The Wolf Of All Streets - BREAKING: Chainlink Partners With U.S. Government | CryptoTownHall

Episode Date: August 28, 2025

Crypto Town Hall's weekday live stream delved into recent developments shaking up the crypto market, with a particular spotlight on explosive institutional inflows into Ethereum, Chainlink's high-profile US government partnership news, and a multi-billion-dollar Trump-linked token launch. The goal was to break down these headline events, their immediate impact, and their deeper significance within the broader industry shift. Expert hosts and guest speakers offered informed, and at times conflicting, opinions on where true value accrues in crypto, the utility of decentralized technologies versus narratives and marketing, and the evolving landscape for institutional adoption. There was also detailed technical discussion about Layer 2 networks, the place of Bitcoin and Ethereum in the ecosystem, and the intersection of blockchain with real-world assets and government data.

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Crypto Town Hall every day, weekday on X here on the Crypto Town Hall account, 10.15 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. We have quite a few things to talk about, actually, today. We have obviously the massive increase in inflows in Ethereum, even as the market was down. Obviously, we talked about that a bit yesterday, but some numbers coming out that they 10X outpaced. Bitcoin ETF flows in August, and actually the Bitcoin spot ETFs had outflows in August, while Ethereum did roughly $4 or $5 billion in inflows so far, and the month isn't even over. And as you compare them as not the same size of asset, that's probably equivalent to $20,000,000,000 in Bitcoin inflows. Jan Vannek went on TV yesterday and called Ethereum the Wall Street asset, obviously. parroting a lot of stable coin points that we've heard from Tom Lee and others, bottom line is that right now institutions at this moment, clearly by any metric, are much more interested in Ethereum than Bitcoin. That kind of echoes alt seasons of the past, which is funny. But it is

what it is at this exact moment. But in the meantime, it seems like also some ramping up interest in a lot of other tokens from Wall Street. We have this news today. That's the title, which is that Chainlink has partnered with the United States government. We can dig more deeply into what that means momentarily. But we also had news of a large Chainlink treasury company launching today. We know there's some huge Solana treasury companies getting ready to launch. Makes you wonder if we're going to see rotations or just more coming in to kind of

buoy all of this. So worth digging into right now all of these flows. I mean, it's the end of August. Things are supposed to be dead. Steve, I see you here. Good morning, buddy. How are you? Mr. Gregory. What do you make of all this? What do you make of all this? Still sort of processing it. You know, I'd love to see the all season come on. The chain light news I got to dig into. I think it just came out like maybe five minutes ago. But, you know, definitely loving this new ETF inflow for Ethereum. Yeah, I agree. I mean, Tomra, you were giving me the funny eyes, I know.

It's hard, like, when you know what's going to happen in the end. But there are these moments, obviously, you know, even as a hardcore Bitcoin, or you just have to look at the data and say, this is what's happening. Yeah, no, I'm not denying what's happening. What I was laughing at is, you know, Ethereum has gone through a lot of narratives. It was the platform for decentralized autonomous organizations. It was the platform for minting utility tokens. It was the platform for, I could just go on and on and on of all of these things.

And so it keeps switching narratives because it keeps losing at all of these things that it says that it's going to win at. But right now, it's make haywall the sun shines. It's Wall Street has it. Is there a logical statement behind identifying why Wall Street would prefer Ethereum over any of the other cryptocurrency or over-bibirons? Bitcoin. Not really that I've heard. It's just it's what the trend is right now. It's what the fad is right now. And I don't deny it. But like all the other fads around Ethereum, I don't expect it to stick around for very long. Or to be permanent or proven sound. Well, so there's a lot there. I actually really like Ethereum because I view it as an entirely different asset class than Bitcoin. But once you start talking about ultrasound money or all these things, like. Like, you lose me completely because, to me, Ethereum is not even remotely that. But go ahead, Paul. I'm not the financial guy here, but I'll talk about the technicals on this chain link announcement.

I kind of take it with a bit of a grain of salt because chain link's power and specifically the link token. And link token, you know, pump today because of the news. But the link token is really used to bring data from the real world on chain. And it allows people to stake a linked token to make sure that they are providing accurate data. And this is the data that can be sourced globally around the world, like weather data, price data of an asset that's obviously not natively on chain. With the news of the government, though, they're taking data that the government centrally has. And it even shows in the announcement bringing macroeconomic data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis on chain. And really, the government doesn't even need chain link.

