ROLLUP: ETH ATH! | U.S. Gov Onchain GDP | Google’s L1 | Hyperliquid Prints | EU Digital Euro?

TRANSCRIPT

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:04] Bankless Nation, it is the last week of August, time for the Bankless Weekly Roll-Up. We've got David out, and we've got Hasib Qureshi filling in from Dragonfly Capital. Hasib, how you doing, man?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[0:13] Doing good. Good to see you.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:14] You know what? To get us in the mood for the Bankless Weekly Roll-Up, I want to play you this clip and see if you can identify. This is Big Sean, okay? You ready for this?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[0:22] I'm ready.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:24] I'm going to play the clip right now. Dave's going to edit this out if you want to see this and follow along there it is in Telegram have you seen this by the way?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[0:35] I have not seen

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:35] This enjoy the next 30 seconds crypto and if it is one time that I'm going to say this this is now you're not too late invest in crypto right now tonight if you can do that shit tonight, you're going to get a return from it you know Bitcoin is a good one Ethereum, what's the other one you said?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[0:57] What's the other one you said?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:59] Ripple. Invest in that shit. I'm telling y'all right now.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[1:01] This is a quick plan.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:03] Do it tonight. It's about to go up. You know, I think it's about to go up. It's not like I got no insider out of nation. I think it's about to go up a little bit. Well, there you go, Hasib. I could not have said it better. I think it's about to go up. Not too sure. Do you hear the crowd, though? They're like, XRP, XRP. That's where the XRP holders are, man.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[1:21] I did hear a little bit of a laugh when he was like, I think it's going to go up. What's the other one that's going to go up? You were telling me about it earlier. It's like, oh, so this is like your bro is telling you this?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:30] Yeah, yeah. Good stuff.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[1:32] Yeah, yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:33] Anyway, you know what? It must be bull season when you got Big Sean yelling

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:36] it from the stage. Actually, yelling out tickers like Bitcoin and ETH.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:39] We got a lot to cover today. So, number one, ETH reached an all-time high last week, okay? That's after almost four years. Four years we've been waiting for this. So, thanks to Tom Lee for that. Also, the U.S. government is putting GDP on the blockchain. What the heck is that about? Is that cool? I don't even know what to think. Also, Google has announced they're credibly neutral, planet scale, layer one, and they announced it on LinkedIn, Hasib. Okay, I went on LinkedIn. I'm never there, but I had to go scope this out. So we're going to talk about that. Hyperliquid, printing money. I want you to tell me what you think about this.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[2:14] It's a lot of revenue. I don't know if it's a buy. I don't know what to do at this point. And also, the EU is considering a digital euro. and they said on a public blockchain they said ethereum they said maybe solana they're not sure yet but that seems like a pivot so all this and more we're going to dive into all these subjects uh but before we get to it got to shout out our friends okay has he i got to start with um maybe powell's speech i don't know if you track these speeches at all and did you listen to this one.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[2:42] I did not listen, but I read about the debrief afterwards. Okay.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[2:46] So what do you think about what's going on? Because the market reacted very, very favorably on Friday. I mean, this is where we got ETH price all-time high and crypto jumped up. What's your take on what Powell said?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[2:58] Well, honestly, it was a little bit of a retrace because if you look at the CME, so the CME, they have these interest rate markets where you can kind of project the number of rate cuts that you expect to happen. Yep. And immediately after Powell's speech, everybody was worried that, you know, after basically a spat of bad data, that maybe Powell was not going to be willing to actually cut rates. And we saw the Fed minutes from previous in the year that had only been disclosed relatively recently, that the Fed governors were pretty unified in thinking that it was too early to cut rates. So that had the market spooked, right? Previously, it was, I think, like 99.9% likely that we were going to get a rate cut in the next Fed meeting.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[3:36] And that had come all the way down to like 40% chance of no rate cut. And so the markets were very, very concerned that maybe we're just going to be stuck here and the Fed is going to be too conservative. And with Trump trying to now politicize the Fed and really meddle, many people think that maybe Powell was just going to dig in his feet and say, look, I don't want my legacy to be I get kowtowed by Trump. I start cutting rates and inflation goes up. That's kind of what I thought.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[4:04] Right? This is his last speech. He's got nothing to lose. I mean, he's going to ride off in the sunset anyway. So why not come out hard?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[4:11] Well, we'll come out hard meaning like hold rates or cut rates.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[4:14] I mean, he wanted to be Volcker, right?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[4:16] Yeah. If you cut rates and inflation goes up, you get blamed. You will get blamed forever as being the weakling who backed down to Trump. Exactly. And I think Powell does not want that to be his legacy. So many people were worried that like maybe just the kind of the ego and the legacy of the man was going to resist the rate cut. But I think hearing from Powell, they're like, hey, I think the data is all there, supports a rate cut. We're currently in restrictive territory. All of that just made markets have this huge sigh of relief of like, oh, OK, thank God. There's going to be rate cuts. We're probably going to be OK. Markets now are pricing, what, like 10 percent chance of no rate cut. So it's like 90 ish percent that we do cut rates in the next Fed meeting. And I think that makes ultimately. Now, that's kind of where we were. Yeah. So I think the ETH rally is largely, okay, both the sigh of relief plus all the stuff happening from DATS and Tom Lee being able to push ETH higher. But if you look at other risk assets, largely they kind of retraced to where they were before when people were already confident in a rate cut. So that's my sense of what has happened over the last couple of weeks.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[5:23] And I guess the market is pricing in what, a 25 basis point rate cut. I mean, some are some are hoping for and this is a much lower probability, but like a 50% rate cut in September. Do you think that happens?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[5:34] I think jumbo cuts off the table. Obviously, you can see here from the chart that you pulled up is that CME says, no, no way. No way on a jumbo rate cut this quarter. Possible that we get three rate cuts by the end of the year. But right now, it looks like the median expectation is two rate cuts.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[5:51] But this is all good for risk on assets, you think? I mean, the reason he's doing this is because of weak job numbers and kind of weak economy, right? So it's a double-edged sword always.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[6:00] That's right. Right. And ultimately what Powell's saying is that, look, I think the inflation increase that we've seen is probably short-lived. It's because of tariffs. If it's because of tariffs, then it's not fundamentally about the money supply. It's about, you know, just measuring the price of goods. And tariffs are a one-time thing. They're not a permanent change to inflation.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[6:19] When you zoom out, though, it doesn't seem a little bit weird. So here's a tweet that I enjoyed. Stocks, all-time high. Home prices, all-time high. Bitcoin, all-time high. Gold, all-time high. Money supply, all-time high. National debt, all-time high. CPI inflation, 4% per year since January 2020, 2x the Fed's target. And the Fed says, we're cutting interest rates next month, guys. Like, should he be cutting interest rates? Or is this actually Trump capitulating due to Trump's meddling?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[6:46] Well, look, the Fed themselves believe that right now, so the labor market is softening, right, pretty clearly. If you look at PCE, so just looking at CPI alone, the Fed actually, they don't use CPI, They use PCE, which basically is a different measure of inflation that's less subject to some of these short-term fluctuations. And you also want to be looking at core, which is basically also takes out – it's like a smaller subset of inflation. And the question always when you're looking at inflation is why is inflation

