ROLLUP: Gold & BTC ATH | AI Bubble or Debasement Trade? | BNB Surge | $2B Polymarket Deal

TRANSCRIPT

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:04] Bankless nation it is the second week of October.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:07] It's not feeling like October though on the week David I think our prices are down but uh gold is going up something so maybe there's some hope there something's up somewhere we're gonna talk about that right we're gonna talk about gold at all-time high we actually did eek out a bitcoin all-time high that's last weekend so it's official Well,

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:25] technically, the NASDAQ and S&P are all at all-time high. What do we make of all this? Like, what does all this mean? It seems like there's a debasement trade going on at the same time as an AI trade. And how is that going to play into the crypto cycle? We got a long discussion about that ahead.

David Hoffman:
[0:41] Not just Bitcoin got an all-time high. BNB has been pumping third largest crypto asset now this week, valued at two Coinbases. Why? Why is it doing this? What's going on over there? And what's going on on the Asian market? Because Asian tokens are just up. CZ comes back to Binance, and all of a sudden, the Asian token market has a huge premium.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:03] Wait, did he really come back to Binance? We're going to talk about that later in the episode. I don't think he did, but maybe.

David Hoffman:
[1:08] Also, we have staked ETFs coming down the pipe. We're going to talk about all that news. Galaxy Digital launches a Robinhood competitor, and you'll never guess, Ryan, who's back to leading it.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:21] Is it SPF?

David Hoffman:
[1:23] No, but, you know, you know.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:27] Okay.

David Hoffman:
[1:27] Close. We'll talk about that. Not close. Not close. Not close.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:30] Not close, but, you know, in the vicinity there.

David Hoffman:
[1:32] In the vicinity, yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:33] Also, the New York Stock Exchange parent company, they just made a massive investment in Polymarket, a $2 billion investment. That is good things for Shane Copeland, who became, according to this, it says, the world's largest, the world's youngest billionaire. Yeah. I'm actually not sure if that's true, but.

David Hoffman:
[1:51] It values Polymarket at $9 billion. $2 billion in cash is invested. Does Shane just open the company bank account and just seize $2 billion there? Is that how that works?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[2:03] No, I don't think that's how it works, David. But we do have a Monad airdrop confirmation date, which is a layer one network that I think all of crypto has been looking forward to for some time, which may mean we're close to a main net. After four years, we're close to a main net. So we'll talk about all that and more.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[2:21] Apologies, Bankless listeners, for my voice. Again, I'm going into the week a little sick.

David Hoffman:
[2:26] You're doing great.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[2:26] We're going to hold through this episode. David, we got to shout out our friends and sponsors. David, let's talk about Bitcoin on the week. So it doesn't feel like up-temper, but are we up a little bit on the week?

David Hoffman:
[2:38] October, October. Yes, we are up half a percent on the week. We did have an all-time high. So, you know, even though we're flat on the week, having an all-time high midweek and still being up half a percent, you know, technically still counts. It just, you know, at the moment of recording.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[2:50] When did we hit that all-time high? October 6th.

David Hoffman:
[2:52] That was like Monday or something?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[2:54] That was Sunday. It was Sunday morning, I guess.

David Hoffman:
[2:55] Sunday, yeah. 126,000 even episodes. This is a new all-time high. Previous all-time high was in August at basically $124,000. We've got some commentators saying, the United States government shut down, loose liquidity conditions, narrowing performance relative to equities in gold is drawing attention to digital assets. That is the CIO at a bank who said that.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[3:19] This wasn't a very noisy all-time high. It didn't feel like there was some celebration, but it was fairly muted. I think that's just because it's like a technical all-time high.

David Hoffman:
[3:29] Yeah, it's like $1,000 all-time high, $1,000 higher than last time.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[3:34] Yeah, it just doesn't feel, Bitcoin doesn't feel exciting as an all-time high until like $130K. Maybe that's just me. But I think we start to celebrate more when we actually get an all-time high that feels meaningful and sustained. I've been looking, you know, David, you and I are both big Ray Dalio fans. I've long been looking for Ray Dalio to weigh in directly on Bitcoin. Ray, what do you think about Bitcoin?

David Hoffman:
[3:57] To validate our bags?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[3:58] Yeah. He said good things about it previously. Of course, this is the big debasement guy, right? I mean, he talks about long-term debt cycles, the end of empires. He's a huge proponent of gold. That's probably worked out for him very well lately. And you'd think Bitcoin would be right up his alley. And it is, kind of. someone finally in a podcast asked him a direct question Ray, is Bitcoin a legitimate currency? And he kind of said yes, kind of said no So he said that he thought Bitcoin some consider it as a money some consider it as a store of value but the big question for him was would central banks consider it a store of value? And he said no, probably not and the reasons he gave which are interesting are it's not private So he thinks that the public nature, the pseudo anonymous and not private nature of Bitcoin makes it such that central banks will not adopt it. He also says there's code risk. So there could be bugs in the system. It's dependent on people. It's dependent on software, something that gold isn't. So his conclusion is, I have gold and some Bitcoin, but not very much of it. And I'm wondering how much of this is like a generational type take.

David Hoffman:
[5:13] It is generational. For sure, especially the code risk, like Zoomers don't care about code risk. And you know what gold has as a risk is younger generations just not caring about it. So, yeah, you accept the code risk and you decline the boomer risk. Boomers are just not going to buy Bitcoin and not comparatively to like Zoomers. And Zoomers just don't care about code risk.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[5:39] Well, so when you say they don't care about code risk, though, is this because they're just like naive and they don't think about risk? They're young people. They're, you know, young and stupid. And they just don't think about risk like that. I mean, to me, I think a lot of people in crypto don't care about code risk so much as like because these are social systems. So let's say there was some infinity bug to supply in Bitcoin, some zero-day bug out there in a Bitcoin client. Say that happened tomorrow. Well, price would spike down. Price would react to that. But people would stop running that client. We would fix it via patch. It would get deployed. And then it's not going to drop to zero, basically. Like, yeah, these, you know, no one would accept a infinite supply Bitcoin as the actual legitimate Bitcoin. Therefore, like code risk is not so much a risk as people think it is.

David Hoffman:
[6:37] OK, but to take Dalio's side, he would probably say, like, yes, you could just overcome that with like a social fork and then it's everything's fine. But it still is a mark against the legitimacy of Bitcoin because gold doesn't have to have that do that thing. You don't have to socially fork gold.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[6:51] Yeah, that's fair. Another clip I found interesting on the week is, what does President Christine Lagarde think about Bitcoin? Someone asked her that directly. Here's the clip.