They don't need the link token at all. They can just say, write this onto Ethereum. And now all of the different smart contracts can source that data for whatever. or defy they want. But this is more centralized data. It's like putting, if I were to put information about my personal wellness and people talk about things like insurance on chain. If I put, you know, how sick I am on chain, that doesn't need a network, an Oracle. It doesn't need an Oracle to validate that data to make sure it's true. It's this thing I can put in, just like the government could put this economic data directly on chain. It doesn't need

an Oracle of users that hold the link token to vote on that data being true and then also to lose link token if they put data that's invalid. So this is actually a lot more bullish for Ethereum because ChainLink is native on Ethereum and people will have to pay fees to put it on Ethereum. But I think it's a bit less bullish on Link itself because maybe it's a partnership where they handle the data and put it on chain, but the token itself doesn't really gain any true utility from this announcement. So I would take it a great assault for all those that are thinking, oh, great, link, moon, buy a bunch of length.

This is because the government is going to use a ton of it. I just don't see how they're going to actually need the token itself versus needing the company. Yeah, we just pivoted the kind of conversation entirely, obviously there, Paul, but you did help me stay on the topic here. Dave Weisberger has come on co-hosting and talked about this a lot of times, which is that we still have this sort of bifurcation in the companies and the tokens. and we have very little clarity in most cases on how the value will actually accrue to the token holder, not even specific to Link, XRP, same, a lot of other companies, right? Ripple can do well without the XRP token doing well. Chain Link, as you're saying, could do well without the token doing well.

And that is a problem we've had, I think, across crypto. So I'm not sure if people whose hands up are wanting to talk about Link or the Ethereum flows and such. But Ryan, I saw you were specifically emojiing the link conversation. so I'll let you jump in there. Yeah, I mean, for me, having, like, putting this type of data on chain is just really great indicator for having a polymarket launch on top of base. It's great gambling data. I don't really see how it's going to benefit a lot of other smart contracts.

But then again, I don't know, there's a lot of projects out there. But, yeah, I'm not, it just seems kind of like, oh, we need some. something to announce this is one of the worst weeks and you know typically the market year so we need to announce something positive to keep our token up india's india's bitcoin man i don't know what you call you do i call you india yeah it's okay you can call me india bitcoin man or india whatever suits you can call me florida okay you're up so i'm more of a macro thing I believe macro is very, very important for today. But at the same time, I also agree with Tomor that, you know,

Ethereum valued at 23% of Bitcoin's market cap doesn't make sense because it always needs some new narrative. Solana valued at 1 million Bitcoins also doesn't make sense. But we'll talk more about it. I have no comments to make on ChainLink, although I've used ChainLink a lot on smart contracts and Ethereum while I've quoted, even in Solana. but I don't see the necessity for the U.S. government to be actually partnering with Chingling. I agree with the gentleman before me. I'm Mateo.

Yeah, I think I'll take a different stance here, which is when you look at the importance of, and the theory of like everything will be tokenized, which is kind of something that we've been saying as a philosophy for years. now, you're going to have to have some kind of link, pun intended, to take that actual data and bring it on chain. You need a trusted, registered, certified tool to do that. I don't think, I'll counter the point that the government could just throw this data on chain. I don't think

that they have the infrastructure, the sophistication, or the tools to do that. I think chain link is extremely well positioned, both from a regulatory standpoint. I think it was Chainlink that just got the SOC2 certification, which makes them uniquely positioned for these kinds of contracts. The fact that people would take this kind of news, I understand that there may not be a fundamental underlying utility that is extremely geared towards this exact data. But the fact that we're actually getting government data coming on chain is monumental news. And I just don't think that that should be underappreciated. And that the fact that we are using a native crypto project to do that is monumental.

It also signals to the rest of the world the importance of having more transparent data available within the market. I do agree with Paul that one of the big things that we're going to see on this is betting markets that are going to take place on this data. it's going to emerge very quickly. People are going to be betting very precisely on what this economic data is going to do and where the trend's going to head, et cetera. But more transparent government, yes, please, more real-time data.

We know that the government tends to lag extremely behind in making data visible to the general public, although some of this stuff that they're bringing on chain already is. So I think it's monumental, actually. I don't think we've really seen anything like this enter the market thus far. And I think people should really appreciate the work that Link is doing. And if you're not bullish, I think that you're being silly. Yeah, interestingly, I had Sergey on my live YouTube show two Thursdays ago, two weeks ago today. And they use that to break their own treasury.

announcement. And when you listen to him talk about how deeply tied they have become to the United States government, I think there is something absolutely real here. Once again, I can't speak to what that means for the token. But I mean, he was at the, you know, he was one of the few people selected to meet the president sitting there at the Winkleby twins and Sailor and such. And I do think that there's something very, very real here. I should actually, Ryan, before I jump to you, I just want to read what the actual news announcement says because I don't want to take for granted that people have any idea what we're talking about. We're excited. to announce that Chainlink and the United States Department of Commerce have worked together to bring

U.S. government macroeconomic data on chain from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. These new chain link data feeds securely deliver critical information around key U.S. economic data on chain, including real gross domestic product, personal consumption expenditures, price index, that's PCE, and real final sales to private domestic purchasers. It's pretty big news. Ryan, go ahead. Yeah, so I can see this plane into, you know, automated trading bots on the dexes and that type of thing that people want to follow economic news. The hard thing is on a technical level, like blockchains are just not great for storing data. It's very expensive. It's very slow consensus around, you know, global consent, decentralized consensus is not a cheap thing to achieve.

