ROLLUP: Bitcoin All-Time-High, Is ETH Next?
Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:04] Bankless station is the second week of july it is time for the bankless weekly roll-up we got bitcoin all-time highs david we made it we did it it's been what
Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:14] eight weeks since an all-time high something like this about.
David Hoffman:
[0:17] That yeah and we are just watching it go higher and higher and higher so as i am speaking this sentence there is yet another bitcoin all-time high different from the first all-time high that started when you started that sentence just a moment ago
Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:29] That's the way we like it. Also, David, there's a big sentiment shift,
Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:33] I'm feeling, in Ether, the asset this week, okay? We've got ETH treasury companies taking center stage, a bunch of big announcements. ETH on mainstream finance on a daily basis, getting that Bloomberg, getting that CNBC. But the question is, is this going to translate into a big price move, okay? We got a price move on the week, but was it big enough? Not as big as it should be, I think. So we're going to talk about that too.
David Hoffman:
[0:57] The word that we're looking for is idiosyncratic, and that is not yet what we have. It's what we all want, an idiosyncratic move in ETH. We don't have it yet. It's going up. It's going in the right direction. Not quite there yet. We're going to also talk about the pump ICO that is starting this week on Saturday. The pump ICO will open up on exchanges. Apparently, the private sale for the pump ICO is completely sold out. And so the public sale to just investors on exchanges opens up on Saturday. We're going to talk about at $4 billion, is Ryan a buyer or a non-buyer of the PUM token?
David Hoffman:
[1:31] We are going to give a detailed analysis of exactly what Ryan's going to do. And then also crypto gets its what color is the dress moment with the Zelensky suit. We're going to talk about that. And then also Jack Dorsey invents a new way to send Bitcoin.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:45] David, let's start with prices. Bitcoin all-time high week. Okay, this could be a new all-time high by the time Bankless listeners are listening to this. But what do we got at the time of recording? Thank you.
David Hoffman:
[1:54] Man, we haven't had an all-time high in about two minutes and 15 seconds. We are currently coming in at $113,562 for a Bitcoin. The new all-time high happened about, yeah, three minutes ago, $13,820. $820, that's pretty good. We're up like $3,000 in the last hour or so.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[2:19] Yeah, it was good. It's good to break that, you know, 100K to 110K range that we've been like range bound, bound like in for a long time. We finally broke through that. Also this weekend, which is kind of interesting, it was all over crypto Twitter. The Bitcoin whale woke up and moved some assets. All right. I saw this on, I think it was the day after the 4th of July, right? We had a long weekend here in the United States of America. And I think this was on Saturday. This started to happen, which was a really early address, Bitcoin address. I think we're talking like circa 2010?
David Hoffman:
[2:53] 2011. 2011. Okay.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[2:55] So super early address. A lot of the funds in this address through Bitcoin mining, I believe, $8 billion on the move. An address that hasn't moved in what, like 13 years, something like that.
David Hoffman:
[3:08] Imagine hodling Bitcoin for 13 years, up to $8.6 billion.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[3:13] $8.6 billion. And of course, when this amount moves with one of those early addresses, everybody takes notice. There are a lot of rumors about this. Some people were saying, oh, well, maybe the whale was worried about, had some quantum fears. And of course, early Bitcoin addresses are susceptible to a quantum attack in a way that- Yeah.
David Hoffman:
[3:31] They're the most at risk.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[3:32] Yeah, the newer ones wouldn't. So maybe they're just moving for that. Other people were saying somebody maybe got out of jail. You know, like they've been in the clink for like a decade.
David Hoffman:
[3:41] Do you mean Ross Ulbricht?
Ryan Sean Adams:
[3:43] I have no... Yes, possibly.
David Hoffman:
[3:46] Yeah, people were talking about like, oh, well, Ross gets out of jail. And three months later, 80,000 Bitcoin moved from 2011 when the Silk Road was operational.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[3:55] Interesting.
David Hoffman:
[3:56] I mean, like, there's no evidence, there's only speculation, but it's a pretty good bit of speculation.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[4:00] There was also other people were saying someone got hacked, quite obviously. Other people were saying, this is the U.S. government buying, okay? Look, man, it's River Mill, right?
David Hoffman:
[4:10] Somebody was saying, okay,
Ryan Sean Adams:
[4:11] This is the US government going OTC, and this is Trump setting up his strategic Bitcoin reserve and finding an early whale and just making a nice OTC purchase. He's getting ready to announce it. I'm recycling rumors.
David Hoffman:
[4:24] Yeah, that one did not happen. That one did not happen.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[4:26] Of course, of course.
David Hoffman:
[4:27] It wasn't that one.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[4:28] The interesting thing about this, I always find, is this is free advertising for Bitcoin all the time and for crypto all the time because it's so mind-boggling to think about $8.6 billion just moving in an instant.
David Hoffman:
[4:41] And we all get to see.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[4:43] We all get to see. So it's free advertising for Bitcoin. Also, it's just like, we need some privacy, don't we? Wow. Everybody can see it. Every single transaction on chain. And it's cool for a bit.
David Hoffman:
[4:54] And then and then when you realize that we are legitimately trying to get all of society on chain and we still haven't like rid the world of authoritarianism, then you're like, oh, yeah, no, we need privacy.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[5:04] Yeah. So lots of things. But we have no idea why this Bitcoin is on the move. It'll probably be unresolved for forever, maybe. Or maybe someday we'll find out.
David Hoffman:
[5:12] The Bitcoin, the Bitcoiner who moved that is not going to raise his hand.
David Hoffman:
[5:16] It was me. And here's why I did it. That will not happen.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[5:19] All right, enough about Bitcoin. Tell me about ETH price, David, because we got to talk about ETH for a little bit on today's episode. It was a big week.
David Hoffman:
[5:26] ETH price is also on the move, $2,820, a recent high of $2,830. But ETH BTC is up on the week as well. We're up about 7 or 8%. So even when Bitcoin gets all time high, ETH BTC is up about 7 or 8% on the week this week. And since ETH was up in dollar terms and up in Bitcoin terms, you know what that's called, Ryan?
Ryan Sean Adams:
[5:51] What's that called?
David Hoffman:
[5:52] It's called a Ryan-Sean Adams week, my friend. When they're both green, it's called a Ryan week.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[5:56] Oh, my God. I appreciate you glowing me up. You know, I'll take credit for this one, too. I'll take credit for every week that ETH is green. Somebody else has got to take credit for the red weeks, though. It's not going to be big.
David Hoffman:
[6:07] Hang on. I'm going to contest you a little bit for the credit because while ETH was pumping, I was actually climbing. I was on a wall.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[6:14] You were climbing, but you were climbing. What were you? So what have you been climbing lately, by the way?
David Hoffman:
[6:19] Yeah. Okay. So my big climb got canceled just due to weather, unfortunately. First time that's ever happened to me, but it's always destined. So I'm just climbing a bunch of like smaller things rather than like a double overnight, like two overnights. I'm doing just like day climbs. This is a hike. This is like a trail run in the middle of two climbs. So last, yesterday I went to Italy and did a valley climb. So stayed low to the ground. Tomorrow, I go actually do a summit. So it's a bigger climb. So if there's a bigger pump tomorrow, I'm taking more of the credit. I'm taking more credit.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[6:50] I feel like that's right. And this is you on a morning run through what looks like a Sound of Music style landscape somewhere in France. It's absolutely beautiful. And I think you tagged this running from the bear. And you're talking about the bear market, right? You're just running from the bears.
