The Wolf Of All Streets - Ethereum & Solana Soar While Bitcoin Dominance Falls Below 60% | CryptoTownHall

Episode Date: August 13, 2025

Dave, they famously say that third time's a charm, it took me six to get on stage today. Six. Six tries. I guess, I guess, you know, X gets busier when markets get frothier. I guess. What an epic panel today. Got a lot of friends out here. It's awesome to always have this incredible group.

I don't take for granted that we get to chat with 10 of the most brilliant people on a rotating basis in our space every single day. it's absolutely epic um really really awesome so thank you guys my internet IQ came in at 56 just dude i i was yeah mine said i don't like to say the word um but it literally called me a i'll call it a redact a redact i think uh i did that thing the what he's talking about is where you put your name in this thing and according to your twitter account it tells you your ique and then they probably hack you steal your keys and take all your money just so that you can play a stupid game but i played it anyways uh and it It showed me at like a 61 IQ or something.

But the thing that gave me solace, my wife actually did it, of course, because she had like a 125 and she was like, see, you're actually half as smart as me. But I entered Mario because I was like, listen, if I'm, if I'm a 60, Mario's like a 12. And he was like four points below me. So it was amazing. What game are you talking about? No, there's something that was going around on Twitter, which you should never click. And I did.

And she did it on my behalf, to enter me. But it's like one of these stupid things where you enter anyone's Twitter name and it tells you their IQ based on their Twitter account. It's like throwing darts, but mine happened to land on the word that I don't say because it's inappropriate. We used to say it all the time in the 1980s, by the way, we all together that all the time, but you can't do that anymore. It's not okay. So here we are. We might be able to say it again. But if you enter your name in twice, it actually changes your IQ because I did it and it just changed my IQ like multiple times.

So I don't know how it's just a random number. generator. Yeah, whatever. Whatever, Ryan. I'm dumb, okay? I'm going to use this an excuse for everything moving forward. It's like, it's not my fault. I'm dumber than Forrest Gump.

He did well, though. So you're one of those people who Googled yourself like as soon as someone told you that you could do that. No, I just, my wife entered it and said, look. And I said, well, that's bad. And so, of course, I tweeted it because, like, I'm a very self-debted. So I just tweeted, nailed it with a screenshot of my low IQ. If you want a fun one, you need to ask chat GPT, what are some things that you've noticed about me that I probably don't know about myself?

That's a fascinating. Oh, I did that today, but I said, what are some things that I don't want to admit? And then it let rip on me. It told me all of stuff, it was like, actually you're kind of like this. And I was like, no, I'm not. Shut up. It's totally right. It's totally right.

Back on the IQ thing, I did mine. I put it in. I got the lowest score I've ever seen, which is 55. And I was like, actually, I'm in Mensa, so I don't know how accurate that is. I can't even sell Mensa. I'm literally dumb. Jesus, it says it. Go ahead.

I was going to say you're in luck because we're entering low IQ season. So this is advantageous for you in every way and your wife. So she has you to thank for the upcoming success you will achieve. So should we talk about crypto or should we talk about random memes and how stupid I am? Let's do crypto. So I think that we have a topic here. Even SolSor, Bitcoin dominance below 60%. I have a feeling that might have just, okay, it's still there.

But Bitcoin dominance, when I just checked was bouncing pretty hard and Bitcoin was up to 122, but it's fading by a couple hundred bucks here. I think we just kind of have a massive bullish trend going on right now. And I don't know if, I mean, we're running into a bunch of all-time highs here. I mean, Bitcoin, everyone, we're talking about Eith and Solana, but Bitcoin is a hair's breath from an all-time high. If it's less than $200 from an all-time high, you know, Salana not near the all-time high, but looking to break out. I mean, it's happening across the board. Yeah.

I mean, I think it depends on your time scale, obviously. You know, it's, I'll get, I'll be excited when ChainLink is at an all-time high and still half. It's still 50% below, which, you know, considering all the excitement about all and all the narratives, I mean, of all the odds, I think that one has the strongest narrative. You know, you had Sergei on a couple weeks ago to describe it, and it's still 50% below its all-time high. So, you know, if you want to get to that, if that is the relevant metric, you know, it is what it is. But that said, it's been doing very well over the last couple of weeks for damn sure. And that's measured in dollar terms, not Bitcoin terms. right? Yes. A long way to go in Bitcoin terms for effectively any altcoin to,

to break out. Oh, in Bitcoin terms, it's not even, yeah, the chart, it looks, it almost looks like it's not rallying. So, you know, it's like, if you want to be depressed, if that's what you, if that's what your holdings are. Yeah, every, every time I type in a ticker versus Bitcoin pair, it just says HFSB, right, so instead of whatever the ticker is. Did you know that if you enter Doge, by the way, on Trading View. I saw this today on Chris Franks' screen that the dog dances out onto your trading view. Didn't work for me, but it worked for him live on my show. I'd never seen that.

Crazy. Nope, never called that either. That's interesting. Yeah. All right. So, but let's talk about the market here. Obviously, we've got, we talk about it every day, but we've got incredible tailwinds here on basically every single front.

This is one of those times when I think you can turn your brain off and just understand that there's fundamental reasons that things are. going up and that everything is performing so well, it's nice to see it happening in August, where, you know, usually we're in the doldrums is the worst month historically. I think for Bitcoin, and even in bull markets, we've had some very, very rough August. So I guess the question then remains how we forecast the coming months. I saw that James is up here at Butterfield. I think he left.

Tom, I would love your actually shot at that one. I mean, how are you kind of handicapping the rest of the year? year? Yeah, so I think folks are still underestimating how much money is left in these digital asset treasuries, and it seems kind of like so obvious. But just looking yesterday, for example, at Euth, how much dry powder each one of these individual entities who could still purchase Ethereum from issued equities they have. And there's $27 billion, worth of dry powder. that's 5% of Ethereum total supply or a third of all Ethereum that's outstanding on centralized exchanges right now. And price is set at the margin.