So I just, it feels like everyone wants to put everything on chain. And from a technical level, it does not make a whole lot of sense. But shifting to what you said about the Ethereum inflows, I'm really excited that we're finally getting to this spot in the market. I think every other cycle we've seen a little bit tighter cycle between Bitcoin's upswing and Ethereum upswing. This seems to be like a bit more of a longated pause between a bit of a bit more. Bitcoin's up swinging in Ethereum, or I guess Bitcoin swung up last December, and then we had another one in July, which is a little bit atypical for a cycle.

But now that we're seeing, we're seeing Ethereum swing up less than a month later, I'm excited. I think we're right on the verge of something good, but then I have that other nagging voice in my head that says, if everyone thinks we're on the verge of something good, then is it like the exact opposite? or is it a self-fulfilling prophecy? So I can get my own head with market cycles here. But, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think Matt Hogan this morning when I spoke to him put it pretty clearly, at least with the Ethereum Bitcoin conversation. He was basically like, you know, we saw the playbook.

You get an ETF, then you get flows, then you get treasury companies, and the asset goes. So Ethereum, you know, you kind of get the ETF. It was very delayed, but then started to get flows, then you get the Tom Lee, then you get the Treasury companies. Very clearly, if you want to play that game, Solano's next. Solano's getting an ETF. It's going to have flows, and we've already got multi-billion dollar treasury companies from very serious players getting ready to launch.

So I think that you can see the institutional playbook here if you think there's going to continue to be rotation or the next man up. Go ahead, Tomer. I know this conversation is jumping all over the place. So I apologize for, like, going back to the previous topic, but are we thinking that if government puts its data on chain, it makes it true in the first place, or it makes it more true or more verifiable? Like, isn't a, are we, are we now trusting what the government has to say and excited to have that put on chain? I mean, I think it speaks to the fact that this is not really quite the same kind of data the chain, like, was really built for. This is met for globally reportable data where thousands of people that hold chain link tokens can verify it through independent sources and then put it on chain.

This is just simply taken what the government is already centrally creating and centrally publishing and then just simply putting that on chain. And so you're right. It's 100% trust in the government versus the decentralized, more oricalized trust in data that chain link typically would put on chain. Then how does this accrue value to chain link, Paul? It doesn't. At least it doesn't prove a value to chain link the token. Obviously, if the company is being paid to facilitate what I think is a trivial, trivial technological feat, which is putting data on chain, which is absolutely trivially easy. But if they're being paid to do that by the government, the government is pretty wildly known to overpay for things, then it's going to bring a tremendous amount of value to chain link.

I mean, the government is also the same entity that paid $500,000 a couple decades ago to create an iPad app that makes an arrow point to the left or right to determine if you get TSA pre at the airport. So recall that's how much the government overspends, and I'm sure they're going to do the same kind of overspending for chain link. So the company will benefit wildly with the token by association. I think that's what the cryptocurrency industry has been kind of criticized for is that there's an associated token that doesn't actually crew value, just like Scott was mentioning. But to the layman that doesn't know any better, they'll go ahead and eat up the token anyway. I'm going to go ahead. Yeah. So, I mean, again, I'll sort of counter that sentiment, which is this is still a decentralized Oracle with node operators that are actually powering to bringing the data on chain.

And as a result of that, that requires an immense amount of staking. I think we have to look past just, is the government turn to. cash into link to power transactions and look more macro at the network that the vast amounts of data that come on chain require more node operators participating we have chain link staking which is only going to continue to accrue we likely have link ets that will then embrace some form of liquid staking down the line with the news that have been developed with this we have more and more link pulled out of circulation. We have more and more fees that will be used at the level of operating chain link.

And like actual max adoption of bringing all this data through the Oracle and the pipelines on chain. So I think when you look, we pull back a little bit. You can see that this is one of the most serious, impressive ecosystems that are also going through the complete compliant route to get every. everything set up to be very dominant in the space with no second bass. So, I mean, I think that that, when it comes to actually, like, taking data, bringing it on chain, it's the industry leader by far, and no one's even close.

