Ryan:
[0:04] Bankless nation is the first week of september we're september 2025 i've got my co-host david hoffman back i know you missed him he was that burning man david yeah okay not less than 24 hours after you left we had an eth all-time high
Speaker0:
[0:17] Man dude how funny is that i wanted to celebrate that i can just call it we're like okay yeah i'm going on some wild crazy adventure eth is going to do something
Speaker0:
[0:26] and it's just so consistent to this point that it's actually pretty immaculate because you were.
Ryan:
[0:30] Kind of off the grid you're a burning man
Speaker0:
[0:32] I was gone okay at what.
Ryan:
[0:34] Point did you know that we hit an all-time high at all it was probably
Speaker0:
[0:37] Gone by then i was we were watching me and ben lake off from bankless ventures we were in reno driving to burning man losing service as eth was flirting with all time oh that.
Ryan:
[0:49] Had to be hard yeah hard time to
Speaker0:
[0:51] Lose service we lost service and ETH was like 4780 or something and then I think I got I got like a random bit of service on the playa like four days into it and what did I see? It was already over I saw some message from the discord saying somebody was like oh congrats on ETH all time high and the message was like two days old or something.
Ryan:
[1:13] Yeah yeah yeah but unfortunately by the time you got that if you checked prices it probably would have been like you know 4200 or something like that.
Ryan:
[1:19] Anyway it was there. So how was Burning Man though?
Speaker0:
[1:22] Dude, Burning Man is probably one of the greatest. If you can survive being dirty and sleeping in a tent for an extended amount of period, Burning Man is like an incredible experience.
Ryan:
[1:33] Okay, this is you in the sandstorm. I was seeing all these images of like sand happening and it was the sandiest Burning Man ever. I was like, oh, David's in for it.
Speaker0:
[1:40] I talked to like Burning Man people who had gone for like 20 times. And people said that it was this storm that came in and wrecked the burn in the first day was the biggest storm that they had ever seen. And it was like 60 mile an hour winds. I was holding on to what we call Tent City. And it's like the just like piping that holds up tarps that gives you some shade so you're not burning up in the sun. And so the tarps are just massive sails. And I was holding on to this piping to make sure it didn't blow away. And I got lifted up off of the ground.
Ryan:
[2:08] Oh, my God.
Speaker0:
[2:09] Yeah.
Ryan:
[2:10] That's kind of fun. Yeah. Was it kind of fun to be in a sandstorm?
Speaker0:
[2:13] No, it was a top three crisis moment where like the tarp started ripping and we all had to strike Tent City. So that means you just take everything down. And so we built all day and then we had to take it down because of a storm that we built again the next day And then there was another storm not as bad, but more rain And then it was muddy and then there was a third storm the next
Speaker0:
[2:29] day So this burning man got off to a very rocky start, but it all came together. It came together.
Ryan:
[2:34] So tell me tell me something you learned and something you learned maybe about yourself
Speaker0:
[2:38] Uh, it was definitely the most like hyper social I've been. Like usually I can spend time with people for like six hours at most. And then I need to like go be alone. Uh, I did 10 days and it was fine.
Ryan:
[2:52] People don't know this about you. You're actually like more on the introvert type spectrum, right?
Speaker0:
[2:56] Yeah. Yeah. And people, so like, yeah, people meet me at a conference and they expect me to be all chatty. And I'm like, bro, I'm over stimulated right now. uh but yeah it was great the the camp was great the cool the cool thing about burning man is it's very like tribalistic in the sense that uh not like crypto twitter tribes but oh like you're living with a group of 50 to 100 people you are making decisions together you are eating together you are adventuring together you are having to like do like make tough calls together and it's like living in a tribe you all have work to do because there's shifts uh and you do that and It's like the most primal ancestral experience that.
Ryan:
[3:34] I think people have. It's kind of how we were meant to live, though, right? Exactly. It's kind of how humanity has done things forever,
Ryan:
[3:38] except for this last couple thousand years of the modern period, right? Yeah. This is why we feel so unnatural most of the time. And it's increasingly feeling unnatural with all of the digitization in our lives, right? And this is getting way back to how it was.
Speaker0:
[3:52] People joke at Burning Man that Burning Man is the real world and the world that we're currently in is the default world. Yeah. But it was great. I encourage everyone to go. There's a lot of big overlap, Venn diagram, between crypto and Burning Man. There's a shared ethos there.
Speaker0:
[4:06] I put that into an article if people ever want to read that.
Ryan:
[4:08] Let's put it in the show notes. Let's see that. Meanwhile, though, David, we've got to get people up to speed on the week in crypto, including you.
Speaker0:
[4:15] Because I got back yesterday, so I have no idea what I'm doing reading out the news.
Ryan:
[4:19] Well, let me give you a few things. So first, we're going to talk about the mystery of the ETH treasuries. All right, David, they've been buying so much ETH. Incredible accumulation. We're going to look at the last 90 days of accumulation. But why is ETH still down? And also, David, MNAVs are down. OK, we got big ETH treasuries and the MNAVs are below one right now. Tom Lee, though, says, have faith. I want to play you a bull clip of Tom Lee. Get your response on that. He says there's a way for us to hit 60K. All right. We just got to wait. We just got to have faith.
Speaker0:
[4:47] Also, I come back and World Liberty Financial, the token, is now trading. Apparently, Trump's crypto wealth, crypto paper wealth, has flipped his real estate wealth, which is just a crazy crazy thing that that exists uh so we'll talk about everything about the world liberty financial and how much money trump made and also united states citizens can now use polymarket it's not illegal anymore we can all take down our vpns that's pretty exciting i'm pretty stoked about that we.
Ryan:
[5:15] Got some big updates on tokenized stocks this week as well ondo and galaxy shipping some things also some more details on you remember that stripe layer one we've been talking about i think before you left tempo okay we got some more details on that including an announcement post Also, this is really exciting. This kind of happened. We might soon be able
Ryan:
[5:33] to buy spot Bitcoin and spot ETH on the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker0:
[5:38] How does that work? I'll tell you. Not the ETFs.
Ryan:
[5:41] Not the ETFs.
Speaker0:
[5:42] This is something else. Because I kind of thought that's what an ETF was for.
Ryan:
[5:44] No, it is. But we might also get real spot Bitcoin, spot ETH ETFs. Not ETFs, excuse me. The actual asset itself on these exchanges,
Ryan:
[5:54] both the NASDAQ and New York Stock Exchange. So all that and more coming up. let's talk about prices on the week we got bitcoin it is 109k i believe what's uh what's this on the week we're down right price
Speaker0:
[6:07] Of recording 109 400 down three percent i think there's a big question going on i come back uh to uh crypto twitter ryan and i see two things i see tokenized pokemon cards and i see this subject of uh seasonality for bitcoin yeah uh september seasonality apparently is bad september.
Ryan:
[6:26] They always say that they say they always say that down timber basically and then october is next like so so
Speaker0:
[6:32] Traditionally about october.
