Unchained - Why Arbitrum Won Over Robinhood + A $59 Million Polymarket Controversy - Ep. 863

Episode Date: July 4, 2025

Today, we’ve got two very different stories in one episode. First, Steven Goldfeder, co-founder of Offchain Labs, joins Unchained to explain why Robinhood is rebuilding its product on the Arbitrum tech stack, what it says about crypto’s evolution, and how this could finally bridge Web2 and Web3. Then, Calvin Hamilton breaks down the bizarre $59 million bet on whether President Zelensky wore a suit — and why vague rules, a fateful tweet, and one protocol’s vote could damage Polymarket’s reputation. Visit our website for breaking news, analysis, op-eds, articles to learn about crypto, and much more: unchainedcrypto.com Focal by FalconX Ledn Steven Goldfeder, co-founder and CEO of Offchain Labs Calvin Hamilton, Polymarket bettor on the ‘yes’ of the Zelensky dispute. Unchained: Robinhood Is Building Its Own Layer 2 Blockchain Robinhood’s presentation at ETHcc: To Catch A Token Rob Hadick’s tweet on tokenized stocks  Timestamps: 🎬 0:00 Intro 🚀 1:44 Why Robinhood chose Arbitrum and how much control they really have 🧑‍💻 6:38 How Arbitrum Stylus could power better UX for Robinhood and beyond 🌊 10:26 Why liquidity fragmentation is still a major unsolved problem 🧲 11:41 What makes MEV capture so attractive to big players like Robinhood 🏆 13:48 Why tokenized stocks might be the “big prize” on Arbitrum 🌐 16:12 What it means to be part of the Arbitrum ecosystem 📊 18:02 How tokenized equities could change investing and what the risks are 🏛️ 21:11 Why the Arbitrum DAO stands to gain from this partnership 🔧 22:17 How Steven thinks fragmentation can be fixed more easily than most believe 🌉 25:52 Where the crypto-TradFi convergence is headed next 💬 29:40 Why Steven defends Ethereum and calls out the critics of L2s Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I think that that's a short-term problem because I actually think that we're at a zero to one moment here. And as we look long-term, more and more of this is actually going to come, you know, natively on-chain. Vlad was on CNBC last week, and he basically said, you've used crypto as the next evolution here. So we started off with pen and paper, you know, went to mainframe, you know, on-site eventually, obviously all the way to crypto. And I'm sure when people move from pen and paper to computerized or some friction there as well, the pen and paper couldn't keep up as well, but I want to keep everything a pen and paper. I think crypto is the rails of the future, and we're all going to move there eventually. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained. You're a no high resource for all things crypto. I'm your host,

Laura Shin. Heads up, we have a double header today with two back-to-back interviews. So after the first interview with Stephen Goldfetter of OffChane Labs, who spoke about the Robin Hood deal, we'll also hear about a $59 million controversy on Polly Market. We love reading your listener comments, and we feature them in every episode. Today we have a comment from Potens on X, writing a response to our recent episode with Hossu and Vossili about Lido's launch of dual governance. Potence wrote, dual governance is fascinating, balancing token holder interests with protocol needs. Curious to know if this model becomes the new standard for sustainable defy governance. To have your comment featured, write a review of the podcast overall or leave a comment on our video on YouTube, Farcaster, or X.

This is the July 4th, 2025 episode of Unchained. Lutton is a leading platform for Bitcoin-backed loans, offering a secure and transparent way to unlock liquidity without selling your Bitcoin. Issuing loans since 2018 and earning over 1,000 trust pilot reviews. Learn more at ledden.io. Imagine an AI that speaks crypto and does the work of a team of analysts. Introducing Focal by FalconX. and clarity to a world of noise. Visit askfocal.com. For today's guest, we have Stephen Goldfetter, co-founder and CEO of Off Chain Labs. Welcome, Stephen. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

So the big news, Robin Hood is going to be launching perpetual swaps, tokenized stocks, and its own chain. And while the crypto world has for a long time been working on getting people on chain, it now looks like the rest of the world has caught on that this is going to be a thing. And so we're starting to see that this is starting to happen in a much bigger way. And what we know in the crypto world is that there's like a competition in the backgrounds to be the rails for that onboarding. So it was a big deal for Obitram that Robin Hood has chosen to initially launch on Arbitrum 1 and then build its own chain using the Arbitrum Tech Stack. And on top of that, it looks like there's some people saying on X in other places that Salana may have rich. been the choice for Robin Hood. But as we can see now, Arbitrum clearly went out in whatever

competition was happening behind the scenes. So, Stephen, from your conversations with Robin Hood, what does it seem were the deciding factors for them? I think it comes down to a few things. Number one is the maturity and the security of the Arbitrum tech stack. It's a tech stack that can support the scale of the likes of Robin Hood and has been running in production for years and has a proven track record. But secondly, relatedly, but different is also the flexibility. So Robin Hood announced, and when they announced, they actually went live immediately with their tokenized stocks and ETFs on Arbitrum 1. And they also announced plans to, as you said, migrate to their own arbitram chain, the Robin Hood chain. And Arbitrum is actually the only ecosystem that has both of

these products and gives you the ability to do that. There are some ecosystems that have a stack. There are some ecosystems that have a credibly neutral blockchain. Arbitrum is unique and that it has a credibly neutral blockchain in Arbitrum 1, top 5 blockchain and Arbitram 1, and also a top blockchain stack, and allows Robin Hood or anyone else to basically to grow with them and to graduate with them. So they can start off quickly and easily at Arbitrum 1, and they can grow with them and grow with their needs, and they can use the exact same tech stack and don't have to change anything

when they migrate from the public chain to their own chain. And I think that was a big part, big part of it as well. So, you know, as we've been talking about with this tech stack, you know, one of the appeals of it is that it enables the company, in this case, Robin Hood, to offer or to, you know, customize it to their own liking. And so why don't you kind of like walk us through some of the different types of customizations that Arbitrum Orbit offers? So there are two different types of customizations.

They're what I like to call out-of-the-box customizations. And these are basically customizations that we directly support. And examples of this are custom gas tokens. So when you set up an Arbitrum chain, Arbitron 1 uses Ethereum, ETH as its gas token, but you can actually use a stable coin or your own token as the gas token of that chain. So it's an out-of-the-box customization in the sense that we give you this, you know, fill in the blank here and tell us which token you'd like to use for fees. Similarly with data availability layers, Arbitron 1 uses Ethereum, which is the most secure data

availability layer, but we also have support for Celestia and EigenDA and many, many other others that are launching data availability layers as well. So that basically are two examples of out-of-the-box customizations. And then other ones are like block times. Arbitron 1 runs at 250 milliseconds, but some chains like Rhea run at 100 milliseconds, and the tech is actually stable enough to support that. And these are just parameters that you can put in. And then there's what I call like deeper customizations where you actually have to go into

the tech and change things yourself in ways that may not be supported, but you're more to welcome to. So examples of this are chains like Phoenix that are building privacy directly into the Arbiture TechStack. So they're using fully homomorphic encryption in their case to add privacy. And then you have chains like Plume and Kinto that are adding institutional KYC controls into the chain level itself. So you have some sort of environment where kind of everyone's been compliance checked at the door. These are some examples. And then you have like communities where they do things like enforcing royalties, where if you want to transfer a particular asset on the chain,

there's a royalty that's enforced. You have NFT communities like Yuga Labs building the ape chain for the board of Yacht Club community. So many, many different customizations, but all using the kernel, which is the Arbitrum tech stack. And there's another kind of tech advantage, which is Arbitrum Stylist. Explain what that does and what problems. it solves for companies that are looking to use the Arbitrum Tech Stack. So Arbitrins stylus is a relatively new product. It went live in September of last year.