Haseeb Qureshi:
[7:14] up? What are the subparts of the basket that are inflating? If you see broad-based inflation, like it's happening to everything, that's a sign that this is the bad kind of inflation that's more connected to the money supply and to interest rates. If you see isolated inflation, only certain things are inflating, then you have to understand, like, okay, why is that inflating? It may well be that there's a war somewhere or there's a shortage of something or there's something else that's exogenous and has nothing to do with the money supply. So the Fed, they're very data-driven. They look at all this stuff. And now, look, stocks all-time high, Bitcoin all-time high, gold all-time high. I think these things are kind of unsurprising, right? Actually, these things are supposed to go up over time. That's why we have an inflationary currency is that these numbers are supposed to go up over time. The home prices are maybe the one that's not supposed to go up all the time. The home prices are supposed to be mean reverting, right? That's a weird thing. That's not supposed to happen.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[8:08] It's supposed to be like any other commodity. It's not like TVs get more expensive all the time. So the fact that home prices are getting more expensive all the time, that's a problem. It's a social problem as well as also a policy problem that we decided that we want home prices to keep going higher and higher. But all these other things are actually, that's kind of how it's supposed to work. Yeah, yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[8:26] That's a good point there. Talking about prices, let's look at Bitcoin on the week. So we are at $112K at the time of recording. That's up. That's basically flat on the week. You know, I saw this tweet, Hasib, which I found kind of interesting. One of the Bloomberg ETF guys.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[8:41] Basically, the question of who owns the Bitcoin ETFs, okay? And the number one spot here above banks, above governments, above private equities was investment advisors. You know, your Charles Schwab guy. That's the type of person, individual, that is actually a buyer of these Bitcoin ETFs. And they have about double what the hedge fund managers have. Is this surprising to you or is this somewhat expected that the investment advisors are really the ones driving a lot of these ETF flows?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[9:12] So this is my first time seeing this. When it says investment advisors, does that mean on behalf of retail investors and so on who have accounts at Schwab? Or what exactly does that mean?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[9:21] I think that's what that is, yeah, basically. It's like a registered investment advisor type, you know, who's advising maybe your parents on their 401ks and whatever retirement assets they have.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[9:30] So, yeah, my understanding was that the Bitcoin ETF complex, when it first launched, institutions as we normally think of them were something like 10% of the total Bitcoin ETF holdings. They've come up quite a bit. So now they're like somewhere in the 30-ish percent, which means that most of the Bitcoin ETF complex is still held by retail. And it's, you know, maybe unsurprising that, yes, Bitcoin is mostly owned by retail, even though the institutional interest in Bitcoin has picked up quite a lot. But crypto is still a retail driven asset. And we still have, you know, a lot of the even like the sort of high net worth and family office advisors, a lot of them still don't have the authority to be able to affirmatively pitch them buying Bitcoin yet. A lot of these platforms don't even offer Bitcoin when they're these kind of RIA, high net worth, wealth management type arms for like Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs or whatever. So a lot of them are reverse inquiry only, meaning that they're not allowed to sell you the Bitcoin ETF. But if you ask, then they can say, okay, yeah, you should look at the BlackRock. You should look at this. You should look at that.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[10:37] That will almost certainly change. But my understanding is that for many of the banks, it has not changed yet. So I think this number is going up. The amount of institutional ownership of Bitcoin is going to go up because in many ways, like retail is kind of, it's not fully tapped out, but retail has had access to Bitcoin for a long, long time. Like, I don't think the Bitcoin penetration among retail is going to like 10x.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[10:58] It's very high already in terms of the number of people in the U.S. who own Bitcoin. The institutions is where the penetration of Bitcoin is much smaller. And for many of the institutions that have exposure to Bitcoin, you know, I speak to many of these institutions. Many of them are LPs. They have like 1%, maybe 2% Bitcoin, at most, very, very few of them are at like five. Five is like the highest you could possibly imagine. But if you think about something like gold or commodities, like most of these have much higher exposure to assets like that than they have to Bitcoin. Over time, that's going to change. That's almost certainly going to flip is that Bitcoin is going to eat more and more into that. And there's still many, many institutions that are on zero. And that's probably the modal high net worth or institution in the U.S.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[11:45] Still has no crypto exposure at all.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[11:47] So if these institutions have like 0% or 1% to 2% in Bitcoin, how much are they holding of Ether than Hasib? Is it also like 0%, not even 1% to 2%?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[11:57] Dramatically less. Yeah, basically zero.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[11:59] And that's been an interesting story. So at price in the week, we're at about $4,477. So that is down. But we did hit an all-time high. Okay, I'm going to give you the new all-time high number is 4,954. In the previous all-time high, that was set sometime in, I believe that was November 2021. And that was like 4,780, something like that. But who's counting? And that was on that Powell day. Okay, it jumped 14% off of the back of the Powell speech, which I guess indicates more liquidity, more easy money, more risk on. And ETH price liked that a whole bunch.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[12:40] This was the second largest daily increase for ETH. So really big day. And just, I think for ETH bulls, hitting that all-time high number, just like psychologically felt really good. Although you could argue, Hasib, like if you look at, let's see.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[12:56] Market cap, we've already hit all-time high before, right? if you look at ETH market cap because, of course, supply has increased. There's another metric you could look at for all-time high, which is ETH staking. So if you take all of the ETH issuance, essentially maybe dividends, you might say, into the asset, then we were already at all-time high. But still, getting above the psychological dollar amount in all-time high, I think, felt pretty good for ETH holders and has been a long time coming. Are you surprised that it took so long? Were you one in the camp that, oh my God, Like maybe the bull is going to skip ETH this cycle.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[13:33] I mean, I was relatively confident after ETH bottomed that ETH was going to eventually get against all-time highs. And, you know, I think what I didn't anticipate was the DAT cycle and Tom Lee coming in and becoming the savior for this asset. No, it's been absolutely surprising to me. But I remember actually I was on, I think I was on stage at Cornell Tech with David. And we were talking about, you know, who's going to be the Michael Saylor of Ethereum? Because obviously somebody has to step up and kind of do the same thing.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[14:08] Did Tom Lee come to mind?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[14:10] No, not at all. Actually, we proposed David would be the Michael Saylor. And David was like, oh, I don't know if I really have the sauce. And, you know, I guess maybe unfortunately he didn't raise his hand and take that seat. But Tom Lee, his excellency, great work. I mean, holy shit. But it's been absolutely incredible to see him just run a masterclass in rebranding the ETH story.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[14:33] It has been incredible. I mean, he's CNBC. People love him. He's everywhere. I mean, every day. He's on a podcast. He's on CNBC. He's on Bloomberg. He's somewhere. Tom Lee is just everywhere these days telling the story, and he's stacking a whole bunch of ETH. I could recite how much ETH he bought this week, but another $1 billion, something like that, Hasib. So he seems serious about getting that 5% ETH supply number, which just seems audacious and impossible. But he's on his way. He's creeping up on 2% of all ETH supply. What do you make of this story? There have been a lot of reports.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[15:08] And you don't know whether this is just price increasing. But big Bitcoin whales rotating into ETH. This is Willy Woo with some charts. Love Willy's charts. Capital has been rotating from Bitcoin to ETH. You can see the flows into ETH. They're in orange. They're now approaching Bitcoin's inflows right here. So, you know, the ETH inflows approaching Bitcoin inflows. But in general, I mean, there seemed to be a report of rotation. So people are looking at big whales on Hyperliquid and they're, you know, selling Bitcoin for ETH. Is this expected? Is this just this point in the cycle? Everyone's anticipating a typical four-year rotation where Bitcoin,