Ryan:
[6:33] Uh october so october november december have been up have been pretty good for crypto especially during bull uh years but september's have always been bad for some reason allegedly
Speaker0:
[6:43] So the average bitcoin median september return is negative 3.1 ethereum is at negative 12.5 percent uh ben cohen has a couple tweets iterating sentiment that's pretty similar to this he says historically bitcoin finds a low in september of the post-alvinning year and then bounces off of it into the markle cycle top that occurs in q4 so ben cowan implying a market top in q4 and then he also has a tweet for eath he thinks eath it's going to drop to about three thousand six hundred dollars and then and then and then ryan goes into price discovery afterwards going into uptober obviously so if you're into the seasonality thing. This is kind of what Ben Cowan is pointing at. If you're not into the seasonality thing...
Ryan:
[7:25] I'm not into it.
Speaker0:
[7:25] I've got some tweets for you as well. So we have Van Spencer who tweets out, according to Bears, There are only five calendar days per year that you should be long. Sell in May and go away. Summer is a terrible time to be long. September is bad. October is bad. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Vance saying basically this whole seasonality thing is a farce.
Speaker0:
[7:46] Just be long, which I think is also, I think, Ryan Sean Adams' sentiment as well.
Ryan:
[7:51] I agree. I agree. Like, why? I mean, we're going to look at astrological signs. Like, what? I mean, a lot of this feels like superstition.
Speaker0:
[7:57] Yes. We'll do that.
Ryan:
[8:00] All right, man. I just choose to ignore that. I don't want to see 3,600 ETH, but if we have to go there first, then fine. I still remain bullish. And speaking of that, ETH price on the week, are we up or are we down?
Speaker0:
[8:13] $4,300, down 4.5%. But it's cool that ETH is up $4,300 and we're down almost 5% of the week.
Ryan:
[8:22] Yeah, you know what?
Speaker0:
[8:22] We were higher.
Ryan:
[8:23] See, if it happens, if the bull market happens too fast, David, it's actually bearish.
Speaker0:
[8:28] I 100% agree with that.
Ryan:
[8:29] That means it could end this year. And I think now that we're getting some down temper action, maybe it goes a little further. That's going to set us up for an elongated and extended bull run into 2026. That's what my astrological signs are telling me right now in this moment.
Speaker0:
[8:46] That's fine. Because I choose to be bullish. The low and slow is good. We like that.
Ryan:
[8:50] Low and slow. All right. So, yeah, we did cross an all-time high, David, when you were out. You know, but I want to give you some more hopium. All right? From our Lord and Savior, the man who came in and bought just incredible amounts of ETH. We'll talk more about his ETH buys. Sir Tom Lee. Okay? So, this clip was going around. Yes, sir. We have to call him.
Speaker0:
[9:10] Nighted. He's a knight.
Ryan:
[9:11] So above like $5 billion, you get knighted. You get your cert title, okay?
Ryan:
[9:17] And he is definitely there. He's got some price targets. I'm going to play this clip. It's a long one, okay? So you'll stay tuned. And it's in Tom Lee's, you know, he speaks very, like he doesn't put a lot of expression in his words. It's just very matter of fact. But this is the bull case and some prices that he charts out for ETH. I'm going to play this and get your reaction. Well, here's Ethereum's price since 2018. and as you can see, there's two periods I'm shading here. These are called bases. And in Wyckoff's methodologies, they say the bigger the base, the bigger the breakout. And what they mean by that is that you're creating a lot of potential energy as a stock or a network asset bases and then eventually leads to a breakout. Well, let's look at that breakout. In 2020, that breakout took place and Ethereum went from $90 to $48.66, or 54 times increase. Well, the low point here in this base was $13.85. So with this breakout, we're expecting an upside move. Is it potentially 54x? I'm not sure, but that's what happened last time. Another way to think about Ethereum is the Ethereum to Bitcoin ratio. And in our view, the tailwinds I'm talking about argue for an all-time high in this ratio.
Ryan:
[10:37] The eight-year average Ethereum-to-Bitcoin ratio is 0.04790, and it's currently 0.04032, meaning we're below the long-term average. The all-time high in this ratio was 0.080727. Of course, it started off higher, but I'm talking about the 2021 all-time high. So we think that not only should Ethereum recover to the long-term average, it should probably get to the all-time high ratio and arguably exceed it as we start talking about Ethereum acting as the chain for both Wall Street to build its payment rails and the financial system as well as AI. So let's think about what that means for price. So I have a grid here. On the left side is Bitcoin price levels and then going across are various levels of the Ethereum to Bitcoin ratio. Our year-end target, this is from the Fundstrat side for Bitcoin, is $250,000.
Ryan:
[11:45] And if you look at the eight-year average, then you can see the range of prices for Ethereum using this ratio and different levels of Bitcoin. And here's the 2021 high. And as you can see, at a $250,000 Bitcoin, you get to somewhere between $12,000 and $22,000 value per Ethereum token.
Speaker0:
[12:14] But that's just a ratio recovery.
Ryan:
[12:17] If you look at the replacement cost of payment rails and the banking system, that gets you to an implied value of Ethereum of around $60,000. And that puts the ratio at roughly 0.0. $2,500 Ethereum to Bitcoin ratio. And as you can see, that's how you get to $62,000 per Ethereum token. There you go. That's as simple as that, David. That's how you get to $62,000 per ETH token. I should say, I mean, a lot of people are quoting, that's the top side of his range. He's not calling for that necessarily. He's saying right here, the range, if you just take the ETH Bitcoin ratio and we get back to average, and Bitcoin goes to $250K, we get $12K ETH. If we get our 2021 high in the ETH-Bitcoin ratio, we get $22K. So his range there is $12K to $22K. Not necessarily by the end of the year, but I don't know, maybe.
Speaker0:
[13:12] He said that Bitcoin, his projected Bitcoin end-of-year price is $250,000.
Ryan:
[13:17] Okay, so he's saying end of the year.
Speaker0:
[13:18] He didn't explicitly say, therefore, my expected ETH ratio end-of-year price. He didn't continue that. But it does follow. It does kind of follow. that he does say that yes and.
Ryan:
[13:28] Then he goes ba-da-ba-ba 62k which okay you know
Speaker0:
[13:33] He's doing he's doing two things he's combining ta and doing the whole wyckoff uh like you know base thing yeah and then he's also making an opinion stance and then he about like if ethereum captures x percent of commerce in ai like eat like agentic commerce then you just add on to he's so he's combining two different strategies here of course.
Ryan:
[13:52] But that's what everyone does in crypto i feel like. They combine a little bit of kind of more long-term type TA, call it, the Ben Cowan type of thing, right? This is just flavored with Tom Lee, flavored with his characteristic bullishness and now in particular his ETH bullishness. So when I saw that, this, I thought, okay, I mean, of course, 62K ETH, I mean, that starts to get into, that doesn't sound reasonable, Tom Lee, how do you get that number? But when you look at sort of the long-term ratio and the possibility, And the building momentum, that's what he said, like, you know, we've been three or four years flat and now we've broken out of that. Right. 12K, 22K. I can see that range being totally possible. Now, I don't know if we hit that by the end of the year. We got to get through down timber, of course.