David Hoffman:
[7:05] I'm running from the bears, meaning bearish people. I'm running away from bearish people. And people are like, I didn't see any bears. I'm like, okay, you didn't get it. Maybe it's a bad joke.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[7:14] Yeah, the ETH bears are really getting run out of town these days. I feel like there's a massive sentiment shift in Ether right now. I don't know if you've noticed it.
David Hoffman:
[7:22] But this is- Oh, definitely. Okay, this is accounts- I don't know how, but it's just like all the Ethereum communities is like, all right, we are bullish now and it's just time. It's just time to be bullish.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[7:31] It's time to be bullish. I think it is absolutely time to be bullish. I think the ETH community has really woken up to that. More on that later. I want to get some of your commentary on that and I'll give you some of mine, but this is an account that- this is a trader account, Pentoshi. Do you know this guy? I don't know him really.
David Hoffman:
[7:46] But- I know they count.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[7:47] He doesn't usually tweet ETH, you know, bullish sentiment. And now he is tweeting ETH bullish sentiment. So even when kind of traders, Bitcoin maxi types, start getting bullish on ETH, then you know something is happening.
David Hoffman:
[8:00] Right. Yeah, because I feel like the ETH community is kind of like,
Ryan Sean Adams:
[8:04] Misaligned with traders and traders are generally misaligned with like ethereum.
David Hoffman:
[8:08] Just because like the ethereum is just like no don't trade just hold yeah but then when traders are like okay eth looks actually kind of bullish you know it's true because that's like the last asset that they'll say is
Ryan Sean Adams:
[8:17] Bullish that's right right so so once every four years kind of all of these things align right and so maybe we're getting into an aligned territory this is a look at this chart okay now this is from this is pure eth maxi hopium i think but the context for this rational.
David Hoffman:
[8:32] Professional ETH maxi, I'll call it.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[8:33] Yes. The context for this chart, though, does have some history to it. And ETH has a history of ripping straight up. Once it decides to go, lots of people will be left behind. Are you one of them? Are you one of them, Bankless listener? Okay, so these are the big rips in the past, right? We had a 2016 kind of big rip up. We had the 2016 ICO boom. And then, of course, we had a 2017 ICO boom. And then, of course, we had a DeFi summer 2020. 20. And you could see a massive amount of price movement in a consolidated period of time. Okay. And if you keep drawing the square, David, we can have a massive move.
David Hoffman:
[9:09] If you just move the square over to where we are.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[9:12] Yeah. All the way to 100K ETH. Okay. It might not be as explosive as that, but there's a point.
David Hoffman:
[9:18] Yeah, it's not going to 100K. I'm sorry.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[9:20] When we have big price moves, it moves in a hurry and there's not much time. So you have to be positioned before ETH moves. Do you think that'll carry into this cycle?
David Hoffman:
[9:28] Yeah. You know, at some point, how long has ETHBitch just been flat? It's been ETHBitch. It's been flat for so long. It's been flat for like a third of his life. Yeah. So at some point, you know, at some point it's due. Yeah.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[9:41] It's due for a pump.
David Hoffman:
[9:42] Due for a pump.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[9:43] One other metric you might be interested in is the ETF flows. So yesterday, ETH ETF flows were 211 million inbound net inflows. Bitcoin was 215 million. So that's only a $4 million difference. on daily inflows, which is very bullish.
David Hoffman:
[10:01] Which is when like Bitcoin is eight times larger than ETH at $4 million. It doesn't matter.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[10:08] Yeah, it's fantastic. Now, some people are saying that all of this sentiment shift and we do have a price up this week, but what was it like a five, six percent price increase?
David Hoffman:
[10:18] It was not it was not it was not idiosyncratic. It was following the market.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[10:23] Yeah. And so this is this is ran crypto man ran, you know, ran. Right. And he said this. And this was, to be fair, before a little bit of the action on the upside this week. But he said this, I'm genuinely concerned about ETH. The sentiment on my timeline is euphoric, but the price isn't moving at all. ETH bulls are celebrating $2,600. Of course, now it's $2,800 at the time of recording, but still not any idiosyncratic pump. He said, if it doesn't actually start moving soon, the next move could be down. Why do you think there's a disconnect right now between the bullish sentiment, which is verging on euphoric? I mean, I don't think I've heard the ETH community this excited in a long time. But it's really, it's sentiment first. Usually you have price first and then sentiment follows price. And now we have sentiment first. What's up with that?
David Hoffman:
[11:10] It is pretty peculiar. I don't think I've ever remembered something like this happening quite this way before. You do have to point towards all of the East Treasury companies that have come online. Tom Lee was the unexpected white swan of East evangelism to Wall Street. I don't think anyone really saw Tom Lee coming. And he's a very credible figure. Yeah. And that's after Joseph Lubin and Sharp Link Gaming. And now there's like three, four, five more that are all coming online. Oh, yeah. And so, yeah, sentiment can kind of get ahead of price here. But also that makes sense with what treasury companies do. Like treasury companies have this expectation of buying more ETH than what they currently hold. And so there's all of these vehicles that are now, it's their number one job to go out and source as much ETH as possible. And all of them pumped this week. And so maybe the price didn't show up in the ETH price. It did a little bit, like $200 to $300 price increase. But all of the ETH treasury companies are up between 15% and 50%. Oh, that's true. SBET is up 50% this week. Oh, that's true. Did you ever buy any SBET? We don't actually talk about what we buy. Did you ever buy any SBET?
Ryan Sean Adams:
[12:17] I'm not going to say I didn't, David.
David Hoffman:
[12:19] How's that? Okay, I bought SBET when, like, all of crypto Twitter was, like, grave dancing on it. Because it, like, it did this crazy move up to $35, $50. And then it crashed down to, like, $7 or $8. And all of crypto Twitter, the anti-Eth people are, like, there's crime. It's dead. This country will never work. And then it turns out there was no crime. and there was just like the cohort of people who are gleefully grave dancing on something ETH related.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[12:46] I'm like, you know what?
David Hoffman:
[12:47] I'm going to buy. And that's what I bought. And I am up 80%. I'm up 80% right now.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[12:51] That's funny. I bet there's a lot of ETH believers, long-term ETH investors who are actually like, you know what? Screw it. I have enough ETH, but maybe I'm going to do some of these treasury stocks. And they're probably up like, you know, 2X, 3X, 4X on those treasury stocks. And maybe that accounts for some of it. I also, do you want another bullish take on the sentiment move before price? I'll give it to you. Okay. I think it's signal because I think this is holders and long-term investors who are just saying what you said a little bit earlier with enough is enough. Price has got to go up. We are bullish. And to see that on crypto Twitter, to see sentiment first before price, I think that's a signal because often you get kind of like a, you know, price moves and traders, you know, kind of action and they're pumping after the fact and they want to keep the momentum. But to see kind of the build-in sentiment before we get a good price move, it feels more foundational. It feels just a bit more fundamental here and I think could be a good sign.
David Hoffman:
[13:48] I think all of this is going to be determined by the ETH price over the next like two weeks. Because if there's no move, then it was just hopium. We were just having hopium and we were all just passing hopium around. But if it did move, then we're all going to pat ourselves on the back and be geniuses. And also that will inspire momentum for the next move because there is a like a positive feedback loop of seven ETH treasury companies go online. ETH pumps by $500. All of those treasury companies pump by like 3x. They have more premium to issue more assets so they can buy more ETH. And so we are in a very critical point right now, I would say, with the ETH market.