David Hoffman:
[7:00] Who is that? That is the, she works at the EU Central Bank. So we have the European Union Central Bank commentator.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[7:06] Yeah, she's Europe's Jerome Powell, basically.

David Hoffman:
[7:08] Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[7:09] Here's the clip. So can Bitcoin be like a digital form of gold?

David Hoffman:
[7:13] Okay. No.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[7:16] That's the final answer, right? Yeah.

David Hoffman:
[7:19] I mean, you know, I hesitate to say that, but I say it because I have no fear, because I know that the social media tonight and tomorrow is going to hit me like crazy, because that's the community that they form, and that's the belief that they have, and that's the confidence that they generate amongst themselves. But I still am of the view that there is no intrinsic value and there is no underlying value to it, which doesn't mean to say that there is no hype created as a result that some can associate with a value meaning a price. Which then moves up and down depending on what happens, who is instrumenting all this.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[8:00] It's fascinating to me, David, that the reason she gives is there's no underlying value to Bitcoin. That's the reason it's not valuable, which begs the question of why is gold trading at $27 trillion on the week? Again, do you think this is a generational thing? The idea that gold can be backed by nothing of value, but Bitcoin, oh, that's a bridge too far. Obviously, that can't exist. That's not a real thing.

David Hoffman:
[8:24] I mean, this person is just the spokesperson of fiat. They are just fiat incarnate into this real world. They are the voice of fiat money. And so this is what fiat money would say. He's like, yeah, don't believe in Bitcoin because my life depends on this.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[8:40] Yeah, they're paid to not understand this, I guess.

David Hoffman:
[8:42] Yeah, exactly. Yeah. There's an interesting graph that went around. Who owns Bitcoin in 2025? Bitcoin, in the year of our Lord, 2025, is still predominantly owned by retail. 71%, almost 72% of Bitcoin is owned by retail. 7% of Bitcoin is in ETFs. 5% is left to be mined. 5% is owned by Satoshi Nakamoto. 4.5% owned by public companies. And 2.5% owned by countries and governments. Crazy how dominant retail holding of Bitcoin is.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[9:16] Do you hear the headline take here, which is, I'm not selling Bitcoin until the country's bubble becomes as big as the retail bubble today. Do you think that is the end state? Regardless of what Dalio and Christine Lagarde think about it, central banks are going to have to acquire Bitcoin and hard crypto assets. That's just the future. Or maybe just younger generations take control of these

Ryan Sean Adams:
[9:39] institutions and they effectively become that.

David Hoffman:
[9:42] Yeah, that's exactly right. But that's always been the plan is Bitcoin only works as a grassroots revolution for like central bankers to actually end up holding the bag and then having to buy all of our bags because we were buying drugs on the Silk Road in 2013.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[9:58] Wait, speak for yourself, dude. Okay, speak for yourself. Hold on now. More evidence of this, though. Actually, some news on the week. We have the first EU sovereign wealth fund allocating to Bitcoin. It has never happened before. It's the country of Luxembourg. Though they bought a Bitcoin position, 1% via an ETF. So we're already working up that scale. We got to the level of massive institutions, the Black Rocks of the world. Now we're getting into the big money, the big institutional capital, which is sovereign wealth funds.

David Hoffman:
[10:32] Luxembourg.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[10:34] You got to start somewhere, man.

David Hoffman:
[10:35] Got to start somewhere. No shade against Luxembourg.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[10:39] They're like a startup country, right? Don't they have digital identity rolled out and all these different things? I think that's right.

David Hoffman:
[10:44] Yeah. I think a very high GDP per capita.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[10:47] Yeah. Just the capita size is pretty small, I guess you should say. How about little brother ETH on the week? We should check in.

David Hoffman:
[10:54] ETH down 3% or 4% on the week. Down 3%, $4,300. Hit $4,750. It was getting me real excited and then immediately went down. So sad. But overall, just down 3%.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[11:06] Was that it, man? Was that Uptober? Are we done?

David Hoffman:
[11:10] October 9th, we got 20 more days.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[11:13] Okay, so I know you had a conversation. I was not feeling well, so I couldn't. But with Tom Lee and Arthur Hayes, and I'm hopeful you asked the question to them of, what about the cycle? Because, again, ticking clock right now, if this cycle ends like previous cycles, we only got about two months. What did they say to this?

David Hoffman:
[11:34] Short clock. Yeah, short time left on the clock.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[11:38] Give me some good news. Do they say something a little bit different?

David Hoffman:
[11:41] Oh, yeah. They're like, no, no, no, no. It's Fed liquidity, brother. It just is a coincidence that the four-year cycle has just lined up with Fed liquidity events. And Arthur Hayes in the episode just goes through it. It's like, all right, the Bitcoin bubble in 2013, well, here's the Federal Reserve liquidity event. In 2017, here's the corresponding Federal Reserve liquidity event. So he maps it out. He correlates it. And that's why I think that this cycle hasn't felt so frothy is because interest rates are at not all-time highs, but like have been higher than they've been in forever. And the Federal Reserve is only slowly cutting them, but they are cutting and they're cutting them now slowly. And so my takeaway from that is like, oh yeah, just again, the whole plan is the slow cook throughout 2026.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[12:25] So there is a case that the cycle ends this year, but Arthur Hayes and Tom Lee are making the case that we get an extended cycle just because the money printers are just starting to fire up right now. Not only in the U.S., but in China as well. Did they give end-of-year price calls, by the way?

David Hoffman:
[12:42] Oh, yeah. But, I mean, come on. The listener's going to have to go listen to the episode. No, no, no.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[12:46] Tell me what the – okay. Okay. We'll leave that tease out there then to listen to that episode. It's in the queue. Good news, David. The bull market indicators. Remember the coin glass bull market indicators that we checked in? Mm-hmm. None of them have hit our sell. Are frothy. Yeah. Nothing's frothy right now.

David Hoffman:
[13:02] Yeah, yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[13:03] So this is kind of what you wanted, I feel like. You kept telling me the last couple of months, hey, I want slow, steady, up. I don't want anything crazy.

David Hoffman:
[13:11] We got a good thing going. Things are just up slowly. Maybe one month is down. The next month is green. But quarter over quarter, over quarter, over quarter, over quarter, We're just grinding up, dude. We're just grinding up.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[13:25] It's not as exciting. Okay. We're all getting rich slowly.

David Hoffman:
[13:28] And by slowly, I mean over three years.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[13:32] That's great. David, we have the ETH staking ETFs, a world first. Who's doing it?

