Bankless - ROLLUP: War Returns, Markets Shrug | Saylor Sells | Robinhood Memecoins | Ethereum 3.0?

Episode Date: July 10, 2026

War with Iran is back, but markets barely blinked. Ryan and David unpack Saylor’s $216 million Bitcoin sale, whether it marked the bottom, Robinhood Chain’s memecoin breakout, and Vitalik’s “Ethereum 3.0” roadmap. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 📊BITGET | TOKENIZED STOCKS 2.0 https://bankless.cc/bitget-stocks  🧭OKX | TRADE, EARN, PAY to OKX | 120M+ USERS WORLDWIDE https://app.okx.com/join/USBANKLESS  🎯THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://thedefireport.io/bankless  --- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 3:12 Iran War Returns, Markets Shrug & Saylor Sells 3,588 BTC — Was That the Bottom? https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/2074781504757027087  https://x.com/saylor/status/2074101854875656316 https://www.bankless.com/read/how-strategy-can-sell-billions-in-bitcoin https://x.com/rob_e89rtosmit/status/2074484772622172307 20:17  Robinhood Chain’s First Hit: Memecoins https://x.com/vladtenev/status/2074695821896065360 https://x.com/haydenzadams/status/2075062776473546979 https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2026/07/09/cashcat-trader-turns-usd800-into-over-usd1-million-on-robinhood-s-brand-new-blockchain https://dune.com/entropy_advisors/robinhood-chain-network-overview 28:17 Ethereum 3.0? Vitalik’s New Strawmap https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/2073459000398463446 https://strawmap.org https://x.com/r2Jamong/status/2074053557284982925 https://x.com/barnabemonnot/status/2073708226701328474 https://x.com/dankrad/status/2073532475431887354 https://x.com/DefiIgnas/status/2073480431887056958 45:46 JPMorgan’s $700M Ethereum Fund & Paradigm Fundraise https://cryptobriefing.com/jpmorgan-jltxx-tokenized-money-market-fund-surges-250-percent/ https://x.com/TradingProtocol/status/2074383012939141407 https://x.com/matthuang/status/2074873573983035801 53:13 The Fight for 24/7 Markets & David’s Portfolio Check-In https://x.com/jchervinsky/status/2075230297134645744 https://x.com/econoar/status/2075056773724062031 https://x.com/rambo_xbt/status/2075192964259672434 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/2062122936790581520 1:04:00 Closing & Disclaimers --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Bankless Nation, another Friday, another week. It's time for the bankless weekly roll up. Ryan, how you doing? I'm great, David. I was really excited to celebrate the 4th of July, you know, the 250th anniversary. It is actually July. This is the, I think, is this the 10th? This is the 11th year of existence for Ethereum.

Is that right? July, Ethereum's 11th. No, is it 10th? Yeah, the Ethereum blockchain started some time in July in 2015, so this makes Ethereum 11 years old. Yeah. So where do you? think Ethereum will be in...

Forget America's birthday. Happy birthday Ethereum. 250 years from now. Where do you think Ethereum will be? Still producing blocks. Give me an Eith price prediction. I don't know if the dollar is the correct denominator at that point in 250 years. I mean, the dollar's got Lindy, but I don't know if it's got 250 more years of Lindy. Not to say anything about Ethereum's 11 years of Lindy. Well, we are not going to be around, so it's not going to be our problem. Unless you do the Brian Johnson thing.

I think there's a very solid chance that at least. I will be around because I'm at least trying half-heartedly to do that. Well, you might need a new roll-up co-host then because I'm not sure about myself, David. What do we got this week? This week, the ceasefire with Iran is over. The United States struck 80 targets over two days across Iran. Iran hit back with U.S. bases in Bahrain and Kuwait, and oil sanctions on Iran are back on. So how are the markets responding to all of this?

We did it during market hours this week. Usually Trump waits for, you know, Friday at 4 p.m. after the market closes. Does he really? Yeah, dude, he did that like four times. Oh my God. It's Friday at 4 p.m. It's time to bomb Iran.

But there's a ceasefire and then now is seemingly over. Trump's got some words to say. There's also Michael Sayler once upon a time, you know, in distant memory, he sold 32 Bitcoin and Bitcoin dropped like 20%. This week, Saylor sold 3,58 Bitcoin, and Bitcoin went up 3%. Huh. You told me you think that marks the bottom. We've got to dive into what your thoughts are on that.

Also, the Robin Hood chain finished its first full week in production with a killer use case that's emerging. We'll talk about what that is. You've never seen this use case before. Brand new meta in crypto. We've never seen it. Speaking of brand new, there's a new Ethereum roadmap brought to you by Vitalik. At least he published it. He pushed it out.

It's called The Straw Man. I really get the feeling. Oh, Straw Map. Oops, not Straw Man. I really get to the feeling they wanted to call this Ethereum 3.0, but like just didn't. He did say the third phase. I know. He didn't say that.

Just say it. This is Ethereum 3.0 folks. We're on Ethereum 3.0. We'll weigh in on that. We never really knew when 1.0 ended and 2.0 started and it's going to be the same thing now. 2.0 started with the merge. 1.0 was when the whole thing kicked off 11 years ago, 10 years ago. Yeah, that's fair.

The merge was 2. I guess we've been in 2 for a while. Yeah, it's a little bit. like D.C. ship, though, because the merge, we ejected the consensus layer and added a new one, but the execution layer stayed the same. We'll get into it. I think it's Ethereum 3.0, at least. But let's start with Iran, the big news around the world. What happened with Iran? So two major waves of airstrikes on July 8 to 9th across Iran targeting 170 military sites in total, so I would imagine this was a pretty big in terms of strikes, which was a pretty big one.

This was in direct retaliation for Iran attacking three commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz earlier this week, which the United States characterized as a clear violation of the existing truce. I'm guessing what happened here is we decided to see what we can do with pushing boats through the Strait of Hormuz and seeing what Iran would allow. And Iran was like, well, we're going to strike those ships and they struck those three ships. And then the United States just escalated. And so here we are. So I think the big question is, is the ceasefire over? Like, are we just back to war with Iran?

Let's go ask the Donald himself. Let's see what he said. Have any questions? Mr. President. Is the ceasefire over? Is the ceasefire done? Is the MOU dead? It's a very interesting question.

To me, I think it's over. I don't want to deal with them anymore. They're scum. You know what scum is? They're scum. They're sick people. They're led by sick people. And they're vicious, violent people.

And if they had a nuclear weapon, they'd use it. As far as I'm concerned, it's over. I'll speak to our negotiators. They want to negotiate. They're good people. Steve Whitkoff, Jared Kushner. But they have to come back to me. As far as I'm concerned, it's just a waste of time dealing with them.

They're liars. We make a deal. And if I make a deal with him, we have a deal. And he goes out. He talks. We make a deal. Everyone's agreed. No nuclear weapon.