David Hoffman:
[14:27] where there needs to get some momentum under these ETH treasury vehicles so that the appreciation of ETH can show up in the equity so they can start the flywheel. And it has to happen like pretty soon.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[14:39] The thing that is new that we have never seen across any cycles is so much mainstream attention on ETH or the asset. So this is a clip. This is Joe Lubin on CNBC. You can see him. He's like on the hot seat. Most of the time you've seen Bitcoin folks be like on CNBC and Bloomberg and some of this traditional finance. We've got Vlad from Robinhood talking about tokenization. So he's a credible figure on traditional finance. You mentioned Tom Lee. You got Joe Lubin in rotation. You and I, David, just did an episode with the ETH treasury company BitDigital and the CEO. He's been making the rounds. So that is something new this cycle. And you were talking about the ETH treasury companies right now. There does seem to be some kind of a race for acquiring as much ETH as possible. well, maybe a race to $1 billion. So we have, of course, let me filter. You can find all this at the Strategic ETH Reserve, by the way. Let me filter by Treasuries.
David Hoffman:
[15:34] Website, dot XYZ.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[15:35] Yeah, dot XYZ. So we got Sharplink, that's Joe Lubin, SBET. They're number one. They've got almost 600 million ETH right now. Then we've got BitDigital, number two. That's the CEO, Dave and I just interviewed. That episode's going to be out next week. They've got close to 300 million in terms of ETH. And followed by this company, BTCS, they've got about $40 million of ETH. But just this week, they announced a plan to purchase $225 million more, I should say. And we also have Tom Lee, who's not yet on this chart, but we know is coming soon with a $250 million buy. And some kind of a promise to be like the biggest of all of them. So he's doing that. And then there was a fifth company that announced this week. The ticker for this company is GAME. And they announced an intent to purchase $100 million worth of ETH. And interesting, this is a gaming company of some sort. I haven't looked into the detail. But you know the Fortnite streamer, Twitch streamer Ninja? He's somehow involved in this? So all of this just happened in a very short period of time. And I think that's all feeding into sentiment right now.
David Hoffman:
[16:45] Yeah. It does feel frothy when unrelated Twitch streamers are doing ETH treasury companies. I would like that to be a little bit more closer to, I prefer Joe Lubin, personally.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[16:57] I feel like it's not frothy if ETH is not at all-time high. My God. I mean, if this is frothy, if we're frothy in the 2000s, we got to get to at least 5K to do something to make me excited anyway.
David Hoffman:
[17:11] So the Ethereum network issues about $6.5 million of ETH at present prices, 2,330 ETH a day. Joseph Lubin has stated that he intends on buying tens of millions of dollars of ETH per day. So just Joseph Lubin alone is sucking up all net new issuance, and that's just the one treasury company, and there's like five more to follow on top of that. So at some point, it has to actually show up in the ETH price. How much, what the magnitude is, remains to be seen, but something's got to give.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[17:43] I'm also excited about the way it's being pitched, by the way. I know you've been hiking the mountains this week, but did you catch this report that Fidelity put out?
David Hoffman:
[17:51] No, I did not, actually.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[17:52] Okay, so basically the title of this report is Blockchains as Emerging Economies. And this is again- I like that title.
David Hoffman:
[17:59] I love that title.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[18:01] You will absolutely love this report. Actually, I totally think you should read it or at least put it in chat GPT.
David Hoffman:
[18:06] Remember when we had Hasib on? I think it was the first time we ever had Hasib on and he had just released this article, like blockchains are cities. And then it was a good episode. And at the very end, we were like, Hasib, we think they're countries.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[18:19] And have for a long time. I mean, I was actually going down memory lane, David. Do you remember this episode? A Bankless Nation, episode number 17.
David Hoffman:
[18:26] Core Bankless, yeah.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[18:28] Yeah, basically the way to think of layer one networks and blockchains is as emerging economies. The way to think of their money is as a currency, particularly a store of value currency. Guess what? That's exactly what this Fidelity report says. Look at some of these charts, right? In the same way that blockchains can incorporate a GDP-like framework to illustrate how their economic activity has developed. yeah they compare they compare you know like nations exactly to to ethereum they they talk in terms of gdp like this one the following sections will also demonstrate that ether can serve as a medium of exchange and store of value okay like the way the way they couch it and the way they're pitching it is like they totally understand it they totally get it it's kind of how we've thought about them for a long time and now it's seeping into into the fidelity reports which is fantastic. In fact, this is Ryan Watkins, okay? I'm not sure if he's a fan of bankless, maybe like not so much, but he said- We've had him on the show. Yeah, okay. He said, listening to people show the new ETH treasury on CNBC legit sounds like I'm listening to a bankless podcast in 2021. I don't know.
David Hoffman:
[19:32] If you meant that as a compliment. ETH was all-time high and market dominance was all-time high. Fantastic. That's great.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[19:38] Yeah. So the narratives are getting through here too. And yeah, it's basically the narrative of ETH as a store of value asset. Now, Tom Lee is saying a bit more, he's saying like stablecoin, you're bullish stablecoins. ETH is the stablecoin platform. Therefore, you should be bullish ETH. This is kind of another report that came out this week from Electric Capital, which says as much. Also says ETH is a store of value asset, reserve asset.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[20:02] But they make the case for ETH as a store of value and a place for stablecoins tokenization. Anyway, this flood of reports, the flood of ETH treasuries feels like it's all happening at once. And all of this has contributed to the massive sentiment change.
David Hoffman:
[20:17] Beautiful. Yeah. It does feel like 2021, which feels really good. Actually, that was like my favorite time.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[20:24] So as you know, since I've come back, David, I've been more like the reckless bull. I'm just like, I'm kind of doing what a lot of people are doing right now, which is like, I'm deciding to be bullish.
David Hoffman:
[20:34] Why? You're leaning over your skis, not leaving too far. I didn't say that. But when you want to go fast down a mountain, you lean over your skis and you are leaning over your skis
Ryan Sean Adams:
[20:45] That that that's a way to frame it i would say i'm just like what i'm saying is like all of the elements are there like my take is like all of the elements are there for it to be worth way more and we just haven't captured the narrative for people to realize that anyway i came back i decided to be blue money gospel bullish right since i've come back it feels like you you are bullish eth but you're also more if i'm a reckless bull right now you're more of a cautionary type bull.
David Hoffman:
[21:11] Yeah, I'm leaning back on my skis.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[21:14] Okay, so you wrote this blog post this week called The Two Sides of ETH. And just give us your take, because I think you're wrestling. There's two wolves inside of David Hoffman. One is the ETH bull, maxi bull, and the other is kind of someone who's concerned
Ryan Sean Adams:
[21:28] about the Ethereum roadmap, at least to some degree. And tell me what you were getting across in this article that you published.
David Hoffman:
[21:34] Yeah. So what I'm my concern is that we have we have a lot of great narratives with Ethereum and narratives do couple to fundamentals in some degree. And like you see Tom Lee going on CNBC and talking about all of the great reasons that ETH is valuable. You see Fidelity doing it now. And so like if you want to paint a very bullish narrative for Ether, it's easy. It's easy to do that. And we are watching that happen in real time. that's what all these ETH treasury companies are doing which is great telling the ETH story always Ethereum always needs to have its story told it's one of the more complicated stories ever What I am concerned about is that we can use narrative and storytelling to like paper over cracks. And, you know, cracks will never be perfectly filled. Every blockchain has its foundations that have cracks in them. Like Bitcoin has its security budget, but it just papers that over with the 21 million hard cap. And that works very well. Don't look over here.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[22:33] Don't worry about content. Don't worry about security budget.