India. Not to belittle the narratives that are built around these coins like chain link. because everybody wants to pump their back so be it i don't really worry about that but wall street needs narratives but as somebody just before me said the blockchain for first principles is not the most ideal way actually it's not cheaper faster you could do it from a centralized database so i completely refute your point that whatever the narratives that you may be building and then the liquid staking and bringing everything on chain that too from a centralized note like the U.S. government, I don't see

the economic principles behind it, but it's fascinating to see the discussions nevertheless. Sorry, I'm having mic issues. I'm Mateo, did you have a response to that? I mean, I think my response was baked in. I just, when you look at centralized systems, yes,

are they faster, maybe cheaper? But they didn't go with a centralized system. They went with a decentralized system with a contract to then bring centralized data into the decentralized ecosystem. You know, this was a very intentional choice to do this. Maybe not at this moment, but down the line, we might be able to, you know, there was also I saw you retweet, Scott, that Pith was dedicated to sort of verify this data. I think there's going to be a lot of tools to do that where all of a sudden government data becomes something that the ecosystem has more opportunity to audit to get more visibility and maybe not we'll see i mean some of this you have to read into but the the contract is here it's it's finalized so i i don't really

care if someone could do it cheaper or or faster i care about what actually occurred all right let's pivot the conversation from chain link because i want to talk about all things trump everybody's favorite topic all the time. Obviously, we have $6.4 billion or $6.8 billion, I think $6.4 billion raised for a Kronos treasury CRO token from crypto.com has doubled basically this week. That's a crazy amount of money. And this is from Trump Media, by the way. So Trump Media, the actual public company, raised over $6 billion to buy the Kronos token.

I don't know the market cap. I haven't looked. But when you see announcements of $1 billion here and there for much larger tokens, $6 billion is eye-opening for a smaller market cap token that's obviously less popular. And on the heels of that, on the crypto side, you have World Liberty Financial finally launching their token on September 1st in a couple days. So it drives this market. Can we all agree? It's not owns crypto. It's his market to do with what he pleases.

Guys could take the other side of that if you want. But I literally tweeted that about nine minutes after the Trump meme token launched in January. Because that was it. That was the end of times. Go ahead, Ryan. I mean, if nothing else, the guy is building an empire, right? Like, they've got everything from, you know, cell phones to cryptocurrency to mining to, you name it. They're social media.

I mean, he, this is like a masterclass on how to leverage your brand into every single possible industry when you have the upper hand. And he's not just, I don't think he's just thinking about himself, but this is like literally a Trump family dynasty that he's building here in every single industry vertical. It's pretty amazing to watch in real time. And it seems rather unstoppable. And I'm not sure we want to stop it because it's, I mean, he's producing good products. I mean, minus Trump token and the Mlani token. But it is fascinating to watch. So do we know how good of a product World Liberty Financial will be?

I mean, let's be, and I'm not saying that it won't. But like they've been actually very transparent or at least their wallets are available. So people know what they're investing in and know what they hold. So I think that that's a positive. Obviously, we've seen the reports of what they've bought or sold at any given time. But do we still really know what the platform is going to end up being? It seems like we have this sort of amorphous DFI narrative around it, right? And once again, does anyone know if the token will actually accrue value based on the success of the company or platform?

Has anybody done a deep dive into World Liberty Financial here? I mean, this should be the Super Bowl of Alquo. It should. We have the institutional side with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and then obviously whoever gets an ETF next. But if you're looking for something to cause a stir or wake up the Alcoin market writ large, what's bigger than World Liberty Financial? Because look what Trump token did. How high did it go, 60-something billion market cap in the first weekend?

That was a meme. This is an actual thing. So I'm assuming that there's a case to be made that this should do exceptionally well, at least in the short term. I mean, do you guys have any thoughts on how there's a look, Paul? You know, it's funny. Looking at World Liberty Financial, it looks like it is defy without the actual D, without the decentralized finance. They're issuing a stable coin and a governance token in a world like a Maker Dow, which is, you know, does give us more of a defy feel in the sense that, you know, you've mint an algorithmic stable coin and you have. a governance token, there's actually a smart contract that the governance token allows you to

vote on the changes to the smart contract, how the smart contracts should behave. World Liberty Financial sounds like it basically took Maker down and fully centralized it. You get to vote on the governance of World Warlibrary Financial, and so the people that run the company say, okay, thanks for voting that way. I think we will go and make changes to our platform based on how you vote, but you have to trust us to do that. And in the same sense, it goes in mince a stable coin, but it's centrally backed as opposed to being backed by a smart contract and its actual digital currency assets. So it's kind of defy and kind of not. I think it took a lot of the concepts of defy, just put a company

in it as opposed to a smart contract. So it's vague. It has all the right buzzwords to, I think, create a lot of the buzz that we've seen and why we're talking about it in the first place. But kind of taking away from a lot of what DeFi really is supposed to be, other than just using the buzzword. Yeah, Paul, that's all really important, but will the number go up? I think it will because the investors don't actually look any deeper to what these products really are. So it will for a while. I think it's like a 2017. If you remember the 2017 ICO boom, that is where a lot of great tokens like AVE came out of unify.

I mean, sorry, uniswap and whatnot. But then there was a plethora of garbage projects that raised a ton of money, number one, up, but they had no true value behind the token. There was no real utility behind it. And, you know, it was governance of a company. You know, there was a dating app I saw that had a token. This kind of fits closer to that, except that it's the government launching it. But that's what it reeks of to me. Ryan.

