Crypto’s IPO Craze: Stablecoins Ignite Wall Street’s Bullish Bets

TRANSCRIPT

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:04] Bankless nation is the second week of june it's time for the bankless weekly roll-up we got stripe buying another crypto company we also have david i know

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:12] you're gonna love hearing this stable coin summer is in full swing.

David Hoffman:
[0:16] Do you know how many times i've seen stable coin summer on my feed this last week it was a solid like four times from people all across crypto

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:24] Twitter what can i say you heard it here first all right this is where the narratives are born we got the Genius Act votes. We've got Circle pumping.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:31] We've got every bank in America, it seems like, talking about issuing a stablecoin. And there's a whole bunch of other tokens I think people should pack on Staplecoin Summer. I've got some takes on what that might be. David, I want to hear yours as well.

David Hoffman:
[0:43] And outside of the world of stablecoins, Polymarket and X have an official partnership, which is probably, I think, one of the most mainstreaming things I've ever heard come out of crypto. So the Polymarket prediction market directly integrated into Twitter. And then we We also got the SEC chair, Paul Atkins, saying DeFi is as American as Apple pie, which, wow. Is that a quote? Is that a quote? Music to my ears. That's incredible.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:08] It's also the year of the IPO, David, 2025. I think that's what it's going to be remembered by. So who is next on the IPO list? And finally, we got Trump making an unexpected appearance at the Coinbase conference.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:22] He has a few words. We're going to share that at the end.

David Hoffman:
[1:24] Ryan, did you, so the Limitless podcast where we now do the AI roll-ups. If anyone's curious as to where the AI roll-ups on Bankless went, it went on to the Limitless podcast. Did you catch that one this morning?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:34] Oh, yeah. I catch it every, like, it's the first thing I do on Thursday mornings. This is the second thing I do, but that's the first thing. I listen to it on Spotify, so people can get it there. They can also get it on YouTube.

David Hoffman:
[1:44] Okay, what's the common consensus take about Apple's WWDC that you hear on Twitter?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:50] What is it? Everyone is sad about it. Everyone thinks Apple missed the boat on AI completely, and they flubbed it. They flubbed the ball.

David Hoffman:
[1:58] Okay, so one of our hosts, Josh, is a huge Apple fanboy, has been for years, continues to be. He has a completely contrarian take. I know. You listened to the episode, so I'm already telling you. Yeah. He actually thinks that Apple is doing the high IQ 40 chest thing.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[2:14] I enjoyed it. I think the show is fantastic. The AI roll-up is just a great way for me to get downloaded on AI stuff. And I also heard in that episode, David, you now subscribe to the $200 a month chat GPT plan.

David Hoffman:
[2:26] Yeah, I pay $200 a month for chat GPT. That's a lot.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[2:29] You're aware that's $2,400 a year, right? You just do the math?

David Hoffman:
[2:32] Run those numbers? I just aped into it because he just told me to.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[2:35] And it's 03 Pro and it's good.

David Hoffman:
[2:38] Right? It takes a long time to think. It takes like multiple minutes to generate an output, but the output is... I mean, it would have taken me multiple minutes to think that.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[2:49] So as you guys were talking about this, I was like, I am not smart enough to actually generate a prompt for a PhD level.

David Hoffman:
[2:56] The constraint is the quality of the human's input, not the output.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[3:00] That's kind of a problem. If that's a PhD researcher, I don't know how to prompt a PhD level researcher. And so like what? I posted this on Twitter and people were like, yeah, what you have to do is you have to ask it how to prompt it. And at that point, why am I even here? Yeah, these are the.

David Hoffman:
[3:16] Existential questions that we kind of ask a lot on the AI rollup. Anyways, so go subscribe to the AI rollup if you just want. It's Bankless for AI. We cover the weekly news in AI. It's a ton of fun. Ejaz and Drash are great hosts. And then we are also looking for a growth manager for Bankless because the AI rollup is doing very well. And we need to just hit the gas on that. And so if you are good at growth, podcast growth, Twitter virality, YouTube virality, we're looking for a growth manager. That's both for Limitless and Bankless. So there is a link for a human person, a human growth manager, a growth marketer to just help press on the gas on this podcast.

David Hoffman:
[3:52] There's a couple other jobs as well. There's links in the show notes to go check them out as well.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[3:56] Tell me about Bitcoin price. Yeah. What's the Bitcoin price? Up 2.8%.

David Hoffman:
[4:00] On the week, $107,600. Pretty good. Pretty good. This last week, the Bitcoin ETF became the fastest ETF ever to break $70 billion. That's BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF. Look at this chart,

Ryan Sean Adams:
[4:13] Man.

David Hoffman:
[4:13] That's pretty nuts. That's pretty nuts.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[4:16] This is for those that can't see, this is IBIT, the BlackRock Bitcoin ETF. And it's charted over time since, you know, it was first, I guess, released. And it's comparing to the gold ETF and some of the other big ETFs. And it just hits the, what was the key number? 70 billion. It hits it so much sooner than all of these other ETFs.

David Hoffman:
[4:35] Like four times sooner. Granted, this doesn't account for inflation. So there's like, you know, two to three times more dollars out there than there were when those ETFs, but still it's exciting.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[4:46] Very exciting. Tell me about ETH price in the week.

David Hoffman:
[4:49] ETH price up 5.6%. So we're back to another Ryan Sean Adams week where things are up and ETH is up more than Bitcoin. Call that an RSA week.

David Hoffman:
[4:59] $2,738 is where ETH is at this week. But also I think the ETH ETF story is telling a very interesting story. What is that story?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[5:09] David, that story is about, green positive numbers flows into the ethereum etf this is the ethereum etf from july 2024 that's when it was released the july 23rd 2024 all the way down see look at this table look there's a lot of red on this table and i'm going to keep scrolling down we see lots of red red red red red red as we're finishing the outflows.

David Hoffman:
[5:30] Of the grayscale yeah eth

Ryan Sean Adams:
[5:32] Trust exactly when it's red it's outflows when it's black it's in flows and so let's look at this let's look at this like the last two, three weeks or so, it's all black. It's all inflows.

David Hoffman:
[5:44] Black is good. Black is green.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[5:46] Black is green. Yeah. So black is green. Black is good. We're confusing folks here. The bottom line is we've got a total of 3.7 billion in net inflows into the Ethereum ETF with some really strong performance over the last couple of weeks.

David Hoffman:
[5:59] Which- 18 days in a row of inflows?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[6:01] Yeah. It feels pretty good. I mean, it's like maybe the institutions are kind of changing their mind on either the asset. Maybe they're starting to get bullish. What are they seeing that the rest of crypto Twitter isn't? That's what some of the ETH bulls are asking, and I'm among them. There's another metric. Do you remember Jim Bianco?