Ryan:
[14:42] But what do you think about Tom Lee's bull case?
Speaker0:
[14:45] I mean, the whole Wyckoff accumulation that he started with at the very beginning, I resonate with because that was where I got my like ships. Wyckoff? Yeah.
Ryan:
[14:55] Yeah. You know Wyckoff? Yeah.
Speaker0:
[14:56] Yeah. Yeah. That's what we were looking at all throughout 2018 through 2020 when ETH was flat between $100 and $300 for like two years. Yeah. It's actually crazy that we are twice that long. And so he goes like, OK, and then there was a 54X increase from $90 to $4,900. Could that happen again? Well, the Wyckoff accumulation is twice as long. And so even if you say that, like, OK, you can't go 54 X from four thousand dollars. Sure, I'll take that. Like, that probably should be base case. Like, you can't do another 54X into infinity. But the Wyckoff accumulation is twice as long. And we've done it once before. So there is something to the notion that, like, ETH has coiled up for quite a long time.
Ryan:
[15:39] Right. Yeah. I mean, it sounds possible to me. All of this sounds possible to me. And the one thing I like about Tom Lee,
Ryan:
[15:45] well, one of the many things I like about Sir Tom Lee, is that he is backing this up. He's putting his money where his TA is, I guess. or what his price predictions are, and he's buying astronomical amounts of eat.
Speaker0:
[15:57] And then he licks his finger, sticks it in the air, and says $62,000.
Ryan:
[16:01] No, no, no. It's better than that. Oh, by the way, there's a rumor going around while you were out that Tom Lee's going to be on Joe Rogan.
Speaker0:
[16:06] Yeah, I came back. Just a rumor. Just a rumor.
Ryan:
[16:10] Just a rumor. I can't even...
Speaker0:
[16:12] That would actually be material.
Ryan:
[16:14] I can't even predict what that conversation would be like. Tom Lee and Joe Rogan? It's like, just like, it just doesn't seem to fit. But I guess Joe Rogan...
Speaker0:
[16:21] We should play a drinking game for how many times Tom Lee says ETH versus Bitcoin? No, I think he says ETH probably 200 times on the show.
Ryan:
[16:30] I hope he explains it to Joe. That would be very bullish. But then I could see 62K. That's in the cards. Ratio, how are we doing on the week?
Speaker0:
[16:39] Below 0.04, which is sad. 0.03928. ETH is just retraced a little bit. Down a little bit.
Ryan:
[16:46] And then we are below a trillion total crypto market cap 3.87. um david you must have noticed too while you were out coming back gold has hit an all-time high yeah it is this is actually kind
Speaker0:
[16:57] Of scary to me when gold gold when gold goes in parabola mode i'm like that's scary.
Ryan:
[17:03] Yeah that's what it's doing i mean it's a kind of store of value asset this is the ray dalio thing you know this is biology's take which was somewhat interesting it's basically um gold is now the store of value for central banks whereas digital assets crypto is the store value for individuals. And so basically what you're seeing is central banks are stacking and buying and accumulating gold and individuals are using crypto assets primarily as their store of value.
Speaker0:
[17:31] Totally checks out. Which central banks is buying all of this gold? Who's moving the gold price?
Ryan:
[17:37] A ton of them. China, Russia. All of them? Yeah. A lot of this has happened post the sanctions.
Speaker0:
[17:43] Freezing of Russian banks. Yep.
Ryan:
[17:44] And so this is what you get. Gold all time highs.
Speaker0:
[17:48] All right then.
Ryan:
[17:48] David, let's talk a little bit about the treasuries. I just want to recap the last like 30 to 90 days of Ethereum in particular, because it's had an incredible 90 days with respect to its institutional accumulation story here. This is a chart of ETF flows. Blue is Ethereum. Look at this.
Speaker0:
[18:06] That's a lot of blue.
Ryan:
[18:08] June, July, August. Look, August, it's all blue.
Speaker0:
[18:12] It's like 90% blue in August.
Ryan:
[18:14] These are net inflows, I should say. And ETH has just led. It has dominated for the past three months and even into the past four months.
Speaker0:
[18:24] For the summer, yeah.
Ryan:
[18:25] This is crypto treasury companies purchases by assets. Bitcoin, of course, in orange.
Speaker0:
[18:31] Ryan, I give you permission to use the F word right here.
Ryan:
[18:35] Right? Yeah. It's fantastic, isn't it? Yeah, it's incredible. From June, where Bitcoin dominated.
Speaker0:
[18:44] I was talking about flipping it.
Ryan:
[18:45] I know what you meant. I know what you meant. But July, ETH was still smaller, but August ETH dominated in terms of treasuries.
Speaker0:
[18:51] ETH is not even close. There's no other colors.
Ryan:
[18:54] Not even close. This is a tweet from CryptoGushi. Bitmine is accumulating ETH 20 times.
Speaker0:
[19:00] CryptoGucci.
Ryan:
[19:01] Goochie. What? What did I say? Gucci. Yeah. 20 times faster. Whatever. 20 times faster than MicroStrategy ever did. So this is BitMine. This is, of course, Sir Tom Lee. He is doing this much faster. This is a log chart. A little bit deceptive here.
Speaker0:
[19:16] Yeah, a little bit.
Ryan:
[19:17] Until you realize it's a log chart. But it is a log chart. And look at the BitMine line versus MicroStrategy.
Speaker0:
[19:23] Well, above 10% of MicroStrategy is still pretty large, given how long Sailor has been buying Bitcoin.
Ryan:
[19:29] Yeah, what's the way to say this? BitMine has done what, like in 60 days, what took MicroStrategy how many? Like four years to do? Three or four years to do? in terms of percent of supply. It's absolutely incredible.
Speaker0:
[19:41] Not only Tom Lee, though, but Ether Machine also bought $654 million of ETH through a private transaction. Yeah, so it brings the total holdings to nearly 500,000 ETHs, almost half a million ETHs, as it prepares for a NASDAQ listing later this year. So yeah, Ether Machine not yet actually being traded, which is kind of interesting. And then also, you know who bought ETH, a bunch of ETHs this year, Ryan? Or just recently? yeah who jack ma jack ma the guy from alibaba well not technically jack ma but uh a there's like a series of events between this like one chinese financial group jack ma owns 30 of it he founded the thing that the current thing bought whatever young feng financial group bought 10,000 for 400 for 44 million dollars uh to just put it in his corporate strategy.
Ryan:
[20:31] Yeah this is a hong kong finance company and the reason that they said they bought it is as a strategic reserve asset Which is a narrative violation there.
Speaker0:
[20:40] And then it jumps by 10% after the announcement, which means they have more capital.
