Bankless - ROLLUP: WSJ Lies About Crypto | SBF Testifies | Markets Pumping

Starting point is 00:00:00 But the biggest mistake you can make at this point in this cycle is chasing the pump. So the advice that we have, the not financial advice, life advice, don't be a chaser, hold your high conviction, let the market come to you. Yes, you let the pump come to you. Don't be needy. Let the pump come to you. Yeah, you don't have to respect the pump. Okay, that just means aping into stupid things.

Starting point is 00:00:22 Let the pump come to you. Bankless Nation is the fourth Friday of October and the Friday, the roll-up, might I remind you? before Halloween, which means we do something special. David and I are in costume today recording this roll-up, and I'm looking across the screen, looking at this co-host that I thought I knew. He's got suspenders on. He's got a yellow t-shirt. David, yeah. Dude, you, you are one of your NFTs. You're the Salana NFT thing, right? I'm my mad lad. Yeah, I'm a mad lad. You're a mad lad today. I'm a mad lad today. I am my mad lad. If the podcast editors could put the Mad Lad on the screen. In fact, just put it right over Ryan's face so you can do the

Starting point is 00:01:04 for my Mad Lad versus me. I look exactly the same as my Mad Lad. It's actually really good. This is really good. I am the third. The third year in a row that you have dressed up as your NFT. Yeah, I've only got one NFT left, so I need to buy another NFT after next year. Yeah, you're going to buy some more this cycle. Okay, now do me. Who am I? You are Sam Bacon Street. I didn't even need to add. You're wearing a massive curly-haired wig and an FTX t-shirt. It's so simple. It's so simple.

Starting point is 00:01:37 It's so perfect, actually. And do you want to hear my Sam Bagman-Fried impression I prepared for you guys? I would like nothing left. Yeah, so I'm like, I'm going to be taking the witness stand later today and explaining to the jury that from an EB perspective, like, I think we made the right calls. And that's what some of your listeners don't know, David. I think there's like, to some extent to which one of the major exchanges in 2022 had to die, and it just happened to be FTCX.

Starting point is 00:02:09 Kind of mid. That was pretty good. That was really good. Yeah, you're just not on enough amphetamines. I don't care how many pots of coffee you're on. You're not matching him on. I'm not SBF energy? Well, I hope he brings the energy today.

Starting point is 00:02:21 You're not vibrating like SBF was on our show. Well, that's actually a true story, though. So he is taking the stand today. I am taking the stand today. So this is not only a Halloween costume, this is, I don't have any solidarity with SBF. I don't wish him well, actually, but we'll see what happens today. You're commemorating the day. I'm commemorating the day.

Starting point is 00:02:40 The day we took down one year, it's almost like a year ago that all of this happened. November 8th, I think, was the day. So next week will be one year since the fall of FTCS. Yeah, I'm celebrating the outing of a fraud and the cleaning up at this space, which we've been doing a lot of over the last year. But tell us, what do we have for the agenda besides these fantastic costumes that we're sporting? In addition to all the things that we've already teased, we get to say, welcome to October. Yes.

Starting point is 00:03:07 We got a double-digit week this week. We were talking about it. It finally came. Everyone pat yourselves on the back. We got that. Bitcoin is up 15%. That feels great. Can we get it again?

Starting point is 00:03:21 Okay. Now the next question is, when is the next time that we get double-digit weeks for two weeks? in a row. Oh, two weeks in a row. One week's not enough for you? Like, can't we just bask for this? It's never enough. It's never enough. I want to bask this week in enjoying this because this could mean the end of the bear market. Like, I feel like this could be a very significant week actually for us. We also have the Wall Street Journal blatantly lying, blatantly spreading misinformation about crypto, associating it with terrorism and failing to retract it. And citizen journalist and friend of the show, Nick Carter, is on their ass to do something about it.

Starting point is 00:03:58 I love it. I love the facts coming out. So we're talking about that. What else we got, David? New York Attorney General charges DCG and Gemini for fraud. So while, like, Gemini was pointing at DCG and DCG is pointing at Gemini, the New York Attorney General was like, you know what? We're taking both of you in. Both you guys.

Starting point is 00:04:15 Both you guys. Yeah. Just charges. So we'll talk about that. Like we'll buy inside, SBF about to testify. And also, a uniswap app chain gets launched. but by whom? Who launched the UniChain?

Starting point is 00:04:30 We will talk about that. I think that this is a great story that totally went under the radar this week. Ryan, did you know that the Uniswop app chain got launched? David, you're so excited about this. I think this is a great story and no one's paying attention to it. This is David's breaking news,

Starting point is 00:04:44 journalists to it. Breaking news. You have the journalist's suspenders on. And Uniswap didn't deploy it and Uniswap Foundation didn't deploy it. Who deployed the UniChane? This is a bit tin-fetching. foil hat, but we'll definitely get to that later in the episode for sure. Before we begin,

Starting point is 00:05:01 we got a shout out our friends and sponsors over at Dopple. Doppel. Yeah, so Doppel, not to be confused with Doppelganger, of which I am quite clearly SBF's Doppelganger today. I've always thought this, actually. SBF RSA, huh? You can't. You have three letters. What's going on here? Yeah, something weird. You can't trust people who use their middle name as their main name. Anyway, something else you can't trust on the internet is all the fishing links that you get. And Dopple plays whackamol with all of the fishers. So, David, we have started using this service as of about two months ago. And they have done a fantastic job every time a fishing site, a fake bank list comes up or a fake Ryan Sean Adams account on Twitter or Instagram. You know what they do, David? They bang him. Yeah, they dopple them right

Starting point is 00:05:48 in the head. They just doop them right on the head. And it's a fantastic service because they're are more and more fishing scams and links going on. And if you are a project, a DAPD developer in the space of crypto, if you have a community, you need to protect your community or at least do what you can. Doppel is the service to go do that. They have something going on, I believe, for bankless listeners as well. A free trial. Can you tell people about that? Yeah, free limited time trial to who bankless members, there's a link in the show notes to get started. Also, doppel.com slash sign hyphen up. Overall, it's just like the scammers, the fissures out there, are automated. And so the manual reporting of counts is just not going to cut it.

Starting point is 00:06:28 You need to fight fire with fire. You need to fight automation with automation. So this is what Doppler does. So if you're a project that has customer deposits, don't let doppelgangers intercept your... Is that why they're called doppel? Yes. Oh, of course. Okay.

Starting point is 00:06:44 Yeah, the doppelgangers intercept your customers' funds from going into your project. So you want TVL. Don't let the doppelgangers get your customers' TVL. Take it from the guy with the FTXR, okay? I know a thing or two about scammers. Yeah, stop. David, let's get to the good stuff today. You ready for this?

Starting point is 00:07:05 Yes. Prices. Good-looking prices on good-looking charts. Bitcoin up 15% this week. 15%? 15%. A monster. green candle. We saw definitely a short squeeze where people were just caught off sides and then

Starting point is 00:07:20 they held onto their shorts for too long and then what is it was a short squeeze? Well, somebody, somebody's short and then they're like, I don't want to be short anymore. So they have to buy back their Bitcoin to stop being short, which causes the Bitcoin price to go up, which causes other people to have to do the same thing. Too many people caught in the wrong side. So Bitcoin started at 29,500 up 15% to 34,000. Come down a little bit off the top. So we're just below 34,000. You know what, David? I feel nothing for the pain of the shorters. Okay? That's what you get for shorting this market. Bears deserve that. Don't short crypto. How dare you? Yeah. I'll teach you a lesson next week, too. Get out of here. This is an 18th month high for Bitcoin, at least not right now, but it shot up above 35K. Actually, if you look at the cracking charts here.

Starting point is 00:08:06 Which, as you said, they are looking beautiful today. I love this trendline. I love the way that line goes. It looks like the upwards chart emoji. So Bitcoin with an absolutely monster week, up 15% on the week, or higher, at least from the time of recording. How about Ether on the week? Ether, starting the week at $1,600, ending the week at 1776, some freedom numbers, up 11% on the week. Also a double digit for Ether, but definitely Bitcoin 1 this week is a Bitcoin week this week for sure. And so what does that mean for the ratio, David? Ratio down 3.5% down to 0.052. Not great. Are you worried about this? This blows. It's definitely Bitcoin dominance.

Starting point is 00:08:43 season, isn't it? It's a little bit surprising. I did not expect to get here. But like I said, last week, I've reduced my, what do you call it, average buy price. Yeah. So you're fine with the position. I mean, I've already held it down to this number. I've done this once before with Heroes Capital. We're going to talk a little bit more about why Bitcoin is up. And I think in relation even to Ether and some other assets throughout this episode. Bitcoin being number one doesn't happen often because it's the biggest one to move. It takes a lot more to move Bitcoin. That's a big story. You know, and in previous cycles, Bitcoin has gone first, and that seems to be what's happening this cycle as well. David, but let's look at the global crypto market caps where are we at on the week.

Starting point is 00:09:24 $1.293 trillion, rocketing past $1.2, almost up to $1.3 trillion. That is, that's nice. That is nice. Look at this. Do you know around, let's see, three, four years ago at this time, we were less than $200 million? $200 billion. Yeah, that is a kind of. billion, yeah. Right? So we are definitely up on that time horizon. David, there were some movers this week as well. So we talked about Bitcoin, which was up. Link, RPL, Rocket Pool, and Solana had monster weeks as well. We're looking at the seven day right here, and let me grab Salana, up 24% on the week. I think if you span that out a little bit more, it would be up even higher. I think it's up 50% in the month. Wow. And we also have Link.

Starting point is 00:10:10 chain link with an absolutely monster, 43% on the seven day here. In one week, wow, link, the same week that Bankless does our bullcase for a link episode. Is that a coincidence? I don't think so. RPL, RP, I haven't listened to that, by the way. How was that? It was very bullish. Ripple, I would say RPL and I think Ripple for some reason.