David Hoffman:
[22:35] Yeah. Yeah. Like don't look at the stake rated QoS centralization of Solana. Like, you know, the chain goes fast, you know, decentralized NASDAQ. And so it's very easy to paper over problems or incomplete parts, components of the Ethereum fundamentals. And what I'm trying to say is, let's not forget those and let's still be, wear our problems on our chest like we always do, talk about them, focus on them, talk about how to fix them. Because when we do fix them, then ETH can be even more bullish. And so like I'm in pursuit of like kind of taking the hard path of just trying to just take all of the pain now so that we never have to have any of the three, four years downwards price action that ETH has had in the last four years ever again. And we have to do that by like taking the medicine, building the foundation right. Because if you build the foundation right, then you just give so much more ammo to people like Tom Lee and Joseph Lubin. So I'm kind of just advocating to like not paper over our problems and still prioritize them and emphasize them. And it's OK to talk about them.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[23:46] That's impossible to disagree with. That's a complete agree from my perspective. What are those things that you see as kind of the problem now in Ethereum that need to be worked on? And yeah, like what would you name?
David Hoffman:
[23:58] I think the big thing is just the layer two value capture question. And there's no real way to like we can't go back. we're not undoing layer twos, right? But we can
Ryan Sean Adams:
[24:09] Heavily encourage and research and push towards base and native rollups is like one possible solution.
David Hoffman:
[24:15] But there's needs to be a stronger supply chain of like Ethereum's layer two roadmap and the value capture of ETH. And there's no, we can't tariff the layer twos. That's nonsensical. That's not going to work. What we can do is we can build out standards for like native rollups or base rollups that use more layer one resources so that when somebody buys and sends a billion of stable coins that actually does have a meaningful value flow into ETH or the asset. Whereas today, now, if you just buy and send $10 billion of USEC on base, ETH gets like less than one penny of value capture from that transaction. Yeah.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[24:54] Look, I get that. And it also seems like very much that ETH has bent the roadmap in that direction anyway. I mean, there is massive work on base and native rollups.
David Hoffman:
[25:03] There's still a lot to do.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[25:04] There's a lot to do. Did you catch the Justin Drake at ETHCC who was talking about how we get to 10,000 TPS, right? There's massive improvements that have gone on with ZK proving technology, real-time ZK proving technology. And there's a credible path in the next five years to get to 10,000 TPS. Not to say that that work still doesn't need to be done. It absolutely does. But like there is definitely a shift towards prioritizing scaling the L1, prioritizing based native rollups, and prioritizing interoperability. but I totally get the take that like job's not finished, right? And like if we lose sight of that, then we won't be able to sustain this momentum beyond kind of the narrative pump. That said to me, I do feel like ETH doesn't need a reason to pump at this point. It's got a lot of catch up to do for Bitcoin.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[25:53] And I think it has that. I also think a lot of the ETH bulls in this space have some PTSD from the last four years as well.
David Hoffman:
[26:01] I definitely think I've got some of that. Yeah?
Ryan Sean Adams:
[26:03] You've been hurt too many times? Yeah. Yeah. So I totally get it. I think you'll feel a lot better at 5K, David.
David Hoffman:
[26:10] So I think you're right. Yeah.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[26:14] Let's talk about some other things too, because E does have some competitors nipping at its heels here. Solana, the ETF, saw 75 million in inflows in the first week. So remember, we were kind of watching that.
David Hoffman:
[26:25] Respectable. Well done.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[26:26] Yeah, it's pretty respectful. So here they are on the charts, 75 million. And Eric Balchunas says, it's all much smaller than Bitcoin or ETH, but there's a lot of green numbers and that's good. So $33 million in a day, that was their biggest day. For context, I think ETH and Bitcoin had a $200 million plus day on the same day. So just like much smaller, but there's only one of them right now. And also, I don't know if you saw this, BitMining is converting its holdings to a sole treasury and raising up to $300 million to support a Solana-facing focus strategy.
David Hoffman:
[26:57] Miner companies are abandoning Bitcoin mining to buy shit coins, shit coins from the frame reference of Bitcoiners. Yeah. That is so funny, dude. I know.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[27:07] I know. So that is happening too. So a lot of things going on,
Ryan Sean Adams:
[27:11] David. But what do we got coming up?
David Hoffman:
[27:12] Coming up next, we're going to talk about the pump token. Everyone comes to Bankless to get Ryan and David's take on the pump token. We've got all the details. We're going to talk about what we think about the $4 billion valuation. But-
Ryan Sean Adams:
[27:22] Just like Ethereum, Pump also has its competitors that are nipping at its heels. And so Bonk is the new Pump?
David Hoffman:
[27:31] So we're going to talk about the Bonk metrics that have come to... This is Ryan's favorite subject. You can see it in his face. All the Bonk metrics that are interfering in Pump's market. And then we're also going to talk about the Zelensky suit drama and what it teaches us about prediction market. So we're going to get to all of that and more right after we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Well, Like Pump Fun is launching the ticker Pump Token through an ICO beginning on July 12th. That is this Saturday. On their announcement tweet, they tweeted out, our plan is to kill Facebook, TikTok, and Twitch on Solana. So what are the details? One trillion tokens. Remember when everyone back in like four years ago was like issuing one billion tokens? And I was like, all right, you guys are really playing into the unit bias thing pretty hard. Well, Pump's coming in hot with one trillion tokens. Of course, of course. 24% of the tokens are reserved for the community and ecosystem initiatives. 20% is going to the team. 2.4% ecosystem fund. 2% for foundation. And 13% for existing investors. 3% for live streaming, which I think might be streaming incentives. I thought ICOs were illegal. Which I'm assuming is quite a lot of the chunk of the $700 million raise that they raised from private investors. And they're also looking to raise even more from the public ICO, which is the thing that I just talked about. $4 billion at the ICO price. All that got filled up in that $700 raise by private investors. All tokens sold will be fully unlocked in 72 hours.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[28:58] I think you could just ask questions.
David Hoffman:
[28:59] So if your sale begins on Saturday, we will see the Pump token trading on Tuesday. I believe that's how that works. How can you buy into the Pump ICO if you are so interested? If you have an account with BuyBit, KuCoin, BitGet, MC, Maxi, Kraken, or Gate.io, all of these have partnered with Pump Fund to do their ICO because you need to be KYC'd. Because I could only assume, I doubt American United States citizens are going to be allowed into this ICO for probably regulation reasons.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[29:26] And yeah, be ready at 2 p.m. on Saturday, UTC. I don't know what time zone that is. Figure that out.
David Hoffman:
[29:32] And those are the details. Ryan, what's the biggest thing that comes to your head when you see all this?
Ryan Sean Adams:
[29:37] Yeah, I guess my first thought is this video itself, the promo video, is absolutely hilarious. It's exactly what it feels like to look at Pump.Fun, at least for me. And I can see the appeal to some people, for sure. Another thing that comes to mind is ICOs again. Again, like I don't think any company would dare to do this under the Gensler regime. So the fact that we're doing this maybe means something. I think there's still this like, what is the pump token? Does it have utility? Is it a pseudo equity?