Ryan:
[20:44] Yeah. One thing, David, as we kind of zoom out and we look at the strategic ETH treasuries here, all the ETH treasuries here, we see BitMine, the scoreboard is BitMine clearly in the lead, 1.87 million. Sharplink Gaming, 837,000 ETH, the Ether Machine under that, just under 500,000 ETH. So three horses in the top here that are still kind of competing. One thing I should draw your attention to, though, is this column right here, the MNAV column. OK, so bit mine right now, one point zero five lowest I've seen it on the week. Sharpling Gaming is under one at this point in time. And there's some dispute as to whether it's actually under one. It depends on who's measuring
Speaker0:
[21:28] How many shares equities have on the stock market, which is an insane thing to not know. Yeah. But the whole stock market, you don't know how many shares there are.
Ryan:
[21:38] It's it's hard. I mean, so we've got different dashboards claiming different things. and they're all like pretty close. This is actually the official Sharplink dashboard that they published. And this might not even be accurate. But this is an MNAV of 0.84.
Speaker0:
[21:51] Okay. That's low.
Ryan:
[21:52] So there's that. There's the strategic ETH reserve is 0.87. Blockworks was somewhere around there as well. So different dashboards are giving you different numbers. Here's another one. That is crazy. It looks like it may be one. It might be one or it might be under one at this point in time. So what's your take on that? I guess one thing it means is the ATMs, the at-the-market purchases where these treasury companies can basically dilute their shares in order to buy more ETH, they're not going to be able to do this anymore with MNAV at one or below one. So that's an obvious takeaway. Some of that buying has to stop. But what do you think about these treasury vehicles? Are you worried about this? Do you think that this is a buy?
Speaker0:
[22:34] I think we need more data really just with the ETH treasury companies because it's still such a new phenomenon. on but my current understanding of mnav is it's kind of an oscillator in the sense that it will oscillate above and maybe and i guess also now below uh one uh and it'll oscillate around kind of like retail sentiment retail froth around ether the asset and so one potential path forward is like maybe we do this whole down timber uptober thing yeah maybe maybe mnavs even go way lower Maybe they go to 0.8 or something and everyone gets wrecked. But then Ether goes into price discovery and MNAVs go back up to... 1.2, 1.5, maybe even two. And it just oscillates back up. And it's kind of just like a.
Ryan:
[23:18] It just overshoots and undershoots.
Speaker0:
[23:20] It's a sentiment checker on steroids. And so if retail is bullish ETH, then MNAVs go to two. And then all of a sudden more ETH goes on the balance sheet. And right now we're just in a depressed state. Like every, there was a lot of froth like last month. And now everyone's like, okay, let's, let's check if like, we're all still good here. and let's let the tide go out a little bit. Everyone still wearing shorts? Okay, we're good. All right, let's send it back up. And I kind of feel like that's where we are right now.
Ryan:
[23:46] Well, if that's the case, if you're right about that, then it does seem like some of these treasury companies below one could be a big buying opportunity, I would say. And I spoke to Joseph Shalom from BlackRock last week. Yeah, that was a really good episode. You caught up with that? Yeah. These guys are long-term oriented. It's Joseph Lubin. He's been holding ETH forever, right? Yeah. The two bald Joes, man. They're going to get us there. Another thing that's happening with ETH treasury companies, ETHzilla, where I think that's number four, I think the largest ETH treasury company, they are deploying $100 million into DeFi. They're putting it into EtherFi, the restaking protocol.
Speaker0:
[24:18] Ethereum is so cool. It's because you can buy the asset and you can recirculate it into the economy that supports the asset. EtherFi has got $11 billion TVL. It's the largest restaker. and I just love the fact that we can actually repurpose our capital. That's why Ether is so excellent as an asset is the capital efficiency. You can buy it and then you can do things with it to get more yield. Why are they putting it into Etherfy? Because Etherfy gives you some of the best yield on your ETH. Uh, and yeah, so that's pretty cool. That makes sense to me. Uh, in addition to that, speaking of Etherfy, uh, they're kind of having a moment right now. So Etherfy also has a credit card. So you can deposit ETH into, or like sables into your Etherfy vault. It gets yield kind of similar to like Yearn back in the day, if you remember. But then you can swipe your Etherfy credit card and it spends the money straight out of your accounts on chain. So that's pretty sick.
Ryan:
[25:10] So you're bypassing a bank altogether.
Speaker0:
[25:12] Bypassing a bank. Yep. It goes, it's just straight non-custodial on chain.
Ryan:
[25:15] Pretty sick. So cool.
Speaker0:
[25:16] Apparently brazilians figured this out and like brazilians signups for etherfi credit card is just like up and to the right uh and this is basically like a huge revenue stream for etherfi uh so congrats to the etherfi team on the success like seeing actual adoption of their product plus deposits from uh east treasury companies is pretty cool all.
Ryan:
[25:36] These east treasury companies are looking for yield it's hard not to think this is going to cause a uh defy an ethereum defy echo boom as some of these large treasuries go and look for yield on that Lido. David, I don't know if you noticed this, Lido, they launched a new Earn product this week, which is kind of cool. So this is them kind of going up market, and it's basically blue chip Earn potential for your ETH. So this thing is called Lido DVV, and it gives you 4.5% APR on your ETH, and it kind of distributes it to blue chip DeFi essentially. So with one click button, you can get that yield. So I think blue chip ETH yield is going to be a big thing to watch.
Speaker0:
[26:14] Yield, yield, yield, yield, yield. Yeah. Something that's also happening, strategy, I'm going to put my eyes on strategy right now. Looking at a potential inclusion into the S&P 500, which is the end game.
Ryan:
[26:26] That's free money.
Speaker0:
[26:26] That's for all treasury companies. If you get into the S&P 500, you just have the permanent, infinite bid. Like if you're a hardcore Bitcoin-er, which... I definitely appreciate these perspectives at times. You kind of understand micro strategy is like an attack on the United States dollar. Just short the dollar as much as possible, long Bitcoin as much as possible. And if you get into the S&P 500, you get a free flow of capital to continue shorting the dollar.
Ryan:
[26:52] It's all that passive yield. I don't know if you caught that episode.
Speaker0:
[26:55] Because you're in 401ks, because you're in all of the funds. So people have to buy micro strategy. And what does Michael Saylor do? He translates the value of the MSCR stock into Bitcoin on the balance. And if you're in the S&P 500, you just have free flows to constantly reload your ammo to buy more Bitcoin. Yeah. This is the endgame for all treasuries. Micro strategy is almost there.
Ryan:
[27:17] An ETH treasury could get there someday. I mean, before you get to S&P, you get to like Russell, which is another index of like what is, I don't know, thousands of companies. So they're all trying to get into these indices. That's why it's a power law winning game as well. David, the NASDAQ looks like it's tightening some of its disclosure requirements for DATS, though.
Speaker0:
[27:34] I think they are very aware that there is a DAT bubble happening. There are quite a lot of DATs and we're going down the long tail of the shitty assets in crypto and they're getting DATs. Like Story Protocol is getting a DAT. So the headline reads, the Nasdaq is tightening scrutiny of companies raising cash to buy crypto. They are beginning to require shareholder votes for some deals and pushing for more disclosures. They may also suspend trading or delist firms that fail to comply. According to anonymous insiders mentioned by the publication. And so actually following the news, share prices of several deaths actually fell. So I think people owning these assets know that there was probably some shenanigans
Speaker0:
[28:16] going on. And I am just perfectly okay with this.
