ROLLUP: Silver Parabolic | Aave Civil War | Uniswap Unifies | New CFTC Chair | Bitcoin vs. Quantum

TRANSCRIPT

David Hoffman:
[0:04] Welcome to Bankless. It's the first Friday of 2026. And on this Friday, we are bringing in Anthony Cisano to substitute for Ryan, who got stuck in a little bit of a snowstorm. So we're bringing in our favorite substitute teacher to go through the weekly news and crypto with us. Anthony, welcome to the show.

Anthony Sassano:
[0:19] Thanks, David. It's good to be here again. And Happy New Year. And it's funny that you mentioned that Ryan got stuck in a snowstorm when it's like really hot here, anywhere I'm in australia so it's like snow why is it oh that's right yeah right.

David Hoffman:
[0:32] Right yeah we're in the middle of winter up here yeah yeah yeah there are some evergreen subjects that are we're going to talk about anthony uh we're going to talk about the first the silver gold and s&p 500 breaking all time highs because that all happened in the last seven days and then we're going to go back and touch on ave in the civil war because while that was kind of like two weeks ago there are still some updates and i also want to get your takes on it as well meanwhile while ave is diverging Uniswap is converging. So there's a lot more alignment in the Uniswap ecosystem. We're going to talk about that news as well as Michael Selig, the new CFTC chairman that just got named, who is a very big pro-crypto CFTC chairman previously from the SEC. And we're going to talk about that. And then also we're going to talk about Quantum's threat because that's all I know you know about Quantum and otherwise focus on chain security. So I want to get your takes on all of these subjects and more.

David Hoffman:
[1:26] But before we get into all of that, it's the 1st of January. So what's your take on 2025 as a whole? And then also, I want to pick your brain about what you're excited for, what you're looking forward to, where you think signal is coming down the pike this year in 2026. So let's start with 2025. What do you think about 2025?

Anthony Sassano:
[1:44] Yeah, I think 2025 was a kind of obviously volatile year in the markets in particular, but I think it was like a kind of maturation year for crypto. For a long time now, I remember, A lot of people in the ecosystem have wanted like a cleansing of crypto, like get rid of the scams, get rid of the grifts, you know, all these tokens are worth so much when they shouldn't be worth as much as they are because they're fundamentally worthless. And I'm not talking about, you know, people can argue about what, what token should be worth what, but I'm talking about like these tokens that are part of projects that are dead. So everyone wanted this cleanse. And it felt like we got that cleanse to an extent, I think in 2025.

Anthony Sassano:
[2:20] And I think that was from the fact that like crypto is no longer like this niche thing, right? When you have the president of the United States talking about it, like every other day, crypto is not like a niche thing anymore. And then we have all these TradFi institutions coming in and they're kind of like, I mean, they're coming in a different way. Some of them want to be supportive and additive. Some of them want to just obviously control everything and be extractive, but they're coming in in a really big way. They're getting excited about things like stable coins. We've kind of gone mainstream on the tech side, I think. Obviously on the asset side and the market side, everyone already knows about Bitcoin. But when it comes to like the tech side of things, I think we've gone a lot more mainstream now. And I think that it was a funny thing watching people's reactions to that because I think a lot of crypto natives didn't like that because they felt like, well, are all the gains gone now because we're not early anymore? Where's the excitement? Where's the kind of fun stuff? Is it just going to be boring stuff like stable coins and low risk DeFi? People gave Vitalik crap about it for talking about it because they're like, oh, this is boring. We came to crypto because we want the fun, exciting stuff. But I think that really is kind of, I guess, the main theme of 2025 to me is that graduating and coming into like the real world and not just being a teenager anymore. Like crypto kind of went from being a teenager to like an adult now. And I think some people get left behind in that transition because they just really don't vibe with that kind of world anymore. They want it to be early. They want to be part of something that feels underground. And yeah, I can't like say that crypto is underground anymore.

David Hoffman:
[3:44] I think maybe what you're saying, the word that is coming to mind for me is culling. 2025 was a year of culling where we kind of just purged exactly what you said. The DNA of crypto is like, congratulations, you found crypto. You are early. And that is just no longer true in 2025 and 2026. And that is so much of what this industry has stood upon is like, you're early. You're actually in, you found this weird corner of the internet that's going to take over the world. But in 2025 and stablecoins, that is actually happening. And so much of what people came here for and some of the DNA that many projects and evaluations of tokens have stood upon is actually just fundamentally different now. And there is going to be a zeitgeist change, a cultural change for what it means to be in crypto moving forward, because we're kind of now entering the middle years of what it means to being in crypto. I think this is what you're saying and what I definitely agree with.

Anthony Sassano:
[4:42] Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I think on that as well, like if we look at, you know, just the market side of things, which is what people pay attention to, they use it for all sorts of signal. I think the big reason why a lot of these other tokens are doing so poorly is because the institutions, you know, the TradFi folks, they're not really interested in this stuff, right? They've dipped their toes in with BTC and ETH and they're kind of, you know, building on those on Ethereum, obviously.

Anthony Sassano:
[5:05] But like everything else from what I've seen, they don't seem very interested in. And I think when you have like no bidders just coming from retail and then the institutional side isn't filling the bid either for these tokens, that's why they're kind of where they are. And now I think maybe in 2025, we went too far towards like one side where there are a lot of good tokens that got caught up in this as well. And, you know, I look at them and I'm not going to mention any for obvious reasons, but I look at some of them and I'm like, you know what, this is actually undervalued now. Like, I don't think that this should be as low as it is. But then I look at other things and I'm like, wow, this thing is still worth X amount. Like, why? Like, who's buying this stuff? So I think that also jaded a lot of crypto natives in that they were hoping for quote unquote alt season, right? Like where it always happens after Bitcoin runs up, you know, the alts go crazy as they're known to do. That just didn't happen this time. And obviously we had the meme coin stuff, which is, I guess, like a small pocket. It reminded me more of maybe like DeFi tokens when they kind of happened in 2020, rather than like a huge new thing that was bringing in tons of new capital. If anything, it actually extracted most of the DGN capital that was left. And now we're left with the fact that, okay, well, if the institutions aren't buying these things and the crypto natives don't want to buy them because they know a lot of them are just not worth much and there wasn't any old season, everyone's like, oh, what's happening? So I think that's why maybe if you go on crypto Twitter, you see a lot of people being depressed or sad about this and kind of burning out because what they came into crypto for isn't what's happening anymore. And as you said, it's not early anymore. So that stuff is probably not going to happen going forward.

David Hoffman:
[6:35] Yeah, it feels like crypto is going through... And like I said, a culling. It's going through a pretty tough time in 2025. And I think people are kind of gearing up for a little bit of continuation in that in 2026. Part of that is what we're going to talk about today.

David Hoffman:
[6:51] The attention is elsewhere. So three things have hit all time highs, none of which are crypto. Silver, gold, and the S&P 500. Silver has really been the standout in December at the end of this year. It's really just gone parabolic. It's gone up 150% to 160% in 2025. And most of that has really come in December, November and December.