David Hoffman:
[6:16] Bianco, yeah. He used to talk about this,

Ryan Sean Adams:
[6:18] Which is like the amount of stable coins and how that is correlated to both DeFi, token valuations, and also valuation of either of the asset. Look at this chart here. How would you describe this chart?

David Hoffman:
[6:30] We are looking at two charts. We are looking at the ETH price overlaid stable coin supply on Ethereum. I'm guessing that's on Ethereum. And stable coin supply, I mean, it dipped a little bit throughout 2023, 2024, not that much. And it's at all-time highs now. We're coming in at $130 billion. And then ETH price is overlaid on top of that. And, I mean, ETH price, everyone knows what ETH price has done over the last... four, five years. I do not consider these things to be correlated. Those don't look correlated to me.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[6:57] It's, I mean, you see kind of a bump in the chart, right? And then ETH price follows. It's kind of maybe a lagging type thing.

David Hoffman:
[7:04] In 2021 to 2022, there was very strong correlation. That's because everything was up in 2021 to 2022.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[7:10] Maybe, maybe. Or maybe stable coins are just net good for ETH.

David Hoffman:
[7:13] If we want ETH to be correlated to stable coins, it needs to go up. It needs to go up right now.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[7:17] Yeah. Well, we're up 5% of the week. Look, I'm staying humble. staying humble this week. I'm not making that mistake. I did the week before last when.

David Hoffman:
[7:26] I got all cocky. I glow you up.

Speaker2:
[7:27] You don't blow yourself up.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[7:28] Nope. Nope. I'm just staying humble. Okay. So we'll see what happens,

Ryan Sean Adams:
[7:31] David. We just don't know. Should we do a quick macro drive by and what's going on in the quote unquote real world? Let's talk about the inflation numbers. So inflation rose, but less than expected, David. So that surprised some analysts. The forecast was about a rise of 0.3% for CPI and 2.9% for core CPI. And it came out, not 2.9%, but 2.8. That means the annual inflation rate is 2.4%. So it's burning less hot than some people said it would. And of course, J.D. Vance, the Trump administration took no time to do a victory lap on this and call on Fed Chair Powell to reduce rates. Inflation is not hot, you can reduce rates. This is what he said. The president has been saying this for a while, but it's even more clear. The refusal by the Fed to cut rates is monetary malpractice. He said this on the back of the lower than expected CPI.

David Hoffman:
[8:25] Monetary malpractice. I like those words. I'm going to use that.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[8:28] That's pretty good. I bet he plugged that into chat GPT, David, to get that. So, you know, others are saying, look, the forecast is reassuring. Inflation is not as high as we thought, but we haven't seen the tariffs affect these numbers yet. And that is still to come.

David Hoffman:
[8:40] Sure, sure, sure, sure. Yeah, the politicization of the Fed chair is, I think, going to be a reoccurring theme throughout the rest of this year. I think there's been a crescendo of, like, Donald Trump wants somebody else to be the Fed chair.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[8:52] Someone who's a bit more easy money than Powell.

David Hoffman:
[8:54] A little more lenient, you know? A little more submissive, if you will.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[8:58] Yeah, all presidents want that, but Trump really, really wants that. Sure, Trump really wants it. He's making it very obvious that he wants that.

David Hoffman:
[9:04] But a while ago, we talked about during the tariff media, we talked about the poly market recession indicator, recession odds market. And it got up to as high as 60 percent during the depths of the tariff scare. It is clocking right now, right? Twenty six percent, which in this recession in 2025, there's a 26 percent chance of recession in 2025. Now, granted, we have like three months left in 2025 than we last did when we checked in when it was 60 percent. So, you know, there's 25% for only the last six months of the year. Yeah. But still, it's down.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[9:37] It's down. So, no, I mean, Polymark's saying probably no recession in 2025.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[9:42] Maybe we'll see what 2026 looks like. And David, you know, last week we talked about the breakup of Elon Musk and Donald Trump. And there was a lot of that drama late last week.

David Hoffman:
[9:51] We cut the very beginnings of it, but we ended the roll-up.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[9:54] It got worse, right?

David Hoffman:
[9:55] Right after we ended the roll-up, Elon dropped that bomb. Pedophile. Yeah, he did call him a pedophile.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[10:01] Well, the relationship seems to be back on this week, or at least it's not as hot as it was. This is Elon Musk. I regret some of my posts about President Trump last week. They went too far, is what he said.

David Hoffman:
[10:15] Well, you know, I wouldn't want to go up against the president of the United States either. He's kind of the most powerful man that exists right now. So I think this is kind of a logical outcome, especially when Tesla shares got rocked and then have since recovered. But also, I've noticed Donald Trump just being a very, taking the high road on this, right? No way, really? Yeah, he's not twisting the knife. He didn't fire back? He didn't fire back, yeah. He didn't take a victory lap. I think he like opened his arms. I think, yeah, they are making up. Kiss and make up.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[10:46] All right. So I guess the bromance is back on and maybe that's good for assets. It seemed like assets were down at the end of last week as a result of the Trump and Elon breakup. But I don't know. Maybe that's it's all fine. Who knows?

David Hoffman:
[10:58] Why my coin stock was down because Trump and Elon broke up. I don't know.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[11:03] We got a lot more to talk about in this episode, but there is a bold tweet that

Ryan Sean Adams:
[11:07] maybe sums up some of the themes right now as we're heading into the summer. What's this?

David Hoffman:
[11:10] Yeah, this is even happened before the very recent Stripe acquisition of Privy. So even more of a plus one to what this tweet is trying to say. This says, this is Anne from Ansem. Appetite for crypto exposure has never been higher. Various entities alongside Saylor buying multi-billion dollars of Bitcoin. Circle IPO 25x oversubscribed 5x on open. Plasma $500 million ICO filled within two minutes. That happened again, by the way. We're going to talk about that in a hot second. Another $500 million got opened up, got filled within 30 minutes. Wow. Government Pushing Act regulatory clarity. I'm just like, this has been the sentiment going around crypto Twitter this week. People are just saying like appetite for crypto,

Speaker2:
[11:47] Very strong.

David Hoffman:
[11:48] Very high right now. Very good.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[11:50] Why did you include this link, David? What is this?

Speaker2:
[11:53] The New York Post?

David Hoffman:
[11:54] This also came out this morning. Just in case you were curious, it's like what's going on in trad media. The New York Post put out an article titled, How to Buy PepeCoin.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[12:02] This is not real.