Starting point is 00:10:35 Rocket Pool, a monster week as well. What's interesting, I think, about some of these numbers, too, is remember tokens like Solana had to go from absolutely catastrophic lows, right? So they were down like, you know, 95, 96, 97%. When you're down 95% is easy to bounce back. Yeah. So Solana right now, I like to, like weeks like this, I'd like to go check the percent down from all-time highs because I think that, that, you know, that represents something to me. So Salana, sole token, still down 88% from all-time high versus Bitcoin, only 50% from all-time high. It's a huge difference. And ether, 63% from all time high. So, well, let's just finish that out. Chain Lake,

Starting point is 00:11:16 80% from all time high as a benchmark. So really interesting. I have a take about this, though. And this is a take we threw out during our charting episode with a ledger from up only earlier this week. But it's just, I think the mistake that people make at this part in the cycle, David, is they become chasers. Okay? They look at the charts, the seven days, or the third. day and they're like, what's pumping? Oh, man, my fundamental thesis about all of crypto was wrong. So I better go change it and I better go sell my conviction assets and ape into the thing that is pumping most recently. Yeah, you're chasing the pump. You're chasing the pump. It's a classic mistake people make at this phase of the cycle. And this phase of the cycle, I think we can call it,

Starting point is 00:12:00 is the early bull phase of the cycle. All right? I mean, we are officially calling the bull phase of the cycle. Are we doing a minute? I'm ready to. You're ready? Do you want to? Let's call it. It's the bull phase of the cycle, guys. We're still early in the bull phase, but I think we have, this week, sentiment has certainly shifted. Totally shifted. We have broken the back on the bear market, okay?

Starting point is 00:12:21 Sorry, Shorter, sorry, bears. Your time is short. I'm not sorry, shorters. I'm not sorry. But the biggest mistake you can make at this point in the cycle is chasing the pump. So the advice that we have, the not financial advice, life advice, don't be a chaser. Hold your high conviction. Let the market come to you.

Starting point is 00:12:39 Yes. You let the pump come to you. Don't be needy. Let the pump come to you. Yeah. You don't have to respect the pump. Okay, that just means aping into stupid things. Let the pump come to you is the Zen advice on bankless this week.

Starting point is 00:12:53 But David, let's get into some analysis because I think people are wondering why is Bitcoin price up. I'm wondering that. Tell me. Well, the easy answer is obviously we've got spot Bitcoin ETS and they're coming. And we'll talk about that after the break. But I have three other reasons that Bitcoin might be up. More reason. More bullish reasons other than that?

Starting point is 00:13:15 That's like the big one. Well, I think the big one might still be the Bitcoin ETF. Although there are people like Arthur Hayes who say there's another reason. There's another force driving these markets. You know what that force is? Tell me. Global instability. War.

Starting point is 00:13:30 Oh. Okay. So Arthur wrote a post this week just in general kind of geopolitics, U.S. policy, all of these things. It was called the periphery. And he said, Bitcoin is not up so much on big ETF news. It's up because of war. Okay. And like he throws this chart up. This is the total amount that the U.S. has spent on war since 2001. And it amounts to about $10 trillion. This is mainly Iraq. This is, this is Afghanistan. And now we talked about this last week. of course, the U.S. is, Janet Yellen says the U.S. has enough to fully fund wars, essentially, in Ukraine and Israel,

Starting point is 00:14:16 and to help preserve and protect their allies and preserve Pax Americana. And this is not, I don't think this is really like a political view. You can politically think that that's a good idea or a bad idea. I think Arthur is taking the perspective of a traitor. He's saying, okay, what does this actually mean? for treasuries, for government bonds. And his conclusion is basically, like, look at this chart. So this is T-bills, treasuries, the white line.

Starting point is 00:14:47 This is gold in yellow, appropriately yellow. And then Bitcoin is green, okay? And so bonds took a massive hit, down about 11% over the, since the Fed's September 20th market, whereas Bitcoin is up far more than 11%. I think by the time he, you know, posted this, now it's about 30%. And gold is up as well. So his, is he just giving the take that, uh, that I was talking about, I think two

Starting point is 00:15:17 roll-ups ago where just like war is inflationary. Yes. That's basically what he's like, yeah, he probably heard the roll-up. And it was like, David's right. I'm going to write a post about this. I'm going to write that take and I'm going to elongate it into an entire post. Yeah, because, and he does a great job because it's not just, um, Israel. and Ukraine, it's also the Asia Pacific, right?

Starting point is 00:15:39 So the U.S. is seeing some, you know, creeping dominance from China, and it's going to protect its Pacific, Asia-Pacific allies. So Japan, Taiwan. And, like, he posed the question, maybe China is playing the version of the game the U.S. played with the Soviets back in the 1970s and the 1980s, which is basically get them to spend, spend, spend, spend, spend, and run out of, yeah, outspend them and win that way.

Starting point is 00:16:05 And so he says, a billion here, a billion there, and soon you're talking about real money. The bond market listened to Biden's speech, read his budget and threw a fit. That's why bonds had one of their worst weeks ever. So if you are a long-term U.S. treasury holder, the most worrying thing is that the U.S. government doesn't believe it is spending too much. This is what U.S. Treasury Secretary Yellen had to say when she was asked if America can afford two wars. Yeah. No big deal, right? Of course we can afford two wars.

Starting point is 00:16:34 We can print money. Yeah. So the conclusion is this. All major economies must ramp up production of war materials to hand to their allies in this new reality. And in this new reality, he says, I don't want to own bonds of any country, not just the U.S. Bad news bears all around the golden Bitcoin are starting to tell us this. So that's the first reason other than the spot Bitcoin ETF that Bitcoin might actually be up. Yeah. The second is this one. Once the last time you looked at this chart? here, David. This countdown, I should say. Oh, that has been a while. It has been a while. Tell the bankless audience what we're looking at here. We are looking at the Bitcoin having countdown. And it's been a while since I've seen such a low number. 165 days. That's a less than half of a year. And four hours, 51 minutes from the time of recording. So hold your breath. So this changes, right? I was looking earlier in the week and it was like the end of April. Now it's targeted April 8th. And this is what, what's the space?

Starting point is 00:17:34 Yeah, why is it change? Why is it changed? Because more mining hash power comes online. So Bitcoin is scheduled to have a happening every four years. If hash power is held constant, but hash power never is constant. It's always up. And so the happening is actually coming sooner than four years because the time from a Bitcoin's perspective is always speeding up. So what does this drop us down to?

Starting point is 00:17:57 Annual inflation of Bitcoin right now in blocked rewards. What is it about, you know, 1.5. 5%, 1.9%. Oh, inflation? Oh, I'm not sure. Well, I mean, let me go check ultrasound.com money, ironically, as the place to go find out what Bitcoin inflation is. Let's see, Bitcoin inflation. 1.685%. 1.7%.

Starting point is 00:18:22 It's like it's cut in half. Yep. So, 1.7%. So there you go. The happening is near. And, you know, that's the second reason I have. So we've got war, you know, Fiat dollar governments printing, and we've got the happening Those are some big, big catalyst.

Starting point is 00:18:41 Never mind the pivot from the Fed, which, I mean, there's no indications of that, but we know that that that's more ammo that we have in the quiver that will happen at some point. Yeah. And my third reason here is I think you'll resonate with this. Yes. It's time. Why is Bitcoin pumping? It's time. It's time.

Starting point is 00:18:59 It's time. Yeah. It's. Sometimes markets don't need. reason. Yeah. The reason of bears being tired of being bearish is a catalyst because that is the zeitgeist of the time. Like one person goes like, oh, you know what? Fuck it. I'm buying. I'm done being bearish. Well, then, you know, they message their friend. It just spreads. It spreads through crypto Twitter. People just stop bear posting and they start bull posting. It just sometimes it just happens through

Starting point is 00:19:27 the intra-psychic layer of humans, which is also a catalyst. And that's what, that's, that's what I think we're saying is that's what happened this week. Like the average human just, you know, decided that we're bullish now. Yeah. It's like, why be bearish any longer? They're putting all the pieces to do this. I mean, I've always been saying that. Well, I mean, but now it's the sellers who have to be exhausted, right? And I think the sellers to stop being bearish. It's very obvious with, you know, SBF getting his day in court and all of these other things that we'll be talking about later in that episode. The bad news has been absorbed by the market adequately. Like all of the bad news has been fully priced in. So,

Starting point is 00:20:01 So maybe now it's just time for Bitcoin to go up. And it wouldn't it be odd if this happened? Because it happens every freaking four years, guys. As another catalyst, the four years. Here it is the meme layer. Yeah. So maybe we should all just stop overthinking it. It's time for Bitcoin to go up.

Starting point is 00:20:17 David, what do we have coming up next? Coming up next, talking about the Bitcoin ETF. We've got some news to talk about that. But also we've got to talk about, I think this is going to be great. Calling out the BS, Nick Carter is leading a vendetta against the Wall Street Journal because the Wall Street Journal has posted just totally. debunked information that Elizabeth Warren is citing and they can refuse to retract it. Citizen journalist Nick Carter having absolutely none of it. SBF, of course, taking the stand

Starting point is 00:20:43 today, the day of recording. We sadly won't be able to comment about it, but we will share what we know. All of this and more coming up as soon as we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially Cracken, our preferred exchange for crypto in 2023. If you do not have an account with Cracken, consider clicking the link and show notes to getting started with Cracken today. best crypto trading platform in the industry. The place I use to check the charts and the crypto prices, even when I'm not looking to place a trade. On Cracken Pro, you'll have access to advanced charting tools, real-time market data, and lightning fast trade execution.

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Starting point is 00:22:48 January 2024. Did something new happen this week? That's the big question. Is that why Bitcoin is up? A few things did happen this week, actually. And the first is this. Black Rock is now seeding the spot Bitcoin ETF. That means BlackRock is putting some initial funding from their bank and broker to create a few units

Starting point is 00:23:11 of Bitcoin. It does not mean... BlackRock's actually buying Bitcoin. They're buying Bitcoin. Now, it does not... Backro's buying Bitcoin to prepare for their ETF. Yes, they have to do this.