We make a deal. deal. They go outside, talk to the press. They say, we never even talked about it. There's something wrong with them. They're cuckoo. As far as I'm concerned, it's over. As far as I'm concerned, it's over is what he says. Now, Ryan, you would expect markets

to just be in turmoil. I just pause there. I just feel like, that sounds pretty over. But it's also quite over. It's Donald Trump. Okay, that's Donald Trump. So I feel like he said those words previously. Talk about ending the, you know, Iranian civilization.

all sorts of things and then was back like oh these guys are great let's make a deal we got a great deal these are beautiful people respect and now he's back to what he was before so I don't know from anyone else I'd be like that's this is so over but from Trump it's like okay right and I think the markets are saying exactly what you're saying so looking at the oil prices as like the indicy of how over is this it's not that over or actually it's somewhere in the middle so like oil prices jumped from $68 for WTI up to $71, that's up 5%, which is in the grand scheme of the war. That's like nothing.

Yeah, zoom out a little bit on this chart. Oh, this is the entire war. This is the entire war. Wait, this is the entire, wait, entire war? Yeah, so these are weekly candles. Oh, this is the 200 week. I see. You're doing weekly candles.

This is the weekly candles. So here, I'll go to daily candles. Yeah, I get it. And so, yeah, like, we're doing fine. Yeah, because we were above 100 at various points in the war, right? Like, as high as 112. So this is as high as 112. And then it was ranging between 85 and 112.

And then the lows, which we were at three days ago, was $67. And we were at below $72. So the market kind of thinks this is over, right? The market thinks it's over. I mean, sorry, not over. It's just like not a big deal. It's not a big deal. Yeah.

And I think like the Trump administration did a phenomenal job, in my opinion, doing expectation management with the markets as it was to the war, when the war was actually in its. height. They really just like, they only struck on the weekends. Then it was like peacetime between Monday through Friday during market hours. But then once the weekend hit, it was wartime. And they did that so long. That's insane. Now that like we're striking Iran again, the market's like, whatever. Like, we'll add 3% to the oil prices. But we're moving on. I mean, it showed up a little bit in the indices. But really, like, the NASDAQ and the SPI are fantastically green today. So there was like a red blood bath

on like Tuesday, but it was one day. It kind of implies that the market is calling the shots on this war, which is sort of bizarre, but maybe that's what's going on. But it also implies that, I mean, Trump has a really of real weakness around this. If Iran knows what's happening, they could do the same analysis you just did and just be like, Trump is not going to do anything if the markets go down. And so they can exploit that. They have all sorts of ways to exploit that.

I guess that's not my interpretation. My interpretation is that the market doesn't care. Donald Trump gets to do whatever he wants because the market is, what will push Donald into a corner, not Iran. And so, like, Donald just got away with two days of strikes across Iran and the market was like, whatever, we're just going to cough a little bit and go up. I'm choosing to just, like, not let it affect my... I think you're allowed to not think about it. That's what the market's saying. That's what I've been doing. That's what the market agrees with being on that. Let's work at the crypto prices. So Bitcoin up 2% this week. We're at $63,000,

ETH up 2% this week at 1750. And then Stretch, I think, is the most interesting thing. Trading at $86. Stretch from strategy, it's trading 14% off. I think this is kind of starting to find some sort of equilibrium about how comfortable people are holding stretch and the yield at $86. $100 is too high, but $70 is too low.

And the other indicator of health of this bull market, Ryan, that's the stretch and master micro strategy like the crypto health side of things. DRAM is like the momentum of the AI stocks. It's kind of come off of his highs from $80 down to $60 and it's up to 65. And so I kind of think the memory stocks, the AI trade is kind of consolidating right now. It's not going too high, not going too low and it's a little bit of a pause. But as far as I'm concerned, like the market, the trend is still in the market's favor.

These are all my takes. What about this big Michael Saylor sale then? I mean, the market seemed to absorb that, which was somewhat unexpected, I suppose, because this is a $200 million sale here. I mean, that's not, it's less than, it's about half a percent of all micro strategy holdings. But that's the first time that strategy has sold in size. It's a big amount. It indicates more to come or more could come from somebody previously in previous regimes thought of is just an accumulating. later. You know, strategy, Sailor does not sell. It only buys an outsold and the market shrugged

that off. So what happened here? And what do you think this means? The biggest piece of information for me on this is Sailor sold a lot in comparison to what he sold last time. So 32 Bitcoin is what he sold $3,58, so way more. He raised $216 million, which is like one and a half months of dividend coverage. So in terms of like buying time, he didn't buy himself that much time. So we're going from like micro sales to small sales of Bitcoin. But it's still, to your point, it's only 45 days he bought. Yeah.

Right. It's still very small. And so I do think it's bullish that Michael Saylor is selling because he needs to become, in my opinion, irrelevant to the market. And when there is such a large overhang from Sailor and he has such a large obligation, for dividends, that's just going to define the Bitcoin price because that's what the market is going to be looking at. And Saylor needs to, in my opinion,

puk up some Bitcoin so he can absolve himself of some sins and get 30 plus months of dividend coverage short up. And so he's selling, but in my opinion, he's not selling enough, but it is notable that the Bitcoin price has gone up this week despite Saylor selling $3,58 Bitcoin. Do you think Bitcoin price in the market is just saying they're accepting the fact that he's going to puke up some Bitcoin.

But so long as he pukes it up in an orderly fashion, the way everyone can kind of absorb it's not unexpected. You know, markets hate uncertainty. This is sort of some certainty in the market that they can predict. Yeah, she's going to puke up a little bit, but he's going to do it in orderly fashion according to a plan. It's not going to be a graceless collapse or unwind. It's just going to be something that now happens.

And I guess the market is bullish on that, because they've removed some uncertainty. This is how strategy is going to solve its STRC, um, you know, a preferred share dilemma. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. When he sold his 32 Bitcoin and then Bitcoin dropped like 20% from like 70 down to like 58,000 or whatever, like I don't think it was the market responding to that 32 Bitcoin sale. It was the market anticipating much larger cells like this coming in the future. And perhaps this is the first of a hand. handful of these, hopefully, in my opinion, the first of many, whereas Sailor actually does, again, puke up some Bitcoin to shore up his defenses so the market can kind of move on. And so the drop in Bitcoin price, way back a month

and a half ago or whatever, was front running all of that future selling, this selling, and all of that future selling, giving Saylor kind of terrible execution on the sale. Like, he's buying the top and then selling the bottom. But nonetheless, like this is, I think, what it takes for us to kind of just clear this debt that we have. Well, let me ask you what you think this might imply. So do you think now that the market has and sailors seemingly resolved the problem here, right? We have a path towards resolution. You just keep doing this type of sale in an orderly way, however frequently you want to do it. It's not a problem right now. It's going to be very orderly. So that removes the sailor micro strategy blow up risk. I guess what I'm asking,

your probability last time that we saw the bottom was what, like 50%. 40 to 50%. Yeah. Has that gone up? Yeah, that's gone up. So because when we bottomed at like $57,000, Sailor was selling into that with this sale. And so to me, like, and so when I said it was 40 to 50% probability,

I didn't know. No one knew that Sailor was selling at that time. Had I known that Sailor was actually selling into that, I'd be like, oh, he's the forced seller selling into the bottom. this is what a bottom looks like. So my probability is going up. So now you're waiting. Your waiting is basically that you're what, 60% something like this?