Ryan:
[28:18] More disclosure is good. Yep. Thanks. Coming up next, David, we got to talk about World Liberty Finance. It's a token just started trading. And Trump's crypto wealth, they are now like crypto mega billionaires and stacking in quite a hurry to talk about that. Also, maybe this caused Gavin Newsom to want to launch a meme coin. All right. He actually said this.
Speaker0:
[28:37] No, thank you.
Ryan:
[28:38] I think he's going to do it regardless of what we said. We're going to cover all that and more. But before we do, got to thank the sponsors that made this possible, including...
Speaker0:
[28:45] The World Liberty Financial Token finally started trading. It's officially listed on major exchanges on both spot and perps on Monday. It started on September 1st. There are a total supply of 100 billion tokens, which makes some of these maths pretty simple. uh 24.6 billion tokens were unlocked so effectively 25 float not bad uh not flat not bad uh if you are in the pre-sale 20 of your tokens have unlocked and so pre-sale investors have unlocked the remaining roughly 75 percent of supply will remain under vesting schedules different investing schedules for depending on what kind of tier you are in the first day of performance the opening price was $0.30, which gives it a fully diluted valuation of $30 billion. We are down to about $0.17, $0.18. So that's about $18 billion fully diluted valuation, a market cap of effectively almost $5 billion. That puts World Liberty Financial at number 39 in all crypto assets, which is pretty crazy.
Ryan:
[29:48] Eric Trump says, even though it's down, this is just the beginning, so a long way to go. We should do kind of a reminder of what World Liberty Finance actually is and what they've launched.
Speaker0:
[29:59] Do we know? They don't have a functioning app.
Ryan:
[30:02] Yeah. Okay. So they do have some stuff. Let's just go here for a second. I'll pull it up. Okay. So first of all, there's the USD1. So they have a stablecoin. There's a stablecoin. Right. Okay. It's not nothing. I was looking at the charts. It's actually a $2 billion stablecoin at this point in time. Wow. Okay. So that's launched. I stand corrected.
Speaker0:
[30:20] There is something here.
Ryan:
[30:20] There's a stablecoin. It's a $2 billion stable coin. So 19 providers there. And then, of course, you have the token. The token is the product. All right.
Speaker0:
[30:30] So we got two tokens.
Ryan:
[30:31] World Liberty Finance, the WLFI token. You can stake that if you choose. You could also buy it. You could sell it. What do you do?
Speaker0:
[30:39] What happens when you stake it?
Ryan:
[30:40] I don't know. Who knows? You can trade it. Maybe you can't stake it. Look. I guess delete that. Maybe you can't stake it. You can unlock it. You can trade it. All right. And you can do governance. There was a governance proposal.
Speaker0:
[30:53] You can do governance. That's great.
Ryan:
[30:54] There was a governance proposal, actually, to distribute the profits back to WLFI token holders.
Speaker0:
[31:01] The profits of what?
Ryan:
[31:02] Well, this is the stuff that's TBD.
Ryan:
[31:04] wlfi app soon and so there's going to be an app and there's lend and borrow what i think this is going to be is basically ave so you know how ave had um go they have their stable coin they have borrowing and lending i think this is like world liberty financial america trump branded ave kind of wrapped with a meme wlfi meme token basically can we can we launch
Speaker0:
[31:28] Our website with a bunch of features that i'll say soon on it and make a token.
Ryan:
[31:32] No you can't because you're not donald trump okay so uh you know it's it's harder to do if you don't have that um
Speaker0:
[31:39] Can i tell you what the first governance proposal is on world liberty financial yeah you actually mentioned it buybacks yeah so they announced that they kicked off a governance proposal where 100 of the fees earned by wlfi's protocol liquid no no.
Ryan:
[31:53] No no current
Speaker0:
[31:54] Current the protocol owned liquidity so that there is owned uh like ether and stables.
Ryan:
[31:59] Oh that's right they
Speaker0:
[32:00] Put that into into they collect fees on that by like lp-ing it into amms or something they collect fees and those fees go back to burning buying and burn it's pretty home.
Ryan:
[32:11] You don't want to show you don't want to show your revenue here you know you gotta imagine the revenue possibilities it's better it's worth more as a meme coin um speaking of how much it's worth crypto is now the biggest portion of trump's family's uh paper net worth so big in real estate but all of their real real estate holdings were worth like $2.5 billion or something. World Liberty Finance alone at one point was worth $5 billion. And that's not to
Speaker0:
[32:38] Mention- The Trump family's ownership of World Liberty Finance. Yes.
Ryan:
[32:40] And that's not to mention, you know, Trump Media and Technology Holdings, they have 15K Bitcoin. It's $1.6 billion. They also partner with Crypto.com. uh on the cro type deal um they have a holding company which is a crypto treasury vehicle the trump sons also this this week they launched a trump back bitcoin company called american bitcoin this is a bitcoin treasury and a bitcoin mining company they have a chunk of that that's seven to eight billion in terms of market cap right now i don't know how much total
Speaker0:
[33:14] Market gap okay.
Ryan:
[33:15] Total but i i think i don't know i was reading maybe 30 of that look dude it's it's definitely uh i don't think it's double digit billions but like five six seven billion that trump has just in crypto holdings at this point and keep in mind they are
Speaker0:
[33:29] Doing a fantastic job of monetizing the role of the president.
Ryan:
[33:33] Yeah all of the things
Speaker0:
[33:34] No one's done it better oh.
Ryan:
[33:35] Last week while you're out um trump jr uh became advisor for uh polymarket yeah
Speaker0:
[33:42] Yeah we've got that later and the gender, we're gonna talk about that.
Ryan:
[33:44] It's like all of the things. So this has caused probably people like a Democrat, Gavin Newsom, who is like in a meme war with Trump right now to talk about launching a meme coin. I'm gonna play this.
Speaker0:
[33:55] And if you want a real prediction, I know we talked about the Taylor Swift prediction. The real prediction is, you know, we're about to put a meme coin out. And you know what, Donald Trump, we'll see how well your coin does versus our coin. I mean, we're just trying... trying to turn up the heat and trying to tune people into the absurdity. Is it going to be called GavinCoin? No, it's, I think, Trump CorruptionCoin. Gavin, you're going to lose, man.
Ryan:
[34:22] His heart's not in it, is it?
Speaker0:
[34:25] You're going up against Trump. Gavin's, he's not a bad meme, but he's going up against Trump. Like, you're not going to out-meme that, man. What would be funny, though, because Trump launched his meme coin on Solana, if Gavin launched his meme coin on Ethereum just for the sake of the meme, just like put all the libs on Ethereum.
Ryan:
[34:42] Oh God, I don't want those political wars to bleed over into crypto. It's funny. I just don't think Gavin's heart is in it. I don't know if he's actually going to do it.
Speaker0:
[34:52] I think he just threw out that comment.
