ROLLUP: Coinbase Ships | JPMorgan Onchain | Solana Firedancer | Aave Civil War | DTCC Tokenizes

TRANSCRIPT

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:04] Bankless nation is the third week of december last week before the holidays uh time for the bankless weekly roll up we've got some coinbase updates december 17th that was a date on which they were supposed to give an announcement and they definitely gave an announcement they had their system update announced a whole bunch of things we're gonna cover all of them and my big question going into this was did we just get tokenized stocks yet hold

David Hoffman:
[0:27] Your breath we'll let you know but not just coinbase also bankless, That's us. Shipped two new products

David Hoffman:
[0:33] this week that had the entire industry on the edge of their seats. What did Bankless ship? We're going to talk about the cool new things that we

David Hoffman:
[0:41] introduced into the market. And we're also going to talk about the Aave equity versus token misalignment conversation. I was wondering if that was going to be a thing. I was wondering how come Aave just escaped all of the token equity misalignment conversations.

David Hoffman:
[0:54] Turns out they didn't. What triggered it? How is it going to get resolved?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:58] Also, Solana, they had their Breakpoint conference and they announced a number of things, including Solana's Fire Dancer upgrade. So we'll talk about that.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:05] JP Morgan, the biggest bank in the US, they finally deployed something directly on Ethereum L1. I think it's a big deal. We'll talk about that as well. But before we do, got to shout out our friends and sponsors over at, well, what does the market want right now? What does the market want? Tell us, what are the Bitcoin prices?

David Hoffman:
[1:21] The market wants specifically $86,400 Bitcoin, which happens to be down 4%.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:27] I'm part of the market. That's not what I want.

David Hoffman:
[1:29] That's not what you want? Well, the other people disagree with you, Ryan. Down 4% on the week, but down 17% on the year. Bitcoin started the year a smidge above $100,000. Not exactly the year, exactly 365 days ago, so December 18th, 2024. ETH, down 10% on the week to $2,850. down 26% 10%.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:54] On the week did this

David Hoffman:
[1:55] Feel like a 10%.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:56] Down on the

David Hoffman:
[1:56] Week yeah I don't know where that came from I do know that prices both Bitcoin and ETH prices are just jumping all over the, remember the barding that we talked about all of last week the barding has continued more barding more barding left and right don't like it don't like it at all down 26% on the year ETH started the year at $3,600 down We are not there anymore. No. It's crazy that we got an all-time high in Ether this year because, like.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[2:22] That was just like a

David Hoffman:
[2:23] Few days of celebration before just returning just to just not awesomeness.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[2:29] Do you know, though, if you zoom out, if you look at, if you zoom out,

David Hoffman:
[2:33] If you zoom out, though.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[2:34] How about this? How about this? If you compare the prices in April of 2025, Ether's looking pretty good right now. Yeah. What's that, like $1,400? $1,700?

David Hoffman:
[2:44] The very bottom of the Trump tariff scare. If we pick the bottom, Ether's looking pretty good.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[2:48] Dark times. Yeah, some benchmarks. You said it, right? So 17% for Bitcoin, down on the year. Ether was down 27%. Solana was down 45%. So it could be worse for Bitcoin and Ether. There's always Solana.

David Hoffman:
[3:03] Why did we decide to include.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[3:05] Solana this week? I shouldn't say that. We got some bullish news on Solana on

Ryan Sean Adams:
[3:07] the week. Fired answer. So maybe it's just a price thing, not a fundamentals thing.

David Hoffman:
[3:12] You know what else is sad, Ryan?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[3:13] Yeah, what?

David Hoffman:
[3:14] The total crypto market cap starts with a 2.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[3:17] I almost missed that. What?

David Hoffman:
[3:18] Starts with a 2. 2.988 trillion dollars.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[3:22] It can't be.

David Hoffman:
[3:23] Yep. Not great.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[3:24] We're below 3.

David Hoffman:
[3:25] Yeah. Started the year at 3.8 trillion. We are now at 2.99 trillion dollars.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[3:30] Well, okay. What's your take on 2026? Now we're at the end of 2025. It's a down year. Let's call it. It's been a down year for crypto. Yeah. 2026.

David Hoffman:
[3:39] Only down like a little bit though.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[3:41] Only a little bit. What are you talking about a little bit?

David Hoffman:
[3:42] By crypto standards?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[3:45] 16% 17% for Bitcoin Yeah 27% for ETH, that's a down year.

David Hoffman:
[3:50] Yeah, that is a down year. I'm not disputing that. It's just like only a little bit. Like down 26% for an asset that can also go up hundreds of percent. Like, yeah, I'll take that. Okay.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[4:00] So that's rose colored, I suppose. What's your outlook on 2026 then?

David Hoffman:
[4:05] Slow grind up.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[4:06] Slow grind up.

David Hoffman:
[4:08] Slow grind up. I feel like that'll be my outlook as a default. Slow grind up.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[4:14] So that means up though. At the end of next year, at the end of 2026. you're predicting up here.

David Hoffman:
[4:19] Slow grind up. That's right.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[4:21] Barclays is not with you on that prediction. Okay.

David Hoffman:
[4:24] The top analyst at Barclays. That's just the, that's the basketball varina that the Knicks play at in Brooklyn. I don't know. I don't know what the hell they know.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[4:34] I don't know what they know about crypto though either, to be honest. This is just a report that they published and they see that 2026 will be a down year for crypto. Why? Do you ask? They cite weaker retail participation and They say a fading speculative activity and they say constrained revenue growth for retail exchanges like Coinbase. They're basically saying that while tokenization seems like a big deal, that's not going to affect prices next year in the short to medium term. And they say there's some silver lining, you know, maybe the Clarity Act comes forward. But even if that legislation passes, it'll take a while for that to bake into crypto prices. That's the Barclays take.

David Hoffman:
[5:17] I think that's pretty fair. That also sounds pretty aligned with the take that we got from Joey Groog, who just interviewed, where he was like, the interesting big things on the horizon for 2026 is like the SpaceX IPO. Yeah. I wish it was. Or the open AI or anthropic IPOs. And those are just going to be liquidity sucks. And there's not much attention to be gotten in crypto. But that also means that he also continued saying, well, that's kind of why he's bullish on buying in 2026. Really good interview. That comes out next week?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[5:50] I think so. Next week or the week after. We got your holidays covered, guys. So we're going to keep publishing podcasts during the Christmas season for sure.

David Hoffman:
[5:57] As if Bankless would ever stop. There's a bunch of stuff that has made me question things, but I have never questioned getting three episodes out in a week.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[6:07] We're working for you guys every day. David, do you remember that one time Warren Buffett called Bitcoin rat poison squared? Do I remember? That was seven years ago.

David Hoffman:
[6:18] Oh my God, seriously?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[6:20] Yeah, that was 2018. It seems like just yesterday. Well, it's kind of interesting because I saw this clip from Warren Buffett. I'm going to play it. And he talks about fiat. And I sort of get the impression that maybe fiat is the rat poison.