Starting point is 00:23:21 Like, hey, it doesn't work. Is this, hey, is this thing on? It's testing, right? Like, they're just buying some Bitcoin. Now, this is not buying in bulk. Just setting up my Bitcoin ETF. But the fact that, so they're not buying in bulk yet, but the fact that they are doing it and

Starting point is 00:23:36 they're doing it publicly, right? They've just like announced to the world that they're doing this. That is a sign that we are getting closer. So that is a thing that certainly happened this week. But I think the big question on everyone's mind is when the Bitcoin ETF comes, because it is, it is coming, will it make a material impact on Bitcoin, the price of Bitcoin itself, or will this all be front run, will this all be priced in by the time we get a new Bitcoin ETF? Or will there even be any demand? I mean, like a lot of people would argue, we've had

Starting point is 00:24:10 Bitcoin already. You can go buy Bitcoin in your Cracken, thanks to Cracken, exchange right now, basically anywhere in the world. And so why do U.S. residents need a Bitcoin ETF? Well, this is a tweet from Eleanor Territ. She is a reporter for, she's a reporter for Fox business. What is she saying here, David? She says, I've been speaking to a couple of Tradify execs regarding the Bitcoin Spot ETF. And I think it's interesting how mind-blown most of them are about the level of interest that it's created.

Starting point is 00:24:42 In regards to the Bitcoin major rally, she says, quote, I mean, we're excited for these products to come to market too, but this level of hysteria is something that we've never seen before. And she concludes in saying, seems Tratify can't quite believe how much demand there actually is for mainstream crypto asset investing. So this is demand, this mania, this hysteria that she's talking about, are just from average people who have their capital, their money outmanaged by financial dizers or money managers. And all the money managers, what she's saying is like all the financial advisors, like, yo, like we're also excited for the spot Bitcoin ETF, but our clients

Starting point is 00:25:19 are really excited about it. And that's what really matters at the end of the day. I want to believe this, right? This is a very hypey tweet. Sometimes you wonder whether it's just a hypey tweet somebody puts out there for engagement. I choose to believe. I mean, look at all the things that are going on that we had the seven different reasons why Bitcoin's bullish. Like at least a few of those have to be landing with just normies. David, David is choosing to be bullish this week as well. Here's some numbers that back this up. And I find this analysis helpful as well when you compare that to kind of the normative analysis there. This is from Alex Thorn, he's an investor at Galaxy. And he actually ran the numbers based on projected inflows, projected demand for the Bitcoin

Starting point is 00:26:03 ETF. And he based this on a number of factors, I believe, past performance of the gold ETF. He really looked at the total sizing of the market inflows. And we'll include a link in the show notes to this tweet and some of his analysis. But he thinks that post-Bitcoin ETF, Bitcoin could see another 75% price appreciation. So almost a doubling of price. And that is based just on year one inflow. So in the first year. And he gets to a number of about $15 billion of net new buying activity into Bitcoin in year one. And he kind of backs into that number based on the number of broker-dealer purchases that are going on, the number of bank purchases, the number of registered investment advisor purchases. And yeah, I think it's some compelling number.

Starting point is 00:26:54 So he's saying 15 billion in inflows into Bitcoin, net new purchases of Bitcoin in year one. And then he's projecting 26 billion in year two and almost 40 billion of Bitcoin inflows in year three. So that's a lot of inflows, man. That's a lot of inflows. And importantly, this, this amount of inflows doesn't end there. That's not the only new inflows. There will be inflows that will buy Bitcoin ahead of these flows because they know that these flows are coming.

Starting point is 00:27:24 What do we say at the start of every episode, front run on the opportunity? Like, if you are buying Bitcoin in your stock brokerages through the Bitcoin ETF, you are no longer early. I would say actually the mark of like being early to Bitcoin is buying Bitcoin before the ETF exists. I think you're right, David.

Starting point is 00:27:39 I think once the ETF exists, you are no, there's no more early buyers of Bitcoin. Yeah, you're at least in the, you're not in the early adopter. You're maybe in the early majority or something like that. Early majority. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But importantly, like this $15 billion of new buy pressure that's coming this year is going to incur like another $15-ish billion of just like people buying because other people are buying. And that's what a bull market is. Yeah. And I don't think crypto-natives fully understand the size of this potential market, right? So here's some numbers here. The size of assets under management that get exposure when there's a good Bitcoin ETF, broker dealers alone, they have 27 trillion

Starting point is 00:28:23 in assets. Again, that's the total market size of this. Banks have about 12 trillion that they could be deployed. And the big one that I think I'm most interested in is the Edward Jones guy. It's like the financial advisor in the U.S. that is going to say, hey, now I have a product that I can sell my 401K users who come to me for financial advice. That is almost 10 trillion in assets that registered investment advisors have in the U.S. So it's an absolutely huge market. The other thing I think with all of this kind of pressure on the SEC to like make this happen, the bigger question is when we zoom out is, why don't we have a Bitcoin ETF already? Like that's at some level, David, that's the more

Starting point is 00:29:09 amazing part, that the U.S. still doesn't have a Bitcoin ETF. What's his tweet from Nate Grassee say? Yeah, he just, like, lists all the terrible ways that we have Bitcoin exposure through, through, like, normal, typical trad rails. You know, GBTC, which is off 25%, micro strategy, which is, you know, like a proxy Bitcoin exposure and is being used for Bitcoin exposure, even though it's a company, buying Dogecoin, Bitcoin Futures ETF, 2x leveraged Bitcoin Futures ETF, blockchain quote unquote ETFs, ETH futures ETFs, all before a very simple product that is the spot Bitcoin ETF. It's just lunacy.

Starting point is 00:29:50 It's just insane that we have these things in trad accounts and not a very simple spot Bitcoin ETF. All of these apparently, according to SEC, are safer than the spot Bitcoin ETF. Here's how Hester Purse put it in an interview. 2X leverage futures Bitcoin ETF. Give me a break. Yeah. This is Hester Purse.

Starting point is 00:30:08 on Squawk Box on CNBC. All right. Let me play this clip for you guys. And I can't say whether or not the commission is ready to approve a Bitcoin exchange traded product. I've been thinking we should approve one for the last five years. So the logic for why we haven't has always mystified me. The court case, obviously, is an important factor in the landscape.

Starting point is 00:30:30 But I can't guess as to my colleague's approach to this topic. I can't guess my colleague's approach to this topic. because he's an insane person, and he's unpredictable. Oh, wow. Hester Purse, again, SEC Commissioner is mystified about her colleague's approach to this. It's not just the Bitcoin ETF either. You know what's actually underpriced and probably like undervalued by the market right now, David? I have a guess.

Starting point is 00:30:59 It's the Ethereum spot ETF. And that is coming too. This is from James Seffert. He is talking about the filings for a spot. Ethereum ETF. This one specifically has got pointed as the fifth currently active spot for Ethereum ETF finally. The Bitcoin spots of ETF has like in the teens of number of contenders. Ethereum's got five. ETH has five spot ETFs. So like the count the number of catalysts that we have, bro. Like after the Bitcoin spot ETF, it's the ether one. It's got to be the ether one,

Starting point is 00:31:33 right? And this one specifically, it's got a deadline of July of 2020. I'm going to schedule a mountain. Well, you should, David. Schedule a mountain for July of next year because I think that within months, it could be the case that we actually have an Ethereum ETF after our Bitcoin ETF. And if you want another prediction market for all of this, you can go look at the grayscale ETHE price chart or the Bitcoin GBDC price chart. Okay. This is, again, these are these trust type products that don't trade exactly. you know, to one to one with the ether or Bitcoin spot price.

Starting point is 00:32:13 Not even close. Yeah. Because it's almost like a prediction market on when these products will convert to full ETFs to actual spot ETFs. And the gap has closed on this. The premium to NAV has closed on this. What did I say? Do you remember I think it was like December or January of 20, 22, right after FTX? And these things hit their lows.

Starting point is 00:32:35 their discount, the ETHE discount to net asset value. Same thing with Bitcoin. I think it hit a low of like negative 40%. What did I say? I said that the bull market will very clearly be back on when we can recapture the lost capital, the billions of dollars of deleted capital because of the Eth E discount and GBT discount.

Starting point is 00:32:57 We are watching that in real time come back to zero. Where are we at? Negative 19, still a lot, still a waste to go, but very much healthy. healthily off the bottom of like negative 54% so going from negative 54 to negative 19% off of net asset value is the restoration of billions of dollars of capital into investors hands yeah the the de gens are being refueled yeah so as this approach is zero and we actually restore that billions of dollars of capital this this like frees up so much capital to to get unlocked yeah well in the bull

Starting point is 00:33:33 market, it'll probably go above zero, too. It'll go into the positive territory. Well, if it turns into an ETF, it'll always be at one, finally. And that was ether, the numbers that you gave. I mean, it was down about 50% for Bitcoin as well, and now it's only down 14%. So the gap is closing, and I think that's a prediction market on when Bitcoin, when Ether, ETF. So that's what's going on in the world of ETFs. David, there's some lies going on in mainstream media this week about crypto about specifically crypto and its ties to terrorism. What are we going to talking about next? The Wall Street Journal is being called out for reporting misinformation that everyone knows is misinformation about how crypto is involved with terrorist financing, specifically with

Starting point is 00:34:19 Hamas. Now, other organizations have also reported similar things, and then they have retracted the statements after organizations like chain aliasis and other agencies reported show that the numbers were wrong and they then provided the correct numbers, but not the Wall Street Journal. Now, that would be one thing if the Wall Street Journal was just taking their, you know, journalistic malpractice to the face and just, you know, whatever, dealing with it. Except Elizabeth Warren is using this and citing the Wall Street Journal in letters to the White House. Ryan, we've shown this particular Wall Street Journal article on the weekly roll-up before. It was either two or three weeks ago, right after Hamas invaded Israel and had this start of the conflict there. And we talked about the

Starting point is 00:35:04 use of crypto and how crypto ended up in the hands of Hamas. This is the article in question. So here we are two, three weeks later, after another individual, Sam Callahan, who tweeted out, it has been confirmed that this article is patently false. It was straight up fake news. So we're looking at the title of this article, Hamas militants behind Israel attacked raised millions in crypto. And you're the subtitle on this article. Digital currency transactions highlight how U.S. and Israel have struggled to sever the access of Hamas, Palestinian, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah to foreign funding.