Yeah, from what I can tell with World Liberty Financial, it looks like it's, built on top of Ave. So it's not really even anything different. I think Paul's exactly right. It's just kind of a centralized service where you get to vote with the token and you kind of have to trust them to do, you know, basically fulfill the vote. It on first blush, just kind of looking at what they have and as much as I can see under the hood here, it looks like a money grab. it's like it's not real tech it's not real anything unique it's honestly it just looks like a money grab so like in this context shouldn't the aves of the world i mean defy is actually humming right and that's not being reflected in the tokens which should actually capture some of the value right so shouldn't this be a powerful narrative for the aves of the world absolutely and that's that's the hard thing is

a lot of this comes down to marketing and the Trump brand and that the thing that they do the best out of anything is marketing and they have the name they have the channels and they do a hell of a good job with it so anywhere there's to grab cash it just seems like to keep up being the ante each time Trump coin is probably just a test of it and now this World Liberty Financial is the $5 billion cash grab Which is still 12th of where Trump went, Trump token went, which is just wild when you think about it. So it's just going to be really interesting to see where this opens market capitalized. Just really quickly, as an update to the story about Chaitling partners with the U.S. government in the news group in the background. Coinbase is actually has made an announcement there involved as well. I don't know if we said this, but it says we're proud to be a crypto infrastructure partner of the Department of Commerce on this project. Onchain data equals higher transparency plus better accessibility. And then PIF also, as kind of mentioned, was getting in on the action saying the U.S. Department of Commerce,

a selected PIF network to verify and distribute economic data on chain. So it's not just chain link here, clearly, some others in the mix. And then it also said this data is updated monthly or quarterly as applicable and is initially being made available across 10 blockchain ecosystems, starting with the following chains, Arbitrum, Avalanche Base, Botanics, which I'm not sure I've ever heard of ever in my life. ever. Ethereum, Linia, Mantle, Optimism, Sonic, and ZK. Sink. So a lot, not going on here. A lot going on here. Did that not? Do you just stress that you had not heard of Botanics yet? And I want to give people some awareness. It's actually quite an exciting chain because it's one of the most, I hate to use

the word decentralized, but one of the more decentralized L2s on Bitcoin, giving EVM capabilities to Bitcoin and allowing people to, I think, in the future, be able to stake Bitcoin as part of the validator set. So it is actually pretty exciting tech. I'd like, I'd love, I'd love to have you have some of their team on a show and actually go and give them the grilling on what they've built and what they're delivering in the roadmap. But they've got a lot of Defi projects carrying over from Ethereum onto Botanics. And for those that, you know, use Rap Bitcoin right now just to be able to use Defi on ETH and other chains, you'll be able to use Bitcoin more natively on Botanics.

And I have no vested interest in Botanics. I'm just excited about the project. How dare you say something positive about something without having invested interest, Paul? This is crypto. I know. Well, I'll say this, though. I do have Bitcoin. And Botanics is a pure Bitcoin play. So I guess I lied.

I have invested interest in Bitcoin. Listen, the name, you know, the name is like, in crypto, there's marketing should be like bringing tulips online or something. You know, since everybody here loves a good tulip narrative. But yeah, that sounds actually really interesting. And it's funny because, Paul, what you just described, now, you know, time passes so fast. months or a year ago, whenever we really had this sort of explosion of building on Bitcoin has gone very quiet, actually, with all these other Ethereum narratives, but it's still very powerful and happening in the background.

Like, I obviously, like, Yago is a good friend of mine from Bitcoin OS. I talked to him about what they're building all the time, but, you know, Bob. And, I mean, there's so many of these incredible platforms that are starting to allow you to build all these same things on Bitcoin. And kind of that narrative has just kind of been cool for now. I don't know why. I think it's just been outstripped by the institution. Yeah, but it was before that, right?

Yeah, I agree. But I think it's happened before that. But, yeah, that's a huge part of it. I think it's cool because they just didn't, hadn't shipped yet. And so Botanics is one of the first of Botanics, Citria, Alpin Labs, and I think one of the one that skipped in my mind, it's one of the first ones to ship. And I give them credit because the business development within Botanics was really good in the sense that they actually got a lot of D5 protocols to port over GMX is live. on Botanics. They were the first to ship on day one. Yeah, as I'm saying this, I forgot that I tweeted news this morning, Tether to launch U.S.D

on Bitcoin using the RGB protocol. So that could help spark it. Go ahead, Ryan. Yeah, real fast. So I love Botanics, by the way. I wrote a paper in 2013 on decentralized private key sharding and consensus. And when, Botanics popped up, you know, several years later, I looked at their white paper and I was just like, holy crap, like someone's actually doing it is really, really exciting. Essentially, they do sharded private key consensus on a layer two. So you can freely move Bitcoin in and or between blockchains with doing consensus around signing. So very, very cool technology, really excited to see it finally coming to fruition. But yeah, a big fan of some of these Bitcoin Layer 2s. It's just they have a long way to go to catch up to the Ethereum ecosystem.