And what this does, it's actually very unique and there's no other product in any other ecosystem like it. It gives developers the ability on Arbitrum 1, so on an EVM chain to also bring in other traditional, I'll say, so non-crypto programming languages. So like Rust and C and C++. So what can you do with this? Well, say that you have some cryptographic library, it does verify some new signature scheme or zero knowledge proofs. Typically, the roster of C implementation is going to be a lot more efficient

than, say, solidity implementation of that. You can actually just bring in this code on chain and actually write your contracts in these other languages. Similarly, for AI inference, you can use these alternative programming languages, which are typically much more performance. In our benchmarks, we've seen that for computation, You typically get a 10x plus benefit in cost reduction when it comes to using stylists for computational needs. The cool thing, though, is there are rust chains out there.

Solana is a rust chain, but typically you have to choose up a door. You can go to the EVM chains or you can go to the rust chains. And that's a decision you have to make ahead of time. And every developer who's going to build on a chain with you needs to follow that initial decision that was made for this particular environment. Whereas with Arbitrum and any stylus enabled chain, you can write in both EVM and these other languages, and every developer can choose that for themselves. And more so, these contracts, they talk to each other and interrupt directly. In fact, you don't even know on-chain what a particular contract is being written in. You can have a single application that uses 98% solidity code.

But there's one hard part where they benefit from rewriting it in Rust, and they can do that because everything on-chain talks what he called, the solidity ABI. Everything talks in the solidity language on chain and you don't even know what the underlying contract was written in. So it's a seamless integration of bringing in these tools for other developers. And why that's important, well, when you're talking about the convergence of Web 2 and Web 3, Web 2 developers typically prefer these other languages. So you want to have a single environment that can both appeal to the EVM developers that love solidity, but also the Web 2 developers that love and have years of experience and code already written in Roster C or C++ or other languages to come, that they can now directly leverage in their blockchain applications.

Yeah, and I would imagine that at a place like Robin Hood where they also have so much code, just plugging everything in if they're able to, like it would probably make it easier for their existing systems to talk to this tech stack. Or I'm not a developer, but I'm just imagining. Is that part of the appeal? So I don't want to speak for them exactly, you know, what they're launching on the chain or still any thunder and, and how it's going to interact exactly.

What I can tell you and confirm is they are very excited about stylists and view it as a very big unlock. I think both as a first party, but also as a tool to attract others to build on this chain as well because they're really positioning this chain as the home and a leading place to launch RWA's. And a lot of that, of course, happens in traditional brokerages today and places that have years and decades of legacy code. So this I view as a potentially easy bridge, both not only for themselves but for others and something that they are very excited about as part of a technology stack for their chain. And do you feel like it also would solve problems for the notorious liquidity fragmentation issues in defy itself? Like, is that something that, again, makes it easier, like when people are looking for interoperability and, you know, kind of interacting with other chains, that if they wanted to, you know, create bridges to other systems, like, is that something that would also be helpful? I think that's a slightly separate problem, one that we have to solve and one that we at

Offchain Labs are actually very, very focused on solving and creating a better experience to join not only all Arbitrum chains, because that's not my goal, but it's really to join all all eVM chains in ways that users can interrupt more easily between them, and developers can build shared experiences as well. So Stylist as a toolkit is certainly helpful for whatever you want to build on the blockchain, chain, but I don't know that it's specifically helpful, specifically more useful for that application, other than the fact that what it does do is it allows you to verify zero knowledge proofs on chain very, very effectively. So to the extent that bridging solutions need to make use as EKPs,

which often they do, it could be beneficial there. All right. So one other factor that I think may have been an issue for them was MEP control. You know, it's funny because I took note of this mentally and then I forgot to know who said this, but it was either maybe Johan Kerbara of Robin Hood or it might have been AJ Warner, your chief strategy officer that mentioned that this, you know, was another part of the appeal. So I think if you put these two things, you know, and compare on the one hand launching on a public chain, and the other hand launching on your own blockchain. And if the question is, you know, should Robin Hood launch their own blockchain or why would Robinhood launch their own blockchain?

There's a few very, very convincing arguments to say, hey, they should be on their own chain. And one of them is definitely MEV capture, right? Because if Robin Hood is launching and could only be on someone else's public blockchain, they're going to leak all that MEV to someone else. So certainly having your own chain and being able to control the MEV capture, whether they use something like time boosts. which is what we recently launched in Arbishop 1 for the chain to capture some of that MV. Or they use a different system like something built by flashbots. That is going to be their decision. And I don't have anything, you know, too definitive to say there today.

But the idea that they can capture their own MV is something that's really uniquely possible on your own chain. And, you know, similarly as a second point, fees as well, right? If you're launching on someone else's chain, you're actually, you're operating costs. you're paying fees for every transaction that users do, you actually have to pay those to someone else's pockets. But if you launch your own chain, you actually turn those operating costs into revenues. So now,

not only do you have to pay fees because you're basically paying them from one pocket to the other pocket, but everyone else that's paying fees, all the other traffic that you're bringing onto this chain is actually bringing fees into your revenue stream as well. So, yes, there's a lot of benefits you can have more from MVV capture, as well as adjacent fee capture, they really only become possible when you're launching your own chain.

I'm back with Stephen. So let's talk about the Robin Hood tokenized stock offering. I heard your chief strategy officer, A.J. Warner, say that this was the main prize the Arbitron was after. This was at the event on Monday. And I wondered, you know, out of all the announcements that they made, including the launch of the Robin Hood chain, I was curious why he was saying that this was something that was so appealing to your team.

I view the Robin Hood chain as adjacent to that, because the question, question of Arbitron 1 or Robin Hood chain is actually, like I said before, you know, we're pretty agnostic to that, but it was a tokenized stock offering in the Arbiteran ecosystem, the tokenized equities in the Arbitrism ecosystem, be it at Arbitram 1, be it on the Arbitron platform on Robin Hood's own orbit chain. I think that was the big prize that we were most excited about. And the reason is, you know, I'll speak to my own history in this space of why I think this is so important. You know, when I got, when I was first introduced to smart contracts in 2013 and got excited about it.

It wasn't about all these new verticals that would emerge. Some of them, I think, are fascinating and very interesting, like NFTs. But it was really about, like, wow, this is really powerful technology that we can rebuild and reinvent the current system using that. And I feel like in the past decade, for many, that vision has gotten a bit diluted and almost abandoned and kind of viewed as crypto as this own separate thing and separate system. But what Robin Hood is doing here is so forward thinking and actually so, for the back to that original vision of crypto that many had forgotten.

Because they're not saying, hey, here's some crypto product that's like, you know, here's a chain. We'll slap up around and do something there, you know, crypto people. It's like, no, let's actually rebuild our core product, right? Vlad used the word rebuilt. Let's reinvent our core product on crypto rails. And at the event, they showed side by side the U.S. experience for Robin Hood app users and the European experience.