Starting point is 00:35:41 So again, tying crypto directly to terrorism. And then last week, David, remember we talked about that letter that was signed by 100 members of Congress that Elizabeth Warren spearheaded, was basically like, hey, we've got to do something about cryptocurrency and terrorists. and like the use of cryptocurrency by terrorists, in particular, Hamas. And she sourced and cited this very article. That's the problem. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:36:08 So Sam Callahan and Twitter account says, last week, the Wall Street Journal published an article claiming about $90 million worth of crypto was used to fund Hamas, a serious claim that gained significant attention. He continues and says, it was confirmed that this article was patently false. It was straight up fake news. and this has been confirmed by chain alices,

Starting point is 00:36:29 the people who would know, which ran the numbers themselves. It turns out the authors of the article mistakenly counted an entire exchange's trading volume of $82 million for a terrorist group's address, which is a rookie move. The actual funds that went to the known terrorist linked addresses were substantially less.

Starting point is 00:36:49 Do you want to know how much less they were, Ryan? Versus 90 million? Versus 90 million, 82 million. Yeah. Yeah. $450,000. Oh my God. Yeah, those are different numbers.

Starting point is 00:37:02 Yeah. And like you said, Ryan, Senator Warren wrote this letter to the White House where she said, indeed, between August and 2021 and the past June, the two groups raised over $130 million in crypto. As the Wall Street Journal reports, researchers who study Hamas' financing said crypto remains a number one tool the groups used to raise funds. So here is where Chain Alice is comes in with their statement.

Starting point is 00:37:25 Look what's cited here too in this letter, David. It's a very article we're just looking at. The Wall Street Journal. Chain Alice has released their statement saying, terrorist orgs have historically used and will likely to use and continue to use traditional fiat-based methods like financial institutions and shell companies, aka Tradfai, as their primary financing vehicles. But some terrorist organizations raise store and transfer funds using cryptocurrency.

Starting point is 00:37:50 This is true. Thanks to the transparency of the blockchain, crypto has for years proven to be an ineffective tool for terrorism financing at scale, but even small amounts of funds can do tremendous damage and should be investigated. Again, they're not discounting this. They're just trying to put it in perspective. Taking a closer look at these counterparties, we find more evidence that it's likely that some kind of service provider,

Starting point is 00:38:11 and of the roughly $82 million in crypto received by this address, about $450,000 worth of funds were transferred to the known terror-affiliated wallet. So basically saying, the number is $450,000, not millions and millions and millions. It's a big freaking difference here. It's a very big difference, yeah. So Nick Carter comes in, and Nick Carter, I would say, he's written like academic articles before. He knows a thing or two about journalistic integrity.

Starting point is 00:38:37 So he gives this recap saying, first, Wall Street journalists, and then names them. Angus, Berwick, and Ian Talley, write a flurry of articles citing eclip elliptic data, which is another publisher. We'll talk about that in sec, claiming that. claiming that P-I-J, a Hamas affiliate, raised $93 million in crypto. Second, Senator Warren uses this article to claim Hamas raised over $130 million in crypto. Don't know where that, Amber came from. This article is the sole citation in her letter, the Bloomberg article.

Starting point is 00:39:06 The entire letter, Elizabeth Warren's letter, depends on the Wall Street Journal article. Third, over 100 members of Congress sign the letter, which asks for Biden administration to further crack down on crypto. Next, chain alice comes out with an article disputing the Wall Street Journal. journal claims, saying that instead of the $82 million, the real figure is around $450,000. And last, the Wall Street Journal refuses to follow up or retract, instead writing more articles relying on their claims. Wow. That is bad.

Starting point is 00:39:37 So they're refusing to redact that to. So the source of the data that the Wall Street Journal, they weren't looking at these on-chain transactions. They were getting this from a company called Elliptic. What did Elliptic say in the aftermath of this? Oh, well, they wrote an article, Ryan, saying, setting the record straight on crypto crowdfunding by Hamas. And they corrected the record and issued a retraction of their original statement.

Starting point is 00:39:59 And the first bullet point here, there's no evidence to support the assertion that Hamas has received significant volumes of crypto donations. Hmm. So correcting the record. So somebody's doing it. Somebody is going back and saying, yo, we effed up, sorry. Just not the Wall Street Journal. Then here's Ian Talley, the author of the article that come out of the Wall Street Journal,

Starting point is 00:40:17 just absolutely doubling down. Really? You know, digging his heels in. They're doubling down on this? Oh, they're doubling down bigly. Yeah. Uh-huh. What?

Starting point is 00:40:27 Do they have any data? Are they like actually bringing? Oh my God. No, no. Okay, so this tweet, which is this guy trying, you got the Twitter community notes to correct the record, which is how you know you're off. And so this tweet from the author gets 155 likes.

Starting point is 00:40:42 And then Nick Carter follows up and says, you are a liar, you have been found out. now do your job and publish a retraction, salvage some dignity coming in at 1.3,000 likes. That is a massive ratio. This reporter is just doubling down on misinformation. Yeah, not great. So Nick Carter follows up and he retweets,

Starting point is 00:41:07 welcome back to Twitter. I see that we have your attention. Elliptic and chain analysis have rebutted your analysis. Your kingdom is crumbling. But yeah, dig your heels in further to see where it takes. He just is on a role, man. Another take from Nick saying, make no mistake, journalists and senators

Starting point is 00:41:22 lying about crypto financing terrorism and pinning the blame on us is an existential threat. They win that information war. There is no limit to government aggression. This is our battle we need to win. And the truth is on our side. And so here's the meme from Nick Carter.

Starting point is 00:41:40 He's got the SpongeBob beam of to-do list. And it's one, Liptic corrects the record, which is done. next, Wall Street Journal retracts, next, Warren letter, signatories retract, blast Liz Warren fesses up. If we get any of these, that last one's not happening, that last one's not happening. Brian Armstrong weighing into saying, this is crazy. An inaccurate Wall Street Journal article caused 20% of Congress to sign a letter. That's scary.

Starting point is 00:42:05 It's crazy. Liptic has now refuted the evidence in the Wall Street Journal article. Wall Street Journal, will you issue a retraction slash correction? They haven't yet. time of recording Wall Street Journal has not retracted this. Bology comes in and says, the refutation could not be stronger. Will Wall Street journals, authors, Ian Talley, and Berwick, correct the record?

Starting point is 00:42:26 Quote, there is no evidence to support the assertion that Hamas has received significant volumes of crypto donations. That's the line I read earlier. David, it's not great, but the good news is, as Hester Purse has said before, we have the courts on our side. We also have truth on our side. I love having truth on my side. It's in the blockchain.

Starting point is 00:42:41 Go look up the data yourself. It's a true. I mean, the records are clear here. What's going on with our friend and my doppelganger, SBF this week, David? So, SBF is going to take the stand. He's going to do the thing that he is so good at, which is just running his mouth. There's been a bunch of analysis as to, like, why is SBF going to take the stand? Why is he deciding?

Starting point is 00:43:06 This is risky, right? Why is he doing this? Yeah. And so here's how this has gone so far. Sam's defense has struggled, as you could imagine. The prospects for Sam don't look good. The judge has even denied seven expert witnesses that Sam would like to have proposed a call to the trial.

Starting point is 00:43:26 I don't know why, but not great. Like, you're just being removed of your collateral. I would suppose that maybe there's a handful of reasons. They've also denied many of Sam Bankruptry's arguments and evidence, and he, of course, faces decades and pretext. is if he's convicted. So he's not, it's not looking great. So this is potentially a new strategy. It feels like a Hail Mary to me, David. It feels like a little bit of a hair Mary. It's not going well. So what did we got? We'll just put, we'll just put SBF on the stand and hope maybe he can

Starting point is 00:43:57 talk his way out of this. I think part of the idea is they, the defense wants SBF to appear that he didn't intend to commit any fraud. The prosecutors are painting him as some kind of criminal mastermind. He's just a guy that got caught with too much complexity. And crypto and financial products, they're all incredibly complex. And hey, I'm Sam. I just got stuck in the middle of all of this. And so they're hoping they can paint that kind of a portrait. The thing that I think they're exposing a lot of risk to, David, is that the prosecution knows all about this. And they have the receipts. Here's a formal federal prosecutor saying this is a risky maneuver. And he says, expect they've been preparing, this is the prosecution has been preparing, I expect they've been preparing

Starting point is 00:44:44 for SBF to testify for a long time. They've mined all his prior statements, whether it's tweets. You remember some of those tweets, right, David? His emails, his texts, public statements, they got all that information that he made about the company and they're going to just sit there and impeach him with them. I'm sure they will. So that is probably going on right as we've record this and we'll have some more info for you next week about SBF's trial. and what happened when he took the witness stand. I think there are some assumptions that we can make about how this is going to go down based off of past evidence.

Starting point is 00:45:17 I will make the assumption that the prosecution knows everything that there is to know. There's nothing that Sam has been able, the cards that he's kept close to his chest, those don't exist because he's a blabber mouth. So there's nothing that the prosecution doesn't know. And so is everyone around him. There's no like a eight up his sleeve. He doesn't have anything.

Starting point is 00:45:37 It is a Hail Mary. Yeah. And I'm going to also guess that the prosecution is just like licking its lips. Like, yes, he's going to be on the stand. Are you serious? This is great. I think this is a real picture of Sam striding into court this morning. And the quote here from the person who tweeted this,

Starting point is 00:45:56 when you know you're going to prison for a few decades, but the doc just filled your Adderall prescription. This is Sam, just like cocaine confident walking into court the morning for giving in his testimony. whole picture. He has his shirt just like not tucked in at all. He's a little bit scraggly looking. And then he has his massive ankle bracelet on his. Oh, I just noticed that. I thought his, I should have added that to my costume, David. Maybe you do. We can't really tell. Anyways, the other assumption, this is, this is my, okay,

Starting point is 00:46:30 I don't have any evidence for this, but I'm going to go ahead and guess that after having spent so much time with Sam, that Sam's lawyer is like, I'm effing tired of this kid and I don't really have any more patience for him. So, F it. Just put him on the stand. I don't know. Maybe. Maybe.