David Hoffman:
[13:38] Great scale. Great scale. So they launched the first U.S. Spot crypto ETF that allowed access for investors to have staked Ethereum via ETH and ETH-E. and also soon for Solana as it's waiting for regulatory approval. So ETH, ETH-E, the Grayscale ETH-E will now pay distributions. But also ETH, the other one, just ETH, they have the ticker ETH for the ETH ETF. That's crazy. They will just roll staking returns into the NAV, and so it will just compound over time. But also ETH-E, the old one, charges a 2.5 management fee. So ETH, the better one, charges 0.25 management fee.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[14:19] Yeah, 2.5%, you should say.

David Hoffman:
[14:21] 2%, yes.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[14:22] That's 250 bips.

David Hoffman:
[14:23] Yeah, 250 big ones.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[14:25] Versus 25 bips, which is a big difference. What would you prefer? Would you prefer getting the cash distribution every month? Or would you prefer just rolling.

David Hoffman:
[14:33] It into the nav? Roll it into the nav. Why not? Because then I'm not taxed. You're taxed on income with distributions, right?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[14:42] Oh, that's right. It's more tax efficient. Yeah. Dude, well done.

David Hoffman:
[14:45] Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I've been brushing up all my taxes. Okay. DATS are not done yet, though, because DATS also want to provide staking, which they do. They're easier to provide staking. So Joseph Shalom, former BlackRock ETF guy, now at SBET, strategic bet on ETH, he says, quote, So having worked on BlackRock's Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, I've seen how powerful these vehicles are for institutional access and adoption. But some limitations are unlocking your staked ETH can take up to 40 days. It's not, it's usually not that long. And then also ETH ETFs will have to keep a large portion of their ETH holdings liquid, aka not staked. At Sharplink, we are able to stake 100% of our ETH generating superior yield. On top of the yield, we'll develop new businesses that have ETH nominated revenue, increasing our ETH concentration even further. So Joseph's saying, hey, we are a better product than even staked ETH ETFs.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[15:40] Because our yields are higher, basically.

David Hoffman:
[15:41] Our yields are higher. Yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[15:42] Yeah, I mean, that feels like that lines up to me. Yeah, but higher yields.

David Hoffman:
[15:48] Also more risk. More risk. Not too much more risk. They're trying to be conservative with it, but nonetheless. Well, not just the staking.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[15:54] Like, I mean, they can stake 100%. So right there, that's risk-free. That portion is risk-free.

David Hoffman:
[15:59] I guess that, and that's identical. The risk profile is identical. Yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[16:02] Yeah. David, they're not the only ETF. This is not the only ETF news, I should say. It seems like it's going to be, we're days away from Solana getting its first, not their first ETF. They've had some more exotic.

David Hoffman:
[16:15] Their first good ETF. They kind of have this kind of hacky ETF that has been around for a bit.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[16:21] The Grayscale, the 21 shares, the Bitwise, the Franklin, the Fidelity, those are coming to Solana. And the final SEC deadline is actually, I mean, today, the time listeners will listen to this, the 10th of October. So Bloomberg is pricing, like, odds of approval is 95% here. So it seems like it's going to be a slam dunk that this thing is going to be approved. Got to expect this will be, I mean, what do you think? Do you think this will be a price catalyst for Solana? I think the market's already priced this in.

David Hoffman:
[16:51] What's your take? I don't think the staking component of ETFs is a big price catalyst. It's not just staking.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[16:58] It's all these Solana ETFs. So Solana's getting its first fleet of all of these super legitimate ETFs.

David Hoffman:
[17:05] I mean, we saw what happened with the Bitcoin and ETH price after they got their ETFs. So I would expect to see some correlation with that.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[17:12] Well, what did ETH do? I mean, it kind of slumped after, actually. The volumes weren't that exciting.

David Hoffman:
[17:17] Yeah, but Solana doesn't have grayscale unlocks to deal with. So that's actually a privileged position that Solana has.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[17:23] I think they have some, right? They have a grayscale that's rolling over. They must have some unlocks there. I haven't looked into this. We'll see.

David Hoffman:
[17:29] I mean, the reason why BlackRock has been... I don't think BlackRock has a Solana ETF. And BlackRock's position is like, we don't see demand for a Solana ETF. That's why we're not doing it. But, I mean, that was a while ago. So maybe there's more demand. Yeah. Coming up next, we're going to talk about the debasement trade. Gold has hit another all-time high and shows no sign of slowing down. What? Is that telling us? And scary? Is that scary? But also, there's the AI trade too. Also perhaps scary. Uh-oh.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[17:55] Yeah.

David Hoffman:
[17:55] And then ENB has now become the third largest asset in crypto, up 40% in 30 days. Why is all of Asia catching a bid? We're going to talk about this and more,

David Hoffman:
[18:05] but first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[18:09] The big news in all of finance this week was the gold all-time high. I mean, let's start there because this signifies something that a lot of people are calling the debasement trade. What happened was gold hit a new all-time high, surpassing $4,000 per ounce earlier this week on Monday for the very first time. And just to put some perspective on it, this is up more than 50% this year. Gold, okay? Up more than 50% this year, and it has more than doubled over the past two years. Reason for this, consistent buying of foreign central banks. China is definitely one of them. People say a lot of this is happening after the 2022 U.S. Imposed sanctions against Russia and other non-U.S. Aligned countries are like, well, we're not keeping our money in treasuries. So they're buying gold and that accounts for a lot of the price action. Also, retail is allocating to gold as well. But, David, when you look at this, you know, the list of the world's largest assets, gold is now like there is no second best here. It's not even close.

David Hoffman:
[19:21] It's not even close. Jesus.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[19:23] Gold is $27 trillion in market. Okay. That's so big. That means over the past couple of years, David, they've added about, let's see, $12 trillion.

David Hoffman:
[19:35] Yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[19:36] $12 trillion. So how many bitcoins is that? Six bitcoins.

David Hoffman:
[19:40] Six bitcoins.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[19:41] When gold moves, I mean, with 50% or doubles over two years, these are like deca trillion dollar moves here we're talking about. Nvidia is the second largest asset in the world worth $4.6 trillion. So, oh, by the way, gold is having its own alt season too. Not talking about it, but like silver is catching a pretty massive bid on this too.

David Hoffman:
[20:04] The Litecoin to gold, yeah. Yeah, that's crazy.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[20:07] Yeah, that's right.

David Hoffman:
[20:08] I mean, this is the debasement trade, obviously. It's just kind of crescendoing right now. And why it's crescendoing, I think we would probably have to talk to some macro people to really get that answered. But at some point, this has always been the trade. This has been the trade as long as I've gotten into crypto.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[20:27] The debasement trade you're talking about?