David Hoffman:
[30:07] Is it 25% of the pump fund revenues will go to buy and burn the token.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[30:13] And that is a good thing, right? Yeah, that's a good thing. It adds value and adds utility and adds revenue share to something. It's not just a meme coin.
David Hoffman:
[30:21] Basically, right? It's not a meme coin. It's not a meme coin. But like where does it
Ryan Sean Adams:
[30:27] Fit in the whole, like we still don't have clarity from the SEC as to where it fits. So, I mean, I guess that's good that they're doing this. I mean, ICOs are better than not having ICOs.
David Hoffman:
[30:37] I like ICOs. I really like ICOs. Yeah.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[30:40] I guess the big question for me is like.
David Hoffman:
[30:41] This sale mechanism I'm actually quite happy with because people are going back and forth, $4 billion overvalued, undervalued, and there's no consensus, which means I think it's fairly priced.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[30:53] Yeah, so are you a buyer of $4 billion of pump?
David Hoffman:
[30:56] Will I be buying it? No, because I'm lazy. Do I think it will go up? Yes, I think there will be some initial volatility because the seed investors are getting unlocked. So investors are unlocked in day one. And there is a lot of people who have made a lot of money. And so there needs to be a pretty solid amount of buying pressure to counteract all of the seed investors who are exiting. Yeah. And so there's going to be a lot of volatility inside of like the first day. But yeah, I bet you, I would bet it ends the week higher than $4 billion.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[31:31] I'm not a buyer just because it's not my thing, but like- It's not your thing. Yeah, it's just not my thing, but that's fine. What do you think of this? So this is one of the founders saying, now we're aiming to kill legacy social media platforms with Pump, right? This is obviously hyperbolic, but do you think there's an element of this is a disruption to Twitch and to Twitter and to Instagram, as they were saying in the initial tweet?
David Hoffman:
[31:56] Yeah, so he, in his second tweet, Alon says, users today are slaves to the algorithm, throttled against monetization and subject to censorship. Buy pump and you'll become a part of creating this reality. I just skipped a bunch of the middle ground, but he was like, yeah, buy pump as like a way to like, if you, buying pump is a way to like signal like you're opting out of this system and you're going to opt into new rules. And my mind is like, okay, if you're going to try and kill TikTok, Facebook, like Twitch, all of these things, like you're going to replace them with Pump. Is that a different algorithm that we would? Is that better?
Ryan Sean Adams:
[32:31] Is that not clearly better to me, but it is different.
David Hoffman:
[32:33] Not clearly better to me. I'm happy that there's more choice. There's going to be content that's going to be funny and interesting and engaging on the Pump streaming platform. Is it allowing people to break free from the shackles of Web2 algorithms? I don't know that that's what it's going to do.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[32:50] Yeah, it's definitely a different algorithm. Like the question is like, net, is this good for society or not? Or does this kind of like, you know, foster the continuation of like nihilism, whatever? You know, I definitely could make the argument that it's just, you know, creating shackles in a new type of algorithm. But yeah, it is different. It's like the existing platforms are not running the, you know, token meme coin price play that Pump is running right now. So it's novel.
David Hoffman:
[33:15] I think we might have skipped a step in this conversation, which is actually talking about what PumpFun wants to do for those who haven't been privy to it. They are looking to build a direct Twitch competitor, a streaming platform where your stream is a PumpToken. And so there's a chart that goes to the stream. And a lot of the money that they've raised are raising like $700 million, $700 million, is likely going to go to like paying streamers to stream on the platform. This is a normal thing that you do in the Web2 streaming world. So getting big streamers, streamers like Ninja, the guy that just launched the E-Treasury company, to come stream on Pump and bring their fan base on Pump. And so they need a lot of marketing dollars for that because they're shooting for home runs. And so got to give them props for being ambitious. And so they're just trying to make a streaming platform competitor. And so that's what they need all the money for. I think that's pretty valid. And like, again, I think that there's going to be very hilarious and viral moments that come out of the Pump streaming platform that would have never come out on Twitch, and I'm looking forward to seeing those. The just positioning that they're trying to take down all of Web2 with a tokenized streaming platform, that doesn't, I don't, I'm not on that boat.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[34:24] The other question is, well, how big is the moat for Pump, right? And can it be unseated? There have been some attempts, but actually, like just this week, there was maybe the most successful attempt yet. Bonk.fun captured 62% of Solana launchpad revenue, The entire market for these launchpad-type things did that last week.
David Hoffman:
[34:44] We've never seen pump funds market dominance in token launchpads this small by comparison. And this is just a very short snapshot in time. Like overall, pump dominance has been just gargantuan. But it has been compressed over the last, what candles are these? Like one-day candles? It has been compressed by Bonk more than it's ever been compressed by anyone before.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[35:02] Tell me about Bonk because I haven't really been paying attention to this stuff. So Bonk is a meme coin. I know this. It's a long-standing Solana meme coin. you know with some legitimacy i don't know if it's.
David Hoffman:
[35:12] That same bunk
Ryan Sean Adams:
[35:13] Okay i assumed it was but you tell me and then now they're launching they're launching a launchpad basically, Yeah, I mean, this launchpad has been around for a while.
David Hoffman:
[35:23] Why it's resurging right now, I don't know. I'm on the website, and it looks like a PumpFun clone.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[35:31] That maxes out our knowledge on MemeCoin launchpads, David. So let's turn to the Zelensky suit.
David Hoffman:
[35:37] Okay, I know a little bit more about this one.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[35:39] Now, you compared this in the intro to the blue and gold dress, and I think there's a lot of people who maybe don't know what you're talking about, but you're talking about this image, right?
David Hoffman:
[35:46] Yeah, yeah. What color is that dress?
Ryan Sean Adams:
[35:49] Okay, so this dress is gold quite clearly when I look at this dress.
David Hoffman:
[35:52] Yeah, it was white and gold.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[35:54] Yeah, white and gold. That's what I see.
David Hoffman:
[35:55] Yeah, that's what I see too. Apparently some people see black and blue.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[35:58] They see black and blue, okay.
David Hoffman:
[36:00] And this is like a viral thing that happened like a decade ago or something. It was like everyone was like, what color is this dress? And there was like the black and blue people and there was the white and gold people. Okay.
David Hoffman:
[36:10] When you look at this picture of Vladimir Zelensky, is that a suit? And there are further pictures. You can keep on scrolling.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[36:19] Down i could keep on scrolling okay the first one second one okay look at them it's it's all black it's definitely there's some sort of suit type of jacket here he has a lapel.
David Hoffman:
[36:30] There's lapels there
Ryan Sean Adams:
[36:31] There's a colored shirt some cat you know i i think it could pass as like a casual designer type suit it sort of depends on what you mean by suit man i'm not in the fashion industry.
David Hoffman:
[36:42] So what's a suit point right it really does depend on what you mean why does this matter
Ryan Sean Adams:
[36:46] Why are we talking about this week?
David Hoffman:
[36:48] Because the polity market for this, which had a number of millions of dollars riding on this, because this wasn't really just gamblers gambling on whether Zelensky will wear a suit. This is indicative of, because why won't Zelensky wear a suit? Because he's at war. And so that's what he said.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[37:06] They were betting on whether he would wear a suit or not, right? That was the polity market. Will Zelensky wear a suit before July is the bet.