Starting point is 00:46:47 I do think it's a yellow type of move here. David, we got more to talk about, though. What's coming up? Yeah, I got some more tinfoil hat stuff for you guys. The uny chain is on. Ethereum is deployed. An OP stack unichain. Who did this?

Starting point is 00:47:02 We'll talk about that. Was the DCG Fiasco bigger than Enron, New York Attorney General, coming after DCG and Gemini. And then also, there's a new speaker of the house. Sadly, it's not Tom Memmer. But is he crypto-friendly? We'll ask all of these questions and answer them. As soon as we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors

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Starting point is 00:48:14 The last thing we have to clean up is Digital Currency Group, DCG. This is a Genesis. Gemini Earn was involved over a billion dollars in retail depositors funds lost. The New York Attorney General says this is a bigger deal. The fraud that digital currency group pulled, it's a bigger deal than Enron. bigger than Enron, actually. What's going on with this case, David? Yeah, so New York Attorney General Latita James files a lawsuit against DCG for defrauding more than 230,000 investors, including 29,000 New Yorkers, of over a billion dollars. So, of course, as we know, just to recap, Gemini, Gemini the Exchange, the Winklevye, lent funds to Genesis owned by DCG, Barry Silbert's Digital Currency Group as a part of its earn

Starting point is 00:49:03 program. Some of that funds went to three-roar's capital, who, of course, got liquidated and didn't have any money to pay back. Leaving Genesis was to a $1.1 billion hole in it, also leaving Gemini unable to repay back its earned customers. So the main allegations here are Genesis' former CEO, C.O. I'm just pictured that name. I apologize. And DCG's CEO, Barry Silbert. You don't have to apologize to that. I don't think. That was a hard. That's a hard one. I don't know how to pronounce that. And DCG CEO, Barry Silbert, defrauded the public by trying to conceal heavy losses that investors bore. Gemini knew Genesis's loans were unsecured at one point, highly concentrated with one entity Alameda Research,

Starting point is 00:49:47 but did not reveal this information to investors. Okay, so then the New York Attorney General comes in, because, like, we've been watching the Winkleweigh like throw poo at Barry Silbert, and Barry Silbert saying, that's totally unfounded. And then New York Attorney General comes is like, both of you guys knew bad stuff. And both of you guys are guilty. Yeah. So that is what is being charged. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:50:13 And by the way, the reason I said you don't have to apologize for the pronunciation of the CEO's name is they should be apologizing to us and to all of the retail investors who lost a lot of money. And there's some stories that we can get to a little bit later. But I think my summary of this is Gemini was careless. Some might say reckless in terms of. like what it did with respect to Genesis. But DCG, that was straight up fraud. This is what friend of the show, Ram Alawala, says. FTCS was worse than Madoff and DCG was worse than Enron.

Starting point is 00:50:47 So he's kind of agreeing. He says this thread will show how and why the New York Attorney General's request will force a sale of grayscale. So grayscale might be sold, probably will be sold as a result of this. He compares Enron and DCG. He says the Nron fraud involve the use of off-balance sheet special purpose entities to hide debt and inflate profits.

Starting point is 00:51:08 Enron execs engaged in self-dealing transactions, and DCG, at least according to the allegations, did both of these and more. Through complex financial structures, Enron was able to disguise its true financial state, misleading investors and analysts, and DCG did the same thing. In fact, they misled Gemini, asked their financial state. Gemini was like, okay, these balance sheets don't look good. These transactions don't look quite right. Can you send us? the update, they fabricated things, they misled, they stalled. They didn't give Gemini the truth here. So that is the story. And what I think this is interesting and relevant, David, is because this is really the last thing that we have to clean up from 2022. You know, 2020 is such a mess,

Starting point is 00:51:52 but we've been cleaning up all year. And this is kind of the last thing that is in the end stages of being cleaned up. But just a reminder of the human cost here. Here's a sample of the human cost. This is from the New York Attorney General's case. There are 230,000 investors, $1 billion. That includes a 73-year-old grandmother and her husband, both retired, had their life savings in Earn. Not a good financial move, but also there's some sense that the earned product was safe, and it certainly wasn't. It was being papered over by fraud. I think on the back of this, somebody could go like, hey, bankless guys, aren't you ashamed of crypto? like what everything that your industry did.

Starting point is 00:52:35 And I guess my response to that would be, I think the crypto bankers failed us last cycle. FDX, this costume I'm wearing, Barry Silbert, DCG, the CEOs of BlockFi, Alex Machinsky, Celsius. The crypto bankers failed us once again. The crypto protocols themselves kept working. So no, I'm not ashamed of crypto.

Starting point is 00:52:56 I'm ashamed of some of the actors in this industry. But once again, it was the centralized intermediaries who failed us, technology, not the protocols themselves, not the social layer of Bitcoin and Ethereum and the other protocols. So, you know, that would be my answer to that. And I'm glad we're cleaning all of this up. Yeah. And this is, of course, why we say protocols, not people, code, not kings. People. People will let you down. That's why we are putting our finance, our financial system into code. And you named his name, but I think inside of all of this with DCG, Gemini,

Starting point is 00:53:31 there's one man who I think really takes more, ought to be taking more responsibility than I think even people are pointing towards him. And that's Alex Mishinsky. So if he is not related in this story, he is not part of DCG or any of this. But think about, like, we saw Zach Prince from BlockFi go onto the stand

Starting point is 00:53:51 and testify about the San Bankman-Fried case, and he had to reveal some of the financial calculus that he was making and the TLDR was he was gambling he was being irresponsible you said like the Gemini twins and Gemini earned that would they were also being responsible why was everyone being irresponsible why were all of like you know why are just normal people like money managers running normal businesses why are they just straight up gambling with everyone's money I'm going to point my finger uh to a variety of places and also specifically to Alex Michinsky because blockfi Gemini Earn had to compete with Celsius,

Starting point is 00:54:28 and Celsius was faking their yields out the yin-gang. Right? And so they all had to go out on the risk curve because they all had to compete with Celsius who wasn't playing fairly. They were just juicing up their yields by taking leverage and being an actual Ponzi scheme. And so they pulled all of Gemini,

Starting point is 00:54:49 all of Blockfly with them out on the yield curve, on the risk curve, and pushing everyone's like, this late 73 year old grandma's life savings in further down the risk than what would be appropriate because Alex Mishinsky fucked it up for everyone that's my take well you're on a tirade against Alex Mishinsky and by the way I haven't heard much about his prosecution so I feel like we need to kind of look into how that is getting settled but I do agree there's like there's um there's some actors that are worse than others in the previous cycle right there there are levels of

Starting point is 00:55:21 of fraud committed last cycle and you know well look at Look at you. You just boosted up your suspenders. Vint show here, David. My spenders fell down. All right, give us, while you got your suspenders on, give us the uniswap take here. Uniswap chain. Uni-Chane.

Starting point is 00:55:36 Okay, what is those? What are you on about, David? Yeah, okay, so remember our old episode with Dan Elisor saying unichain is inevitable? Yeah. Okay, so here's Andrew. You think you found it? I think I found it. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:55:48 So Andrew Huang from Conduit tweets out, tweets out announcing the Uniswap V4 Sandbox, an Opie stack powered roll-up by conduit in collaboration with the Uniswap Foundation. Build your custom AMM on top of Uniswop's battle test contracts while still operating with existing liquidity instead of fragmenting it. Okay, so OP stack roll-up that is the UniV-4 sandbox. It's just a sandbox. Just a sandbox, but it's an OP-Stack Uni-V-4 implementation. Okay. Does the value go to accrue to Uni-Tokens in any way? Is that part of the story here? I think I need more details on that. If this was a true uniswop app chain, it would be powered by the Unitoken. Maybe that could come later. I think this is right now, I'm going to call this

Starting point is 00:56:36 Schrodinger's Uni-Chane as to like whether or not it is actually the fully fledged Uniswop App chain that like we were talking about in that episode with Dan Elisa will be determined by the market. But this is where it would start. But this also implies, doesn't it, that anybody can spin up their quote unquote unichain. Yes, but Conduit is in a very specific position to do this because they are a roll-up as a service provider. Conduit is the infrastructure behind public goods network, behind Zora chain, behind a lot of the OP stack chains.

Starting point is 00:57:09 Also, we didn't have time to put it in the roll-up, but Arbitrum Orbits just hit May Net, like are going live, and Conduit is also doing Arbitrom-Orbit chains. And so one-click-deploy OP stack chains, one-click-deploy orbit chains. And so this is conduit saying, yo, we're going to do the unichain. We're going to do the unichain. You know, this is the good news about, you know, everyone was upset last week about the uniswap interface taking a fee for swaps, right? But the good news here for consumers is that fees will go down to the extent competition

Starting point is 00:57:43 enters the marketplace. And now here is some more competition. Looks like forking Unswap v4 code. It's not competition with the front end. So the front end will still say the same. But they could just fork the front end and put that on here and add their own. They don't own Uniswap.com. They don't own the URL, but they could just fork the front end.

Starting point is 00:58:02 What I thought was pretty interesting, Ryan, if you go and click into the Uniswap Foundation, Twitter, after Conduit released this announcement saying in collaboration with the Uniswap Foundation, the Uniswap Foundation had to put out this tweet, which says, we are excited to acknowledge the initiative taken by Conduit in launching an optimistic roll-up and enable the test net version of Uniswap v4. To clarify, Uniswap Foundation does not intend to carry this to main net or establish a formal partnership. They're saying, yo, like, what is the Uniswap Foundation's like prerogative?

Starting point is 00:58:33 What is their, what is their like role in the world? They want more builders to build on Uniswap. They are not, they are saying like, yo, that's not our chain. That's not ours. That's not ours. There's an interesting, I think you've uncovered an interesting dynamic here, David. I'm not sure what it all means. but yeah, let's keep our eye on this, shall we?