And the thing you'll notice is they look exactly the same. And unless someone told you, which of course we are telling you, but users would be none the wiser that the first one is happening using traditional brokerages. And the second one is happening using crypto, in this case, arbitrum. And that is such a massive, massive unlock. So it's not just, hey, let's launch this other asset on chain. It's the combination of doing that and plugging that back in to the Web 2 rails. And so everyone on the Robinon app can access crypto, whether they realize that or not,

I think is so, so powerful here. And I feel like one of the other factors that probably played a role in their decision was, you know, Arbitrum has a healthy amount of TVL. You know, it's slightly more than base, which obviously is, they're the only two really that are kind of like around the same level. And so I wonder, you know, when, so I understand Robin Hood's starting on Arbitrum 1 and then they'll launch their own chain. But I just wondered if you could talk about, you know, what the benefits would be to Robin Hood. that you see from, you know, being interoperable within the existing Arbitrum ecosystem. Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head there, which is liquidity, of course. You know, Robin Hood is a very strong player.

I don't think they're going to have any issue driving liquidity to their own chain. But, of course, for a product like this to succeed, having a network with deep liquidity is fundamentally important. And a chain like Robin Hood, that chain like Arbitron 1, I should say, you know, provides that environment for them. And by the way, even looking forward to these assets being issued on Robin O'Chay, I think they're still going to be very, very impactful for the entire Arbitrame ecosystem because the Arbitrame ecosystem is an extremely strong ecosystem when it comes to DeFi,

and having not only crypto-native assets integrated in these innovative defy protocols, but now having equities and ETS and the like all working together as part of these protocols, having, you know, assets that are backed by collateral, equity collateral on chain. It's going to actually be transformative for the whole ecosystem, for the whole arbitram ecosystem, and actually more broadly for the entire Ethereum ecosystem, just to have these assets issued on chain. And I think that will continue to benefit Arbitron 1, both for the near term but also for the long term. I think you probably saw that Rob Haddock, or maybe you didn't because you're probably running around to a lot of things at Encon, But he tweeted that, you know, he felt like this could also have other effects, like when you're trying to bring together equities with the defy world, especially if some of these products get used in defy in different ways.

And so he was saying that it could like create issues where, you know, people obviously because like basically the tokenized version, the price of it might diverge from the underlying because obviously the markets for stocks are not. open 24-7 the way that they are in crypto. So I wondered if you could talk about how you think about how, you know, those kind of little details around, you know, basically just those sort of logistical details, how that will, you know, come together and what people need to be cautious of. Yes, I'll talk to. I actually did not see that take. So I'll talk to the general issue.

But if I'm not responding to exactly what he said, that's because I haven't seen it. But to your point, first of all, right now, they're launched, they're 24-5. So it's not 24-7 just yet. But I actually think that, you know, of course, there always is after-hours trading, even in the traditional markets. And having, you know, more efficiency here is important. And the reason why, you know, having liquidity on the chain and having a deeply liquid environment where you have big financial players is important. Also, is, of course, to have arbitrage opportunities to keep. these different markets in sync. So are there going to be, is it going to be, is it new? Yes. Is

innovative? Yes. Are we going to have to understand exactly what the dynamics are between connecting the old system to the new system? Absolutely. Of course we are, but that's, you know, hardly reason to run away from this. I think that that's, you know, there are a lot of benefits of 24 or 5 or even eventually 24 or 7 trading where a lot of it, you know, this is archaic. And when it comes to things like, you know, redemptions also. And I was talking to someone recently told me for their money market funds, they have to wait five days, right, T plus five to get their money back with stable coins on chain, you know, you can get your money back immediately into players of

large balances with, you know, that's a lot of lost interest and they can now recoup. So the idea is there's a lot of benefits for investors and retail users alike from having more access and faster access and efficiency here. And maybe the, the forward thinking thing I'll say is I think that that's a short term problem because I actually think that we're at a zero to one moment here. And as we look long term, more and more of this is actually going to come, you know, natively on chain. Vlad was on CNBC last week and he basically said, you've used crypto as the next evolution here.

Right. So we started off with pen and paper, you know, went to a mainframe, you know, on site, eventually, obviously all the way to crypto. And I'm sure when people move from pen and pen and paper to computerized, there was some friction there as well, the pen and paper couldn't keep up as well. but I want to keep everything a pen and paper. I think crypto is the rails of the future, and we're all going to move there eventually. So there is one thing that I was curious about because, you know, often with these types of deals,

there is also a financial component. And, you know, I wondered, you know, if you could talk at all about what kinds of financial incentives or what, you know, what was part of that side of the deal with Arbitram, if there's anything you could share. or sorry, with Robin Hood. Yeah. So unfortunately, as a matter of, as a policy, I can talk about the specifics of the details, specific details of the institutional partnership. What I can say is I think that this deal was a very, very good deal that was beneficial for both sides.

And ultimately, we'll drive, you know, a lot of value to the Robin Hood ecosystem and allowing them to expand their product, but also drive a lot of value to the Arbitrum Dow as well, which is going to directly benefit from these integrations to both from a community building perspective, but also the Dow monetarily benefits from every orbit chain that launches it as well. Yeah, with a 10% profit share. Exactly, yes. So I did want to circle back to that liquidity fragmentation issue that we discussed earlier. Obviously, this is just going to become probably more of an issue as we're starting to see these worlds,

collide in two ways, you know, I'm talking about Tradfi and crypto. So I don't know if, you know, there's any particular solutions that you're looking at that feel exciting to you or like, you know, what parts of, you know, the work on that that you feel like need to be looked at more or, you know, just generally where you think that's going to, how it's going to be resolved. Yeah. So this is something which I spent a lot of time thinking about and particularly we had off-chain labs thinking about a lot. And maybe the controversial take is, you know, I think for many in the ecosystem, they view this as a technical problem where you can get a bunch of smart people together in a room with a whiteboard and build this complex protocol that's going to solve fragmentation.

And I think that's about 10% of it. I actually think 90% of it is actually U.S. and like wallet support, right? So you can build whatever protocols you want. But if, you know, while this aren't going to, extract the details away from users and make it feel like a unified environment, it's not really going to actually be helpful. And the flip side of that is, you know, I think there's a lot of room we can do to build better protocols. We actually have really pretty good protocols today. They're not perfect, like intent-based protocols, pretty good protocols today that can actually

facilitate this. But the thing we're missing, the 90% is actually the better U.S. support and the better UX integration. And one analogy that I like to use, I think the way we view the blockchain now is almost like going to the internet without a browser. We have to type in these long addresses to figure out how you want to talk and do these like handshakes back and forth. Like it's not accessible for most users.

And what we've built are these browsers that just abstract these details away from you. Imagine like going to YouTube and you get this pop-up that says, do you want to watch YouTube on AWS today? Or do you like to see PCP? But that's what we have, right? For many users, like they don't care. They just want this app, this app experience. So ultimately I think that it's the front end.

experience that needs to be revamped. And that's the low-hanging fruit that no one's doing. And we're working, actually, we've announced some inter-op initiatives that we're launching to really try to push us along. And it's actually a core focus for us at OffChane Lab as a company to solve this. We'll be saying a lot more about that in the coming weeks, but we've already said a lot. And we're publicly very invested in solving this problem. We'll get better over time.

