Unchained - Why JPMorgan and Shopify Are Rolling Out New Products on Ethereum Layer 2 Base - Ep. 855

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

On Tuesday, JPMorgan announced that its blockchain unit is launching JPMD, a USD deposit token for institutional clients, on Base. That’s right: the world’s biggest bank by assets and the 12th largest company by market cap is putting real dollars onchain. JPMD isn’t quite a stablecoin, but it’s close. It represents actual dollar deposits at JPMorgan and will be used by institutional clients for blockchain-based transactions. The bank plans to run a pilot over the coming months and eventually expand it to other user groups and currencies, pending regulatory approval. To understand what this means for the broader crypto ecosystem (and why JPMorgan chose Base), we brought on Jesse Pollak, head of Base and Coinbase Wallet. In this episode, Jesse explains: Why JPMorgan (and Shopify) chose Base What deposit tokens are, and how they differ from stablecoins Why infrastructure is finally “ready” for institutions How Base scaled from 2.5 million to 35 million gas/sec What’s next for Coinbase users who’ll have one-tap access to onchain assets And Jesse’s response to the critics who said that Coinbase doesn’t give enough credit to Ethereum Visit our website for breaking news, analysis, op-eds, articles to learn about crypto, and much more: unchainedcrypto.com Ledn FalconX Jesse Pollak, Head of Base and Coinbase Wallet Unchained:  JPMorgan to Pilot ‘JPMD’ Token on Base Coinbase and Amex Team Up on Bitcoin Card as Exchange Reveals Broad Expansion Plans Comments on Bloomberg by Naveen Mallela, global co-head of the bank's blockchain division Kinexys by JPMorgan Timestamps: 🎬 0:00 Intro 🏦 1:49 What JPMD actually is 🔧 4:26 Why Jesse believes infrastructure is finally ready for institutional adoption 📊 7:03 Whether Base can handle global scale 💵 9:24 How JPMorgan plans to use deposit tokens in real-world blockchain transactions ⚖️ 11:22 Whether deposit tokens are a better model than stablecoins 🛠️ 16:59 Why JPMorgan chose to launch on Base instead of other chains 📉 19:00 How recent events served as a wake-up call for fintech and commerce 📲 22:22 Why Jesse is hyped about seamless access to onchain assets inside Coinbase 📈 25:47 How Coinbase plans to manage the chaos of token pumps and dumps 🌐 27:54 Jesse’s take on the criticism that Coinbase doesn’t show Ethereum enough love Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is like the thing that gets me out of bed every morning is getting to build this future with people, whether it's the team of JPMorgan or the team of Shopify or any of the other small builders or big builders that we get to work with. Like the tools are finally ready. And now it's just about who can apply them and who can use them to make their businesses work better. Hi, everyone. Look at the Unchained, your no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. We love reading comments from our listeners. In every episode, we feature a few. Today we have a comment responding to the latest episode about Hyperliquid with Arthur Hayes and Hansen Beringer. On X, FOMOSynthesis wrote, great episode, guys, I agree that if the team pulls off the HIP3 vision,

then it would be the holy grail of crypto, obviously rooting for that outcome. You can watch the Hyperliquid episode on YouTube or listen anywhere you get your podcasts. And if you want your comment featured, write a review of the podcast overall, or leave a comment on the video on YouTube, Procaster, or X. This is the June 20th, 20205 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 Falcon X, bringing clarity to a world of noise. Visit askfocal.com. Well, today's guest is Jesse Pollock, head of base and Coinbase wallet. Welcome, Jesse. Hey, Laura. Thanks for having me. Super excited to be here. And hello, everybody who's on the live stream and seeing a lot of chatter on the live stream,

and it's great to see all of you. So on Tuesday, JPMorgan announced that its Kinexus unit, formerly known as Onyx, is launching JPMD, which is a USD deposit token for institutional clients on base. And this is a big deal for base. This is the layer two that you've incubated at Coinbase. JPMorgan is the 12th largest company in the world by Market Cap. And as I mentioned, this, JPMD is being called a deposit token. So it's not exactly a stable coin.