So you can imagine as these folks start issuing equity and purchasing Ethereum, there's going to be some pretty powerful price movements coming. And Scott, I'm sure you've seen this. We've chatted privately about it. But we see pitch decks for these digital asset treasuries still every day. And it's not just Ethereum anymore. It's Solana and like all these other alt coins. I mean, you've seen Story and B&B and all these other ones coming. And it's supported by folks like Pantara who are raising funds to invest in these debts.

Now, like long term, maybe that's not great. But in the short term, three, six months, you have this ridiculous amount of capital coming into, namely Ethereum, but also Solana and a few others. And that's really like what we've been missing the last three years is we've just been PVP trading against each other. And now we're finally activating, you know, the traditional markets for all these other assets like sale or activated Bitcoin for the traditional markets. And I think you're just going to see, we talked about all coin season not coming. I mean, this is how you activate all coin season

and anything that can have a digital asset treasury and brings on more flows. Yeah, I'm looking at an article right now that ran. I think yesterday, 8% of Ethereum supply now sitting in ETFs or company reserves. So to add to the fuel of what you just said, 8% is already effectively in these assets that are largely held by people who have no intention of, you know, it around and selling it. James, I see her back up. I would love to ask you the same question. Yes.

It's just been an incredible couple of weeks for Ethereum. Well, a month or two, actually, for Ethereum. I think since May, we've seen $9 billion of inflows. And in July alone, we saw $5.5 billion of inflows. So that's, just put that in perspective, last year, that's more than the whole of last year. And then this week, we've already seen $1.6 billion of inflows. There's an incredible appetite.

And just relatively, Bitcoin's only seen a month to date, where it's seen the $400 million of outflows. So relatively people are massively favoring Ethereum at the moment. And last yesterday, or sorry, it was Monday. It was the largest in daily inflows on record. so it's just huge appetite for that. I don't see a huge amount of appetite of evidence to say it's bleeding out into other alt coins yet.

There's a little bit flowing into XRP and Solana, but I just think that's more of the hype of the ETF launches, but all the other altcoins, we're not seeing that. And Ethereum, sorry, yeah, Ethereum is just massively, on a relative price to other altcoins, is massively outperforming too. And I just think it's because, speaks to our clients, it's a combination of factors.

It's the Genius Act, it's the Stable Coin Act, the SEC action, various treasury companies now buying it. There's a whole, I think, range of political, economic and corporate support for the asset, which is really encouraging. I've been wrong on Ethereum for the last two years, but I feel like now it's starting to come good. Hey, you were, if you were wrong, we were wrong together because we did it often on YouTube and I was talking to Chris Inx about this today. He, you, myself, Matt Hogan, people I very regularly had all the time on my show. Maybe even you, Tom. I don't want to put words in your mouth. But we're all like, each should catch a bit at some point. Like this is crazy and kind of remained there. And listen, you're at the all time high now. So who cares? You can be wrong for a year and then be right on Eith a month. It takes a month. Right? The thing moved so fast. Go ahead, Tom. Yeah, and this sort of all happened at once. Like we talked about all these narratives like ETH being a traditional finance, an asset that's attracted for traditional finance, Eith having most of the activity, Eith having most of the stable coin volumes, like all the things all suddenly like clicked at once.

And obviously these digital asset treasuries have a huge hand in that, but they're being sold because of all the things we just talked about. So, you know, I think it's just really finally an inflection and realization point. point. And, you know, folks like the dunk on Heath and say, oh, we don't even have the all-time highs that you had, you know, back in 2021. And, you know, you've had the opportunity to buy Heath all the way from 900, all the way. It was, you know, just a few weeks ago, at 1800.

And get, you know, 3, 4, 5. It was 14 in April. And then. Yeah. You've had plenty of opportunity for upside as long as you were patiently accumulating. So, you know, I don't think this story's changed at all. And if anything, it's more exciting now.

I mean, is it just the Tom Lee effect, though? Like, he created a narrative, he stepped out in front of it, and then all of a sudden, all these things that we've been saying did never matter when prices bad matter to everybody because you're in a bull market and prices going up. I mean, to me, that's really what this is. It just needed someone other than Vitalik Buterin to become the face of Ethereum. I really think that. I'm a tail. Yeah, I would just second that, that, like, Ethereum really needed a sailor composite. that could drive the market, get everyone high and get people to see consistent inflows coming in.

And as we always say, there's no better marketing than price going up. And so seeing that there was all this inflows, but I think it's coupled with what Dave was saying, which was a lot of people were questioning the ETH, whether it had a design flaw, whether it was just to be left behind and whether it would get smoked by competitors. editors. And I think what the stable coin legislation has done, the rise of where user traction has been with base continuing to dominate, even though some of that value doesn't accrue back to ETH, ETH itself has really stood its ground. And this is kind of what I was saying, you know, months ago, which was it's going to have its place and it's going to find its place in

the market. It's so established and there's so much innovation that's been built upon it. I just think that people were not giving that enough credit and people were all expecting that money from all L2s had to flow back to Eath to make it work. And I just don't think that's true. I think that it's been an innovation layer for a really long time. And now that value is starting to be sort of aggressively bought up and realized very quickly during the hype of it. So I mean, Who knows, it might be six months until everyone's in the doldrums are on ETH again. But as of right now, it's playing catch-up pretty quick here. Well, it's interesting because I don't understand a lot of things because my IQ is only like 64.