But there's already enough protocol work that we can do that we can solve 90% of it today, in my opinion, just by putting the pieces together. So I imagine you are probably having some really interesting conversations right now that you can't really talk about. But what you could probably talk about is maybe trends that you're seeing or like based on those conversations sort of where you think. I mean, because we're watching this. We can all see like all these companies are starting to kind of converge on the same space. They're trying to compete in the same territory. They're coming from different directions probably different strengths.

But, you know, we are now seeing like, okay, this, this, this. that I think a lot of people in crypto have had for a long time, which is that, you know, the internet of finance is going to just, you know, I, yeah, I can't remember it was, maybe it was on bankless or somebody said that you like to say something, we won't talk about trad, find deep, it'll just be finance, which I agree. We are watching this happen in slow motion now. We'll take whatever 10 years or, you know, however long. But, you know, given the conversations that you're seeing right now, where, you know, we're. where do you think things will go in the short term? Like, what are some of the interesting ways these two worlds will be coming together that you feel like everyday people are not necessarily aware of just yet? Yeah, absolutely. And first of all, like, and I do love to say that, which is, you know, I think we actually heard ourselves with adjectives.

Like, I've never, like, met someone that, you know, that tells me, hey, I work in centralized finance. But we like, I work in, like, ultimately, these are, This is, the thing we're understanding is crypto is not this fringe thing that's only accessible to a few, but it's actually, it's useful for the, to rebuild the entire system. And it's just going to be fine. It's just going to be finance. And I think that's going to increasingly be the case over time. And crypto is going to play a large, a large part of that. In some of the ways that I think that this will play out, first of all, you know, it's always difficult to be the first one to jump in the water. and everyone's looking to sort of have someone clear that first barrier and then okay we can do that as well so definitely there's a lot of people like smart people and a big institution saying

I didn't think anything like this would happen for you know for some time you know maybe if ever but if they can do it I think we can do it too and part of that is just like encouraging and part of that is like actually looking at what they're doing looking at the token standards saying hey how can maybe we even like you know work together or reuse some of these pieces and build open standards around these things. And those are conversations that are happening today. And already, I don't think there's any large financial institution in the world that there's not someone or some team that's been thinking about for some time how to integrate crypto. That wasn't true five years ago. Five years ago, you had to go and convince someone that this is even worth talking about. Today, that's the

case. And between the regulatory environment shifting, but also big moves from important forward thinking ahead of the curve players like Robin Hood, it's definitely, you know, easing, the decision for everyone else. The old saying is no one ever got fired for choosing IBM, right? The idea is that as these decisions become more mainstream, more acceptable, and institutions understand, hey, you can build on crypto rails. It actually brings benefits to your users, benefits to your, to your bottom line costs. It's actually going to be a good decision.

And hey, you know, we're in the path. It's comfortable. We're not doing this alone. Someone else already jumped in. And in this case, you know, Robin Hood is one of the early ones. to jump in, particularly at this deep level of engagement. But of course, there are others as well, Black Rock, Franklin Templeton, Wisdom, Tree, all of these, UBS, all these are building products on Arbitrum today.

In terms of your question, so what does this mean for the average user? Again, it's that, back to what I said before, it's the most fascinating thing about this is that this is not like, oh, you can use crypto, but to use the Robin Hood, you know, app now you're going to have to go and like down on your wallet and, you know, back from the C phrase and figure out to connect to an RPC server. And I think for many, they always viewed crypto as limited by that. But what we're seeing today is real users can actually access crypto. And crypto can serve as rails for crypto-native users and non-crypto-native users.

And it may seem funny for someone like me saying this because, hey, don't I think it's important to have users like have their own wallets and have self-sovereignty? I actually think it's important for have users to have the optionality of self-sovereignty. So they know at any point they can go and take these assets into the money. own custody or transfer into another custodian. That's a core benefit. But I'm not delusional enough to think that the next billion users are going to be using the same browserless U.S. if you will, that we're using today.

Okay. Well, last question for you, as I'm sure you're aware, for a little over a year, in fact, maybe a year and a half. There has been this narrative about L2s like Arbitrum being parasitic to Ethereum, ETH people don't like that phrasing, but whatever it is, the point is that there is this notion that the L2s have taken away something from Ethereum in the sense of, you know, whatever it is, like fees or, you know, we've all seen the activity and with like the ultrasound money thesis kind of not really holding together anymore, all of those things.

So I did want to ask just like, you know, obviously at the event there was, a moment where AJ and Vatolic and Johan, they were all on stage together. And for a while, it even felt like Vatolic or the EF was not necessarily even supportive of DFI. So what do you feel like this moment says for the Ethereum community for the relationship between Ethereum and the L2s? Yeah, and just like even Vatolic's own relationship to DFI. Yeah, I think the Ethereum community, is here to stay. And I actually was the one who first share of the details before it was public of this, what was happening with Vidalic. And I can tell you that he was very, very excited about it.

And actually, you can tell that because he made an effort to be at the event, of course, and was there. So Vatelic is certainly supportive of this. And again, I don't want to speak for him, but for my conversation with him, he definitely was excited by what's happening. And also, it's ultimately a big win for Ethereum. And maybe, you know, maybe the, slightly controversial thing I'll say is in terms of those people who feel like the relationship between L1 and L2, like, you know, those who are questioning, oh, do we really need L2 is put everything on the L1? I think they actually weren't ambitious enough because, you know, if your view of where

crypto ends was where we were a week ago, so maybe you can argue that, okay, like, you know, why do we do this L2 thing, put everything on layer one? But hopefully now you see, no, no, this, we need like a lot of capacity. The institutions are coming and they're not coming in some small way. largely, they're actually expanding, you know, to 32 countries and they're putting their core app on this technology. Like, we need the absolutely most scalable technology possible. And the L2 vision is the only way to actually build this out. And not the capacity that we had yesterday, not even the capacity that we have today, but the capacity that will have, you know, for the

foreseeable future, we need this L2 roadmap. And, you know, to end with one more analogy, because I like analogy so much. If you build a new, road, you know, if you have a single lane highway that's congested, they say, okay, we're going to fix this. And you build like 10 new lanes. And then like the day, day two or maybe even day 100 comes, you're like, this was a waste. Like, no one's using all these lanes. They're not saturated yet.

We should have both built one more lane or maybe just put everyone on that first lane. Again, you're not ambitious enough because, no, like, there's a new city being built and all these lanes are going to be saturated. And we don't want to be constantly doing this every single year. We want to, what we did with the L2 roadmap, it's hard. Yeah, it's hard to go from a single L1 platform to a more fragmented, if you will, layer two roadmap. But you do that once, you figure out the interop, and then you're good to go forever. And that's what we've done in the Ethereum community.

We're over that hump. We still have some wrinkles to figure out, but we're largely over that hump. And we are positioned as a community to be able to support the Robin Hood launches of the world. And it's not me just saying that. It's Robin Hood saying that they chose Ethereum because they understand that this is the best ecosystem for their business. and arbitrage is the best platform for them to launch on. All right, Stephen. Well, it has been such a pleasure talking to you.