There are some similarities. Tell us what it is. Yeah. So the easiest way to think about JPMorgan is the JPMD is that it's a deposit token. And basically what that means is it represents the kind of internal ledger entry that a customer has at J.P. Morgan. And makes it easier and more efficient for J.P. Morgan to manage those internal ledger entries as there's balance changes happening between customers. For instance, if institutional customers inside of J.P. Morgan are doing transactions. And one way of kind of thinking about this at the highest level is, you know, the historical way J.P. Morgan has operated is that they've had a bunch of kind of old legacy systems existing off-chain where

when customers move balances around, you know, thousands or hundreds of thousands of lines of code ran that debited and credited and made it so all the balance adjustments actually work. And what JPMorgan is piloting here is using the efficiency of this new platform that we're building on chain, on base, to make it so you can kind of translate those hundreds of thousands of lines of code into like tens or hundreds of lines of code, denominated, defined in smart contracts to make the bank run more efficiently,

make it easier to do settlement between institutions on the platform, and make it more efficient for JPMorgan to run their business. And this theme, the theme of off-chain businesses, whether they're financial businesses or commerce businesses or social businesses, finding ways to use on-chain as a new platform that let them be 10 to 100 times more efficient, let them be much cheaper, and let them be much more globally available. That's the theme of this moment,

and that's the theme of what base is enabling for all these businesses around the world. Yeah, honestly, this is kind of funny to hear about because I'm a quote-unquote class of 2015 in the blockchain of crypto world. And in 2015, the main thing everybody always talked about was, so at that time, the mantra, by the way, you probably know, was blockchain not Bitcoin. And the theory was that blockchain technology would make the back end of financial institutions more efficient. And so it's just so funny to me that, you know, that's what everybody thought at the time.

And that's clearly not what has happened so far. finally now it looks like we're getting kind of the first iteration of that. Yeah, well, it's kind of the classic mantra of like, you're never wrong, you're just too early. And I feel like that's been a lot of the history and the story of crypto. But the reality is that back in 2015, the technology wasn't ready. But now the technology is ready. We have ultra low cost, fast, usable blockchains like base. We have really good wallet infrastructure that makes it so all this can be kind of abstracted from either

the institutions or the consumers who are doing things. And then we have a bunch of the financial infrastructure that's actually making it possible for people to do more and more complex on-chain things. And so I think the trend that we're starting to see now is really enabled by almost more than a decade of technology investment to make this platform strong enough for people actually to use it to solve problems in their business. And the exciting thing for me is, you know, what started as just a dream 10 years ago is now starting to really be a reality, and it's picking up.

I mean, it wasn't just JP Morgan that announced that they were using this technology to make their business more efficient last week. Just a few days before, we had Shopify, which served $875 million consumers, more than a trillion dollars of value over the last year, say that they are rebuilding their commerce stack on chain on base and accepting USC and base payments on all of the Shopify stores around the world. And again, it's the same pattern where when we dug in with Shopify for last night, months, what we saw was that, you know, commerce is this incredibly complex thing, where it's not just a peer-to-peer payment.

You have to think about inventory, and you have to think about tax, and you have to think about escrow, and making sure that the value is moving between the right stakeholders at the right time. And the way that historically Shopify has managed that is through millions of lines of code of off-chain systems, and we were able to work with them to build a new commerce payments protocol that is hundreds of lines of smart contracts. that lets them do all of the same things way more efficiently, way cheaper, and fully, fully global. And so these two kind of huge players in Shopify and J.P. Morgan, kind of choosing base and saying, we're going to use this technology platform is both indicative, obviously, the fact that we've, I think, been making good progress on base, but I think almost more so the fact that over the last five years,

we've done the work as an industry to mature out these technology products and the platform to make, they can actually be ready to solve the sorts of problems that businesses like JP Morgan and Shopify and other Fortune 500s have at a massive scale. Yeah. And out of curiosity, just talk a little bit about, you know, that building out of the tech. Because so it looks like right now, base is at about, is it about 100 transactions per second? Or like, what, you know, just describe for me like where you are and then how you think, you know, bringing all of these Shopify merchants and, um,

the JPMT, although I imagine that's like, you know, lower transactions, but still like how that can, you know, work at scale on base. Yeah. So scaling is a P0 for base. And really the thing that drives that is we can't bring the world on chain. We can't build a global economy unless we can actually serve everyone. And so if you look at the key thing that we measure to kind of indicate how much we've scaled, which is this thing called gas per second, which is basically how much compute can we do every single second on the world computer that is base. we've scaled that about 20x in the last 18 months, from 2.5 million gas a second to 35 million gas a second. But there's really two things that we're looking at when we're scaling. There's what we call kind of like the target capacity, which is what's our like resting throughput that we can support

that kind of exists over a long tail. And then what's our like burst capacity, i.e. how much can we spike up to serve when there are really high demand moments? And so what you're kind of referencing there in the 100 transactions a second, We're generally right now seeing our target, the kind of like resting rate be in this 100 to 150. That's up about, you know, 20x from where we were 18 months ago. But even more excitingly than that, what we're seeing right now is that our burst capacity is way higher. And so, recent example of this is virtuals has been going really kind of viral on base recently.

