Unchained - The Chopping Block: Polymarket CEO raided by FBI, Ethereum’s Beam Chain, and Trump’s Pro-Crypto Agenda feat. Vance Spencer - Ep. 738

Episode Date: November 21, 2024

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner get together and give the industry insider's perspective on crypto. This week, special guest Vance Spencer of Framework Ventures joins the crew to explore Ethereum’s Beam Chain proposal, a bold yet contentious vision for Ethereum 3.0. With promises of quantum resistance, faster transactions, and decentralized staking, is this five-year roadmap a revolutionary leap or an unachievable ambition? The team dives into the tension between Layer 2s and Ethereum’s base chain, alongside Solana’s growing dominance as a UX benchmark. On the political front, the conversation breaks down Trump’s pro-crypto administration. From speculation around key cabinet picks to the potential establishment of a national Bitcoin reserve, they analyze what this new era could mean for regulation, innovation, and the broader market. Tune in for a lively discussion of the forces shaping Ethereum’s evolution and crypto’s role in America’s future. Show highlights 🔹 Polymarket CEO Raided: The crew discusses the FBI’s raid on Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan following the election, raising questions about politically motivated actions and the future of prediction markets. 🔹 Trump’s Crypto Administration: Trump’s pro-crypto agenda, including cabinet picks and a proposed Bitcoin strategic reserve, signals a potential shift in U.S. crypto policy. 🔹 D.O.G.E. and Dogecoin: The Department of Government Efficiency (D.O.G.E.), led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, ignites a Dogecoin rally and highlights crypto’s rising cultural impact. 🔹 Bitcoin’s Surge: Bitcoin hits $94,000, sparking predictions of $250K or more during Trump’s presidency, while the crew debates whether a long-awaited altseason is imminent. 🔹 Ethereum’s Challenges: Ethereum’s Layer 2 friction and Solana’s growing UX dominance fuel concerns over Ethereum’s long-term competitiveness. 🔹 Solana and memecoins: Solana’s connection to memecoin markets strengthens its position as a key rival to Ethereum. 🔹 Crypto Regulation Outlook: The potential for sweeping pro-crypto legislation under Trump’s administration raises hopes for innovation but also risks overexuberance. 🔹 Ethereum 3.0 Skepticism: The Beam Chain proposal reflects Ethereum’s struggle to balance long-term visions with immediate market pressures, drawing comparisons to Solana’s rapid growth. 🔹 Future Price Predictions: Vance and the crew share bold price predictions for Bitcoin and Ethereum, exploring the political and technological forces driving market momentum. Hosts ⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly ⭐️Robert Leshner, CEO & Co-founder of Superstate ⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures Guest: ⭐️Vance Spencer, Co-Founder Framework Ventures Disclosures Timestamps  00:00 Intro 01:36 Trump's Election and Market Reactions 03:14 Polymarket CEO FBI Raid 13:37 DOGE or the Department of Government Efficiency? 16:10 Memecoin Meta Update? 23:17 Trump's Pro-Crypto Administration 33:23 Market Sentiments and Predictions 42:00 Ethereum 3.0 and Beam Chain 52:17 Ethereum's Future and Competitors Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

And so I just wish Ethereum could move in a faster velocity because I think if they deliver that in the timeframe that they expect, Ethereum will be obsolete. I mean, I liked it for kind of different reasons in terms of, let's say you're, you know, Battalic or Justin Drake, you know, you're a steward of a $400 billion asset or, you know, 350 or whatever it is. Let's say you come out, we're raising the gas limit. We're going to raise the rent on L2s. We're going to, you know, we think we're, you know, we need to change things immediately. You hit the panic button, you come out just absolutely firing. You can't do that when you're stewarding that large of an asset. Like Bitcoin doesn't have that problem.

Not a dividend. It's a tale of two-clan. Now, your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways. Unnamed trading firms who are very involved. D5 protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the chopping block. Every couple weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider's perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intro is first to get Robert, the Cryptoconucer, and Tsar of Superstain. Good morning, everybody. Thanks to get Tarun, the Gigabrain, and Grand Puba at Gauntlet.

You. Joining us today, we have special guest, Vance, visionary VC, at Framework Ventures. Visionary, thank you. Thank you. Yes, absolutely. The time is right to call you out as the visionary. I'm a sieve, the head hype man, a dragonfly. We are early-stage investors in crypto, but I want to be able to be able to investors in

crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is an investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Please see chopping block. That XYZ for more disclosures. So, Vance, you must be feeling pretty good. You were one of the loudest, you were one of the loudest VCs proclaiming that you were absolutely confident that Trump was going to win. I got to say, I hope you are still basking in the glow of the Trump call.

How are you feeling about it? And what do you feel like other people got wrong that you saw? I feel like that was pretty easy money, honestly. I mean, he's the best to ever do it. I think we will live another 50 years with no one even close to the type of campaign he ran. I don't know, like from the polls to the sentiment to like just the virality. And people forget, but like, you know, Michael Bloomberg raised over a billion and got 4% of a primary vote.

It's not about money anymore. It's about just culture. And I think that's probably what people missed. And so what do you think the polls got so wrong in the, media got so wrong that, do you felt so obvious? I mean, the polls were off by the exact same amount they were off last time. I think people expecting that that would change were just betting on, you know, basically the polling apparatus would change. And I think that's like one of the least susceptible to, you know, dynamism industries that you could possibly imagine. And I don't

think it's surprising that like Anne Seltzer has retired post-election. Like, they kind of need to clean house and restart. And I think it's a huge vindication for Polymark. it and the fact that they called it on election night is pretty incredible. And obviously, you know, Shane got raided and it seems like he's fine. I talked to him. He's in good spirits, but never great to have your door, you know, kicked down. I'm not kicked down, but like, you know, someone banging your door at 6 a.m. That's not fun.

Yeah. So, okay, since you mentioned it, let's jump into one of the stories this week. In our last episode, we took a week off, but in the last episode, we talked a little bit about the success of Polymarket on election night. Now, one of the seemingly codas to that story was that Shane Copland, the founder of Polymarket, got raided just basically about a week after the election closed. So it was reported that around 6 a.m., the FBI raided his apartment and seized his phone and his electronics.

There was no arrest. So this was a search warrant, but there was no charges actually against Shane himself. There's not a lot of information right now about exactly what happened, but Shane came out on Twitter soon after he, I guess, got a new phone and we gained access to his accounts, tweeting only new phone, who dis, which garnered a huge amount of applause and praise from the crypto world that just loved the kind of Promethean spirit behind it. he later went on to post a much longer post calling out the current administration as basically being driving some kind of partisan slash political prosecution of him on the basis of the fact that Polymarket was calling out Trump as being the frontrunner for the election. So right now it's still relatively unclear exactly what motivated this raid. And I think we don't know and it's not

necessarily clear that actually Shane himself knows. You know, typically in these kinds of situations, the FBI is not necessarily going to divulge exactly what they're looking for. So they may have just been looking to see if there is something with which they can put together a case and bring it against him. There's also been reporting supposedly that Trump was aware of the raid, and not aware in advance of the raid, but aware of the story, and that it's been brought to his attention that he's not pleased about it and considered it to be part of this overall political prosecution of the whole kind of pro-Trump universe. And of course, you know, it is backed by Peter Thiel and Elon Musk was one of the people who came.

out saying that, hey, this is really terrible that this thing happened and that this raid was committed against Shane. So any reactions to you guys against seeing this raid? Do you think it's likely to result in charges? Or is this, you know, the last gasps of an outgoing administration? Well, I'll just add on to what you said about, you know, not having a clear understanding of what was the purpose of the raid or what they were looking for, what the, you know, potential crimes or trying to investigate are.