David Hoffman:
[7:14] The chart I'm showing on screen, which is the silver chart, is going from $36 an ounce to $71 an ounce. And these are one-month-long candles. So that's November and December of this year. And why is this happening? It's being squeezed from two different sides. It's being used as, you know, the silver to the gold, the monetary inflation hedge demand, because gold has been on a tear. Silver is catching up a little bit, but it's also just increasingly used in solar arrays, electronic vehicles, and just electronics generally. So there's two sources of demand there. Alongside silver, gold also hit its own new all-time high above $4,500 an ounce. And again, gold has been a fantastic asset to hold this year. Yearly gains are 60% to 65%. And then the S&P 500, the normal stock market, has hit $6,909. That's a new all-time high for the S&P 500.

David Hoffman:
[8:11] Year-to-date gains of 17% to 18% in 2025, the third straight year of double-digit returns after the 2022 drawdown, which we were all kind of brought up in. And so AI, gold, precious metals, turns out the alt season is in precious metals. All of this is outside of the crypto arena. So while crypto kind of goes through its growing pains, it's like it's maturing and it's losing a lot of the fun of being a kid. Now it has to be an adult and it has to be a little bit more responsible than it ever was before. And somebody is losing some of his DNA. At the same time, attention is just in other markets and crypto is just not the first place where a wild west risk on investor goes to get returns.

Anthony Sassano:
[8:53] Yeah. And what I find funny about that, in particular with gold, is that Bitcoiners would make fun of gold bugs for many years, right? Because gold was actually doing nothing for a long time. It was pretty much sideways for, I think, over 10 years. If you look at its last all-time high to where it broke its all-time high, I think it was 2010 to somewhere in the 2020s, it just sat and went sideways. So that wasn't exciting. But then obviously, you had crypto, which was going nuts every few years and posting these enormous returns.

Anthony Sassano:
[9:22] Which is kind of a funny contrast now where it's kind of flipped, where crypto is going sideways, not doing much, but gold has gone ridiculous and looks like a crypto chart and same with silver. But I think you hit it on the head with regards to demand as well because I think people don't realize, especially when it comes to other precious metals other than gold, is that a lot of them are actually used in industry. Gold is to an extent, but you could say the vast majority of gold's value is speculative, right? It's kind of a store of value thing there. But with silver and other kind of precious metals, they are definitely used very heavily. And as you said, because they're used within kind of computing parts and AI has just inflated the cost of all of that, that's just going to feed down to the bare metal, for lack of a better term, right? Nice. A literal bare metal. So I think there are also consequences of that too, where obviously hardware is just getting expensive across the board. And if the components to make that hardware are getting expensive, then that's just going to continue that trend in 2026. So I think at some point, something we'll have to give where it's like, well, who's buying this stuff? Like someone's going to be buying it in order for it to all kind of like flow down. And, you know, people have been screaming about the AI bubble bursting, all these sorts of stuff. Like I think at some point, yeah, there'll be some kind of crash and like, just like there is in any market.

Anthony Sassano:
[10:37] But yeah, I mean, I don't have a good read on precious metals. It's not something that I've followed. But when it comes to crypto, I think it's good for us to maybe be quiet for a little while, build actual kind of products and services that people want to use and mature as an industry, because I don't think what we had been previously over the last 10, 15 years is sustainable at all because it was just based on speculation only, really. It wasn't based on fundamentals. And my hope is in 2026, we can see more of this kind of shift towards fundamentals.

David Hoffman:
[11:05] Yeah, certainly. When the crypto industry collectively kind of goes through a painful period, goes through a cuddling of the herd, to me, I'm like, okay, yeah, I feel bad with everyone else. But I know that there's a light at the end of the tunnel, that once we go through this period, you know, people drop out, people just leave and go elsewhere. Eventually, that turns into the fruits for everyone who stays. And so kind of, ultimately, it's just a waiting game. It's like, yeah, you have to be a little bit masochistic. You have to accept the pain. It hurts. And then one day, you are a lot more wealthy because you held on while the industry grew and fundamentals were reoriented and reprioritized. And that's how we grow healthier as an industry. We have seen this cycle before, quite literally, every time there is actually a true cycle in crypto. Let's get into the crypto prices. Starting with Bitcoin, $88,500 on the week. We are up 2% on the week for Bitcoin. And then Ether, pretty similar story. We are at $3,000, flirting with $3,000 right now, up 3.5% on the week for Ether.

David Hoffman:
[12:07] Matthew Sigal, he's one of the analysts over at VanEck. He tweeted out, Bitcoin long-term holders have flipped into net accumulators, which is something that we definitely did not see over the last year in 2025. One of the big indicators that people like to look at is Bitcoin long-term holders. Are they selling or are they holding? And over 2025, long-term Bitcoin holders were selling. They were putting supply of Bitcoin into the market. One of the reasons why Bitcoin didn't really push past its all-time highs into the 130, 140 territory. So people decided to sell as Bitcoin holders. But this has flipped. As of recent times, long-term Bitcoin holders are no longer selling, which is an indication of what appetite is and if there are new supply going into the market. So it's a very bullish setup. It's a variable signal to say that people are not selling

David Hoffman:
[12:59] Bitcoin. And then in the world of Ether, there is a story with the DATS. This is Sharplink. Sharplink is now earning 500 ETH per week just from Ethereum staking. I don't know what percentage that is off the top of my head. Maybe you do. But it's another indication of just like, oh, the Ethereum DATS, for as much as there is a hangover, nonetheless, they were successful in soaking up supply. And whatever percentage of supply they soaked up will be a function of how much future supply issuance, they will also soak up. And that's what we're seeing here from Sharplink. Sharplink just reserving 500 Ether a week off of the secondary market for Ether. What's your commentary here, Sazel?

Anthony Sassano:
[13:38] Yeah, I think it's like, if you look at the market kind of action and you showed that chart about like kind of long-term selling and stuff like that, I think that was definitely what we saw across BTC and ETH in 2025, where you had these, obviously with ETH, you had the DATS come online. And I think a lot of early ETH investors, and I'm talking really early investors, like maybe potentially close to the ICO or at the ICO.

Anthony Sassano:
[14:01] They probably were like, well, I'm already up like a million percent, right? And it feels like the ecosystem's maturing and it feels like maybe now's the time to kind of cash out, right? Like maybe now's the time to actually, when there's so much kind of like, as you can call it, like liquidity, right? There's so much liquidity coming into the system because of the DATs. I think they took advantage of that. I think the same was true for BTC because of the ETF liquidity and also obviously Saylor was still buying as well and other kind of BTC DATs. So I think a lot of them did that, but then a lot of them would have also been selling and then rebuying in the ETFs because it's more tax advantage way. That's why that these kind of on-chain analytics actually have weaknesses as well. It's not just an exact science. There are lots of kind of nuances here with this, but from what I've seen anecdotally myself and what you can see in the market as well, it certainly does feel like a lot of these long-term kind of holders, these big whales we're cashing out there.

Anthony Sassano:
[14:56] Now, in terms of what this looks like going forward, I think we did clear most of that in 2025, if not potentially all of that. I think that ended with the 1010 crash, which obviously reset a lot of the market and we've had to recover out of that. I think that's why we had a pretty poor end to 2025, but I think we're mostly past that now. And I think if you look at the broader investing world, pretty much every other asset class except crypto has performed, right? And not just performed, but like gone into what you could call bubble territory where they've just gone parabolic. And when people and smarter investors and kind of like bigger investors see that, you don't really want to be in that when it's doing that. Like if you're in it already, you're going to start taking profits out of that because a parabola is by very nature, not sustainable. So if you're noticing that and you're thinking, okay, well, it's time to take chips off the table, but you don't want to sit in cash because you expect rates to start going down next year or continue going down. So maybe you look at crypto. Maybe you say, okay, well, crypto hasn't done much.

