets. That's probably the big one, right? Yeah, that's probably the big one. Yeah, yeah. So 50 million global clients, again, second biggest asset manager after BlackRock, finally opening up the door

to crypto ETFs. They missed the door on shipping a Bitcoin and Ether ETF. Like they could have had a competitive product, but no, now they don't. They just gave it all their black rock. And they still had to compitulate. And they still had to compitulate. With other people's products now.

But at least they're coming through the door now. And so maybe we should celebrate them too, David. Better late than ever. Yeah. Speak of someone who is not late, though, which is Tom Lee, okay? He is early to the party. He purchased another $1 billion worth of Eiff last week. So that was a 234K ETH purchase.

Wow. Look at this track. This is casually buying a billion dollars. Just to remind us from he started this process back in July of this summer. Okay. And you could see just some sustained, like this is how Tom Lee dollar cost averages in. It's like every two weeks, he's putting in a billion dollars. Mm-hmm.

A billion dollars, billion dollars, billion dollars. Same, you know. His size is size. So now he's got about 12 billion. Uh-huh. US dollars worth of ETH right now. He's got about 2.2% of total ETH supply. You remember of the summer, people were, like he said,

I want to get 5% of all ETH supply. And people were like, okay, Tom Lee, that's nice. He's same. I also want that. Yeah, that's cute. Well, like, in three months' time, he's got almost half that. He's on track to do this.

And the MNAV is at 1.3. Yes. That's positive. That's up too. That's large. It also caused this, David. So this is a chart of Bitcoin total supply in Bitcoin Dats like Microstrategy and Friends. Percentage of total supply.

Versus ETH. Total percentage of total supply, Ethereum Dats. And this is a flippening of the sort. Not the real flippinging, but there's more Eith as a percentage of supply in Ethereum. Ethereum Dats than there is Bitcoin in Bitcoin debts. I think this is a notable metric, but I don't know if this is like useful for any reason. Probably not. Like I think what we're actually measuring here is the combination of the age distribution and like

overall maturity of the respective store value networks that each of these things represent. And so what you're actually just seeing here is like Bitcoin is just six years older than Ethereum. Yeah, but it is notable how quickly Ethereum has done this. Yeah. That is true. Because like Bitcoin has been doing this for five years. Yeah. And as a percent of total supply, Ether just caught up this summer.

It is also measuring how fast that happens. It's also measuring how easy it is to acquire the same percentage because of the lower market cap. So it's just like a weird metric that like it shows a bunch of different things. And I don't know if any of them are useful. There are some power laws at play with some of these DAT treasury companies. And one of them is volume. Because you actually want your debt treasury company to be highly liquid. And that like liquidity begets liquidity, begets MNAV,

begets more purchasing of the underlying asset that you're trying to buy. Bitmine with strategy together, they command 90% of all trading volume of digital asset treasury companies. Bitmine has about 40% of that. So it is winning on the volume metric side of things. And I think that is notable. Also, Tom Lee is winning on the photo op game, okay? Here's Tom Lee with Vitalik. Dude, Tom Lee loves his photos.

Yeah. We got him with Vitalik this time. This was at Token 2049. By the way, on Token 2049, have you heard much coming out of that? I know you didn't attend, but. Yeah. I'm not a token person. Yeah, like what's been the vibe or what have you seen or what have you heard?

Not too much, really. Yeah, I don't know. The token, like, yeah. The whole Singapore-Dubai, like, access of conferences is, like, away from what I typically go to. So I'm not really sure. Yeah. Okay. Well, I guess maybe tune in to, we don't have any takes on this.

People are there right now and they're coming back. And so people will have their like, here's everything I learned a token tweet threads next week. Okay, we'll have to look. It doesn't seem like it's a very loud conference. In token, 249s of the past, have seen more content, more kind of like, you know, party content, something. Yeah, that's what I understand token to be is, like, a very big, like, part. party festival. My style of conference is more down in DevConnect Ryan, where there's Asato everywhere,

Asado and Mountains. That's what I'm going for. That's a good point to. To round out of that conversation, this came out of Reuters. US regulators probe stock market moves before companies made crypto treasury announcements. So apparently the SEC is looking at investigating insider trading at some of the DATs, which actually kind of like checks out because I would like. That's great.

Look at the all the like data announcement. and then you would see that there has been just like price volatility, mainly to the upside, for a lot of these assets, like a couple days to weeks before they got announced. I'm like, huh, I don't know if it's supposed to be like that. It's not supposed to be like that. I don't think it's supposed to be like that. Yeah, and so the SEC is cracking down where it should, right, where insider trading laws are being violated. So that's a good thing to me.