60% chance that that was the bottom. That we've already seen the bottom. That we've seen the bottom. 57.5K, I think was the pico bottom. Okay. What about you? Has that changed your? My probability is not changed.

I think I remain unaffected by the sailor thing. And I'm probably more influenced by Michael Nato and the work that he's doing. I haven't listened to you guys in this week. What do you guys see in this week? This probability that we've seen the bottom is 45%. So his probability that we have not seen the bottom that we go to lower lows. There's 65%. Okay.

And he's like limit orders at 55K or so. And 55, we're like, it's the same same. That's the first limit set of limit orders. Then you've got 50K limit orders. And then you could get into the 40s if things get really ugly. And like 40 is kind of a, 60, you know, 3, 64%, something like this drawdown from all-time highs, which should be commensurate with kind of the trend that we've seen.

And his reasoning is kind of different. He's looking at, you know, hold the coin switching hands from different cohorts. And he's also looking at volume numbers. And he's like, we haven't seen the volume that we typically see in these kind of mark the bottom capitulation type events. He really wants to see some heavy volume on the buying and the selling before he gets the bottom signal. That it was not, this bottom was not a violent bottom and all the other bottom. have been violent. That said,

look, his portfolio is something like 70% in crypto now, 30% cash, right? So he's still the weight of, you know, on the bullish side of things. He's leaned exposure.

Like, right before 10-10, he went to like 80% cash, right? Yeah, he did. Yeah, so he's totally switched and bought in. He just, he's pretty convicted. Doing it slower than I am. Yeah.

A little slower to call, a little slower on the job. there. There's one more angle of the sailor thing that I want to talk to you about. Okay. Because I think it's kind of actually important. There was this, like, they released the, like, statement or whatever they're filing about the selling of their Bitcoin price.

And there was, like, a bunch of words that has come with this. And so there are now, there are three buckets in their, like, digital framework, monetization framework shenanigans. Which is just how they're going to sell or that's what this means. And so there's three different categories for how strategize, you know, and so there's three different categories for how strategize. sells Bitcoin. There is the Build the Reserve category,

which they have, that's the authorization that they have authorized themselves to sell $1.25 billion for the USD Reserve. That's one type of authorized sale of Bitcoin. So that's just like emergency fund, cash padding, that kind of thing.

That's what the reserve is? I don't know if it's emergency fund. It's just cash. Rainy day. Rainy day fund. Yeah. Then there's cover the preferreds, which is you sell Bitcoin to pay the fixed dividends and interest strategy owes on its preferred shares and debt, or to replenish the reserves after they pay them when management decides to sell Bitcoin

beats issuing common stock. So after they pay out, like, their monthly dividend or biweekly, however long they're doing it, they're allowed to sell Bitcoin to immediately replenish those dividends. And then there is a third bucket, which is just to fund buybacks, which they're allowed to sell Bitcoin to repurchase its preferred shares, MSCR stock. up to $1 billion of each with Bitcoin sales potentially cover

and relating taxes, fees and expenses. Sure. So there's three different buckets for how they sell Bitcoin. That $1.25 billion authorization that they authorized themselves to, which they don't need to do,

but they did, is untouched by this sale of $216 billion a million dollars of Bitcoin. That is the cover the preferreds category, not the bill of the reserves category. The build the reserves category, they have still authorized themselves $1.25 billion of a permission to sell Bitcoin.

And the sale from this week is not in that bucket. It's in the cover the preferreds bucket, which is a limitless bucket. They can sell as much Bitcoin as they need to cover the preferreds. Okay, so they're just saying all of the sales we made this week, didn't count toward the number we gave you last week. And also we deem that. We authorized that to not count.

Right. So I don't know what I get from that other than the selling could continue. And it's totally up to them. do they want. What are all these words for, dude? Well, I'm glad we talked about that and cleared all that up, dude. What do we have next? Okay, coming up next, we're going to talk about the brand

new innovative use case on Robin Hood chain that has been recently discovered this week. No one saw it coming. And then also, Ryan's going to talk to us about Ethereum 3.0. We got a new straw map to talk about. That's my term. Okay. Not that's Vitalik term. It's all of that and more. But first, we're going to talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Trading is changing. Not gradually right now.

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this week and opened for business. The bridges opened up and you were able to go and buy tokenized stocks and put money into morpho and trade on uniswap and get 7% yield. You know what happened, Ryan?

Yeah, people did all of those things that you said? I mean, sure, some people did, yeah. But what is actually everyone's excited about? What's on? Meme coins. Meme coins. Can I tell you about the meme coin

that's on Robin Hood chain that people are excited about? What's it called? What's the meme coin of the week? It's called Cash Cat. And the lore is that this is what Robin Hood was called before it was called Robin Hood.

And there's a tweet from Vlad from 2021 about this. And people immediately found that meme and it jumped up to $180 million in market cap or something. And then because of the flurry of activity of meme coins on Robin Hood chain. So many people wanted to bridge the two Robin Hood chain

that all the bridges ran out of ETH, ran out of liquidity on the Robin Hood chain. Just like everyone bridged over. It's like, yeah, we don't have any ETH for you. You have to go to the canonical bridge if you want to go on. And so, like, people just rushed in to buy meme coins on Robin Hood chain.

I forgot that, like, when a chain launches, the first thing that happens there is just people just buy the native meme coins of the chain. But that's what happened. It doesn't always happen, though. I mean, didn't happen for Crackens Inc. Like it just depends. It doesn't happen for lots of chains.

But you would want it to. You would want it to. Everyone would want it to. Maybe we'll talk about why. But this seems like an endorsement almost from Vlad Teneff, the founder of Robin Hood. He tweeted this, while we're building Robin Hood chain to be the best chain for real world assets, it works great for memes. There you go. It does work great for memes.

Blockchains do work great for memes. That is something that we've actually known for quite a long time. So now, like all the meme coin traders are, like, like, all the meme coin traders are, like looking at Robin Hood and Vlad being like, are you guys going to list the memes? Like, but you have to support the meme economy. You need to list Cash Cat on the main

Robin Hood app because we need you guys to support the memes. And I think people are just have way too much hope for that. I don't think that's happening at all. I guess the theory of why a meme coin would explode on Robin Hood is distribution. You've got you know, 25 million

training de-gens. The same thing with BAME and meme coins on base. It's like you pump the meme coins on base and then Coinbase will list it. Yeah, but with Robin Hood, it's untouched people too, right? It's like the same people on Coinbase. They haven't been burned by meme coins before. We could burn them.