David Hoffman:
[20:28] The debasement trade, yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[20:29] Yeah, it's basically like fiscal deficits, fiscal dominance. The U.S. Is like 7% of GDP deficit this year. Congress isn't stopping it. The economy is doing pretty well. And still Trump is like, yeah, you know what we could use? Some rate decreases. We could replace Jerome Powell with somebody who is much more dovish and willing to cut rates. And we're doing this at a time when can we afford to actually do it? I guess maybe we can't afford not to. With our interest rate payments as a nation being so high as well.

David Hoffman:
[21:07] I mean, when the United States national debt is $38 trillion and we're paying like four and a half percent on that interest payments on $38 trillion, like gold doesn't need a reason to go up. That's got, that's plenty of reason alone.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[21:21] Yeah. I mean, when you even zoom out, right, it's always been taught to me that, the Warren Buffett thing. Why would I buy something that doesn't have cash flows? It's not a productive asset. Why would I buy something like gold? That's stupid. You should buy U.S. Stocks, okay? Over the last five years, our best performing indice in the world has been the NASDAQ. It is up 98% over the past five years. Gold is up 112% over the last five. Gold is inert, you know if.

David Hoffman:
[21:52] You owned real estate a hundred years ago it's about the same value as it was in gold terms

Ryan Sean Adams:
[21:58] Yeah it's incredible uh some more stats gold up 50 in nine months uh the s&p is up 10 percent in the same time if you go back in time all the way since 2000 what if the stock market gains were measured in gold this is if they were measured in gold this is all stocks around the world on us it's basically you know down only as far as you know that's crazy right see i mean the gold bugs your crazy uncles right the entire time uh gold is on pace for its best year since 1979 up 51 of course as we said if you look at these numbers and.

David Hoffman:
[22:36] The world's biggest asset

Ryan Sean Adams:
[22:37] That's the last time we saw something in like higher than 50 i'm going back through these years here was all the way back to 1979. And so what happened in the 1970s? You get some really good return years for gold. 1972 was about 50%. 73 was 73%. 74 was 66%. 79 was 126.

David Hoffman:
[22:59] What happened in 1971, right?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[23:00] We got off the gold standard.

David Hoffman:
[23:02] We made our fiat currency worthless. We killed Bretton Woods. Gold goes on a tear.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[23:07] So it's the 1970s with respect to debasement. Again, that's what the 2000s are, it seems like.

David Hoffman:
[23:12] Yeah. Yeah. In the 70s, we took our dollar off the gold standard. And then in the 2020s, we can't pay our debt. So now we're printing a ton of money.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[23:20] Well, the question is like, at what price point, though, does this become alarming? So right now, gold bulls are like, yay, celebrate, celebrate. But I mean, if we keep having 50% years, this implies something is going very wrong with our fiat money systems. There's a comment from Twitter. Gold's parabolic move towards $4,000 is sending a warning sign to the traditional finance system. Developed market nations are losing clout as being good stewards of capital. This comes on a day when the U.S. government has shut down due to dysfunction. France's prime minister resigned after three weeks. And Japan's new prime minister planned stimulus at a time of elevated inflation. Nation states are just like not handling their finances well. And so people are resorting to gold. But at some point, this gets like scary, right? This gets into like...

David Hoffman:
[24:13] I mean, you're making comparisons to like when fiat currencies collapse relative to gold, it's usually not a good time. Like the Weimar Republic in Germany, Bretton Woods in the 70s. I mean, it's not a collapse, but it wasn't great. Anytime a fiat currency collapse, there's like discord and chaos. Like hyperinflation is different from gold appreciation. So we can cut off those comparisons. And also at the same time, like we're in 2025, like things are very liquid and fluid in capital markets. And so, I mean, you investors have more optionality and more escape valves from the fiat system better than ever. And so, I mean, part of that is just like, yeah, it's very easy to buy gold now.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[24:55] Yeah. And let's talk about one of those other escape valves, which is crypto. So how about our digital gold products? How about our non-sovereign store values? How about gold versus crypto? We could look at that on the year, David. So gold, as I said, is up 50%.

David Hoffman:
[25:09] I never thought that gold would be beating both Bitcoin and ETH on the year.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[25:13] It is. So Bitcoin up 30% on the year, ETH up 30%, 33%, gold up 54% on the year, which is pretty funny. Now, if you zoom out though, okay, if you zoom out all the way to Bitcoin inception in 2012, you price Bitcoin in gold terms, okay, gold has been down only relative to Bitcoin, right? So I guess the answer is kind of zoom out. Although.

David Hoffman:
[25:40] Yeah, that's not fair, though.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[25:42] It is fair, but it's not fair. I think it's like another look at it, right? Yeah. But I think the big question is, now that gold is $27 trillion, okay, well, we can just make it like Bitcoin can catch up to that, right? Crypto can catch up to that as an asset class. And the question is, do you think it will?

David Hoffman:
[26:02] Over the long period of time, yeah. It's just like, again, it's a generational thing. Right now, I think it's because the central banks are freaking out because the United States has all this debt to pay and it's just debasement. And so banks are like this largest financial institutions in the world are making this trade, which is why it's such a big move in gold and like trillions of dollars are sloshing around. But like if we are long-term investors and I'm talking like decades, like what am I going to put my life's denominator into? It's going to be the internet equivalent of what is exactly going on because slowly the balance of power will shift from the analog to the digital. That's the whole crypto thesis. And millennials and Zoomers, as we get our hand on Boomer Capital, central bank capital flows down into Zoomers' hands. All of a sudden, they're like, all right, you know what? One day, Ryan, there will be a millennial Jerome Powell. What are they going to do? Are they going to buy it? They're going to be like, we have a lot of gold and not very much Bitcoin. I am going to equalize those things. We just have to wait for the millennials to own the banks.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[27:05] That's probably the case. That goes back to the clips we played earlier. Although I will say what you just said is more the narrative, right? And this is certainly the Bitcoin crypto narrative, which is, hey, crypto is also a debasement hedge. Okay. There have been periods of time where it traded like that,

Ryan Sean Adams:
[27:22] where it was correlated to gold. So there was a long stretch from late 2022 to late 2024 that the CME summarized that gold rose 67% while Bitcoin surged nearly 4%. There was a relatively tight correlation. But there are other times, in fact, most of the time, these two assets have been pretty decoupled. So it's a narrative that Bitcoin should catch up to gold and trade like gold and is a debasement hedge. But it's actually, in point of fact, Bitcoin is much more correlated to what the NASDAQ is doing. And so Michael Nadeau from the DeFi report wrote an entire post, which is basically the question of, does Bitcoin follow gold? And even, should you have gold in your portfolio if you own crypto assets? And his conclusion was basically like, if you look at the data, no, not really.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[28:14] Bitcoin behaves as a distinct tech-like asset driven by adoption, liquidity, and reflexivity. It's not like levered gold. gold is inversely related to real rates and the dollar bitcoin shows zero almost zero relationship to either of those things which is somewhat interesting so we've got the narrative that says yeah it's just like gold it'll catch up to gold it'll do what gold does but in point of fact it's actually still very much correlated to tech stocks and not the debasement trade so we'll have to see if that changes yeah.