David, what do we have coming up next? Coming up next, plasma, the stableclone chain backed by Tether. It becomes the sixth largest chain in less than a week by. TVL. But Bankless asks, why aren't they a layer two? And then Stripe wants to give everyone a stable coin,

so hopefully the doopoly between Tether and Circle is over. And then also CloudFair is launching a stable coin on base. What is CloudFair doing with a stable coin? And why is it pretty neat? Why do I think is pretty neat? We're going to talk about that and more right before we get to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible.

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Learn more about BitDigital and try their MNAV calculator at bit-digital.com. That's bit-hyphen digital. Bankless is being compensated by BitDigital for this ad. You can find out more information by clicking the link in the show notes. Introducing K-Gen, aka Verify, the world's largest verified distribution protocol or VDP. If you're trying to grow a real protocol or app, you need real users doing real actions. If it's not verify, it's just noise. At the core of Verify is Poggy.

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you grow faster. And that's exactly what Verify delivers. If you're building a web 3, AI, or gaming, request a demo to grow your protocol at www.kogen.io slash demo. That's www.k-G-E-N.io slash demo. In less than one week, the new plasma layer one has been able to put $4 billion, oh, excuse me, $6.5 billion into the Ave deployment on plasma, making that Ave deployment, the number two largest Ave deployment.

after our arbitralum. A four X bigger than their third place, Arbitroam, which is pretty crazy. Plasma, of course, it's the tether, not incubated, but tether bootstrapped, backed,

and enshrined, layer one. So very fast payments chain for the tether stable coin, growing very, very quickly by pretty aggressive XPL incentives. XPL is the token of plasma.

And so if you deposit like tether, you get a bunch of, like, rewards, and that can go anywhere between like 12 and 20 30% rewards, which kind of nuts. And that's what's happening with like AVE, right? Like these yields are juiced with XPL.

Yields are juice. Yeah, yeah. So if you have like a bunch of tether, you can get some yields and juicy yields. I remember when I was farming AVE on Polygon during Polygon summer of 2021, Ryan, and I was getting like, I was like, no one tell anyone about this because I'm getting like 60, 60% APY. This is ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah. So some of that's coming.

Yeah. Question. Ryan. everyone in the ecosystem is asking this. Yes. Why is plasma not a layer two? Why is it a layer one? Yeah, I mean, I think there are a lot of technical reasons that are given for this, for sure.

Actually, this was a tweet thread that I enjoyed from A.J. Warner from Arbitrum, who actually says that, ironically, Plasma would have been much better off with a layer two, and one of the reasons why, right now, plasma does not have a decentralized validator set at all. So it's a layer one, it's EVM, but plasma is the only group that's actually running the validators for this chain. So it's like completely centralized. Now, in order to decentralize, they're going to have to give some of their XPL tokens as rewards to validators, right? And so they're targeting about 5% of total, annual issuance per year

to go to validators for rewards. So if you kind of like do the numbers on that, add an FDV of an impressive $10 billion, which is what Plasma is trading at right now, 5% of that is about 500 million per year. And that's a cost to holders of XPL tokens, right? It's a cost essentially to the network.

and AJ makes the case that, well, like, you could just save all of this money if you were a layer two instead. And when you look at that, I mean, it seems to kind of line up. I don't think there are technical reasons that really fundamentally prevent plasma from being a layer two. At least all of them seem like they could be navigated. What I think is actually going on here, David, is something that I think of as the layer one premium. So for whatever reason right now, the market is assigning a juicy premium to layer one tokens versus layer two. And I can give you some cons for this. So think of something like Arbishop as a layer two.

FDV, it's, you know, 4.3 billion. Optimism, about 3 billion. ZK Sync is about 1 billion. Then switch to layer ones, like Tron, for example, $32 billion. plasma 10 billion right there's like a nice juicy layer one premium that layer two's are not getting and um let's say that 5 billion of the plasma fdv is that layer one premium right well like it's not worth it for them to become a layer two just to say 500 million a year i mean it would take 10 years for that to actually pay off from an ROI perspective.

In addition to that, they can adjust issuance down to whatever they want in the future, can't they? So it's 5% now. In the future, it could be like 1%, it could be 2%. So I do think that there is a driving market incentive, an ROI, for chains to launch as layer ones, so long as this L1 premium exists. and people in the Ethereum camp are saying like why isn't this,

why is tempo? Why is ARC? Why is plasma not a layer two? It's because the market structure is not rewarding that. It's like market rational to be a layer one. If you're aiming for

and you think you got a shot at a decadillion dollar valuation, then just be a layer one. You can always pivot to a layer two later and the market is just rewarding that now. Anyway, that's my take. What do you think? Yeah.