Starting point is 00:58:51 All right. By the ways, I love the drama. I love the chaos. Speaking of new trains and chaos, remember DYDX, it used to be an Ethereum roll-up. It is no longer, is now on a cosmos. So it's a cosmos app chain. And they just announced that today, this was someday as of this week, we're proud to present and fully open source the completed D-Y-D-X chain.

Starting point is 00:59:12 So Antonio did it, David. A lot of work to migrate. It was like over a year, right? Yeah, well, that's what he said. said it would take. It's a lot of work. And here, there it is. It's, it's Cosmos. I think it's, it's the largest DeFi PURPS exchange out there by a long shot. It is now on Cosmos. So that is, I think, bullish for the Cosmos community. Yeah. I think this is going to be, this is now some data that we get to get. What happens if your app does leave Ethereum for your own Cosmos IBC app chain?

Starting point is 00:59:46 Like, and then what happens next? Finally, we'll be able to take it. take a look. David, I think I found my bottom signal on NFTs this week, by the way. Yeah, I've been waiting for it. I know you're a huge secret closet. You know I'm a huge NFT fan, right? But I'm just looking for like a price to buy. And I feel like I finally found the bottom signal for JPEGs. It's from none other than not a friend of the show, Andrew Tate, okay? So this is a take. I want to play for you from Andrew Tate. He's talking about NFTs. And of course, this is going to be the first time I've ever listen to Andrew Tate. Really? Okay, here we go.

Starting point is 01:00:19 Today we're going to talk about there was a time when very successful, rich people were trying to convince me to spend millions of dollars on a JPEG. And they tried to explain to me that it's on the blockchain and it's one of one and you can see on the blockchain. Who the the fuck is checking the blockchain for my JPEC?

Starting point is 01:00:39 Who cares? Three million for a baggie. Fine, drive the baggatty. Three million for a JPEG. People can just copy and save the JPEG. He said it. No, my JPEG is the real one. It's on the blockchain. Look on the blockchain. If you go to Etherscan.com. He said ether scan. Nobody gives a fuck by Eater scan, checking the blockchain.

Starting point is 01:00:54 Even if I proved, after all, that I owned that picture, guess who would care? No one. Only nerds. It was a circle jerk of a nerd. Only nerds. Did Andrew Tate just call us nerds? Yeah, yeah. He goes on a rant about NFT crypto influencers here.

Starting point is 01:01:10 Are you ready for this? If you make a whole bunch of money with crypto, guess what you learned. That's not us, though. You didn't learn anything. You are still a dork. But now you're a rich dork, which makes a, you a megadork. Money doesn't change who you are.

Starting point is 01:01:23 It amplifies it. There you go. I could go on. This is a 10-minute rant, David, but I think that is the bottom signal for NFTs. We are all a bunch of mega-dorts. I don't know yet.

Starting point is 01:01:33 If you got any suggestions, let me know. A crypto punk. Dude, they're still freaking expensive in E-terms. I want... Rang! Cry about it.

Starting point is 01:01:43 They're the first NFTs on Ethereum. It's just a JPEG. It's not also that people will throw a flag. They're not the first. But they're the first. meaningfully, highly priced NFTs on Ethereum with the branding of... What are we talking? How much ETH to be talking?

Starting point is 01:01:56 I think the floor one is like 45 to 50. Dude, that's more than an ETH validator. That's a lot of ETH. I bet you one Cryptopunk will get you more yield in ETH terms, more returns than ETH. You think a crypto punk has higher returns. It's going to outperform an ether. A validator, yes. Yes. A crypto punk will outperform ether, yes.

Starting point is 01:02:15 See, you know what? I think I'll be perpetually stuck on this, where every time, like it goes down in price or I see a bottom signal and be like, but it's just a JPEG. And I'd rather hold ETH. So maybe I'll just never be. I'll never be one of the game. Then I'll suggest you a Mad Lad because then you don't have to sell your ether for it. You can sell, I don't know, something else.

Starting point is 01:02:34 Soul tokens? Because you have to buy soul. I don't think you have any soul. You have to buy soul and then you have to buy it. So you don't sell your ether. Just sell your like. Sell my soul. All right.

Starting point is 01:02:44 All right. All right. I'll see that. David. This is my Madelaud is my Salana exposure. Yeah. Yeah, so that's it. You're all in on Mad Labs and no sole tokens right now. Yeah, that's right. David, in regulatory news, I thought we had something great, which was,

Starting point is 01:03:00 do you know, the Republican Party has been really struggling to find a new House majority leader? And there was a brief window of time where it looked like it might have been Tom Emmer, which of course is one of Crypto's strongest allies, friend of the podcast. He's been on bankless many times. he believes in this whole thing that we're doing. At least he says he does. Peer to peer money. He's against digital authoritarianism. He showed up at the permissionless conference.

Starting point is 01:03:26 We did a panel. I know that this man understands crypto and he was nominated as Speaker of the House. So I put this tweet out and I said, Tom Emmer could become Speaker of the House. He's just been nominated. Bullish. What happens? Four hours later. Wow.

Starting point is 01:03:40 It seems like Trump nuked it. Maybe some others nuked the nominations that he's kind of not fit. you know how these politics, political things go. They knew House Majority Leader has just been elected, though. And his name, the most generic name ever, Mike Johnson. Mike Johnson. His crypto sentiment, he's kind of an unknown, like in general. And he's also an unknown with respect to crypto.

Starting point is 01:04:05 So he, of course, is a Republican on the Coinbase Public Policy app website. It's basically like unclear. Crypto sentiment, unclear, not enough data to do. determine. So I don't really know what this means for crypto. I just know we missed a good one with Tom Emmer, and I'm not necessarily optimistic about Mike Johnson, but we will see. Yeah, the last unknown person to take some leadership position was Gary Gensler, but at least it's more general. All right, so, Ryan, this came across my desk this week. Song. Dot tech. Sound familiar? Sound familiar? Friend. Dot tech. Friend. Dot tech. Now, song. Dot tech. Now, instead of buying friends, your friends shares,

Starting point is 01:04:46 you can buy your song shares, songs in Spotify, just like songs, you can buy songs. Guess what's the number one most valued song? Never going to give you up. Wow. Never going to give you up by Rick Astley. Yeah. Astley, Astley, Astley, yeah. I don't know what number two is, but pump it up by Endor. Somebody bankless says who probably knows that. Number three, Sandstorm by Derrude. Number four, all I want for Christmas is you by Mariah Carey. Number five, 99 problems by Jay-Z. One more time. Daft Pump. punk. Daniel, okay, then number, coming in at number seven, I just need Daniel Allen. You don't know who that is, I'm guessing. No, who's this? No. Okay, so why is Daniel Allen here? And who is Daniel Allen? Daniel Allen is a music and of T guy. And all of a sudden, he,

Starting point is 01:05:33 his songs are at number seven on the charts. Okay, so the, again, this is just a bonding curve. It's on base, I'm pretty sure it's on base. And you're buying and selling shares of songs because that you kind of for the same reason why people buy shares of their friends. Who gets this, David? Do the artists actually get the fees here? So if you are a spot, this is the genius. This is the virality aspect of this and why I think that this is really interesting. If you are the artist, where's Taylor Swift?

Starting point is 01:06:02 Taylor Swift's coming in at 11, 12 summer, and 12, yeah. If you are Taylor Swift and you own the Spotify creator account of Taylor Swift, you can log into song. Oh my God. And claim your stuff? Yes. No freaking way. Yes.

Starting point is 01:06:19 Yes. This is genius. Yes. Uh-huh. Okay. So 10% of fees, just like FrenTech. But all the holders of shares receive 5% of those fees, half of the fees. And then the other half of those fees are reserved for the artists themselves.

Starting point is 01:06:37 So Taylor Swift has a claim on all of the trading fees that are going on on song. Because she obviously owns the Spotify creator account. Because she controls the Spotify creator account. So rather than sue these people or whatever, Taylor Swift could just be like, oh, this is cool. I get money. I get maybe more money than I would for streaming this on.

Starting point is 01:07:00 It's another revenue source for me in the T Swift Empire. That's exactly right. Yeah. And so Daniel Allen, he has claimed his Spotify account. And so he's earning, as the creator, he's earning 5% fees from the songs that people are buying and or. selling. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:07:15 How crazy is that? I guess it rests on Spotify's ability to authenticate artists. And I'm sure they have that. I mean, that's already kind of a solved problem, right? Wow. I think this is genius. Okay, so currently it's only 500 songs. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:07:31 We're in phase two. I think the first phase was 100. 1000 songs is coming in with phase three. I think this is great. Let me go buy some T-swift. It's a W.w.w. Song.w. Song. Dot, dot tech. Pretty cool. That's cool. Shake it off by Taylor Swift. Great Taylor Swift song. I love. Really? That's your favorite T. Swift song? Oh, yeah. Me and my brother-in-law are big Taylor Swift fans, and my sister makes fun. Oh, my God. I feel like that's not what a true Swiftie would say. They would go deeper on some of her albums. That's like the poppy song she has. I'm not a true swiftly. I just know that that song fucks. David, lastly, a new investment from Bankless Ventures that we're both pretty excited about. It's in privacy as well, which I think bankless listeners should know about. We got some.

Starting point is 01:08:10 new privacy tech coming to Ethereum in the form of Nocturn. What is Nocturn, David? Okay, so Nocturn. First, they've raised $6 million co-led by Bank Capital and Polytrain with participation from Vitalik Buterin, Tim Bako, and of course Bankless Ventures, which is why we're bringing this up. We cover all of the raises from Bankless Ventures portfolio companies as a inception of conflict of interest for you all here on the podcast.

Starting point is 01:08:35 And then also we get to talk about what they do. What does Nocturn do, Ryan? I'm so glad you asked. Nocturn is this innovation. in the world of account abstraction and stealth addresses. It is basically your private Ethereum account. And so you know how you have an ENS name, RSA.eath, and you've gone to the ENS website, and you've registered your ENS name to your Ethereum account.