That's right. We could be the guys that burn them. This is a whole new audience we could burn. This is a whole new audience like that could tap into the potential. I think that is probably some of the theory. It's Robin Hood distribution. I mean, you correct me. I'm not a meme coin trader.

What do I know about this? That's right. That's right. And I think people are getting, even if Robin Hood does do that, which I don't think they will and I don't think that they ought to because you shouldn't be, in my opinion, distributing meme coins to your retail buying

like just because you want to support the meme coin economy. Why not? Why gatekeep, David? Why gate keep? You're such a gaykeeper. I'm sorry, I'm listening to all the people who own Cash Cat on Twitter and be like, Vlad, list Cash Cat, Vlad List Cash Cat. And all I'm hearing is Vlad, let me dump on your customers. That's always the case. This is

always the case. Like, there's no way. There's no way. And like, Robin Hood moves slowly and, you know, to some degree, that's actually benefited them because they've been able to be like 17th mover advantage on Ethereum layer twos. Yeah. And they just get to bring all their distribution.

And like going fast, they would have been in the experiment like Wild West phase. And like that's not their deal. And so I don't like, I'm not holding my breath for Robin Hood to list cash cat on their retail app. Nor do you think they should. You think they should keep that segmented sandbox. You want, you want me.

If you want to buy memes, download Robin Hood wallet, not Robin Hood app. Yeah. At least there's a step there. And a hoop someone has to go through, and so they're not, you're like enticed by this. But this has been pretty good for some of the native defy protocols for wallets. I saw 140,000 wallets have been opened on Robin Hood chain. This is Hayden Adams.

On one day, that was just one day. I think we're cumulative wallets on Robin Hood chain is over $200,000. On July 8th, there was 141 new active wallets on Robin Hood chain. $500 million of trading volume in uniswap in 24 hours, which is roughly a third of Solana's Dex spot volume just on the Uniswap version of Robin Hood Chain. Pretty crazy. I mean, could you make the argument that,

hey, this is memes are a great way to bootstrap an ecosystem. You get users, you get people on the wallet, doing things, activity, and then once they come, they'll stay. I've heard this story before. I feel like we've said this before. I've heard that before. More crypto wallets and more hands is net good.

I think memes are always kind of. of just like it's the spark whether or not it lights anything is completely unfounded well um there were some defy protocols that are winners here you mentioned uniswap there's also athena and morpho which received some some total value here so they benefit from robin hood chain doing well some of these robin hood tokens were on pump fun which is a massive yeah so like pump pump wants to give their users in on the action and so you can buy robin hood meme coins on pump fun now which also now includes Robin Hood stocks. So you can now buy Robin Hood stock tokens on Pump Fun, which is interesting. It's a great way to cycle your meme coin winnings into something that's a bit more sustainable.

I hope that's what they're doing, David. But how about the real world asset part of things? How about the tokenized stocks? Are those flying off the shells? Are we selling some tokenized stocks on Robin Hood chain? Sure. There's $366 million of assets on Robin Hood chain. 266 of that is stablecoins granted. And a decent chunk of that is, as you said, in Morpho getting that 7% like boosted yield from the Robin Hood stablecoin, the USDG. That's Paxos. So $90 million of that is in Athena getting yield.

$86 million of that is in Morpho getting yield. And then there is a whopping $13 million of tokenized. stocks, Robin Hood tokenized stocks, $13 million, which... It's not zero. It's day three, you know? It's day three. Well, I'm sure that number will go up when they open it up at least to the U.S. It's just Europe only...

It's not available in the U.S., which sucks. I'm sure there's a lot of gates that, like, I haven't tried to purchase token stocks. I actually haven't actually tried it out directly yet because Robin Hood stocks are permissionless, actually. Yeah, to do it for next time. David's going to go try this. Let's look at the data availability purchase from Ethereum. Some interesting stats. So this is L2B.

Now Robin Hood Chain is on L2B, and because Robin Hood Chain is a layer 2 and probably the most successful layer 2 that's come out in the past like 12 months or so, right? As far as off the bat success, it's kind of like people are looking for some validation of the Ethereum L2 roadmap, which has not been,

going well lately. So Robin Hood chain purchases its data availability from Ethereum, the layer one, and they have so far spent about $600, purchasing that data availability. That's $600 of Eath. It's just gone forever. $600 of blob space so far. And that's just the start. And of course, it only spikes up when there's contention. So because there's much more supply than demand, the fees are low. Yes, you know the trial. Should we talk more about Ethereum? You want to talk about the straw map? Yes, you do have to give a shout-out to Arbitrum, which is going to be our token mover of the week,

which was up 13% this week. Oh, they are up, because they were only up like 3% last week when we talked about this. So they got a boost. They got a boost because they get 10% of all of the execution fees of Robin Hood chain goes into the Arbbtram Dow. So Arb token, mover of the week, congrats Arb. Yeah.

Okay, now talk to me about the straw map. Well, I don't know. Did you see it? So this is Vitalik posting, the straw map. So we already had a version of the straw map, which is basically Ethereum's roadmap for the next, call it three to five years, maybe 10 years plus. Why do we call it that?

Like Strawman, you know, I said. It's like an idea of a roadmap? Yeah, it's just like a draft of a roadmap, right? This could change. Like, don't take it too seriously. It's just a straw map. I never did. Well, you might have reason to take it a bit more seriously this time around

because this is a new version of the Straw Map. And this one has something I did. see in previous versions, which is some columns for dates. For dates and action. That's new. That is new. Can you imagine dates? How specific.

It's just a straw map, so don't get too excited, okay? These are straw map mates. I got excited. But we do have these dates, and we have them tied roughly to future hard forks. So we have lists of features tied to hard forks, which are shippable pieces of software on Ethereum, tied to like, I don't know, this looks like a six to nine month cadence.

And it goes from 2026 and the two next hard forks all the way to 2029. And you also have this column called North Stars. And so these features are grouped. So you know the layers of the cake for Ethereum. How many times have we educated ourselves on this and the rest of the bankless nation on this? Consensus layer, data layer, execution layer, the three layers of the cake. and then you have these North Stars, which I appreciate. Why are we doing these things?

The North Stars are fast L1, so fast finality, terra gas L2, so lots of blobs for Robin Hood Chain and base, one gigabyte per second, and then gigagas L1, that's one gigagas per second, and then Private L1. So those are the four North Stars for Ethereum at this point, and all of the features across all of these swim lines, lines map to one of those four North Stars. Are you with me so far?