I think if we're doing the whole layer two thing, we've called layer two's dictator in a box, right? One single box, one single dictator, constrained. So like dictator can't be bad. Like it's constrained for what the powers that the dictator has. But then you get all the benefits of centralization and you have just this one node that can go super fast.

We also do know, especially when we did our SOV episode with Jonah, we did this thought experiment where like, all right, if all Bitcoins in the world got centralized to one person, what would the value of Bitcoin be? And the answer would be far lower. Because part of the value of Bitcoin is that it's a payment, it's a distributed payments network. It's owned and operated by a decentralized set of stakeholders.

And so perhaps the layer two model is like destructive, value destructive, because there's no network. It's just this one operator. And so maybe, yeah, from a user perspective, the chain is the same. And actually, maybe it's even better. as a layer two goes faster, has lower latency as a layer two, but you don't have a distributed ecosystem set of stakeholders

because you've done the whole dictator in a box thing. And so perhaps layer twos are like value destructive in that sense. Like you don't get any sort of like Metcalf's law premium that we are seeing in the layer one. Maybe. Or maybe the like layer one premium will always exist. Or maybe it's, it goes away over time. Maybe it's kind of dumb that it's there in the first. place and it's just comped based on Bitcoin and XRP.

It's always been there. It has. I am noticing that like there are layer ones launching at very high valuations lately. Like double zero, not a layer one, but it is a token. Launched at yesterday at $7 billion FDZ. What did? What did? Double zero.

We're going to talk about later. Yeah. And so we're having token launches coming in at like. Oh, but double zero is not a layer one like blockchain. It's a completely different setting. Yes. But my point is. is that when we launch tokens at billion dollar valuations,

we are going to, that is early stage froth. That's a froth magnet. Yeah. And it's like all of a sudden like, oh, seven billion dollars? Let me go launch a layer one. And that's how the layer one premium disappears is like the layer one froth magnet gets a little too strong. We launch a bunch of low quality layer ones and then that premium gets milked

and then we enter a bear market. Yeah, I could see that happening as well for sure. I mean, if the premium goes, away, it's going to go away for some chains, not all chains, during the bear market, isn't it? It's not going to go away right now. Let's talk about this next story. So it begins with Phantom launching a chain. So Phantom, of course, is the browser and mobile wallet, most popular on Solana, also extending to other chains. They have launched a stable coin called Cash. You recall, was it last week or the week before? Metamask launched its own stable coin. It seems like all of the

large wallets are going to have their own stable coin, which is notable. So cash is going to be phantom's native and default stable coin. Here's where it was actually issued. It was issued through Stripe's bridge infrastructure, David. And that gets into the next part of this, which is Stripe launching a platform called Open Issuance. This is a Stripe collaboration. You recall they acquired a company called Bridge. We had Zach Abrams, the founder of Bridge on bankless, back in September, and he told us all about this.

But Bridge is basically a stripe product that allows anyone to roll their own stable coin. And Phantom used open issuance as the easy button for just rolling their own stable coin. Why do you think they did this? What are the reasons why Phantom would need or want its own stable coin? For the yields that they get to pocket, isn't that the whole idea? Yeah. And sometimes it's pocket. But at least it's not giving them to USDC or Circle or Tether.

Right. They can give it to their users too. Right. The answer to your question is like, why does this entity that has distribution, why do they issue a Sablecoin? It's because they get to dictate the yields that would otherwise be going to tether or a circle. And so they get to give them to users, they get to pocket them, but now it's theirs to have. And that's the main use case for open issuance.

So picture you have large AUM in stable coins. You're a wallet. You're an exchange. You're a bank. Like whatever you are, right? You're some sort of entity. Well, if you have like $500 million in stable coins on your platform. That users have deposited into your wallet.

So if you're Phantom and I'm like, I'm a user, I've deposited $1,000 into USC. It's work you've done. You've got that AUM, right? Well, your customers aren't getting it. They're not getting it. So who's getting that, you know, 25 million a year or whatever, the 5%, something like that on your, you know, 500 million in stable coins? It's circle. It's tether.

And like, you're doing all the work. This is what hyperliquid realized. And they were like, we don't want to give this yield to stablecoin. We're going to, you know, create an RFP process for a native hyperliquid stable coin. Anyway, that same conversation is being had by all of the fintechs, all of the wallets, all of the exchanges, and now there is a very easy way to just roll your own stable coin so they can off the shelf get their own stable coin. So picture this, a user just contributes cash into a wallet. It's just converted into something. It's not USDC or tether.

It's just called digital dollars. It's completely abstracted from the user. Just like Venmo. I have $200 in Venmo. Yeah. Or it's even like... $200 in Phantom. Yeah.