Anthony Sassano:
[15:52] It's still growing though. Like ETH and BTC have these really, good, you know, drivers of demand from ETFs, from DATs, things like that. And in particular, Ethereum, there's so much happening there. Like you can make an investment case based off anything you want, really, like not just stable coins, but a bunch of other things. So I think you might see a rotation back there. And it's funny because when I say every asset class, I do mean like everything, even things that people don't consider to be asset classes, like trading cards, for example, have just gone nuts, like labooboos, you know, stuff like that, right? It's just gone just gone crazy. So crypto really is that one that hasn't. And that's actually really advantageous for crypto going forward, because if everything else decides to slow down a bit, then these investors are going to be like, well, where can we go next? Where can we rotate into next? And I do think a lot of that capital is definitely going to look at crypto and be like, that's attractive. It's attractive at these valuations because it's not in a bubble. It's not in a parabola. It's been quiet for a while. So let's kind of accumulate now.

David Hoffman:
[16:50] Yeah, let's get into some crypto native topics. I think the big one that has been ongoing is the Aave civil war, especially culminating in Stani, the founder of Aave, buying 84,000 Aave tokens. That's not $84,000, 84,000 Aave tokens, which are priced at something like $110 a piece. There has been an ongoing topic. We've talked about this a few times on the roll just because it continues to go. But let me just kind of cover through the details since I have you, Anthony. I'll start from the beginning and we'll go up to the current moment. So this all started in December 4th where Aave Labs, the centralized entity that works around the Aave protocol, announced an integration with CalSwap on the Aave front-end interface. The stated goal was better swap pricing and MEV protection on the Aave front-end. But importantly, the fees earned by Aave for this swapping feature was swapped from the DAO to the Aave Labs entity. That was really the trigger that really kicked off this entire cascading set of events. Mark Zeller, the pseudo-accepted leader of the Aave DAO, characterized this as a stealth privatization of Aave since roughly $10 million per year that would have gone to the DAO. It was now being sent to Aave Labs through the front-end swap feature.

David Hoffman:
[18:05] Aave Labs, led by Stani, said that the front-end revenue was not something that the DAO was inherently titled to. The front-end is owned and operated by Aave Labs. So therefore, previous CalSwap fees were simply donated, voluntarily donated from labs to the DAO in the past. So that's kind of where the lines are being drawn. Aave Labs is this private company that builds products and charges for services. And the DAO owns the protocol, but not necessarily the website or front-end operations.

David Hoffman:
[18:31] This has created a pretty big division in the Aave community. And a proposal surfaced from an individual in the Aave forums called Tulip King that demanded pretty aggressive actions, including seizing Aave IP, the code and the brand, forcing Aave Labs to become a DAO-owned subsidiary, and also clawing back past revenue earned by using the Aave brand from Aave Labs. That proposal did not go through because it was stated to be non-compliant with governance, but nonetheless kind of made waves in the discourse surrounding the topic. And then a separate proposal came from Ernesto, a former Aave Labs CTO now associated with BGD Labs. The proposal asked for moving the trademarks, domains, and social accounts to the DAO. The rationale was that if the DAO pays for development and marketing, the DAO should control the brand and key distribution assets like domains and socials. There was a snapshot vote put to a vote over this process that was opened on December 23rd, which notably is two days before Christmas, That was aligning with the general idea of giving Aave holders explicit control over brand-related assets, trademarks, domains, social, and naming rights. Ernesto publicly objected to the timing and the process of this. He said the vote was pushed while discussion was still active, and he urged people to abstain.

David Hoffman:
[19:46] Mark Zeller agreed with the criticism that the vote was rushed during the holidays intentionally to kind of dissuade voting participation. Nonetheless, a significant amount of Aave showed up to vote. Ultimately, there was about a million Aave tokens who voted no, about 55%, and about 750,000 Aave tokens that voted to abstain, about 41%. Stani voted no. Mark Zeller and the Dow side mostly voted to abstain. And basically the implication here is that Aave Labs will retain control of the relevant brand and distribution assets under the status quo because the proposal failed

David Hoffman:
[20:21] And interestingly to note, the top three voters controlled 58% of the total voting power. The largest voter, probably Stani, I'm guessing, was 27%, and the second largest was 18%. And so this is kind of where things have laid off, has laid out. As this all happened, the Aave token really sold off in the market. It was down 20% on the week, with an additional drop happening in the vote window. And this is kind of where things have shaken out. Now, Stani, lastly, last thing, Stani publicly said that the disagreement is a part of decentralized governance, and he intends to make economic alignment between Aave Labs and token holders clear going forwards. And he stated that a recent $15 million purchase of Aave that Stani made on the market was not used to vote on that proposal. So that's kind of the mess of everything going on.

David Hoffman:
[21:11] Sassel, when you were watching all of this drama unfold, what was your first thoughts or impressions or takeaways? us?

Anthony Sassano:
[21:17] Yeah. I mean, this has kind of been a tension, I think, within the DeFi protocols for quite a while now in particular where, yeah, they've got this kind of labs entity, which is a centralized entity. And it basically has developed everything up until that point. And then you have this DAO that really doesn't really have that much power over things, right? Some projects will say, well, everything belongs to the DAO, so we're just going to give it to the DAO, like some of the labs kind of teams and then dissolve the foundation or dissolve labs, whatever it is. Some will spin it off into different entities and give some kind of control to the DAO. But yeah, I mean, we saw this tension with Unispop as well for a while, which has kind of been funny to see because that's done a 180. I think we're going to discuss that as well.

Anthony Sassano:
[21:59] They've done a 180 on that. But yeah, I think that if these things are to succeed long-term and be sustainable and not be capturable to an extent and kind of fend off, not just... See, this is the thing about capture is that if Aave Labs doing it, then yeah, okay, it's relatively transparent. You can probably rely on them to have the best interest of Aave at heart and not want to kill anything. Maybe they just want to make money for themselves, but that's not too bad considering that what could happen if a hostile takeover was done by a competing protocol or by someone who just wanted to destroy Arvair for whatever reason, then it starts to get really messy with the DAO model as well, where it's like, okay, if the DAO owns everything, then how do we prevent that from happening? How do we prevent that from killing the protocol and aligning all these incentives? As you mentioned there, Stani wanted to align the economic incentives here. I think maybe the cleanest way to do it is really to give everything to the DAO because if you're talking about something that's supposed to last decades.

Anthony Sassano:
[22:56] If that's what your kind of aim is, you can't have some centralized entity just like bolted on and kind of leeching off, right? Like where it's kind of like a cancer where it keeps leeching off and then eventually it keeps growing and growing and growing and kind of like kills the host sort of thing. Because that's what we see in the kind of real world where these centralized entities, if they don't, you know, a lot of centralized entities get bought up by private equity firms and these private equity firms comes along and they're just like, they're a cancer. They just suck everything out. And then that business goes under because it's just like they're done with it, right? and then move on to the next thing. So that could happen within crypto protocols as well. Whereas with a DAO, you have more distribution of power. You have more kind of, I guess, like... Distribution of how many people are involved with this thing. And it's not necessarily centralized. There are people that have more power than others, but it could potentially lead to better outcomes than the way it's currently structured and fairer outcomes too, because people want to feel like they're actually, especially token holders, they want to feel like they're actually getting value out of it. They want to feel like their investment's going to go up too.