And in some of their kind of token launches, there's tons of demand that's coming on the chain. And we're seeing base serve thousands to almost 2,000 transactions. a second, which is way further than we were, you know, 18 months ago. And so where we're going from here is we're going to 10x and then we're going to 10x again. And then we're going to 10x again. Because in order to serve the sort of scale that we're talking about when we say bring the world on chain, we have to be serving, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of transactions a second. Obviously there's a lot more work that we need to do in order to get there.

But the team has been cooking. And I feel really confident that we're going to be able to keep kind of scaling the platform in order to serve these more and more skilled use cases as the rest of the world comes on chain. And so just to go back to JPMD, like how will that be used? Could you walk us through an example of how they're expecting that institutions will use it? Yeah, great question. So the primary way that they're thinking about institutions using this is kind of for internal settlement between different institutions in the JPMorgan network.

So imagine that you have, you know, two different institutions that are banking with J.P. Morgan where they're transacting frequently between each other. Maybe they're just doing kind of payments between each other, or maybe they're doing other more complex financial transactions where they need to do settlement of financial assets. What JPMorgan, like JPMD is going to enable them to do is to do that settlement on chain, have it be instant, have it be 24-7, have it use this new technology infrastructure to execute all of those kind of rebalancing and plusing and minusing of balances of JPMorgan customers. And so this is a permission use case, right? It's not a fully permissionless stable coin where any consumer can go and buy it and use it. But it is a great example of how, again, J.P. Morgan is using this technology platform to solve a real problem that they have, which is how do we make it so that we can give this kind of settlement infrastructure in a faster, cheaper,

and more operationally efficient way for our business and for our customers. And since it's for institutional clients, that would be like, I don't know, hedge funds or family offices. I mean, it can be the whole range. So hedge funds, family offices, coin, coins is a customer of J.P. Morgan. You know, there are small businesses that are customers of J.P. Morgan. I mean, J.P. Morgan, again, is one of the largest financial institutions in the world. And they serve a broad range of customers, you know, ranging from those more financial institutions, all the way to everyday, mom and pop small businesses.

And I think over time, what we'll see is that more and more of this kind of like payments and banking infrastructure will be brought on chain to make it so that those folks have a better experience. Something interesting I saw was Nevin Malella, the global co-head of the bank's blockchain division, Connectis told Bloomberg, quote, from an institutional standpoint, deposit tokens are a superior alternative of stable coins. Because they are based on fractional banking, we think it's more. more scalable. And that was an interesting statement to me. You know, where do you think there,

it sort of seems like, well, no, just tell me, what's your reaction to that statement? I think it's spot on. And, you know, I wouldn't say like these are in competition with each other. I think that's kind of the wrong way to be thinking about this. I think the way I look at this is that we spent the last, you know, 100 years building a lot of really important financial infrastructure that makes our world work today. Whether that's the kind of banking infrastructure that we have or the payments infrastructure that we have, that's been a huge boon for our site, right?

There's more economic freedom today than there was 100 years ago. But there's a few big problems with that infrastructure that we've built. One is it's still very slow and inefficient, right? It's mostly built with legacy systems that are slow moving, hard to improve, hard to kind of build on top of. Two, it's pretty siloed in terms of who can access it. So, you know, if you're based in a certain region, you might have access.

If you're not, you don't. And then three is, it's not very open. So it's hard for other people to actually build on top of it. And what I think we're seeing now is that a lot of the kind of, not even philosophical, a lot of the structures that have been built are very, very good. But again, because they're built on these old systems, they're less efficient than they could be. And what we're going to see in this next chapter is that we're going to take those same structures. and we're going to use this new infrastructure to make it better and more efficient and more global.

And so when I think about kind of like stable coins versus deposit tokens, I don't think we have to choose either or. I think we can look at these and be like, okay, one of them is a one-to-one almost cash-like equivalent. The other looks a lot more like our traditional banking system. Both of those have really, really valuable roles in the economy. What we've seen kind of proliferate first is this stable coin one-to-one use case. But there's no reason that the, kind of fractional reserve banking model wouldn't also benefit from having a hundred times more efficient platform, having a global kind of by default infrastructure, and having full composability so other people can build on top of it. And so that's what JP Morgan's doing

here. They're saying, let's take the structure that we know works and use the best of this new platform to make it even better. And let's have it live side by side next to stable coins. that we can have all of the tools that we need to build a more efficient, more global, more accessible, more composable global economy. And I don't think it's going to just stop with deposit tokens or stable coins. I think that we're at kind of the dawn of people realizing, oh, my God, every single piece of financial infrastructure, every single piece of governance infrastructure, every single piece of business infrastructure that we've built over the last 50 years, we can now bring that to this new platform and use the strengths of this new platform to make all