Yep. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So Vitalik calls this the biggest kind of thing, a new era of Ethereum. He doesn't say Ethereum 3.0, but that's my interpretation. Now, unlike the merge, it's not like a one-shot. Like, we ship the whole thing. So this happens much more gradually, which is maybe some of the reason you don't want to call

this whole thing, Ethereum 3.0. It's because it's just not a moment in time. There's never a moment. No, we're shipping Ethereum 3.0, as I'm calling it, in these kind of hard fork phases towards these North Star definitions. Do you have any, like, I don't know if you saw this compared to the previous version of the roadmap, but like based on everything I've said, what are your impressions of the changes here, if any? Well, the old version was a straw map, which was subject to change and updating. and all that kind of stuff. And I think really the first version,

you know, the beta version of the straw map was Justin Drake's most hated slide ever out of DevCon in Bogota. Was that 2024? Bangkok, for you. Yeah, it was 2024.

Were he introduced lean Ethereum, that whole idea? Right. And it was like a five-year plan and everyone was grumbling about it. And, you know, well, we're two and a half years later

or halfway through. But like, it's a straw map. And so it has been updated. it was subject to change. We've changed it. It's now this. And what has changed in those two and a half years? AI and also quantum. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I agree. Those two things are like reshuffling priorities. And then you also have the unbundling of the EF. Vitalik doesn't really care about block times. Heath Labs now cares about block times. And so because of the reshuffling of the actual organizations leading this drama app, you kind of see also some of the priorities. And so it's just updated for 2026.

It's kind of like my summary of how things. changed. I think it is updated for 2026 with some of those priorities. I want to get back to that in a second. But also I'd point out it's like so much more detailed, so much less fog of war. If you go back to do you remember Justin Drake's slide from 2024? It was just very

vague and it was like there was we were going to pill everyone first. You know, like that's part of the reason you got some pushback. This is detailed. This has dates. This has columns. This has hard forks. This has specific features. Does it have for like micro strategy authorization to sell Bitcoin dates or are they dates?

I think that, well, I don't think you, the dates are a straw map, okay? But the level of detail is something that we haven't seen for this era of Ethereum. But let's talk about the prioritization that you noticed. Yeah, the advent of AI, formal verification seems to be getting kind of a big boost in this, or at least you can see the effects. In the same way that, you know, a secret unlock for Ethereum in the past has been snarks. That's what's allowing this roadmap. And we've already kind of priced that in, let's say, incorporated that in previous versions of the straw map. This one seems most affected by formal

verification because there seems to be this idea that we can move from a multi-client execution layer to a more consolidated single-client pieces of the execution layer. So rather than have, in order to preserve security redundancy through multiple clients, there's this idea, I think interjected through this version of the roadmap that we can consolidate, have a single client as long as it's formally verified, that gives us the security that we need. And because we can only have one client, that speeds a lot of things up. So in particular- That was a lot of development, just... Like, like coordination and so many different layers.

It's so much faster. We can just focus on one client. Yeah. So what you see here is that the ZK EVM, has been sped up. Okay? Now it's in K-star, the K-star fork,

whereas previously it was like an L-Star or longer. So that has moved forward. L-star, can you imagine L-S-Sar. I'm going to be 40 years old. No, you're not. This is K-star is 20-28. L-Star is 20-29, okay?

Okay. You're going to be 40 in 2020-29. So, um... All the way. Native roll-ups also make an appearance on this. I don't know if I've seen that on previous versions. Native roll-ups with date is now. So anyway, I think that's cool. Another thing that I noticed was there seems to be

more acceleration towards quantum. So some of the quantum dates have moved up as well, more from the 2029 and 2030 to the 2028 time period for quantum acceleration. Privacy, also more ambitious? I will say about quantum. It is nice Ethereum being the second market cap blockchain, because if you have a quantum computer, like, are you going to go for Bitcoin or are you going to go for Ethereum? And the answer is unequivocally, you're going to go for Bitcoin because Ethereum's still going to be harder to break and more readily available. And so, like, Bitcoin will take the bullet for Ethereum. Yeah, I mean, that's right. And also, I think Ethereum is kind of leading the way for Bitcoin in terms of, you know, figuring out which cryptography works for

blockchains. Privacy, Ethereum looks like it's going by the end of this in the longer term, going full Zcash. So what we're looking at is, at least in the Straw Map, okay, is a privacy pool at the consensus layer. That's like basically Zcash functionality on the L1. That is a shielded pool in the layer one. That is Zcash. Something that Bitcoin is not doing, but it's basically saying, hey, privacy, we'll take that. That'll be a feature that we add onto our blockchain rather than launch an entirely new blockchain. So those are the big things I notice. Now, there are some things that were deprioritized, data availability, blob features seem to be pushed back to a bit a bit more because like I guess we have enough and they're not

like I mean it's not generating a lot just charge Robin Hood more money that's fine it was an okay product it's not a it's blown out you know the records in terms of sales for a blob space also let's see slot times were moved back a little bit but I was looking at the Eith labs team like this is Barnaby from the Eith Labs team to see what they'd say about this this roadmap And they were actually bullish. This is Barnaby saying he likes decoupled consensus is very bullish, he said, because they're decoupling some things. You get the sense that ETH Labs might be able to move on slot times independent of this roadmap.

Whereas like maybe the Ethereum Foundation isn't prioritizing it, there's opportunity because they're decoupling for ETH Labs to come in and prioritize it. So there's that too. And then one other thing I noticed, which is like, I don't know. what this is exactly snail issuance like I've heard talk about that but like

issuance, ETH issuance could be on the table in some form or another it has an emoji which is like uncertainty emoji so that could be a discussion in the future too. I can't believe we're going to do another round of ETH issuance debates

in the Ethereum community and like I can just see that title wave coming and I'm going to take part in it because I find ETH monetary policy probably the most interesting subject about Ethereum but I'm just like Like, I'm just going to get so many gray hairs. Did you share this take that Donkrad had on the back?

So Donkrad, former ETH researcher, of course. Now he's at tempo. He said the Ethereum Straw Map has a lot of really cool features in all caps. Fully proven STF and scaling to get gas. With finality in seconds, gets me excited, he said. But three to four years is very slow. I think we should be ambitious and get it done in one year. I think that's unreasonable to get it done in one year.

I think if we wanted to get it done in one year, you would basically have to punt every single Ethereum developer and then get tempo to come in and do it in their very top-down, like, centralized way. I don't know how we would do that in one year. So you're fine with three to four years, but not... I agree with Donkrad is that it should be done as soon as possible, but I just don't see how we do that.

It's just like not in the culture that we have in Ethereum. Defi Ignis had a take on this. He said it was bullish overall, but he said the missing piece is ETH tokenomics, although it's a non-issue of reduced fees, attract more transactions per user. That's a big if. So his thing was like,

there's nothing that addresses fee generation on Ethereum is that kind of insight. And if the bear market continues for longer, then Tempo, Canton, they start to eat away at Eth's market share. I don't know about that latter point, because, for all this like Ethereum is in a league of its own and Ethereum and to his first point about like inducing fee demand like that's no one's job to do BD and growth on Ethereum. That's kind of been the issue the entire time.