India. You know, Eric Kram just recently said on stage that my dad is a Bitcoin maxi, which I find very humorous. I think he's a crypto president, all for cash grab, which is good. for him. You know, at the end of the day, they all want to accumulate more dollars. I think he's a dollar president. But having said that, I don't know who's giving him the advice is because EVM architecture, in my opinion, is a very flawed architecture. I think if they're going to launch something, they should have actually listened to David Thack and launched it on Solana or a move architecture. All Ethereum spot contracts basically have fallback functions.

Reentry and C attracts are very common for Ethereum. Not to be little Ethereum or the Avium architecture, but I don't know why they're in the first place launching it on Ethereum and similar to like, BlackRock doesn't really care about decentralization, right? I agree with you, man. Yeah, I mean, you're speaking from the perspective of like a very intelligent deep crypto native and not from the, hey, we're going to go with the one that has the biggest name, the most money, and seems to be the most secure. And that's what they're probably choosing on.

And by the way, right now, Ethereum has the. the ETF and the institutional stamp of approval. So if you're working at one of these companies, it's very easy to sell the let's do this on Ethereum and really hard to say, hey, guys, have you heard of Botanics, let's launch our tokenized treasuries there as BlackRock.

It's not going to happen right now. So that's why. It's the name brand and the size. So you would agree with me that it's all about narrative. It's nothing to do with technology or decentralization. It's all about narrative. I mean, I think that way about nationalism, religion, sports teams, money, literally everything. So, yes, I agree with you.

I think everything in the world that is viewed as true is because it's a shared narrative. So yes. Short answer is yes. But that doesn't take away from the fact that they're choosing Ethereum and are likely to choose Ethereum. So I don't think that that's going to change. But I guess what, you know, Ryan, Paul, you guys look so deeply at the stuff. Like, what would cause a BlackRock to say, hey, I get it. This needs to be built on Bitcoin. Well, it's still their biggest TTF.

That's probably the biggest thing, right? And so bringing back the Bitcoin narrative to bump the inflows on Bitcoin is probably the biggest reason. And even though they're not holding Bitcoin on one of these L2s, it's just part of the narrative, just like you said, right? Hey, we can now do these things on Bitcoin. Now you can go and do defy and do AVE and leverage trading on GMX on Bitcoin is something that might get them to pump that narrative just for the sake of pumping,

once again, the bags of the ETFs that they so largely hold in this ecosystem. Yeah, the hard thing about Bitcoin is that it is decentralized. You can't control the network and you can't control the block creation unless you also heavily invest in infrastructure and mining. And that's what we thought Black Rock was doing when they took a big position in core scientific. We thought, oh, okay, Black Rock is taking a big position in mining. But now it doesn't seem like they're as committed and focused to trying to control or be invested in the Bitcoin ecosystem other than just holding the ETF. I really think over the next year or so, we're going to see a transition where BlackRock and some,

larger asset managers move into ecosystems that they have more control over, mainly proof-of-stake ecosystems where if you hold more of the coin, you have more of the say in the network. Ironically, that's actually what's coming with Bitcoin and the L-2s. They're all proof-of-stakes, since none of the L-2s can actually mint new Bitcoin. And so one of the things that I would, that I'm guessing will happen is the transition of a lot of these centralized ETFs and holders, first of all, being able to offer rewards from staking, like I know early on when based in similar companies offered staking,

that was shot down as being a security, and that seems to be slowly getting rolled back, meaning that they can actually offer the yield. That's been rolled back, right? That was, well, as a, staking as a secondary service was effectively just rolled back when it was dropped in Cracken. You'll remember Jesse Powell a few weeks ago, equipped,

you know, can I get my $30 million back? Because they basically paid it right because they're... because they're offering staking. And so that still is unique to other chains than Bitcoin, but the L2's coming online will allow these services and ETFs to provide yield on staking on Bitcoin itself. So that could bring the narrative back because now it's like, oh, you don't just hold your Bitcoin with us. You can actually earn yield on it.

I say this with the damn I hate hearing this because that kind of motivates people to leave their money in things like ETFs. And of course, I'm a self-custy maximumist. I want people to hold their own keys. But I'm also being real. Like as the regulation changes, and if it is beneficial for things like ETFs, that will happen and it will change the narrative around the different assets that didn't have this specific feature staking specifically, and Bitcoin's one of them. You know, if you don't mind my jumping in, I'm trying to zoom out and think hard about what's being said today because there's so many announcements and so much excitement. Is it Citri? Is it botanics?