David Hoffman:
[6:34] Is rat poison squared? Maybe.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[6:35] He didn't say those words,

David Hoffman:
[6:37] But let's play what he did say. I mean, people can study economics and you can have all kinds of arrangements, but in the end, And if you've got people that control the currency, You can issue paper money, and you will, or you can engage in clipping currencies like they used to do centuries ago. Or there will always be people, and it's the nature of their job. I'm not singling them out as particularly evil or anything like that. But the natural course of government is to make the currency worth less over time, and it's got important consequences. And it's very hard to build checks and balances into the currency. system to keep that from happening.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[7:34] Does that sound like a crypto advocate?

David Hoffman:
[7:36] He sounds like a Bitcoiner, dude. That's what a Bitcoiner says. I'm not going to lie. When he first started talking, I was like, why is Ryan playing a clip of RFK Jr.?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[7:44] He's, Buffett's, look, Buffett's 95, okay? He's got a little raspy into his 90s, but, I mean, still obviously an incredible investor for his tenure. He just has never come around to non-sovereign monies like gold or like Bitcoin or let alone Ethereum. But he He has all of the logic there.

David Hoffman:
[8:04] Look, it took Warren Buffett 95 years to come around to what we knew a decade ago.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[8:10] Try to keep up,

David Hoffman:
[8:12] Buffett. Yeah, keep up, Buffett.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[8:14] This was actually a clip that caught my eye. It said Berkshire is moving, that's Warren Buffett's company, $348 billion into the Japanese yen. And I was like, wait, what? That is not true. If you saw that on Twitter or wherever, Buffett is not deploying, you know, $350 billion into the Japanese yen. He does have, however, about $380 billion in treasuries and dollar-based assets on cash on the Berkshire Hathaway balance sheet right now. So that positions him in about a 30% cash position at this point in time. Always good to have cash. You got to have that spare dry powder for buying the dips. And Buffett has seen his share of dips and he's done his share of buying throughout the decades. but this is up from like other positions where he's had like 15%, 20%. Now he's up to 30%. So he's fiat bearish, dollar bearish, but he still likes to have that cash reserve just in case some of the assets he does like go down.

David Hoffman:
[9:18] Yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[9:19] Pretty sensible. Yeah, I feel like that's normal. Do you play it like that too, David?

David Hoffman:
[9:23] No, I don't have any cash. What are you talking about? Why would I do that?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[9:26] You fully deployed all the time?

David Hoffman:
[9:28] Every time I've tried to hold cash, I'm like, I want to buy that thing.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[9:32] Do you know why it's so hard to hold cash? This is another take from billionaire investor Ron Baron, who summarizes it like this. Basically summarizes why you feel poor today. Most people feel poor. It's because money kind of sucks as an instrument. The dollar. Money loses, this is the dollar, 4% to 5% purchasing power per year. That, of course, is inflation. The economy grows at 2% annually. That's roughly a 7% combined erosion. So what this means is that prices double every 10 to 12 years. Prices double. And your savings are cut in half every 15 years. And so this system is basically designed to punish you if you hold fiat. That's why you can't store your wealth in fiat. This is why you don't store a lot of your wealth in fiat and why it's painful to hold dollars over the long time horizon because they're just leaky. They're just leaking every year.

David Hoffman:
[10:23] At least in 2025 that we have a bunch of options to actually get real yield, which we never had in 2021. Remember the big discourse in 2021 is like there is no yield to be found anywhere. So you have to buy.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[10:35] Because FedRateSat were like zero, basically.

David Hoffman:
[10:38] Yeah, so we were in Zerp. Yeah, the Aave app is giving you like 8% to 9% yield on your stables. Morpho's giving you 6%. So at least you can kind of like hold steady. Prices are still doubling while you're holding steady. So like that's still a phenomenon that's happening. But at least to some degree, there is a viable way for like, you know, end investors, retail investors to actually get some amount of yield to keep up with things.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[11:04] It's hard to keep up, right? But even from an income side, if price doubles every 10 years, like your salary, if you're a $100K salary, you better be making $200K just to break even in 10 years time. I mean, that's a pretty big hill to climb.

David Hoffman:
[11:16] Yeah. People always, people talk about like becoming a millionaire these days. I would like that's all the meme, like got to become a millionaire. Yeah.

David Hoffman:
[11:22] But people were talking about becoming a millionaire in like the 90s where $1 million is like $10 million. So like the new millionaire is actually $10 million, which is just, it seems a little bit more difficult.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[11:34] Yeah. I mean, for our kids, they'll be looking for like, you know, $1 million coming out of college or something, salary. Tell us about these big bankless announcements you promised, David.

David Hoffman:
[11:44] Okay. We got two secret products. I'm leading one. Ryan's leading the other. So we're going to fight in our hands. You're making this a rivalry? We're making this a rivalry. Okay, what's your product? The project that I really like, it's called ICO Watch. I'm making this with the newsletter team. And it's just an aggregation of all the information that an investor needs to be informed about ICOs. There have just been a ton of token sales getting announced.

David Hoffman:
[12:06] And we know that there are more coming down the pipe. And so this will be updated as more token sales get online. But it's just a page to go to get all the relevant information that you need as an investor to be informed about token sales. Like registration and sale dates. so to make sure you don't miss the deadlines the valuation of the token being sold the raised target how much they're raising the sale mechanism are they doing a Uniswap CCA are they doing a coinless sale a sonar sale what the lockup schedules are, who the team is, who the previous investors are, any useful links that we found, and if we've done one.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[12:39] An interview.

David Hoffman:
[12:40] An interview with the team directly linked. And so I did an interview with Mike Demare from the Rainbow Wallet and also his- Demare.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[12:47] That's how you say his last name.

David Hoffman:
[12:48] That's his name, yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[12:49] I've always been mispronouncing it.

David Hoffman:
[12:50] Yeah, same. And you can click the link and it'll take you straight to an interview that we did about the sale and about the investor rights and investor protections. And so if you want to be an informed ICO public sale participant.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[13:03] If you've got any money still to invest.

David Hoffman:
[13:05] If you've got any money still, there's a button to get alerts for any incoming new ICOs. And also, if you're doing an ICO, at me on Twitter so we can add your ICO to the ICO watch page.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[13:17] Wait, wait, you don't want just any ICO. You're only picking the cream of the crop, right? Are you open to any shitcoin ICO out there?

David Hoffman:
[13:24] I do kind of expect the possibility of there being just like too many ICOs, and then we'll have to start curating. But right now we are listing every single ICO that we do not find a red flag for. And you will notice that there is a disclaimer saying these projects are not vetted by Banklist. Do your own research. So we are listing ICOs that we cannot find red flags for is our curation criteria.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[13:46] Now I'm going to put you under the gun. Tell me your favorite. Your favorite one that's coming out on this list. Pick your favorite.

David Hoffman:
[13:53] Oh, there's a handful of here. Okay, so I can't pick favorites. Here's a reason why I like Rainbow is because they have a proposed strategy for equity token alignment where the foundation owns a significant amount of the equity and the foundation is a fiduciary duty to token holders. I appreciate that. Okay. I like that. We have a.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[14:13] Topic about that coming up in the episode with Abe.