What about the token economics take, which is just like that's issuance. So it is touched on. That is issuance. But that's just reducing. It's not just issuance because like I think what what defy ignis and some people are looking for is for the burn to come back for there to be some sustained cash flows in terms of fee general. Yeah, but that's demand. And we can't force demand to happen on Ethereum. We can just induce demand. It's not just demand. It's also supply. I mean, you can...

Right, which is reducing issuance. No, no, no, sorry. Not for... Like, I'm talking about actual fee generation. So what I'm saying is people like Defi Ignis, think of ETH right now as it doesn't have a value proposition unless it can generate substantial fees, not like issuance. From like fees or MEV sales, right? Like the monetary premium thing is like not a thing.

We want to see discounted cash flow to ETH. And this roadmap does not create any discounted cash flows that they would like to see. I don't know what he proposes. But that's not what this roadmap would ever do. Like when did we get like the burn? We got it from DeFi summer. We got it from NFT mania, which is like app, the application layer creating products that people wanted. and the Ethereum Foundation

and the Eith developers were never involved with the app layer, intentionally so. And so there's nothing in this protocol that is like, oh, and then here's how we create demand. It's not just a demand story. That's just the one point I want to emphasize because the other reason you got fees

was because you had restricted supply because you weren't scaling anything. Right. Part of the reason we have no fees right now is because supply out strips demand. Right. And so this is why I don't agree with the whole Ignis Tamp

and the takes that ETH needs to be a discounted cash flow type asset is because fees will never be a thing. Fees will never, like I think this whole roadmap when I look at it, again, it's an inkblot test. You could look at this and be like bullish or you could look at it bearish. I'll give the bullish way to look at this. This is optimizing for ETH as a story value in a crop censorship resistant type way and it's optimizing for slow defy. at the cost of fast defy, say you're super fast slot times. You trade that off and you get like privacy for your crops asset. Like I think what if what Vitalics, because this is kind of Vitalik's vision, right?

What Vitalik is doing is he's creating a crops defy friendly, a platform with ETH as the store of value without actually saying that's what he's doing. Right. Because that's what the roadmap essentially is. That's what it delivers if you get to the end of this. Yeah. You're saying that Ethereum is a app chain. It's an application-specific chain. The application is Ether.

Yes. The fact that you can build Turn-Complete Smart Contracts is really just because then we can build things like Uniswop and Ave for Ether. Yes. And we can implement the ZK privacy pool inside the layer one for Ether. That's what I'm saying. So it's an app chain for Ethereum. And it's about time that because,

When I look at this architecture, I'm like, oh, that's what you're building. It's about time that the Ethereum community and the EF say that that's what they're building because that's what they're building. Yeah. If we as a community, as an Ethereum community, had gone back in time to 2017 and then started thinking on those terms, I think we would have ended up in a very similar yet very different spot. Whereas, what is Ethereum for? It's for Ether versus what is Ethereum for? It's for the world. Yeah.

I agree. Well, but like, ether is for the world. But I see what you're saying. But you can't ether's for the world, but it's your name is for ether. All these tokenized use cases and all that, like all the stuff that was kind of a subquest. Like decentralized internet or world computer. No, no, no, no, no. World asset.

Yep. That's right. And then Bitcoin is like, but you stole that from us. I'm like, yep, that's right. Yeah, it was a good meme. But you're blockchain boo-boo. Anyway, that's my take. And I don't know how we got there from the demand side or whatever, but whatever.

Yeah. And that made my last question on this. Do you think that Ethereum is going to deliver this? Maybe not in three to four years, but say four to five years. Yeah. Like the long-term conclusion on the roadmap is inevitable. There you go. But that's just not for being the issue.

What do we have coming up, David? Coming up next, we're going to talk about the JP Morgan $700 million fund on Ethereum. We're going to talk about the paradigm raise. And then also we're going to do a little portfolio check in because Ryan, I'm going to top my own portfolio and do a little victory dance about something that I think I deserve. And so we're going to talk about that and more right after we've got to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show 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. 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. Hey, Bankless Nation, it's David. If you're hearing this, that's because you are listening to the free bankless podcast feed. Did you know that there is a premium bankless RSS feed? The premium feed has extra interviews that I do for my own personal research and just deeper questions that I want answered about the crypto industry. Questions that I want to answer so I can be more informed as an investor, both at Bankless Ventures and also just in my own personal portfolio too. Also, there are no ads, which means if you listen to the premium feed instead of the free feed, you'll get about 20 hours of your life back every year because you choose to support bankless directly. So, if you're a if you're interested in getting extra content all while skipping the ads, or you just appreciate what we do here and want us to keep doing it,

we'd appreciate it if you signed up for bankless premium. And there is a link in the show notes to get started. Cheers to a good 2026. This is a title. J.P. Morgan built a $700 million fund on Ethereum and nobody noticed. So we talked about this. I don't know, a month or so ago, maybe six weeks ago. JLTXX.

Yes. This is the second tokenized money market that JPMorgan. has released. And there was a question at the time, will anyone care? Will it get any traction? It's actually grown 250% in the last month. So it is now a $700 million dollar money market fund. And this is all on Ethereum. So just a refresher of what this thing is, it's a money market. So it's U.S. Treasuries, overnight repo. It's not for, you know, typical retail investors. There's a $1 million minimum. There's some expense ratio. It is denominated in USC. It is on public main net, layer one. It does accept stable coins for redemptions, and it was designed for the Genius Act. And what's interesting

about JP Morgan strategy is they have their own internal blockchain system. It was once called Quorum. I always forget what it's called now. ConnectSys or something. That's right. And they also deployed something on base. They deployed JPMD, which was their deposit token, and they piloted that on base. So you get the sense that their strategy is they're going to have an internal blockchain, and they're also going to have maybe payments, deposit tokens on base and various L2s. But on layer one, it looks like they're building their big money market funds. And what's interesting about that is they are actually doing it on Ethereum L1,

not on a layer of two, not on their own internal chain. And I was kind of wondering about this question, because there is a real-world asset war going on out there. I think I've made the point, and you've agreed, that Ethereum is not necessarily optimized for real-world assets, right? It's optimized for censorship resistance. It's privacy, like other things. And yet it still might win the real-world asset game,

or at least J.P. Morgan is continuing to deploy there, the biggest bank in the U.S. What are your thoughts on, I guess, the real-world asset game here? Do you think Ethereum could actually win this by just optimizing for crops? And then as a second, it becomes the liquidity hub and wins network effect for that. And then thus becomes the home also for tokenized real-world assets? Or do you think it's going to be like a knife fight out there with Canton and Tempo and even Solana? rising up the ranks. The properties that Ethereum has and what it's being built for,

the crop stuff, and then the properties that what Ethereum, the real world asset tokenized issuers want and in need are like somewhat overlapping, but they're not one to one. Like no asset issuers looking at like the censorship resistance of Ethereum and being like, great, I can call this place home. I was talking to Carlos Domingo from Securitize,

and they issued Securidized, what does Securidize do? They securitize assets into tokens on Ethereum. on Ethereum or public blockchains. And so when they spacked, they did the obvious thing, and then they tokenize their own equity. So this is not a Robin Hood stock token. This is not an Ando, like, derivative. This is actual, the actual equity with, you know, DTCC compliance.