They might not be related to Shane himself even. He might just be a witness to something. You know, the speculation I've heard on the internet, for the most part, comes down to the idea that it's either related to U.S. traders active on Polly Market in violation of a settlement that Polly Market had previously with the CFTC. And the second hypothesis I've heard was that it was related to market manipulation. And one of the, I think, baseless ideas that was floating around for the weeks leading up to the election was that polymarket was somehow either A, being manipulated or, you know, B, you know, being used as a tool to influence the election in a improper way. And so, you know, I think we're all going to have to wait to see if anything comes out

of this and what it is, but I agree that we don't really know what it's even related to. I think the only thing I'll say is, you know, if it would probably have been, if it really was market manipulation, then arguably I feel like someone from the other prediction market should have also had a similar knock on the door because like they started tracking each other within like the last two weeks of the election. So it's like, if you're really going to go after one, you should go after the other. So I feel like it's really hard. I mean, they would be arbitraged in line with each other, right? Sure, but I, I just kind of am like, it's just weird to me that like, if you're, if it's really just a manipulation case, like why wouldn't you go for both? And also,

why would you do the kind of like raid type of thing? Just I, I, I, I, I kind of agree. Yeah, I kind of agree it does feel politically motivated. It's something who's weird about it. It's like, okay, if you're going to subpoena someone and be like, oh, I want your hard drive or phone or whatever. That's different than like kind of the raid aspect. In a way that makes it feel not kind of like either there's

some crazy case we don't know about like I don't know. Polymark have facilitated some OFAC violation or something like that or or it's like hard. The null hypothesis of politically motivated seems to have quite high

likelihood mine. Yeah. I mean, I think it's important for people to understand, you know, normally, like, so Polymarket already had a settlement with the CFTC, right? The fact that the CFTC settled with them means that, okay, we consider you to be fairly straightforward, rational actors that are able to, like, enter into legal agreements with the government, right? It means you cooperate it on some level, otherwise there wouldn't be a settlement. They would go and they would sue you. So the fact that there was already an outstanding settlement with the CFDC means that the base case assumption is that, okay, polymarket, you know, it's an organization with a general counsel and with legal counsel. And, you know, I think Sullivan and Cromwell represents polymarket, right?

These are people that law enforcement know very, very well. These are not, you know, some rag tag weirdos. You know, these are not like Russians. These are not, you know, foreign agents. So normally the way that this is done is that, okay, if the government wants to know something that's relevant to a case, they send a subpoena. which is a nice little letter in the mail that says, hey, we would like these documents, please send them to us

in such and such period of time. This stuff is extremely normal, happens all the time. That is how law enforcement and investigative agencies are supposed to be doing their work of figuring out information. The only time that you would do, execute a search warrant, without an arrest, without a subpoena, would be if you have strong reason to believe, two reasons. One, you have strong reason to believe

that this person will not willingly give over this. information or they're going to destroy or hide this information, right? Which, given the fact that the Polymarket so far, I mean, they entered into a settlement with the CFTC, meaning that they agreed to do stuff in agreement with the government, knowing that the government was monitoring them. Like, you know, Polymarket, again, they're not offshore. They're in New York. They're like right in the, you know, they're right in the FBI's backyard. So either one, they had strong reason to believe that Shane was going to destroy evidence or something like that. Or two, they wanted to scare him. And very, very often that is the answer. When you see that, you know, there's something

like this is that they want you to be scared. They want to put pressure on you to get you to fold into some kind of agreement that you might not otherwise do. In this case, I mean, again, we don't know what we don't know, but strongly feels to me like, you know, when we say that it's political, again, we don't know exactly what it means, but it does mean that, okay, this is the kind of case that doesn't necessarily rise to criminality. But for whatever reason, there is increased desire to get him to be scared and agree to something that he doesn't necessarily need to agree to. So I have to imagine that his legal team is pissed

and they are trying to figure out what exactly was going on here from the perspective of the prosecutors or whoever that they believe there wasn't good reason to believe, wasn't good reason to think that Shane was going to be able to cooperate. And then also they didn't go after the company. They didn't raid the corporate offices.

They didn't, you know, they didn't raid the company. They reigned to Shane personally. So again, to your point, Robert, it's possible that he was a witness to some other crime. And but again, the normal way that you get at that is a subpoena. So it does feel to me like there's something extra punitive that's going on here that they're trying to do. Well, of course. And to add option C, you know, as opposed to trying to terrorize Shane, I think the third path is that they're trying to send a signal to the broader industry at large. They're trying to send a signal to betters on polymarket.

they're trying to send a signal to, you know, everybody at large that this is an entity that they don't like. And I think in a lot of ways that was already made clear. I mean, Calci and the CFTC battled in the courts over whether prediction markets on elections would even be allowed to exist. And the U.S. government lost just weeks ago. And this is a sector that, you know, broadswaths of the government just don't like. have tried to fight through the courts and now could be fighting extrajudicially. But I think FBI is quite different than CFTC in this case, right?

The raid was FBI. So, like, huge difference in terms of... Yeah, and the reality is also the line between, you know, what is a civil violation of some kind of agreement with the CFTC and what's a criminal violation. There are some things that are hard lines, like OFAC violations. there's some things that are softer lines like, okay, what's the state of mind, you know, to what degree is this like normal negligence versus criminal negligence?

So there's very blurry lines. And the reality is that when the government wants something to happen, very often they just enlist the FBI to just kind of help them, you know, it's kind of like bringing in the heavy guns if you want to politically intimidate somebody. So again, we don't know what we don't know. So, you know, we always hesitate to speculate too aggressively. but right now there's not enough information to know other than that look the administration is going to turn over in January that's when Trump is going to get inaugurated presumably and I would guess

that when that happens we're probably going to get a lot more clarity about what exactly this was about and we may just find that okay this thing just you know given that it's federal this thing just basically gets waved away once Trump comes into office seems seems pretty plausible to me if in fact it is politically motivated Now, all that being said, you know, so despite all of that, much focus right now is on Trump and how he's going to assemble his cabinet as he comes into putting together the coalition for January when he takes over the government. So there's been a lot of excitement around a few elements of how he's going to be assembling

his cabinet. First and foremost, of course, is Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency. I'm sure at this point everybody's heard of it, but Trump, sorry, Elon Musk and Vivek Romiswamy are going to be heading this department that is going to be executing massive amounts of stripping government programs and lowering total government spending, supposedly about to $2 trillion,

which I think most people doubt that number was actually reachable, but maybe some significant fraction of that can be cut from the federal government. The most important thing for crypto purposes is that Department of Government Efficiency stands for Doge, and as a result, Dogecoin has been pumping

like just absolute madness. And it seems, again, like this is all part and parcel of this picture that crypto is somehow going to be in the center stage for the next four years, or at least the next two years. I mean, you know, we'll see if this energy continues for four. But supposedly Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, has two years to prove its mandate. And at least for two years, we're going to keep seeing Doge in the limelight and in the timeline. I was listening to like a podcast where people are like very

you know let's say anti-crypto and anti-Trump you know just so that to understand the precise language they would use around

do you listen to stuff by people that are anti-crypto and yeah I like to know a little bit like Vance I like to make sure I know all sorts of weird sides to make you know like

I want to I want to do the deep research and It's actually very funny because like I want to hear the criticisms, right? Because like all these people were like dancing on Crypto's grave, right? All of 2023 and like whatever. So I wanted to see what they're saying now. And they like they refuse to even say Doge on their thing.