David Hoffman:
[12:03] And is it a good investment?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[12:06] This is not real.

David Hoffman:
[12:07] This is real. This is real. This is what the normies are reading. PepeCoin. It's not even a new meme coin. It's like an older one.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[12:13] Yeah, this feels very bull market vibes. maybe alarming levels? Hopefully we're not there yet. Hopefully we've got a ways to go. But what's next in the roll-up?

David Hoffman:
[12:22] All right, coming up next, Ryan's going to talk to us about the Genius Act because we've got some, in addition to the very bullish appetite coming from TradFi, we have very bullish sentiment towards the Genius Act, which is, I think, from, I'm going to quote Ryan Sean Adams right before we started recording, is going to pass. So hopefully he's not getting too bold about that one. And then he's also going to talk to us about Stablecoin Summer even more because he just really loves those words. Circles, live on the NASDAQ, we're going to check in on that. And we're going to talk about the second order effects of Circle trading at five times its IPO price and holding that price, by the way. Before we get to all of that and more, we're going to talk to some of these

David Hoffman:
[12:54] fantastic sponsors that make this show possible.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[12:56] The U.S. Senate is on the cusp of passing the Genius Act. This would be the first major crypto legislation coming out of the Senate ever. Goes to the House after that. It'll likely pass there. And it is the first stablecoin bill. This is a senator on the floor showing his support. Senator Thune. The President is clear that cryptocurrency is here to stay. And it's time that we bring it into the mainstream. Passing the Genius Act is a good first step. The Genius Act would provide a clear regulatory framework for stable coins. It would ensure Americans can trust who they're doing business with when they purchase stable coins, allowing the American people to exercise financial freedom with confidence. He goes on. He talks about the stable coin.

David Hoffman:
[13:41] Financial freedom with confidence.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[13:43] Yeah, and this line is great. Like cryptocurrency is here to stay and it's time we bring it to mainstream and the genius bill is the first step.

David Hoffman:
[13:50] The first step. You know, I love the nuances.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[13:53] Yeah, it's great. So what happened this week was there was another vote. You know, they had votes before the votes before the votes. This is not the final vote. The final vote will probably happen next week. But basically, because this passed in the way it did, 68 votes in favor to 30 against, it means it's pretty much certain that the Genius Act will get past the Senate next week when they hold the final vote.

David Hoffman:
[14:16] I'm expecting that Elizabeth Warren crossed arms meme to be passed around crypto Twitter quite frequently next week.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[14:22] Yeah, I think so. And she had some things to say. We should just actually, before we get to her, we should recap what's in the Genius Bill because this is probably going to be the law of the land after it gets through the house. And it looks likely it will get through the house as well. The first is this. There are reserve requirements. So every stable coin must be matched with one-to-one cash reserves in the bank, right? So these are all custodial, fully collateralized stable coins. Another thing, the issuer eligibility. So who can actually issue stable coins under this act? Any bank that's regulated can do this. Any credit union can do this. And so you know what we've been noticing? We haven't really covered it in the roll-up, but we've been noticing almost like every bank is like, oh, we're doing a stable coin. I saw like one from Bank of America this week, just we're doing a stablecoin. It's because now they have the legal ability to do it under the Genie Stack. So they're just trying to get ahead of that a little bit. Importantly, tech platforms, tech companies.

David Hoffman:
[15:20] Apple, Amazon cannot. They are specifically barred from issuing stablecoins.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[15:25] Yes. And that was something that Elizabeth Warren wanted to make sure happened and she got her way on that one. But crypto and fintech firms can also issue stablecoins. It's not just banks and credit unions. What they do need, though, is a brand new OCC license. Okay. The licensing for stablecoins before this was like really weird. It was state by state. It was really crappy and confusing. And now all they need is this brand new OCC license. There's also a state route as well, but that only is capped to $10 billion.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[15:56] Now, the thing I was really worried about in any stablecoin legislation, David, was AMLKYC. It's like, were they going to do a thing where you couldn't send stable coins from one wallet to another, non-custodial wallet, without doing some sort of AML KYC check? This is like some of the legislation going on in Europe. So this was kind of a sticking point for the bill. Of course, there were many folks, Elizabeth Warren, who wanted additional increased AML KYC. And where they finally landed on this is basically where we are now, that the issuers of the stablecoin would have full AML KYC rule set as they basically do today. So that means customer identification, right? If you're holding a stablecoin on an exchange, they need to know your ID, who you are. It needs to be a government-issued license. They're doing the SARS report under the Bank Secrecy Act. So if there's anything suspicious, they file a SARS report. They're doing sanction screening, all of this. But we have preserved our ability to move assets from one non-custodial wallet to another without any additional AML KYC.

David Hoffman:
[17:04] And importantly, from a custodial wallet to a non-custodial wallet, which is unlike Europe because there are currently KYC restrictions on that right now.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[17:12] I believe so. I mean, I'm not sure with kind of the latest that's going on, but that at least has been discussed. And that was my nightmare scenario for any stablecoin legislation that they would try to AMLKYC everything on chain, everything in DeFi. Looks like we basically preserved kind of the rights that we have today, which is fantastic.

David Hoffman:
[17:28] It's worth noting that that was actually a pretty big fight to fight. And stablecoins is one of those big like ask for forgiveness things where it moved because of the technology. The Overton window was moved. So like the correlate before stablecoins came out was like PayPal, right? Well, I had PayPal bucks in my PayPal account. And if I wanted to send it to Ryan, Ryan would need to make a PayPal account and then give him his PayPal, his ID with stable coins. That technology enabled me to send Ryan United, USDC without him signing up for the circle platform. Exactly. And so that was outside of the law. That was a legal gray area that we did not know, even though it makes intuitive sense for all people who got into crypto. It's like, oh, yeah, I'll send you USDC. You don't need to sign up. That's great. That's good UX. But that was outside of like regulatory certainty

David Hoffman:
[18:15] up until right now, which is pretty cool.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[18:18] Yeah. So there were 30 senators who voted no on this. Most of those were Democrats. You can, as you can guess, Elizabeth Warren was one of them. Also Chuck Schumer, Amy Klobuchar. Those are some names that you might recognize. They also voted no. Some of the reasons, of course, like Elizabeth Warren wanted far stricter AML KYC. She said like North Korea uses this stuff, you know, stable coins are used for scams. So like.

Speaker2:
[18:40] We basically she wanted

Ryan Sean Adams:
[18:41] To kind of regulate it very tightly, almost regulated out of existence. But there were other Democrats who said things like this.