David Hoffman:
[37:13] Yeah, is the bet. And so if the if the war ended before July, then you would see Zelensky wearing a suit in theory. This is like how some people have thought. And so it's a proxy market for other larger, more geopolitical things. It's also a proxy market of like, OK, will Zelensky bend the knee to Donald Trump because he was made fun of. and so it's not just like let's roll the dice and see if he's going to wear a suit it's a proxy for a bunch of other things but he wore
Ryan Sean Adams:
[37:41] This in the month of June he.
David Hoffman:
[37:43] Wore this and now
Ryan Sean Adams:
[37:44] There's some dispute as to whether it's a suit or not.
David Hoffman:
[37:47] Yes and so it settled in the no he did not wear a suit so according to Polymarket which this went into dispute and so it was initially I think it was actually initially saying yes he did wear a suit one issue with this story was that Zelensky has worn this suit before, and a previous polymarket betting market also already settled no in the past. And so there's already been precedent for this suit is settled as no. A further hiccup is on this polymarket event. One of the conditions was credible news sources would report that Zelensky was wearing a suit, which did happen. And so like seven or eight or nine different news companies. Oh, that was the criteria?
Ryan Sean Adams:
[38:35] They listed some criteria and definitions?
David Hoffman:
[38:38] Yes. And it's still settled to know. Why did it settle to know? Because when poly markets are in contention and they go into dispute, they go into the UMA, the court, it's like a court, UMA, Universal Market Access.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[38:52] UMA, which has a UMA token, right?
David Hoffman:
[38:54] Yeah, very old project. Yeah. Which has its own token. And if you are a token holder, then you are the oracle, basically. You get to vote in the oracle. And so it's ultimately like governance by UMA oracle.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[39:05] And this backs all poly market markets, right? UMA protocol.
David Hoffman:
[39:08] And 99% of the time it never goes to UMA because they just settle normally without fair and orderly. Yeah. This one did not. It went to the UMA oracle and they said, no, it's not a suit. Why did they say that? Maybe because the market before this had already settled no and it was the same suit. And so they wanted to keep it continuous. If you are on the, yes, that is a suit, you are very upset. People have been critiquing UMA token holders as being corrupt. I haven't seen any evidence of corruption.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[39:36] Subject to bribes. Subject to bribes, maybe. Subject to bribes, yeah. The protocol is corrupt. Yeah.
David Hoffman:
[39:41] Ultimately, my big takeaway for this, here's my big conclusion, Ryan.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[39:44] Yeah.
David Hoffman:
[39:44] Poly market and prediction markets generally are set up to collapse in a Schrodinger sense. And so if something has to collapse, like one or two outcomes needs to happen. Yeah. And in this universe, it's entirely possible that the position does not collapse. Actually, the position stays open. And why was Zelensky wearing this suit? Well, because he was trying to actually split the difference. because he wanted to like wear a suit-y enough thing to like appease Donald Trump, but still appear that he is a military leader who is at war, which is exactly what he did, which is why there's now a polymarket dispute, which is like, did he wear a suit or did he not? Which means Zelensky did his job of confusing everyone. It's like, okay, he kind of wore a suit, but he also kind of didn't. And now there's like millions of dollars on the line about who wore the suit or if it was a suit or not.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[40:36] Isn't this just a hole or a flaw in prediction markets? Like number one, like, couldn't you just argue that you can't have a prediction market with a binary outcome that collapses if we don't even have social consensus on what a suit is? Like at the very beginning, when you showed me that, I'm like, well, it depends on your definition of a suit. And I don't know, there's not a standard definition of a suit. It's like, it's a fashion statement. Is this art beautiful? Is this person beautiful? It's all subjective, right? So you can't really make, maybe it's the way that the question was asked or the way the market was defined that's the problem here.
David Hoffman:
[41:07] I would agree. And yeah, so like I think it's really just a quirk of prediction markets that they are expected to collapse and sometimes they don't have to necessarily collapse. And yeah, the way that you phrase the question is very important. How you set the criteria is very important. I don't think Polymark is at fault at all. I don't really know what's going on behind the scenes at UMA. It's not the token holders aren't that distributed, but no one really knows. People, again, people are claiming corruption. I don't really think that there's any evidence for that.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[41:37] I think it's kind of like buyer. You have to be careful of what markets you bet on. There's another element of this too, which I've always wondered, right? So let's say Zelensky wanted to bet in this market, okay? So Zelensky could bet anonymously in this market. He could bet on, yes, I'm going to wear a suit. Zelensky's going to wear a suit. And then the next day, he could put on a suit and wear it. He has some level of control over the outcome of this market. And there's lots of markets like that, right? I don't understand how that even works in a prediction market sense, right?
David Hoffman:
[42:08] I think that's a part of the game. I don't think that is within the rules.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[42:12] So you just basically know that if you're betting on a market, that there is somebody influential who could just decide to change the outcome of what happens and win money as a result of that.
David Hoffman:
[42:27] They are not perfectly orderly because they're predicting the future,
David Hoffman:
[42:30] right? It's not going to be perfectly orderly every single time.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[42:34] There you go. Buyer beware if you're looking at prediction markets. Dave, we've got a lot more coming. Phantom Wallet adding hyperliquid perps. People are saying this is a loss for Solana. It definitely seems like a win for hyperliquid. So we'll talk about that. Also, you won a case, a court case, against Janet Yellen and the U.S. Treasury.
David Hoffman:
[42:50] Did I really know? The government just gave up. They lost. Which counts.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[42:53] I feel like you won by default then. Also, Commissioner Hester Peirce, she's raising an eyebrow on these things that people have been calling tokenized stocks. We'll talk about all that and more. But before we do, we want to thank.
David Hoffman:
[43:03] And Phantom Wallet has added Hyperliquid perps into its wallet. So if you are now a user of Phantom, you can just go and get a perp done right inside of the wallet. Never have to leave. They wrote, Phantom's intuitive mobile-first design will allow you to easily open, close, and manage positions directly within your wallet. No extra apps, no confusing interfaces, and no compromises on speed control and performance. 100 markets, 40x leverage, powered by Hyperliquid. Hyperliquid, Ryan, has, I know, I'm going to guess, you have not bridged to Hyperliquid.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[43:33] I have not bridged to Hyperliquid, though. It is pretty cool. It's very exciting to see perps in a more open finance type way.
David Hoffman:
[43:40] The bridging to Hyperliquid has always been probably the big bottleneck for getting to Hyperliquid because you already go to Arbitrum and then you got to bridge over and apparently it's not very easy. I have also not bridged over to Hyperliquid.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[43:51] Because neither of us are traders.
David Hoffman:
[43:53] The fact that they are now in Phantom Wallet, the mobile wallet, on your phone.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[43:57] Super easy, right?
David Hoffman:
[43:58] It's a pretty big deal for Hyperliquid. Yeah.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[44:01] And one thing that's notable here is that Phantom is integrating Hyperliquid, right? So some in the Solana community are saying Phantom could have chosen Jupyter Exchange as the perps provider. It's a Solana native project, $1.4 billion. Remember that, like, you know, Phantom is kind of like Solana's wallet. It sort of grew up in that space. I know it's multi-chain now, supports Ethereum, supports all sorts of layer twos, but, you know, I think many in Solana. Yeah. Okay. So many in Solana. I think so. I think a number of them. But and many in the Solana community have always thought of Phantom as kind of their chain. And the fact that they're going to Hyperliquid instead of Jupiter, some of the Solana community are saying, well, this seems like a loss for like for Solana. And I don't think they're wrong about that. But yeah, I also think that, of course, this is what Phantom was going to do. I mean, this is an interesting thing where it sort of puts successful wallets in kind of the super app type category, right? They are the user aggregator, and they can just pick the best chain of all of the chains to do the functions that their users want to do. And so, like, why should they only do things on one chain and have chain loyalty from this perspective? They're just going to integrate whatever they want. And they're in a great position here with these, like, app-specific chains that are doing one thing and doing it really well. in that they can kind of direct traffic and their users wherever they want.