They're like Department of Government Efficiency. We won't say the acronym. I just kept laughing listening to it. Because they were like they were like really trying hard not to say Doge because like we don't want to encourage. cryptocurrency enthusiasts. Did they actually say that? Yeah. Wow.

I just thought it was funny because I'm like, I feel like all they're doing is making it more of a meme, but they're not even cognizant of that. It was like amazing. It's like saying the F word instead of just actually saying fuck. Yeah, exactly. Almost draws more attention to it if you refuse to say it. Do you think Doge has actual legs? I mean, like I'm just looking at the 2021 chart.

And, you know, the day that he was on SNL, it peaked. It's like May, you know, 10th or whatever. I think each time he does this, it kind of gets less and less powerful in some ways. And I think like the laws of gravity for crypto coins are like one basic one is, it's just really hard to get over 100 billion FDV and stay there. Luna top there, Avax top there, Solana top there last cycle. Like you're at 60, 70 billion with Doge? Like, I don't know.

Is this thing going up? Vance is not a believer in $1 Doge. That's what we've learned. No, I've heard that people are a believer in $100 doge. That's what the kids on Twitter are talking about. Who is saying $100 doge? I've seen it. People who don't understand.

Robert, Robert, I have a bunch of doge. I think those are Europeans. Those are Europeans and you're mistaken in a comma for a period. No, no, no. If you think that's crazy, you should see the people talking about the ripple price targets they have. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That is crazy. I mean, both camps.

of meme points. I want some TikTok of this guy who's like, I quit my job because I bought XRP at 30 cents and it's going to be $30. 300 is a very common one if you look on the internet. I'll say like 300 or 489 for some reason. Amateur mistake. Don't look on the internet. Amateur mistake.

Actually, I told Vance this like a few weeks ago. But TikTok crypto is a very interesting world to like just, you need to spend like an hour a week. Dude, it's so bad. It's so room temp IQ at best. It's also pretty small still. But you learn a lot about, you know, newcomers to the market from that,

more than anything else. Instagram crypto is a bit more lit than TikTok crypto at the moment. I'll let you. Got it. Okay. So I want to know, I want to know what is the class of 24 about? Like, what is there? I mean, I have to imagine that's a lot of the TikTok content.

Animal coins. It is just pure meme coin trading. Like there's nothing else. Mudang AI coins, third rate dogs. Are AI coins class of 24? Is that like people who came in this year? Are they into AI coins? That's already over.

No, no, no. I mean like the trading bots like Elisa and whatever. I was on, AI 16. I was on Twitter and someone was like, AI agents have died. Yes. But like, you know, you just got to pick the right ones and stay bullish.

Like the metas are moving so quick. Like, did you see the AI? I 16Z one where they were a 16Z and then some other person launched like the same token they were going to launch and then like had the same thing happen to them it's it's getting wild out there the founder has already gone through this like cycle of life in one week it's actually pretty amazing to read their Twitter we met we met with a pitch this week and we were like when did you guys start building this? They're like eight days ago. Oh, great. Yeah, that's the class of 24. Yeah, that is very true. Hasid, you're going to need to start adding months to the classes.

You can't just stay the year. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah, I think the, yeah, I guess like the age in crypto is logarithmic, right, where it's like, if you've been around for one week, okay, you launched a meme coin, three weeks, okay, meme coin launch pad. And a little bit longer, maybe now it's like an AI AI meme coin. I did make this point with somebody earlier that I think the AI meme coin cycle, you know, we talked a little about goat last time, I think. Obviously, there's been many more in the interim since then. So you heard about AI 16 and Z and there's a few others now. I think the analogy I give, so some people were debating of like, okay, is there going to be this AI meme coin super cycle? Is this the new meta that more and more AIs or LLMs are

going to be on chain and creating their own meme coins? And the point that I was making is that I don't think that's very likely because watching an AI make a meme coin or an L-LM, you know, become like this sort of fake KOL thing. It's a little bit like, you know, seeing an elephant paint where it's like, when you see an elephant paint, it's like, holy shit, that elephant is painting. Now, in reality, like, most of the paintings are terrible, right? So if you see, like, if you go look at one of these AI meme coin, like Twitter feeds, most of the tweets are crap, right? They don't have a lot of engagement, you know, they have like, you know, 5,000 views. But then like one out of every 10 tweets is just like a banger and it's got all this, everyone's retweeting it.

They're like, oh my God, look at this tweet. It's so smart. Like, oh, my God, I love this AI token. But once you get over the shock factor of like, oh, the elephant is painting, after like seeing 10 or 20 of them, it's just kind of like, okay, whatever. I mean, I've seen it before. Elephants, you know, they're actually, they're not good painters, though. You know, most of their paintings are pretty shitty.

And so I think as the, as one, as the LMs get better at chilling meme coins. And two, as we see more and more of them, I think the shock factor will subside and we'll go back to like, okay, what's the next thing that's going to shock you that's going to captivate your attention? And yeah, the novelty factor, I think, is already starting to wear off,

which is why you see the cycle starting to ebb in terms of the centrality of attention. But with Doge, I think it's quite different. With Doge, I do think, my mental model of meme coins, that's all about the spotlight effect. And the spotlight on Doge is only going to increase and is going to become like very, very broad and wide across the U.S., right, which is that,

like, every time they cut something, they're going to cause a lot of drama, and that's going to cause even more attention, even more clicks, and even more people, you know, say the ticker, and the ticker is Doge. And they will just, you know, already I see, you know, when people covered in the news, they call it Doge. They don't call it the Department of Government Efficiency. So, like, this sort of earned media, quote unquote, for Doge is just going to be absolutely massive for the next few years.

Is that a long thesis for Doge? No, not trading advice. I thought there was no financial advice to see me. No, I'm not giving financial advice, but I am saying I think the attention on Doge will be very sustained for the next two years. That's good financial advice. All right, Vince, why don't you tell us how to trade on that as the input into the financial portfolio?

You're sending channels, simple wedges. Really, you know, you got to be in and out of things like Doge. Yeah, watch for an iron condor and then make sure I don't know what. Which to the one minute order book candle and then I think you. Yeah, correct the leverage to 100. Yeah, I think the only thing I can say for sure is class of 2024 other than meme coin like rotation is the search for the next Solana. I feel like that is like you look at the valuations like that is clearly like the thing

that persists the whole year. Like everyone everyone is trying to get. to make a narrative of anything that could potentially be the next salana like apparently hashcraft is now the next salana i saw that i was like i forgot i forgot i forgot they existed i hope it's coming it's coming um anyway all right let's sorry let's get back on politics everyone's favorite um so there there's a few other things that are uh captivating a lot of people's attentions in the industry um a few of the picks that uh we already know that are likely from Trump. So first, Howard Lutnik, who was originally campaigning to try to become

Treasury Secretary, has been appointed to Commerce Secretary. So it's still an important role. It plays a big role in business and trade, especially domestically. But he, of course, is the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, which is, you know, they're very strongly behind Tether. So another pro-crypto name that's going to be fairly central in the Trump administration. Treasury Secretary right now, there's a few people who are playing for it. Obviously, Howard Lutnik has been passed over. Apparently, the CEO of Apollo, Kevin Warsh, who's ex-Federal Reserve,

who's very pro-crypto. I think he's an advisor to electric capital. And then... There are people debating whether he's pro-stablecoin or pro-CbDC on Twitter. So I haven't read enough to be educated, but I will say... Trump is so anti-CBDC. I feel like that's a non-starter, no?