Ryan:
[34:54] He threw out that comment, you think? This is a Jake Travinsky take, which I resonate with. World Liberty Financial will make it way harder to get market structure legislation done in the Senate where we need seven Democrats to vote, yes, and for whom a pro-crypto vote will be politically challenging, to put it mildly, no matter what the bill says about policy. Happy fall. So this has
Speaker0:
[35:14] Always been the danger of politicizing and getting putting crypto behind one political party. Stuff like this becomes more difficult.
Ryan:
[35:21] Yeah. So I think he's right about that. I don't know how this bodes for clarity, but I'm a little bit worried about this. In better news, though david we have a clear a possible clear path now for spot bitcoin and spot eth to be sold on the new york stock exchange and the nasdaq how
Speaker0:
[35:41] Does this work.
Ryan:
[35:41] All right so
Speaker0:
[35:42] Are there other things that are just directly listed on the nasdaq how does that work.
Ryan:
[35:46] Okay so um you know currently there's like two worlds you have crypto exchanges and then you have tradfi exchanges and those two worlds are pretty much separate.
Ryan:
[35:58] The CFTC and the SEC issued a joint statement. That in itself is notable. A joint statement. Like they're actually talking to one another and cooperating? Who would have thought? Well, that's happening. So very bullish on that side. They basically said the path is clear and they were looking for proposals for these large US-based exchanges, TradFi exchanges, to submit a proposal to be able to list assets like SpotBitcoin or SpotEth on the New York Stock Exchange, on the NASDAQ and the CBOE.
Ryan:
[36:33] Okay. Now, in order to do this, there are some hoops that these organizations would need to go through. They would need to figure out the filing itself with the SEC and CFTC, custody and clearing as well. So they're not going to store it. They use Coinbase or Kraken or somebody else to actually store the assets and the surveillance hurdles, right?
Ryan:
[36:54] So SEC and CFTC have surveillance laws. But if they get through those things and they submit a report, SEC and CFTC are saying, it's legal. You could do this. In fact, we want to see these reports. And David, one reason why this is significant is because these exchanges alone, they do about $600 billion in daily volume across their assets. In comparison, our largest exchanges in crypto do about $20 billion okay so we're talking about massive volume if these assets spot bitcoin spot eth are listed on these exchanges it's not going to happen overnight but now the path is clear for them to do that
Speaker0:
[37:28] Okay here's what i'm a little bit confused about uh first this seems competitive with some of their current customers being like blackrock fidelity bitwise who have listed actual etfs and so they're going to be competitive with their biggest customers like i wouldn't want to piss off blackrock up and all and also they're gonna have to charge fees for custodianship and other things and are they going to be fee competitive with blackrock who's coming in it i don't remember how many bips but a low number of bips with.
Ryan:
[37:57] The bitcoin etfc
Speaker0:
[37:59] Yeah so if like nasdaq lists their own financial products which are competitive with what they're supposed to offer a service of a platform to trade but then they're also offering products that are competitive with other people it i'm kind of confused by how this works yeah.
Ryan:
[38:11] I don't know that they would be offering the products themselves they would just be like these products could be available outside of an etf from some other issuer i suppose okay yeah and so the only way they've been available right now is an etf form
Speaker0:
[38:27] I'm not sure what like what that unlocks yeah what's what do we unlock here because like the etf is like the erc20 token for a trad fi like it's the composable thing you can, collateralize it in your brokerage it's like what everyone is used to i don't know what this unlocks here i don't know.
Ryan:
[38:43] That it's going to lock a lot of pent-up liquidity that hasn't been able to access these assets right away but it is a marker of the convergence here that's happening between the world of you have crypto exchanges over here and then you have all new york stock exchange all the trad fi exchanges over here And now these can list crypto assets, the TradFi exchanges and the crypto exchanges. We're seeing them evolve to start listing equities and tokens. So it's just another marker of the growing convergence that we're seeing between these worlds.
Speaker0:
[39:11] I did like that line in your recent debate with Omid versus Austin Campbell. Great fucking episode. Where the premise was that there's like currently the TradFi world and the crypto world. And in the future, there's just going to be one big financial world and these things are going to bleed together. I did like that line.
Ryan:
[39:27] Speaking of that we got some details on stripes layer one the tempo release we're talking about that also some big moves in the tokenized securities world both on ethereum and solana and david you gotta talk to me about tokenized pokemon i don't know how i missed this last week but you came back and you told me that was a thing happening possibly
Speaker0:
[39:46] Miss the tokenized pokemon meta.
Ryan:
[39:48] We'll get to all that and more but first we want to shout out our friends over at frack Introducing Tempo,
Speaker0:
[39:53] A payments-first blockchain incubated by Stripe and Paradigm. This interestingly got broken on Twitter by Matt Huang from Paradigm before anyone I saw from Stripe actually tweeting it. But the people from Stripe followed up a few minutes later. So here are the details. Tempo is a purpose-built blockchain for stablecoins and real-world payments. Born from Stripe's experience in global payments and Paradigm's expertise in crypto. To ensure Tempo serves a broad array of needs, We're excited to be working with an incredible group of initial design partners, including Anthropic, Deutsche Bank, DoorDash, LeadBank, Mercury, NewBank, OpenAI, Revolut, Shopify, Standard, Chartered, Visa, and more. Interesting to see some of the AI companies in there. Obviously.
Speaker0:
[40:37] Blockchains and AIs go together. How are AIs going to send money on a blockchain? It makes way more sense. Tempo is being designed to be a payment. I'm always reading from Matt Huang's tweet. Tempo's payment-first design includes predictable low fees, payments, and gas in any stablecoin via an enshrined AMM. What does that mean? That means that the Tempo blockchain has an AMM built directly into the blockchain paradigm. Also, Dan from Paradigm just basically helped build Uniswap V3 and V4. So I would assume this is very significantly overlapping with Uniswap. Just put that right into the blockchain. And then because it's enshrined, you can just pay for gas via any token by having liquidity access through the AMM. That's kind of cool. Payments first UX, dedicated payment lane, memos, access lists, et cetera. Opt in privacy, scale 100,000 transactions per second with sub second finality. And this is all built on Reth, the Rust Ethereum client pioneered by Georgios in the Paradigm team. So this is Reth's first big debut in production as a dedicated client for a layer one blockchain.
Speaker0:
[41:43] And then lastly, Tempo eases the path to bringing real workflows on chain, such as global payments, payouts, pay-ins, and payroll, embedded financial accounts, fast and cheap remittances, tokenized deposits for 24-7 settlement, microtransactions, and agentic payments. Interestingly, we are building Tempo. This is Matt again. It's always been Matt. We are building Tempo with principles of decentralization decentralization and neutrality that includes stable coin and neutrality anyone can issue a stable coin and any stable coin can be used for payments or gas along with an independent and diverse validators validator set with ryan a roadmap to a permissionless model which i find interesting it.