David Hoffman:
[18:48] Should be issuing crypto while they're in office or a vice president. There's no reason any person on this floor should do it or anybody in the House of Representatives should do it. And now in a partially regulated regime.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[19:02] So this was Senator Bennett basically saying that, you know, I want an amendment on this bill that says vice presidents, presidents, members of Congress can't issue these stable coins or other crypto assets. So this is a shot at World Liberty financial. It's a shot at the Trump coin. You could kind of understand why members of Congress- I don't have a problem with that. I mean, that piece of the amendment, I'm like, I agree with.

David Hoffman:
[19:24] Fine. That's great. Give them that compromise so that we can get more Democrats to sign.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[19:28] Well, it was already signed, overwhelming majority without that amendment. So it looks like that amendment's not going forward, but you can understand the rationale for why it was wanted.

David Hoffman:
[19:39] So presidents can issue stable coins?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[19:41] Yes, they can. And they are, David. They actually are.

David Hoffman:
[19:44] Wow. Okay. All right. Okay. So the final passage will happen on Monday. Monday is the vote. So I think that is the day to tune into this.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[19:53] It could bleed into Tuesday. Okay.

David Hoffman:
[19:55] All right.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[19:56] And on Tuesday, we have Senator Bill Haggerty on the podcast, who's going to be giving us an update, hopefully with some good news about the passage of this bill. And then it goes to the House, of course. If all goes well, this whole thing could get done by the third week of July. It could be on Trump's desk. He, of course, would sign it. If it doesn't go so well, it could be August or September if there's some fighting in the House, that kind of thing. Third week of July.

David Hoffman:
[20:18] That's six weeks away.

Speaker2:
[20:21] That's soon.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[20:22] This is soon. How long have we been waiting for this thing.

David Hoffman:
[20:25] David? I'm impatient.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[20:26] Years. It's been years. I'm impatient.

Speaker2:
[20:28] Six weeks.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[20:29] All right. That's it.

David Hoffman:
[20:30] So long as Ryan Sean Adams says it's going to pass.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[20:33] It's going to pass, and we're going to get it during the summer. Okay. Because it's stablecoin. And that's what happens during stablecoin summer. Yep.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[20:41] Yeah. There is another bill, actually, I wanted to mention to you, too, that I've been kind of monitoring, but I haven't gone deep on. We've talked about this before. That's the Clarity Act. And so this is sort of what's the difference between a commodity and a security when it comes to tokens? It's a house bill. They're trying to provide clarity for this.

David Hoffman:
[20:59] This is the market structure bill. Is it stablecoin bill? This is the market structure bill.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[21:03] Yes. It used to be called FIT 21. Now it's called the Clarity Act.

Speaker2:
[21:07] It's kind of

Ryan Sean Adams:
[21:07] A revision to it. But it has a moderate chance of passing. It's not going to pass before the stablecoin bill. They're still kind of debating it. It needs to get through committee. But this is the most interesting piece of it, actually. There is a decentralization test right now in the bill. Okay? I think that's the most fascinating part.

David Hoffman:
[21:24] That's going to be a big deal because there's going to be layer ones that pass or fail this test. And there are also going to be layer ones that are going to need to spend a lot of lobbying effort to make sure that their particular layer one passes that test.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[21:38] And this is a core part of the bill. It's not something that will be stripped out, at least the concept of a decentralization test, because it's providing a bright line, right? So if you're on one side of the line, you're a commodity, you're decentralized. If you're on the other side of the line, you're a security, you are not decentralized.

David Hoffman:
[21:54] You do not want to be on the other side of that line.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[21:56] Yeah. So I plugged the text of the bill into chat GPT and there's a few things. There's a few criteria for being on the decentralized side of the line and being deemed a commodity. The mainnet has to be functional and live. It can't be in beta. It has to be mostly done. There has to be programmatic operations. So everything is enforced by code, no off-chain discretion. this is interesting distributed ownership so insiders can't own more than 20% of the supply huh or.

David Hoffman:
[22:29] It's still security I wonder how they define insiders yeah

Speaker2:
[22:32] Right.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[22:32] And they also have governance limits. So no one coordinated group can unilaterally change consensus or command greater than 20% of the on-chain voting power.

David Hoffman:
[22:41] I feel like that's pretty stringent. That's a pretty high bar.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[22:46] Well, so if you run it through like ChatGPT and, you know, ChatGPT, who knows how it defines this, but it says it's likely if this were the criteria that gets in the finalized bill, it's likely that Bitcoin, ETH, Monero, Litecoins, these OG things pass. Because by the way, if your asset was 2020 or before, some different rules kind of apply.

David Hoffman:
[23:05] Wow. Okay. Yeah. So there's some different provisions.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[23:08] What flunks right now, according to ChatGPT, XRP would flunk. BNB would flunk. Yeah. Okay. Tron, Aptosui would flunk. Yep. Solana would flunk.

David Hoffman:
[23:21] Ooh. To me, that is the big line is like, is the line before or after Solana? I think it's like there's a Bitcoin Ethereum. Those two things are pretty easy to come together. Sure. Then there's a line there. And then there's like a bunch of the other ones that you also mentioned, like Monero, pretty decentralized. Then there's a bunch of those. And then there's like a space for another line before Solana. And then Solana, to its credit, has some amount of decentralization. And then there's a line after Solana, which follows like Sui, Apto, Se, like it's going to be Monad, like all of those.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[23:57] Right. And those are the layer ones, right? But there's also DeFi tokens too. How about Uni? How about Aave? How about DYDX? Oh, interesting. Under the criteria, they don't pass either. Okay.

David Hoffman:
[24:08] Well, yeah, it makes sense to me that like Uni and Aave are not commodities. That makes sense to me.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[24:14] Well, if they're not commodities, are they securities?

David Hoffman:
[24:16] I don't feel comfortable with that.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[24:18] Right? You can't file a 10K for something that's all on-chain revenue like Aave or Uniswap.

David Hoffman:
[24:23] I do not envy anyone who has to deal with this.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[24:28] This is so hairy. They're getting into the specifics of defining decentralization.

David Hoffman:
[24:32] Okay, so I was talking to Austin Campbell a while ago at BlockWorks, the Digital Asset Summit. He thinks that the market structure bill, the clarity bill, is too ambitious. It's going to get bike-shedded. It's going to get argued all to hell. And it's going to get unbundled because it's just too big. That was his take.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[24:50] So we won't have the bright-line decentralization test at all because it's too messy. It's too hairy. There's too many vested interests.