David Hoffman:
[45:20] Yeah, yeah. Yeah, those are all my takes as well. Phantom has just done an incredible job slowly building out the right features in the right time and just adding hyperliquid. It just makes a ton of sense.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[45:31] This is Uma Roy saying this phantom and hyperliquid integration is bullish for phantom, bullish for hyperliquid, bearish for Solana was her take on this. So, yeah. What do you think of the hype token, by the way? You a buyer?
David Hoffman:
[45:44] I could be. I've thought about it.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[45:46] $12 billion or so, $13 billion, throwing off a lot of cash.
David Hoffman:
[45:50] It's only $12? I feel like it should be higher than that. $14.3. $14.3.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[45:55] So compare it to like Robinhood or something like that. It's got some perps, right?
David Hoffman:
[45:59] Well, Robinhood's at $85 billion. Yeah. Robinhood's very rare. Room to grow, right? Fully diluted. Maybe I'm a boomer if I'm thinking fully diluted. 40 diluted of $43 billion. Ooh. So, yeah. So half of a Solana.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[46:14] Yeah. Some big unlocks coming. Some big unlocks. That's why I've always stopped from doing it. It's just I'm always like, the unlocks. But that's probably a dumb take.
David Hoffman:
[46:23] I just think of Hyperliquid as just like, it's just the next generation version of BitMEX. And BitMEX was huge. And why did BitMEX get taken down? Well, because it was centralized. And a bunch of other reasons. So like, yeah, like Hyperliquid likely has a permanent fixture in the crypto world just because perps do. But I don't know if I have edge there buying hype. And so, you know, stick to what you know. Yeah.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[46:48] Well, one thing you know is how to beat the U.S. government in your court cases, David, because you had a win this week. All right. This is the this is the official news. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit Court officially ended the legal fight over U.S. Treasury sanctions against Tornado Cash. Of course, there's still the Roman storm trials that are happening. I think they may be happening next week, actually, Dave, so we've got to cover that. It's coming right up. But there was also some court battles between whether users actually had the right and ability to use Tornado Cash. And you were a plaintiff in this case, actually. Give us some details. What is this case? What happened here?
David Hoffman:
[47:23] Yeah, take us all the way back in time. Right after OFAC put Tornado Cash contract addresses on the OFAC list, meaning that if you use it, that's a felony, so you can't use it, a bunch of
Ryan Sean Adams:
[47:36] People in the.
David Hoffman:
[47:36] Ethereum ecosystem got dusted. So somebody else sent 0.1 ETH outbound to, like, you got dusted, I got dusted.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[47:45] Shaquille O'Neal got dusted.
David Hoffman:
[47:47] And so technically, since we touched the contracts, we were all in violation of the OFAC sanctions list.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[47:53] The contracts touched us in a way.
David Hoffman:
[47:55] But that's still- They touched us. I didn't go to the contracts, but it doesn't really matter because my address is now linked to, like David Hoffman.eth address was linked to Tornado Cash. So I had to go piss me off because when I go and talk to the lawyers, they were like, oh yeah, you just violated OFAC. I'm like, I just did nothing though. I didn't do anything I said on my hands. and they said like yeah you need to go fill out this form now and it's like i have to go fill out a form like i do this one time a year when i file my taxes it's the only time i'm ever compelled to do anything now i have to be compelled a second time to do this piss me off okay so
Ryan Sean Adams:
[48:30] It was the documents that pissed you off it wasn't.
David Hoffman:
[48:32] About protecting americans privacy to do something okay it was they forced me to do something or else apparently i'm gonna be a felon i'm gonna have to go to jail because somebody sent me. Insane, right?
David Hoffman:
[48:42] Absolutely insane. Violation of my freedoms. Sure. And so Coin Center reached out to me and they were like, hey, if you would like to be a plaintiff in this case, we will go sue Janet Yellen. And I am like, fuck yes. Let's do this. And really, that's about as much involvement in this case that I've had. They update me every now and then. Well, this is the latest update.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[49:04] The latest update.
David Hoffman:
[49:04] And this is the latest update. There will be no more updates because this is the end.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[49:08] The U.S. government was just like, we dropped the case, which is an admission that you were right. So you didn't technically win. You didn't lose. But I think that means you won by default. They gave up.
David Hoffman:
[49:18] I won by default. So I was right in my curmudgeon-ness of being compelled to file documents because tornado cash is technology. It is not illegal. You cannot make a smart contract illegal. And that is the precedent that has been established by this case. Well, well done, David. Huge tip of the hat to all the Coin Center people for actually doing all of the hard work. I just got dusted.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[49:38] Yeah, and now Tornado Cash is no longer on the OFAC sanction list. I believe that was removed under the new administration. There's still a court case to win, which is the Roman Storm court case. Yes. I think he almost has all of them. It would be.
David Hoffman:
[49:47] Such a tragedy if we got access to Tornado Cash and we set the precedent that smart contracts cannot be illegal and Roman Storm still went to jail. That would be a huge tragedy.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[50:00] Yeah, you can still give to that. By the way, look, man, he almost raised all of his support here. He's at 92%, which is awesome. But you could still donate to that cause and help Roman Storm with his legal defenses there. David, let's pivot the conversation. Some layer ones are making moves. It's kind of a different environment than the environment we grew up with with respect to foundations. So this is Breaking Bullish, which is a crypto exchange is going all in on Solana.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[50:24] This is the Solana account tweeting this. The crypto exchange with 1.4 trillion in trading volume is migrating their core infrastructure to Solana native stable coins to power custody, payments, trading and settlement. you really get the sense that the Solana Foundation is heavy on the BD side of things, right? They're trying to make deals happen. They're actively engaging. This is something that the Ethereum Foundation doesn't do at all. It's just like not in their DNA, not in their ethos to do. And it's not just Solana. It's like, here's Monad. So this is a layer one that hasn't yet launched. It's going to be like an EVM layer one. It's coming soon. It's been coming soon for a while but yeah it's coming it's coming.
David Hoffman:
[51:02] Soon all right it's
Ryan Sean Adams:
[51:03] Coming soon david maybe knows okay so they just the monad foundation just acquired a stable coin infrastructure company called portal and this is even more of an escalation it's not just bd we're actually doing acquisitions at the foundation level right what and they're trying to stable coin.
David Hoffman:
[51:20] Oh not in trining but they're gonna have like a monad flavored stable coin on monad chain at block number one i think yeah i I mean, it makes sense in this day and age because you need to have apps on your chains. You can't just have chains in this day and age.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[51:33] What does this make you think of, though? This is like kind of operating much more like a company than, you know, the foundations of years past.
David Hoffman:
[51:39] That's how I think of Solana.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[51:41] As a fintech company?
David Hoffman:
[51:42] I consider Solana to be a company, yeah.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[51:44] A fintech company with a protocol, would you say? Or do you think the protocol is like part of the company and it's all just like fintech?
David Hoffman:
[51:49] Yeah, blurry lines.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[51:51] I sort of think the same with Monad as well. Yeah, I think.