Or it's like a Starbucks card, right? You don't get Starbucks dollars, right? Let's say you have a loyalty card. Yeah, you just have dollars. It's on the Starbucks balance sheet, you know, but it's basically just dollars, and that's how they denominate it. I think this is going to happen all over the place.

In fact, Nick Carter wrote an interesting essay this week which is he basically thinks that the tether and circle duopoly, where they've had, I think you said like 90% of the market. I mean, something close to that. Yeah, 91% of the market in March 2021.6. I said 92. So it's fallen, by the way, right now it's 86%. But Nick Carter says it's going to continue to fall. And it's basically because there's an incentive for stable coin explosion,

intermediaries rolling their own chain, where they get to customize the properties. They can figure out what reserve assets they want. Who gets the yield? They can use that yield to incent customers and growth. That's what all of the fintechs are doing. And this is going to lead to a stable coin explosion. Hopefully not in a way that's like fragments the market. Because I think it's all going to be abstracted and they're just going to be called dollars. As long as it's a genius bill stablecoin, it'll just be called dollars in the user experience. And that doopoly will end and that market share will shrink. I mean, this is, these are new banks. And I say that.

Like positively. Where, like, why does Phantom want to do this? Well, they want to have the deposits so they can get the yield, just like a bank. But the difference is, is that it's a stable coin on a blockchain. So you all get to audit it. It's not a black box. Users have the ability to exit. And it's just like a lot more transparent.

And so, like, to me, I look at our episode with Austin Campbell that we did a while ago, which was like his whole thesis was, you know, if 2008 happened under a stable coin paradigm, we would all have been fine. And actually, there would not have been 2008. It just wouldn't have happened. Yeah. Because of the transparency and the auditability and the lack of the black box nature,

if customer deposits and banks had been stable coins, not fractional reserve of lending. Yeah. And that's the other thing is like, it's not going to be the phantoms of the world and the exchanges of the world that are keeping the 4% yield for themselves. I think they'll be forced to pass the majority of that

to customers, to users. Yes. They might carve off like 25 bips, 50 bits. Something very small. You know the 25 bips that you were getting in your savings account in Wells Fargo? Now that's the 25 bips is actually what Phantom is getting. Exactly. And the users get all the money.

Yes. So users, consumers benefit from this. And it's really fantastic. It's a byproduct of the genius bill. Thanks are fucked. You mentioned Cloudflare earlier in the episode. So what are they doing? So ensuring a stable coin.

on base. So they're working with base. Base is building this thing called X402. I think we've mentioned a handful of times on the weekly roll-up. Some payment standards. It's a payment standard for the internet.

Kind of like, you know, HTTPPS, T-C-P-I-P-E-X-402 is when a website is like, hey, you just pinged to my website, but if you want my data that I have on this website, you got to pay me. You got to pay me.

And pay me four cents, and I'll show you the data. And that goes through the X-402 protocol. And the idea is like you probably have a wallet in your browser. And then, the browser is like, hey, do you want to pay this website seven cents to like look at what's going on here?

And you're like, yes, I do. And then you can open up that website. And it's beautiful and there's no ads is the idea. It's my version of the future that I would like. I think that's a good version. It's also, so that's a human doing it. But also in many more cases, it's probably just going to be machines. Like your AI chat GPT interface is just going to pay this server.

Yeah, exactly. It's like microtransactions to get the data. Hey, my user asks me to go do this. service, can I do this service? And you're like, yeah, you can totally do that service. Pay me seven cents. Pay me a dollar. Exactly. Pay me something. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So this is Cloudflare doing it with their own stable coin, deploying it on base. Reminder, 20% of the internet runs on Cloudflare. I thought it was more than that. I thought it was too, but I don't know what portion of the internet they're talking about. A large portion of the internet runs on Cloudflare. So this is distribution for machine to

machine or agenic payments using this X402 standard and Cloudflare can just like insert their stable coin into the process, make that a default and win that way too. It's a great 20% of all websites. I wonder if what represents traffic, what of traffic that is. Yeah, but it's a huge deployment and like opportunity for for partnership between Coinbase and Cloudflare. I'm pretty excited about that blend of like Web 1, Web 2 and yeah. in crypto. In fact, we're trying to get them on the podcast, right? We're going to get them on the podcast, yeah, the creator of X-R-O-2 and then potentially

the founder of Cloud Fair. Cool. Going to be thick. All right. Coming up next is lighter, Ethereum's answer to hyper-liquid. We're going to talk about lighter a decentralized perplexex that just hit Mainnet this last week. Shane, Shane from Polymarket gets flipped off by this old guy from CME at a CFTC. What's going on over there?