And they're, because they're a, what is it called? They're a transfer agent. They do all this stuff. So it's the actual equity. It's KYC on the Ethereum layer one. You have to have a KYC to get it because that's how equities work. excuse me, it's not on the Ethereum one. It's on Solana and it is on Avalanche.

Why is it there? Because Avalanche has like the permissions and like the compliance needed that securitized needs to make that work. And why is it on Salana? Because Solana has like the prop AMM ecosystem to provide the really tight slippage because there's just a lot of regulation

and constraints about how to compliantly issue these things. And right now they can only do it on Avalanche and Solana. They're going to do it on Ethereum. But the fact that it's not first on Ethereum, Ethereum is very notable to me. And I asked Carlos, like, why not? And it's like, well, the block times are really slow. And that prevents our market makers from being able to compliantly quote the price that needs

to be because they have to do, they have to give you the asset at a best price. Because they need to give you out of the best price. There's like some stupid rules about it, which actually the SEC is going to eliminate in a year, which is interesting. Okay. But it's just like Ethereum has properties and those are adjacent, somewhat congruous somewhat parallel to real-world asset tokenized issuer needs, but they are not the same thing.

So it's not clear-cut. It's not the case that Ethereum will be the default for this. No. It will be the default in some cases. It seems to be at least currently the default for JP Morgan, their money market fund. But, I mean, I guess that could erode. That could change over time.

Or it could be the default for certain types of defy use cases. Like, this is kind of a vault use case. This is definitely a slow defy-type use case. I found the Ether scan for this. so I'm looking at this. It's not even listed on Coin Gecko. It's got like a preview page on Coin Gecko. The EtherScan has six total wallet holders of this thing.

These are just whales kind of just parking stuff in this. Yeah, like one wallet holds like 83% of it. And so like this is like an accounting tool as far as I'm concerned. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, the other question is if Ethereum does win the real world asset, you know, war anyway,

or let's say it wins majority, something like 60%. Does that even matter for ETH price? Does that matter for ETH price? Marginal. Yeah, that's kind of what I think too. Yeah. A non-zero amount. Paradigm has raised $1.2 billion for their fund for David.

They've kind of pivoted into AI a little bit. But I think more like a little bit. I don't think there's any crypto, like 100% crypto VC left. Like no one is a Let me know, if I'm wrong, at me on Twitter But like no one is a crypto-only VC anymore And you're seeing this raise Reflected with Paradigms

1.2 billion dollars is a pretty chunky raise But they have also said In addition to crypto, they are also going to be investing in AI and robotics and just other frontier technologies But I think is like the right category Like that's kind of what I'm interested in Is like frontier technology broadly Crypto has something to do with it

Like Venice, for example, private AI AI, also crypto, Frontier technology, absolutely, like using like near AI to do all that kind of stuff. Like Frontier tech, and that's sick. And so that category is what I think kind of crypto is now. It's just like crypto plus frontier tech. This era in general, can we extrapolate this,

has seen kind of the death of the crypto-only investor? Correct. Like there aren't crypto-only like VC firms, as you pointed out, but like you're not a crypto-only. investor, right? Like, who's left is a crypto-only investor? There are a handful. A handful of people. Most people are playing into other assets, though, and other frontier technologies. I mean, like, I have more of my money in the stock market than doing crypto.

That's first time since I ever met you. I think that's probably the case, right? Yes, that's, yes, yeah. Uh-huh. So this is a story of what everyone is doing this cycle. Yeah. David, you included this. The CFTC talking to the CME, telling them to buzz off. What's this about? Yeah, the CME filed to do 247 365 markets. I think it's just starting with their oil market. And they asked the CFTC if they could do that. And the CFC just said, no, you can't do that. That is not what you are for.

Like, stay in your lane, bro. And kind of interesting. I don't really know all the nuances behind this. But this is very much, the CME very much did this in response to hyperliquid and the 247 365 perplexes. listing oil and gold and all this stuff. And so the fact that the CFTC is telling CME is like, this is not what you guys are for.

Like stay in your arena. Do what you're good at. And then let the perp dex is do what they're good at. That's kind of what I think is happening here. This is why Jake Chivinsky is tweeting this tweet because he's at the hyperliquid policy center. So he would know. And he's like kind of like kind of,

he's able to read between the lines. But I do think it's interesting that there is a, there's a war being fought in the same. same way the banks and Coinbase and crypto have been fighting each other for the past four years, there is a brewing war between the commodities exchanges and the PURP Dexes. And yet within that, too, this cycle, there's a war between the Perp's Dexes themselves. I think maybe this gets into a little bit of your portfolio, but before we started recording, you told me you think that Hyper Liquid versus lighter is the, I think you said the new Ethereum versus Salonah

or something like this. for Solana. That's right. So what's interesting is it does feel like every single bull cycle for your cycle, we do get some kind of dichotomy of competitors here. It's like I think 2017 is very much the Bitcoin versus Ethereum kind of cycle. Totally. Maybe previous to that it was, or like after that it was Ethereum, let's say,

versus Salana or Ethereum versus the Heath Killers. Are you planting a narrative that this cycle might be like, the big perp dex is fighting off Ethereum, or sorry, hyperliquid versus lighter, is that just going to be a sub-story of this? I don't know if I'm planting the narrative, but like this happened downstream

of the lighter partnership with the Robin Hood wallet and they're getting the endorsement from Robin Hood. It's like now there are a bunch of very triggered dot HLs. Remember the dot-eaths? Like we were the dot-eaths. Now there's like dot HLs. Is dot HLHL like the ENS for hyperliquid? I don't know if it's an ENS.

I think they just did it. Maybe it's actually like real. I wouldn't know. But there are like hyperliquid has made a ton of people very wealthy and has earned like won the hearts and minds of like a lot of people because they got the hyper liquid air drop and they got wealthy as a result of it. And so it's created a very strong tribe. And now like lighter has pumped like 50% or something in the last like week or so off

of the back of like the Robin Hood announcement, which is, you know, an insult to the identity of a hyper liquid person. Like how dare any other person. Purp decks do anything good. And so now you're starting to see, like, the lighter versus hyperliquid tribe emerge. And I, like, I'm not used to being the smaller guy. I'm on... Oh, you've chosen a tribe.