Ryan:
[42:24] Is interesting and so this is um evm which is cool it's all wrath so you can see this is really a fusion of there's a lot of paradigm influence uh in this as well i actually got some of the inside scoop because I talked to Zach Abrams earlier this week. That episode's going to be out on Monday, I believe. And Zach is the guy who sold Bridge. It was basically a stablecoin payments company. He sold Bridge to Stripe for a billion dollars. And Matt's had a key role in actually selecting this platform and going with an L1. And so I asked him, I was like, Zach, why did you guys do it? And he went through a case. Actually, he tweeted about this. But one of the things that they had been trying to do at bridge was do like basically an airdrop imagine for instance if you remember the stimmy checks we all got imagine you wanted to issue stimmy checks like 50 million americans and they did some of this i forget what country he mentioned but they were doing large-scale airdrops of stable coins to some users for some particular use case
Ryan:
[43:28] He said none of the chains, none of the L1s could actually support that use case. They were too slow, cost too much in terms of gas. They even tried things like Stellar. So people don't remember, but Stripe was an early investor in Stellar, and that was a chain that they were attempting this on. Yeah. Okay. And so his take was basically we couldn't accomplish this with any public L1, and so we needed to roll our own. And so if you want that sub-second finality, and if you want even the privacy and low gas fees, layer one for them, he said, was the only option. So that's some of the reason why and some of the use cases around it.
Speaker0:
[44:06] I find that answer incomplete, but I'll accept it for now.
Ryan:
[44:10] Yeah, he was also very quick to say, this isn't Stripe's chain, right? Hence, you saw that consortium of other companies. It almost reminds me a little bit of the resurrection of Libra.
Speaker0:
[44:19] Just on a smaller scale. This is just Libra. This is Libra.
Ryan:
[44:23] But Libra was not EVM. Now they're doing a Libra version with EVM and sort of a consortium.
Speaker0:
[44:28] So this is the spirit of Libra. Same kind of, which honestly you have to give credit to Libra for being way ahead of its time. Yeah.
Ryan:
[44:35] It was just like wasn't politically tenable at the time. And now it totally is. That's why they're doing this. Yeah. David, there's some big moves in the tokenized securities world. The first was Ondo. so ondo launched tokenized securities on ethereum so are you familiar with ondo at all david
Speaker0:
[44:52] I know the name i haven't really ever done the rabbit hole deep dive yeah they've been around for a very long.
Ryan:
[44:57] Time they've been pretty big in the world of uh like tokenized treasuries for a while and this is their first attempt i believe oh it's restricted so here's the thing it's not available for people in the u.s so i'm not on a vpn right now just like a you know good American. I can't access this. But it has a whole bunch of stocks, ETFs. There are some limits in terms of how much you can buy ETFs, all the big fangs. I don't know, it's like 100, 200 different stocks and ETFs that you can buy.
Ryan:
[45:24] And the benefit here is it's not like X stocks. So the benefit here is you get better liquidity guarantees. So the problem with some of the tokenized securities like X stocks was there almost like a synthetic version and they would trade off the price and liquidity of kind of the primary versions of these assets that were on like real TradFi exchanges.
Ryan:
[45:47] This gets around that and I'll tell you how it gets around this. This is on Ethereum, but it's actually using intense infrastructure. Okay. This is actually a unique use case for Ethereum real world assets, how they work. So I was talking to the team Our liquidity model, they said, is fundamentally different from existing permissionless solutions like X stocks. We do not rely on on-chain market inventory. Instead, their architecture runs on intents-based systems where the tokenized stock is only minted when investor demand occurs. All right, so there's some investor demand, like I'm doing a 10K buy for Apple shares, let's say, and then an intent clicks, and that is fulfilled on the other side. So this allows them to not pre-fund the liquidity on-chain. so it lowers the capital costs of bringing traditional markets on chain and it was beneficial for them to launch on ethereum because ethereum has very well developed intense based infrastructure to support that type of a use case so it's interesting i think it's an evolution of what we've seen with tokenized stocks like x stocks kind of janky had some problems this is better from the liquidity side of things it's still not the same as like actually owning a stock all right but you can redeem it very quick and it should trade closer to the price
Speaker0:
[47:01] Well ryan if you want to actually own a stock uh you can actually own galaxy stock you're just going to have to go to solana to do it because galaxy has tokenized their actual stock not an iou of a stock but the actual stock is now tokenized on solana this is that with robert lesher's a super state uh there's there's a coin gecko page which is pretty cool it's not yet trading so there's no price or like you know price action at all but the fact that there is a coin gecko page of what is an actual stock again not a redeemable for a.
Ryan:
[47:32] Stock native security that we've seen native security
Speaker0:
[47:35] On uh on a blockchain which is pretty damn cool uh i of course went right to my dms with robert leshner and i was like rob why is it on.
Ryan:
[47:44] Solana he
Speaker0:
[47:46] Says uh if you are the issuer of said stock you get to choose what chain you put it on apparently galaxy just chose solana.
Ryan:
[47:52] Yeah i think this is a big step forward actually getting native securities on chain and it's much better than the xdoc design much better i guess from a property rights perspective right of the because
Speaker0:
[48:04] It is the property.
Ryan:
[48:04] It is the property the problem is though it is going to be harder to bootstrap this and to get because like what this requires is that every single issuer like want to do this cooperate create a new legal structure specifically for they're tokenized uh you'll stock on chain so like it seems like you could get one or two or some niche players it's going to be hard to get the type of volume that tradfi is getting right until you kind of break through that bootstrapping problem hopefully this is where everything goes and we get actual native stocks on chain but it could take a while to get there and we'll have these hacky type solutions until then
Speaker0:
[48:41] Well, I want to push back a little bit on that because yes, everything you said is correct and right. It's like there's friction, the new legal entity, all that kind of stuff is going to have some costs. A, there are IPO costs. And so costs are being paid to access liquidity one way or another. But if our thesis about DeFi is correct, which is you get capital efficiency, if you put a token on Ethereum, you get access to Ethereum's complete DeFi tool set, there's a very strong gravitational pull to be able to put your stocks inside of Aave or Morpho or any sort of DeFi app.
Ryan:
[49:11] I think for crypto native companies, it could be worth it for them, right? Because they already have the crypto customers. But if you're looking at like the liquidity of basically, you know, the traditional exchanges and 600 million in securities volume, and you go you look at crypto securities liquidity, and it's like, I don't know, 20 million a day or something, you're definitely going to want to put your asset where the where the volume is. And that's just the bootstrapping problem you have to get.
Speaker0:
[49:35] And now it's Robert Lechner's job to go and seek out like the larger and larger like deals so he can go start climbing the ranks of publicly traded companies and be like, hey, you want to get your tokens on crypto? And the more he does that, the more liquidity flows. More like stablecoin all time highs are being broken every single day. And so the size of the gravitational pull is increasing. It'll just take some time.
Ryan:
[49:57] I agree with that. David, Polymarket finally got the green light. Do you want to read this tweet?
Speaker0:
[50:02] Yeah. Oh, yeah. So this is from Shane Koppelman, the founder and CEO of Polymarket. Polymarket has been given the green light to go live in the United States by the CFTC. So they received a no action letter. They filed saying, hey,
Speaker0:
[50:12] can are we going to get in trouble if we allow U.S. citizens? And the CFTC said, no, basically, no, you're not. And so we can all take down our VPNs now. United States citizens can now access Polymarket directly. And this is pretty cool. I mean, this is huge just for. I think just like assurances and sentiment, I would say, it will be kind of cool. I guess also funds can now go trade on Polymarket. I don't really think this really stopped any individuals, but it definitely stopped funds from trading on Polymarket if they want to take a position in something.
