ROLLUP: Trump Eyes Greenland | Davos Goes Crypto | NYSE Goes Onchain | Quantum Spooks Bitcoin | Farcaster + Lens Acquired

TRANSCRIPT

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:03] It is the fourth week of january it's time for the bankless weekly roll-up uh

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:07] david trump wants to take over greenland is.

David Hoffman:
[0:10] That good for our bags trump land no trump land

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:13] Yeah uh we'll talk about the market's reaction to this also all eyes on davos this week there's a couple themes there it was maybe trump versus the world

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:21] but also crypto versus stratify there was an appearance by crypto folks at the World Economic Forum. Brian Armstrong was there. Jeremy Allaire was there. CZ was there.

David Hoffman:
[0:31] Kind of a who's who of crypto.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:33] Yeah, it is new to have crypto people on the same platform as all the TradFi central bankers.

David Hoffman:
[0:37] Also, the New York Stock Exchange has announced their tokenization platform using a lot of our words to talk about their new tech product, their new trading platform.

David Hoffman:
[0:48] We're going to talk about it, if it's good or bad for the rest of crypto. Is this another tempo or is this people actually leveraging our blockchain? We're going to talk about that. Also, not the greatest week for decentralized social platforms. Both Farcaster and Lens kind of throwing in the towel, getting acquired by apps inside of their own ecosystem.

David Hoffman:
[1:07] Interesting. Did decentralized social fail? We're going to talk about that. And also a very large institutional investor at Jeffries, don't know what Jeffries is, Ryan's going to tell me what it is, says he's selling Bitcoin because of quantum. And he's not the only one. There is starting to be a trend of the market not liking Bitcoin because of the existential risk of quantum.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:27] We also have an update on the Clarity Act, of course, and an update on the next Fed chair. Is he going to be crypto friendly?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:34] Before we get to all of that, we got to thank our friends and sponsors over at David. Let's talk about markets and why they're down on the week. At least one explanation for why they're down. And that's because Trump wants to invade Greenland. At least it seems like.

David Hoffman:
[1:50] How many people live in Greenland? How many people live in Greenland?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:53] Right. It's like, isn't it something like 50,000? It's not that many. something like this.

David Hoffman:
[1:57] How many people live in Greenland 56 to 57,000 people probably would be pretty easy to invade actually

Ryan Sean Adams:
[2:03] It's not about the people though it's about the resources I guess for Trump so what went on here.

David Hoffman:
[2:10] Okay, so this started a while ago, and this was one of many crazy things that Trump just murmured, and you can't give credit to all of them. And so this is one that actually was murmured a while ago and now has, in this last week or two weeks, has become actually a significant topic.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[2:26] Wait, is this a real tweet? Is this a real thing from the Oval Office of the White House?

David Hoffman:
[2:29] This was a real tweet from Donald Trump's Truth Social, which is a map of the United States and Canada and Greenland and also Venezuela, all with the American flag on it. So, like, kind of implying that, like, this is our domain. Like, we are going to take all of these things.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[2:47] Yeah, kind of implying that they all belong to America.

David Hoffman:
[2:50] Yeah, because, like, six months ago, there were huge protests in Canada about how Canada doesn't want Trump to take over Canada.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[2:57] They definitely don't. I mean, I have Canadian relatives. They definitely don't want this.

David Hoffman:
[3:01] Of course they don't. Of course they don't. But Trump was like, yeah, we're going to take Canada, and it's going to become the 51st state. Anyways, now we're talking about Greenland. And so Greenland, last week and this week, Donald Trump has started to publicly and privately push for the United States to acquire Greenland, framing it as a strategic necessity, mainly just because as the crow flies, a straight line between Moscow and the United States in New York, Washington, D.C., flies straight over Greenland. So kind of in the same way that, like, Russia found its way into Cuba to, like, set itself up very close to the United States, that's kind of how they're positioning Greenland. It's like, you know, this is a strategic buffer between us and Russia. So for the United States national defense, for our strategic operations across the globe, we need to acquire Greenland.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[3:52] Okay.

David Hoffman:
[3:53] Greenland is... Owned by Denmark, which is like a weird,

Ryan Sean Adams:
[3:57] Weird thing. Aren't they like a commonwealth of Denmark?