David Hoffman:
[28:48] I do think bitcoin and ethereum especially in when they're so early in their lifespan. And like Bitcoin's 15 years old. And so the first seven, eight, nine, 10 years of Bitcoin are just, it's like infant aged. And same thing with Ethereum. And so like the next 10 years of Bitcoin where it's more an adult and same thing with Ethereum, I think it's going to have different investment properties, different comparatives than what we have when it's like a child.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[29:13] I think I agree with you too. Okay. So that's the debasement trade. But the interesting point in history where we are, David, is that's one thing that's happening. It's not the only thing that's happening. We have gold all-time highs, but we also have stock market all-time highs. We have NASDAQ and S&P 500 all-time highs. So they are both up about 20%, 20 and 15% respectively on the year as well. And the real driver of growth, of course, we know 40% of US GDP growth this year has been AI. If you look at 80% of all of the gains of the US stock market this year, it's all been AI. An economist out of Harvard this week said this, without data centers, GDP growth in the U.S. Would be 0.1% in the first half of 2025. Okay? So all of the CapEx spend, all of the growth that we're seeing, it's highly concentrated on AI.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[30:16] And we also, you know, there was a time where I think AI bulls have been saying, well, all of this is with cash-rich tech companies. They have really strong balance sheets, and they're just financing all of this CapEx spend with retained earnings. That has been true. It's starting to be less true. So here's a report. The amount of debt tied to AI has ballooned to $1.2 trillion. So we're starting to get some debt in the system to fund some of this capex. It's not just retained earnings. And of course, we know what this looks like, right? So here's kind of a diagram of almost the human centipede of AI right now. Where it's like a very small number of companies that are all cutting deals with one another. and all pumping each other's shares up, right?

David Hoffman:
[31:04] So just this week- NVIDIA has a bunch of money, made an investment, or OpenAI made an investment in India. NVIDIA who bought a bunch of Oracle stuff, who makes a deal with Intel, who competes with AMD, and then it all flows back into Microsoft. Exactly. It's all the same money. It's all the same $500 billion.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[31:22] Yeah, so did you say this week, OpenAI does a deal with AMD, and AMD shares are up 27%. And what was part of that deal? that OpenAI would get AMD shares. What the heck?

David Hoffman:
[31:33] Hey man, when the fiat money is worthless, like this is to be expected.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[31:38] Okay, so, but this is kind of weird. We got debasement going on. At the same time, we have something that looks like- As like hyper growth. Hyper growth, like, or what's maybe another word for hyper growth that starts with a B? Is it bubble? Notable investor Paul Tuber Jones had a great interview on CNBC that I enjoyed very much. He actually compared all that's going on to the 1999 tech boom and bust, okay? And he predicted that a blow off the top was coming soon. So he said, hey, man, I was there in the late 90s. This looks a lot like that right now. You're saying we're in 1999. For those that don't know the timeline here, October 1999, tech stocks were still booming like crazy. Meanwhile, by the way, the Fed was actually increasing rates. So monetary policy was tightening. It's going like from five to five and a half to six. Anyway, during this time, there was still a bull run ahead. And then we got massive gains from October 1999 in the NASDAQ to the top, which was March 2000. And he said, I see something similar here. We got price increases. We got the tech fervor. We've got the build out. You know, everyone calling AI a new paradigm. And he's saying, this seems a lot like what we have seen before.

David Hoffman:
[32:59] This feels a little forced to me. I mean, the dot-com bubble was truly a bubble in the sense that, you know, bullshit was getting priced at billions of dollars because, you know, it had just like a, you had an investment brochure. It's like the same thing with the ICO bubble. It's like you'd spin up a website, you could get hundreds of millions of dollars investment. And so, like, it was purely all just hype driven.

David Hoffman:
[33:21] And like, you know, AI, it's not hype, man. It's like, these are the largest companies in tech. These are Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Meta, like NVIDIA. These were all pre-existing companies before AI came in. So that's a big difference, right? It's not just like anyone spinning up an IPO because they have a website, which is what happened in the dot-com bubble.

David Hoffman:
[33:44] And yeah, also like these are real products. Like I pay opening, I have a $200 software subscription to open AI. Like, I'm paying them $200 a month. That's ridiculous. Jeff Park pushed back on this. He had a tweet that I thought was useful. I'll read a small part of it. He says, I occasionally hear macro traders comparing the current bubble to 1999 because of the AI mania and stretch valuations. But this is quite a lazy thing to say, in my opinion, and should be taken with a grain of salt. Then he goes on to say a few things that you iterated, like the Fed was raising rates in 1999 and is cutting rates now. I think the big one that I like from Jeff Park's tweet was in 1999, there was no Bitcoin. There was no social media. There was no smartphones. And today money moves so fast and there are just escape valves everywhere. And, you know, markets are just way more informed these days. I mean, the 1999 tech bubble was because of the existence of the Internet. We didn't have the Internet to talk because that's what we were speculating on at the time. Today, we have the Internet like markets are much more efficient, much more informed than they were back then. and investors have like a lot more optionality. And so I kind of see that all as like bubble armor, bubble resistance, at least as it compares to like the 1999 bubble.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[34:56] I think that there is some bubble resistance, but I'm going to take more of the Paul Turd-Jones case on this. Not necessarily that this is exactly like 1999, but you can see like overinvestment, allocation towards one specific area. I mean, there's some price point where AI is just promising far more than it can immediately cash, the same way the internet did. Everything in 2000 about the internet did prove to be true. It just took another like five to 10 years for that to germinate. And I think that might be true at AI. Not necessarily now, but at some point. Now, Paul Trudor Jones does say that like, hey, in situations like this, you cannot afford to be out of the market for the months preceding the blow off top. Okay. You got to be absolutely allocated because that's the time you get the 2x, the 3x. Things get crazy. You just have to be cautious. And I do think it's worth being cautious about what is going on in kind of AI.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[36:00] They asked him, what assets should you allocate to? And this is what he said. If you look at the biggest winners, right? The biggest winners are gold. I think it's up 46, 47%. Bitcoin, I want to say it's up 50 or 60. I'm not even sure. Or there's a Morgan Stanley basket that's a retail flow basket that has all the meme stocks. And it's up 67, 68 percent. So it's really what retail jumps on. So crypto, digital gold, that's obviously something that's very, very appealing. Does that mean you're jumping on all of that right now? Well, I'd want to have positions in all of it for sure. So if you said to me, what are going to be the winners? Again, we have this race. Right. The race, realistically, is certainly to the end of the year because that's when everyone marks institutionally. And then you have to figure out what's going to go on in next year. So what would I want to have? I'd want to have a combination of gold, crypto, probably the NASDAQ.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[37:05] I want to say that I've said that before, and I think that's still the right one. And I think whatever the fastest horse is at this point in time probably has a good chance of being that on deck 31. There, whatever the fastest horse probably has a good chance of saying it. So he's saying crypto, he's saying gold, and he's saying the NASDAQ. The question is, though, if this is a bubble, what do you like escape into? Do you sell for treasuries? Just keep these assets. It's like, if the denominator is shifting, what do you actually sell in some kind of an AI bubble? And I mean, I don't think that's clear.