Anthony Sassano:
[23:57] And I think that it's a nice way to kind of protect against that. But yeah, it's kind of funny seeing this play out with Aave because it's like, I would say the biggest DeFi protocol in terms of just like general awareness as well. Because if they can't fend off against this sorts of stuff and they can't work this out, then the smaller ones, like it's kind of like, okay, well, how are the small ones going to do it then? So I think that's another signal that gets sent to the market is that like, if Aave can't do it, then what's the chance these other smaller ones can? So I think that if Aave can work it out and they can kind of come to a nice conclusion there, same with Uniswap, obviously Aave and Uniswap probably be the two heaviest hitters there, if they can kind of make something that works, that's really positive for all of DeFi, especially in this, I guess, new era where making it so that tokens can share in the revenue or the profits of the protocols is actually not going to get you arrested now because we have a different government in the US, right? So I think that was a big thing as well that plays into all of that.

David Hoffman:
[24:51] Yeah, the reason why this is happening to Aave and Uniswap is because of how simply old Aave and Uniswap are. They just come from such a long history. Like Uniswap, the entity Uniswap was made in 2019. Aave, I think, even earlier than that. And that was actually a pre-Gensler era. That was, who was the SEC commissioner before that? I'm forgetting his name, but it was similarly not as welcoming to having tokens directly capture value. And so the foundation model was established even before Gary Gensler to really protect around this. And I don't really think the industry at the time really considered or knew or had the foresight to understand that creating two differently owned entities, one owned by a token and one owned by equity shareholders, would produce the long term consequences that we're dealing with today.

David Hoffman:
[25:40] And I think newer foundations, for example, Morpho, the fact that it's an Aave competitor, completely unrelated, but there just happens to be only one asset with Morpho. And I know Kane Warwick from Infinex and also Synthetix, he also made Synthetix, also did this with the same strategy. That's actually just one asset. There was never any equity around Synthetix and same thing with Infinex. And that just happened that he's got a little bit lucky. Kane's a little bit more risk. He's into Kane's into risk let's say that and so the nature of how these things came to be developed back in the 2018 to 2021 eras really matters and I don't really expect this to be as relevant from for a newer protocol launching like in the last year because they just don't have the same baggage the Aave Labs and the Aave DAO has had years and years and years of build-up of team members and sophistication and process and they've just ultimately come to be very divergent even though they are both growing towards the same outcome of growing the AVE protocol, there's just such different organizations. Like there are, there are org charts, respective org charts for, for each of those, not for the DAO, but it has its own process. Um,

David Hoffman:
[26:50] And so I think this is like a unique example just to talk about these two projects the most. And so I think this is an important conversation for the industry to really learn about how do we have complete investor protections and investor rights so that there is only one asset to own and hopefully it's the token. But nonetheless, I kind of expect this to be largely constrained in industry impact to really just these two protocols and the other ones that have foundation versus equity misalignments. I don't really expect this to be. I expect this problem to be solved in real time because we are all watching this as an industry.

Anthony Sassano:
[27:29] Yeah, I don't think it's an insurmountable problem. I do think for newer teams, what they have to be careful about is not going straight DAO. I think that that actually leads to worse outcomes because then if you go straight DAO, you have way too many cooks in the kitchen during the earliest phase of the protocol and they expect to get paid, right? And they expect for the token to go up. So I think, because you can have a DAO without a token, but normally they go kind of hand in hand. And if you do a token too early, I think that's pretty bad for some projects. So I think, yeah, you can start off quite centralized. And that's what this safe harbor thing is about in the US. I know the SEC wants to do this, where essentially you can have safe harbor for three years. You can remain centralized, build out your thing, and then you decentralize it over time. I think that's the better model. Because yeah, if you go straight DAO, from what I've seen in the past, it doesn't do very well.

David Hoffman:
[28:18] Yeah, I think DAOs need to decentralize as necessity. you don't make a DAO for making a DAO's sake.

Anthony Sassano:
[28:24] Yep, yep.

David Hoffman:
[28:25] All right, so with Aave Divergent, we have Uniswap converging. So we'll move into the Uniswap part of this conversation, which is actually going in contrast very smoothly. So there was a vote not terribly long ago. What day did this happen? This happened on December 28th. The unification proposal out of the Uniswap labs and foundation entities was voted on and passed by all of the uni token holders. So now the foundation is going to absorb the DAO, excuse me, the foundation is going to absorb labs effectively. Labs is going to be a service provider to the DAO and the economic value of labs is going to be something that the DAO has governance and control over. So the DAO pays Uniswap labs for their services to the Uniswap protocol now, and this vote went forward on the 28th. Importantly, the Uniswap web app, mobile wallet, and browser extension, which are all products made by Uniswap Labs, now have all of their front-end fees, the fees that they are charged to swap, are gone. There are no front-end fees or fees on positive slippage or any other app-level fees in the Uniswap ecosystem.

David Hoffman:
[29:32] What that is saying is that the labs is no longer taking a cut of the products they have made, which makes Uniswap a better product. I think this is giving Uniswap, if I'm reading between the lines here, giving the Uniswap the green lights, like, yo, guys, turn on the protocol fees. Like, the higher-level fees are being turned off. that gives you guys the margins to turn on the protocol fees. So I think this is setting up the Uni token to turn on the fees of the fee switch and then capture value for the token holders. Anthony, were you following the story?

Anthony Sassano:
[30:01] Yeah, I was. I think, as you said, like it's the right way to do things. I think people are very happy with this after obviously years worth of back and forth with kind of the labs and Uniswap kind of core team there. But I think as we were discussing before, that was due to a very hostile SEC. I mean, they literally went after Uniswap themselves, right? So Uniswap Labs and I think Hayden himself, the founder there. So I think this has been a long time coming. And I think that obviously now is the correct time to be doing this because there's very little risk of anything happening to you from the law side of things.

Anthony Sassano:
[30:37] But also at the same time, it is, as you mentioned before, better for investors and better for investor protections and better for everyone involved in the ecosystem that there isn't this kind of, I guess, dislocation of incentives where the labs entity has one incentives, the token holders have another, whereas the token holders before were getting nothing at all. Like that, the token was basically a meme, like it, and, and labs was getting everything that would get, that had tokens that they could sell and they had the profit coming in from whatever they were doing on the app layer, layer fees. So I think.

Anthony Sassano:
[31:06] I mean, it's aptly named, right? Unification. This is unifying all of that so that around the token as well, right? Around the uni token so that everyone is aligned incentive wise. And that's the way to do it. Like, you know, if Ava wants a playbook or that's it. And if any other DeFi protocol wants a playbook, and I should say mature DeFi protocol, like don't do this at the start. But like once you're mature and you've got product market fit, this to me is like the playbook to follow. And this is what you should be doing. and I think there might be some temptation from protocols to do things differently just for the sake of it and I understand that because that happens across everything in life right people just like okay well they're doing it this way and yeah it's really awesome but like people are going to be bored of that we have to try a different way and usually it doesn't go very well if you try a different way because there is like a really optimal way to do things a lot of the time and if you just change something for the sake of it it usually ends badly so I think that people should be kind of copying this and obviously altering it for their own protocols to make sure it encompasses everything because not every protocol is like Uniswap. They will have different considerations because they're a money market. They're not doing swaps and stuff like that. So I think when you look at it from that perspective, it's a blueprint to kind of follow. But yeah, you can add your own things, remove things that you think are unnecessary and then you can add This is, to me, the gold standard right now.