Ryan Sean Adams:
[15:47] you know, makes a run and then ETH is next. And then we get kind of altcoins. Is that what you think these traders are anticipating?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[15:54] Yeah, in a way, having cycles like this, everybody's kind of primed of like, oh, it's happening again. And once everybody's primed, like everybody has this pattern in their mind, and they kind of make it so. Yeah. You know, in a way, like, people often think this, exactly. People often think this about the business cycle, is that like, why do we have business cycles? And, you know, there's some kind of deep structural things that be like, oh, there's a billup of debt and like bad investments that eventually have to come home to roost. So then there's, you know, defaults and blah, blah, blah. And you have to clear out that. So there's sort of these micro reasons why you might have business cycles. But then there are also these kind of macro, almost psychological reasons is because people think that they're business cycles. And if people think they're business cycles, they'll kind of talk themselves into business cycles, which mean that like, oh, now is like the late part of the cycle. So we should just like sell these assets. They start, you know, it's kind of like, you know, the longer that you're married, you start to like notice the faults in your partner. And you're kind of like, oh, you know, like it just sort of like almost becomes this this thing that, you know, because you expect it to be there, it arrives, you know. And so anyway, that's a little bit what it feels like to me is that whether or not we'd ever been if we had never been told that crypto has four year cycles, I think maybe we wouldn't be seeing such a ferocious rotation into Ethereum. But I think because everyone's ready for this, it's happening and it's happening very visibly.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[17:16] So is that your base case, just because we've all been hardwired into these four-year cycles and we're expecting it, so we all kind of then act in unison together? I mean, if we get another four-year cycle, basically the clock is ticking. And if it ends like the previous three cycles, we're talking about November or December of this year. I mean, that would be the Bitcoin top at least, okay, if it repeats previous cycles. There's others who say, no, this time it's different. We've got these institutional flows. It's less retail driven. ETFs have kind of stabilized things. And we're going to get a cycle extension into 2026. What do you think about this? Do you think we hit the four-year mark and it's over? Or do you think we get into 2026 and have some legs there?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[18:01] Yeah, I think trying to predict, oh, it's going to be one year, six months. There's an extra extension here. It's a little bit like, I don't know, it feels like augury or soothsaying. Like this is not real. Like, no, I think this is bullshit. What I'm describing is I think the rotation of momentum from Bitcoin to Ethereum to other majors and then eventually to alts. That rotation, I think, is a bit of a self-fulfilling thing in that people are looking for the first sign. They're like, oh, has altcoin season started? And then when it does, people are like, great, I'm going to chase the alts and figure out which one. I want to front run the rotation, right? And by front running the rotation, you make the rotation happen because the momentum just – like crypto is very momentum driven. So I think that is a self-fulfilling prophecy. But the timing of is it one year, is it three years, is it four years, is it going to be a six-year cycle this time? I don't think markets have that level of granularity. I don't think people have this internal clock ticking in their heads of, oh, shit, it's been three years. It's time to get out because we're too late in the cycle.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[19:04] I don't know, man. I'm getting it. At the end of this year, like November, December, I'm getting a little worried. I'm starting to sweat a little bit just because of how history has played out.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[19:10] But we're not at the four-year mark yet.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[19:12] So why? I mean, we will be, though, in November, December.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[19:16] When did the cycle start? When did the cycle start?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[19:18] Well, it's last time, four years ago, it was like 2017, or I mean, 2021. and then 2017. Yeah. Every four years is kind of like- Hold on.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[19:26] But well, clearly we cratered in 22, 23.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[19:29] Yeah, yeah.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[19:30] But we're talking about the Bitcoin top.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[19:32] We're talking about the Bitcoin top at least. If you measure it by then, it would be November, December.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[19:36] So you're measuring by trough. You're measuring by trough. Trough to trough is four years.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[19:40] Yeah, exactly.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[19:41] Yeah. Okay. But so the trough was like 23, right?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[19:44] Yeah. Well, no, I'm not trough. Just Bitcoin top. So Bitcoin topped is 2021, end of 2021. And then before that, four years before, Bitcoin topped December 2017, four years before 2013. It's like you get the top every four years.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[20:00] All right.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[20:01] Anyway, I'll worry about that. You don't have to worry about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[20:04] So here's the other thing I'll say. Here's the other thing I'll say is that very clearly in the early days of Bitcoin, Bitcoin was basically impervious to macro. And this was largely because Bitcoin was just so small that macro was just not the dominant factor relative to its own growth. right? We're not in that world today. We're in a world where we can clearly see macros in the driver's seat, macros, huge, huge effects on Bitcoin, Ether, on all of these assets. We went from, if you recall, beginning of last year, CME was pricing seven rate cuts last year.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[20:37] Instead, we got, you know, three, basically. And this year, it was, again, the beginning of the year, pricing seven rate cuts, six or seven rate cuts at the beginning of the year. Here we are, you know, getting excited about like, oh, we're finally getting a rate cut, markets are rallying, You know, so the reality is that macro has actually been pretty unforgiving in this environment. And if there's like, oh, well, you know, it's like four years since the last top, blah, blah, blah. But like we were going into this cutting cycle and we know that, look, whether or not Powell is going to stand the line, Powell's getting replaced, right? His term is coming up fairly soon, early next year. And when he gets replaced, markets are going to be dancing because we all know what Trump is going to do once he basically controls the Fed board. They're going to be cutting as fast as they possibly can. So that is going to be very stimulative of risk assets. And that includes Bitcoin, includes alts, includes Ether. So I think the macro setup has to be positive going into medium term. And that may, you know, even if you're right, there's a normal, very strong draw toward a four-year cycle. That cycle may get elongated just because of the massive impacts.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[21:42] Yeah, you've got to be right on that because it is macro. Macro is the dog weighing the tail, right? Whereas crypto, I mean, this is the four-year cycles. It's got to be somewhat superstitious. I mean, macro is going to be the dominant force that drives all this. So we'll have to see what's in play there.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[21:55] We've got a lot coming up next, including one of those altcoins I want you to tell me a bit more about. Hyperliquid is now bigger than Robinhood. Okay, how the hell did that happen? Some incredible volume. Also, Solana is getting in that public treasury game. They got three that launched. Who's going to be Solana's Tom Lee? That's why I want to ask you, Hasip. And also, Google launching at Layer 1. We'll talk about all that and more, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Here we go. Hyperliquid is absolutely crushing it. Some of the trading volumes are competitive with some of our largest exchanges right now. This is a headline from Cointelegraph. Hyperliquid recorded $330 billion in trading volume in July, surpassing U.S. brokerage giant Robinhood. In July, Hyperliquid was bigger than Robinhood.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[22:42] It had some days, I believe, well, was this all of December where Hyperliquid was the second largest Bitcoin spot exchange by market share, only succeeded by Binance. Binance was 38. Hyperliquid was 12%. We're seeing all of this big whale activity of Bitcoin traders swapping some of those Bitcoin to ETH trades that I mentioned. All of that was happening on Hyperliquid. And then as far as revenue goes to see, I don't know if you've seen some of these charts, Hype is doing 36%, all crypto revenue, okay? It's 1.2% of total crypto market cap and is doing 36% of crypto revenues. This is Hyperliquid, this chart. See that dark green in the bottom? And then we've got some other chains. We've got like Solana. We've got Ethereum. What else do we have? We have some other layer twos, I suppose, here. Anyway, Hyperliquid is just crushing it in terms of network revenue. Tell me about this story. I don't know how much you've been following it. Maybe you guys are investors in this. I'm not sure. But what is going on with Hyperliquid? How do you account for this success?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[23:56] So we own some hype. And I'll confess, I'm not the deepest on the Hyperliquid space because I know there's going to be some Hyperliquid bros who are going to be mad at me for missing some of the details about this. Every time I talk what Hyperliquid I get dunked on by somebody who's a bigger Hyperliquid fan. So a lot of respect for the Hyperliquid team. They've obviously executed amazingly. They're now one of the largest exchanges in the world. And they're kind of the darling of DeFi at this point. They're the biggest success story with respect to actually getting an exchange working. I think for Hyperliquid, look, the reality is that comparing them to Robinhood is a little bit misleading because is Robinhood as a brokerage. It's not an exchange. And an exchange, a lot of the volume on Hyperliquid is like market makers providing liquidity or crossing other market makers or people hedging and stuff like this. That kind of activity doesn't happen on Robinhood because it's a retail brokerage, right? Only retail is interacting with them.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[24:53] A better comparison is probably Binance, right?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[24:56] Yes, Binance or Coinbase or Kraken. These are better comparisons. Now, to be clear, it very much holds its own against those global exchanges as well. But it's continuing to grow, which is probably the most amazing thing, is that many people thought that, okay, now that it's owned most of the volume in DeFi, and that was really the big question mark, is like, okay, hey, it's expanded the market significantly, but now it basically dominates perps trading volume in DeFi, right? It owns almost everything in the entire market, but it's going to hit a wall because the centralized exchanges, like, you know, are people from centralized exchanges going to move over into hyperliquid? And it didn't really seem plausible that they were going to be able to get to the scale of the really, really big global exchanges, right? If you look at hyperliquid daily active traders, I don't know the exact numbers, but I believe it's around like 30,000 to 50,000 on any given day, which if you compare that to a Coinbase, to a Binance, much, much smaller numbers than what you see at the global exchanges, right?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[25:51] And that being said, Hyperliquid's doing this with one hand tied behind its back. It doesn't have the ability to go out, take TV ads or to go out and do the kind of normal playbooks that these global exchanges do of sponsoring F1 teams and all this other stuff they do in order to get in the eyeballs of retail. They're doing this kind of global DeFi go-to-market and I'd always believed that DeFi was just not going to be able to get to the same scale as something that can dominate an entire country And have these fiat on ramps such that for Coinbase, it's like, okay, if you got US dollars, where are you going to go? There aren't that many options. But people have increasingly learned how to get their capital directly onto hyperliquid. And they're doing it now around the world. They have huge market share in many, many countries that are otherwise impenetrable for a lot of centralized exchanges