of those things that are good, even better. And that's going to lead to a whole more, a whole lot more innovation in crypto. It's going to lead to a whole lot more innovation in the rest of the world. And I think it's going to lead to kind of the blurring of the boundary and the kind of almost like going away of this idea that we have a crypto economy and an off-train economy. And we're going to end up in a world where we just have a global economy. And the global economy is just going to work 100 times better because it's using this new technology that lets us move money in a permissionless programmable way to make it better. And that's like, that is the ultimate vision of why we're building this. Yeah, yeah. Honestly, when you were describing this, I was thinking that it sort of like

brings the efficiencies of things like the SEND network. Hopefully this is not one of those words that will make people cringe, but or so it was Senn and what was the other one? You know, The Silvergate and the signature banks, those two, yeah, the signet, signet. Those two, you know, were such a benefit to the crypto community when they existed, crypto industry. And, yeah, it sounds like it's the same thing. So in a moment, we're going to talk a little bit more about this deal, but first a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible.

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On X, David GMI responded to Hansen Beringer stance that Hyperliquid is building loyalty by making its users rich. David GMI said, this is a very great take, but let's not have. forget, hyperliquid airdropped six to seven figures to users before resuming work on growing their ecosystem. AirDrop play major parts in building loyalty. Arbitrum is also a good example. Remember, if you want to hear your comment featured on the show, please write a review or leave a comment on an episode on YouTube, Farcaster, or X. Back to my conversation with Jesse. I was so curious how this deal with JP Morgan came together. Did they reach out to Coinbase or did Coinbase pitch them? And yeah, I'd be curious.

to hear what made them decide to build on base. Yeah, so we've been in conversation with JP Morgan for a long time. Obviously, Coinbase is a customer of JP Morgan, and that's like a really strong foundation for building that relationships. I started talking with the ConnectSys team maybe six to nine months ago about some of the use cases that they were solving. They've been very visionary over the last many years. I'm thinking about how do we actually use blockchain to solve a lot of the problems,

that they're seeing at the scale that they're operating at. And kind of through those natural conversations, we started collaborating together and started thinking about what can we do together. I think that we were naturally drawn to each other as partners, where they have a bunch of really hard problems that I don't get to experience firsthand because they're operating at the scale in the existing system.

And similarly, I think they looked at kind of what we're doing with base, and they're seeing the scalability, they're seeing the low cost, they're selling the trust, in the ecosystem and say, we can actually bring some value from our side to help them accelerate their goals, help them build more on chain. And so that just felt like this natural combination where we could actually get in the weeds and build together.

And I'm super excited about it. And in general, this is like the thing that gets me out of bed every morning is getting to build this future with people, whether it's the team of JP Morgan or the team at Shopify or any of the other small builders or big builders that we get to work with. the tools are finally ready. And now it's just about who can apply them and who can use them to make their businesses work better. And getting to be at the front lines there and see firsthand how much value this technology can bring to these businesses. It's so cool.

And it really gives us an opportunity to, I think, push the industry forward in terms of what possible. Yeah. I imagine that you are in so many conversations. right now where you kind of get a sense already of what the future is going to be. So I'd be so curious because you probably know there's been a lot of speculation that banks will launch their own stable coins. So, you know, given the fact that, I mean, there's just a lot of stable coin activity, as I'm sure everybody in crypto is aware. From your advantage point, can you paint a picture of what you think this world, like deposit token, stable coins,

et cetera, what that will look like over in the next six months to a year? I think that the last, you know, few months have been a real wake-up call for, you know, commerce, payments, financial businesses. The combination of kind of the stripe acquisition of Bridge and then Privy, the Shopify launch, this JP Morgan launch, I think it's kind of pulled back the covers on what I would say has been like 9 to 12 months of more quiet progress behind the scenes where the people who saw the vision early, like went and started the work and did about a year of work and then started talking about it publicly. And what's that caused is it's caused everyone who's maybe a little bit more skeptical

or, you know, just like wasn't in a place from a business perspective where they could take the risk to be at the cutting edge, realized, oh, whoa, this is real. Like if Shopify and Stripe and JP Morgan are all actually being able to use this to make their business more effective and better, like that means it probably is something that can be used to make our business more effective and better. And so I think what we're starting to see now is just kind of like the next wave where everyone else is trying to figure out, okay, how do we actually do this? And, you know, I tweeted it out the other day. I was like, here are any of the businesses who I want to work with to like accept stable coin payments. And I got a ton of inbound on that. Because everyone's like, whoa, like, can you help us figure out how to do this? Because we want lower fees, because we want to expand more countries. And stable coins can let us do that. Same thing's happening with JP Morgan where I tweeted out again, like, hey, hey, here are all these banks that I want to be working with to help them be more efficient, a ton of inbound, people being like, can you help us figure out how to do this? And I'm super excited because, again, you have all of these people now who have real-scale businesses,