David Hoffman:
[24:58] Maybe we do, but it will get unbundled and argued inside of its own bill and then other parts of the market structure bill. Because this isn't the only thing about the bill. There are other parts of this bill. So the bill just gets kind of unbundled and passed separately. That's what he thinks.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[25:11] That's definitely one to watch because this Brightline decentralization test would shake things up in a big way. David, let's check in on Circle. Circle, yeah. So this is the Stablecoin Summit leader asset. Okay, what's the price of.

David Hoffman:
[25:22] Circle in the week? Yeah, so let's see. Over or under $100, Bankless listener, place your bets while Ryan figures out how to get Alex Honnold out of TradingView. We are coming in at, what is it, $110, which is $25 billion. So Circle is holding the line.

Speaker2:
[25:38] Holding the line, a pretty juicy valuation.

David Hoffman:
[25:42] Still 31, still 3 to 4x times its IPO price. And so the longer that it stays here, the more stablecoin summary it is.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[25:51] I feel like that's the rule. You know what's funny is I don't think crypto natives are buying Circle. I am not buying Circle.

David Hoffman:
[25:58] There's no way. We talked about this last week. They're $120 million of yearly revenue to justify a $25 billion valuation.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[26:05] If it's not us, who's buying it? institutions, right?

David Hoffman:
[26:09] TradFi who is looking for a stablecoin. Because you said it, like every single bank is like trying to do a stablecoin and then there are investors like, oh, stablecoins are hot. How do I get stablecoin exposure? You can't get stablecoin exposure via Coinbase because it's too money. Like they got an exchange and they got a layer two and they got all these other things. Circle is just stablecoins. And so like, to me, I see when I see Circle at $25 billion, I see people are aping in. People are not thinking. People are trying to buy a narrative and Circle is the only way to express that narrative. Yeah, I see froth when I see the circle price.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[26:40] But what's interesting about that is the people that are doing this, the people who are buying into this, like in your words, they're not our people. They're not us. Right. You know what I mean? What's exciting about it is it's kind of a new cohort of buyers. It's not people on crypto Twitter. This is the institutions that are FOMO-ing into this asset, which in and of itself is interesting. This is Mike Eppolito. He says, Circle is a great example of price-leading narrative. Two weeks ago, Circle was on its deathbed. Today, my timeline thinks It's a better buy than coin. He's speaking about basically the crypto Twitter bubble of which we are probably in as well.

David Hoffman:
[27:13] Yeah, I was talking about this with Brett and John on the roll up. Is crypto Twitter right in their bearishness about Circle? Because we know the actual fundamentals and Wall Street is just like top blasting this thing that's clearly overvalued. Or are we just so disconnected from Wall Street and Wall Street appetite? And it's like, well, right now, crypto Twitter is wrong because Circle is 5x the IPO price or whatever. I just think

Ryan Sean Adams:
[27:39] Crypto natives are going to FOMO into things that appeal to them and appeal to their narratives. And institutions are going to FOMO into things that appeal to their narratives. One of those is Cathie Wood, ARK Invest. So she purchased 4.48 million Circle across her ETFs.

David Hoffman:
[27:52] She didn't FOMO win. She bought the IPO. So she is up for like 3, 4x because she bought the IPO. She's not top last.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[27:59] Yeah. on the uh on the analyst side some analysts are cautious market cap of 22 billion circle is selling at 140x earnings okay that's less than tesla what is tesla 108 or 180 also a big narrative but yeah i guess.

David Hoffman:
[28:14] Buying tesla has worked out

Ryan Sean Adams:
[28:15] Yeah others say the intelligent investor should just wait wait for like 90 to 180 days wait for this thing to cool down post.

David Hoffman:
[28:22] Ipo right now

Ryan Sean Adams:
[28:23] Yeah don't maybe don't buy it during staple coin summer.

Speaker2:
[28:27] That lends the question to like,

Ryan Sean Adams:
[28:28] Are there other assets that are doing well on the stablecoin narrative? And I think the answer to that question is yes. And some of them are crypto native assets. So I put out this tweet because I was just brainstorming. I didn't actually pack my bags for stablecoin summer. You know, I've previously owned some of these assets and just like they've been long term holds, not all of them, but like many of them. But packing my bags for stablecoin summer. What do you buy? What do you buy for stablecoin summer? Aave is doing quite well recently, kind of like.

David Hoffman:
[28:59] Money market for DeFi.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[29:01] Maybe because of the Go stablecoin. Maybe people are just looking at the assets and Aave surpassing, what is it, $50 billion and just being like, okay, we're in the clear. Maker, now called Sky. Athena, doing quite well. Frax, doing quite well. Maybe there's a play for Ether. Maybe that's why some of the institutions are buying that ETF, David.

David Hoffman:
[29:19] Maybe that's why ETH is up on the weak.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[29:21] Some people are saying like Tron could be a good buy under these circumstances.

David Hoffman:
[29:25] I'm looking at all these charts one by one as you say them. None of them are, oh, Tron, just kidding. Tron's doing great.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[29:31] Yeah.

David Hoffman:
[29:32] But none of them other than Tron are really expressing any sort of like anything about Circle doing well. And Tron has been doing well for a while, so it just continues to do well.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[29:42] Aave seems to be like just crushing it recently.

David Hoffman:
[29:45] Yeah, that's true. But also the Ghost Stablecoin is only at $220 million.

Speaker2:
[29:50] Yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[29:51] I don't know. What do you think about this? Do you think this is a play?

David Hoffman:
[29:54] For people i think this is much more of ipo season than on-chain stable coin related assets season like athena ave like none of them are responding like i just said none of them are responding to the circle price and so i think it's much more of just like can we go public and then i would also like to see like kraken and gemini go public and see where they get comped to because i think their appetite for going public is downstream of circle launching at like a forex IPO price, but they're going to get comps to Coinbase, not to Circle.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[30:25] I don't know, man. I don't know. I think we could see some animal spirits in stablecoin, summer narrative, on-chain assets as well. I mean, explain this one. So this is Plasma doing an ICO on Kobe's Echo platform, right?

David Hoffman:
[30:39] What is Plasma? Kind of. Plasma is a tether-based platform. payments chain is a layer one that is going to be optimized for payments it's like you know how like tron is like 99 stable coin activity but tron tron fees right now are like four to seven dollars for a transaction so that's not great so plasma is making a layer one that's dedicated for tether for tron or excuse me for for uh yeah tether uh and so it's a payments layer one it's just just for payments for for tether so it's kind

Ryan Sean Adams:
[31:08] Of centralized but it's super juiced yeah it also has some kind of Bitcoin miner settlement to the Bitcoin blockchain, the way Stacks does.