Starting point is 01:08:58 So there's like 0XF7, 3, 4, 2, and you've just registered RSA.Eth to it. You can do the same thing with a private account. So you register a private account to a public account, no one knows that you've registered it. You just, this is the power of zero knowledge cryptography. And then all of a sudden you have a private account. Using this thing called stealth addresses, your private account can make transactions that engage

Starting point is 01:09:23 with defy. And so using zero knowledge cryptography, a thing called a stealth address will be generated by nocturn. And a stealth address is a one-time use address. It's like a mask. You just put on the mask over your private account. You put on the stealth address mask. And then using zero knowledge cryptography, the stealth, the stealth,

Starting point is 01:09:39 stealth address will go to Uniswap and say, hey, Uniswap, I will prove to you that I have 10 ether that I would like to sell for USC or something like this. And then the Uniswap is like, oh, you do, you do have the 10 ether. The stealth address has it because it has a zero knowledge cryptography link to your private account. Then the stealth address makes the transaction and then makes the trade and then the funds, the trade happens and the actual private account makes the trade, but the stealth address obfuscates it. So no one can see which. account is actually making the trade. Same thing for sending you payments or receiving payments. Where do the funds end up? They just stay in the stealth address? They stay in the self address,

Starting point is 01:10:18 yes. What happens when I want to take them out? That is, a stealth address, sends it outbound from the private account to a public account, and then all of a sudden it's no longer in the private account. Ah, very cool. Very cool. So this other cool thing that is, that I think is really nifty here, is that say you want to send me money, you will not have to say, hey David can you generate a stealth address for me so I can send you this money privately what you would do kind of like like I was saying you just have the ENS thing registered you would go and you would type in david hoffman.dh into the nocturn system and then nocturn be like oh yeah there is a there is a private account registered here here's a stealth address so you can send them money yeah and this is

Starting point is 01:10:58 all of like happening this is all happening behind the scenes you know how like in venmo you've venmo someone you can just like toggle it private yeah like the bull case for nocturn here is that you just have that button, send privately embedded into your wallet. And so you don't go to Nocturn. It just becomes like you have your public wallet and you have your private wallet. I think it's super cool. This might be like one of the ways we fixed privacy in crypto, right? This is that SSL layer for our crypto transactions. Very cool. This is going to be a public good. When is this going to be available? When is Nocturn actually rolling out publicly? They are looking to roll out their launch of the V1 so people can get their hands on this. In the middle of November. A specific date TBD, middle of November. Very soon. All right, David, what do we have

Starting point is 01:11:44 coming up next? Big congrats to knock on. Yeah, that's very cool. This is the privacy tool that I have been trying to get my hands on. Much needed. Much needed. What do we have coming up next? Coming up next, is it a good time to be in ether with all of the regulatory threat around or should we rotate into something else? That's question number one. Question number two. Will the governments of the world ban Bitcoin? Not just a question. This is Balaji's take, Bologi's take. We're going to talk about some questions and some other takes from the world of CryptoTrader. But first, I'm going to talk about these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Arbitrum is accelerating the Web3 landscape with a suite of secure Ethereum scaling

Starting point is 01:12:20 solutions. Hundreds of projects have already deployed on Arbitrum 1 with flourishing defy and NFT ecosystems. Arbitram Nova is quickly becoming a Web3 gaming hub and social apps like Reddit are also calling Arbitrum home. And now, Arbitrum orbit from orbit, allows you to use Arbitrum's secure scaling technology to build your own layer three, giving you access to interoperable, customizable permissions with dedicated throughput. Whether you are a developer, enterprise, or user, Arbitrum orbit lets you take your project to new heights. All of these technologies leverage the security and decentralization of Ethereum and provide a builder experience that's intuitive, familiar, and fully EVM compatible. Faster transaction speeds and significantly

Starting point is 01:12:58 lower gas fees. So visit Arbitrum.io, where you can join the community, dive into the developer docs, bridge your assets, and start building your first app with Arbitron. Experience Web3 development the way it was always meant to be. Secure, fast, cheap, and friction-free. Here's a question from Kiwi Dog 4. One of the big selling points for Defy and Crypto is that anyone can read and view the chain. How do we reconcile this with the ultimate goal of a fully private chain?

Starting point is 01:13:22 I like and want privacy, but I feel like we're losing something almost as important. ZK proofs allow some verifiability, but can we really ZK prove enough to make up for the loss in transparency? It's funny we're just talking about privacy before the break. Now's the question. There's a reason why we have this question in here right now. Is that a good thing? What do you say to that?

Starting point is 01:13:40 Yeah. I'll kind of reframe this. One of the big selling points for defy's crypto is that anyone can view and read the chain. What if I change that statement to one of the big selling points for defying crypto is that anyone can verify the integrity of the chain? So I think those are different statements, but I think that kind of points towards the goal here. using zero knowledge cryptography, you get privacy, but you can verify integrity, right? AVE might be able to hide its pools, but it can provide proof of reserves, for example.

Starting point is 01:14:14 Just being able to audit the chain is certainly valuable, but we can still audit the chain and audit the state of the chain and audit the integrity of the chain and the integrity of people's balances without actually disclosing what they are. And so I would actually kind of reframe, like maybe the goal of crypto isn't to have like all of our world's finances out in the open, but to very simply prove that what we are saying is true or the integrity of people's collateral, et cetera, et cetera. So I think we can have our cake and need it too here. I do think we'll sort this out, the same way the internet sort of this out is, of course, we have a lot on the internet that's public, right? Like a website, you can publish it. It's completely public. Anyone in the world can

Starting point is 01:14:55 access it, right? That's a great thing. But you also have HTTPS, right? Which is when you want to send your credit card information, that piece gets encrypted. You don't want to broadcast that. You don't want that part to be public. And so I think what will happen with crypto is all of the things that benefit from auditability, transparency, those will remain public. Those will remain on chain. But the things that we want to keep private, those will have an SSL type of wrapper where they're encrypted in private. So I think we'll find the right balance here. Now, I don't know that the governments will feel the same way, right? I think governments want to everything digital to be like fully open to their purview. So that might be a fight we have to fight.

Starting point is 01:15:35 That actually brings us to the next question of the week from um, Alex Rowe.Eath. After the IRS episode, I started thinking about portfolio allocation. Bitcoin seems to be accepted by mainstream, but ETH can still be greatly devalued by regulation. How do you guys stay so heavily weighted in Eath with this potential threat? I'm 95% ETH right now, but I'm thinking I should rebalance more to Bitcoin. What do you say to that, David? Yeah, okay. So Alex Roe is saying, hey, TradFi is just totally accepting Bitcoin with open arms, but regulation is going to ultimately focus on Ethereum because of Defi. How do you guys square that concern? Isn't that bearish? My answer is like, no, that's bullish. That's extremely bullish. If the incumbents

Starting point is 01:16:21 of the world, the banking system, the regulators, the nation states feel threatened by something, I want to buy that thing. I want to buy that thing. I'm one of you. You're on that you're on target here. I've always kind of had to take that Bitcoin is relatively impudent, and that's why Wall Street just accepts it with open arms. Like, it's actually just not a threat. You know, it's a really, you know, what's really a threat? Defi. Yeah. Like ZK proofs. And so that it's a threat because it's valuable. Yeah. And so I'm like, I'll buy that asset over and over and over again. Yeah, I do agree. The fact that incumbents are threatened is bullish, usually, right? But that doesn't mean there might not like in the short run.

Starting point is 01:16:59 They could put a lot of regulatory pressure on Ethereum. And it's true. Ethereum has more surface area to regulate, right? But that's because Ethereum has more surface area for value creation. That's why there's more space to regulate it. The other question I would have is back to what we said earlier in this episode is ask yourself, Alex, are you just doing this because Bitcoin had a really good, are you thinking this way? Because Bitcoin had a really good month. Alex, are you chasing the pump?

Starting point is 01:17:25 Right? Like seriously, ask yourself that because the crackdown has been real for the last year, regulatory crackdown. And just now you're thinking about this. So I, you know, I would ask yourself that. But the other thing, and maybe I just wanted to fit this mental model in, because I wanted to hear what you think about it, David. But I think you bet on Bitcoin if you think crypto is more like a religion. And you bet on Ethereum if you think crypto is more like an economy. Like it's more economic in nature, right? So, like, the most bullish thing about Ethereum is its block space being highly valuable and tied to an economy. The most bullish thing about Bitcoin is that it wins this kind of vitriolic, like, meme narrative of, like, just passionate, basically insane people who are going to hold their Bitcoin to the grave, right?

Starting point is 01:18:18 Right. And both those models are true. And by the way, I think, like, I think crypto is both of those things. I think it's an economy, it's religion. I think it's both. But I think Ethereum leans more economy maybe than Bitcoin. And so if you think of it in that way, then yeah, a regulatory crackdown might be bad in the short run. But I think an economy can outperform a religion.

Starting point is 01:18:47 And when you tie those two things together, it becomes incredibly powerful. This may be a pie in the sky way to answer this too. but I guess the last thing I'll say is I have not rotated out of Eith towards Bitcoin. That's backwards. I think. Backwards in history. Ever. I have done the opposite several times.

Starting point is 01:19:07 The last time I did that, I bought some ether with my Bitcoin was 2018, 2019. Wow. So long ago. Yeah. When, you know, when Bitcoin was up relative to ether. And I haven't changed. I feel no desire to change. I still have some Bitcoin. I have much more ETH, and I'm very comfy right now.