David Hoffman:
[14:16] Yep, you can find out more about that in the interview I did with them. I also like Sama because they make you shield your stable coins in order to participate. So you actually have to use Zama and the value of the Zama project is being used in their own public sale. I think that's also noteworthy. But I think there's a lot of innovation left. So I'm going to reserve my favorite

David Hoffman:
[14:33] ICO for the future ICOs that come down the pipe.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[14:36] Yeah. Keep in mind, guys, if you do one of these, you could lose everything, right? Like who knows, right? These could drop to zero as ICOs have in the past. Okay. My product, I guess, is a podcast.

David Hoffman:
[14:47] Wait.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[14:48] Yeah. What? Yeah. So it's Mike from the DeFi Report. We've been doing these monthly bankless podcasts. He's really great. But he writes weekly reports. And I was like, well, doing something weekly on Banklist, that'd be like a bit too much. Why don't we just do a TDR, the DeFi report? That's what TDR stands for. Separate podcast and just cover. Like, so I'm going to read his report every Wednesday. I read these anyway. And then we get on a podcast, record it. And basically, it's an opportunity to follow an investor on his crypto journey. And he invests very much in the different crypto cycles. So he's got a take on where we are in the cycle right now. He's, you know, like even, I suppose, different than Buffett. He's only got 20% in crypto and 80% in cash. So he's really ramping up to deploy during the bear market. Yeah. So he's very opinionated and it's just very interesting. So you can catch that on the DeFi Report feed. There's a link in the show notes or I think you just search.

David Hoffman:
[15:48] It is not this podcast. It's called the DeFi Report.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[15:50] We did one episode on the Begless feed. that'll be the only one I think we do for the DeFi report all of those others will be published in the DeFi report Spotify, YouTube

Ryan Sean Adams:
[15:58] Go search, go find that. All right. David, we got some other announcements coming up. Maybe bigger announcements than the bankless announcements we just launched.

David Hoffman:
[16:07] No, nothing's bigger than that.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[16:08] Coinbase product announcements. They are trying to become the everything app. And there's an Aave, Civil War. I want you to tell me about that too. All this and more. But before we get there, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

David Hoffman:
[16:21] On December 17th, Coinbase hosted their system update event. That is what they're calling their kind of like Apple debut. Like, here's all of our new products event, system update. Kind of a, it's nice because it's the Coinbase system update. So Coinbase is getting a system update, but they're also trying to update the system. So they're kind of giving progress on that. And so key, some key things here. Goal is to become the number one financial service app in the world. Not crypto specific to finance generally. And a lot of the announcements here at the system update event is definitely aligned with finance broadly rather than crypto specifically. Gary Tan tweeted out, Coinbase just launched an Instagram, a Robinhood, a Venmo, and a MasterCard today. And so this was all the collection of all the different things that they announced this week. Perhaps the big one, the first one, the one that they led with, stock trading. So stocks are now available on Coinbase. stocks like nvidia apple amazon tesla all listed right in the coinbase app alongside crypto assets like bitcoin and ether and all the other crypto assets that you know uh this is rolling out uh to every coinbase user over the next few weeks so some people have this right now some people do not i opened up my coinbase app couldn't find it but i'm sure it'll be available to me shortly let's say actually take a look at what this looks like in the demo so let's see how this works.

David Hoffman:
[17:40] I open up my Coinbase app where I can now see a dedicated section for stocks on the trade tab. I'm going to buy Nvidia for this demo. And after just a few taps, I can buy Nvidia using USDC, where I'm also earning best in class rewards. And the best part is that you only need one account. So now you can trade stocks and a huge selection of crypto all in one place.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[18:07] That's the theme, right? All in one place. All in one place. Now they have the stocks. So this is available not to everyone you said it's rolling out, but it's only rolling out to the U.S. as well. Right.

David Hoffman:
[18:17] Only U.S. users. Australia, Canada.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[18:19] It's only U.S. accounts. It's kind of inverted, right? Because I feel like Europeans used to get everything sooner than Americans, but now we're getting tokenized. Actually, these aren't tokenized stocks.

David Hoffman:
[18:29] No, these are not tokenized stocks. These are normal equities. These are just normal equities in the same way that like Robinhood provides them or your any other brokerage has them. Maybe you're wondering, how do they do that? How does this work legally speaking? So Coinbase, thanks for asking, Ryan. Coinbase has launched their own brokerage arm called Coinbase Capital Markets. If you find out more, I was doing some digging. Coinbase.com slash CCM. You open up a brokerage account with your Coinbase login to trade stocks and ETFs. And so you sign on to their service agreement for Coinbase Capital Markets.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[19:02] That's how they're regulated to do this, as a broker-dealer.

David Hoffman:
[19:04] Yes, U.S. broker-dealer, FINRA member, SIPC member, exact same kind of category of document that you would sign at like Robinhood, Schwab, Fidelity. One small difference, which I guess is useful, is who actually holds the stocks? In Coinbase, there is a third-party company called Apex Clearing Custody and Settlement. So Coinbase runs the UI, the account access, and the order routing, but Apex Clearing and Custody holds the actual stocks. Slightly different than Robinhood. Robinhood Securities holds the custody and settlement, while Robinhood, as we know it, also runs the UI and order routing. So differences like outsourcing versus vertical integration here.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[19:42] This is a good move. This is an expected move, I think, by Coinbase. I was very excited about it and hopeful that this is the direction that they're going. It's really a catch up to where Robinhood has always been. I mean, Robinhood has started basically with equities. I think they make a ton of their money on options and other more complicated, but they do have spot market for equities. So this is Coinbase catching up. I would still say, though, that Robinhood is a step ahead, particularly on the tokenized stock game, right? So remember, they partnered with Arbitrum, and there are like hundreds of tokenized Robinhood stocks right now on chain on Arbitrum 1. There's about 13 million in value, so not a ton of value. But there is still a step ahead of Coinbase on the tokenized stock game, I would say. And this is Coinbase catching up a little bit.

David Hoffman:
[20:32] Yeah, and the chart that we're looking at on the Dune dashboard is a nice up and to the right chart. So only $13.4 million, as you said, but it's going up. I actually was surprised by this. It says 1,900 number of assets tokenized, which is a pretty good number.

David Hoffman:
[20:48] But I actually really haven't run into a Robinhood tokenized stock in my on-chain explorations. And so I haven't really interfaced with it personally.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[20:55] But you do use Robinhood for just purchasing stocks.

David Hoffman:
[20:58] Normal Robinhood to do normal things, yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[20:59] Custodial stocks, that sort of thing. Correct. Now, are you excited to have this on Coinbase as well?

David Hoffman:
[21:05] Yeah, I want to know about the fees. Robinhood has the whole no fees for their equities. And then when you go and try and buy crypto in Robinhood, it's like extremely expensive. The fees are terrible. Like don't buy crypto in Robinhood. The fees are too high. And then you go to Coinbase and like Coinbase doesn't have low fees. They're not low fees for crypto, but they're way lower than Robinhood's. And I would expect the fees on the stocks to be kind of the same. So like the fee parity, the fee matching, I would like to explore that a little bit.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[21:34] But all in one place.