David Hoffman:
[31:16] Interesting. Oh yeah, they're trying to do, they're trying to be some like BitPM extension. That's more of a cherry on top, I would say for what it is right now. Right now people are just trying to get like, well, Circle is coming in at $25 billion, but I'd like to get exposure to Tether, which is like so much time, many times bigger than Circle. And so Plasma is kind of like incubated by Tether. They had their first initial checks cut by Tether and they're not the The other, the only ones are others as well, but their timing of this sale. And again, this deposit cap wasn't a sale. The deposit cap was people depositing Tether onto the plasma chain. And then it's like waiting room once plasma chain goes live. And then when plasma chain goes live, it'll have $1 billion of people's deposits, their Tether deposits on the plasma chain. So it'll start with a billion dollars of Tether TVL to kind of bootstrap itself. And the people that deposited will have a right to access the ICO. So it's like you are buying a ticket. You're not actually selling anything because you're not buying a ticket, but you're reserving your right to buy into the presale by depositing Tether into the Plasma chain. And the appetite for this has been incredibly high. They first started with like a $250 million cap, got filled in an instant. They raised it again to $500 million. They raised it again to a billion dollars just this morning. It just got filled instantly. And so people are looking towards Plasma as like a way, a more crypto native way to get stablecoin summer exposure.

Speaker2:
[32:37] It's fascinating, right?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[32:38] Like just to see that kind of the animal spirits jump into this. And the construction here is very interesting. It's got some pieces of Ethereum too. It's like Plasma Reth under the covers.

David Hoffman:
[32:49] Oh, really?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[32:49] Yeah. Yeah. So obviously we don't know. I mean, is this more narrative play in the short run or does a Plasma just dedicated layer one for Tether actually make sense? I guess we'll have to see on that. But there are some others. So, I mean, that to me is animal spirits and kind of like crypto native assets around this narrative. We'll see if it picks up in other areas. But this is certainly going to be the year of crypto IPOs, to your point. So, you mentioned Gemini. You call this one too? Well, I mean, I think we're already seeing it, right? Like we've seen, I guess.

David Hoffman:
[33:19] Galaxy is not an IPO. We've seen one. We've seen Gemini file to go public. They filed their S1 or whatever.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[33:25] S1? Yes. Yeah, so Gemini, just crypto from Gemini confidentially files for U.S. IPO. Confidentially. They're going next. What do you think that valuation is going to be?

David Hoffman:
[33:36] I don't know many people who use Gemini still.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[33:40] In 2021, Gemini raised at a $7.1 billion valuation.

David Hoffman:
[33:45] Yeah, well, in OpenSea raised it at a $12 billion valuation.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[33:48] Over or under on that? And that was before, by the way, Gemini got rocked by the whole Gemini Earn thing.

David Hoffman:
[33:55] I don't know. No, I don't know the financials, but I'm going under on $7 billion.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[33:59] Okay. I mean, there's some other names here, which is like Kraken could IPO. They've not filed paperwork, but that's something that's in speculation.

David Hoffman:
[34:07] They've been wanting to do that for a while, going public.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[34:10] Phantom Wallet was also mentioned. Really? Which would be fascinating, I think. Really? Yeah. Could be fascinating. Could be possible.

David Hoffman:
[34:17] Seems odd.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[34:18] I mean, if you're going to IPO, though, 2025 is the year. I mean, I think there's a successive circle.

David Hoffman:
[34:23] Other people have named Chainalysis, Anchorage. There's a few other companies. Yeah. But like, oh, there's also, we're going to talk about it in a hot sec, just a very hot mergers and acquisition timeline right now. Not mergers, just acquisitions. Overall, there's just like a lot of money changing hands.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[34:39] Yeah. So what are we going to talk about next?

David Hoffman:
[34:40] Coming up next, Polymarket fully integrated into Twitter, into X. So we're going to talk about what that means. Stripe, the thing that I just mentioned, Stripe buys a crypto company. and then also SEC chair Paul Atkins the anti Gary Gensler He's ready to support the right of Americans to self-custody in DeFi. Wow, that feels so good. Very progressive, yeah. Yeah, we're going to talk about all that and more, but first we're going to talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Like, breaking as of this week, this happened on Wednesday, Stripe has announced that they are acquiring Privy. So Stripe, the payments company, is acquiring Privy, the good UX embedded wallets infrastructure company, backend infrastructure company. So Privy just makes it really easy for people who download an app to get a wallet that's native into the app automatically without having to do any seed phrases and all that stuff. A non-custodial wallet, right? Non-custodial, yeah, that's right. And so if you ever use Frientech, that was enabled by Privy. There are a bunch of just applications that you might not even know or enabled by Privy. Hyperliquid.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[35:38] Yeah.

David Hoffman:
[35:40] The BankerBot people on Twitter would like everyone to know that they are enabled by Privy as well. BankerBot is this thing you can just add on Twitter. And you have, as a Twitter account, you have a wallet. Really? By this application called BankerBot, and it uses Privy. And so you can just go at BankerBot and if you don't have a wallet yet, it'll give you one. I mean, that's impressive.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[35:57] That shows how easy it is to actually like spin up a non-custodial wallet using Privy.

David Hoffman:
[36:01] Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so everyone on Twitter has a Ethereum wallet thanks to BankerBot. You just add it and say, and you have to add money to it, obviously, but you can just like tell it to buy. It's one of those like AI things. Yeah. It interprets what you want and it interprets your intent and you can go buy me this like shit coin and it'll take the funds in your wallet and go buy it. It's pretty fun. Anyways, acquired by Stripe. So details undisclosed. So I wish I kind of knew the actual valuation that they bought it for. But, I mean, seven to eight million businesses use Stripe.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[36:33] Everybody uses Stripe.

David Hoffman:
[36:34] Everybody uses Stripe. And so I don't know if they are just like using Privy just to integrate their wallet infrastructure straight into Stripe. It would make sense. I love it. Pretty big acquisition.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[36:43] Apparently, Privy has about 75 million accounts. So that's probably 75 million non-custodial wallets that spun up over time. I mean some of these will have very small dollar amounts but, Seven to eight million businesses in Stripe. This is the non-custodial wallet infrastructure API SDK play. Remember, was it earlier this year or was it last year, David? When did they buy Bridge? They brought Bridge this year, right?