Starting point is 01:19:29 It's very comfy. Yeah. I'm feeling pretty good about that. But not financial advice. You got to, you got to weigh these things out for yourself. Ryan advice for Ryan. Yeah. David, takes of the week. Since his Bitcoin week, we have a question. You're going to have to walk me through this take, actually. Okay. So here's a question I saw that was asked of Bology. And the question was this, which I think is a good question. I'm wondering Bology, if you can talk about the prospects of Bitcoin being banned. And what you would do in that case and how you would buy gold custodially. Bologi, of course, ignored the last part. He would not buy gold custodially. But he had this really good mental model where he thinks that

Starting point is 01:20:04 the world's nation states will actually trifurcate in three different kind of areas. The one is there will be Bitcoin atheist nation states. These are nations that crack down on crypto. So the Elizabeth Warren tribe, war against crypto, or maybe totalitarian China. which says like crypto is banned, right? Bitcoin atheist types of states and crypto atheists. Then he thinks there will be nation states that he calls Bitcoin monotheists, that basically they only embrace Bitcoin and they don't embrace the other coins, right? So probably an example, proto example of this would be El Salvador. They're very Bitcoin friendly. Are they Ethereum friendly? Are they crypto? Are they blockchain friendly? No, they're just Bitcoin friendly. And then he thinks there will

Starting point is 01:20:54 be a third cohort of nation states called the Bitcoin Polytheists, which I was like Bitcoin and then everything else, all of the other coins. So crypto. Yeah, crypto. And he frames things as Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, right? Big Apology is a Bitcoiner. Yes, he is. But those that reject crypto, those that just embrace, like Bitcoin maximalist nation states, and then fully crypto nation states. And he thinks that the fully crypto-bicto-Pythiest states will be like, basically, economic hubs of the world. The future New Yorks, the future Singapore's, the future Hong Kongs, that kind of thing. Anyway, so different than an outright ban, right, this kind of breakdown. What do you think of that? What do you think of that take? It sounds like it's just like a level of

Starting point is 01:21:39 banning as a function of how when crypto came about. So like he's saying, okay, some states will just ban crypto altogether, not even include Bitcoin, some will include Bitcoin, and then some will include the rest of the risk curve, Ethereum, Solon, et cetera, et cetera. I think that this is a Bitcoiner's take. I don't, I don't, he's putting a Bitcoin atheist, Bitcoin monotheist, Bitcoin polytheist. Yeah. Like that's a Bitcoin-centric version of reality that I think that very few people will operate with.

Starting point is 01:22:11 My take on it is the framing of the three is probably correct. I think there's going to be a lot fewer Bitcoin monotheist than he thinks. Like it might just be like El Salvador. in a couple of other countries. That's the Bitcoin-centric nature of it. Bitcoin's not that special. Sorry, apology. David, what do you bullish on this week, man?

Starting point is 01:22:29 I'm bullish on crypto people, being the spearhead against the corruption of the establishment. I think once upon a time, crypto people were considered to be, like, weird basement-dwelling libertarians, and over time, we have increased the fold of who is a crypto person. Now we have, like, culture and art people and NFT people as crypto people.

Starting point is 01:22:53 So like we've become more normal. Meanwhile, the state has increased its, I would say it's authoritarianism. It's authoritarian curiosities. And we are seeing this play out with like Nick Carter's, just vendetta against the Wall Street Journal. Bologi has been going after mainstream media for like a decade now.

Starting point is 01:23:13 Liz Warren is being the spearhead of like, I am the state that is completely misaligned with facts and reality, perhaps on purpose. And I think the crypto people of the world are ready to show leadership as a community to push back against corruption, to push back against the authoritarian tendencies of the state. Crypto people were bold. We're not afraid to call out BS. We have exposure to assets that go up when the state does bad things as a check on the state.

Starting point is 01:23:47 I am bullish on. the leadership of the crypto industry to show the rest of the world what's at stake. I hope so. That's an optimistic perspective. And I think we have that in us, particularly the settlers,

Starting point is 01:24:00 the crypto natives who have stayed around. I can tell you that the rest of the world doesn't see crypto people like that. The rest of the world, they see this guy right here, me in the FTX shirt. He's going to jail. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:24:11 We are putting him in jail. Yeah. Well, I guess they are not saying like crypto people putting him in jail. Yeah, I think the crew, okay. I guess I'm fully, on board with your optimistic take and I just think that we have to get there and it could take some time. Ryan, what do you bullish on? I am bullish on the bull cycle, David. We called it earlier in

Starting point is 01:24:30 this episode. You agreed to me. Yep. I think we broke the back of the bear market this week. Yeah. Like I think we did it. Yep. The episode with Ledger confirmed it for me. And so I have like three resolutions for if this is the start of the bull run for the start of this bull run. The first is, this time, I'm going to do things right, David. I'm going to have a cell plan. Oh, did you not do things right beforehand? I did things okay. Like, better than my first.

Starting point is 01:24:57 So this will be my third. And I improved last cycle over the previous cycle, and I want to do another layer of improvement. So here's what I'm going to do. One, I'm going to have a cell plan to take some stuff off the top, right? When, like, you have a dollar cost average plan in. You can dollar cost average out at a specific price or, you know, time intervals or however you want to do it. For me, it's price. You know, when X-coin hits Y, I'm going to sell

Starting point is 01:25:23 Z amount. It's basically that. That's what a sell plan is. And coming up with that while you're sober, you're still sober now. We're not drunk in the bull market. Like, believe me, we're still just kind of wondering if it's true or not. So now's the time to create a sell plan for me and probably for you, bankless listener. The second is I want to have a stake plan. So I ain't selling all of this, David, at all, not by any stretch. I think Ether specifically, and some might say Bitcoin too, but for me it's mainly Ethereum and a little bit of Bitcoin is a long-term hold asset, like long-term generations I'm talking about, right? Like many decades.

Starting point is 01:26:00 So I want to have a stake plan of my forever hold Eith where I'm just not, it's not going anywhere. So a sell plan, a stake plan. And then lastly, I want to have some more fun this bull cycle. All right? Like last cycle, I felt like the first cycle I was worried, you know, and just not knowing what I got into the last cycle, I felt like it was kind of a grind. You know, like we were just busy.

Starting point is 01:26:25 We're doing a lot. We put out so much content last cycle. We did. We did. And we're still going to put out content. We're still going to put out that much of golf or gone. I just want to enjoy it more. Right?

Starting point is 01:26:33 And it's over before you know it. You know what I mean? So time speeds up during the bull market. So I think listeners should definitely count for that. Yeah. So that's what I'm doing. The perception of time goes way faster. That's my plan.

Starting point is 01:26:47 That's why I'm bullish on. David, we got a meme of the week. What are we looking at here? We are looking at. What are we looking at? I forgot. Oh, yeah. Okay, so here's Tom Schmidt of Dragonfly saying this is the classic SpongeBob meme of Squidward

Starting point is 01:26:58 in the dark room looking out at SpongeBob and Patrick just frolicing around having a ton of fun. And the caption is, Last Cycles fraudsters watching the pump from pre-trial detention. We got two SpongeBob. That's you, Ryan. That's you, actually. That's me. That's me. That's me.

Starting point is 01:27:13 We got two Sponge Bomb memes in this episode, David. So, well done. Yeah. Everyone knows I'm a big SpongeBob. Guys, going to end with the risks and disclaimers in a minute. But first, disclosures. David and I mentioned Polygon in the episode. I am an advisor to Polygon.

Starting point is 01:27:27 David and I are both advisors to optimism. I think we mentioned them as well. Uniswop is a bankless sponsor. You guys know that. Bankless ventures are investors in Nocturn. We name that in the section. Of course, we are long-term investors. We're not journalists.

Starting point is 01:27:39 We don't do paid content. There's always a link to our disclosures in the show notes. Before I give you the risks, I want to tee up this moment of the second. Zem. We talked about Tom Emmer. He could have been Speaker of the House. Moment of Zen is all about what could have been, but was lost in this four hours. So stay tuned for that. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. It's the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Happy Halloween. And thanks a lot.

Starting point is 01:28:07 Crypto, when it comes to the economic issues, I believe it's towards the top of the list. But again, that's me. You've got to be ready with the right people to be telling you. the administration, they don't have to be pro-crypto. Just don't be anti-crypto. Be pro-innovation and let America do what Americans are best at, which is create and innovate. We love it, right? We love Web 3, the ownership economy, the idea that we can do business directly with one another and we don't have to have intermediaries.

Starting point is 01:28:38 Not that we'll never need them, but we get to choose them, right? They're definitely, a lot of people talk about, is there a choke point 2.0? trying to debank crypto. Well, you've got to tell me, is this a coincidence that we lost Silvergate, Silicon Valley, its signature, all within a matter of days, a couple of weeks? I don't think there is any coincidence, gentlemen. The key for us is to keep being positive.

Starting point is 01:29:09 The courts have started to do the right thing, which is a great point, basically pointing out what all of us have been saying. And you just got to stay the course because the future is going to be about what you're doing. It's already here. The question is, will it happen here in this country or are we going to push it out off our shores? Gary Gensler, who I believe is one of the best examples of a bad faith regulator. This guy's been choosing to blindly spray the crypto community with enforcement actions,

Starting point is 01:29:41 yet he keeps missing the true bad actors. He goes after all the good people in the space. This new area is all about people being able to get capital, to expend capital, to grow new ideas, to improve their lifestyle. I got news for you. That's not a Republican or Democrat thing. That's an American thing. I'll reclaim my time.

Starting point is 01:30:04 Mr. Gensler, despite your years of rhetoric, like today, I'm convinced you are not an impartial regulator. Instead, it's clear that you are working to consolidate your own power, though it means crushing opportunities for everyday Americans and frankly the financial future of this country. Even the federal courts are highlighting the damage you, sir, are doing to our constituents and they're telling you that you don't have the legal authority to accomplish your goal of squashing competition in the financial markets. This is what frustrates me with Elizabeth Warren. Elizabeth Warren, if she truly believe in the American value of self-determination,

Starting point is 01:30:43 If she truly believed in individuals' right to make their own decisions, which she claims, she would champion crypto. She would champion digital assets. Instead, it's very clear to me that she's nothing more than a big central bank power-hungry leader who sees her power essentially being diluted and taken away by this decentralization of our financial system and our financial transnational. transactions, Ryan. She's desperately, along with the establishment, the institution. She is desperately clinging to hold on to that central banking thing because that's where their power is. You want

Starting point is 01:31:25 crypto and everything associated with it to grow here, to innovate and grow here, because that will grow the economic pie for everyone. Republicans, Democrats, that's the only way. I'm going to tell you right now, my belief is that's the only way that you can deal with the 30s. $32 trillion in debt.

Bankless - ROLLUP: WSJ Lies About Crypto | SBF Testifies | Markets Pumping

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