Yeah, yeah. But there is this, like, there are a couple articles from him about very pro-CBDC. Although views evolve with the times, right? Like four years ago, everybody was like, ooh, like CBDCs could be cool. What if they were built on the Ethereum blockchain, then the Vyukes were cool, you know? And like since then.

Trump was anti-Cept up four years ago. Yes. So. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, sorry. I'm just pointing out that there's some, there's some, you know, there's some fighting about this. Totally. But views evolve, right?

Right. People change. Well, right now, Polly Market is, uh, tax. tracking Treasury Secretary to be 68% likely to be Kevin Warsh, 19% Scott Bessent, 12% Mark Rowan. Mark Rowan is the Apollo CEO. So it looks like Kevin Warsh is the frontrunner, but still TBD, and there may be more to chew there.

For SEC pick, apparently Teresa Goody Gwien is supposedly right now the frontrunner for SEC, although other people have advocated for Hesser Purse, of course, who's known as Cryptomom and is one of the most friendly SEC commissioners to potentially become the SEC head, but still a bit early. Supposedly the SEC chair will get picked before Thanksgiving, so probably by this time next week, we're going to have an idea who the next SEC chair is suspected to be.

Supposedly Gary Gensler has also intimated that he's going to be stepping down, which is very customary for an SEC head when an administration turns over to not end up serving out their full term. And then lastly, other piece of news, apparently Trump has met with Brian Armstrong to discuss staff picks and, oh, is it a phone call? Okay. So is getting some input from Brian Armstrong directly on how to position the administration as being pro-crypto, as well as, of course, you know, at the Bitcoin Miami conference,

or sorry, Bitcoin National Conference, Trump claimed that he was going to make a Bitcoin and Crypto Advisory Council. And supposedly Charles Hoskinson is speculated to become a, or, sorry, we're going to one of the advisors on this council, Charles Lawsonson, of course, being the founder of Cardano. So we've got a lot of names floating around, but it does seem so far that the overall picture is that this administration is going to be very pro-crypto, almost uniformly pro-crypto names that we see being floated for these campaign positions. And so to the extent that people were worried of, oh, you know, is Trump, is this kind of

a Trump campaign promise, he's not really going to fulfill these things? So far, it looks like crypto is actually going to have a seat at the table in this administration So I've heard a lot of speculation. I'm curious to get you guys' response that maybe the market is being over-exuberant and is kind of pricing in a little too much that Trump is actually going to deliver on everything that he has claimed on the campaign trail. Vance, I know you've been very, very pro-Trump. How do you feel about that question?

Do you feel like markets are not fully pricing in the extent that Trump is going to be super pro-crypto? Or do you think that, hey, it's correct to be cautious right now? I mean, I guess I'm like a Trump guy, you know, just versus the alternative, of course. I do think he's going to honor his promises to the industry. And I think the names that are being thrown around for Treasury Secretary and SEC are great. I think Mark Rohn is probably a notable departure from that. Like, he's a big, I just saw a quote from him with a pretty KYC-C-pilled and wants to, you know, have all the wallets be brokers and all that stuff.

And that would be kind of more sympathica with his views. maybe he would be great, but he's probably my least favorite of the options. The Hoskins and stuff, I'm not as big a fan of. I think the only thing that can kind of take down the Republican movement at this point is just like too much cronyism. You know, if he brings the wrong people, if he's doing for favors for people that were like, you know, if he's going to be the party of common sense, he should just go with the best option logically.

And I think that's kind of what I hope will be the defining feature of his presidency, but there's a chance that it isn't. In terms of like pricing. On some level, like you live as a populace, you die as a populace, right? Like, you know, if you're going to go full doge, like on what grounds can you be like, well, no, but not Charles Hoskinson. He's not invited. That's fair.

I mean, you know, we got to send our best, I think is the first, first order of business. And I'm not sure Charles is that. You're telling me that Charles Hoskinson, co-founder of Ethereum. I'm so excited for the comments. I'm so excited for the comments. I mean, you know, to, I mean, you know, to, Look, look, I agree with you. I just wanted to say the co-founder of Ethereum things, because, you know, he always does.

I mean, I'm, I think basically what we're hoping for is a light touch. We're not hoping for like space age regulations for this industry. We will get legislation. I hope that is also light touch. But I think the, you know, at least my optimism for crypto is, is never been higher in the sense that inflows are coming. People are, people are, people know that the crypto bro is not. going away. He's going to be a mainstay of society for a long, long time. And I think that's a permission structure that allows all these entrepreneurs to come in and build things. And like,

we've seen probably the best pitches we've seen, you know, over the past couple years in the past three months. So I'm very, very bullish. The ask is that they just don't do much of anything. You know, obviously arrest the criminals and people who are fucking around. And I'm interested to see how that pans out with the meme coin frenzy. Because Shaq just had that $11 million dollar NFT sale or settlement today, that will probably need to kind of come and manifest itself at some point to get a lot of the scams out. But the ask is a lighter touch. And I think he can deliver on that. Okay. So then to the extent that you are bullish on crypto, so obviously right now, I imagine most people are aware, Bitcoin has hit all-time highs. We're now sitting at 94,000.

Actually, like that's about 92,000. Yeah, 92,000. It hit 94 just a little bit earlier. all-time highs on, you know, many, many metrics in terms of, you know, the extent to which people are all basically uniformly bullish that crypto is going to do very, very well. And there are many expectations that crypto is going to hit $100,000 for the end of the year. So even relative to where we were at the election, last episode that we did, at that time, we were like around 75. So Bitcoin has increased $20,000 in just a couple of weeks, which is one of the most massive on an absolute basis, periods of price appreciation for Bitcoin in its history.

Now, all that being said, many people are now, you know, the age old game of making price calls for where Bitcoin is going to go. So Novogratz has called for 500K Bitcoin. Kathy Wood says $1 million by 2030. Obviously, would be good for all of us. Vance, being that you are Trump-Hilled, you believe that Trump-Hilled, you believe that Trump is going to fulfill his campaign promises to the crypto industry. What's your price call for where you think Bitcoin is going to go under a Trump presidency?

I mean, look, we hold a lot of Bitcoin. We hold a lot of all the majors across the funds. So, you know, a disclaimer of some sort. But I mean, I'm probably higher than Kathy Wood by 2030. You know, no matter how you slice it, Bitcoin probably shouldn't be 10% of gold market cap. That doesn't make a ton of sense to me. Should it be 50%? Should it be 100%?

I think that's dictated by the flows that come into the hands of millennials and Gen Z. And that's slated to happen over the next 40 years. And that's going to be the largest wealth transfer in the history of the country. So if Orange Coin, you know, gets there. And I think it's getting there from a culture perspective. And then you have central banks bidding. Like basically you can think about the bid as like a hierarchy of needs where retails at the bottom and central banks are at the top.