David Hoffman:
[37:06] This year, yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[37:07] Okay. And so Bridge was basically a stablecoin play. So Bridge has its own stablecoin and it enables companies to create stablecoins with reserves in U.S. treasuries and it handles all the compliance and regulatory stuff. And since they acquired Bridge, they've really expanded it. So Bridge is now active in 101 countries through Stripe and allows people to hold balances in stablecoins like USDC and their own Bridge stablecoin. So you got non-custodial wallets, you got bridge level stablecoin stuff. It seems like Stripe is like just going all in to stablecoins.

David Hoffman:
[37:44] Yeah, it really doesn't take a big imagination to put those two things together.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[37:48] That's wild. Okay, what's happening with Polymarket, speaking of imagination?

David Hoffman:
[37:52] Yeah, so I also want to start to actually see this roll out, please. But they announced X and XAI. So this is Twitter. XAI actually technically isn't X. It's a separate company, but I think they're trying to fold it all together. have announced that they are integrating Polymarket straight into Twitter. And so this has been a theme that has been brewing around the media space where, I mean, kicked off by Polymarket. I think everyone in crypto was talking about post-election. They were watching the TV, watching the news, but they were really watching Polymarket report the news way faster. And so media companies, of which we would be familiar, are all talking about there's something about prediction markets and markets generally that need to be integrated into news sites. I think this is downstream of that. So Twitter and Polymarket, X and Polymarket, formally integrated. So you're going to be able to just see Polymarket things on Twitter. And I would hope that there is a way to just easily see some sort of outcome and be like, buy, sell, express some bet on that outcome pretty natively in Twitter. I don't know how that would work, but details will come out, I'm assuming, over the time. And so pretty crazy partnership from Polymarket.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[39:06] Maybe with like a Privy wallet inside of Twitter.

David Hoffman:
[39:08] Right? Within reason, yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[39:10] X already uses Stripe under the covers as well. So maybe that's something that they could do. Right now, you can also see Grok in the Polymarket UI. So I think that's happening too. And so in the Polymarket UI, on the Polymarket side of things, if you have the question about a certain prediction market, so what are the odds of US for saying, tell me more about this prediction market, then Grok is right there to tell you more too. It really makes sense. Like the AI plus... ex-Citizen News plus Prediction Market team up. It's like pretty good synergies here.

David Hoffman:
[39:40] Yeah. Shane Copland, the CEO of Plymarket, tweeted, the top two truth-seeking apps on the internet are stronger together. It's pretty good synthesis, I would say.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[39:50] Yeah. I like that. David, tell me about Morpho Labs because according to you, they are doing the whole DeFi token thing right. Tell me what they're doing.

David Hoffman:
[39:58] Yeah. So they've always done this pretty well. Maybe I'll start with that or something slightly unrelated, but definitely related. Do you know that all the Morpho founders, when they started Morpho, they all signed a contract with each other to not angel invest and not advise other companies. I don't know how long that contract stands for, but yeah, they're like, yeah, we're not going to get distracted by anything else. No distractions.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[40:18] No divided loyalties.

David Hoffman:
[40:19] No divided loyalties, just Morpho. We're not going to use our position as Morpho execs to gain access to exposure rate, just Morpho. And so down in spirit of that, they have always been pursuing this idea of just like this single asset to control and own Morpho. Full alignment. Full alignment. This is in kind of contrast to the equity token split that we see at Uniswap Labs versus the Uni token. There's just misaligned incentives there. And people love to harp on Uniswap for this.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[40:49] They were born.

David Hoffman:
[40:50] Inside of the Gary Gensler era. That is downstream of that environment. I'm not really blaming them at all. It's unfortunate. It is what it is. There's no malpractice there. Morpho was not. Well, they were created in the Gary Gensler environment, but really at the tail end of it.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[41:04] But the Uniswap example shows divided incentives, right? Because there's Uniswap Labs with separate kind of equity, separate set of holders, and they're optimizing things for Uniswap Labs, right? And then there's the Uniswap token, which is the Uni token, which some people feel like it gets kind of the leftovers. It's not fully aligned, at least, with everything that Labs produces.

David Hoffman:
[41:24] Yeah, it doesn't have a big voice. It doesn't have... Uniswap Labs is not advocating for the Uni token. And so the front end fees and Uniswap.com is owned by Uniswap Labs and the Uniswap.com fees goes to Uniswap Labs. And then the token holders are like, well, what about us? And so there's no like strong leadership that's like advocating for the uni token holders specifically. And so, again, this like byproduct of the Gary Gensler, you can blame Gary Gensler for that.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[41:50] I totally will. I'm happy to. Yeah.

David Hoffman:
[41:52] Morpho built just later, like a couple of years later after really. It was like started like two, three, three years ago. There's only one asset for Morpho. There's just the Morpho token. And they made a blog post around this, which is like really trying to focus on just like the Morpho Labs entity is owned by a structure that is controlled by the token, which is pretty cool. Pretty cool. So no equity alignment issues. And then also they also released Morpho V2. So there's a second version of Morpho coming out on the back of this, which is

Speaker2:
[42:23] It's not technically correct,

David Hoffman:
[42:25] But like think about it as like an order book for loans. So you have bids and asks for loan terms, and then they have like kind of a matching engine. Again, these things aren't technically true, but they're directionally true. And so there's like a lot of modules here. So KYC and compliance so that institutions can come in. Just like a lot more expressive features in Morpho.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[42:45] I think this is about more than Morpho, right? It's about sort of converting our DeFi tokens from sort of lemons with divided loyalties into sort of unified, aligned assets that you want to hold to get all of the upside of both the initial product and the protocol and any other product or protocol that the team spins out. The way you get with equities, you sent me a link to a presentation of a bankless guest that you had on the podcast when I was out. Felipe from Thea Capital. And his point was, he called a lot of existing DeFi tokens sort of like lemons, right? They're sort of neutered. They don't have the full alignment that equities have. And so, I mean, he made the point that if something like Amazon spun out a different token, essentially, a different equity asset for every business it created. Right.

David Hoffman:
[43:40] AWS token. Yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[43:42] Imagine that.

David Hoffman:
[43:43] Amazon Fresh token.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[43:45] Yeah. Yeah.

David Hoffman:
[43:45] What would you invest in? How would you get Amazon exposure at the end of the day?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[43:49] How would you? Exactly. There would be like an Amazon book token. And then when it expands, you have different equity for every single thing. That's not the way equities work. The way they work is kind of compounding gains from a successful product launch of two, three, four, and five. Anyway, our DeFi tokens don't quite work like that. And he wants them to.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[44:06] So I guess Morphozik is a good example of something Philippe would approve of.