Thank you so much for coming on unchanged. Likewise. Thank you for having me. Markets are ripping, but not every pump is created equal. You need to make sense of the action and what's coming next. But where do you start? Meet Focal by Falcon X, your AI-powered crypto analyst. It's like having a legion of experts at your fingertips,

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To hear a comment featured on the show, please write a review or leave a comment on an episode on YouTube, Farcaster, or X. Today's topic is the $59 million polymarket dispute over whether Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelenskyy wore a suit by the end of June. Here to discuss is Calvin Hamilton

a better on the yes side. Welcome, Calvin. Hi, Laura. Thank you for having me. This polymarket bet on whether Zelensky wore a suit before July is now the top market on the site. It's beating out even the one about the F1 Drivers Championship. And it looks like a foregone conclusion

when you look at that market with only a 2% chance of a being resolved as yes, but there's been a lot of controversy around it. Can you explain what's happened? I will do my best. There is a lot of nuance here, but the shortest way in the most clear way that I can put it is that polymarket created what is otherwise a fairly silly market on whether or not Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky will wear a suit before various. time periods. This market actually existed last month as well. So there was a market for this exact same thing, but it was before June instead of before July. And now this month, it was for

before July. Last month, when this market happened, there was a little bit of controversy at the end of the month because Vladimir Zelensky was in Germany where he wore an outfit that fit the dictionary definition of a suit. And given that the policy, market rules simply dictate that if he is, you know, videotaped or photographed wearing a suit as reported by, you know, credible media, that is when the market should resolve to yes. The market actually resolved to no last month. And the reason for this, as I understand it, is that the quote unquote spirit of the market is that he should be wearing a traditional Western suit, meaning exactly what you would expect a president to wear.

otherwise. And this is obviously highly contentious because the rules do not state that. In the May market, in the May market, as well as in this market for, and I say the May market. So the before June market, which is I think like late April through May. And so the rules haven't changed. Now, last month in June, President Zelensky went to a NATO summit in the Hague in the Netherlands. And he was photographed wearing something that looks eerily like a black suit. And it was reported to be a black suit by numerous global news outlets, ranging from the BBC to the New York Post to, you know, Derek Guy made a tweet about this suit, but it was relating to the May market. There it is. And they all said, President Zelensky spotted wearing a suit. And so given that

polymarket's criteria for resolving this market to yes, says that if there is consensus from credible reporting that he's wearing a suit, that this will resolve to yes, you would imagine that this fits that criteria, that this meets those standards because there's overwhelming evidence and overwhelming consensus from credible reporting. However, it does seem like the market's going to resolve to know because the UMA voters and a lot of the polymarket betters say that this outfit resembles the outfit and looks very similar to the outfit that he wore last month, which also resolved to know. Okay.

And can you share that, that link, the May one? The May one? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So one other thing to mention here is the, and you can just share it maybe in the chat here or in the Twitter dance that we had. But basically the June market had a different, way of defining how this would be resolved. And it was based on this consensus of credible reporting.

And so, um, okay. Well, so I'll actually clarify that the June and May markets have the exact same criteria according to. Oh, they do. They do. Um, which is what makes this even more contentious is that from the June market at no point in time, did Polly Market bother issuing additional clarification? as to what a suit should be defined as or what consensus of credible reporting is considered to be. So this month, or when I say this month, I'm referring to what happened in June 4th, the July market. The biggest point of debate is there's tons of credible news outlets that have reported Zelensky wearing a suit. And so does that not meet the requirement for consensus of credible recording? I would argue that it does, even if you look at the outfit and you don't say that it's a traditional suit.

Right. So here's a few different examples of that. One of them is this Holy Market tweet, actually, which calls what he was wearing a suit, which is interesting. Here's the New York Post showing that it is that they think it's a suit. Zelensky ditches T-shirt for a suit for sit-down meeting with President Trump. There's a bunch of these. There's the BBC, the Huffington Post, menswear guy on X, Derek Guy, who at least on X seems to be the authority in all things fashion.

He also said that it was a suit. And you had created a document that was circulating that captured a bunch of different instances of media. It's calling it a suit. There were 51 that I saw that you captured. You know, a lot of them, well, I should say. So most of them just directly called it a suit. Some, you know, right in the headline, that was what the story was about. Others in the copy of the article.

Others did use some qualified phrasing like the New York Times said he wore a black. suit jacket. So I do, I do see, you know, or everybody can all see just by looking at it that. Like, if you were to just imagine a suit in your head, maybe it wouldn't look exactly like that. But, you know, it basically fits the basic definition. Like looking at it, I had the feeling he knew he had made this promise to not wear a suit. But then he found himself in situations where he needed to wear a suit. And so he kind of tried to like split the baby a little bit. However, The most important or most interesting, I should say, of these different instances of people, you know, kind of debating whether or not this is a suit is actually Zelensky himself in an interview. He describes what he was wearing as a suit.

And indeed, there were things that don't bring us closer to ending the war. There were some media. The media people standing around us were talking about some. more things like my suit. So, yeah, as we can all see there, he himself describes it as a suit. Why is it that you think that we have this case where it looks like Polly Market, despite the notion that this consensus of credible reporting requirement has been met? Why does it look like it's going to resolve to know?

So this is where things are a little strange and a little complicated. The best answer that I can give is that because, Because last month was also contentious where when in Germany, Zelensky wore a similar outfit that ultimately resolved to know. But mind you, last month, there wasn't much media covering that outfit. There were a couple of articles. Everybody keeps telling me that, oh, we also had consensus of media. But by all accounts, when I've looked into it, it looks like there's a maximum of five articles that existed on Zelensky wearing a suit in the month of May for the before. for June market. So do you really call that consensus of credible reporting? I don't know. I think

it's a bit more of a stretch when you only have five sources that you can state or, you know, quote, but the market ultimately resolved to know. And then this month when he wore a similar outfit, right, it's not the same. People keep saying that it's the same outfit as before. It's not. If you look at the little peles of the jacket, it's quite clearly a different jacket that he's wearing. But because it is undoubtedly similar, I'm not going to be an idiot and say that it is not a gray area. He's clearly walking a fine line here. And I personally think it's a little bit of a stretch to call it a suit. But at the same time, it does fit the dictionary definition of a suit. And credible reporting has said as much that it is a suit. So the problem that we're facing is

that the precedent for a very similar outfit is that this is in fact not a suit and thus the market should resolve to know. And if the market were to resolve to yes, it would effectively be kind of a middle finger to everybody who voted yes on last month's market. It's saying, hey, this is a very similar outfit. And even though some people called it a suit last month, we ultimately resolved to know. So if they were to resolve to yes this time around, it would just be a massive contradiction. And it would upset a lot of polymarkets, betters, and customers that voted on yes last month. So a lot of people who voted yes on last month's market have actually been very vocal about the fact that they are voting no on this month's market, even though there's significant evidence that should go to show that it should resolve to yes. But ultimately, there's this precedent, which I think is more or less irrelevant because, again, at the end of the day, the polymarket criteria is very clear.