There's basically no assets that can, you know, access the top of that pyramid, other than Bitcoin. And if it gets there, I think like 500K is pretty bearish. So, okay, that's 2030. What about 2026? Like, 26 is, you know, full Republican control of government, right? Most likely in the midterms, I mean, I don't know, you tell me, but I think the, the base case right now is that probably at least one of the, one of the chambers of the House gets lost. Or sorry, chambers of Congress gets lost to Democrats, which means that no longer we have unified government.

So basically, we have two years for Republicans to pass. any legislation they want and enact the full-scale pro-crypto, you know, legislative package. So let's say by end of 2026, where do you expect they're going to be? I don't know if I can give you an actual price, but I think it's worth considering like, okay, let's say it goes to, you know, 250K by the middle of next year. Oh, my God, you know, made so much money, whatever. Like, do you sell it? I don't know.

I don't think you necessarily do if you've got a multi-year perspective on it. Maybe it goes from 250 back to, you know, 100, and that's the bear market. I know people are saying no more bear markets. I personally just have been in crypto too long to really believe that anymore. And if, you know, that's class of 24. Class of 24 is no more bear markets. Who is saying super cycle again? This is like crazy.

I didn't expect to hear it so soon. You see things on Twitter, you know? Wow. Okay. TikTok. You mean TikTok. You got to spend more time on TikTok, but like, I don't know. I think the stock market is basically perfectly priced.

You know, Nvidia is at like $150 to $200. Feels like that's pretty fair. Gold is, you know, at $28 trillion, something like that. That's probably pretty fair there too. And so now you have people moving out the risk curve. And like what's taking off space, crypto, nuclear. But at some point, like, and I think like with, you know, space and nuclear, those will be priced as well.

But crypto and specifically Bitcoin doesn't have a ceiling. You know, the money use case does not have a ceiling. So infinite. I heard infinite. No ceiling equals infinite price. In the fullness of time, Bitcoin is probably a few million dollars per. That's my guess. Turin, what is your 2026 Bitcoin call?

I think all of our listeners are eagerly awaiting for you to make your annual Bitcoin call. I don't know if I have a good one, but I will say I thought it was interesting. there was almost $2 billion of options traded today on ETF, which is like record high. So I actually, I think like I'm just kind of watching the VAL products to see if there is like way more outsized usage of those as a way of like getting leveraged exposure. And if that's true, then I actually think like the you're not going to see the same kind of like crazy price spikes we've seen before. People will like try to get used like the.

like the tradfi people won't have to buy spot only. So I do think that will be like a, we'll slow things down a little bit. So that's why the 2026 and 2030, I, I probably think like 200, 2020, 250, yeah, 200 to 250.

I don't know exactly. Like, again, the, the derivatives market is the thing I'm most curious about because when I think about, you know, everyone talking about central banks buying, central banks for like Eurodollar and dollars, right? Generally, buy in futures market. Generally don't buy spot when they don't have to. Can you explain the intuition of why it is

that if you're buying, you know, if you're buying, if you're getting levered through options as opposed to buying spot, why that would reduce the overall volatility for the industry? Or I just don't think the price, like, so basically people will buy more out of the money options or somewhat out of the money options. Brokers probably won't, fully delta hedge. So they won't like buy exactly the amount of spot as the options they're selling. They'll have some margin for that, which generally means you don't have as much like spot buying pressure the way you, you know, the way everyone like stares at the ETF inflows and are like, this means there's this much demand to buy spot. I actually think that will, if that goes

to the other products, it will like not be as tangibly clear as like this much in inflow means this much in price impact over a month. And I'm not saying that won't, it won't. It won't. will eventually lead to that, right? Because like around the expiry, you'll see these huge jumps. I just think it will look different than it does now where it's like everyone see... The shape of it will be different.

The shape of it will be different. And like that might stretch out the spot price increase. That's all. That's all. It might look more like an S curve than a walk up. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's sort of, that's sort of... So like, you know, that's not, I don't know if that's not like

some crazy inside or anything. It's just something where it's like, do think that's a different microstructure thing than we've seen with the ETF so far. Right. I do think like the micro strategy dynamic is just absolutely wild. The fact that I was trading at three exits nav is pretty remarkable. I went to this idea dinner in New York, I think probably six months ago. And one of the, it was like this like, Wall Street hedge fund. And one of the guys, everyone had to bring an idea. And one of the guys brought a long Bitcoin short micro strategy to one X-Nav.

And he was explaining this and it was just like, yeah, that makes sense. But like, you are just going to get out. Yeah, that's how you get blown out. That is a classic mistake in crypto is that makes sense. It's like, you know, I don't know how he's doing. But yeah, I think there's like the bare case for Bitcoin is basically Sailor has bought so much. It's a bad look.

Like what if, you know, Sailor gets caught with like some crazy crime or, you know, some bad visual or PR? And the central banks of the world just don't want to be involved with that. Maybe the ATM runs out early versus later. But I also think to your point about the S curve, like, you're going to be diminishing marginal returns to this bid. Maybe it's at 150K. Maybe it's at 200K. But I think that lays the groundwork for alt season.

You know, the fate of the alt season. I was going to say like one interesting thing about like, you know, you're asking about like, hey, do the administration, do you predict that? like the policies will work. I feel like the reason you're not seeing any alt season type of behavior is because like that's what people are waiting. They're A, waiting for, yeah, like people stop buying Bitcoin who are just like, that's their exposure. But B, I feel like people are still a little like, oh, well, what could happen between now

and inauguration that might be anti-altseason? I mean, yeah, I think. except for Salana competitors, which seem to just have no, there's no unbounded upside. Same thing as last run, right? It was like basically four years ago today. Taylor, you know, emerged onto the scene. S&P 500 companies were going to buy only Bitcoin. You know, the run was only going to be Bitcoin. And then in Q1, kind of everything rerated. It just needs to get high enough where people are like, there's just like, are you going to buy Bitcoin at 125K? It's a lot different decision than just like holding it. And you have to give Solano a lot of credit.

It is bucking all season. It's the only thing that's like growing. Yeah, yeah. And I think you're starting to see more dispersion, like Suey, you know, doing well. I think the new L-1s will do very, very well, you know, Monad and kind of things like that. But, you know, the L-1s of this cycle haven't launched yet. It's time for the Vance prediction, though, because you are the Barra-Chane maxi. that you're a baddie, yeah, exactly.

So what is your price and timing predictions? Bro, you know I cannot say that. I can still, hey, hey, hey, hey. It's not advice, it's not advice. I can still ask. It doesn't mean you have to answer. Higher. Higher than the currently non-existent price.

Yes. Yeah, so I think you're right. I think though it's not the anonymous. that the market is waiting for, I think it's the end of the good news. And right now, the reality is that Trump has been very, very clear that most of his specific policy proposals are not about crypto, they're about Bitcoin. Right. So there's like, okay, I'm going to fire the SEC guy. And yeah, we're going to make it friendly for crypto here. But the main thing is that like, okay, we're going to buy Bitcoin. We're going to have all the Bitcoin be made in the U.S.

The U.S. government is going to own a shitload of Bitcoin. And that, you know, I think it would be, if it were to be that it becomes a crypto strategic crypto reserve as a strategic Bitcoin reserve, that would be incredibly bullish for alts. But right now, I think until that gets delivered, that I think is the main kind of shining good news that, okay, what happens when there is a strategic Bitcoin

reserve and what is the knock on effect of other central banks and or other sovereigns that decide, hey, I want to get in on this. And like now the U.S. has shifted the Overton window. And Bitcoin is now invested. to agree that it wasn't before. I think that probably means that Bitcoin is going to remain in the driver's seat for quite a while. I actually think it's unlikely that that we go into full-on alt season by next year because the market is still going to have this big spotlight on Bitcoin.