David Hoffman:
[37:40] Yeah, well, that's why I think part of this is happening. It's like all of these tech companies have hundreds of millions of dollars to slosh around because of the debasement. So on one end, we have debasement because there's so much money. And then where did all this money go? It went into AI. And so that AI is propping up the valuations, not just because it's a bubble, but also because there's too much money around. Speaking of money sloshing around, we can get into some crypto native subjects. Finally, it's a big Marcus episode this week.

David Hoffman:
[38:07] BNB, a top five asset over the last month, because it's up 40% on the month, 20% week over week. And, you know, it's crypto. Things move volatile. Things are volatile in crypto. So 40% a month is not crazy. But when you're a top five asset and you move 40%, that's something like 30 or 40. Excuse me. No, that's like 60 or 70 billion dollars on a fully diluted valuation.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[38:29] And it puts them at number three, right? The third largest crypto asset, just behind Ethereum.

David Hoffman:
[38:34] Behind Ethereum, yeah. They're also behind Tether, but of course, let's not count Tether.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[38:38] They were ahead of Tether earlier in this week, so they've been back and forth.

David Hoffman:
[38:42] Yeah, Tether's coming in at $178 billion of stable coins. That's a stable coin. BNB, yeah, it's a stable coin. But, I mean, you know, I think it's funny. Do you think that this

Ryan Sean Adams:
[38:52] Price is justified, David? Why is BNB... Worth anything? Is BNB money? Is BNB a utility? What's the REV profile of BNB? Do you think it should be the third largest crypto asset?

David Hoffman:
[39:04] I mean, you're asking very intelligent questions. I'm not sure if those are the right questions to ask in order to get it.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[39:10] Let me ask you another one then. So at this valuation, BNB token is worth 2x the market cap of Coinbase. And interestingly, BNB token is not the same as shares in Binance. No.

David Hoffman:
[39:23] Binance revenue used to burn bnb it no longer does that uh all we can really talk about are some of the things that have happened in the last month uh aster which is one of the new perp decks is to come in after hyper liquid uh cz has kind of like king made aster and so if you're on binance smart chain aster is like the thing and there's just been a bunch of um wealth effect downstream of of aster so if you're if you're an aster token holder you're just a you're doing great and so there's been a there's been a binance smart chain wealth effect uh downstream of that is meme coins if everyone's on binance smart chain is rich then like what happens next is meme coins and so meme coins have attracted a lot of the the meme coin traders on binance smart chain and overall just revenue on binance smart chain is like 3x over uh like a month long period it's like 3x more activity so fee revenue has now exceeded tron which used to be just like a number one or two chain in terms of fee revenue so binance smart chain is like a tide it's like only only um hyper liquid is generating more fees than binance marching right now which is kind of crazy uh and so all of these have started to happen the waves the momentum behind binance has definitely because is because of all the on-chain activity uh why it's two times a coinbase i don't know dude

Ryan Sean Adams:
[40:41] Yeah, all of those reasons, I think, are right. There's also BNB holders get access to Binance airdrops. So there's something like $2.4 billion in airdrops in 2024 awarded to Binance holders. So I guess that makes it a cash-yielding asset as well. The thing is, I was digging into this that I didn't realize is there are reports that CZ holds between 60% to 70% of BNB tokens. And this is not transparent. This is a reporter who worked on an article for Forbes. I'll include some sources in the show notes. I didn't fully do the sleuthing to look this up myself, but it seems like it could be the case, right? Because Binance has a whole bunch of BNB tokens and he traces the wallet to that. CZ has a whole bunch personally. CZ owns 90% of Binance. He might have between 60% to 70% of the BNB supply. He's probably not selling.

David Hoffman:
[41:34] Right? It makes it really easy to go up if your largest holder holds 60% and isn't selling.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[41:38] Oh, there you go. But it's a different type of asset than something like Bitcoin or ETH or some of the other assets that are much more evenly distributed.

David Hoffman:
[41:45] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's been a wealth effect across Asian crypto, the Asian side of crypto. So Mantle has been on just a pretty crazy run. Mantle is trading at $2.50, whereas just like three months ago, it was trading at $0.60. Mantle is like the Bybit token, and that's downstream of the Bybit exchange. So that's also gotten a wealth effect. So overall, just the Asian markets are very, very hot. I didn't go to token 2049. Neither did you, Ryan. Apparently, the token conference is just flush with cash. And so there's just like a lot of liquidity over there too.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[42:19] Oh, there we go. David, what do we have coming up?

David Hoffman:
[42:21] Coming up next, the world's largest TradFi exchange gave Polymarket $2 billion,

David Hoffman:
[42:27] making Shane Koppelman the youngest self-made billionaire. Also, Galaxy has launched a Robinhood competitor. It's not what I expected to come out of Galaxy. And you wouldn't guess who's leading it, Who's back? Who's back to be the CEO? And also, Ryan here has got three things that he's excited about. So we're going to get to all of that and more. But first, I'm going to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. All right. Ice, the Intercontinental Exchange, which is the New York Stock Exchange parent company, is investing into Polymarket with $2 billion valuing Polymarket at about $9 billion. Wow. $9 billion valuation for Polymarket. Apparently in cash. I don't know, Ryan. I think Shane has a bank account with $2 billion in it. That's what I'm reading.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[43:10] Yeah, that's pretty good.

David Hoffman:
[43:11] Yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[43:12] They're not only investing, right? They're also distributing. So again, this is the company behind the New York Stock Exchange is also planning to distribute Polymarket markets. Not exactly sure what that means, but that's part of the deal here.