Haseeb Qureshi:
[26:43] to be able to compete with them. And they're doing it on very, very attractive fees, really, really strong liquidity, very fast iteration in their product roadmap. It's honestly unprecedented.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[26:56] Is that why people are using them? Is it because just the product works? Or is it also because there's low friction? I mean, I guess the volumes are good. I know perps are incredibly popular in general. We've seen them in crypto. So I guess, is it also because they can do this anonymously? Like, is there any AML KYC? And what's interesting about this is like, I recall like, you remember the BitMEX days, right? And Arthur Hayes, I believe he, I mean, he was on house arrest for like a year or something like this for AML KYC types of violations. CZ served time in prison.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[27:31] Yeah, that's right.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[27:31] So are they going to be able to get around that as well? I haven't really fully unpacked the story of Hyperliquid, honestly.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[27:40] Yeah. So it's a complex story because very clearly Hyperliquid is a decentralized exchange. And you can see from this administration that they've been trying to be much more open and permissive on decentralized exchanges. They've dropped the case against Uniswap. They basically said, look, we're not going to go after people criminally for non-registration or sort of these quote-unquote victimless crimes. So I think for hyperliquid, that's a good set of facts for hyperliquid. It means that probably the U.S. government is not going to be as aggressive against something like a hyperliquid. Now, hyperliquid has been under a lot of criticism for maybe not being as decentralized as many of its counterparts. So, for example, hyperliquid is still closed source. You cannot see the code that the nodes are running on. And it's pretty openly known that almost all the nodes, or I believe all the nodes in hyperliquid, run out of AWS Tokyo. Okay. So if you're in AWS Tokyo, that's where all the validators are slash have to be. And being in one data center means that you can operate the exchange in much lower latency. So it's a better UX to have all the nodes in one data center. But it does also mean that if AWS Tokyo is like, hey, we don't like that this is happening here, they could shut down Hyperliquid. Now, it might not be trivial for them to figure out which boxes within AWS Tokyo is running on. But does that matter?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[28:54] Because it's not custodial, right? You're not putting your assets on this exchange.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[28:58] Correct, correct. But any P&L that you have that's unrealized, or if your hyperliquid blows up, a lot of bad stuff will happen. And of course, there's HyperCore, which, sorry, not HyperCore, HyperEVM, which HyperEVM is a stateful thing. So I actually don't know exactly what happens if the exchange goes down with respect to your assets that are bridged. Because hyperliquid is not layer two, right? It's a layer one. So I don't know exactly how that works. I'd assume they have some mechanism, but honestly, I haven't looked into this. But probably there'd be some way they could coordinate and figure out what's the last snapshot of state.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[29:31] I mean, people are moving billions of dollars on this thing. I would expect somebody has looked into this.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[29:34] Totally. But, you know, they have indexers. There's the ability in principle for you to index a state, figure out what the last valid state was, and then eventually do some kind of very painful but, you know, eventual kind of, you know, figure out who owns what and who needs to withdraw from the bridge. So there'd be a way to do it, but it would be painful. It's not so closed source that you couldn't actually figure out who owns what.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[29:57] What's really impressive to me, too, is we've been looking for revenue driving kind of DeFi tokens and assets. And Hyperliquid is just like printing revenue. I mean, here's some comps. I believe this is maybe the equivalent of a price to sales type ratio for Hyperliquid. Last 30 days, about $100 million in revenue. For Hyperliquid. Okay. So that's a, I think this is a price to sales ratio of 12, which is like incredible.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[30:25] Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's not price to sales. That's PE.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[30:28] Is that PE?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[30:28] Because they're buying and burning. They're buying and burning.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[30:31] Yeah, they are.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[30:31] They're buying and burning on a run rate of over a billion dollars a year.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[30:35] It's kind of a cool asset, right?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[30:37] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. To be clear, these kinds of earnings are only really seen by the world's biggest exchanges. Hyperliquid is on that scale. And famously, they have a very, very small team. And so their fixed costs are pretty low and they buy and burn like I think 97%.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[30:52] Yeah. It almost reminds me of Tether in terms of their profit margins, right? It's something that traditional finance has not seen. The level of, I guess, profit that you can scale to in DeFi with just a small number of employees and team size.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[31:07] That's right.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[31:07] Anyway, do you think that Hyperliquid has a ways to go? Do you think it's going to continue to attract volume?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[31:12] Well, one thing that's clear is that Hyperliquid right now is still pretty hard to buy. So you can buy it on Binance now, but you can't buy it. Coinbase, I believe, does not list Hyperliquid. It still doesn't have a lot of market access. There was a DAT that launched recently, although I think it has kind of had very volatile price action. I think it's SONN is the Hyperliquid DAT. But I think the penetration of Hyperliquid into the mainstream of crypto still hasn't totally happened. I think it's one of these things that actually crypto Twitter, despite everyone saying that crypto Twitter is now like got no alpha.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[31:49] Something crypto Twitter was early on, right?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[31:51] Yeah, yeah. Crypto Twitter was certainly early on Hyperliquid. I think it actually continues to be early. I think just the, you know, give it a year of this asset kind of making its way across more and more exchanges in more and more countries. I think Hyperliquid is likely to just get more of an addressable market for the token itself. but I'd say in terms of its awareness among traders You can see it's already there. And the kind of revenue they're making speaks to that, is that traders, DGENs, they love hyperliquid. It's a great product. It's executed incredibly well.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[32:22] So, Hasib, there are some big Solana treasury companies coming out, publicly traded treasury companies. I think three of them within the last week, at least these are the ones I saw. One that was about looking to raise a billion for Solana treasury company. This is Galaxy Digital, Multicoin, and Jump. There was another medical device company pivoting into a Solana treasury company. This is called Sharps Technology, a $400 million private placement. And then we've got Pantera Capital as well, looking for a $1.25 billion raise to create a Solana treasury firm. So we've already had some Solana treasury firms out there. But now this week, suddenly there's kind of a slew of new entrants. We saw something similar with Ethereum. What's your take on these treasury entities? We saw them for Bitcoin, obviously, Michael Saylor, massive strategy. Like Run, that's been incredibly successful for him. We've seen Ethereum, that seems to be very successful. Tom Lee is absolutely crushing it. Solana, it seems like it does not yet have a spokesperson. The question is, who's the Michael Saylor of Solana? But it does have some of these large entrants jumping in. What's your take on this trend overall?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[33:35] So I think right now, the time for Bitcoin and Ethereum DATs is probably over in the sense that what you see is that the MNAVs have really drifted pretty far down over the last couple of months. It used to be that almost every single DAT was trading above par. Now what you see is that actually the majority of DATs are trading at 1x MNAV and some of them are even trading below now. And what you see is that basically the premia almost entirely belonged to the winners. And or, you know, ones that exist in kind of weird jurisdictions that have their own idiosyncrasies, like Metaplanet in Japan. But in the U.S., what you've seen is that the MNAVs have come way, way down. Unless you are the winner, you know, if you're Tom Lee, if you're, you know, Michael Saylor, then maybe you get an extended premium and you get to do a lot more gymnastics.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[34:22] Tom Lee right now is about 1.03 MNAV, and Sailor MicroStrategy is now 1.5 or so, 1.55. And that's down, of course, from like, what, 2.8 or something that he was last year?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[34:35] At the high, it was 2.8. I think earlier this year, it was like 1.8, then it came to 1.7. And so the MNAVs have been coming down for sure, which to be clear, I think is a good sign. Okay. But now that the MNAVs have really compressed, so BitMine has been kind of fluctuating between like 1.05 and then like 1.15. I guess it may have come down recently with the ETH pullback, but everything else is trading basically at one or below one. And that's basically a signal to the markets, stop doing this. No more new ones. Nobody wants to put any more money into these. And so the private fundraising for these, I mean, we get pitched on a kajillion of these vehicles. The assembly line is frozen now. There's no new appetite for new BTC or new ETH vehicles.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[35:18] Because why would you? Because there's no MNAP premium.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[35:20] Yeah, exactly. Exactly. There's no MNAP premium. And so you're just taking a liquidity for what? For nothing, right? There's no upside to you doing this. So, and I think that's what you were waiting for is that the reason why there's a mad dash to create these vehicles for an asset is so that a sailor can emerge. And everyone wants to be that sailor. And Tom Lee has proven that, okay, he's the only guy who has the kind of mandate of heaven to do this for Ethereum. Now for Solana, there's been just total fragmentation. Yeah. Right? So you've got DeFi strategies, you've got Upexi, you've got all these little vehicles trying to be the microstrategy for Solana. And clearly none of them have really taken off. And then you had Accelerate. If you guys remember, there was all this drama about Joe McCann who was going to run Accelerate. Accelerate kind of fell apart after all that Twitter drama. But that was going to be the biggest. And the idea was that, okay, Joe McCann is going to be the spokesperson. He's going to be the sailor for Solana. That fell apart. And now there's this big hole. And so you've got actually a number of groups that are all jockeying to try to become like, hey, can we become the sailor for Solana? And so there's a few groups now that are in market, and obviously you just mentioned a few of them, that are trying to position themselves as that person. And right now, my sense is that the jump multi-coin coalition is probably going to be the biggest.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[36:36] And now here's the issue is that, you know, if you're looking at the altcoins, For many of these altcoins, when the foundation is getting involved, they're like, hey, we like this thing. We want there to be one DAT that attracts the best team and has the best kind of sailor-like voice that can get on Wall Street and tell our story. They'll often subsidize the DAT.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[36:54] And that's what's happening here, right? Is this with the Solana Foundation for Sharps and maybe the multi-coin one as well?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[37:00] It's fairly little, actually. Relative to a lot of the other ones I've seen, the subsidies that the foundation is giving is quite small. So I don't know exactly what it is at this point because it depends on the total raise. Sure. Because all the other money dilutes the subsidy that the foundation is going to be giving. So if they go above the target, let's say they hit 1.5 billion or something, then let's say the foundation subsidized with, let's say, 50 million of free money. Then that 50 million of free money gets smaller and smaller and smaller as a percentage gain that you get for participating in the debt. Anyway, there's all these mechanics around it. But the most incentivized person to do it is one, the foundation, and then two, the big holders. Right? If you're a big holder or three, if you have lock tokens and they're willing to cut you a deal on your lock tokens, right? Which maybe public markets will ignore the lockness because the DATs are supposed to be long-term holders anyway. So all that is to say, my guess is what happens is that we're going to have three, four of these vehicles competing to become the micro strategy of Solana. Probably most of them are going to fail. There's going to be one that succeeds and that one guy is going to get on CNBC constantly and they're going to do the same playbook that we've seen now for Ethereum. So that's the game right now. And probably the people behind it are going to be very large Solana holders who are going to be willing to take a haircut and be willing to subsidize some of the economics in order to try to get the underlying momentum for the asset because they own enough of it that they care.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[38:22] Do you see that leader emerging? Like who is the Michael Saylor type of persona or the Tom Lee type of persona for Solana? Could that be like a Kyle Somani or something like that?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[38:31] Kyle Somani would be probably the first person that comes to my mind.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[38:34] Some people said Chamath. He's kind of busy.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[38:39] Yeah, I don't think it would make sense for Chamath. I think that's not worth it to him. It's got to be somebody who owns so much soul that it's going to be worth it to them to play this game. Kyle seems like the most natural person. But there's a number of people, I think, who could play that role. um but none of them i feel like are as visible as faces you know um probably joe mccann and kyle were the two most loud and um sort of, what would I say, most brazen. Yeah. And I think that's really what you want. You want a big personality. You kind of need to, yeah, exactly. You want a big personality. You want to make headlines. You want to make waves. And probably there aren't that many people who really have the personality to sustain that.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[39:21] Well, job applications open. If you're that person listening, okay? I mean, Solana could use that. This last thing, news that Google is building its own layer one. So this was a LinkedIn post by the head of strategy of Web3 at Google. And he's looking at the Stripe layer one, the Circle layer one as well, and saying, we've got Google Cloud, a universal ledger. It's got a private test net right now, Google scale network effects, billions of users, hundreds of institutional partners adapted and built for finance.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[39:56] I guess I want to ask you not so much about the Google Cloud universal ledger and whatever this thing is, the layer one that they seem to be talking about on LinkedIn. I don't know how real it is. we'll look into that a bit more but what do you make of these i guess corporate layer ones stripe are doing circles doing also tether has uh plasma i believe where they're kind of um they're invested in that it seems like they're pouring a lot into that now google with their own layer one some in the ethereum space are like well why not layer twos and others just with general blockchains are just like why didn't you just deploy this on ethereum or solana we have tons of different blockchains why are you doing your own corporate l1 what do you make of this so.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[40:37] First of all we don't really have enough detail um this this linkedin post by the way the weirdest way possible to announce a blockchain which makes me extremely bearish um but this linkedin post gave so little detail that it's really hard to tell what they're talking about or like in what sense is an l1 so you know it's it's called the google cloud blockchain right um having the having the cloud in their Google Cloud, like Google Cloud is like an enterprise B2B sales, you know, juggernaut, right? I remember when AWS, you probably remember this, when AWS had like a blockchain offering. Oh, yeah. And it was a hosted blockchain on AWS that was like basically for enterprises. I can't remember. It had a name. Awesome. And it was just like a complete nothing burger, you know, like, you know, the people who are going to be like, yeah, I want AWS's blockchain offering so I can have a blockchain and like, great, now I have a blockchain. But it almost caters exactly to the people who don't understand what they're buying and don't understand what the point of blockchain is. So you don't think this is