David Hoffman:
[32:22] Yeah. Notably with the successful vote of the unification, which was overwhelmingly successful. This was not a controversial vote. It was something like 98.8% voted for and 1.2% voted against. Can't imagine who voted against.

David Hoffman:
[32:37] With that vote, 100 million... SushiSwap dibs. Yeah, SushiSwap, yeah. 100 million uni tokens was sent from labs to the burn address, which represented the retroactive revenue that the Uniswap protocol would have burned if they had turned on the fee switch during the Gensler era. So kind of like a retroactive, sorry for the trouble, it wasn't our fault, it was Gary's fault. Here is the money you would have made. We're going to go ahead and burn that. And so a very significant amount of Unitokens was burned. Maybe I misspoke earlier because in this tweet, it says fees are on for Uniswap V2 and a set of V3 pools on mainnet. So it sounds like the Uni protocol is capturing fees in addition to the fees that are also coming from the Uni chain. So fees, chain fees on the Uni chain are also burning Uni tokens as well. There has been some discussion on Uniswap revenue. I actually have a prediction from Omar from Dragonfly. I had him on the podcast when I wanted to talk about Coinbase versus Robinhood. Unrelated though. Uniswap Uni tokens, excuse me, Uniswap Uni token holders realize that their new protocol fees will be de minimis and won't offset token grants, tokens that come from grants from the Uni Foundation. Frustrated with price performance, they will vote to turn back on front-end fees. I think turn back on front-end fees and hopefully burn more Uni tokens from the front-end fees. So interesting prediction from Omar here. Do you have any commentary or comments on just like the magnitude of Uniswap fees?

Anthony Sassano:
[34:05] Yeah. So if we look at, I guess, kind of what's happened with fees generally across the board, and we've been through this many times with regards to, you know, fair revenue, but also burning that fair revenue and how that drives value to the underlying kind of tokens. We went through this with Ethereum, right? Where, you know, a lot of ETH was burned with fair revenue and all that. And then, you know, maybe you could say that it did something positive for the price leading up to it. But if you look at like the longer term, it doesn't seem material to the value of ETH. It seems like the value of ETH really has come substantially from the fact that it's valued as a store of value and there's people buying it because of that.

Anthony Sassano:
[34:43] And obviously, revenues have collapsed since we were burning lots of ETH in 2021, 2022. So I think when it comes to fair revenue and specifically burning, I don't know how much value burning actually drives, whether it's a layer one protocol or a default protocol, it doesn't matter. I feel like it's all about the demand. And if something's burned, it depends on how it's burnt as well. When ETH was getting burned, it meant that the ETH had been bought already. So that demand had already been realized and then it's burned. We don't know when that ETH was bought. Was it bought five years ago? Was it bought a day ago? So with Unisop, I think it's a little bit different where essentially the fees will get collected and then burn kind of uni or the fees will get kind of paid out there. but then you have to make assumptions about, okay, well, how much fees are going to get collected here? What's the sustainability of this model for Uniswap? Are they going to keep growing from here? They're already pretty much like the biggest, have been the biggest for a while. Are they going to be competitors? So when you start valuing things based on fair revenue, yeah, it starts getting very muddy and it starts getting pretty brutal out there. And that's a.

Anthony Sassano:
[35:51] Beat the drum that ETH shouldn't be valued on fair revenue. I mean, one of the reasons, there's a lot of other reasons, but yeah, I think I agree with this point where what ends up happening, and there's actually like a skit about this in the show Silicon Valley where he, you know, this guy basically says like, as soon as you start talking about revenue, it's never enough. Like people, your shareholders or your token holders will always demand more revenue. So yeah, I kind of, I agree with this kind of prediction where if, you know, they're frustrated with price action and they want more fees, they're going to try and extract fees from where they can. And then obviously the easiest way to do that would be to turn on the front end fees because that has been shown to materially drive our revenues.

David Hoffman:
[36:30] Yeah. The difference between ETH burn and UNI burn is that as I understand that the revenue going into the UNI SWAT protocol will actually buy UNI on the secondary market and burn it. Whereas with ETH, as you said, it's just paid for gas. So that ETH already existed in the pockets of gas spenders anyways. And so there is actually buy pressure. So revenue is buy pressure for the uni token. And the other thing that's nice about the buy back and burn model is that it is relatively cypherpunk. It's just like kind of the governance free, no opinions about what we should do with this. We just burn it. And that's the protocol. And so there is, well, well, I agree with you that the value capture is weak because It will show up in the price as like the last possible thing, at least with things like ETH. Whereas like, oh, that when there is a, when finally a wave of demand comes, well, there's less supply on the market. And that's, but that's the thing that happens last rather than first. Well, as opposed to the Uniswap model where like there is, you know, revenue is by pressure at the same time.

Anthony Sassano:
[37:30] Yeah. Yeah. And I think one last thing on that, like Amar mentioned that with regards to supply, and that's another thing, right? We went on about ultrasound money, ETH being deflationary kind of for a while there. And it's all about how many new tokens are coming onto the market versus how many are burned, if you want to look at it from that perspective. But it's not just the burn that's driving demand, whether it be for ETH or Uni. It's obviously people buying Uni for speculative reasons or whatever, people buying ETH as a store of value. But yeah, when you kind of like take it as a whole there, Amar mentioned, there's going to be all these Uni kind of tokens being given out as grants. And we can be pretty confident that's going to be sold, right? Like pretty much 100% of that's going to be sold. So if you have more grants being paid out than uni being burned and the only real kind of, I guess, value driver for uni is fear of a new because no one's really buying uni as a store of value, right? And then obviously there's speculative value, but that's not lasting. That's not sustainable. That's a short-term thing. Then you could argue that, yeah, the price will either go sideways or go down because you have this kind of more sell pressure than buy pressure. I mean, And at the end of the day, it's all supply and demand. But yeah, when you reason about the different kind of dynamics here, that's why you could potentially get that scenario there. And then, as Omar said, the token holders would be like, well, we need to increase revenues. How do we do that to offset these grants? Well, let's turn on more fees. Let's collect more rent, as they call it, right, to offset this. So yeah, it's a tricky game. It definitely is. And when it comes to revenue, especially within crypto.

Anthony Sassano:
[39:00] I think people really like obsess about it a lot, especially for early stage projects, which kind of puzzles me.

Anthony Sassano:
[39:06] And then they take the other side of it where they'll say, well, it's earning $0 today, but like, I think it's going to earn way more than that in the future. So I'm going to buy it now. It's like, yeah, okay, you can do that. And that's a valid strategy, but then you have to consider like why it would be earning that much fee revenue as well. So yeah, it's a tricky game. Investing is not easy. People thought it was easy because crypto did this thing where it did the old season, after Bitcoin ran up and everyone's like, I'm a genius. It's like, no, investing is actually really hard. Fundamental investing is really hard. Driving revenue is really hard. So I think that's another thing, as we talked about at the beginning of the show, that's another thing I think going into 2026, people are going to have to come to terms with is that, yeah, you can love revenue and that's fine and that's good, but you've got to be really realistic about the fact that there's not going to be many protocols that generate huge amounts of revenue. And if you actually go and look at these tokens, a lot of them are already worth way more than the revenue that they're generating. So yeah, it's a culling, as you said. It's not a fun time for people, I think.