have real hard problems, and now the technology has finally matured enough to the point where we can actually use it to solve those hard problems and make their business skill more. And so that's like the funnest thing to do because it's not like wandering in the desert anymore. It's much more like, okay, let's actually like put our heads together with world experts with people who are firsthand in their business trying to solve these problems and let's solve them. And there's nothing more rewarding than being able to use technology to solve someone's problem that's costing them money or, you know, make it so they can't serve customers or slowing down their internal processes in the way that super frustrates them. And so I think what's going to happen over the

next year is that we're just going to see the pace of this accelerate, where it almost becomes like normal for everyone to have a stable coin strategy. We're not going to be talking about it. Every single time a new business starts doing things with stable coins, it's just going to become like the internet where it's like if you're not accepting stable coins, just like if you weren't accepting internet payments, like something is wrong. And like that's weird versus like it's weird if you are accepting stable coins.

You are starting to be thought on your business on chain. Yeah, that totally makes sense. So I just want to pivot to one last thing because obviously last, last week, you also announced that users will now be able to automatically access and trade DEX tokens on base on Coinbase. And I'd be so interested to hear, I mean, I don't know what that takes on the back end. Maybe it's super easy. I guess they're all ERC 20s or something.

But if you could just like talk about like how it is that you came to that decision. And, you know, yeah, just I'd be interested to hear what the regulatory conversation was as well. Yeah. Well, first off, it's going to be a totally seamless experience. for end customers. You know, the vision, and Brian talked about this earlier this year, I talked about this earlier this year, is that the idea of listing goes away and that instead it's really like indexing, just like the internet in the early days, where every asset that customers want to trade,

the second it launches, is available for them to trade. That's the way it should work. And the thing that's let us kind of start to get here, again, is this infrastructure that we've built that we've done over the last two years. you think about the stack that goes into enabling this from a consumer perspective on Coinbase, it's we needed a low-cost chain. We needed wallet infrastructure like smart accounts. We needed Dex aggregators. We needed stable coins. We needed these kind of like non-custodial infrastructure that let it all kind of plug in together. We did a ton of the work to kind of trace or bullet

and make that whole stack work with the Bitcoin borrow product that Coinbase launched about six months ago, which now has done, I think, like $700 million of a rich nations in a few months, where we actually put all those pieces together. So now you can get a Bitcoin, a USC loan against your Bitcoin in the Coinbase app. But instead of it doing like any off-chain stuff, it's all fully on-chain. So when you click a one-tab button, you don't sign anything like a big form, you instead sign a transaction. And what that transaction does is it takes your Bitcoin, it wraps it to CBVTC, it deposits it into a morpho lending pool on base. And you instead, and It withdraws USDC against that, and then it puts it back in your wallet.

And all, it's like five transactions are batched into one with the smart account, and it's executed totally seamlessly for an end user. That product was kind of our first product where we were like, okay, let's make this staff work really well. And now what we're doing with the Dex product is we're saying, okay, now let's just apply this stack to this new problem we have, which is listing all assets and making them available to Coinbase customers. And I think you can kind of think about this as a repeatable playbook. playbook where every single financial service will move on chain and Coinbase will use the stack that we've built to make it really, really easy for us to build those net new services and then

make them available to our customers in an easy, cheap, global way. And so I'm super excited about it. I think the big thing that's going to unlock for the base economy is just way more eyeballs and way more liquidity where you now have millions of Coinbase customers. And I think at last I checked, like hundreds of billions of dollars of retail Coinbase assets, where we're, we're going to be able to which are now one tap away from going into the base economy for borrowing and lending, for going into the base economy for trading, for finding those early stage assets and builders that they can invest in. And all of that can be available without Coinbase having to do a ton of work every single time. But instead, we leverage the platform, the open platform of

on-chain to make it so that just works. And how will you deal with things like kind of more pump and dump or scam type things that happen like, yeah. How about that? So, you know, when we're talking about indexing, you know, you're definitely going to have the same problems that folks like Google had when they're indexing the internet, which is, you know, the internet is an open and permissionless place. Just like that on-chain is an open and permissionless place. So that means just like on the internet, of course there are going to be things that, you know, maybe are a little bit fraudulent or have problems or bugs or whatever. And it's the job of a browser like Chrome.

or a browser like this new Dext experience that Coinbase is building to protect users and help them make sure that they're not interacting with the bad things and they are interacting with the good things. And the way you do that is you do it by building a really good technology staff that can detect, alert, you know, kind of advise when things are happening. And then you do that by building affordances to users where it kind of helps guide them to not make mistakes. You know, the easiest one to think about as an analogy is when you're going into Chrome and you go to a fraudulent website or a website that's trying to hack you, you'll get a big red

alert. Like you will literally be like, do you want to proceed? And they don't block you from proceeding. You can click through it, but it's very, very well tuned to prevent the 99.9% of people from making that mistake. And that's the same work that Coinbase is doing, where it's how do we index on chain in a safe way that lets customers actually engage with the economy while having kind of guardrails that help them engage in a good way.