David Hoffman:
[21:35] All in one place.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[21:36] Yeah. That wasn't the only thing they rolled out. They also rolled out equity perps. What are these?

David Hoffman:
[21:40] 24-7 access to trade equity perps. So we cannot do equity. Not yet. I can't find it in my app, but they say that it's rolling out soon. 24-7 access to perps contracted to 20x leverage, which would also allow users outside the United States to gain continuous capital-efficient exposure to U.S. equities via a perp. So interesting. Would also like to see that roll out and see what happens.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[22:04] I mean, perps are a crypto product, right? And now they're being applied to the equities world. I still have some older, you know, non-crypto brokerage accounts and they don't offer perps, but I think it's a valuable product. Not that I go margin long on many things or anything, but it's really intuitive. It's very useful. To me, it makes much more sense for the retail investor than something like an option, right? You just go 2X NVIDIA or 5X long Apple or whatever and just hold that until you... You get margin called.

David Hoffman:
[22:36] Yeah, you get margin called, yeah. Whenever I look at options, I just get so overwhelmed. It's like, okay, there's a strike price and there's a call, like call price, all this kind of stuff. I'm just like, I can't, there's too many variables for here.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[22:46] Yeah, just let me gamble in a simple way,

David Hoffman:
[22:48] Please. Just let me do 20x and I'll hold it for a few days. Like I don't understand how to do that. It is worth noting that there are future perps currently available in Coinbase, but like it's kind of wonky because if you hold it over the weekend, they increase your margin requirement just because of regulations. because over the weekend you have to require more margin because it's less liquid. And so it demargins you or it deleverages you over the weekends. And so that's kind of clunky. It's like not hyperliquid or any other like Perp platform where you can just simply hold a 20X position and it's just uniform for as long as you want.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[23:20] That's the thing I want.

David Hoffman:
[23:21] I will see. We will see if that's how it works in Coinbase. Still, I don't have access to it yet, so I don't know. This is something that Coinbase is ahead of Robinhood on. Robinhood promised perp equities has not yet shipped it.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[23:34] Okay, interesting. What else we got?

David Hoffman:
[23:36] Prediction markets directly through the Coinbase app with Kalshi in the back end. And so you can bet on sports and anything else related to prediction markets directly through Coinbase. I would imagine it's the same model used by Robinhood where Coinbase takes probably the majority of the fees from Kalshi, but they are able to just provide their customers with prediction market demand.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[23:58] This is another catch up to Robinhood, I suppose, because Robinhood has been offering this. And you told me, I think, Robinhood is actually planning to roll out their own prediction market as well.

David Hoffman:
[24:07] So Robinhood owns their customers. And so why don't they just build a prediction market themselves?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[24:13] Rather than rely on CallShea.

David Hoffman:
[24:14] Rather than have CallShea in the back end, which is what they're doing. And so they kind of just use CallShea to bootstrap their own demand for prediction

David Hoffman:
[24:21] markets. But now they're just doing it themselves.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[24:23] Are you surprised that a crypto native company like Coinbase picked CallShea rather than Polymarket, which is more crypto native?

David Hoffman:
[24:29] No, because Polymarket is to Tether as CallShe is to USDC. So Polymarket is kind of the offshore, less regulated entity. CallShe operates a prediction market.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[24:41] But it's getting there.

David Hoffman:
[24:41] It's getting there. It's getting there.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[24:42] It's pretty close now. They just got the license agreement.

David Hoffman:
[24:44] Yes. So it should have feature parity or regulation parity, maybe I should say. But CallShe is currently, their event contracts are compliant with the CFTC. and so that is what gives Coinbase a regulatory compliance to be able to do this. Again, Polymarket will do this in the future but they're not here today so that's why it's Kalshi. And I would imagine, to your point, why would Coinbase pick Kalshi over Polymarket because in the future like i would expect them to just have both there at the same.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[25:13] Time i think they're just going to aggregate all the prediction markets that they can and maybe i think the

David Hoffman:
[25:17] Bigger question is does coinbase build their own prediction market.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[25:20] Yeah and they could but they're pretty busy and there's a lot of products that they're rolling out just now uh another big feature was the dex access to solana tokens so right now in the coinbase app of course uh any asset that's traded via base on airdrum is available to you and they just extended that this is kind of the DeFi mullet approach to all of the tokens on Jupiter and the Solana platform. So any Solana token, you can now access inside of the Coinbase app. So should you choose to do that? Also, some other things they didn't announce as net new, but they kind of underlined.

David Hoffman:
[25:55] Chest beaded about.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[25:56] Yeah. And yeah. And reminded us that they're still there. One of which was the token sale platform, right?

David Hoffman:
[26:02] Yeah. So they talked about their Monad ICO and kind of gave some metrics just kind of to show the power of their sale platform. So with a Monad ICO, $260 million in allocation requests from 85,000 unique accounts that they have KYC'd and verified. So these aren't like on-chain potential like Sybil accounts. These are just ICO'd people over 70 countries. So use the success of the Monad ICO to talk about their ICO platform. And then there's a few other like marginal updates that are still kind of useful to illustrate Coinbase's direction. So they have the new direct deposit flow. So anytime you have your direct deposit from your employer, you can set aside some amount of that direct deposit to go straight into Coinbase to automatically buy crypto, now equities, ETFs with every paycheck that you make. They talked about their loan program. And so you can take out $5 million of a loan against your Bitcoin. They announced their ETH loan program. So you can take a $1 million line of credit out with Ether.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[26:56] And that uses Morpho in the background, right?

David Hoffman:
[26:57] That uses Morpho on base. And so there's over a billion dollars of Bitcoin on base using this program. And so we'll now be able to see Ether have a line of credit there. There's an incoming pay tab. And so if you have a Coinbase account and your friend has a Coinbase account, you can hit the pay tab to pay them through their phone number, email, or wallet.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[27:18] Actually, I don't know if the friend needs a Coinbase account. This is something I need to go investigate. but they said you can pay using crypto this would be usdc to anyone like with a phone number email or wallet address so wallet address obviously implies crypto but right maybe just an email and a phone number is enough to kind of get them started they have to download an app and then they can receive it yeah

David Hoffman:
[27:39] Yeah yeah they also talked about their coinbase one card apparently users have received 16 million dollars of bitcoin as a rewards from swiping their coinbase one card which is a visa card i believe, They also announced Coinbase Advisor. So shout out Lincoln Murr. He talked at the Bankless Summit. Lincoln Murr debuted an AI-powered advisor to help manage your financial life. It can evaluate portfolio. You can ask it questions. It can ask you questions and prompt you. It can prompt you, Ryan. Like imagine your chat GPT. Hey, would you like to rebalance your portfolio? Go ahead and press this button. And it can also include prediction market bets. And so if you say, hey, you know what? I'm really bullish on AI. And you can say, hey, well, if you're bullish on AI, you can bet that AGI is going to arrive by 2030 and you can take that prediction market position right now. And it will prompt you in that chat window.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[28:29] Which scares me a little bit. Just to support emotional counseling because I feel like a lot of the journey of crypto trading is a very emotional journey, you know?