But last time we had Ethereum transactions at this level and we're near an all-time high, it would cost like $180 to mint a $2 NFT. And now you can go send a million bucks for 80 cents or something. So, you know, I don't know what the mechanics are, how they change that. But it seems that if you're going to move. value and it's still extremely cheap on the layer one. It's going to take a lot of shine off the layer twos and a lot of the competition. Because yes, that still matters to someone who's doing micro-transactions and I don't want to minimize that. But if you're BlackRock and you're

sending around $100 million, you don't care if you pay $8 or $0.80. Yeah, I think that, you know, I'd like to play a little bit of contrarian here. I mean, you know, the clip of me saying East could go to, you know, well, I got the billions, trillions wrong, but whatever. But, but East could effectively, its high is probably eight times from where it is today. It's got a lot of traction, you know, on X, but there's risk in that. It's an if then else. If ether is the winning layer one for the major, you know, addressable market of moving value within the financial system where you call the, we, we tend to in crypto call this RWA or whatever. But effectively, if it is the winner, then it has still has significant potential, uh, you know, effectively in line with

Bitcoin reaching digital gold status. The difference is, is I think Bitcoin reaching digital gold status is, I mean, I think the risk reward there is enormously high. I mean, my, I think it's over 50% to be a 10x, which is just an insane risk adjusted return. I think ether has enormous competition in the end and what we're seeing over the last month. I mean, getting that excited over one month of price action. I mean, what's the old expression? Fool me once. Shame on you. Fool me twice. Shame on me. I mean, this is liquidity. This is Tom Lee and a bunch of other companies saying, let's go out there and buy it. They push the price up. It starts moving. Price then becomes reflexive. ETS exist and people are like, oh, wow, this thing could be huge.

they don't know what they're buying you know urethrium is you used to joke about it and boom now does that mean that it that this rally won't will will peter out at the all-time high of course not to easily double off the all-time high on this rally i mean i'm not i'm not bearish me bitcoin just did that right i keep saying like it's very exciting to see ethereum near an all-time high for anybody who has been holding it but this is just getting back to 2021 this is the equivalent to be aware if my point is if ether gets to be a $1 trillion asset, it's going to get a lot of attention and you're getting at a lot of people saying, why? You know, where's the value? Now, obviously, on Q with this rally, we've now seen Joe Rubin and others saying, oh, well, it's going to replace Bitcoin and

you get into that. And there are plenty of people on this panel. I'm staring at the icons who probably, when they hear that, their eyes roll. And it's like, okay, look, you know, something that has supply that's controlled by an oligopoly. especially post this last merge where the we're staking can now be you know significantly larger holders is not the same thing as bitcoin it just isn't and and for those who think that it is i really don't have you know other than than psychiatric help i don't really know what else to say uh so okay adam i knew you well i love it's true i mean i don't know we've been talking about this for months now it's like yeah nothing's really changed with ethereum nobody's still using the network the l2s don't

pay the L1, right? So nothing's really changed. Well, price matters, though. But price matters. Supply and demand. First year economics. Bro. And literally, like, I was, I was just on vacation talking to Normie friends, and they don't know anything about it, Heath at all, right? But they heard, oh, Tom Lee's involved. Ooh, right? It was like, I don't know, the Kathy Wood of last cycle. Like, her opinion matters. My Wall Street friends said the same. Everybody gets his research. They see him. They listen. Yeah. I mean, it literally is that simple. I mean, in my opinion, that's all it is. It is self-referential and it will work. I mean, it's just like, you know, people ask me, you know, look, I'm not, I, I do own some of it. I mean, I'm not obviously, you know, I'm in the space. I understand it. You know, whatever. But it is what it is. And, you know, someone asked me this morning in a DM, you know, why, you know, what my thoughts were. My thoughts are simple. It's that ether is, you know, has the potential to, you know, probably eight X from here. If it. You know, you know, you know, you know, it. becomes the winner, clear winner.

But that is a long way out and a lot of, a lot of, there's a lot to happen. And most likely there will be multiple L1's purpose built. I mean, the, the circle news yesterday is really bad for East's value problem. Really bad. It undercuts, it's like, it's like, you know, someone took an axe to it. And it doesn't, no one cares about it in the price because trading is all momentum based and supply demand. Dave, let's not take for granted.

everybody knows what you're talking about. Just really quickly. Circle announced they're going to create their own layer one called Arc. And so the assumption is that obviously they're going to push a lot of the USDC transaction volume to that chain, which would potentially minimize the usage of that stable coin on other chains. I mean, look, will it win? Who knows?

I mean, I see William giving the thumbs down because, well, we know, you know, William is as close to an ethmax as we have here. But the truth is that it is not good news because Tom Lee, if anyone who wants to remember, why did he say he was forming an East Treasury company? He said, now, I personally took issue with it, but he said it's because of stable coins. Well, great. So the largest stable coin issuer is going to have their own L1 and, if not abandon East, you know, use it for maybe for finality. I mean, possibly.

I mean, we're not sure. But it's not good for the East value proposition, which would rely upon East being staying really, really cheap and therefore not returning value to token all. Dave, I don't know if you saw it. People were literally posting on the timeline yesterday that it was bullish that they were using EVM. But somehow bullish also for Ethereum, it's like, how is this bullish for Ethereum when it's not connected in any way at all? Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't get it. You're not missing anything. As I've said many times, you know, the crypto Twitter or CryptoX or whatever the hell we call ourselves now, there are so many, quote, analysts who literally have no capacity to analyze any.