Ryan Sean Adams:
[41:37] A threat to layer ones or anything that's more crypto-native?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[41:40] This is almost certainly not a threat to layer ones. Now, that being said, again, we need a lot more detail. I think the reason why they're calling this an L1, right? So first of all, they say very clearly it's permissioned blockchain. Yeah. They say it's a permissioned blockchain, has AML and KYC built into the chain, but then they say it's an L1. So now, to me, that sounds like an enterprise private blockchain. We normally don't call those L1s, right? So in what sense is it an L1? What do you mean when you say it's an L1? Does it have its own token? What secures it? What is the, is this credibly neutral? Is there a commitment to not censoring things? So like they're sort of using the terminology of blockchains, but then they're clearly targeting a customer that doesn't know what an L1 is. But maybe like that's just we're in a new moment now. And people have heard the term L1 and they've heard that it's good, right? So in the same way, like I remember in the days of the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance, when people were like, you really want to build on Ethereum, but not actually on Ethereum, on something that looks like Ethereum, you know? And so like, come build on Quorum, come use this thing, come use that thing. And businesses more or less will just be like, yes, yes, that's what I want. I want an L1. I've read, my kid says that L1s are great, so I'm going to, yeah, let's buy an L1. And so Google Cloud gives you a nice L1. You can get it by your CIO or whatever. So I just don't know. I think what Stripe and Circle are doing is clearly very different than what Google is doing.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[43:09] The difference, though, and this ultimately we have yet to see because, of course, Stripe has not actually themselves publicly announced what any of this stuff is going to be for Tempo. And for Circle, we have some information, but we haven't seen that much. It's important to recognize that the history of enterprise-driven blockchains is pretty bad. It's mostly been failures. If you remember, Stripe had an enterprise blockchain before.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[43:34] Do you remember this? I don't even remember that. No, I didn't know that.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[43:37] It's called Stellar. It's called Stellar. Remember? Stripe made a huge investment into Stellar. And there was all this stuff about how Stripe is going to be using Stellar and integrating it and da-da-da. And of course, they never really did all that much and they kind of forgot about it. Remember, they also acquired Keybase and that was going to be part of their strategy with Stellar. And it just never went anywhere, right? And so companies keep doing this. They keep finding some way to get in the game. And the real big success story, of course, among enterprise blockchains is base. And here's the really important takeaway that I think very few people fully understand is that the reason why most of these enterprise blockchains have not worked is that you as a competitor to that company do not really trust the credible neutrality of, if I build my business on your chain, can I expect to build it unmolested by your fuckery? And the answer for base is that somehow base has actually gotten the sense that everybody thinks base is credibly neutral. Everybody, even the directly, if you're cracking, like you might not want to build on base, but you probably believe that if you build on base, it's going to be okay. They're going to leave you alone. Right. And that is extremely difficult to buy that level of credible neutrality.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[44:53] Binance does not believe that about OKExChain. You know, like Kraken probably does not believe that about any of these other, like people probably don't believe that about Inc. Maybe they do, but I wouldn't assume that they do. But people do believe that about base. And that took a lot of work for them to build the level of credibility that only is really shared by true layer 1s.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[45:12] I don't think that is in the cards for Stripe or Circle unless they do the work to make people believe that about themselves. For Google Cloud, I think absolutely no way that people believe that about Google Cloud.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[45:23] That's a good point. Actually, there's a similar kind of theme that I want to talk to you about after the break. The EU is considering a stablecoin on a public blockchain. Maybe they're not going to go the CDBC route. Maybe they're considering something like Ethereum and Solana. We'll talk about that. Also, the US government is putting their GDP on chain. That also sounds like a headline from 2016. But everyone's excited about this. And I think you'll find this interesting, Hasib, if you haven't seen it already. The DOJ announced that it's no longer going to prosecute non-custodial devs like Roman Storm. So that's a bit of good news. All that and more.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[45:56] But before we get there, I want to thank the sponsors who made this episode possible. All right, we're back. The U.S. government is going to publish GDP figures on chain. This is Secretary of Commerce lead Howard Lutnick.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[46:08] The department of commerce is going to start issuing its statistics on the blockchain because you are the crypto president and we are going to put out gdp on the blockchain so people can use the blockchain for data distribution and then we're going to make that available to the entire government so all of you can do it we're just ironing out all the details so we can do it