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institutional standard at www.b bullish.com. That's bullish.com. There's a link in the show notes for more information. Okay, so I've been seeing some stuff about lighter this week, David, which is like a perps exchange using some ZK magic. It's like a ZK Ethereum layer two roll up. I don't know. Is this like Ethereum's answer to hyperliquid for like a layer two perps decks? Is that what this is? potentially. It is lighter. It's a decentralized perpx. Just like D.Y. YDX, just like hyperliquid, just like any other decentralized perp dexas that have come before. Do you ever use DYDX when it was a Stark X, ZK roll-up? Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. And everyone in Ethereum was like, this is sick. Because it was super fast. And you just had your assets on Ethereum. You just bridged it out. And then DYDX was decided to go off into the cosmos direction. And then we were like, we're all, collectively Ethereum was like confused.

It's like, why are you doing that? Just stay on Ethereum. And then we had GME with the AMM PURPX model, and then Hyper Liquid came and blew the doors open with just like, yo, we just have like a very low number of validators when we're going to choose up this chain and that's the perp-dex. Later, we're going full circle. We're doing the ZK roll-up thing again. But it's a different kind of ZK roll-up. It's not using like Starknet. It's not using Stark X.

It's not using Starks. Yes, it's using Sucinx Prover Network. So Sucinct is like kind of this back-end. service provider to do the entry and exits deposits onto the ZK rollup. And so property rights, user property rights are assured that way. I remember you had a tweet that went out a while ago. I was like, yeah, what if like hyperliquid ever went down? Like, how would users get their money back? I don't know if you ever got an answer to that. The answer on for lighter is like, oh, you guys, ZK proofs. Part of the answer was stop flooding hyperliquid, Ryan. Like, why do you eat it?

And I was just like, that's not what I'm saying. I'm just kind of wondering. No, it was fair question. I think people, I mean, okay, maybe to give that reaction the benefit of the doubt, it's like maybe people thought we were fighting people's bags, but like, no, we were just asking, you were just asking. So like, yeah, like, hypothetically, what happens to property rights? Right. They also said, unknown answer, unknown answer. Yeah, I think it basically, but the answer is if, if basically hyperliquid goes down or the validators go down, it just shuts down the same way coin base would, you know, kind of shut down. Now, once it resumes, the same way that like Solana, if Slana shuts down, can you get your assets back?

No. Same thing with Ethereum. If Ethereum went down, can you get your assets back? No. Exactly. But Ethereum's never gone down. Okay. Anyways, Lighter uses ZK proofs to ensure user property rights. So there is I'm pretty sure this is true. There's like an exit hatch, a ZK exit hatch

for users to withdraw funds. But other than that, it's just an off chain. It's its own ZK roll-up and it's a perp-dex. And it has accrued $800 million of USC, excuse me. Yes, $800 million of USC deposits. So quite large.

It's been running in beta for the last eight months or so, and it just took off the, took down the gates. So anyone can go and join the Purp Dex. And it's got a ton of hype. It's got a ton of hype. Yeah, well, it's just because it's like Perp Dex season, right? Yeah, hyperliquid just to find, like, this is worth billions of dollars. So these are all the hyperliquid alts, basically, taking a crack at it.

You've deposited some into this. So you've tried it out. What is, like, the bridging experience like? Because it's actually, like, kind of hard and kind of cumbersome to go bridge to hyperliquid right now. Like, for instance. Yeah. You have to get your USC. I know, I haven't done it.

I'm sorry. Hyperliquid people. Deposit it. You would deposit USC onto Arbitrum, and then there's a bridge from Arbitrum to hyperliquid. Yeah. And you can short cut all of that with some, like, but you still have to bridge. You have to take your existing assets and bridge. It's kind of a pain.

You have to do the same to get into. You sign in with your wallet. You make an authentic. authentication transaction with your wallet saying, yes, I own this with this wallet. And then with the USC that you have in your wallet, you hit click the deposit button, you sign the transaction and then it's in there. It's immediately there? Or does it take time? So you have to like initialize a wallet. So you have to like make an account with lighter. And that takes like 15 to 20 seconds. And then after that is instant. Okay. And is there like gas fees to do that?

like eth layer one gas fees which cost me like seven cents okay yeah that's good I mean that's pretty similar to how it is to get assets on hyper liquid much easier than a centralized exchange right I mean far easier to go through AML KYC

and your name and identity no AML KYC password like yes yes yes yeah yeah yeah so so just to comp it 840 million dollars in USC deposits on lighter and that's compared to hyper liquids, almost $6 billion of U.S.