David Hoffman:
[40:08] Well, something that is fun is our friend Mike Selig. He's a new CFTC chair. He just got confirmed. And so he was confirmed by the Senate on Thursday, December 18th. He will be sworn in as the 15th chair of the CFTC, replacing chair, Carolyn Pham, who has already announced her next role at crypto payments firm MoonPay. Interesting.

Anthony Sassano:
[40:30] That rotating door.

David Hoffman:
[40:31] Yeah, rotating door. Yeah. We actually had Mike Selleck on as a podcast guest. He's been on a couple of times two years ago. I had him on when I was kind of just investigating securities law back a couple of years ago. I was just interested in securities law. He has worked as a derivatives and digital assets lawyer. He also worked as the chief counsel for the SEC's crypto task force. And a senior advisor to the SEC team.

David Hoffman:
[40:57] So he's just been around the space. He's been in crypto. He's been in the SEC. Now he's at the CFTC. He also previously clerked for former CFTC chair, Chris Giancarlo. And he's always been known as being relatively innovation friendly on crypto. So definitely a friend that we now have in the CFTC, which definitely feels good. He was confirmed on a 53-43 tally.

David Hoffman:
[41:20] And you might be asking, Anthony, and also listener, what will be on the top of Mike's to-do list when he gets into the CFTC, when he gets into the office? He wants to, first, he's going to focus on crypto market structure and spot oversight. Congress may give the CFTC primary oversight of spot crypto and non-security tokens. Mike wants the CFTC to be ready for this, including staffing up the CFTC on this subject, harmonizing rules and reducing regulatory overlap with the SEC. That would be nice. We definitely ran into those problems over the last four years. Also prediction markets and events contracts. The CFTC is currently under pressure regarding prediction markets due to the high profile litigation and surging retail volume, just the growth of prediction markets. Mike is going to be key in determining how restrictive this regulatory regime becomes on prediction markets. And overall, Mike's enforcement policy is a principles-based, steady hand approach kind of guy, fewer surprise theories, more formal guidance, and adapting customer predictions, market integrity, and anti-fraud to digital assets. So if you want to get a picture of just who Mike is, we'll link in the show notes to two podcasts that we did with him. I'm kind of proud of us here at Bankless Anthony because we found Mike pretty early in his career before he was even anywhere close to getting named CFTC chair. And so you want to know who he is a little bit more. Really friendly guy. There's a few podcasts to listen to if you are interested in that. Any thoughts about Mike?

Anthony Sassano:
[42:42] Yeah, I think this just continues, obviously, the positive trend that we're seeing in the US with regards to crypto after having such a negative trend for a while under the Democrats, obviously, with Gary Gensler and others as well there. And it's kind of funny to me, like I am not an American, like I'm Australian, I'm on the other side of the world, and I'm looking at like the kind of American political landscape from that lens. And not to get too political here, but I think that, you know, I'm really glad to see all of this stuff happening. I'm really glad to see positive crypto stuff happening. But like, I wonder how much, you know, it offsets the negative stuff happening. Like, I feel like the reputation that crypto got in 2025 was that it was just another way for Trump to grift people because he did his own meme coin and like people around him kept doing various things within crypto. And I think this, you know, this kind of positive stuff that's happening offsets that. But yeah, I think that crypto has a really bad kind of reputation at the moment as a branding problem with a lot of people, maybe not institutions, they're kind of warming up to it now. But I guess like just retail, everyday people in general. And I think that's why we saw a lot of kind of crypto just do poorly in 2025 as well, like from a market perspective. So yeah, I'm hopeful that this kind of stuff allows us to innovate more, allows the industry to do a lot more kind of positive things and offset like some of that other stuff that's going on. Because yeah, like everyone that I talk to in my real life about crypto, they know about, you know, because of Trump, like just his grift that he's been doing, especially with the meme coin that he launched.

David Hoffman:
[44:10] It's always the first topic of conversation.

Anthony Sassano:
[44:13] Yeah, and they're very turned off by that, regardless of their politics. Some of these guys like pretty much agree with Trump's politics.

David Hoffman:
[44:19] The conservatives who enjoy Trump and voted for Trump are like, yeah, but that crypto thing is kind of unfortunate.

Anthony Sassano:
[44:24] Exactly, exactly. So like, I really hope that we can fix in 2026 as well, like a lot of crypto's branding problem here. But we'll see. But like, I think it is very positive to see like, you know, obviously this new CFTC chair, same with the SEC chair, they're doing a lot of good things for crypto. So it should offset that. But yeah, I just wish we had like both. I just wish it was good all around, but I guess maybe that's wishful thinking.

David Hoffman:
[44:48] Yeah, yeah. Anyways, I do think I agree with you that 2026 will be a positive year for some of crypto's branding. Just across, you know, There's usually probably a pretty big lag time between when some of the biggest companies are getting into crypto. And they're not pounding their chest about crypto yet because they haven't finished building their products. But overall, I think crypto has this like, retail brand problem that won't really ever change because there's nothing for those types of people to come into crypto because like obviously if we had something for them they would have come into crypto already but that's going to change when some of these big companies big institutions have crypto products and it just kind of becomes accepted and like it'll just slowly transition from like oh yeah this is where retail goes to speculate on meme coins and trump plunge scripts to,

David Hoffman:
[45:39] oh, this is the backbone for Stripe and Western Union has a stable coin. And just like all of these brands that I'm familiar with are legitimizing crypto. And I didn't really think about it, but now crypto is everywhere. And I'm just okay with that now.

Anthony Sassano:
[45:50] Yeah. One of the people I spoke to recently actually said that they're like, oh, I saw that you can like borrow against your kind of crypto now with like JP Morgan or whatever. And he's like, oh, that's huge. And in my head, I'm just like, well, you've been able to borrow against crypto for ages, but you know that's me being the crypto native right yeah exactly so for him and for like the normies as we as we call them as we refer to them um you know they're kind of seeing that as a huge positive signal now because they're like oh okay if you can borrow against it it must be legit then you know jp morgan's behind it sort of thing so yeah i agree with you that there's more legitimacy which should lead to a better kind of reputation for for crypto um especially for people seeing things built on it because a lot of people i talked to the same guy had no idea that you can build things on crypto they just thought it was the assets sorry the more we can educate people that it's more than just the assets the better yeah.

David Hoffman:
[46:38] It's just the assets is an accurate statement for 2017 crypto so you know that there are people who are like eight years behind on crypto fundamentals and foundations is like maybe it is so early you know

Anthony Sassano:
[46:50] Yeah yeah well yeah yeah yes or no i think like it's it's it's funny when you look at it that like that because i think on the asset side, it's, it's, yeah, it's not early.

David Hoffman:
[47:00] It's like a price like that. That's for sure.

Anthony Sassano:
[47:02] Yeah, exactly. But on the tech side, sure. But you know, you could argue that a lot of that kind of stuff has been quote unquote priced into an extent, but yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll see.