Ryan Sean Adams:
[46:31] So there you go we're putting gdp on data on the blockchain so everyone's excited about this it It seemed like everyone in crypto was involved. You've got Chainlink involved. You've got a bunch of the chains they're publishing GDP data to. So Ethereum, I believe Tron's in there, Arbitrum, Mantle, Base, Optimism, Sonic, like all sorts of different chains. Who else is in here? Pith, I believe. Yeah, Pith as well as Chainlink doing some of the- Avalanche, CK Sync. I know, they're all here.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[47:01] They really touched everybody. That's crazy.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[47:03] And everyone's excited about it. And they're actually buying the, I suppose, the tokens in order to pay for the gas for these tokens from like Kraken and Coinbase. So it feels to me a bit like a PR run. They're basically saying crypto president. So of course, we're going to publish the GDP data on the blockchain and you get everyone in crypto involved. Everyone gets to tweet something. Everyone gets to issue a press release and everyone's very happy to be in the crypto capital. So I guess that's good news. Unless there's something I'm missing here, Hasip. Like, do you think it's a fundamentally cool idea to put GDP data on chain?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[47:38] I mean, this is just such obvious, like, pork for the industry. I mean, like, who has this problem that you can't find the GDP prints and you need them on the block? Like, I don't know. Maybe... I'd love to hear somebody give an argument for why this matters, but this feels like just, yeah, this feels like just totally, this is just red meat for the crypto industry, which like clearly they're taking it. They're very happy about this, but this feels totally symbolic, right? This is not solving any large problem that I've ever heard of.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[48:06] I'm wondering if you saw this clip. So this is a different topic, but somewhat related to your take around corporate L1s and why would if you're Stripe, why would you deploy on your competitors layer one? This was the interesting headline. The EU is speeding up plans for the digital euro after the US passes stablecoin law. So an ECB official wrote this without a strategic response. Stablecoins, he's talking about US stablecoins, could undermine Europe's banking system and threaten its financial stability and even lead to geopolitical dependency. So this is Europe kind of worried about the Genius Act and about dollar stablecoins invading their economies. And they had been talking about a lot of talk, a European central bank digital currency. It seems like, according to this article, where is this from? FT. Yeah, FT. They mentioned that they would be considering deploying a digital euro stablecoin on Ethereum or Solana. So maybe pivoting to a credibly neutral public layer one instead. Do you think this is just how the game theory works out? Like if the US has a dollar stablecoin, well then Europe has to have one. And then maybe even like China has to start issuing on a public blockchain. I mean, do you think it goes that far?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[49:24] It seems pretty obvious that that's where the end game is, is that, yeah, all of these assets are going to be competing on public blockchains to be accessible from anywhere, everywhere. Now, that being said, I am pretty bearish on the EU actually responding quickly and strategically. Like having some position paper from some guy who's senior in the EU central bank is not the same thing as EU is doing this. So the headline here, I didn't actually read the headline, but the headline reads, the EU considers. Yeah, they're always considering, right? It's like a position paper by some guy. I mean, they were considering doing a CBDC. They haven't done anything yet. So I'm just very bearish, EU being fast on anything other than regulating things. So let's see if they're actually going to make a move. Great. I will applaud them when they do. But de facto, the US dollar... It basically just dominates the high seas of on-chain liquidity. And if the EU is like two, three years late, it's kind of game over. Like it doesn't really matter that much if you have a government-sanctioned version of the euro that's on-chain. If you're not there when the build-out is happening, then you're largely going to be ignored, right? There's very little value to being like the fifth social media platform. It's like, well, Facebook's already at scale. Like, sorry, we don't need you.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[50:41] There are some EU stablecoins out there, but the market share is about 0.16%. So about 500 million in stablecoins versus the dollar, which is 277 billion. There is a dark horse here, though, which is like China. China does move fast, different from the EU. But it seems like the CCP would never go to a public blockchain. Although maybe their hand is kind of forced into doing this. So there's always headlines like this out of China. This is a Reuters one. China considering won back stable coins to boost global currency usage. Not clear whether they're talking about public blockchains or not. But do you think we ever see a won on like something like Ethereum?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[51:27] So I think it's more likely that you would see it through Hong Kong. So they probably wouldn't issue it domestically, but they'd issue it out of Hong Kong. And of course, you know, the currency is the same, but there's just like there's onshore RMB and then offshore RMB basically. And now, that being said, they did do ECNY. If you remember, that was the central bank digital currency in China that, you know, unlike you actually did launch their CBDC, didn't really work, didn't really get a lot of traction. And they were like throwing subsidies at it, trying to get people to use it, didn't go anywhere. I think, look, I'm generally bearish CBDCs. I think that stable coins are the big story. And the reason why stable coins are the big story is that they're global, they're programmable, they're real time. Anybody in the world can use them with just a mobile phone and an internet connection. That is the that is a really powerful thing China has spoken for a long time about the internationalization of the RMB and they've not really succeeded like the RMB is just not used that widely except by basically you know satellite states of China or the countries that predominantly trade with China um