C deposits, so hyperliquid, obviously very strong. But like for a beta that's now on main net, you know, coming up on a billion dollars is pretty good. How is this different? So this is a ZK roll-up approach. How is this different than the synthetics, like perp exchange that you were talking to me about last week? Syntics doesn't use ZK,

and so it is trusted. Actions, the order brick is trusted is a black box order books that clears every 12 seconds. This, there's a little bit. So we're having the founder of Vlad of Lider on the podcast. These are questions that I would love to ask,

Vlad. Because once you have money deposited into Lider, you can just start clicking buttons. And like you don't need to authenticate your wallet or sign a transaction in your wallet once you have USC in there. So like, is that trusted? I don't know.

I don't know. There's so many different designs for these kind of like purposes. It's pretty interesting. David, crypto is going mainstream, trad-fi mainstream in some big way, some more evidence of this on the week. Society General, how was that for my accent? I don't know how you pronounce that company.

They launched, this is a big bank, of course, SG, launches a stable coin with morpho and uniswap. What? Yeah. What's a major bank? What's uniswarking in there? Defi companies. This is Mika Compacted. Caudible Cablecoin, Eurostablecoin, and then a dollar-based backed stable coin.

It just goes to show like how much defy business development is integrating now with like traditional finance firms and even the big banks, right? Yeah. So what about the morpho part? The stable coins are directly deployed into morpho lending vaults and institutional retail users can borrow or lend the Euro stable coin and USDV against eligible collateral. And then Uniswap, their part in this is listings. They're going to create spot markets on Ethereum for all of these assets.

So there you go. Also, the Swift news. So this was the headline. Swift, this is, of course, the global payments network that basically handles all payments across the globe. It is the absolute juggernaut. They teamed up with Ethereum Software Giant consensus for a blockchain prototype. What is going on here?

We don't really know, but that's kind of the thing. So they're teaming up with consensus, which we kind of know where that's pointed. Like they have their own EVM layer two. We watch somebody from Swift mint a tokenized bond on the Sopoilia test net. So an EVM, Ethereum test net. And so they're just doing Ethereum things without we don't actually, there's no announcement to talk about, there's no release. But they're teaming up with consensus and they're minting bonds on an EVM test net.

So, like, we're just like maybe a calm before the storm before some big hammer drops, but we don't really know at this moment. When you say a big hammer, you're talking about a good big hammer. In a good way. Yeah. So you're saying this could be the start of something really big or it could be a nothing burger. We just don't know. Right now it's like, you know, announcements of like a trial, very ripple-coded.

It's like, we're doing, we're testing things. I mean. Like, does that turn into something? I don't know. Something serious is seemingly happening, I guess. So Swift Consensus is going to involve 30 major banks. So they got a lot of names here, HSBC, Bank of America, J.P. Morgan, City, Deutsche Bank, and others. And the aim is to enable real-time 24-7 international transaction using a shared digital ledger.

We don't know if this is going to be built on Ethereum mainnet. Like the demo that you're talking about here, this is Sopoilia. It's EVM Ethereum TestNet. But we don't know if that's the final destination or if they're working with consensus. whether it's the consensus is layer two, like linear, or what? It could be something else. Maybe it's on JPM's quorum chain. Exactly.

It's on quorum. Yeah, you never know with these kind of corporate initiatives, like whether it's real or it's something else. Actually, David, I want to talk to you about this because we've been talking a lot about stable coins this cycle. And we're getting a lot of... A little too much, honestly. Okay, so tell me about this.

This is, I saw this headline, Circle Exploring Reversible USDC transactions in a break from the crypto ethos. This is a coin telegraph headline. And the president of Circle, Heathon Tarbert, apparently told the Financial Times, we are thinking through whether or not there's the possibility of reversibility of transactions. By the same time, we want settlement finality.

He's talking about reversibility of USDC transactions. Like, that's a good user experience type of feature. You know, if someone's scammed and you can kind of reverse a transaction, then you can make the person who was scammed whole. And so the idea of reversibility to USDC transactions in general. Now, this is completely antithetical to the crypto ethos, right? Which is like we're dealing with immutable blockchains and code is law. And yet stable coins are this hybrid thing where they follow some crypto rules and they also

follow some legal rules. But in general, I was just thinking like, do you think the cyphepunk era of crypto is like dead now that we've gone more mainstream and Tradfai is entering and they're starting to be like, oh, you know what would be nice? I love the blockchain thing you guys have going on. But the immutability thing, I don't know. Like how about we just add reversibility to this and make it even better? When crypto natives would say, like immutability is a feature. It's not a bug here. Like, what are you doing? What's your overall take on this? Yeah. The important thing about a blockchain is that if you want all of the cypherpunk ethos imbued into the product that you use, you have that option.