Now, one really important thing about this, though, is that they are building this product in a fully self-custodial manner. So it's designed such that users are still in control of their wallets, they're going to have the ability to kind of like eject if they want to. And ultimately, they'll be the ones in control of their assets, of the transactions that they make. And that lets us kind of treat this as a browser and give them that full indexing experience.

But there's a lot that we can layer on top of that self-custodial experience to make sure that they're being self-custodial in a way that still has the ease of use and the trust that Coinbase is known for. Okay, and last quick question, Jesse, I just wanted to ask because I saw a lot of commentary about this. You might have seen it as well. After the State of Crypto Summit last week, some Ethereum people were noticing that the word Ethereum had not been mentioned very much. Ryan Bergman's tweeted, I'm a huge fan of base. I can't say enough good things about them. Yeah, in my opinion, it's not right for Coinbase to be building their future on Eath,

but the word Ethereum has only said one time in a full day conference. One time is so little effectively less than random that what can we conclude except that it appears to be an intentional avoidance of promoting Ethereum, but why? What's your response to that criticism? You know, first thing I can say is like base is proudly built on Ethereum.

There's a reason we chose to be built as an Ethereum layer two, and that's because we wanted to be a bridge non-island. We wanted to be connected to this decentralized global infrastructure that would let us build faster, serve more customers, interoperate with the rest of the global on-chain economy. And that is something we're proud of. We've been huge contributors to Ethereum when you look at what's led to 4844, Pectra, all of these scaling initiatives. A lot of it has been the base team kind of doing the open source work in collaboration with Ethereum core teams to scale.

We've also been collaborating with optimism and other ecosystem teams to make it so this OP stack and other infrastructure is built fully open source, accessible to everyone. And so this ethos of we're stronger together and we win together is at the absolute core of, how we think, what our philosophy is. And so I can be 100% certain that there was no intentional effort to kind of shy away from that. We're excited and grateful to be building alongside Ethereum. Now, at the same time, when you think about what we care about, what our customers care about, it's value.

We want to be able to communicate to our customers. Here's how we are solving problems for you. And that's the lens that we bring to every single time. We're going out in front of institutions, like we were at State of Crypto, we're talking about new consumer products. And that ethos of we are solving problems for customers means that that's where we spend the vast majority of our time talking.

Whenever we're talking, that's where you're going to hear us focus on. It's how do we make your life easier? How do you get access to cheaper, better, more global products? And what that means is that because we're focused on the customer, the infrastructure that's underneath can sometimes play a backseat role. Now, that balance is always something we're calibrating. see the feedback. I love it. I appreciate it. We're always open to more of it. But at the end of the day, that's going to be a consistent thing you're going to see from us. We are going to start with

the customer. We're going to start with the problems that we're solving for the customer. And we're going to make sure that we're really, really clear in articulating what are we actually trying to do here and how does it make your life better? Because at the end of the day, if you look at the last five years of crypto, I think this is probably one of the things we've done worst as an industry. At times, we've gotten so caught up in the infrastructure and the technology, we've lost sight of the fact that the only thing that matters is are we making people's lives better by solving real problems?

And that's what base is all about. That's what Coin Mace is all about. We are about taking this technology and using it to solve real problems. We're about taking this technology and using it to make creators' lives better. We're about taking the technology, using it to make people as lives better

in every single country in the world. And I think we've made a lot of good progress, but still day one. And so we're excited to keep working on it. We're excited to keep working on with everyone in Ethereum and Solana and every other ecosystem because we think we can do better together than we can alone. Perfect. Well, thank you so much for coming on Unchained, Jesse.

Thanks so much for having me. Jesse, it is always great to chat with you. Thanks so much. Keep building. Stay based, everybody. Don't forget, next step is the weekly news recap. Stick around for this week in crypto after this short break. Wish you could access cash without selling your Bitcoin? Leden makes that possible. The global leader in Bitcoin-backed lending, Leden has issued over $9 billion in loans since 2018 and never lost a single Satoshi of client assets. Why is a leaden loan different? With custody loans, collateral is not lent out to generate interest. No credit

checks, funds in less than 12 hours, no monthly payments, repay whenever you want, with zero penalties. And proof of reserves reports verified by a top accounting firm are published every six months. Lennon gives Bitcoin holders a secure, transparent way to unlock liquidity without selling. Learn more at letton.io. That's L-E-D-N dot I.O. Welcome to this week's Crypto Roundup. In today's recap, Tron moves toward a NASDAQ listing in a bold reverse merger, while the Senate passes the Genius Act and delays the Clarity Act, affecting Trump's crypto agenda.