But we'll see. I think it also may just be the cutting cycle. The cutting cycle may decide the ratio of energy between alts and Bitcoin more so than the actual, you know, kind of underlying market mechanics. I could see it going both ways. Okay. So let's see it going both ways. Okay, so let's shift gears a little bit. So, of course, DevCon was last week, the flagship Ethereum conference. And at DevCon, there was very big news about what was turned by many people to be Ethereum 3.0. So Justin Drake teased that there was going to be a new version of Ethereum that he was going to announce on stage at DevCon. And announce that he did, the new chain is called the Beam Chain.

The beam chain is going to be a redesign of Ethereum's consensus layer, meaning it doesn't affect execution, doesn't affect the EVM, or smart contracts, but it's a new base layer that everything is going to be settling to. The beam chain is going to be quantum resistant. It's going to have four second block times instead of the 12 seconds that currently exist. There will be single slot finality. You'll get finality in four seconds as opposed to the current, what is it, like a minute or two minutes or something for Ethereum currently. And they will be using snarks, meaning they'll be using ZK proofs to eliminate reorg and MEV opportunities. so they'll be trying to eliminate Reorgan MEP opportunities

with the new consensus mechanism and reduce the staking requirements from where they are currently at 32-Eth in order to be a staker, all the way down to one-eath, allowing many more users to be able to stake. This is going to lead to faster layer-one transactions, a brand-new rewrite of the base layer,

quantum resistance, improved home staking, and kind of this future-proof decentralization. That's the story anyway. So now all that being said, most of the attention and most of the response to the announcement of the beam chain was on the timeline. And what the timeline said was that this will be coming soon in 2029. So basically five years for them to go all the way from specking, building, testing, and then finally launching this quote unquote Ethereum 3.0.

So this was widely panned as being like, oh my God, this is precisely the problem. To be clear, this is not a full commitment from Ethereum. Justin Drake is basically making a proposal to the Ethereum community of something in which he believes is a good direction. But the Ethereum overall development plan has not bought in necessarily into the beam chain concept. But of course, Justin Drake is very influential. So some people said, hey, this is ridiculous. This is so bullshit. Like, this is not even that exciting of an end state.

And it's going to take us five years. Like, that's just absolute craziness. Other people said, hey, look, you know, trying to turn around a super tanker with hundreds of billions of dollars at stake. It's supposed to take time. It's supposed to be slow. This is not a startup. This is what you expect when you have so much money at stake is that you have to do a very safe, very graduated rollout. So I'm curious to get your guys' responses.

Vance, were you at, were you at DevCon? Tarun, I know you were. I was not at DevCon. Okay, Tarun. Were you in the room? What was your reaction? What was the vibe at DevCon after seeing this presentation? I wasn't in the room, but I was like in the building.

and I think the by the way which was an amazing venue I think this might have been the best organized crypto event I've ever gone to like everything was flawless like actually Thailand Thailand in general had very good event kind of management but I think

most people who were very pure Ethereum believers were not really I wouldn't say not shocked by the timeline I think they all just kind of ignored the timeline, if I were to, to be honest, because they're like, well, it's already a kind of sketch of like what could be done. I think the thing people were more interested in was definitely the enshrined ZKVM and stuff like that. That seemed to be the thing that people were most interested in because it kind of like gets around some of these like weird principal agent problems that seem to be hitting Ethereum a lot where like the L2s are sort of, taking revenue and not returning it and this is sort of a way to like actually get something that brings value.

I would say that for everyone who's talking about the five year thing, it was like all people who are like not at the building in DevCon. But we're in, you know, outside, which I thought was interesting. It's like there was like the bubble in the building and then there was the like everyone else outside, which was a very huge distinction. I think it was the bankless guys who were in the room who first tweeted out. Well, they tweeted out, but they didn't, they didn't, they didn't, they didn't, uh, ridicule the five years. I think that once they tweeted it out, then it was, okay, got it. I think another thing, I think there was a really great tweet, um, by Kobe, uh, sort of famous Twitter and crypto personality, which, uh, was in response to, to, to, to, to, to, to,

one of David Hoffman's tweets that was like, you know, um, uh, one who tries to catch two rabbits at the same time catches none, which I thought, you know, it does reflect sort of the, the exterior thing, because it was like there was so many things that were all kind of portrayed at once versus like, here's step one, step two, step three, dot, dot, dot. I think, I think the criticism that I seemed to, I seem to see stick a lot was, you know, you're bundling all of these things and then giving a timeline versus like incrementally, like do this first, do the second, do this third, and then like have separate timelines. And I think, you know, especially amongst the like more, say, centralized development

teams, like the Salinas side, everyone was just like, this is like saying nothing, right? Because like you didn't give any kind of plan. So that being said, you know, I don't think people at devcon's vibes were negative about that. I think like Twitter and. So what was your personal response? What was your personal vibe after? Yeah, what do you think to run?

I think the ZKVM is a good idea. at least it brings some revenue back to the main chain. I think the post-quantum stuff is too speculative anyway. It's not like anyone cares about the implementations and entry type of stuff right now. And then the five years does seem a little crazy. Like, you're not even doing the hard work. Like, people have already built all those EKVMs. Like, the hard work is testing deployment.

It's not like we have to write this thing from scratch and make sure it works because, like, there have been so many teams. The hard part is migrating, you know, what existed? onto a beam chain, you know. But all, if you watch the presentation, it's like, oh, we're going to use all the existing ZKVS. Great. That's the hard part. That's what five years of R&D.

Oh, they are. They're not going to build it in-house. Oh, I see. Well, they're like, oh, we're going to use some combination of the existing open source code. But my point is you already have this huge, this has been funded since 2018, 2017. A huge number of projects of, you know, like, I would say that, if you told me that's going to take five years. Sure. But this part actually does feel a little like, well, the hard part is actually done for you. And like this is like now it's going to be more like a smaller fork.

So I just kind of think the timeline thing was also a little crazy. Also, I will say over time, the longer I'm around, the more that there, you see these bubble charts with 500 doubles that the EF loves making, the more you're like, why would you do that? That's so confusing to someone to look at this 500 bubble chart. And I really think communication style is somehow lacking. But again, everyone in that room was not like, no one at that building was like, oh, this is crazy. So. Yeah. I frankly love the idea of BeamChain.

I think it should exist. I actually wanted to exist. I actually think the roadmap pretty much in the aggregate is great. I mean, turn to your point about quantum resistance, yeah. It doesn't matter yet. So it's like why spend time building something that's not immediately relevant. But in five years it might be relevant. So maybe that actually, you know, it does fit correctly.

But I think it's awesome. I think the five year timeframe is ridiculous. I think, you know, frankly, what's going to happen is someone's just going to launch a similar chain like in 18 months, like potentially built from scratch. If you want to do that, you know, please contact robot ventures, dragonfly and framework. It's a great idea and it's going to exist. And so I just wish Ethereum could move in a faster velocity because I think if they deliver that in the timeframe that they expect, Ethereum will be obsolete. I mean, I liked it for kind of different reasons in terms of, let's say you're, you know,

Vitalik or Justin Drake, you know, you're a steward of a $400 billion asset or, you know, $350 or whatever it is. Let's say you come out, we're raising the gas limit. We're going to raise the rent on L2s. We're going to, you know, we think we're, you know, we need to change things immediately. You hit the panic button. You come out just absolutely firing. You can't do that when you're stewarding that large of an asset.