And if you want to strip away all cypherpunk ethos away from that same product, you also have that option. And so is the cypherpunk vision like the ethos dead? It's like, no, it's always been about choice. And comparatively, the centralized, trusted solutions are faster and easier to deploy and more aggressive. And so therefore more mainstream. But at least those users have the ability to exit to a more cypherpunk ethos stablecoin. I kind of want someone to just redo the MakerDAO play now that MakerDAO is kind of like it's kind of bent the knee a little bit. Can somebody just go and redo, hey, like DM me, say, hey, I'm raising.

I'm raising for a startup where it's called MakerDAO. And I would like that. Cap money is like newer stablecoin that I like that has the cypherpunk ethos. will ever get to like the billions of dollars that like circle and tether are no but it has enough capacity to support me at some level though in my savings i feel like we've tried it we tried we tried many of the crypto native like stable coin type things and it seems like there's this bifurcation now there's like real world assets and they're going to have some real world types of limitations right yeah which is meet space settled maybe reversibility certainly the issue

have the ability to freeze and censor and do all of these things. And that's kind of veered towards one side. And then on the other side, we still have all of our crypto-native assets, right? There's still Bitcoin. There's still ether. Still can't be frozen. Still can't be censored. You know, still is completely immutable. And the middle really has been the thing that hasn't held. And maybe that's just, maybe that's the future. Like maybe there's never going to be a cypherpunk kind of stable coin that exists. Maybe it's just we have crypto-native assets. No, I think there are cyphor-punk stablecoins that exist.

They just don't exist in like large size, but that's also okay. That's okay. It doesn't need to exist in large size. It just needs to provide its quality service to the people when they need it. I want them to be, I, there was a time. Yeah, you want them to be dominant. Yeah, there was a time in 2019 where like, cypherpunk ethos is going to be the largest ham.

And that has not happened. But it has. I mean, we have seen our crypto-native assets grow, like Bitcoin above, you know, 2 trillion, eth. Yeah, that's true. Half a trillion right now. Yeah. Coming down to the end of the world, we've got our second to last subjects. We're going to talk about ZK really fast, especially with the release of Sam Altman's SORA. Have you played around with SORA, Ryan? No, it's like I can't, I don't have a private invite code. I'm sure we can get one. I will get you one. I got mine from Ajaz, who is connected with the open AI people.

at Jaws, one of the two hosts of Limitless. Well, actually, let's go tap into the Limitless podcast, which everyone should be listening to, so we can download people on Sora. Okay. Not Zora, Sora. Yeah, first, what is Sora? It's like, it's AI-generated video from Open AI, basically.

Yeah, it's like, it's getting really good. Instagram, TikTok, except everything is AI, and, like, you can type in your prompts. You can, like, upload your face and say a few words, and then all of a sudden, you're in Sora, so you're the actor, which is kind of creepy. Let's go hear the segment from Limitless. In this video that I'm showing on screen right now,

someone cameoed Sam Altman shoplifting in Target. Oh, can you please turn the audio on for this? This is so good. Oh, yeah, absolutely, yes. I want people to hear. Please, I really need this for Sora inference. This video is too good. That's great.

I love how we just did a clip inside of a clip. Yeah, it's perfect. Clip section here. All right, so on the Linnellus podcast. How real does this look to you, though? It's very real. It's very real. They're showing a clip of a video made by SORA of Sam Altman shoplifting a GPU. And it's Sam Altman. It looks like Sam Altman. It sounds like Sam Altman.

It's from like the perspective of a security camera in a convenience store, right? It's just like... It just nails it. It just nails it. Which like begs the question. It's like, all right, when these things get even just marginally better, like, how are we going to be able to tell what's real and what's not? Like, we're basically there. And it has been a longstanding conversation. in the crypto space for years about data authenticity, data provenance,

and now that deep fakes are like real, like crypto has the solution here, right? Like we can solve this, right? How? How do we solve this? Okay, so Uma Roy from Sysh, who's got the ZK proving network. She says, holy shit, urgency to deploy cryptography

at scale just 100x, provable images, video, and audio will all be integrated into timelines. ZK will power the HTTPS of reality. So Ouma is like, oh yeah, we'll use ZK to prove authenticity. And I think conceptually that checks out, but I think also both me and Ryan are like, how?

How? How does that work? Yeah, like, so how? Like, I get if you are doing an officially related, like, if we're doing the bankless roll-up, for example, and we wanted to sign it cryptographically and just say, this is the authentic bankless roll-up, and you can tell because David and I have signed it with some private keys, right? And we tweeted it out and thanks to our Twitter accounts.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But we could tweet out AI and be like, this is real. Exactly, or somebody else. Or, like, I mean, that just seems like it's a pretty narrow use case, right? An example of you're catching Sam Altman in a convenience store security cameras, is that the real Sam or not, right? It's not something he would be authenticating. So how does ZK actually do it?