Haseeb Qureshi:
[52:28] Now, the U.S. is doing more to maybe kind of fragment the U.S. Dollar hegemony around the world just because he's trying to push other countries to trade less with us, right? That's what tariffs do is they cause trade to decline with the person who's tariffing you. So if we're trading less with other people, that is going to hurt dollar dominance around the world. And then maybe does leave an open spot for China to become a friendlier trade partner to people and to internationalize the RMB more. So it's certainly possible that China will pick up the mantle and they'll start to internationalize the RMB by bringing it onto on-chain venues and get it to trade more so than it does today. I think that's actually pretty plausible for China to do this. And I think China is actually tech forward and aggressive enough to do it.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[53:11] This was big news in some circles. Yeezy Money came out last week. Okay. This is Kanye West's YZY coin. Okay. I'll just give the headlines here. The token rocketed to $3 billion in market cap in 40 minutes. And then, of course, it just shrank into the hundreds of millions. It turned out that this was largely the bulk of it. 90% to 94% analysts say supply was controlled by insiders. One wallet alone had 87%. It was pretty shitty, Hazeep. I guess I'm just wondering, do you think this is the marker of the meme coin kind of meta? Is it over at this point? At least celebrity meme coins, do you think it's over?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[53:49] Look, I think CelebCoins, this was kind of like the last gasp. So if you remember, I think it was toward the beginning of the year, Kanye was initially teasing that he was going to do a meme coin. And I remember there was like this photo of him and Olaf, like in some place in LA doing a handshake. Really? And there was like, oh, it's coming, it's coming, it's coming. Who is that? This was like big news. Well, he keeps deleting his tweets, so there's not a lot of archaeological record. But he was like teasing that he's going to do a meme coin. Okay. And there was a lot of talk that it was going to launch earlier this year, soon after the Trump meme coin. And it didn't. And for whatever reason, he kind of timed it perfectly.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[54:26] In that the market was just, you know, it vomited on arrival, seeing that, oh, good, here's what we needed for, like, the trenches that are already on life support. We need Kanye West to come in and, like, dump on us, too. And I guess the thing that gives me some comfort is that the dump of this asset was so fast, and everybody was cynical about it. And it took all of, like, what, 48 hours or something? It was over very quickly. Yeah, it was totally over. and then Kanye came out and said that he was hacked and that he had to be hacked. And then there's a polymarket on whether or not Kanye was hacked. Yeah. And right now it's sitting at 2%. Okay. So I think there's like, it's just so farcical, right? It's just so obvious. Yeah. That this was just like an extraction from a very troubled man. Like obviously Kanye's had all these kind of mental health issues. So this whole thing is just kind of sad.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[55:22] It's just kind of like we don't need regulations because the market figures it out, right? They get burnt enough times and they just stop buying.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[55:30] Kind of. I mean, there's all these stories about, what's the guy, Hayden?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[55:34] What's his last name? Yeah, I know who you're talking about.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[55:37] This idea that Hayden made millions of dollars on this thing too. Yeah, that's so shitty. Just like the guy who extracted on the Libra. So it's like the same cabal. It's the same people. Apparently, Sahil was also in the mix. Just like every villain. It's kind of like an Avengers movie. It's like every villain from a previous cycle is also back as part of this thing so it's it is a nice way to wrap up the saga if this is the last celeb celeb coin that we're gonna deal with You know, it's good to go out with a whimper instead of a bang. And this is like, this is very much a whimper.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[56:05] Well, that is a hopeful note. I'm glad to see this thing die off. So am I. And we'll end with this last hopeful note here, which is pretty good. I don't know if you saw this clip. This is a speech by the assistant attorney general at the DOJ, the criminal division. I'm not going to play the clip, but a few things he said. This was a speech that he said the attorney general wanted him to give to make it clear to the crypto community that merely writing code without ill intent is not a crime. He goes through in the speech and he says, basically, the DOJ is not going to go after non-custodial open source software developers that are just writing code. He didn't mention the Roman Storm case by name, of course, but from his comments, it was very clear that they wouldn't have prosecuted, this new DOJ would not have prosecuted someone like Roman Storm moving forward,