David Hoffman:
[47:11] Speaking of getting priced in, let's talk about quantum. So this is a murmurations number two from Nick Carter. He's been publishing on his sub stack. He calls it murmurations. Bitcoin and the quantum problem. He has three pieces about Bitcoin and quantum. The third is yet to come out. I'm eagerly awaiting it. But overall, Nick Carter's been causing a lot of trouble in Bitcoin land because he's arguing that quantum computing is Bitcoin's biggest long term risk. Once quantum is strong enough, Shor's algorithm, a quantum algorithm, could derive private keys from exposed public keys. It's not a today problem, but Nick and others cite doomsday clock-style models putting plausible timelines in the late 2020s to early 2030s. Nick says the urgency is practical.

David Hoffman:
[47:55] Migrating Bitcoin, the project of migrating Bitcoin into a post-quantum state, could take close to a decade, he says. and waiting until the threat is obvious is just simply far too late. The community reaction in the Bitcoin world is very split. Adam Back and other Bitcoin influencers and Bitcoin developers say that they're already doing quiet R&D and reject the urgency framing. Nick and his supporters argue that the ecosystem is complacent. And critics say that Nick is talking his book because his fund invested in a post-quantum transition tooling startup, which I just think is ridiculous because you can't discredit an entire vertical of concern around quantum just because Nick invested in a potential solution to it. Quantum risk is appearing in large financial disclosures, including ETF filings out of BlackRock. And institutional allocators increasingly want clear contingency plans before increasing their Bitcoin exposure. And Nick is trying to sound the alarm saying, hey, no one is solving this problem. We need to solve this problem and we should probably start today. Sazel, what do you think about all this?

Anthony Sassano:
[49:04] I mean, I've been a pretty outspoken kind of critic of Bitcoin, in particular with the kind of security budget issues that they're going to have. Like this is separate to quantum.

David Hoffman:
[49:14] The tech side of Bitcoin, yeah. Yeah.

Anthony Sassano:
[49:15] This is another, I think, like critical issue that they've just buried their hands in the sand over, which I also don't think they're going to be able to fix in any kind of clean way.

Anthony Sassano:
[49:23] But yeah, I kind of, you know, the quantum thing, like I guess like the reason I hadn't focused too much on it was because it did feel like it was very far away. But now with recent advancements, it does seem a lot closer than it was otherwise thought to be. But I think this just speaks to the fact that Bitcoin ossified way too early as a protocol. I think that, yes, they argue that ossification was necessary for Bitcoin to grow, but there is a cap on that growth, I think, because of the fact that you have these risks now. And I consider those two things to be critical risks, the security budget and also the quantum threat here. And I agree with Nick that there's no urgency. I haven't seen any urgency around this. I think it's going to take a long time to do anything if they can even do it. And it also begs the question of who's going to do it? Who's going to build it? Because there's not that many Bitcoin core developers. And it's not like Ethereum where you have hundreds of core developers and researchers working on all this stuff many, many years in advance. In Bitcoin land, it's extremely slow. Development of very simple, basic features like Taproot, for example, they take many years. These aren't like Ethereum upgrades at all. And they have no culture of upgrades either. They have absolutely no culture of hard forks. They have no culture of planning things, of naming upgrades, of doing like hard forks, as I mentioned, like stuff like that. It's just not in their DNA. So I look at this from that perspective and I'm like, can they actually fix it? Or will they just like go down with the ship? Because there's also going to be a lot of Bitcoiners who are like, well, this isn't even a risk. This is not something that we should be concerned about.

David Hoffman:
[50:51] It's not even real. It's not even a real risk.

Anthony Sassano:
[50:53] Exactly. Just like they do with the security budget stuff. It's not a real thing. And by the time maybe they realize it is a real thing, it's probably way too close to when this thing will actually materialize as a threat and they don't have enough time to defend against it. So I have very little faith that they're going to be able to fix this. And this has been a huge thing for me for many, many years now. And why I haven't actually invested in BTC or held any for a very long time, why I haven't spent any time there is because I do think that Bitcoin long-term is not going to survive. And I think Ethereum will because Ethereum is tackling this in a really pragmatic way. Vitalik's been talking about quantum threats for like a decade now, ever since like the earliest days. And we have real ways to mitigate this in Ethereum because we have that culture of shipping and fixing things and doing hard forks and no one's against it. We don't have all this concern around it or this concern trolling, if you will. So yeah, I'm very, very, very pessimistic on Bitcoin's future, not just from quantum, but also the security budget issues, which I actually think are harder to fix because security budget issue fix is breaking the 21 million cap, which is like the thing you don't do.

David Hoffman:
[51:59] Yeah. I think people, to me, the security budget problem is a more of a valid debate than the quantum problem where people can kind of go back and forth and a Bitcoiner who says the Bitcoin security budget isn't a problem, I could see a timeline where ultimately Bitcoin just turns into a proof of authority of Binance, Coinbase, and like the next biggest exchange. And it's really those exchange operators that ultimately control Bitcoin. Bitcoin blockchain. And that's kind of just what the logical conclusion of the security budget debate is. It just turns into who controls the exchanges. There's like more on that on like separate threads. And then somebody who's a Bitcoin who would say, yeah, and I was totally right. The security budget was never a concern.

David Hoffman:
[52:43] And they would be considered to be right. Whereas this is different with quantum, where I think if you agree that quantum is going to actually turn into a full production scale computer that will be able to do the things that people say that it does, which is like a lot of people's base case, then Bitcoin does truly like divide by zero. It does actually collapse. It's not a like, there's a potential way out that we don't really see like the security budget. It is truly like if Bitcoin does nothing, Bitcoin will break. The Satoshi coins will be stolen by likely either China or the United States or whoever's got the biggest quantum computer inside of those respective economies. So one of those two countries is very likely going to hold those Bitcoins, a massive amount of Bitcoins, over a million Bitcoins. And then as the quantum computer gets even more powerful, they'll be able to derive the private key of a Bitcoin transaction before it actually lands in the blockchain. And so no one will even be able to make Bitcoin transactions if they do nothing. And so for this, the Bitcoin security budget to me is like possible to debate, even though I know you think you know the answer and other people think they know the answer.

David Hoffman:
[53:54] To me, this one is not possible to debate. Like, the Bitcoin system, the Bitcoin has to solve this problem. It has to transition to a post-quantum state. And I think you're going to slowly, over the next four years, over the rest of this decade, you're going to slowly see Bitcoin be priced accordingly to its progress against quantum.

Anthony Sassano:
[54:15] Yeah, I think so. And I think, yeah, like when it comes to the consequences of this, like as you said, like, you know, divide by zero Bitcoin kind of breaks and kind of goes to shit for lack of a better term. Yeah, the consequence of this is the BTC price literally like not going to zero maybe, but like collapsing a lot. While the rest of the market may collapse along with it in the short term, because that's just what happens.

David Hoffman:
[54:38] In the short term.

Anthony Sassano:
[54:39] But then once Bitcoin, like maybe if we talk about the worst case scenario where Bitcoin literally just dies and that's it, like it's done, eventually the rest of crypto will survive that. Like, you know, prices may go up and stuff like that. But yeah, I think at the same time, like it's not a good outcome for all of crypto either. Like I don't think that Ethereum needs Bitcoin.