It's like, are you putting some sort of ZK timestamp in every security camera, in every iPhone, every picture you take. ZK circuit in cameras. And it... On the hardware devices themselves. Yeah. And it timestamps it and it throws it on a blockchain somewhere. Yeah.

So it can be audited? For CCTV, like local cameras, you have to be ZK signing because they just run. They just run 24-7 and they keep the last 30 days of footage. Is all of that ZK signed? And where are those proofs going? Exactly. This just seems like a massive last mile problem.

We will solve it and we need to solve it with ZK. That totally seems like the solution. But there's no easy button for this, right? If somebody listening knows more about how practically we can solve this using cryptography or cryptocurrency or blockchains, let us know. Because I mean, we've known about this for a while. That was the entire point of this segment is this called action. It's like, please help us. We don't understand.

There we go. All right. David, do you see this clip? The CEO of Polymarket gets flipped off by the CEO of the CME, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Let me set the context for this. So Shane Copeland, he is the founder of Polymarket, of course. He was invited to a panel with a whole bunch of important people. SEC invited him.

It's a CFTC roundtable. So ice? I don't think this is the same ice. Oh, it's the exchange ice. NASDAQ, CME, CBOE, we're all there. And so was Shane. He was invited. And this in itself is a big deal because like,

less than a year ago, his apartment was being raided by the FBI, right? As kind of an illegal crypto project. And now he's being invited by major regulators to panels like this. Anyway, I'm going to play a clip because at this point in the panel, the CEO of the CME flips him the bird, man. Gives them the middle finger. Yeah, okay, but...

He deserves... Shane called him old. All right, let's just play the club. Users, listeners can decide. They want to win on blockchain. And really, you're at a fork in the road where, hey, I can either go and wait and lobby and do rulemaking for five years while everything happens offshore. And we're left with consumers having to, you know, work with guys like you who are a lot older, may not. There it is. There it is. Middle finger up. Terrence stuffy. With all due respect. Guys, they're a little older, CME.

I mean, that was just in good jest. That's just like a funny moment. That's great. Young crypto prediction market startup founder disrupting old boomer CME founder. Yeah. He calls them old and boomer flips them off. That's just hilarious. There you go. All right. So I think that's it. I think we're at the end of the roll-up, Yeah, we are. Do you know, there's a three-day weekend coming up, Brian. That's right, yeah.

That's right, yeah. Why you bring that up? I'm letting you know, and also the listeners know, that I will be climbing. Oh. I'm climbing. I'm gone. So good things. Last time you climbed Theorem hit all-time high.

That's right. Yeah. Well, last time I didn't climb. I was at Burning Man. Oh, you're a burning man. Last time you were out. I was off the grid. I'm just letting you know.

I'm just letting you know. Do what you want with that information. Okay. I think you're talking about the 13th of October. Yes, I disappear on, I leave the 11th and I disappear on the 12th. And I will return on the 14th. There you go. But meanwhile, I'll be on top of map.

Place your trades, everybody. Everyone place your bets. Place your bets. Place your bets. Go 5x, 10x long. 10x long. On Eif. On October 12th.

On October 12th. This is not financial advice. We do have a moment of Zen for people, but I should say, maybe we'll do the disclaimer first. You guys know, none of this has been financial advice. Quicker's risky. You could lose what you put. put in, but we're headed west. Not for everybody, but we're glad you're with us in the bankless journey. Moment of Zen. We've been having this conversation about big banks, wanting to edit the

genius bill, take away crypto rewards. They want all the interests for themselves. This is a coinbase parody in response. Enjoy this. See you next week. Can we actually take that part out of the Clarity Act? Which part? The part that allows for crypto rewards? We've been working on this bill for months. I know. And we've already signed that part into law. Yes, I know. And now you're trying to undo the law. It sounds so much worse when you put it like that. And you already said allowing crypto rewards was fine with you.

I said that? Yes, we definitely talked about how more reward options are better for customers. But did we talk about the community banks? What about them? Well, I'm worried stable coins will threaten their bank deposits. Actually, there's no significant link between stablecoin adoption and community bank deposit outflows, so I'm not. Think about the community banks. This is about protecting consumers.

Really? You can either have crypto, Rewards or you can protect our monopoly. Sorry, what? Sorry, I meant protection for consumers. Okay, so if crypto rewards are bad for customers, should we also ban your credit card rewards too? Well, those are different.

How so? They just are. Got it.