Like, Bitcoin doesn't have that problem because it's just like they're done. And I think that's going to be something that most chains have to articulate, which is like, okay, cool, yeah, you're doing well. But like, what's the long term vision for this chain? Or are we done? And so you kind of do need to put markers way out there on the horizon that basically give your chain a future that exists. beyond its current state. So I think that's just like on the comm stuff. On the communication stuff, I think like, you know, they could have done better in ensuring, you know, what are the near-term changes to the L1 that are going to impact, you know, cost, throughput, you know, whatever adoptability

by retail. But I thought it was generally positive. And like, you know, price follows narrative to some extent, ETHBTC is going to be, you know, under pressure until the sailor buys start hitting that kind of, like, diminishing marginal, I guess, price impact to some extent. But, I mean, I was looking at the chain last week, you know, it's like 100 guay at some point, it's 25 quay at others. It's like, you know, 150 bucks to do a transaction. They're doing like 5,000 eth a day at, you know, 3,000 per in fees. That's $15 million a day.

You know, they're at like a billion, two billion. and it heats up and it goes higher from there. So, like, I don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with the state of the chain of the communication. I just think, like, you do need to be very careful when you're a steward of that large of an asset. You can't come out guns blazing with, like, we're going to throw everything at the wall and just fix it today.

I think while that's true, the other thing, though, that was a bit, like, in Congress with that was, you know, if you go into some of the other events, like the Ethereum Interop Summit, a Vitolic was just kind of like, as the first, First time I ever heard, really heard anyone really mentioned kind of Solana as a UX benchmark. So like, you know, if you, I think about DevCon 2022. No other L1 name was ever mentioned, let alone Solana. This time, I think every conversation about Interop and UX and like fixing roll up stuff for new users inevitably brought up Solana from everyone from the top down.

So, like, I think there was, that aspect was communicated. It just wasn't communicated into like this roadmap thing. It was, but you could see that percoly everywhere, right? You would really hear people compare the U.S. 100%. I mean, I do think in the last cycle, it was Polygon. That was like the UX benchmark that most people had in their mind. But that they're Ethereum.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. I do think you're absolutely right, Tarun, to say kind of the obvious thing, was that like the specter hanging over that presentation was Solana with a very, very long scythe, you know, just kind of like standing in the background. And I think the, in a way, like the details of the beam chain proposal are a kind of concession that we cannot just rely on the roll-up-centric roadmap. Right? The roll-centric roadmap is not enough. What the roll-up-centric roadmap implied is that, to your point, Vance, Ethereum is done. We just, you know, install. we scale the blobs and we allow more and more roll-ups to come on chain. And like Ethereum itself

is not going to be the place where people are actually going to do execution. We don't need to worry so much about block times. You don't need to worry so. That's what the roll-up subject roadmap implied. It was that the sharding approach of like actually scaling the L1, we're too slow. We're not going to make it in time. The roll-ups are going to get there faster. So let's just let the roll-ups do the dirty work. And I think what what Ethereum is realizing is that that is not going to work. And it feels a little bit to me like, okay, the best analogy I can give is that for a long time, Ethereum felt like it was not responsive to token holders, right? And Ethereum almost explicitly has said multiple times that token holders are not the only constituents that matter to us,

right? Who else matters? There's token holders, there's devs, of course. Devs are very politically powerful. There's the validators themselves, the homestakers, they're very powerful. People who are archivists of Ethereum, who may not be none of those categories, as well, as users, right? All of those people, and those users, they may be at odds very often with the, with token holders, because users are like, well, I want really low fees, whereas token holders are like, well, I kind of want high fees because I want to actually capture value, capture rents from owning, owning the block space and owning state. And so Ethereum has made very clear, we are not going to just make decisions for price. And on some level, it's a little bit like the difference

between governments when they start getting very fiscally irresponsible and really start pushing the edge quite a lot. And then all of a sudden you wake up and the bondholders are like, you know what, fuck these bonds. Fuck this government. I no longer believe you're going to pay back your debts. And all of a sudden, somebody gets fired. Everyone wakes up.

It's like, oh, no, there's been turnover in the administration. We now hear you, Mr. Bondholders. We are going to make sure that we play things right. And it feels like that may have just happened in Ethereum land. I don't know if it's exactly that, but I will say, A, the sheer focus on interrupt by Vitalik, and I got to give Vitalik credit for a bunch of events he was on and like, that man was on. I heard he was during 11 events a day. He did like, yeah, 11 or 12 events on day.

But there are a bunch, a couple of them that I was at where he literally would be on stage to all the L2 founders and would just yell at them effective. Not yell, but like kind of a monish. them admonish them for like not having interrupt standards for like boxing each other out like I thought that was like the like quiet flogging of L2s by Vitalik was actually to me the most bullish that I saw I agree I agree but if that that's what I'm saying is it really feels like that might be your new mode that that was sort of what I resembled what you were describing I was like like I thought he really did take a kind of a bit of a like a like a kind of a bit of a like

a stick versus a carrot approach, it felt like. Right. And I think Ethereum being, like, Ethereum leadership being above price, right? Almost like, you know, almost like it's a church, you know? And like, the church never deigns to like talk about how many people attended church today. Like megachurches do talk about that stuff, right? Mega churches are like, no, no, no, we got to get people in the door. We got to get, you know, the television programming, get our commercials down.

And they're like measuring ROI of all their stuff. Whereas, like, you know, the Catholic church is like, oh, my God, that's so. that's an affronts to the beauty of our religion and so on. And that kind of feels like that's been Ethereum's stance on marketing, on narrative building, on, you know, getting the L2s to cooperate, getting the UX to be good. Like, no, no, no, that's not what makes us the Catholic Church. We're the Catholic Church because we're above all of that.

And I feel like Ethereum now is realizing like, oh, shit, we're starting to lose a bit of our congregation, and they see the tide potentially turning against them. And like, okay, now we've got to wake up and remember what made us the Catholic Church to begin with, which was that we actually have the ability to build stuff, to ship stuff, and to have muscular, compelling visions about where the future of technology is supposed to be. Now, all that being said, going back to the point of the five-year thing, five years is obviously embarrassingly long. Yes, okay, Ethereum is stewarding, you know,

super tanker, it's got a lot of money in there, but five years, five years, like Ethereum, like how long do Ethereum take to develop itself, right? Ethereum has been around for what, seven years? So literally it'll be more, more. Ethereum is now like almost 10 years. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, sorry, you're at 2015. 2015 is at launch.

Yeah, so it's nine years. But I think half of its life. The point is like the five years to me would have made more sense of that like included all the ZK development. But that's already done. Yeah, exactly. If it was from scratch, right. What they're describing is like any new Alt L1 that's launching meets

their requirements, right? Like, it seems, well, not any. We're in, we're in bull markets. There's a lot of scan. Okay, sorry, sorry. There are multiple places that you could pull this architecture from off the shelf. And basically, like, imagine, imagine that Ethereum were just to say, like, look, obviously we built the first smart contract blockchain, right? That we had to build. There was no option. The beacon chain, we had to build that. That was homegrown. We had very different requirements than anybody else, right? But imagine if they just said, like, look, there are a lot of other blockchings out there. We will offer a bounty of 1% of the ETH supply for somebody you can build who just give us an open source repo that conforms to these standards and these APIs.