This should boil down to consensus of credible reporting, which was more or less not existent in the previous month. In this month, it is, you know, it's overwhelming. And so that's kind of the tricky part here is that people think that UMA and Polly Market need to be consistent, even if being consistent requires that they ignore or neglect the evidence that's in front of them. And so there's another factor here, which is that UMA has an integration with Polymarket and that, you know, work, it comes into play in cases like this where there's contention over how the vote should be resolved. So explain how that works. Absolutely.

So for those of you listening or watching that aren't familiar, Polymarket as a company really just operates the platform in which you are able to cast your vote on what you think the outcome of different markets should be. But they're not the ones that ultimately decide how the vote or how that market is paid out. Instead, polymarket outsources that responsibility to a protocol called UMA. And UMA is a cryptocurrency that you can buy. You can buy UMA tokens. And then you can stake them via the UMA platform.

And you can use your staked UMA tokens to vote on the outcomes of these different markets. The goal behind the UMA protocol, as I understand it, is that they're trying to decentralize this process, this voting process, to make it so that you kind of have a decentralized democracy that's voting on the outcomes of these various markets. And when you are a voter that votes on the correct outcome for a market, and correct in this context means that you voted with the majority, you get paid out a reward in UMA tokens. On the flip side, if you vote for the wrong side with your staked UMA tokens, you risk being, you risk being penalized, essentially, for your vote because you cast the wrong vote.

So it's a little interesting how they've chosen to done this. They've gotten a lot of criticism because people have, I think, rightfully made this point that, hey, if you're a whale, meaning that you have hundreds of thousands or millions of UMA tokens, you can go ahead and you can vote on a specific outcome and you can skew the odds pretty significantly, right? If I have 10 million UMA token and I vote for a no outcome, the likelihood that somebody with 100,000 UMA token is going to want to vote against me is very, very slim, because ultimately what that means is that they risk getting penalized for their vote because my tokens, given that I have 100 times as many as they do, are more than likely going to, you know, end up kind of, you know, how do you, how would I say this? The scale is tilted so

significantly in my favor, given that I have so many more tokens than they do, that they might as well just vote with me no matter what. So that's kind of one of the biggest criticisms that Uma has received as part of this, that there are quote unquote bad actors on the platform that are trying to manipulate markets. Truth be told, I don't really think that that's a massive concern. At the end of the day, UMA's holders, especially the whales, want the protocol to work properly. They want the right outcomes for the markets, because that's how the token's going to go up in value. If markets are constantly being manipulated by whales, tokens are going to go down in value, which means that whales quite literally devaluing the thing that they're holding, their own assets,

which just wouldn't make sense. So I don't think Uma is really responsible for what's happening here. I think that it's on polymarket to create clear rules and issue clarifications early on what's happening in the market to ensure that there's no ambiguity on the back end. Because what's happened in this market is that we had no clear definition as to what a suit is. We have no clear definition as to what constitutes consensus of credible reporting. When there started to be some ambiguity around these things, when Zelensky was spotted in the Hague wearing something, that resemble the suit, rather than issuing a public statement saying, hey, we believe that a suit is a traditional Western suit or something of the sort. Instead, Polymarket has an account called Polymarket Intel that tweets out saying President Zelensky in a suit last night.

I think a tweet that shows a comparison that when Polymarket Intel made that tweet, the volume on the President Zelensky suit, Polymarket, went through the roof. People started betting on this market in extreme volumes compared to before because you would assume that if Polly Market's account is saying, hey, we saw President Zelensky in a suit last night, that that's absolute confirmation. That's how I got involved in this market. I have no interest on betting whether a Ukrainian man wore a suit a week ago. It's just not that interesting. But the only reason why I did it is that I thought that, okay, I found a unique opportunity

where the odds are clearly being skewed. meanwhile, Polly Market themselves has confirmed that, hey, this is what I think it is. So that's why I bet on yes. I thought this was absolute confirmation. There's no way that you can lose on this, only to find out that Polly Market has since backtracked. They've issued a statement that there is no consensus for credible reporting. And they've actually changed the bio of the Pollymarket Intel account to not say community-run

account kind of distancing themselves from the tweet that went out. But if you look at the data, the volume on this market picked up significant. significantly after that tweet from the Polymarket Intel account. And I think that in many ways, they were kind of just like bringing in naive betters who didn't know any better. And now those same people are being taken advantage of. So one thing, though, is I did want to ask about, you know, this issue around the UMA incentive because there are people who are making comments that are quite explicit about how. I'm seeing them.

Yeah, if they were just in a universe void of all this history that we've discussed, if they were to just bet on this one particular thing with, you know, knowing what he wore that day in the Hague, they themselves would vote, yes, that he wore a suit, but they know that it's just not only a waste of money, but then they might lose their UMA tokens. So I feel like there is also something about, the way that this has been set up that creates incentives away from the truth, which is obviously

not, I'm sure, the goal of Polly Market. So, you know, I don't know. Have you thought about, like, what do you think would be a better way to resolve this type of dispute? Oh, got it. Okay. So my honest thoughts are that it is in the long-term best interest of UMA to vote either yes. or unknown. If they vote yes, obviously that sides with the yes side of polymarket. If they vote

unknown, my understanding is that it goes to 50, 50 odds and that's how it's paid out. I don't think it's necessarily in the best interest to vote no, even though I think that's ultimately what's going to happen. And the reason why I think it is not in the best interest to vote no is because the market rules are very clear. You can read them 100 times over and they do not specify what constitutes a suit. They do not specify, you know, what is consensus of credible reporting. So I do think that OMA is ultimately likely going to make the wrong decision here, unfortunately, that the voters are probably going to use precedent from last month to dictate the outcome of this market. I think that's wrong. I think that, you know, if they really want

to be a platform for truth, as both Polly Market and OMA claim to be, that you should ultimately side with what you think the truth is based off of the evidence that's before you. I think the evidence is overwhelming. But at the end of the day, it's up to everybody's own discretion. Yeah. And just to be clear, like the distinction that you're making is in May, there was no consensus of credible reporting. There were a few outlets, but now we have like more than 50. So is that some people would argue that there was consensus of credible reporting. I've heard that there's a New York Times article that, you know, claimed that Zelensky was wearing a suit. I didn't see that. I know that there was the Derek guy tweet.

In May, you mean? Yes, in May. Okay. I know that there was a tweet from Derek Guy that says, yes, this is technically a suit. But the fact of the matter is you had like, I think it was like five outlets total that I'd reported on this. This month we have over 50. There's a significant difference there just in terms of the volume of reporting. So, you know, I understand why last months could have gone to know. I think it's still contentious. I think it probably should have gone to P3 or unknown. Unfortunately, Hart Lamber, who's the CEO of Uma, kind of issued a statement saying that, hey, there's no precedent to vote P3 or unknown, and thus we shouldn't do it. I think that was wrong.

I don't think it's the CEO's position to come in and kind of influence how people vote. Because ultimately, that's a really bad take. By saying, hey, you shouldn't vote this way because there's no precedent for it, means that you will never vote this way because there's never going to be precedent for it. It's a silly, you know, idea. I spoke with Hart about that. He said that in hindsight, that's a good point and that, you know, maybe P3 is an interesting outcome for future markets.