Is it this? Is it that? What exactly are they doing? And I'm just taken by, you know, there are things. that are built to last and there are things that are built to attract attention for the short term and burnout like a firework. And distinguishing between those things helps you make different types of decisions depending on what you're interested in. I think the Bitcoin maximalists come from this point of view of this thing is built to last. It's built to be indestructible. It's built

to serve a narrow and specific function. And I don't mean to be disparaging when I say this. I think I think with everything else, there's like, what might be, what could be, let's try this, let's try that. It's a tremendous amount of experimentation and obviously a tremendous amount of sometimes expectations that get high and then are disappointing or disappoint lead to disappointment. And then you get all these fundamental questions, which we don't, which we never really talk about here because they're more technical. But for me, this really distinguishes the difference between.

between these different philosophies, different camps that we see in this space. Now, I'll just leave it at that, because I don't want to monopolize and I probably don't have anything else to say. I think there's something unique about the ecosystem of projects coming out with the Bitcoin L2s.

With the Ethereum L2s, the transition to them, one could argue, was for scaling, but another theory, which I hold by, is the fact that all those L2s issued a token. And by issuing a token, they were able to get VC funding. With VC funding, they can acquire developers. And really, a lot of developers that would have worked on L1 scaling on Ethereum had no money

to make there. There was no new token that they could ICO and sell to VCs and VCs dump onto the public. And so they built an L2. With Bitcoin, and the Bitcoin community just won't accept some random shit coin token for a governance of an L2. And so you have to build it with a more pureplay Bitcoin type of an ecosystem that doesn't have a token, if you want to drive adoption within the Bitcoin community. And so, ironically, I mentioned these projects, like a botanics and Alpin Lamps, and there's

really no, like, oh, damn, I bought the token and it didn't pan out, you know, like a 2017 ICO boom. It's simply an extension to the network. Now, granted, there are several that are competing and some will die, but I do think some of them will succeed, but at the end of the day, it doesn't quite fit that same narrative of, oh, gosh, you know, let me go and buy into this thing, hope it succeeds. You know, it's simply an extension of the same protocol that already has a lot of name recognition, and that's Bitcoin. Tomer, where do you stand on, you know, Bitcoin itself versus building on Bitcoin?

You know, obviously there's sort of a bifurcation even of the Bitcoin community about whether layer two is with tokens and such are a good idea on Bitcoin. Yeah, look, my own personal take is that I think so much of all this other stuff that we talk about already has a mature technology behind it, which is called the database, SQL database, and ultimately these things are largely centralized. And so trying to retrofit them onto a blockchain ends up being a tremendous amount of effort for something that blows up that doesn't end up being valuable. The real problem is having sound money that's reliable for the long term, that's permissionless that people can, that isn't going to become corrupted so that we can plan our capital allocation long term around it and do real experimentation there. So I am, I'm very skeptical when it comes to

building on Bitcoin or building beside Bitcoin for things that can be answered with a database. And that, and that's the first question that I often ask. Can the government put its data in a database that it makes publicly accessible? Yes. With an API, yes. Why do we need to put this stuff on a decentralized blockchain and pretend that there's anything going on there other than a very inefficient way of doing things. Now, you know, the government does things very inefficiently, so then

putting stuff on a blockchain is consistent with that, but that's the whole reason we need Bitcoin because we can't put the government in charge of money and they make the money very inefficient and distorted and stolen and all this other stuff. So without going into all the Bitcoin narratives, like I think

for us to find value outside of Bitcoin or at a higher layer of Bitcoin, I haven't seen myself the innovation. And I think the reason we see so many catch-ups and then collapses is because the fundamentals aren't really there to build anything really valuable and longstanding outside of this pure monetary idea, which itself is a hard idea for people to wrap their heads around. I'll pause there for you. Does that make sense? Yeah, it makes perfect sense. That's why I asked. So I agree completely.

I'm a Bitcoin Maxi and I agree completely with Tomer. The world's largest problem is a store of value problem, nothing else. That's what Bitcoin basically solves a purpose for. Having said that, I don't know if you've heard about David Soroy. He's also working on Robin's BitVM and he's further progressing the idea. Yeah, exactly. And he's working further on the idea of ZK roll-ups and optimistic probabilities and in which actually you don't require a token.

So I think anywhere that you require a token is basically just a money grab. So that's my two-cent thought in cordedum to Tomor. And yeah, thanks for that. I wholeheartedly agree. I think the foundation of the financial system is sound money. But, you know, the Bitcoin Maxi narrative of it ends at that is really short-sighted. If you think of our world with, you know, dollars and value, sure, you need a money that you can hold. then you need a payment method to be able to send that money.

Then you need all the financial primitives on top of it. I like to call like a financial stack, much like a tech stack. You have a web server and you've got Linux on the bottom. Here you have technology. Here you have a financial stack. And to say that we just need sound money is just the bottom level of the financial stack. And that causes you to then say, okay, once you have sound money, you can centralize everything else on top of it.