David Hoffman:
[43:26] Oh, interesting. I don't know what that looks like, but that's awesome. That's great for Polymarket. Shane Copland, founder of Polymarket, 27 years old. And this makes him, he's not worth over a billion dollars, which, I mean, congrats to Shane. I mean, on paper, he has to IPO or drop a token, which he hinted at this week. Okay. The Polymarket token was officially hinted at, not confirmed, but hinted at, from a tweet from Shane Coplin, who just tweets out a bunch of tickers, Bitcoin, ETH, BNB, SOL, and then ticker sign Pauly with a little, you know, emoji.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[44:04] Well, there's a certain order to this because this seems to mirror the current crypto market cap by like order. So first Bitcoin, then ETH, then BNB, then Solana, then Pauly. So he's implying Pauly.

David Hoffman:
[44:16] In terms of attention, not market cap. This is an intention landscape.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[44:19] Oh, attention, I see. This is attention.

David Hoffman:
[44:21] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[44:22] Maybe he's going for number five though. Yeah. And, you know, market cap there. This is not confirmed, of course, but would you call this a tease?

David Hoffman:
[44:29] The founder of Polymarket just tweeted out a ticker that says Poly, dude, with a little hmm emoji. So no, this is not confirmed. But it's confirmed. Come on, come on. Now, is this the equity or pseudo equity of Polymarket or is this a token?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[44:45] What does the token do?

David Hoffman:
[44:46] We don't know what the token does. We don't know what the token does, but pretty interesting tweet nonetheless.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[44:51] Galaxy launched Galaxy One. What is this, David?

David Hoffman:
[44:54] It's a finance app. So I'd imagine you can deposit money into it. And then there are different like strategies as well as stocks and ETFs without commissions. And so just pulling straight from the Robinhood playbook, earned interest can automatically be reinvested into crypto and stocks. I'd imagine Galaxy has a bunch of like products and indices and ETFs. I would imagine that they are first class citizens inside of the Galaxy app.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[45:19] I didn't expect this from Galaxy. I did not expect this. This is a Robinhood competitor, right? You have crypto, you have stocks, you can do staking, you can do all the things, yield all the things inside of an app. I always thought of Galaxy as more of like an institutional Wall Street type brand. And that's what they have been doing. OTC trading, that kind of thing. Now they're getting into retail. And they brought a retail guy in to run it. Who is this?

David Hoffman:
[45:43] Zach Prince, the former CEO and co-founder of BlockFi, which doesn't have the best reputation. But it's been a while. So, you know. It's only been three years,

Ryan Sean Adams:
[45:52] David. It's not even that long.

David Hoffman:
[45:54] That's plenty of time. Plenty of time. Okay, so for those that weren't around or just don't remember, BlockFi was part of the downstream contagion after FTX and Celsius as well.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[46:04] It was co-founded by Zach.

David Hoffman:
[46:06] Co-founded by Zach. Zach was the CEO. And so it was a Bitcoin depository institution. So you could deposit your Bitcoin and you could get yield. Something like it started off at like 3%, but then it started to creep up 4%, 5%, 6%. It started to be a pretty compelling way to get a Bitcoin loan or just get yield on your Bitcoin. Turns out when FTX exploded and also Celsius was also caught up in that, the tide went out and BlockFi was caught swimming without trunks. And so they just didn't have money to repay the customers because they were giving out loans to 3R's capital as well.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[46:43] Well, mostly, most of the loans were Alameda Research, and then they had about $350 million on FTX. Yeah. So, they had their money on FTX, and they had a $700 million loan to... Sbf's crypto hedge fund which was like defunct and bankrupt and that's where they were getting a lot of the yield so that was blockfi depositors funds so that money was gone.

David Hoffman:
[47:09] Yeah so a lot of customers lost money with with blockfi and that's kind of this the story there uh zach prince testified during the uh criminal prosecution of alex mashinsky and so we were able to kind of get some insights there my big takeaway from uh zach prince was that he was kind of draw dragged to down into the mud by competitors that were cheating. Like Alex Mashinsky, he was a frog. He was cheating. And he made all of his competitors, it made their life way harder because he was literally giving away a Ponzi scheme and legitimate competitors had to compete with that. And so they kind of got dragged down into the mud in order to just be market competitive with a cheater. And so that's kind of like the-

Ryan Sean Adams:
[47:50] He wasn't a criminal.

David Hoffman:
[47:51] He didn't have- The more forgiving interpretation, yeah. Right, right.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[47:54] Alex Mashinsky had criminal charges. Wait, did he get, is he in jail right now? I can't remember.

David Hoffman:
[47:59] Alex Maschinsky's in jail.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[48:01] That's right. He went to jail. Zach had no criminal charges, right?

David Hoffman:
[48:03] No criminal charges for that.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[48:04] But he did make a huge mistake from a risk perspective in giving funds to Alameda and SBF. He got totally SBF'd. And as someone who lost money in BlockFi, I'm just like, that still kind of hurts. Yeah. You know, in their bankruptcy.

David Hoffman:
[48:19] It's a little insulting to see him as the CEO of a retail deposit app.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[48:23] A little bit. You know, I asked him for more, you know, crypto, asked him for more yield three years later.

David Hoffman:
[48:27] But also, man, who's got more experience than Zach?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[48:30] Oh, yeah. Totally. Run it back differently this time. I mean, I do feel like the entire industry got screwed by Sandbank and Fried and FTX. But at the same time, I'm like raising a little bit of an eyebrow on this. Maybe we'll have Zach on the show sometime and he can tell us what happened.

David Hoffman:
[48:47] I think you're cursed with context, dude.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[48:50] Oh, I'm cursed with only getting 50% of my collateral and paid in fiat, not in actual like Bitcoin, but another story there.

David Hoffman:
[48:58] The Galaxy equity on the NASDAQ jumped 8% after the announcement of Galaxy 1. And so Galaxy is just an institution these days. They're in everything.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[49:09] Yeah, doing quite well. I mean, there is a case for their stock at these levels. I mean, they're a $15 billion stock. Look at Robinhood. They're north of $100 billion right now.

David Hoffman:
[49:20] They're like almost $200 billion now.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[49:22] Coinbase is $80 to $90, $15 billion.

David Hoffman:
[49:25] No, Coinbase is higher than that.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[49:27] They got the institutional side. Now, if this Galaxy One, the retail takes off, I mean, they've got a value appreciation story here. So that'll be exciting to watch.

David Hoffman:
[49:37] Yeah. Robinhood coming in at $133 billion. All right. For those that pay attention to things like this, for the DGens, people in the trenches, the Monad airdrop, Monad, the Twitter account, tweeted out, the Monad airdrop claim portal is incoming on Tuesday, October 14th. End of tweet. That was a whole tweet. And so we're getting, I don't know how they're determining who gets an airdrop because they don't have a blockchain to the airdrop to users. But somehow tokens are going out community stuff community stuff and we will find out how who and how we are getting tokens on October 14th but

Ryan Sean Adams:
[50:16] That means they're going mainnet right.