A pro-Israel hacker group burns $90 million in crypto, crippling Iran's Nobatex exchange. Gemini hits back at the CFTC over a whistleblower case, and Polyhedra's ZKJ token crashes over 80% amid a liquidity spiral. Trump Media secures SEC approval for a $2.3 billion raise and Bitcoin Treasury plans. Pocod and Cardano stir debate with proposals to convert treasury funds into Bitcoin, and a failed kidnapping ends with crypto traders proving their broke. tuning in. Let's begin. Tron advances to NASDAQ listing. Tron founder Justin Sun is preparing to take

his crypto platform public through a reverse merger with NASDAQ listed SRM Entertainment. The 210 million transaction, facilitated by Dominary Securities, whose advisory board includes Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump will transform SRM into TRN, Inc., a digital asset treasury firm holding large reserves of TRX tokens. The move comes four months after the SEC agreed to pause its fraud case against Sun and the Tron Foundation, signaling a shift in regulatory tone under the Trump administration. While speculation circulated about Eric Trump, assuming a formal role at the company, he publicly clarified on X, I don't have public involvement in this company. The launch coincides with a deeper alliance between Sun and the Trump ecosystem. Sun has invested $75 million.

into Trump-linked crypto firm World Liberty Financial, and helped launch its Stablecoin, USD1, on the Tron blockchain. However, Tron faces headwinds. Once favored for its low costs, average fees to send USD on Tron have surged to over $3, raising concerns in low-income markets. It's not feasible, one Stablecoin executive told Unchained, warning that rising fees could drive users toward cheaper chains. Despite this, SRM shares soared over six,

100% following the announcement. Senate passes Genius Act. The U.S. Senate has passed the Genius Act, a landmark bill establishing the first federal regulatory framework for Stablecoins by a 68 to 30 vote. The legislation requires stablecoin issuers to maintain full reserve backing, undergo monthly audits, and comply with anti-money laundering regulations. It also authorizes a wide range of issuers, including banks, fintechs, and retailers, to offer stablecoins under federal supervision. The bill's passage follows months of bipartisan negotiations and marks a rare legislative win on digital assets. However, it was not without controversy. Progressive Democrats, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren, opposed the bill due to concerns over the Trump family's expanding

crypto interests and the lack of anti-corruption clauses targeting public officials. President Donald Trump responded to the vote by urging the House to act lightning fast, calling the bill incredible and warning against any modifications. No delays, no add-ons, he posted on truth social, framing the measure as critical to securing U.S. leadership in digital assets. The Genius Act now heads to the House, where lawmakers face pressure to deliver a clean version of the bill for Trump's signature before the August recess. Senate delays Clarity Act. The Senate will not vote on the Clarity Act, a key crypto-market structure bill before Congress breaks for its August recess, dealing a setback to President Trump's

legislative agenda. Senate Banking Committee Chair. Tim Scott confirmed that while a hearing will be held next month, the markup is postponed until the fall. This delay narrows the window for passing both the Clarity Act and the Genius Act. The two centerpiece bills of the Trump administration's digital asset strategy. The Genius Act, which addresses Stablecoin regulation, remains on track. Having cleared the Senate Banking Committee in March, a spokesperson for Scott stated, Chairman Scott and his colleagues remain laser focused on getting legislation to establish a regulatory framework for digital assets to President Trump's desk as soon as possible. The Clarity Act has already passed through House committees with bipartisan support, but friction has emerged over provisions banning elected officials from crypto business activities. That disagreement has contributed to the holdup, casting doubt on whether Trump's hoped for scientific

ceremony, once envisioned for August on the South Lawn, will go ahead as planned. For now, a stable coin-only bill may be the administration's best shot at a summer crypto victory. Pro-Israel hackers burn $90 million in crypto. The Iran-Israel conflict has reached the crypto arena, with a pro-Israel hacker group claiming responsibility for a $90 million exploit on Nobatex, Iran's largest crypto exchange. The group, Gangeshka Durande, also known as Predatory Sparrow, says the attack was not financially motivated, but intended as political sabotage. Funds stolen across Bitcoin, TRX, Dogecoin, and other assets were sent to vanity addresses containing phrases like

terrorist and no-bytex, making them permanently inaccessible. It is practically infeasible to find the private key which maps to such a public address, security researcher Yehor Ruditsya told CoinDesk, confirming the funds were effectively burned. This appears to be an act of politically motivated sabotage, Elliptic co-founder Tom Robinson said in an interview with CoinDesk. The hackers also leaked Nobatex's source code and warned that any remaining funds are vulnerable, heightening concerns of further damage. The attack follows a similar breach on Iran's state-owned bank SEPA and comes amid escalating physical and cyber confrontations between Iran and Israel. With Nobatex long accused of aiding Iranian sanction evasion, the incident could significantly