David Hoffman:
[28:37] Yeah, they also announced Coinbase therapy for all the crypto investors out there for the bear market.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[28:43] Therapy mode. Yeah, they should. Also, the base app was mentioned too. So Brian Armstrong comes out and he says, that's our custodial offerings, but we also have non-custodial offerings, including the base app. And Jesse...

David Hoffman:
[28:59] Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. How many times did Jesse talk about creators and funding creators and tokenizing content? That's what I was going to tell you.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[29:07] Was that the bit? The whole bit was it's basically the base app, right? It wasn't beta and now it's available to everyone. That was the news. but this is very much a creator economy thing social media that's where Gary Tan you said the Instagram product this is the this is the Instagram type product which is all your posts all your things are tokenized it's very much a Farcaster Zora type feel um It's an interesting part of the, I guess, it's like an on-chain social type of play. And that's a very specific implementation of what a non-custodial wallet is.

David Hoffman:
[29:42] Yes, yes. It's also interesting that last week we talked about how Farcast was like, on-chain social doesn't work. We're pivoting to a wallet. And then BASE is like, we're going to make on-chain social work.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[29:53] I want to see if they can make it work. We'll see.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[29:56] But I'm very bullish on all of these other Coinbase products. And what I would say is, I think this is good for DeFi because it's DeFi mullet. If I am a bank or if I am a brokerage like a Fidelity or an E-Trade or whatever, Charles Schwab or whatever, Or even if I'm a bank, I'm shaking in my boots with this type of announcement. Between Robinhood and Coinbase, which are kind of neck and neck here, seems to me they are eating the demand for financial services, the everything app demand for younger generations, right? It's like millennials and Gen Z, that's their core demographic. And this has got to be a shot across the bow because it does create like an everything app type experience. Now, they're missing the bank piece. You said Robinhood just rolled out like a banking type of feature.

David Hoffman:
[30:48] Yeah, which is a white-labeled service on top of a bank. So when you sign up for Robinhood Banking, you get a bank account with some other bank.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[30:54] Yeah, but the full stack at one location. I do have to say,

David Hoffman:
[30:57] I did sign up for Robinhood Banking, and they gave me a Robinhood checkbook, too.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[31:01] Oh, wow. That's so weird to see. Are you ever going to use that,

David Hoffman:
[31:05] Pubby? Well, I have a check. For people who are paying attention, I'm sorry. I'm sorry I have a checkbook. I have an 87-year-old landlord. It's the only way that he takes checks.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[31:13] So this is how this goes.

David Hoffman:
[31:14] Yes, that's right. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Ryan, Coinbase, financial super app. Robinhood, financial super app. Notable mention, World also launched its super app and has, like, crypto pay. Everyone's got a super app now. And encrypted chat features. Everyone's getting a super app. You know what is also the super app, the superiest of all super apps?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[31:36] What? Were you going to show me something crypto native? Oh, yeah, Ethereum. Ethereum is the super app.

David Hoffman:
[31:42] Let's not forget it. And so all of these, the fintech layer around Ethereum and blockchains generally are all launching their super apps. But we also forget Ethereum itself is a super app. You can go to CalSwap. Okay, so type in 500,000. We're going to buy 500,000 of something.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[31:58] Of your money.

David Hoffman:
[31:59] Of dollars. This is USCC. 500,000 USCC. You want to buy ETH? I'd love to buy ETH. I already have enough of that. I would like to diversify. I would like to diversify using my Ethereum super app that I have because I have a wallet. But type in G-O-O-G-L-O-N.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[32:14] Who's a shit coin you are?

David Hoffman:
[32:16] Sure.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[32:18] Google on.

David Hoffman:
[32:19] Google. This is an ondo tokenized Google. You can buy half a million dollars of Google. What slippage is it telling you you're going to get?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[32:30] 0.03%.

David Hoffman:
[32:32] With that half a million dollars buy, you can get a 0.03% slippage on Google. And now you might be asking, are you actually paying the fair execution price of what Google is currently trading at in TradFi? Well, I compared it and it was pretty damn close. effectively the same. Look at the fees.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[32:49] Too. It's just a very low fee.

David Hoffman:
[32:51] $100 plus a network cost of $1.49 to buy a half a million dollars of Google on your Ethereum super app. Wow. So while all these companies are launching super apps, don't forget about the super app.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[33:05] Don't forget the OG.

David Hoffman:
[33:06] The OG.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[33:06] Okay, so remind us what, Ondo tokens are actually tokenized equities.

David Hoffman:
[33:11] Yes, actually tokenized equities, that's right.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[33:13] And we did an entire episode with Ondo. They have a pretty slick mechanism where they're getting liquidity and they're keeping spreads tight and is a pretty seamless sort of representation of what a tokenized asset should be. And you're saying that's already on available, like available on Ethereum today.

David Hoffman:
[33:29] Yeah. So I was I'm interested in a lot of the like Google owns so much and they're only going to continue to grow more. So I was like, OK, I would like to buy a little bit of Google. I went to Robinhood, looked at it and I was like, OK, I could buy it here. It'd be easy. But the fees are cheaper on the Ethereum layer 1. And it's where all the rest of my money is. And so I did it through a cash swap. It was nice.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[33:52] That's cool. So that was Coinbase. That was Coinbase. Big announcement week. I think it lived up to the hype.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[33:59] Aave. There's some Aave drama on the week as well. What's going on here?

David Hoffman:
[34:03] Okay, so Aave is in the middle of a governance fight over who captures value from the Aave brand. Does this story sound familiar, Ryan?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[34:10] Yeah, it does. It sounds a lot like Uniswap.

David Hoffman:
[34:12] Yeah, a lot like Uniswap. which has solved a lot of it, or is voting to solve some of its issues. Okay, so what sparked it? So the Aave Labs front end replaced Paraswap with CalSwap on the official Aave front end. That just redirected the fees from the DAO to the treasury. So when they had the Paraswap on the front end, those fees went to the DAO. The CalSwap fees go to the labs, the equity ownership. So this would cost the DAO an estimated $10 to $15 million a year in potential revenue for the DAO. So the core dispute on the DAO side, they call it stealth privatization. The Aave brand and the front end were built with the DAO funding and governance legitimacy. So the revenue tied to the brand should accrue to the Aave token holders, according to the DAO. The Labs side of things is that the front end is a separate opinionated product maintained by Labs, which owns the trademark and the domain and also has labs risk around the trademark and domain monetizing it doesn't touch the protocol itself and so there's a pretty hard line between the DAO here and which governs the protocol and on-chain economics and the front end by labs which builds products on top of it including the main interface so of course the big question is that we've been asking for like almost almost years like five years now.