You're indicating you've chosen a tribe. I own both. I own both in a very healthy, like, one-to-one ratio. Okay. And so, but, like, yeah, I think lighter has more growth to it. And so, like, I kind of identify with, like, the lighter camp, yeah. So you're team lighter and you're excited about lighter. What is the...

what is the case for lighter versus hyper liquid? I'm curious. As someone from the lighter tribe, how would they, what they say? Yeah, lighter is the very technically competent. I think it could potentially create a framework for the end game of like exchanges, like full stop,

not just crypto exchanges, not just perpxes, but like exchanges like the NASAC and the NYSE and stuff like this. A high-performance app specific ZKL2 is such a logical conclusion of exchange technology. and later posted a blog post about all of the tech that went behind shaving off microseconds on latency around hyperliquid

and all this kind of stuff. I started reading it. I was like, this is breaking my brain. I don't understand this. But the point was made. And you get all of the assurances of the ZK so the individual user can verify the state of the exchange

and the validity of the change and the exchange playing by the rules, which feels very good. Like a lot of the crypto punk ethos but mainly they are positioned to take the U.S. market. And so Vlad from Leiter, not to be confused with Vlad from Robin Hood, but Vlad from Leiter, who they're buddies, by the way, which is funny. He's on the CFTC advisory, like innovation advisory board,

and Leiter is just at the gate waiting to get a CFTC license to penetrate the U.S. market. And they're doing the coin-based thing rather than what hyper-liquid strategy is, which is being like the one perp-dex to rule them all, you go to hyper-liquid. It's a first-party exchange. You know, builders build on hyper-liquid. Kind of like on Ethereum.

Everyone comes to Ethereum layer one. That's kind of like hyper-liquid. Lighter is a little bit more like a hub and spoke model where they have a spoke now out to Robin Hood chain. And it's its own instance on Robin Hood chain. But with ZK technology, a lot of the liquidity flows back to the main hub. And so this is like compliance spokes for bespoke compliance. compliance needs. So if any, if Charles Schwab wants to build a perp-dex, but they need to K-YC,

all of the traders, all the liquidity and all this kind of stuff, lighter can do that, and they can do that with their specific technology. And they have a bunch of forward-deployed engineers. So the whole idea is they just send their engineers to the United States financial institutions of the world who want perp-dex stuff. And then the forward-deployed engineers build it into the brokerage or Robin Hoh-Jane or whoever. And because each one, is its own bespoke walled garden is highly compliant with U.S. regulation. So that's kind of the pitch for lighter as it differentiates from hyperliquid. It sounds like there's a little bit of a like Binance versus Coinbase thing going on here

or like a tether versus U.S.DC. Yeah, so that's the element of this. Okay, so broaden it. What's your portfolio like these days? So you said you were going to talk about it. So what's gone well? What hasn't gone well? I think this is since you made some changes in May, correct?

Yeah. So this is the tweet that like got some attention. because I tweeted it out at the actual pico top of like a lot of these tokens. And so people were like making fun of me on Twitter because they were reading it as if I bought the tokens in that moment. And then they were at the pico top. And like I tweeted this tweet in that moment

because it was a brag. I wanted to remind people that I bought these tokens and they were all up. But I bought these tokens in like May, May like 9th or something. And then lit was the token that I bought on June 3rd with like the bulk of, of my, it's the ether portfolio that I sold. And so I would like to do an account of how

these, people will call them trades. I will call them investments. There'll be trades if I sell them too soon, but since I hold all of them still, they are in the category of investments in my mind. And so Zcash, I'm down 20%. Hype, I'm up 56%. VV, VV, I'm down 20%. Near, I'm up 25%. And then LIT, which is a token that is my largest position is up 80%. So that's my little victory that I'd like to take. So you aren't moving into kind of your trader era, but you're, I guess. I don't know if that's right, because I'm not going in and out of stuff. Maybe you're just rebalancing towards something in crypto that is much more application forward, let's say, use case forward.

Yeah. And they're all much smaller market caps, which just feels safer to me by, comparison because like, ETH has to justify a much higher market cap and it has to just work harder for that. And like when I look at like lit, that's like a $600 million market cap, I'm like, oh, there's a potential large amount of growth here. Yeah. And that's kind of where I like, I like the smaller caps rather than just like like, like, ETH was great. And because of what it was, like money, internet money, all that kind of stuff. But like commanding like trying to get to a trillion dollars, like that's a really hard fight. That's a hard fight. As we've seen. As we've seen.

in the past five years. Yeah. Well, congrats on those gains, David. I'm looking forward to seeing how that does in the future and where you choose to deploy. I think, like, for me, I'm kind of like, I'm still waiting for the bottom, the bottom signal. You're waiting for people to puke up and stuff?

Yeah, I don't think it's quite time. I think we're nine and a half months into this thing. I still think it's going to take a few more months for this to sort itself out. I don't think we've seen the bottoms yet. what is your shopping list? I like Lit would be on there except it's had an incredible run

from the very beginning so if I bought lit it would be at some lows I have some like Bitcoin obviously on the lows would be interesting I don't know I haven't fully decided

I mean I'm I'm really enjoying Michael Nato's work in his watch list. A number of these are holdings that he has, for example. He's looking at, Zach, he thinks it's overpriced. He's been a big bowl of lit, not quite in near, but there's some things on his

list that I've been eyeing as well. So I just don't think we put the bottom here. You're going to buy pump? It's printing some revenue, which is insane. And that's hard to ignore if you believe in kind of like, well, an application has to deliver revenue, doesn't it? That's

what hyperliquid and lit do. they have the potential to do that, so does pump. So that's something I'm weighing, but it's not, it's like hard for me to get really excited about that particular use case. Yeah, I can imagine you holding on to pump a robot out of time. Right, right. Anyway, we have to end it there. David.

I show you these magic alien hands. Oh, yeah, sure. What you got? Yeah. This is the most wild thing I have seen on Twitter in a long time. So for the listeners, we are looking at an actuating robot hands. with just seemingly perfect high fidelity human-like movement in all of the fingers. Is this real?

What is real, dude? Yeah. Yeah, we're right. Watching a brand new robot hands. We solved fingers. Elon has said, fingers are the hardest part of a robot. Yeah, fingers are the hardest part. That's right.

Dude, the future is going to be wild. I think that's the message I would like to leave this podcast with. Future is going to be weird. I'm pretty excited about it, though. I'm pretty excited, actually. Like, I've gotten over some of the existential stuff of AI. Maybe that's because I'm like using it daily. It's improving my life.

Yeah, we're probably fine. I don't know. And then what choice do we have? So, anyway, we'll see. All right, Bankless Nation, we'll see you once again with Ryan and David on the weekly roll-up in seven days. But until then, crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in. But nonetheless, this frontier is not for everyone, but we are glad you're with us on the bankless journey.

Thanks a lot.