But this market in particular, I think it's more than likely that it resolves to know. I don't necessarily think that's the right outcome. I think that it kind of hurts the polymarket brand and Ouma's brand. Because again, I think that this is that the evidence is overwhelmingly clear as to what the outcome is. But at the end of the day, it's just that's what it is. Yeah. And I think there's about eight hours before it finally resolves. So what do you think is going to happen? Or so, okay, so you just said what you think is going to happen.

but like what could happen that might result in a different resolution. Truth be told, I think it's just highly unlikely. I think we're in a position where the only party that could really do anything to resolve this differently would be if Polly Market were to come forward and issue additional clarification saying that consensus has been met or to clarify what they think the definition of a suit is or what have you. I think Polly Markets made it very clear by their inaction that they're probably not going to do that. I personally have reached out to Shane Coplin multiple times who like I have Shane's cell phone number right I've met Shane we've had dinner together Shane's not a buddy of mine we're not best friends you know it's nothing like that but we know each other because we have some mutual friends and Shane ignored to every single one of my texts I sent him DMs I reached out to some people on his team those were all ignored as well when people made feedback posts in the polymarket feedback section on the website those were all rejected without any response I can personally made a feedback post that I thought was very respectful, essentially saying, hey,

you know, I think it would be a good idea for Polymarket to create some sort of markets integrity team that, you know, can verify markets, look at data, issue early clarification statements. Because what Polymarket did in issuing a clarification statement on July 1st, in my opinion, is outrageous. That should have been done on June 26th when all the media was coming out to clarify it sooner rather than later. So, you know, I think that it's the balls in their course. to do that. Will they do it? No. I think this is ultimately going to try to get swept under the rug. Same reason why they went ahead and they just changed the bio of the Polymarket Intel account without actually making any sort of public statement saying, hey, we fucked up, we're wrong,

we shouldn't have done this. But, you know, that is what it is. You know, I think that this hurts their brand more than anything else. And the only thing that's going to influence the outcome of this market is if they come forward and they say something. But I don't think that's going to happen. I think this market ultimately results to know. Thus, That being said, if anybody's watching this, I would not bet on this market. I just want to make that abundantly clear. I would love to see this go to yes or to go to unknown, but I just don't think that's going to happen.

And I don't want to see people lose money. Actually, that is something interesting because now so much more money has poured in with the controversy. So like, why is that when it just looks like, like, is it like, yeah, why has so much more money been pouring in like recently? Because it's so contentious. And you have a lot of people. And when I say people, I'm really talking about kind of like naive betters that are coming in with $10, $100, maybe $1,000, maybe $1,000.

And they think that this is going to be a really easy way to make $1,000 on their investment. By betting yes? Yeah. Because, you know, I think that, again, like, I firmly believe that the evidence is clear. I don't understand then why is, why are the odds at 2% of yes? Like if so many more people are voting yes, then why are the odds so low? Because if you look at the amount of capital that is going into the market, the vast majority of that capital is going on to the no side.

There are quite literally multiple people on polymarket right now that have active positions betting no of over a million dollars, US. You don't have a single person betting yes with that same bet size. Oh, okay. So all the people that are jumping in now, they're most. obviously betting no. Like, it's just been going up and up and up ever since the controversy started. But they're all betting no?

Most of them. Yeah. You know, if we're just talking about volume of dollars, for sure. Oh, okay. Okay. But you don't, do you think it's like number of people is the opposite or hard to say? I don't know. My gut tells me that if we're focusing on number of people that that,

that favors the yes side. But it seems to me that, and I only say this and just to be very clear about why I'm getting this data, you know, part of it's just gut reaction. What am I seeing? What am I hearing? And then the other part of me is looking at the polls that have taken place publicly. There have been multiple polls. One was on Uma's Twitter or X account. So if you go to Uma, they posted a poll. Is this a suit? Everybody voted yes. Not everybody, but it was like 85% of people or something crazy. There are also been multiple points. polls in Discord. Same thing. Everybody says yes. So it seems to me that if we're just talking about net number of people, that it's in favor of yes. But if we're talking about actual capital

entering the market, it's in favor of no. All right. Okay. Well, this has been a really interesting discussion, quite the contentious to be. I guess we'll see how results. I'm being called a wire like a hundred times in these comments. All right. All right. Well, yeah, we'll have to see what happens. I mean, we had our own internal debate here about whether or not it was a suit as well. I deferred a menswear guy. That's that's my opinion. But I think you. Oh, well, I was just going to like as one last comment here, like ultimately this is such a silly market, right? Like, I'm not going to act here or sit here and act like this is like a crazy serious like discussion. Right. Is it a suit? Is it not? If you just look at the definition of a suit, it is, I think that

polymarket should have just clarified, hey, we're looking for a traditional West And so a lot of people that are saying, no, it's not a suit. You're not looking at the definition of a suit. You're thinking about what do you normally think of as a suit. And as do I. For the record, when I look at this outfit, I don't necessarily think like, oh, yeah, that's what I think of when I think of a suit. It's just that it happens to fit the definition. And given that Polymarket didn't specify what it should look like, that's why I ultimately cited on yes, because also the media has been reporting on it as such. So that's kind of it. Like it's a really silly situation. Yeah, but it's, I think the reason it's important is because it says something about the integrity of

polymarket, which is the leader in this particular space. So it's kind of like how they handle this type of dispute is actually really important for future precedent. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I completely agree. I wish that they had issued some kind of clarification statement much earlier. And then when they finally did, unfortunately, it was not what I think they should have done. All right. Well, thank you so much for explaining this all on Unchained. Yeah. Thank you for having me. Don't forget, next step is the weekly news recap. Stick around for this week in crypto after this short break.

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Let's begin. US Finance Lobby and OpenAI pushback as Robin Hood launches tokenized shares. As we covered on the podcast, Robin Hood has begun offering quote unquote tokenized shares of OpenAI and SpaceX to users in the European Union. The offering coincided with the company's shares hitting an all-time high. The tokens are available via Robin Hood's EU crypto app and are not accessible to U.S. users due to regulatory barriers. But the move has drawn sharp criticism from both the U.S. financial industry and OpenAI itself.

The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, which represents traditional financial institutions, sent a formal letter to the SEC, urging the agency to deny crypto firms exemptions that would allow them to issue tokenized equities. The group warned against allowing firms like Coinbase and Cracken to bypass public review through no action or exemptive relief requests. SIFMA argued that such decisions require a robust public process and transparency, citing concerns around investor protections, regulatory oversight, and market integrity. At the same time, OpenAI issued a public statement disavowing Robin Hood's OpenAI tokens.