David Hoffman:
[35:29] The brand, the IP, the fiduciary duty, what rights do token holders have? What ownership does token holders have? Do they have all those things? Or does Aave Labs or the Labs entity have all the good stuff and the DAO has all the less good stuff?

David Hoffman:
[35:44] This really isn't really an Aave-only problem. So also news this week was that Circle acquired this company called Interop Labs, which is the core team behind Axelar, which is an Interop protocol. So they acquired the entity and the team. Maybe it's an aqua hire. Maybe they also acquired their technology. You know what they didn't acquire, Ryan?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[36:02] Probably all the tokens.

David Hoffman:
[36:03] The tokens. They did not. Yeah, why would they acquire the tokens? They don't need the tokens. They bought the IP and they bought the IP and all that stuff.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[36:11] So all the investors and the tokens feel pretty rugged at this point.

David Hoffman:
[36:14] Yeah, well, especially after the token dropped 45%. Wow. And now maybe you look at Circle and be like, you assholes. But also Circle has fiduciary duty to share their shareholders to provide shareholder value.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[36:26] Well, they have actual fiduciary duty legally.

David Hoffman:
[36:28] To the fiduciary duty. Yeah, so if they don't have to pay for the token holders, then why would they do that? This also happened with Coinbase a while ago. Coinbase bought the NFT Tensor platform. They bought the team. They bought the IP. They bought the website, all that good stuff. Did they buy the token? No. Left the token out to dry, which is just like a really bad look for the industry with its tokens. How can you say, hey, come invest in our crypto assets. You might get rocked.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[36:57] Yeah, exactly. I was actually talking to Martin about this, and he was talking about- Martin Koppelman, yeah. Yeah, from CowSwap, right? He's one of the builders behind CowSwap. And he was just like, CowSwap is crushing it in terms of volume, but the token's only worth 100 million. He's like, it's far more volume in the last 45 days than Polymarket has in its entire lifetime. And like, why is the token only worth $100 million? I'm like, CowSwap as a product is great. The Cow token? I don't know.

David Hoffman:
[37:24] What happens if Coinbase buys CalSwap?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[37:26] Exactly. Our products have... Some of our DeFi native crypto products have product market fit, but our tokens are kind of shit from a fiduciary investor protection perspective. And that's just the reality. And it's work that we have to do. They won't always be this way. I don't believe that. I think we are taking some steps to improve that, including what Uniswap has done recently with their unification.

David Hoffman:
[37:51] Or is doing, not done yet. Okay. is doing.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[37:54] This is Hayden Adams. Tell us about this. Just submitted the unification proposal for final governance vote. So Uniswap had Uniswap Labs, and then they had the Uniswap Protocol and Uniswap Foundation. And these were separate islands once again. And they had the fee switch. It's very reminiscent of what you just described with Aave, but they are in

Ryan Sean Adams:
[38:12] the process of trying to solve this. What's their solution?

David Hoffman:
[38:15] Yeah, Uniswap, which really has been kind of the core example of equity token misalignment, is now kind of leading the charged to fixing that. Hopefully they solve it in such a way that provides kind of a template to the rest of the industry. Again, they're calling this the unification. So here's what happens with the unification. The DAO gets an in real life legal entity, a Wyoma DUNA, they're calling it a DUNA. Labs becomes a main operator to the DUNA via a service provider agreement. And so the The DAO Foundation kind of becomes the thing, which employs, contracts the Labs entity to be the main service provider. Kind of cool. They have a growth budget. So the Labs has a growth budget given to them by the DUNA, $20 million UNI tokens a year as their budget to work on Uniswap quarterly. uh being paid out quarterly starting january 1st 2026 per the forum post so the labs gets funded to do the protocol growth work and explicitly commits to alignment with token holder interests under that agreement uh and then the uniswap foundation moves into the lab so the uniswap foundation is uh already an existing thing they give out grants and they kind of support the broad uniswap ecosystem they become part of the part of labs uh and so a bigger foundation is made with the Dooney, the Doona, and then the Uniswap Current Foundation moves into Labs, and then Labs becomes a service provided to the Doona. Seems complicated, doesn't seem that complicated really to me.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[39:43] It's not that complicated. I think it means the DAO is in charge, the token is in charge, the fees go to the token holders, and the token gets some sort of legal representation, so it can have bank accounts and things like this, and basically employs Labs. Maybe it's not perfect.

David Hoffman:
[39:58] I don't think it's perfect. I think there's a bunch of models like this coming forward that I think the market will need to evaluate.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[40:04] It's a big step in the right direction. And honestly, David, I think we have to fix this during this next, during 2026 in order to get our tokens back to where they should be. Because, you know, Aave is still down 62% from all time high.

David Hoffman:
[40:18] Yeah, but TVL is up so much.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[40:20] It is. It's up like 50X. Like it's never been bigger. It's growing like crazy. The team, I mean, Stani just published a 2026 master plan. Like it's incredible. The product itself is incredibly bullish. Yeah. Okay, so why is the token down so bad? It's because investor rights aren't enshrined and protected.

David Hoffman:
[40:37] Investor rights probably, now that we have the regulatory green light to do things, the first thing we need to do is fix investor rights and fit investor protections.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[40:47] Let's go do it. I think we will. And I think some of these tokens will be... steals this cycle in terms of entrance price. David, we've got a few things coming up. We've got to talk about Solana's biggest conference and what was announced. And also, JPMorgan just chose Ethereum for something pretty big. We'll talk about all that and more. But first, I want to shout out our friends and sponsors.

David Hoffman:
[41:09] As the resident Solana expert on this podcast, I'll tell you about the three things that happened at Solana Breakpoint in Dubai. The number one, the three big things. First one, Fire Dancer. Do you remember what Fire Dancer is? It's been a while.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[41:22] Yeah, it was the other Solana client, basically, that Jump Capital was deploying that promised insane throughput, like a million transactions per second throughput. They were making everything incredibly efficient, and it's been long awaited.

David Hoffman:
[41:37] Yes, yeah. So that is now on mainnet, written in Scratch and C by Jump Crypto, not Jump Crypto. Capital, but basically the same. Re-implement Solana's networking runtime consensus pipeline to be highly, highly optimized. 600,000 to over 1 million transactions per second in controlled tests. Probably doesn't really relate too much to what happens in the wild, so we'll probably see what Solana actual throughput increases. It gets from Fired Answers shortly. It is out in the wild. It's deployed before Breakpoint. It was already running on a subset of validators for about 100 days and successfully produced over 500,000 blocks.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[42:15] But don't you have, like, don't the majority of validators have to upgrade to Fire Dancer for it to actually impact the Solana network, resident Solana bull, right? Because you're still limited by your weakest link,

David Hoffman:
[42:28] Aren't you? Yes, but Solana takes turns. And so if you have a Fire Dancer client producing the blocks, then in that moment of time, you have the Fire Dancer client as producing the blocks at the end of the chain.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[42:39] Right. But the more validators that adopt it, the greater the effect that FireGans will have.