David Hoffman:
[51:54] The grand trend shift, starting from Bitcoin, and Bitcoiners will point to Ethereum, be like, Ethereum the company. And then Ethereum will look at Solana.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[52:05] Not even close. Not even close.
David Hoffman:
[52:06] But comparison to Bitcoin, right? Sure. Ethereum does grants. Ethereum did a grant to Uniswap. Now Uniswap is a huge institution on Ethereum. So you can see some of the patterns. There's a spectrum here. There's a spectrum, yeah. Then Ethereum looks at Solana and be like, that's a company. And then Solana's going to look at Monad and be like, well, that's a company. And I'm on the Ethereum side where Ethereum's not a company, but everything downstream of Ethereum is definitely a company.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[52:32] Yeah. I mean, yeah, I think well put. My comment is I didn't know foundations could do that. I guess they're doing that now. You guys have.
David Hoffman:
[52:39] To do that in 2025.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[52:40] I guess so. If you're new and starting in 2022, this is kind of cool. This is something I'll always appreciate about the Bitcoin ecosystem and Bitcoiners is the lengths that they go to to make sure you can like do niche cases on Bitcoin. This is Jack Dorsey introducing a decentralized messaging service and Bitcoin transfer service, not using cell towers, not using an internet connection, but just using Bluetooth. Okay, this is an open source app that he built so that if I'm near you, I can send you some Bitcoin via Bluetooth. Now, you're like, how does that work? Because obviously it has to connect to a node and settle on the internet. It does, like peer-to-peer kind of in the background. It syncs sort of later. But there's some way to get like some instant confirmation type or some fast confirmation type guarantees if I just want to send you Bluetooth from my phone to yours without an internet connection. Kind of cool, right?
David Hoffman:
[53:35] Yeah, in a science experiment kind of way.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[53:38] In an end-of-the-world type way too. You know, the cell towers are down. All we got left is Bluetooth.
David Hoffman:
[53:44] No, I don't think it's a cell tower is down kind of thing. I think it's a authoritarian government kind of thing.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[53:49] Yeah, I think it's that too. Or the government censoring your Bitcoin. Anyway, I love that Bitcoiners do that. It's fantastic. David, we should-
David Hoffman:
[53:55] Fantastic ROI on some of those investments, you know?
Ryan Sean Adams:
[53:58] We should do a tokenized stock check-in. So did you see this this week? Robinhood was engaging the regulators over tokenized equities. So regulators in the EU were saying, hey, this whole private shares thing, like open AI, what are you guys doing here? Is this even legal and giving them some grief? So I guess, is that expected? What do you think of this?
David Hoffman:
[54:18] Kind of makes me bullish Vlad.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[54:21] Makes you bullish Vlad that he's like pushing the envelope?
David Hoffman:
[54:23] Yeah. That's what it takes. Yeah. There's a tweet that I really like from my friend Austin who works at Dragonfly. I hope he has it pinned. He tweeted out something along the lines of, no, he doesn't have it pinned. He tweeted out something on the lines of like, all good things on blockchains are all slightly illegal. Nice. I like that.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[54:43] Just touching on illegal. Well, this was- Okay.
David Hoffman:
[54:46] Here's what he says. Most successful crypto products start off as kind of illegal. From Coinbase to Circle to Polymarket to Uniswap to Hyperliquid. If no one thinks the product is a little illegal, it's probably not that interesting. This is only natural. Crypto exists as skirts around incumbent power structures. If the product can succeed within those structures, then it doesn't belong on-chain anyway. Obviously, building in good faith alongside counsel is necessary, but respectfully don't ask for permission to build something people want. And I'm like, yeah, vibes, dude. Let's go back to early, early crypto.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[55:17] I largely agree with that, except I would say there's an important axis to look at, which is whether the product is actually good or not and does what it says it will do, right? And Robinhood aside, so I had a conversation. I know you couldn't make this one because of your internet, but the podcast getting released with a tokenized stock company called Denari. This is Gabriel Ott. And his take was basically like, you know, the things floating around in X stocks, those are just like not good products. Okay. They're trading at massive deltas to the actual product that you're buying. So if you're by Apple in X stock format, that price could be totally out of whack with the Apple on an exchange. it's not one for one backed right and like if we're going to do the whole tokenized security thing let's make sure we don't take shortcuts and we do it right it's kind of like if we're going to do the stablecoin thing let's not do a tara luna like debacle that's going to screw everyone over let's do something that actually works like a make or die or you know something like circle or tether and so his take was basically like xdocs are just, They're just not good products and they're probably illegal. And there are ways to do this so you get fully DTC settled.
David Hoffman:
[56:33] Stocks without KYC, definitely illegal.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[56:35] Well, one thing about some of these instruments, Hester Peirce was actually weighing in. And you know, Hester's like, she is a crypto advocate. She knows the technology. She is very rational. She wants to support free and open capital markets. But even she was raising some eyebrows and you could tell it. So she published this speech. It's a very short speech by Hester Peirce standards, but basically I'm going to give you the paraphrase because I feel like by now I can speak a little Hester Peirce. She's basically saying like, be careful making these Liechtenstein domiciled SPV stock IOUs your tokenized stock thing. She's basically saying because this is illegal, probably, and could be kind of a bad thing for capital markets and for protecting investors. And before I bring the hammer down on you guys, you should probably come in and check with us because we really want to make tokenized stocks work for crypto. But some of these instruments are not the way to do it. And she wasn't talking necessarily about X stocks, but I kind of feel like she also was. Anyway, that's my paraphrase interpretation. And it was pretty much validated by conversation I had with Gabriel Ott that's coming out on Monday, all about tokenized stocks and kind of what they are and like what they should be.
David Hoffman:
[57:50] Yeah, I'm pretty excited for that episode. You were telling me it's a pretty good download on like how a stock becomes a stock and then how a stock becomes a token. out on monday so yeah i'm gonna listen to that one when that comes out i think when like tokenized stocks or like pseudo tokenized stocks is probably what these actually are when they first come they're just destined to be bad products because we can't have the real thing because like you have to have a workaround that workaround is going to be janky we are seeing the first generations generation zero of tokenized stocks right now they all kind of suck and really in order for them to be good, there needs to be a clear path that the SEC needs to make and bless as saying like, anyone can do this path and you can have a legitimate, compliant tokenized stock.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[58:34] This is what's so cool about the Gabriel conversation. He's like, we have that basically. So Robinhood is actually doing that apparently in the EU. Oh, really? He's like, he's like X stocks. I don't know what that is, but Robinhood is doing it the right way. And by the way, probably by the end of the year, we'll have it done in the right way in the US too. And it'll be regulated. It'll be like one to one back. End of the year? End of the year, dude. Okay? And they have their broker-dealer license with a checkbox for tokenized stocks. And they're like, we're meeting with the SEC. We've shown them demos. They like it. They're going to bless it. This is all going to happen. I'm just saying right now in the summer, some of these products aren't so great. But it's coming pretty soon. Anyway, that's the episode on Monday. And you got to listen to it. It was a great conversation.
David Hoffman:
[59:17] Wow. I'm so bullish. Yeah. Robinhood tokenized stocks. Are you serious?
Ryan Sean Adams:
[59:22] Yeah, I know. What a killer product. It's pretty great. We've come a long way, Dave. We've come a long way. All right. Risk and disclaimers. Guys, you know, none of this has been financial advice. Crypto is risky. You'd lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. Not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bangless journey. Thanks a lot.
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[59:42] Music