Ryan Sean Adams:
[56:55] which kind of begs the question of like, well, what about poor Roman.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[57:00] Right?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[57:00] The DOJ case against him still proceeds, but it does seem, it was nice to hear this. It does seem to be a much softer touch from the DOJ. If you watch the speech, what reflections did you have from this?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[57:12] Well, I think it's more nuanced than that, right? So the line is merely writing code without ill intent is not a crime. Okay, so what is ill intent? And under what standard are you going to put somebody to figure out whether or not they had ill intent or decide to bring a case against them? One thing that's very clear in our criminal justice system is that it very, very, very strongly favors the government. Is that there's a strong, you know, nominally we have this presumption of innocence, but in reality there's a presumption of guilt, which is that, you know, grand juries, you know, the famous line is that you can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. And when it comes to criminal cases, the government wins something like 96% of cases that it brings to trial.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[57:55] So just the act of the government going after somebody is itself enough to either one, make it very, very difficult for them to end up making it out unharmed. But also, it creates a very, very long and uphill battle for them to fight against, even if they're in the right. You know, Roman, obviously, he ended up having a hung jury on the two most serious charges. Now he's facing the less serious charge, the unlicensed money transmission charge. And he's going to appeal that. And I think it's very likely he's going to prevail on appeal. But it's going to take a long time and a lot of money and a huge derailment of this person's life. And that alone is enough of a chilling effect to tell the next person, hey, if the government decides that you had ill intent in you building this thing, then maybe you're also facing three years and a criminal trial and, you know, all this money in your entire life being upended for you to defend yourself, right? That alone is sufficient punishment to deter anybody from wanting to do this again. So I think it's a little hollow for the DOJ to come out and say, hey, hey, hey, just so you know, like, we're not going to do this again. It's like, okay, well, you're not going to do this again. First of all, you're doing it right now. You're still doing it because you haven't dropped the charges. It's true. And then second, it's like, okay, well, what is the boundary?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[59:06] What counts to you as ill intent, right? If Roman Storm gets up on the stand and says, no, no, no, I was doing this in response to what the Ethereum community told me they wanted, is they wanted privacy for being able to transact on chain unperturbed by other people. We didn't do this for criminals, right? If that's what Roman Storm says on the stand and you prosecute him anyway, then like, okay, then now it's a mind reading competition. is that you're going to try to mind read to see did this person really have ill intent or really were they doing it for the wrong reasons, okay? I think this is not how a justice system ought to operate is that is this defendant going to be able to predict how you will perceive their intentions Or are you going to say very clearly, here's what's okay and here's what's not okay. Here's what we learned about the Roman Storm case that you should not do if you don't want to also get prosecuted, right? DOJ has not said that. What they've said is that, look, all these developers are freaking out. All these civil liberties groups are freaking out. All of these now, even politicians are hearing about this, that the Roman Storm case is a scandal. And the response is, no, no, no, no, don't worry. We're not going to go after you too, right? Okay, prove it.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:00:10] Yeah, I guess from that vantage point, It is kind of weak, maybe. And, you know, your take is that one speech doesn't really repair this. If they were really serious about...

Haseeb Qureshi:
[1:00:20] If they drop the case against Roman Storm, then that would be... Then now we're talking. Yes, I see. And also, you see clearly what the line is, is that Roman Storm was not over that line. But we don't know where the line is, right? What exactly is the boundary of criminal intent or ill intent, quote unquote, not criminal intent, ill intent? What is the boundary of ill intent? I don't know. Do you know what it is? Do you know who is that person who would be prosecuted versus the person right next to them who wouldn't be prosecuted? I don't know. And the principle of criminal justice is what's called fair notice. Fair notice means a person of ordinary intelligence should be able to understand what is prohibited and what is not prohibited. Do you know that Aztec is not beyond the pale, but Tornado Cash is? Do you know? Do you know whether that's true?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:01:04] No idea.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[1:01:04] If not, why not? No idea. I have no idea. Yeah, it's basically DOJ discretion,

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:01:09] Basically.

Haseeb Qureshi:
[1:01:10] Exactly. Exactly. Which to me is like, that's the opposite of what you want from a justice system.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:01:16] All right. We're looking for another step from the DOJ beyond just words in the speech. And it would definitely go a long way if the Roman Storm case was dropped. We're going to end it there. Hasib, thank you so much for filling in for David. And where can folks catch you just like in your travels these days? I know you're on Chopping Block. I know you're on Twitter. Where are you appearing the most these days?

Haseeb Qureshi:
[1:01:35] I mean, I'm kind of everywhere at this point, but the easiest way to find me, just look me up on Twitter. I'm Hasib. Just Google my name and you'll find me. I think I'm the top rank at this point.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:01:44] Definitely do that, guys. Risk and disclaimers. Of course, got to let you know, none of this has been financial advice, not even that hype advice back there. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we're 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.

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