David Hoffman:
[42:46] Yeah, but I don't think there's like a hard line. Like it just slowly increments upwards. And so it's, yeah, incremental is the key word. So a minority of nodes are adopting it right now just for security reasons. Got to play it safe. Interesting strategy from Solana.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[42:59] It is a pretty big milestone to have their second client from an independent development shop.

David Hoffman:
[43:04] Yes, but it is not a second client in the same way that Ethereum has multiple clients. The intent is that the network goes into Fyre Dancer and it's just a single client. And then it has the Agave client as like kind of a fallback. But that's still useful for fallback purposes. It's better. It's better. It's not the security-mindedness that Ethereum has, but sure, it's something. Okay, so congratulations to Fyre Dancer getting made net. Can't wait to see all the data that comes in. It is a big achievement for Solana. Number two, out of Breakpoint, Phantom is launching prediction markets feature with Kalshi. phantom also in this super app game kind of the same thing that Robinhood had and coinbase just announced you have call sheet in the back end small difference, Perhaps a large difference. Positions are tokenized, actually. The positions are actually tokens on Solana. Yeah. And so this maybe makes it integrated with the Solana DeFi ecosystem. And so you can do more things.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[44:03] With the data. I think that's actually an important feature. That's pretty cool. I didn't realize that.

David Hoffman:
[44:06] Yeah. Would like to see how it rolls out and how much surface area is there to do more things with tokenized CallShea positions. CallShea has beat his chest saying, like, yo, we're a crypto company. and everyone else was like, are you guys?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[44:19] Yeah, I don't know.

David Hoffman:
[44:20] Well, now they have tokenized positions. That's true. So that's real. Again, third, Visa offers a stablecoin settlement for U.S. banks on Solana. So a U.S.E.C. settlement service for U.S. financial institutions using Solana as the rails to send U.S.E.C. around. So those are the big things.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[44:38] Yeah. Another item on prediction markets, David, was IBKR. What does the CEO think about prediction markets? What is IBKR? Why did we include this?

David Hoffman:
[44:49] That's Interactive Brokers. So Thomas Peterfee, Peterfee, interesting last name, founder of Interactive Brokers, which is a very large brokerage, spoke at the Goldman Sachs conference and talked about prediction markets. I thought what he said was notable. Right now, there's a big conversation on crypto Twitter about like, oh, prediction markets are just gambling. There's blah, blah, blah. We had this conversation with Joey Crue too.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[45:10] Which was actually really fascinating.

David Hoffman:
[45:11] What's the value of a prediction market? There's been this, theorized value prediction markets in a world where prediction markets literally have prediction markets about everything that are also very liquid about the opportunities that arise. And I think these statements from the CEO, founder of Interactive Brokers, kind of illustrate that future. He suggested that institutional prediction markets could move beyond simple forecasting to directly influence automated portfolio management. For instance, if a market predicts a heat wave, a portfolio might automatically adjust energy investments or hedge electricity price risk. And so we are talking about prediction markets about the weather, connecting that to your financial portfolio to buy or sell energy based off of weather predictions and whether the world will need more energy or less energy. And I think you can use your imagination, extend that to just like, if there are more prediction markets about more things, you could really integrate that into hedge fund strategies.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[46:09] I guess that's right. Because what are prediction markets? They're truth markets. They're really information markets. More information, better information, higher quality signal, better trading outcomes and signals and faster ability to respond.

David Hoffman:
[46:22] Yeah. And energy markets are very, very large. So like the weather and financial markets are actually already interconnected. Yeah. And with prediction markets, they can get interconnected in much higher fidelity ways.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[46:34] That's fascinating. Very creative. David, speaking of TradFi or maybe Suitcoiners and SuitFi, which has been a theme lately on Bankless, the DTCC. You're familiar with the DTCC, right?

David Hoffman:
[46:46] Sure. Yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[46:47] Okay. Well, this is the company. They're like Fedwire for U.S. equities and securities. So do you remember when Sergey from Chainlink came on and talked about how Chainlink was like working with the DTCC? And we're like, okay, tell us more about the DTCC. And he told us at the time that the DTCC settles three to four quadrillion annually.

David Hoffman:
[47:10] Oh, yeah, that quadrillion moment.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[47:12] For quadrillions annually in securities. Okay, that's the DTCC. The SEC just greenlighted the DTCC, so again, settlement for all U.S. capital market securities, to tokenize their assets. Okay? The first time the SEC has ever done this, basically greenlighting them, giving them the go-ahead, encouraging them to tokenize their assets.

David Hoffman:
[47:36] On Ethereum.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[47:37] Well, okay, let's talk about that. So what the SEC did was they approved a three-year pilot for certain L1s and L2s, so not all. They had some requirements. The ability to operate from a primary and secondary location, a maximum four-hour recovery time objective, so you can't be down... greater than four hours, a maximum of two minutes of data loss from an outage. Oh, you can't, nevermind. You can't be down for greater than two minutes and annual out of region disaster recovery. So they basically said, Hey, whatever chain, whatever settlement layer meets these requirements, then you can use them. We're not going to tell you what to use, but maybe you can't use Solana if it's down.

David Hoffman:
[48:16] Well, you also can't lose Ethereum layer twos then.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[48:19] You can't. A lot of Ethereum layer twos have gone down too.

David Hoffman:
[48:21] But you can use Ethereum, the world's greatest super app.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[48:24] This leaves a smaller kind of set that have had a history of not going down. And so people naturally said,

David Hoffman:
[48:30] Okay, well, how about Ethereum? I guess you can technically use Bitcoin too.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[48:32] There was actually a demo that I saw. These are the DTC guys right here, okay? So these are developers of DTCC. I'll scan through this demo. I won't play it. But basically, you can see they have Apple. This is an Apple share settled on DTCC. And what they're doing is they are transferring it to Ethereum. They're tokenizing it. And they're doing some things with USDC to buy and sell. So this is a demo on Ethereum.

David Hoffman:
[48:56] World's greatest super app.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[48:58] All right. So that happened. But also, but also, the DTCC launched a press release to partner with a blockchain company called the Canton Network.

David Hoffman:
[49:09] Canto?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[49:10] Canton Network, not Canto. And this partnership between the DTCC indicates that the Canton Network is one of the first pilots where they're actually going to tokenize some of their securities, beginning with U.S. Treasuries.

David Hoffman:
[49:26] Is the Canton Network a blockchain?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[49:29] The Canton Network is kind of a blockchain. This is big news, by the way. So they've been operating in the background. They've been in Wall Street for a very long time, talking about real-world assets, tokenizing things in the background. But just like, I think crypto natives have been completely unaware of what the Canton network is doing because it's not public. It's not a fully permissionless chain. It's not... But like that's part of the value proposition that they're bringing to the DTCC because it's fully private. Anyway, we just booked the CEO of the Canton Network for the first week of January. So we're going to talk to them and learn more about this. There's actually a Canton Network token. Did you know this?

David Hoffman:
[50:10] Did it pump or something?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[50:11] Here's the token.

David Hoffman:
[50:12] $2.7 billion?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[50:14] Yeah.