You can centralize the exchanging. You can centralize the borrowing and the lending. And then we end up with the same problems we had four years ago with block Fy Celsius, go way back, Mount Cox, and not because we had sound money, but no other financial primitives on top of it. So you can't be a little defy and smart contracts. I 100% agree. You don't put everything on chain. Anyone that says, like, oh, this doesn't get whatever technology put on chain, the blockchain of the database, absolutely idiotic. Like, you know, the blockchain is not a database or it's least the world's worst database. But being able to build true financial

primitives that have the same principles as Bitcoin, censorship, resistant, global, globally accessible, no KIC, build that stuff on chain, and you're replacing more of the financial stack, not just sound money, and therefore disrupting more of the existing financial system and replacing it with true defied, true cryptocurrency. I'll try and pin you the exact video of David Soroy, but I think you misheard me. I never said that, you know, you do not need to build up the payment stack. No, not you, previous speaker, sorry, previous person I was talking. I can't remember who that was.

So, no, I actually agree with you. I actually know David's throw out of coffee with him three times. Great guy, you know, a moderator panel at Bitcoin, Vegas with him. So very familiar with David, great job. But sorry, I wouldn't make sure it was someone else that I was commenting. I couldn't see who that was. You can actually build RWAs or you can build even gambling casinos or whatever, defy.

But you don't need a token. That's exactly what he's building on. That's what my point was. 100% agree. And I like that in comparison to the Ethereum L2s where they all had tokens and they were just a land grab, or just a money grab. Something rare. We always have people requesting as a policy. We never bring up people that we don't know on the show.

But I see Chris Loeffler here, I believe CEO of Calibur, which I believe is the Link Treasury Company that was announced today. So it must have seen the title and jump in here. Is that correct, Chris? Did I get that right? Chris, you there? You're on stage now. Tech always goes great. So, yeah, I guess we can circle back to the rest of the other conversation,

although I think we've pretty much wrapped up. Yeah, there you are. Hey, how are you? Good. How are you? You're the first person in the history of Cryptotown Hall that requested that we brought up. Congratulations. Well, we just had a good announcement this morning.

Well-timed, yes, that we have launched a digital asset treasury strategy focused on Link. So just figured I'd drop in and listen and say hello. So can I ask the question? I had it here pulled up in the news and discussed it actually this morning on my other show. So great that you happened to show up. I literally never even click on the accounts of people requesting, and I just saw it. So pretty crazy. Yeah, go ahead, ask the question.

Yeah, this is about Link because I'm just learning. about it a little bit more from the conversation we've had about it. So it sounds like it's a token that that is the people used to validate the verity, the truth of claims as an oracle. If you build a if you're building a large treasury asset or treasury base, does that give you control over declaring which things are true and which things aren't? Is that a centralization risk? Or am I completely missing the point of what Link does or what the treasury approach to it is? No, no, I think what we see that Link does and what it is is essentially the, it's the underlying infrastructure of providing data to blockchain across many, many different projects. And so if you, you know, I come out of the real estate and finance world and investing in infrastructure is something that we do all the time.

And when we started to look at different opportunities in Treasury and we saw the link story, we just, you know, we fell in love. with the fact that we get to be a part of the underlying data infrastructure of the entire WebTree ecosystem. And so acquiring the link token and investing into the protocol itself is just the first step for us. We intend to take this and implement it into our private equity real estate investment platform. We intend to use the infrastructure of ChainLink to as an an example, automate the calculations of our net asset value for our assets and provide transparency to our investors who own real estate with us. And there's just a lot of really interesting applications of the chain link technology

to our actual business. So not just taking advantage of what we saw is a clear opportunity to buy link at a price that is highly undervalued considering the use case, but also to invest into and to infuse the technology to our business. Anyone else? Got Chris here. You can ask all about Link. We had the whole conversation before.

I came in late. Sorry, guys. We're on the West Coast. Yeah. Oh, no, it's good. I'm saying we literally, like, had a whole conversation on Link and value accrual to the token versus the company and everything at the beginning because of the,

obviously, announcement at the top. And you probably could have. answered a lot of those questions for us but well i appreciate you the the connectivity like dcc and the swift and to um i mean the the application of link across the financial income ecosystem and basically bringing in traditional assets into into blockchain is is incredible yeah i i was just saying before that i had sergey on two weeks ago uh on my show kind of doing their live treasury announcements and the few when i do get the opportunity to speak him. I mean, he's an incredible, incredibly smart guy and clearly well, you know, tuned into

what's needed and what's being built and very much part of it. So, you know, I think you'll probably do exceptionally well. With that, guys, we're going to go ahead and wrap the show up. We will be back, of course, tomorrow 10.15 a.m. Eastern Standard Time for the next Cryptotown Hall. Thank you so much to all our guests and all of you for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. Thank you.