David Hoffman:
[44:11] Yeah. And again, a lot of this is downstream of the SEC. and the reasons why we can't have nice things is because of the SEC, which brings us to talking about Paul Atkins and the SEC. What happened with Paul Atkins this week?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[44:24] He said some pretty bullish things about DeFi. So he said this, DeFi, this was a speech title, DeFi and the American Spirit, okay? He said this, the American values of economic liberty, private property rights, and innovation are in the DNA of DeFi or decentralized finance, the movement. And the prior administration, we know he's talking about, discouraged Americans from participating in blockchains by asserting through lawsuits, speeches, regulation, and threatened regulatory action that participants and staking as a service providers may be engaged in securities transactions. And he goes on. Basically, he's going to stop all of that. But think of that line, David. The American values of economic liberty, private property, and innovation are in the DNA of DeFi. That sounds like something straight out of bank lists like circa 2020. Yeah.

David Hoffman:
[45:16] I mean, this

Ryan Sean Adams:
[45:16] Is the chair of the SEC saying this.

David Hoffman:
[45:18] This is pretty cool. I did wish he would say the privacy word.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[45:23] I don't think he said.

David Hoffman:
[45:24] I don't think I heard privacy.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[45:25] One step at a time. One step at a time. But think of, okay, this is a complete 180 from Gary Gensler. Totally. But around this time last year, do you remember the whole stab, you know, like 121 where the SEC led by Gary Gensler was trying to sneak an obscure accounting rule to stop banks from cussing crypto? It's had to go to the Senate. The Senate voted, said this was like, you can't do this. SEC doesn't have the authority. And then Biden vetoed it. That's what we were dealing with 365 days ago. We were all like.

David Hoffman:
[45:53] Biden's going to pivot. He's not, he's going to not veto it. And then he totally vetoed it.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[45:57] He totally vetoed it. Little loser. It is a completely different world. And so this speech, by the way, was given at a panel of roundtable. So Jill Gunter was there, Peter Van Valkenberg from Coin Center, Eric Voorhees was there, and also Paul Atkins, Hester Peirce, Caroline Crenshaw.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[46:18] So they're talking about it. And I know, David, you've had questions about like, what is the SEC actually doing? So it's nice to hear the speeches, certainly. But what are they doing? So one of the things they're doing are hosting roundtables on tokenization and DeFi. So they're talking about this stuff with crypto industry leaders. So something we asked for, that is something we asked for, that is action. Also, they're rolling out FAQ sheets on crypto. So they're giving more clarity to the extent they can. I know... they have talked about, and we've talked about this on the rollup, they've signaled carve-outs for regulatory ATSs, right? So these are brokers that can spotless Bitcoin and Ether. So like merging together the ATS kind of regulation in crypto. And I think what we can expect next is some more proposed rulemaking around Hester Peirce's innovation sandbox idea. So when crypto projects start, they're not automatically securities. I think they'll do more around token classification rules. So we'll get some more clarity that way. And ultimately, I think they'll give their take, independent of the Clarity Act, they'll give their take on which assets are securities and which are free to trade commodities. So I think we can expect to see a lot more clarity out of this SEC.

David Hoffman:
[47:31] Yeah. And which is not to say that I'm disappointed with the progress from the SEC. That's not true at all. I know that it's a very unwieldy hairball of BS that Hester purse has been delivered from previous the previous administration and so it's just i yeah i just want all things to happen like now and like immediately and i know it just doesn't work that way anyone who i've ever talked to who has like interfaced with hester purse is like they are just doing exactly what we wanted them to finally but also at the same time i'm like okay let's let's actually put pen to paper and like do something yeah well donald

Ryan Sean Adams:
[48:06] Trump is doing something david and so is.

David Hoffman:
[48:08] Uh The World Liberty Financial team. I'm relieved. So there was

Ryan Sean Adams:
[48:11] News this week that World Liberty Financial was acquiring Trump, Trump the meme coin, for its treasury. So, of course, they hold other crypto assets. I think Aave is in their treasury as well as Ether and now also Trump. So any hot takes on this?

David Hoffman:
[48:28] Trump's World Liberty Financial DeFi app is acquiring Trump's meme coin.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[48:34] Yes.

David Hoffman:
[48:34] To me, it just reads like he's taking money from one pocket and putting it in a different pocket.

Speaker2:
[48:39] I just don't think this helps us right now.

David Hoffman:
[48:41] No. No, none of the great things. All of this stuff is a deal with the devil.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[48:46] Yeah, it definitely doesn't help us. I guess, I mean, we talked about this. I feel like we talk about this every week. It's a lot better than the previous administration.

David Hoffman:
[48:53] It's a lot better than the previous administration. I wish he stopped at NFTs. NFTs were fine. Nothing wrong with the NFTs. But MemeCoin, World Liberty Financial, their incoming stable coin, it gets really hard to defend.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[49:07] Well, I guess we'll have to end it there. It is good to have a bullish.

David Hoffman:
[49:11] Crypto bullish present. Look at that Nick Carter tree. Look at that Nick Carter tree right below it. What do you say?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[49:18] Trump shaking hands with Trump, signed by Trump. That's great. Yeah. That's great. I think we'll have to end it there for the week. I mean, bullishness, I think we're in bullish season for sure. Oh, by the way- We have a.

David Hoffman:
[49:30] Moment of zen, I believe?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[49:31] We'll include this in the moment of zen. So President Trump actually, unexpectedly, at least I didn't expect it, showed up at a Coinbase conference. So we'll play you a snippet from his speech because he gave a speech. But think of this, the president of the United States attending a Coinbase conference and saying some positive words on crypto. That's where we are in 2025. We'll leave it there. Of course, you know, none of this has been financial advice. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in. We are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

Donald Trump:
[50:00] At the Coinbase State of Crypto Summit, But I'm delighted to speak to some of the greatest visionaries and pioneers in the fields of tech and finance who are working to build a future powered by crypto. Many have called me the first crypto president. That's an honor. I really do consider that a very big honor, actually. And starting on day one, we ended the Biden administration's war on crypto. It was an absolute war and very unfair. And we unleashed American innovators to do what you do best, lead the world into new frontiers. We ended Operation Chokepoint 2.0. I created the first presidential working group on digital assets. I named a pro-freedom, pro-innovation SEC chair, a great man named Paul Atkins. And we created the U.S. Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and the United States Digital Asset Stockpile. But we are not done yet. My administration is working with Congress to pass the Genius Act, supporting the creation of dollar-backed stablecoins. And we also will be working to create clear and simple market frameworks that will allow America to dominate the future of crypto and Bitcoin. Congratulations to everyone at this exciting time in your industry and in our country's life. I wish you all the best of luck.

Speaker2:
[51:29] Thank you.