David Hoffman:
[54:57] It's not the happening path, that's for sure.

Anthony Sassano:
[54:59] No, no. And I don't think Ethereum needs Bitcoin to survive for Ethereum to survive and thrive. But if Bitcoin was to collapse and literally die, that's not going to be good for Ethereum. At least in the short term, right? It's not going to be good for the ETH price. Ethereum, the network will be completely unaffected by this as long as we fix quantum, which I have confidence that we will. We will make Ethereum quantum resistant, but yeah, it won't have a direct effect, but yeah, it will. The prices and everything will collapse like they've never had before. But at the same time, there is a realistic path where it just, as you said, it keeps getting priced in over time. So when that actually does eventually happen, it doesn't really cause much fanfare because everyone's already like, well, Bitcoin died years ago. We already dealt with that. That's the consensus now where we're doing this other stuff. So it's kind of funny to think about because it's been 15 years plus of Bitcoin dominance, right? Where Bitcoin's dominated everything. But you can imagine in 10 years or five years, yeah, we're in a post-Bitcoin world where it's just gone. It's just not a thing anymore. And we continue on with Ethereum and other protocols.

David Hoffman:
[56:01] It does just seem crazy to say that if Bitcoin does nothing, then it will literally fail as a project because there has been, you know, decades and billions of dollars of people raising money saying, you know, Bitcoin's broken. I'm here to fix it. But to actually like and I have almost never really said Bitcoin is like fundamentally broken except for the security budget prior to this.

David Hoffman:
[56:24] But it's crazy to say that I think Bitcoin, if it does nothing, will actually fail as a project and actually completely believe that if it does nothing, if it continues to do nothing. And you and I, Anthony, we've been fighting with the Bitcoin ecosystem, the Bitcoin community just because of our ideological differences between Ethereum and Bitcoin for a decade now. And let me tell you, they are some of the most hardheaded, tribalistic, ideological group of people who just fundamentally think that Bitcoin is capital G good. And having somebody like Nick Carter enter the arena and be like, yo, guys, I'm going to sound the siren. These guys are trained to try and get everyone else to think that there's nothing wrong with Bitcoin. That is the culture. There's nothing wrong with Bitcoin. Anyone who's funding is trying to sell you something. That's why they critiqued Nick Carter for investing in a post-quantum tooling startup. All this kind of stuff. And so the Bitcoin community, I think, is going to be an encumbrance in Bitcoin itself actually making it over the hurdle of becoming post-quantum.

Anthony Sassano:
[57:33] Yeah. And it's just, it's like a natural kind of, I guess, like mechanism for anyone really, not just the kind of hardcore Bitcoiners, they do take it to the extreme, but like anyone will have that natural mechanism of when something you care about is being kind of attacked, you're naturally going to be defensive about that. You're right. And I mean, we do it, like I do it, especially with Ethereum.

David Hoffman:
[57:52] We totally do it with Ethereum. Yeah.

Anthony Sassano:
[57:53] We do it. I like to think I'm a bit more practical than the Bitcoin maxis that go on the hardcore side of things. I'm a little bit more reasonable, but yeah, I do it as well. And I do it with not just Ethereum, just with a lot of things that I care about. And that's just a natural human thing. But yeah, where it becomes a problem is where it goes to the extreme end, where you literally don't admit that there's any issue at all. You're not even open to the idea that there could be an issue with the holy Bitcoin, right? It basically takes on like a religion. It basically becomes a religion or a cult where if you dare question anything, like you're wrong and we need to like shun you and like expel you from our ecosystem because you're bad for us. You're bad for the things that we care about. And it doesn't even enter their consciousness to think that this could be something that's real. It's straight away, as you said, automatic kind of denial, denial, denial of this being an issue. And then, yeah, you eventually convince yourself that it's not an issue either by doing that. If you keep telling yourself that it's not an issue, then it's not.

David Hoffman:
[58:49] You don't even open to yourself. Yeah.

Anthony Sassano:
[58:51] You just kind of brainwash yourself, right? So, yeah. And you spoke about the craziness about how we're even talking about the possibility of Bitcoin collapsing. I wonder what the Romans felt like if someone was to come along to them in ancient Rome and said to them, one day your beautiful and awesome kind of city is going to collapse and it's going to be just tourists that care about it in a thousand years, a few thousand years. That would call you crazy as well, right? That would say that you were insane and no one at the time would imagine that this great and beautiful thing that everyone thought was going to last forever would collapse. And then it did. And the world moves on, of course, and things kind of get birthed out of that. So I think the same could be true here, where the thing that everyone thinks isn't going to collapse, it happens. But then that's it. It's done. We move on. Just like with Terra. Terra is a crypto example where so many people were convinced that Terra was never going to crash. It was going to change the world. It's going to do everything. And then it happened. And yeah, it was really bad for a little while, but then we came out of that and we've matured past that. And no one even talks about Terra anymore. And let's use it as an example of what not to do. So yeah, if you look at it from that perspective, I think that while it's really bad, it's not existential. It's not like all of crypto would die. I think crypto would still be fine. It would be a lot of pain before we were fine, though.

David Hoffman:
[1:00:07] Yeah, I'm in the camp that that is a short-term pain that we would collectively feel as an industry. Maybe I'm being naive and now it would actually be a medium-term thing too, short to medium-term. But ultimately, there will be all the other blockchains that update themselves to be a post-quantum blockchain. And to me, as somebody who has my money in Ether, I'm very glad that Quantum has been on the Ethereum roadmap since day one. And that would inspire at some point in time some investor confidence that these

David Hoffman:
[1:00:37] ecosystems can get ahead of the problem and adapt when they need to adapt. Anthony, that's all the news that we have for today. Give me something that you are excited about for 2026. What are you looking forward to this year?

Anthony Sassano:
[1:00:50] Oh, I'm just going to be like full nerd here and say that I'm looking forward to Glamsterdam, which is the next Ethereum network upgrade. It is going to be the biggest upgrade. Like every upgrade that we do now just seems to be getting bigger and bigger. But Glamsterdam is massive. Like it's like, I think going to be almost double the size of Fusaka if everything that is kind of considered for inclusion goes in to that. So I'm most excited about that on the tech side. But as we discussed at the start on the broader kind of general side of things, I'm excited for crypto to keep maturing. I'm excited for these TradFi institutions to keep coming in and taking advantage of the technology that we've built and for us to keep obviously upgrading that technology for them as well. And I'm excited to hopefully have a better year asset price-wise as well. I don't know. It feels like it should be a bullish year, but I'm always bullish. So take that with a grain of salt. But yeah, that's what I'm excited about.

David Hoffman:
[1:01:43] And I'm excited to watch that all happen with you. Anthony, you and I have been in crypto for so long, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. And so I'm sure to ask you your 2026 reflections and 2027 predictions in about a year, but also many, many times in between now and then. Anthony, thank you for coming in and stepping in for Ryan on the Bankless Friday Weekly Rollup.

Anthony Sassano:
[1:02:02] Thanks for having me.

David Hoffman:
[1:02:04] Cheers, Bankless Nation. You guys know what to do. Crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in, but nonetheless, we are headed west. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you are with us on the bankless journey. Congrats on 2026. Let's have a good year together.

Anthony Sassano:
[1:02:16] Cheers.