anything. It's like all the people in the XRP army who cheer every time Ripple Labs does anything, despite the fact that they own no equity in Ripple Labs and what Ripple Labs is announcing has literally nothing to do with XRP the token. It's this notion. I mean, look, there are people in the equity market's equally stupid. Let's understand. We've seen multiple times that, you know, things that look like Microsoft, when Microsoft has news, other tickers go up. I mean, people buy the wrong stock. I mean, there's all sorts of stupid shit. But let's let's be clear what is good for you know for an ecosystem is not necessarily good for the token if it doesn't influence supply demand in the token but people haven't gotten to that point yet right now

it's just fuck this is new let's buy it it's moving up and and i and i think it's it's as simple as that anyway that's my contrarian take yeah ryan and summer two two quick thoughts so when i hear that USC is going to be highlighting its own layer one, my immediate thought is, well, I'll just use USDT more often than. And then my second thought is, well, the EVM does bolster the Ethereum community, mainly because of the cost, or the cross-chain ability. So you have things like layer zero and wormhole and these other projects that put a lot of infrastructure in place, for moving assets freely between EVM systems. So if the Circle Layer 1 is going to be EVM,

it does open it up to like the Ethereum family of chains. So you can get a lot of cross-chain play and it does make the ecosystem as a whole stronger. But I just don't get why Circle would dilute themselves with Layer 1. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. But I mean, maybe they'll do really well with it and make a lot of money. Well, my question slash, comment was going to be in relation to what you finished your question on, which is it just

seems these layer ones that these stable coin issuers are launching is basically to give themselves clear access to the rails that they're going to be using without any noise, without any fear of update risk or like they'll keep running the version that they're in charge of and their main goal is to run stablecoin on it. So that's where they see the opportunity and better to run your own instance than to run some decentralized instance that may be decentralized and maybe not and may have bugs and may have upgrade challenges and all these other things. And so everyone's forking off, if you will, to run their own chain. And that's not good for any pre-existing chain in particular, especially since stable

coins is so far really the sustainable killer app. It's not NFTs. It's not ICOs. It's not utility tokens. It's not anything. else. It's just stablecoins. And so everyone can have their own. Like this comes back down to blockchain technology only worked for Bitcoin. Like everybody else is running their own database and they may be running it in a blockchain format for for the sake of what's required to be a stable coin. But when there's one permission leader in charge of the whole thing, it's a database. Yeah. Tom, one second. I want you to come up as well. What I'll say is kind of as I was unpacking this, I actually wrote a newsletter about it this morning.

I don't think this is necessarily, quote unquote, good for crypto, but if you're a major institution or a company and you actually decide to use stable coins as payments, imagine sending somebody 500 grand, you know, for a payment for a service on ETH and you accidentally send USDC or send it to a wrong address. There's no, like, customer service line at the Ethereum Foundation to help you, right? So Circle, I think, clearly sees an opportunity where institutions want centralization. They want customer service. They want to know that if there's a mistake, it'll be fixed. And it makes a hell of a lot of sense for them there. I don't think that's great for crypto or decentralization per se. But think about that side of it.

You know, you got some 65-year-old woman in accounting who's trying to pay people with stable points. Go ahead, Tom. Yeah, a lot there to unpack. So I think the first thing I'll just take umbrage with is I'm not sure Bitcoin is at more distribution. distributed, then Ethereum, as Dave cited there, just looking at non-zero balances, Ethereum has 110 million. Bitcoin has 55 million. Unique holders, because obviously you could have multiple addresses that... Let's be clear, Tom. When I say distributed, I'm talking about control over the network issuance, et cetera, and the validation. That's what I'm talking about.

I'm not talking about distributed in terms of holders among the masses. I'm not sure what you mean there because Sailor controls about, what, 6% of Bitcoin now. I mean, you have the old Satoshi coins, 5%. You've a number of other large holders. I'm not sure that it's any more concentrated than Ethereum is, but I guess we call it maybe a tie. I wouldn't say it's... Yeah, once again, not talking about the asset, talking about the network. Talking about nodes and validators, you know, proof of work versus proof of stake.

I mean, it's a much deeper conversation, but it's not a statistical thing. And, you know, it's like if you ask the question, can you, what would it take to break the supply cap on Bitcoin versus what would it take to have new Ethereum issuance and just answer that question. And if the answer is, it's easier to break the supply cap on Bitcoin, then I'm wrong. Yeah, I'm not sure that's true either with large mining pools and a few other things there. I mean, the amount of eth you hold is directly correlated to how much say you have the network. So that is important there. But anyway, potatoes now. So the other part, though, is the USDC, yeah, totally agree if this were to be long-term

sustainable. That would probably be bearish Ethereum, but I don't think it is. I mean, the reason that people actually use Ethereum and why USDC has been tied to Ethereum is the overall settlement assurances and guarantees and security of the network. And USDA has the enormous joint venture with Coinbase, which has led their distribution to date, and Coinbase has base. and that's where a lot of USDC is distributed and through the Coinbase platform, which has deep ties to Ethereum.

So I think this is sort of a last gasp kind of effort to justify the evaluation multiples for Circle personally. I don't really think it's viable in long term. Yeah, I think we'd say I would love to dig in with that on you, Tom. You know, Scott has probably said at some point in the next, you know, month or so, probably when I get back from vacation and they'll start doing long form, you know, a podcast, I think that is an interesting topic because I'm not sure I agree with you. In fact, I think I disagree with you.

But it is definitely something that needs to be dug into because the only way to justify circles valuation within basically five times of this is if they're going to become a dominant player in the infrastructure of stable coins writ large, not just a big stable coin owner. Right. And so that is that is an alpha point. I mean, if you look, people bought into Circle at, you know, at ridiculous, you know, normal metrics of price times revenue, et cetera. On the theory, it's going to get as big as tether, but why when everybody in the world can announce that their own stable coin? So their only path to, I mean, maybe this is what, maybe this is your point, I don't know, but their only path to being valued, you know, actually more than where they are today, is to be the infrastructure player in addition to one of the biggest issuers.