We can plug it into the new Ethereum. Get it done within a year, a ton of people would show up and get that done. Like, it just feels insane to me this like, you know, buy this build rather than buy instinct that Ethereum has, which like it made sense in 2015. made sense in 2020, does not make sense in 2025. To be fair, though, like Ethereum did a lot of things that were focused on network stability versus like end user behavior, like making sure multiple clients work. To ensure network stability. Yes.

I'm just trying to say like I think the priorities are slightly different. But my point is I think the people working on the L1 have finally admitted that the L2 operators, creators are sort of like not fulfilling the promise they were supposed to, right? And I think that's where I saw the tension that was probably positive, to be honest, because like, yeah,

I just feel like the L2s have spent more time just fighting with each other than kind of like... Which is exactly what you would expect, right? I mean, essentially what... No, no, I'm not just telling you that's like kind of the vibe. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Now it's like corral the L2s. I agree with that story. I agree with that story. And it says right now it's a routing around the L2s, right? Like the whole idea of the beam chain is that, yeah, the L2s are not going to get us there. We have to improve the base chain itself to a significant degree because just, you know, outsourcing all the stuff to L2s is insufficient, right, to get us to the U.X that we eventually wanted. To me, it's a little bit like a government that decides to privatize some of the most important

industries and realizing, huh, now that I privatize all these industries, the industries are all competing with each other and there's a big like efficiency loss in just competition. And they're not working together and they're not, you know, colluding to create this like wonderful unified UX. Huh, I wonder why that happened. Maybe I should either renationalize them, which is not really possible with L2s, or just like create a new national Manhattan project to just like create the thing that I, that I privatized in the first place.

That kind of feels like what happened here, you know, if I can draw very, very rough shot over all of them. That's not to say that if they launched the beam chain, that's going to obviate L2s. You just wanted to use Manhattan Project because Trump used it this week and you're like, I want to say something. Did he? I was in Asia all week. I was not following US news for last week. I didn't know that. All that is to say, I do think if they pull this off, which I don't know that they will, the Ethereum Foundation has had a terrible, terrible track record of delivering on software projects. On time. They actually do sort of deliver. just not very quickly.

I would dispute. Where is sharding, dude? Where is sharding? Well, they purposely dropped her. Yeah, it's not necessary. Where are execution environments? Where's like, have the things they said.

What happened to Ewasum? Dude, you cannot tell me that they have, they eventually ship things. Fine. I think you're allowed to be promised to me in 2017. I think you're allowed to drop things off the roadmap that don't work. Yeah. You know, welcome this off.

Okay, but then you cannot claim their reputation for shipping. I mean, if we looked at all the L1s roadmap and what they've thrown off, like, you know, there'd be a lot of that. I don't know, like, you know, the chain is doing a lot of revenue, you know, between two. Like, the L2s are onboarding people. Worldcoin has a, like, I think they did two million verifications last week. Like the EVM ecosystem is healthy. I think the narrative needs some work, obviously. But I also think, like, this is pretty standard, you know, bull market.

fair. Bitcoin runs hard. You know, then people look at what's next. And like, you know, ETH is the second asset that people, you know, are introduced to in crypto. Maybe that changes with meme coins or whatever, but I don't know, we're bullish on ETH as a computing platform over, you know, a five-year time horizon. And that kind of fits with the roadmap. Okay. Let me, let me ask you this, fans, because you've been a big defender of ETH. And look, I obviously have been one of the first to say that I think the EVM, the EVM ecosystem, has been a huge beneficiary and is going to do really, really well. But I'm more skeptical about ETH as an asset as a representative of the health of that overall ecosystem. I think that may

diminish over time. Do you think that ETH is going to outperform Seoul over the next five years? I mean, the things I think about with that are what are the unlocks for Soul. A lot of those will come in Q1. That'll be kind of decision time. And what's the durability of meme coining? Like Solana and meme coins are intricately tied at this point. And I think to be bullish on solely need to be bullish on meme coins, I think that is very, very possible. I think it's equally likely that a bunch of other new use cases come up on these L2s. And, you know, ETH is still the largest asset in DFI. It is the one that most people use in lending markets. It has the most stable coins on its chain. Like, it has a lot of natural advantages. I'm actually like the opposite of you. I'm probably more bullish on ETH the asset than

Eath, like, you know, the, like the L1 or, you know, like, whatever. I think at some point, you know, it's just like the money use case is what dominates. And Eith is there for now. And I think that probably persists, but like we're bullish on all of these chains. And frankly, we hold all of them. So the goal is not to full port into, you know, the number one asset. Like, it's like kind of like the Billy Bean. You know, we can't replace them, but we can rebuild them in the aggregate.

And that's kind of what we're doing, you know, with the portfolio. One thing I'll leave you with, which is I think something I was on some panel and someone was like, what's your, what's the most bullish thing you can say about Heath, which is Solana exists as collateral in a lot. Sorry, Solana doesn't really exist as collateral in EVM land. But Eith does exist in collateral on almost ever run in Salana. And like, if there's one form of moneyness, it's like, are people willing to borrow a derivative version of your asset somewhere else? And I think that to me is like, you know, you've proven that like other networks have to import you, right? Like when they when they're bootstrapping their collateral markets, which is like very hard to get to, which maybe is again, to like that's point. That is very true.

That being said, you know, account abstraction and economic abstraction on the L2s, I think is one of these things that people are talking about as a Ux improvement, which I worry is going to, like right now I agree with you, the L2s are all kind of proxies for ETH. they are expanding the reach of ETH the asset. But I don't know that Ethereum can count on that forever. I think on some sense, the roll-up centric roadmap was a little bit naive that all of these new kind of mini-nation states that it was launching were going to extend the reach of the dollar, so to speak. But once you become big enough, once you become successful enough as your own little dominion, your incentive is to not necessarily kick the value upstairs.

and say, well, you know, thank you, Ethereum for giving me this great home and, you know, I will pay taxes forever even though you're not asking me for them. I think the answer is that they're rational actors. And they're going to say, like, hey, what's going to increase my funnel? What's going to increase my retention? Maybe it's, you know, I'm base. Maybe it's allowing people to pay in, you know, if base ever has a coin, in base coin, or just in USC.

Like, look, I mean, I make money doubling by having more demand for USC on base. So that all being said. I want to caveat all of that with saying, you know, I'm very long ETH. We own a lot of ETH. I really hope that ETH does well. But I think for it to get there, it does feel like there needs to be, as I analogize, this sort of bondholder moment. And in a sense, like we're the bondholders, you know, like us, not just us, but all the other millions of people who own ETHER and are frustrated, that there hasn't been a more come-to-Jesus moment among the ETH leadership. That's something fundamental needs to change. And all the resounding negativity toward the five-year timeline,

it feels like it did register. It feels like people are like, oh, okay, I guess we can't just like sit and chill and, you know, take our EF salaries and just like, you know, take our time building out this thing, testing it as much as we want until finally the thing rolls around. The patience for that feels like it's wearing thin. We'll see where it goes. Vance, we appreciate you coming on and making your very dramatic price calls as well as financial advice. Everybody, if you're looking for any financial advice, go to Vance's Twitter. It's just nonstop financial advice for anybody who choose to trade on them. Vance, always a pleasure of my man. Thank you. Appreciate it, guys.

All right. Until next week. Take care of everyone.