Ryan:
[50:48] I feel like it stopped Polymarket from going as mainstream as it could have. And it probably will go post this, right? Just because there's friction in a VPN. Yeah. You know, like how many people are going to...
Speaker0:
[51:00] There's no friction in getting USDC on the Polymarket, but plenty of friction because of the VPN, yeah.
Ryan:
[51:05] Is this Mr. Beast talking about his own Polymarket? Yeah, Mr.
Speaker0:
[51:08] Beast was on a live stream looking at Polymarket, and he just was having a good time. So, yeah, like Mr. Beast on Polymarket. Polymarket is becoming just like a household name. As we mentioned earlier in the show, Donald Trump Jr. takes a stake in the prediction market platform, Polymarket. So he bought a bunch of shares and now is on the advisory board. Interestingly enough, he's also on the advisory board of Kalshi. And have you been following the Kalshi polymarket just absolutely boiling war between these two organizations?
Ryan:
[51:40] Some big hatred, right? It's a big
Speaker0:
[51:41] Rivalry going on right now. I don't think I've ever seen a level of hatred between two companies like this.
Ryan:
[51:44] Should we get them on for a debate, the founders, both founders?
Speaker0:
[51:48] I don't know if there's any debate to be had. It would be more of like a mediation. Okay, so there's a tweet from this guy, William Legate, which I thought was pretty interesting. And by interesting, I mean hilarious. He said, when I joined Kalshi a year ago, Tarek, some guy at Kalshi, made their mission clear. Quote, copy everything Polymarket does. Our moat is regulatory capture. And then he's tweeting out the fact that CFTC granted Polymarket the approval to make available to U.S. instance. So William continues and says, today that moat no longer exists. I couldn't be more proud of my decision to join Polymarket. Why copy the best when you can build it? So basically he flipped from Kalshi to Polly Market because Polly Market is the cooler one to be. The founder or somebody of Kalshi came into his replies and said, this is a lie. Tarek did not say this. You are just spreading misinformation. And he shares an email from William talking shit about Polly Market trying to get a job at Kalshi. I don't know what the hell is going on here. But like the, oh God, the teeth are out. There's some huge beef.
Ryan:
[52:55] I mean, there's rumors that Kalshi, I don't know if I should say this, but there's rumors I've heard that Kalshi.
Speaker0:
[53:01] Did the FBI swatting of Shane Koppelman? I heard those rumors.
Ryan:
[53:05] That was like that they had reported him or had some sort of hand to play. I mean, there's beef there. That's a rumor. I don't have evidence of that, but.
Speaker0:
[53:14] No one does.
Ryan:
[53:15] You can see why there's some beef there. You also see why they want some political protection, right? If the FBI is going to raid your house, how about getting the president's son to invest your company?
Speaker0:
[53:23] I'll do that. god i hope the political pendulum doesn't swing so hard next year it could.
Ryan:
[53:27] Swing so hard so hard so enjoy this brief period of time we have david and tell me about tokenized pokemon because we can still do that right now
Speaker0:
[53:37] Dude okay so i come back online uh from burning man and i log into crypto twitter and we are doing two things we are ranking crypto twitter accounts and we are buying tokenized pokemon and i'm like oh, nothing's changed we are doing the same thing okay so this is the current trench meta of tokenized pokemon cards there's apparently three different platforms but this one platform collector crypt has taken off uh it is real tokenized excuse me real pokemon cards.
Ryan:
[54:05] Actual physical pokemon
Speaker0:
[54:06] Cards held in a vault somewhere like a physical vault so.
Ryan:
[54:11] It's a real world
Speaker0:
[54:11] Asset it's a real world asset tokenized by this one project called collector crypt and you can go and you can like open up you can buy for 55 you can buy a pack a pokemon card packet and you open up the pack and there's a pokemon card in there and like some people are like celebrating like oh i opened up a charizard and then you can sell it on the marketplace uh you're not going to get a charizard statistically speaking uh but technically it's possible and so yeah this is the current meta we always knew this was.
Ryan:
[54:36] Gonna happen at some point
Speaker0:
[54:37] Right yeah yeah are.
Ryan:
[54:39] You are you a collector do you ever do pokemon cards or magic
Speaker0:
[54:41] Cards i did back in the day never never once that I ever play the Pokemon game, didn't even know that there was a game. I thought the point was to just buy the cards. You're just speculating. I had my binder with my Charmander and my Bulbazar. Who didn't?
Ryan:
[54:53] This is how we reach out to the next generation. Okay, it's not our DeFi boomer stuff. It's Pokemon cards on chain. I knew this would work.
Speaker0:
[55:00] But when can you put them in Aave?
Ryan:
[55:02] Yeah, good question. Good question. All right, actually, I'm going to show you something, David. You showed me tokenized cards here, Pokemon cards.
Speaker0:
[55:10] Has anyone alerted Richie Torres to this fact?
Ryan:
[55:13] Richie Torres. We actually have it now. Gary Gensler cannot stop us. Um, this was kind of cool though. And we'll end with this. You can now borrow in DeFi using your credit score, US credit score. This is always a use case I thought would be cool. And it's just started happening. So, you know, you have a credit score based on your credit history in the US, right? Do you pay your rent, like mortgages, whatever? You know, do you pay your credit card bills? And this is score. Uh, I don't know what your score is. Some people track this, um, to the nth degree.
Speaker0:
[55:46] As soon as I got into crypto, I was like, I don't care.
Ryan:
[55:49] I don't care about this. You know, there's like a 600, 700 is better, 800, whatever.
Speaker0:
[55:53] I don't know what's good. Okay.
Ryan:
[55:54] So you can just import that into DeFi and using this protocol called, let's see what it's called, 3Jane. You actually just borrow money on DeFi using your credit score. So get your credit karma score, whatever, beam it in here. It'll give you a certain amount based on your credit score of what you can borrow. So this is like a credit use case using a real-world credit score.
Speaker0:
[56:18] Do I need to put my ID in?
Ryan:
[56:20] Probably. I don't know. Probably.
Speaker0:
[56:22] So like if I run away with the funds, can they come after me?
Ryan:
[56:26] Well, it'll hurt your credit score. Don't do that.
Speaker0:
[56:28] Yeah, but I don't care.
Ryan:
[56:29] If you don't care. It's a one-time only thing, David. If you don't care, if you're never going to use the credit score again.
Speaker0:
[56:35] I just saw a screenshot with $42,000 on your screen. If I can go to this app and I can mute my credit score for $42,000. You'll do it.
Ryan:
[56:43] You'll take that trade any day. Your credit score is literally dropping as we speak because someone's probably listening in and is like, we're not giving this guy any money. Let's end it there. You know, 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.
David:
[57:04] Music