I mean, I assume you agree with that. Agreed. I think they're enormously overvalued today, and this is sort of a last gasp effort to try to backfill into that valuation, given U.S. Currently, Coinbase makes more money up U.S.D.C. and Coinbase, I don't know if you saw this, but this is actually news today. Coinbase revived stable coin bootstrap fund to boost U.S.D.S.D. So they're actively still, you know, increasing the ways that they're using and exposed it to U.S.DC. I also saw Coinbase unlocks millions of assets for Dex trading. everybody, which is really, really interesting as an aside. But Coinbase is not going to let USDC take away their market share in the amount of money that they're making on it, I would imagine, or not quietly. I'm a tail. Yeah, I just wanted to add to this. I don't know if you guys saw, but Circle's not the only one doing this. Stripe also announced that they're developing their own Layer 1 blockchain.

Theirs is going to be a bit more compatible with EF. So I don't know exactly since they framed it up as a layer one and not a layer two, but there's obviously a trend developing here, whether that's an IP grab for them to develop their own rails. I do think that this spurs more Ethereum competition long tail, but we'll see how fast they're able to spin up these blockchains and the kind of traction they get versus traditional crypto rails. But I think, yeah, go ahead.

Not even just their own blockchains, but some of them, there's kind of this mixed approach on how people are approaching stable coins, right? You have like, I think, you know, Western Union just had there exploring one. We know that Bank of America is exploring their own. A lot of these institutions are going to just create their own private wall gardens and others may adopt USC. So there's kind of just battle for the way this will even be adopted. No, that's fine. Exactly. And there's clearly, you know, whether that's a walled garden, the ability to control, maybe the ability to implement callbacks on transactions and have customer service like Dave was talking about, which is part of these blockchains. You know, we don't know how centralized they're going to be or how decentralized they're going to be and what kind of different utility and like actual fundamental changes that they'll make that improve the user experience. but without a doubt, this is a trend.

I don't think a lot of people saw coming. Just like with the way that Bitcoin's been adopted by banks and BlackRock and now stable coins kind of coming with these big companies developing their own L-1s, I think there's a lot of people who are not like this. This is not what I was hoping for. We were hoping for mass adoption of the native tech, but I think that there's plenty to still lean in here and say that crypto's leading the way It's just coming about in different innovations that people were probably anticipating.

Since we have Ron here, I want to get our daily dose of what the hell's happening in Washington, just as a pivot there. Yeah, I guess it's a little quieter in D.C. right now, most in Congress, in that session, and scenes of regulators are kind of on a listing tour right now. I think they're at at least SACs at St. Francisco this week or something. So it's a little quieter. So I didn't have too many updates to share with folks here. I mean, behind the scenes right now, just for folks' awareness, it's a lot, we talk a lot about the genius bill and the upsides there and the markets afterwards. The next thing to look at is the market structure bill, and that's sitting in the Senate.

It passed the House or a version passed the House. And so the question is it looks like the Senate's going to do their own version. And we're going to probably see around mid-September what that version looks like, you know, potential winners and losers in that current text. And then they're pretty confident they can move it in the end of fall. So all of that, of course, is going to be subject to political discourse. There's a lot of it going on. But for right now, it's kind of quiet.

The drafts are working on the new legislation, so we're having a lot of those calls right now. But I'd say buckle up for more September for some updates for more of a D.C. But it's going to move really quickly. So get ready. And at least right now, prospects are pretty high from our architecture. So I'm getting excited. Hey, Ron. What's the rumor on Bohines?

Where did you go? I don't want to, I've heard a couple things. I don't want to spoil any announcements, but from the rumors I'm hearing, it's a pretty large company that many folks are familiar with because he did stress it's a private sector job. So some folks think he's going back into politics, but, uh, it's no way. Yeah, dude, he had the greatest trade, like the single greatest political career in history became effective. I like the guy a lot. So this is not a criticism. It's a compliment.

He came out of absolute nowhere. Like, it wasn't, you know, everyone. was who's bo heinz when he came up he basically made himself famous in five to six months as the crypto guy in capital hill and then immediately monetize it and didn't have to deal with any political bullshit i mean he dealt with a little bit of the uh bs i guess we came to the genius six months man but yeah yeah he actually ran for congress in north carolina he lost that race uh but like there was yeah there was all i mean that's where i first met him was when he was running for that race uh but yeah there was always thoughts of uh him maybe going back

into politics since there's an open north carolina sentencing and a bunch of other seats probably opening up, but it looks like it's private sector, it's crypto. Again, I don't want to get ahead of it if the rumors I'm hearing are true, but it's a, the rumor I'm hearing, it's pretty large company that everyone knows very well. So we will see what happens, and I don't want to spoil you. The CEO of Black Rock, Bohind, you heard it here first, Larry Fink, is retiring. And what do we know about his replacement? Not too much. Again, I think there's also a lot of questions kind of what happens next, because David Sachs is technically done as well in his advisory role.

So it's kind of, you know, at least right now, all the action goes back to the Senate. As we've seen as well, Trump gets personally involved in this stuff for better for worse. But in the genius case, he actually got across the finish line through his dealmaking. So Trump is definitely going to make a reappearance when the market structure starts boiling up in the fall. So I think that we're kind of the eyes are is kind of seeing what Trump does. But there's a lot of folks that Bo had underneath them as well, and they're really solid. So does that mean that we're not going to have this? like the digital asset committee presence in the White House anymore, if they're all timing out already.

It was, I don't think I realized it was only meant to be like a six-month thing, at least for them. Yeah, just for the figureheads, it's more of a six-month thing, or at least, I mean, both could have gone for a long time, but a sacks more six months. And that was more of his charter, I believe. But, no, they got a whole set of staff, actually, underneath them. I know plenty of them, actually. They're really solid folks from, like, agencies as well. So overall, like, I'm not concerned about. but the White House losing focus here. And again, the president cares. So when he cares, everyone in the White House cares. But they've got a good staff.