disrupt Iran's ability to move capital during an intensifying regional crisis. Gemini blasts CFTC over lawfare tied to faulty whistleblower case. Gemini has accused the Commodity Futures Trading Commission of weaponizing false whistleblower claims to justify its 22 lawsuit against the crypto exchange. In a letter to the CFTC Inspector General, Gemini alleged the agency's enforcement staff pursued the case based on a lie-riddled report from former C.O. Benjamin Small, who was fired in 2017 for allegedly covering up rebate fraud. The exchange claims the CFTC embraced Small's claims without scrutiny, launching a multi-year investigation that culminated in a lawsuit over Gemini's

2017 Bitcoin Futures product. Although the company settled for $5 million in January without admitting fault, it now argues the case reflects a toxic culture within the CFF. Citing internal criticism from acting chair Caroline Pham, Gemini called for a broad overhaul of the enforcement division to prevent politically motivated or career-driven actions against market participants. ZKJ token collapses over 80%. Polyhedra's native token, ZKJ, plunged more than 80% over the weekend, following a chain of liquidity shocks, triggered by abnormal transactions tied to its partner ecosystem. The crash began after the Koji USDT liquidity pool was drained, pushing investors to convert Kogi into ZKJ through a still active pool, overwhelming ZKJ's liquidity, and sparking a cascade of redemptions.

Polyhedra later attributed the event to a coordinated on-chain liquidity attack and large token transfers by market maker Wintermute. Wintermute's address deposited over 3.39 million ZKJ tokens to centralized exchanges in the hour surrounding the crash, The company said, the interlinked nature of ZKJ and Koji, which shared incentives under Binance's Alpha Points program, intensified the sell-off. In response, Binance updated its rules to disqualify trading volume from affected pairs. Polyhedra acknowledged that its liquidity pools were structurally fragile, contributing

to the scale of the collapse. Trump Media wins SEC approval for $2.3 billion raise in Bitcoin Treasury. Media and Technology Group has received regulatory clearance from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to raise $2.3 billion and begin holding Bitcoin on its balance sheet. The approval allows the company to proceed with a resale offering of roughly 85 million shares, including equity and convertible notes, to around 50 investors. CEO Devin Noons said the firm plans to integrate Bitcoin as a core treasury asset, with custody managed by Crypto.com and Anchorage Digital. In a parallel filing, the company also submitted paperwork for a dual Bitcoin and Ethereum spot,

ETF, under the Truth Social brand. The proposed fund would allocate 75% to Bitcoin and 25% to Ether, with Crypto.com, serving as both custodian and liquidity provider. The ETF would join a growing roster of crypto funds alongside giants like BlackRock and Fidelity. In related news, D.T. Marks Defi, a firm linked to President Donald Trump and his family, cut its equity in world liberty financial from 60% to 40%, continuing a quiet sell-off amid political scrutiny over digital asset involvement

and insider access tied to presidential influence. PolkaDOT and Cardano I-Bitcoin reserves. Two major blockchain projects, PolkaDot and Cardano, are considering converting treasury funds into Bitcoin, prompting active debate within their respective communities. On Pocod, a proposal to convert 500,000 DOT into threshold Bitcoin, using a year-long dollar-cost averaging strategy has divided members. Proponents argue the move would improve long-term financial resilience and diversify treasury holdings.

This proposal is about risk management and operational continuity, not market timing or speculation, wrote the pseudonymous proposer, Hippie Stank. Critics, however, question the logic of selling dot at historic lows while Bitcoin trades above $100,000. Meanwhile, Cardano co-founder Charles Hoskinson has suggested converting $100 million in ADA into Bitcoin and Cardano native stable coins to jumpstart the network's defy economy. We could convert some of it into Bitcoin to prime Bitcoin defy, he said, dismissing concerns over market impact as inexperienced. Time for fun bits. Kidnappers free TikTok crypto trader after discovering he's flat broke. a ransom gone wrong and unintentionally quite funny. A 26-year-old TikTok crypto trader in France was reportedly kidnapped last Friday by four men demanding 50,000 euros in crypto. But the plan

unraveled fast once the captors got a look at his wallet. After forcing him into a stolen car and allegedly roughing him up, the kidnappers were stunned to find out their target didn't have the funds. The influencer who has 40,000 TikTok followers, showed them his account balance, which was apparently emptier than a meme coin white paper. He was released the next day. Thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about Jesse, base, and JPMD, check out of the showness for this episode. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, without from Matt Pilchard, Wynarmaninovich, Pamma Jimdar, and Marka Curia. Thanks for listening.