David Hoffman:
[50:15] Okay. Where did this document come from?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[50:17] I got to figure out what this thing is. We got to figure out what this thing is, but that's where their first pilot is. It doesn't mean they're going to be exclusive. This is just U.S. Treasuries. This is the first half of the first quarter,

David Hoffman:
[50:29] But it was a pretty big press release. How is there a network out there that was worth $2.7 billion? I have never heard of.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[50:34] Crypto is big. And this is Sucoin crypto, okay? So it's a different world than the world we're used to. So it seems like the DTCC is doing things in parallel. They're doing some things with Canton Network. Maybe they're doing some things with Ethereum. And we'll have to see where all of this settles, right?

David Hoffman:
[50:50] Oh, nice. Nice. Nice. Well done. Well done.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[50:55] This is big, though. JP Morgan launched their first ever tokenized money market fund, and it is on Ethereum.

David Hoffman:
[51:03] World's greatest super app.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[51:04] This is the first time we've seen JP Morgan actually deploy something, as far as I'm aware, on the Ethereum L1, the public chain. They've done some things on base. They've had their own private ledger that's EVM-based.

David Hoffman:
[51:16] Oh, yeah. JP Morgan, those are the Quorum people, right?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[51:18] Yeah, Quorum. There's a head quorum in the background that's also doing things that we don't know what it does because we never get to see it. But this is the Biddle Fund, essentially. You know BlackRock's Biddle Fund, kind of money market on chain. This is their version of it. They're seeing it with $100 million. What?

David Hoffman:
[51:32] My on-chain net yield fund, Moni, M-O-N-Y. How cute. Of course, because banks can totally issue money.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[51:41] That's very cute. Yeah, so they're on Ethereum now, and that's bullish.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[51:46] David, Do Kwon got sentenced. And I actually haven't read about this. I just saw the headline. Yep. What happened?

David Hoffman:
[51:52] 15 years in prison, pleaded guilty in August of 2025 of conspiracy to commit fraud and wire fraud. Judge Paul Engelmayer called this the crime a fraud of an epic generational scale. The sentence was higher than the 12 years requested by the prosecutors.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[52:11] Oh, my God.

David Hoffman:
[52:11] And the five years sought after the defense. And apparently, if you read the notes, there was a bunch of letters that... People that got harmed by the Terra Luna collapse sent in and saying, just like, this materially-

Ryan Sean Adams:
[52:25] We lost everything.

David Hoffman:
[52:26] I lost everything.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[52:27] Destroyed my life.

David Hoffman:
[52:28] People committed suicide.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[52:29] Oh, my God.

David Hoffman:
[52:30] And, like, Do Kwan was given an opportunity by the judge to read them, and he was like, I'm good. And the judge did not like that. So people are thinking, like, maybe that's why he got the extra years added onto that.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[52:42] Man, he could have just pretended to read them. Do Kwan. Where is he going to serve the time?

David Hoffman:
[52:49] In the United States for the first half, but then the second half, he goes to South Korea to finish his time. But also, he might also face criminal charges unique to South Korea where he could get up to 40 more years in South Korea. What? So he's not done yet, dude. Yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[53:09] This is like, this seems worse. What did SBF get?

David Hoffman:
[53:13] 25 years?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[53:14] 25 years. Okay. It's not worse than SBF.

David Hoffman:
[53:17] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[53:20] Well, end of an era, I suppose.

David Hoffman:
[53:22] Yeah. I remember when, what's his face, the pharma bro was on Up Only and he was like, don't worry, Joe, jail's not so bad.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[53:28] Oh, my God. Here we are. Oh, my God. Here we are indeed. Here we are. David, remember last week we were talking about a New York Times piece on staple coins where they were chitting all over them?

David Hoffman:
[53:38] Oh, yeah. Uh-huh. This week- Did they apologize? No. They apologize.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[53:42] No.

David Hoffman:
[53:42] They issued retractments or corrections.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[53:45] They wrote a piece on how the SEC was basically bending under Trump's will. And let's see, under the second Trump administration, the SEC inherited about 23 crypto-related cases from the Biden era, and it pulled back from roughly 60% of them via dismissals, pauses, freezes, or favorable settlements. They linked this to basically crypto donations and all sorts of other things, basically implying that the... Crypto industry and Trump are kind of in cahoots, working together, and he is giving favorable access to, like, he's giving favorable rulings to crypto, basically. Which is not completely untrue, but the fact that they are not realizing how unprecedented the SEC's attack on crypto was in the first place.

David Hoffman:
[54:36] Yeah, the implicit assumption, anchor point being made here is that the SEC administration of the Biden era was the normal case. and not in cahoots with Elizabeth Warren and the Democrats. It's just the same thing. Now we're pointing it in a different direction.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[54:50] Exactly. This is the kind of thing, I think the attacks from the New York Times and other entities like it will continue just because the Trump administration has come out so pro-crypto and they just have to default be, if Trump's for it, then we're against it. And so it's unfortunate, but crypto has moved once again into partisan territory

Ryan Sean Adams:
[55:10] and I don't see that changing in the short run.

David Hoffman:
[55:13] Nope. All right, Ryan, we got the last news of the week, perhaps the most important. When crypto comes into culture, you know, we're onto something. Netflix has announced a new Bitcoin comedy. They have greenlit a crypto-themed romantic comedy called One Attempt Remaining. Is this real? Led by Jennifer Gardner. It follows an ex-couple. who years after a messy divorce discover that the Bitcoin they won during a wild, drunken night on a cruise is now worth $35 million. Only problem is, Ryan, can you guess what the problem is?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[55:47] Oh, they lost their seed phrase, right?

David Hoffman:
[55:49] They no longer remember the seed phrase. They have one single login attempt and a very short deadline before the funds become inaccessible forever. I would like to know how that happens. You know, this seems like it could be real. You're waiting on the edge of your seat to watch Jennifer Gardner and her love interest, ex-love interest, figure out their private keys.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[56:08] I don't know. I don't know how funny they're going to be. This is like straight to Netflix movie, right?

David Hoffman:
[56:13] Yeah, I don't know how we're going to watch this.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[56:15] I'm really interested because there's also the detail that they only have a single login attempt and a very short deadline before the funds becomes inaccessible. Right? So I actually want to watch this with an eye towards how accurate it is to

David Hoffman:
[56:30] Actually have crypto works. I have a prediction for you. I have a prediction for you.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[56:34] What's your prediction?

David Hoffman:
[56:35] It's not going to be accurate. Don't get your hope. I think you're going to be very disappointed.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[56:39] Well, maybe I'll come for the tech, but I'll stay for the comedy. That's my hope.

David Hoffman:
[56:44] Ryan is a big rom-com guy.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[56:47] Huge rom. Maybe I can actually get my wife to watch something on crypto for the first time. Guys, we'll have to end it there. Gotta let you know, of course, none of this has been financial advice. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on

Ryan Sean Adams:
[57:03] the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

David Hoffman:
[57:05] Happy holidays.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[57:28] Oh, God damn, damn. Sorry. Ethereum.

David Hoffman:
[57:33] World's Greatest Super App.