The company stated that the tokens were not authorized, do not represent actual equity, and were issued without OpenAI's involvement or consent. Any transfer of OpenAI equity requires our approval. We did not approve any transfer, the company wrote on X, warning users to be cautious. Robin Hood responded by clarifying that the tokens reflect indirect exposure through a special purpose vehicle that holds equity on behalf of investors, a common structure in private markets. While not traditional shares, the SPV route allows retail users to gain partial exposure to high-profile private companies like OpenAI. Circle and Ripple apply for U.S. bank charters as Stablecoin

oversight tightens. Stablecoin issuers Circle and Ripple have filed applications for national bank charters with the U.S. office of the Comptroller of the Currency, positioning themselves for federal oversight amid changing regulatory conditions. Circle submitted its application on June 30th, seeking to establish the first National Digital Currency Bank, N-A. The charter would place Circle under direct OCC supervision and support its ongoing role as the issuer of USDC, the second-largest stable coin with more than $61 billion in circulation. If approved, Circle would also be able to offer custody services for tokenized assets,

including blockchain-based representations of traditional securities. Ripple followed on July 2nd with a similar application, The company's filing comes as it continues to expand the use of its R-L-U-S-D stable coin and aims to bring both federal and state regulatory coverage under the OCC and New York's Department of Financial Services. Ripple has also applied for a Federal Reserve Master account, which would allow it to hold R-L-U-SD reserves directly with the central bank. Chris Perkins, president of the Crypto-Native Venture Capital Firm Coin Fund, told Unchained via email, It's been absolutely fascinating how Ripple has been acquiring licenses. I think they're a force to be reckoned with.

They're putting together all the elements to build a very successful and scalable stable coin in RLUSD. Both moves follow recent progress on the Genius Act, federal legislation, designed to establish regulatory standards for stablecoin issuers, which is expected to be signed into law this summer. Solana staking ETF launches with $33 million in first day volume. The Rex Osprey Solana plus staking ETF began trading Wednesday, becoming the first U.S. listed exchange traded fund to combine direct Solana exposure with on-chain staking. The fund recorded approximately $33.6 million in trading volume and $12 million in net inflows on its first day. Roughly 80% of the ETF's assets are allocated to spot S-All, with more than half of that portion staked to generate staking rewards.

The portfolio also includes positions in other Solana-related exchange-traded products and a small allocation to liquid staking tokens such as GEDO-S-O-L. The ETF is structured as a C-Corporation and regulated under the Investment Company Act. Anchorage Digital, a federally chartered crypto bank, serves as custodian and manages staking operations for the fund's assets. Bitcoin ETF outpaces S&P, 500 Fund in Revenue for BlackRock, Black Rock's I-Shares Bitcoin Trust has surpassed its long-standing I-Share's core S&P, 500 ETF in annual revenue generation, marking a milestone in the growing institutional embrace of digital assets.

As of July 1st, IPIT generates an estimated $187.2 million in annual fees, narrowly overtaking IVVs $187.1 million, despite IVV being nearly nine times larger in assets under management. Launched in January 2024, Ibit has amassed approximately $75 billion in assets, fueled by consistent inflows from both institutional and retail investors. The fund has seen net inflows in 17 of the last 18 months, capturing $52 billion of the $54 billion that has entered all U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs combined. Ibit overtaking IVV in annual fee revenue is reflective of both the surging investor demand for Bitcoin, and the significant fee compression in core equity exposure, said Nate Jurasi,

president of Novodias wealth management. Lido-Dao approves dual governance. Lido-Dao has adopted a new dual-governance model that gives St.Eath holders the ability to veto proposals passed by LDO token holders. The system, approved with near-unanimous support, introduces a formal objection mechanism aimed at protecting ETH stakers from governance decisions they may oppose. Under the mechanism, STEath holders can deposit their tokens into an escrow contract to signal dissent.

If the total reaches 1% of all eth-staked via Lido, the related proposal is delayed for five days. If dissent rises to 10%, the protocol enters a rage-quit state that halts further proposal execution until the dispute is addressed. This governance structure introduces a direct check on the authority of LDO token holders, enabling stakers to actively participate in safeguarding the protocol's direction. The change is part of a broader effort to strengthen alignment between stakeholders. We covered this topic in detail on Tuesday's episode of Unchained with Hasu and Vasili Shepovov. Cryptotax Amendment fails to advance in Senate budget bill. A proposal to ease cryptocurrency tax rules was excluded from the sweeping budget legislation

passed by the U.S. Senate on Tuesday. The bill, known as the One Big, Beautiful Bill, narrowly passed with Vice President J.D. Vance casting the tie-breaking vote, but did not include an amendment backed by Senator Cynthia Lemmiss aimed at reforming digital asset taxation. Lemus had proposed a capital gains tax exemption for crypto payments under $300, along with a $5,000 annual cap on qualifying transactions. The amendment also sought to defer taxation on staking and mining rewards until they are sold, rather than when they are received. Despite late efforts from the digital asset sector,

the amendment was not brought to a vote. On Thursday, Senator Lummis introduced a standalone crypto tax bill, reviving her failed attempt to attach it to Trump's omnibus proposal. Tom Lee joins Bitmine as chairman amid $250 million ether treasury push. Wall Street Strategist and FundStrat co-founder Tom Lee has been appointed chairman of BitMine immersion technologies as the company raises $250 million to build a major ether treasury. The move signals a strategic pivot for Bitmine, traditionally known for its Bitcoin mining operations.

The financing round, structured as a private placement at $4.50 per share, drew support from firms including Founders Fund, Pantara Capital, Cracken, and Galaxy Digital. Bitmine said it will use the funds to accumulate eth as its primary treasury asset and participate in on-chain activities such as staking. Lee described the initiative as aligning with the broader shift toward Ethereum-based infrastructure, particularly in areas like stablecoins and tokenized finance. The company will track Ether per share as a key metric, mirroring Strategies Bitcoin-focused model.

Shares of BitMine surged over 200% following the announcement. Once the deal closes, the company expects to become one of the largest public holders of Ether. Judge allows Celsius $4 billion Bitcoin lawsuit against the deal. Tether to proceed. A U.S. bankruptcy judge has ruled that Celsius's $4 billion lawsuit against Tether can move forward, rejecting key parts of Tether's attempt to dismiss the case. The dispute centers on Celsius' claim that Tether prematurely liquidated 39,500 Bitcoin used as loan collateral during the June 22 crypto market crash. Celsius alleges Tether sold the assets before honoring a contractually required 10-hour delay and at an average price of $20,656

below the prevailing market rate. Tetherhead argued that jurisdictional issues should disqualify the case citing the company's offshore registrations. However, Judge Martin Glenn found sufficient ties to the U.S., including American-based accounts and systems, to let the case proceed. The court did dismiss some subsidiary-based claims, but Celsius can continue pursuing its core allegations. Tether previously called the lawsuit baseless and claimed it had acted under instructions from Celsius. Time for fun bits. Rick Edelman says go full crypto. Remember when 1% in crypto felt like jumping out of a plane without a parachute? Well, Rick Edelman just handed everyone a wingsuit and said, try 40%. Yes, the guy who once whispered, maybe just a sliver of

Bitcoin is now out here telling conservative investors to go 10%, and aggressive ones to Yolo, nearly half their portfolio, into crypto. Somewhere, a Vanguard exec just dropped their camomile tea. Edelman claims it's safer now than that baby 1% back in 2021. Why? Because apparently, when the government doesn't want to ban crypto, and banks want to hold it for you, that's a green light. He's not picky either. BTC, E-thith, altcoins, NFTs of penguins doing yoga, your call. And for the skeptics still clutching gold bars in their bunkers, Edelman says, crypto brings in clients, referrals, and more AUM.

Thanks so much for joining us today to learn more about Stephen, off-chain labs, and Robin Hood, check out of the show notes for this episode. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with up from Matt Pildred, Juan Aranovich, Pamma Jumdar, and Mark Okoria. Thanks for listening.