David Hoffman:
[50:17] Yeah it's gotta mainnet I think it's like a open secret that like the Monad blockchain is running up and running somewhere it's just not publicly accessible oh

Ryan Sean Adams:
[50:28] We should say for people who don't remember this is a layer 1 it's an EVM layer 1 that they maxed out efficiency for.

David Hoffman:
[50:37] Yeah, they reconstructed, rebuilt the EVM from scratch. Brand new database, brand new execution engine. So right now, it could be in theory a brand new Ethereum client because it's EVM equivalent. It's not just EVM compatible. It's like the same thing.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[50:48] And they did open source it, which is like credit to them. However, it's not a layer two. It's not, it's its own separate layer one. Uh-huh.

David Hoffman:
[50:57] How much will the token be worth? We don't really know, but we do know that the OTC valuation for Monnet as a whole is coming between $11 and $14 billion.

David Hoffman:
[51:07] Oh, there you go. So not a small chain.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[51:09] Not a small chain at all.

David Hoffman:
[51:11] All right, Ryan. We got three things that Ryan is excited about, and we got three minutes left in this episode. So you got one minute per thing,

Ryan Sean Adams:
[51:18] Dude. Oh, wow. One minute each? One minute each. First thing is lighter. So we talked about it last time. This is a Layer 2 perps on Ethereum. They just debuted on Layer 2B. So they're getting a lot of traction.

David Hoffman:
[51:30] They got their report card, their security report card.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[51:32] Yeah, they got their security report card. And it was exciting from a couple of angles. Number one, doing quite well. So you know how hard these pie slots on L2B are to acquire? They got four out of five in the green. Okay. Wow. Now they're still stage one, but they're pretty close to being stage zero, stage zero, stage zero, excuse me. And they're pretty close to being a stage one. Not only that, they are debuting at number six, the sixth largest layer two that exists. By TVL? By TVL. Not only that. If you exclude all of the other layer ones and just focus on app chains, app chain is kind of like single purpose app. All they're doing is perps. They're the largest app chain in Ethereum. And I'm just like, kudos. They're doing it the right way. This is the founder. His comment was, being in layer one is a bug, not a feature. An L1 is just an Ethereum layer two without any of the security and verifiability parts. As a property rights maxi, I love that because, you know, Lighter is showing that you could do an app chain, be super fast, performant, and actually pass on theory and property rights. Like it's kind of the way Vitalik has always wanted it to go. And it's an experiment we're seeing on that. So that was exciting to me. That's number one.

David Hoffman:
[52:45] We have a podcast with him. We are recording with him on Tuesday next week. So that will be in your podcast feed soon.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[52:51] Number two, David, is Coinbase and Brian Armstrong doing the DeFi mullet. Just continuing it. It's been a number of weeks we've talked about this. This is Brian Armstrong. Now everyone in the US can access millions of assets on Coinbase, excluding New York. Sorry, David. But this is within the main Coinbase app. You can go in Coinbase, anyone of your friends, your family that has Coinbase, and they can buy pretty much anything. They can buy fluid. They can buy meme coins.

David Hoffman:
[53:19] Anything on base.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[53:20] Anything on base they can buy, which is a whole lot of things on Ethereum. And they're doing this through a DEX. So it's going through base on chain, but you get the same user experience as if you're on a centralized exchange, except it's creating a non-custodial wallet for you. You're doing it through Uniswap or Aerodrome, some sort of DEX aggregation, and you're doing it on chain. So this is the DeFi mullet in action. They are also- It's a good looking mullet. It's a good looking mullet. And they rolled out Morpho. And this is, of course, like DeFi borrowing and lending. and this is at already $200 million in USDC. So this is Coinbase. The thing preventing us from doing the DeFi mullet has always been regulation. And now regulatory is open and so we're doing it and you love to see it. That's the second thing.

David Hoffman:
[54:08] Last thing, what is it?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[54:09] Last thing is Ethereum's privacy wallet reference implementation. Okay, so the EF has been talking a lot about privacy recently and I'm like, okay, you're talking about it, but like, what are you doing? Well, this is one of the big things that they're actually doing. It's Kohaktu, I believe I'm saying this right. So this is a privacy wallet. They're taking the Ambire wallet. They're forking that and they are totally building it. So this is the EF actually building kind of a wallet.

David Hoffman:
[54:37] Wow, the EF is building a product?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[54:39] Yeah, but they're doing it like full soup to nuts, full privacy. Because if you look at all of the wallets, crypto just in ethereum on the market none of them pass the privacy test right you have private token transactions no no no no no not like your rpc it's known they track your ip address so this is a wallet from scratch that's going to do soup to nuts true crypto privacy private sends through various privacy protocols that already exist like railgun private receipts private payment payments You're even running the Helios Lite client behind the scenes. So you're creating one account per address. Anyway, this is the EF being like, okay, we haven't seen a good wallet on the market that respects privacy to the degree we want it to. So we're building it. And you guys can use this as a reference implementation. It's great to see.

David Hoffman:
[55:31] That's the most bullish thing I've heard out of the EF because no chain has privacy other than actual privacy chains. But then you can't do anything because you can only do privacy. If they can actually establish privacy standards for crypto wallets, that's just a huge selling point for so many people.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[55:47] It's pretty cypherpunk. It's one of the most cypherpunks I've seen them do. David, we got a moment of zen. You found this for us. Set it up.

David Hoffman:
[55:52] Yeah, okay. This is El Coco. We have done moments of zens from El Coco before. He is a fantastic singer-songwriter, and he makes songs about crypto, about ETH. It's our favorite subject. And I don't know. I just listen to these little songs that he makes. They're really well done. They're really good. I'm just like, I just get a little, I get proud. yeah it's very wholesome

Ryan Sean Adams:
[56:12] It reminds me of 2021 2022 so enjoy this guys gotta let you know of course none of this has been financial advice crypto is risky you could lose what you put in because i'm losing my voice right now but we are headed west this is a frontier it's not for everyone but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot.

David Hoffman:
[59:07] I need permission to Venmo, my friend who paid for lunch? Why do I need to put my name and address and social security number and whole goddamn life story into a big honeypot so the banks can say, hey hackers, look here, I got a whole company full of employees for you to socially engineer. Heath fixes this by the way. And Heath is money, just try to take it from me. You can't. The most pristine collateral used in defi and it ain't even funny it takes away the power from the banks and the governments money's just a product of people agreeing and they're deciding it seems to me and when people use ethereum rails the money's always easy so when ethereum's used by all the government's companies and people in the world what's the money underneath well it ain't bitcoin You know that's right.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:00:14] Well, you know what? At least it's an authentic human-sounding episode, right? AI can't do that.