And they're going to be really busy pretty soon. Yeah. And I mean, we don't even track the Trump family headlines on crypto anymore, but there seems to be one every week. I mean, huge mining moves, World Liberty Financial, some sort of treasury company. I mean, he has not only like a fundamental interest in it, but a very strong financial interest in it, right?

So it's not going anywhere. Yeah, the last thing I'll just say is that, you know, we are inching every day closer to November 2026. And that's when, you know, especially kind of around, when 2020-6 starts, that's when the partnership gets really bad. And that's usually when legislation grinds to a halt, even if one party has all three, you know, branches here or at least in both of Congress as well, the presidency. So the window is pretty narrow to get a bipartisan bill like market structure done. And that's why they're going to be pushing really hard in the fall because if it does get more and more delayed due to other priorities, or Democrats try to link more this to Trump enriching himself, that could delay things because they need 60 votes in the Senate.

And that could, if it's delayed to 2026, the odds of that bill getting signed the law go down dramatically. So this is going to be a big push, but get ready. It's going to be really exciting. But right now, it's pretty well and a lot of the time behind the scenes. Well, yeah, I mean, this has been the craziest August ever for news. I guess just not on Capitol Hill. We've shifted from government to back to treasury companies

and all the things happening on Wall Street, but there's never a dull moment here. Dave, any other topics we need to hit? I know there's going to be a sponsor coming up soon, but is there anything else on the radar? The last point from a market's point of view is look at volatility in the traditional markets, and it matters. Whenever the V-starts gets getting this low, it doesn't get this low and V-bounce straight back up, so this isn't a panic point. But this is all systems go for risk assets for a period of time.

And it correlates with August and we will see what our actual direction is going to be in risk assets as we move into the fall. I think that it is, it's important for people to be aware that all of this is happening in crypto as we're at the top of the most recent Bitcoin range as Ethereum we've already discussed. You know, it feels like the Bitcoin range of this 122 level, which honestly I can't understand why that's. matters, but it feels like it's one of those things where if it can get through it, resistance will become support, et cetera, to the next one. But it's all within a backdrop. I hate to be McLownish on this, but it's all within a backdrop, a very low volatility and a clear risk-on environment. And that is definitely helping the all-coin season. And frankly, I would expect it to continue through to September until we start people get back from

vacation and we start seeing real news. Gary? Yeah, just back to the circle thing and then building a stable coin. I don't think it costs a lot of money, right, or time to build a stable coin. To me, this would be their way of locking in the user, making it easier. They're going to build rails to lock in the player. Like, once you get adoption, you want to keep them, right? Retention.

So I think that's what these tools. Am I correct, though, that it is not really a big lift to launch a stable coin? it doesn't seem like to take the genius. Brock, you just jumped on stage. You know a little something about that. Well, yeah. Brock, why wouldn't they, right? Hello, everyone.

Grant, good to see everybody. Always grateful to be here. Yes, stable coins. No, it's not difficult to build a stable coin. It's not difficult to build a coin. You know, some things are hard, but no, that's not difficult at all. The difficult part is getting any traction. The difficulty is getting exchange integrations, wallet integrations, payment integrations,

and people actually trusting and wanting to use your thing at scale. Only a couple of people have ever been able to pull that off in our industry's history. I mean, the algorithmic ones, obviously, Terra Luna is long gone after it's terrorizing of the market. Maker-Dowen things, you have some in the algorithmic area. in terms of an asset-backed R-W-A type of stable coin a la USDT, of which I started, and then Circle, of which my old firm blockchain capital, we were in the early investors. That, you know, liquidity begets liquidity. You know, it's almost like Highlander, and there can be only one.

What usually you have happened in marketplace businesses where liquidity begins liquidity is you have a dominant player that's number one. You have a distant but significant number two, and then everybody else shares the third position and very hard, usually. And then there's normally not room for number four, five, six, seven. But that's generally market structure, not just for stable coins, but any of these kind of, you know, marketplace type like products. Yeah, that's interesting insight. Gary, I think that confirms exactly what you were saying. And we know why they're doing that. Brock, we got you here, actually.

And I know we have Plank, it looks like, came up. Who's behind that Plank account? Hey, my name is Diom. I'm the CEO of Plank Network. Thank you for having me. Of course. And, Brock, you're involved in this as well, correct? Yes, at D&A, we're investors and advising the project.

Get Scott up here? Where is he, man? which doesn't like me anymore. We've got almost the same name. Generally, I do the public speaking. For a reason. Scott's busy working. Funny how that works.

I mean, you just flip over the M and change a E to an A. And Scott and I are the same person. So it's easy. Now we got Scott Walker. All right. Well, let's do you. By the way, I did propose a show for Scott to do some content. It would be like a crypto cocktail.

You know, basically having entrepreneurs come pitch him on the back of his yacht in Puerto Rico, drinking rum. And then if he doesn't like it, he makes you walk the plank. And I'm like, I love it. Show there. There's something there because we make crypto notes. He's actually accepted. I know you joke like that you obviously do the public facing appearances. And I made that joke, but he's actually exceptionally smart and an incredible speaker and guest.

I love. Yeah. So, yeah, I think that, you know, getting Scott to want to do media is hard, but I pitched him on the idea of a crypto cocktail hour on his yacht because it shows Puerto Rico, you know, drinking rum, talking deals. And then, you know, if you don't like someone and you think they're a scammer, it's a slightly different exit than what we do when you walk out the door at Crypto Nights. Yeah, you need to do that. Wait, did you say Walk the Plank? Is that funny that we have Plankonset?

It's perfect. Intended. Intended pun. All right, so listen, let's talk more about plank and break down what you do. Obviously, layer zero designed specifically for AI-native decentralized services. That's probably confusing for most people. So can you break down in layman's terms, see what that means? Yeah, so that's plank zero that we're talking about. So our Web 3 stack consists of a next generation, yeah, modular infrastructure stack,

which is centered around Plank Zero and Plank 1, where Plank Zero is a, layer zero protocol for launching heavy high performance compute AI chains, but also high performance compute deep in protocols. And the whole Planck zero, the whole layer zero protocol itself basically makes compute completely interoperable inside the ecosystem. And that is currently quite a big problem. You know, compute providers want to move wherever the demand is. We saw it with liquidity a long time ago. That's why bridges came on. That's why interoperability came into life. And we see right now that compute is really isolated in inside ecosystems where not always, not every day, not every hour is there demand for the amount of compute that is sitting inside that

ecosystem and with the different tax tax and the different agents that are being used to onboard this compute into these ecosystems, it is not always that easy to move it quickly towards another ecosystem. Again, we solved with liquidity as well. So Planck Zero is here to make compute, high performance compute, completely interoperable and make sure that compute providers don't even have to worry about, you know, the whole product itself, make sure that compute is sent within seconds towards another layer one or another application inside the ecosystem. Well, forgive me because we joked earlier that when I put my IQ thing in to the Twitter thing, it said I was a 64, so I'm very dumb. So in layman's terms, basically your layer zero

is plumbing for other people to build things. And the layer one is your purpose built for AI chain. It's EVM compatible and can be used for these specific purposes. Yeah, well, yeah, yeah. Our Plank Zero, sorry, our Layer Zero protocol, which is, again, Plank Zero is for other ecosystems to thrive inside our ecosystem and to make compute interoperable. And then you have Plank One, which is our compute native layer one blockchain that currently only holds enterprise-grade GPUs around $40 million currently, and which powers our AI cloud

and our AI studio, which is our AI cloud computing infrastructure that we offer in, mostly in Web 2, because most high-performance compute and AI useful AI applicates are unfortunately still being built in Web 2 and Planck 1 powers that AI computing infrastructure, yes. Yes, I just want to ask Brock, obviously. I think you mentioned DNA lead investors here, you guys don't take that casually. So what kind of was the spark for you and what made you decide to get behind this? Yeah, so we've been very active in the AI side of decentralization. Not everyone and we're big fans of the team and we think that what they're doing is novel and its approach and here to support it. But this is one of the main areas that we're focused on. I think we've

deployed roughly $50 million, you know, call it year-to-date in AI compute. And so, you know, we're excited to be here today to be able to share that with all those that are listening to this spaces and support one of our portfolio companies. Perfect. So, Jim, what do you want people to know about this? You know, obviously we have this large audience here. Is this for the builders? Is this for your average retail?

How are people going to be using these? Yeah, so what I'm trying to do here is collect stakers. So we are, we have been on a private test net, specifically an enterprise grade test net and a retail great test net for quite a while. What we want to do at first is try to collect like edge computing, like devices a little bit more closer to where the data is established. So for instance, you know, your computer at home, your PC with a GPU in it, and we saw that it didn't really worked out. Our vision was three years ago, let's collect all these devices

and let's try to utilize the idle computing resources inside of these devices. And we saw quickly, my co-founder worked at Google Cloud, so he saw very quickly, okay, this is not really working out how we wanted to work out. Let me explain a little bit. The compute resources currently sitting at people in their gaming PC are not reliable and the quality is not not correct as of now with the current state of technology to really monetize it and to offer it to, yeah, well, huge Web2 clients on a cloud computing platform. So what we instead did is we thought, okay, let's sit this, let's put this technology that we already developed to collect this computing power on the bookshelf for now. And let's wait until the state of the technology globally is going to improve so that we can also onboard retail grade GPUs, Eventually, we launched our enterprise-grade test net where we only allowed compute for, from

example, DNA fund, from Deepenex Capital, from other enterprise-grade GPU operators, and we only allowed that compute on our network, and we were able to make $1 million in revenue in less than three months on our cloud computing platforms. You need to engage the community somehow, because we promised everybody to onboard their retail-grade GPUs onto the network and to earn from the AI boom that we are currently experiencing. So instead, we developed collateral staking where community members can basically first enter a liquid staking pool where they get L-Plank tokens. So they get like a first yield there from that dynamic staking pool.

And then they can use re-stake or rebase those L-plank tokens into a collateral staking pool to support enterprise-grade GPU operators inside our network. So what that means is people don't have to put their GPU that they're using in their gaming PC, which they spent a lot of money onto a network and try to get some emissions and basically utilize their device in these networks. And instead purchase tokens or earn them in some way

via an AirDrop or just purchase them on the exchange and actually contribute to a enterprise-grade GPU pool that are being opened up at TGE on our network. So basically people can earn from 800s, eights to hundreds. Those are, those are the device that are worth $20,000 to $30,000 per piece. So now they can earn from a real yield generating GPU device. And that is what we're trying to, yeah, trying to tell the world in the coming weeks upon until our TGE to participate in these enterprise-grade coast-taking pools.

So then I guess tell us a bit more about the token. Yeah, so the token has a couple functions. So we are, of course, in layer one and a layer zero. So the compute payments can be done in Planck, but we see so far that most of the payments that are being done is in USDT, USDC, or mostly actually via credit card, because we are essentially a utility token, which goes up and down. We're not a stable token that you were just talking about. It doesn't have a stable value.

So we see that most of the people are actually paying for their GPU compute, for their inferencing, for their training, for their container execution in USD. And we use that 95% of that revenue to create a buyback flow of Planck so that we keep the buy pressure on the chart. So that is one of the first utilities of the token. Then we have of course validator incentives on our layer zero. So validators earn plank for securing plank chains. on the layer zero protocol.

We have the collateral staking, which uses without GPUs can stake tokens with operators to share rewards. We have the original GPU note incentives, of course, GPU operators earned plank as well. Security bonding, ecosystem grants, L1 orchestrations. We have a lot of token utilities because we're not only a cloud computing infrastructure,

but we're also a layer one and we're also a layer zero. So there are quite some interesting utilities of the token. But going into all of them, we're going to be busy here for like 20 minutes. Generally, then, why are you so heavily focused on this intersection between clearly blockchain and AI? I mean, Brock obviously alluded to it, I think, but you clearly have a belief that this is going to be the next big marriage here. Yeah, I would not say that just being transparent here. I don't think that the Web3 AI space, is completely going to dominate the Web 2 AI space.

There need to be a lot of big centralized players that need to fall down for that to happen. Although everybody in crypto always thinks that such things are going to happen with banking, I think with banking with tokenization is really interesting. It's getting really interesting. But with all the sectors, I just think, yeah, yeah, let's be a little bit realistic.

But I do think it's a very interesting sector, you know, with these and for the privacy and for more cost efficiency, I think the decentralized AI space is really going somewhere. There are just a couple things that need to be solved that we need to overcome.

But yeah, that's, of course, with every industry that is emerging in the Web 2, or sorry, in the Web 3 and blockchain space. Yeah, I don't know if you want to answer this or Brock, do you want to kick in? But how important is this

decentralization as AI takes over the world? Well, I think it's, I'm, you know, I'm operating from a viewpoint of decentralization and what can be decentralized, should be decentralized. But all things lead from centralization to decentralization. Even decentralization projects all start centralized. And so my view is, if you think about the future, do you want a future where Microsoft, Amazon, Google, OpenAI, X, no offense, love Elon and love this platform and everything about it?

Do we want to live in a future where AI is owned by big tech, or do we want to live in a future where we, the people, end up owning part of that ecosystem and benefit from the trillions of dollars of wealth creation? Clearly, anybody investing in crypto wants access to those things. And part of it is in the shared wealth creation. The problem you have, and call it tech in general and traditional tech and capital structure, is that by, the time these companies go public, you know, all the terminal value of that business has been captured and the public market is the exit liquidity. You know, the beauty of the decentralized architecture is that we, the people, have the ability to profit and participate from the products we use. And so I'm a philosophical believer in that. So, you know, that's important

for us. I think that that's very much the way that this could go, as I believe should go. but we'll see right you know decentralized projects are just a lot harder but they have a whole different way of marketing and creating incentive you know to attract adoption and there's more things that are going to be done in AI than you know I can even envision at this point I we've incubated 43 AI companies you know out of my house that's crazy putting entrepreneur in residence like literally I move the entrepreneurs into my house so we can just turn out companies You know, and so basically AI is affecting everything, even more so than decentralization or blockchain. So I believe that the marriage of these two movements is important, which is why I'm such a big believer and, you know, present here today to talk about our overall thesis. But, you know, there's still some challenge, right? Building decentralized systems is harder. And so that's why I think start centralized because it's a lot easier to do that in a controlled environment versus when, you know, when you try to do it in this architecture,

but I think we're here. And it's certainly a category where we're heavily investing and keeping our finger on the pulse because it's in our DNA. Yeah, and that's also for us quickly, what Broke is saying as well, like there are a couple challenges

and starting to centralize this, yeah, most of the time a lot easier. And that's what we're currently, or what we have been doing for the last year as well. We have been very selective, collective with GPU operators that we let on the platform. We really did great due diligence to, you know, establish ourselves first in the market and then go decentralized.

And I think, you know, in the future, the tech will be ready to literally onboard like even mobile phones with their computing power into AI systems. And that's really where we want to go as well. There are just a couple, yeah, challenges that, that need to overcome first on the hardware side. But eventually that's the beauty of decentralization. Yeah, we, we can, we can walk away from the centralized aspect. of it. Yeah, thank you. So what else may we have missed here before I let you go? What else you want everyone to know? Yeah, our TGE comes up in less than seven to eight weeks from now. So very

interesting. We are very looking forward on how the market is behaving in two months from now. So I'm not sure, Scott, what you think of where the market is going. It's actually a question from me to that's where I want to end it. Our TG is in October, but I really am curious about where you think the market is going to be in two months from now. Yeah, I generally think things are ramping up. I mean, it's been a better summer than I think most would have anticipated, and we talk about it here a lot.

It just seems like there's these incredible tailwinds and all the things that we've wanted are sort of happening and we're getting them, and I think your timing would probably be impeccable. I have no idea what the future holds, but I think that you're pretty well positioned. here as would anyone who's doing something fundamentally interesting that might be launching in the coming months. Yeah, 100%. You cannot always time the market, but I do also think that we're in a pretty comfortable position in two months from now. But you never know. No one can really lay its finger on it, right? So thank you for having me. If there are any questions, people can always drop into our telegram community or our Discord community or just drop a comment on our Twitter and we will look at it and answer it. thoroughly. Thank you for having me. Brock, thanks for coming and assisting me here. And yeah, cheers. Brock, any final thoughts? You know, just look forward to seeing everybody where

I guess we should all be in Singapore together for token. I won't be making it to WebEx, Japan. Are you guys going to be there in whatever the next week and have? Most likely we'll get to Singapore. But, yeah, DNA will be, we'll be Korean Blockchain Week, will be Japan, WebEx, but I probably won't make it until token. But let's have some fun and do again what we do. But thanks for having Plank on, and let's find more fun things to do together. Indeed. Thank you. Brock. Thank you so much for showing up, man. Always a pleasure to catch up, and hopefully we'll do it, as you said, in person soon. Everybody else, take out Plank, Obviously, it's a Plank, P-L-A-N-C-K network.

You can see them right above on stage. Give them a follow, and you can obviously follow up and get more involved if you're interested in what you heard today. Otherwise, we will be back tomorrow for another Crypto Town Hall. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you all our panelists. Thank you for listening. Bye. Thank you.