David Hoffman:
[3:59] Something like this. They have their own flag. They have their own like rules, but something to do with Denmark. Sure. So Denmark and Greenland's government flatly rejected the idea saying Greenland is not for sale and also announced that they are moving their military into Greenland. And so they are, they are actually actively moving troops into Greenland in coordination with other members of the EU.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[4:25] Come and take it.

David Hoffman:
[4:26] The EU is like, well, we are going to take this very seriously. We are going to move our military into Greenland. Crazy, bro. Trump states that anything less than U.S. Control of Greenland is unacceptable, says that the island is strategically essential for the United States' defense against Russia and China. And then also during the WEF conference, which we're going to talk about this week at Davos, says that the U.S. Saved Greenland during World War II and shouldn't give it back, leading to one of the most unhinged Donald Trump clips that I have ever seen.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[4:59] Are we playing the clip?

David Hoffman:
[5:01] Let's play the clip. Let's play the clip. Okay.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[5:02] We saw this in World War II when Denmark fell to Germany after just six hours of fighting and was totally unable to defend either itself or Greenland. So the United States was then compelled. We did it. We felt an obligation to do it, to send our own forces to hold the Greenland territory. And hold it, we did, at great cost and expense. They didn't have a chance of getting on it, and they tried. Denmark knows that. We literally set up bases on Greenland for Denmark. We fought for Denmark. He goes on like that. I'm just going to cut that off. He goes on. He says, without us right now, you'd all be speaking German and a little Japanese, perhaps. Wow. Talk about, I mean, that was a long time ago. Talk about some stolen valor there. I mean, like. Right. Yeah. Okay.

David Hoffman:
[5:58] This is something I learned this week. Did you know, Ryan, that we already have, in effect, today, which continues today, the 1951 Greenland Defense Agreement between the United States and Denmark establishing a Cold war pact allowing the united states broad military access to greenland for nato defense we already have what we what he says we want from it okay

Ryan Sean Adams:
[6:21] Who knows it's so hard to know what's going on but there was some escalation right you mentioned some nato forces on on greenland being deployed and then trump said what if you guys do anything here if you don't let me take greenland right i'm tariff you? Was it 10% tariff to 25% tariff?

David Hoffman:
[6:39] 10% tariff on several EU countries with the talk of escalating it to 25% later in the year. This is when the market sold off. I don't know if you noticed your bags, Ryan, but they're not as great this week as they were last week. We are saying that this is- Absorbing that? Yeah. Well, it's apparently because of the tariffs is why we're saying it happened. Also, happy roughly one year anniversary of Independence Day when we were doing the tariff scare about a year ago. I don't know when that was, but it's about a year ago.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[7:07] Oh, that was like April, wasn't it?

David Hoffman:
[7:09] Was that April?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[7:10] Yeah, I think it was April. I think it was April. Okay.

David Hoffman:
[7:12] Well, the Q1 last year was marked by like growing tariff murmurings.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[7:17] And definitely the chaos has been pretty consistent for the last year or so. But as I understand it, as of now, it does seem like there is a Trump-Greenland deal that has emerged. So the tariffs are now off the table. This deal now involves small pockets of land for the U.S., the U.S. Involved in Greenland's mineral rights, so the U.S. gets some mineral rights, indefinite timeframe designed to block Russian influence in Greenland. The U.S. puts a golden dome over everything and some infrastructure investment. Again, this is maybe Trump saying, okay, that's what I want, at least right now. And I ordered the deal and I created this deal. Now America gets Greenland.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[8:01] It's not that much different than what we already had.

David Hoffman:
[8:05] Yeah. And my attitude is like, we already know who Trump is. So maybe it's naive to even say this but like wasn't there more constructive ways of getting here like did we really have to do the tempest in the teapot strategy couldn't we have gone to denmark and be like hi denmark we would like to expand the scope of our alliance yeah let's work together and get me what what we want here's what we want what can we get you but no we had to be like we're going to invade you guys it's a stylistic preference david it's

Ryan Sean Adams:
[8:36] Uh just like chaos as a strategy um let's look at poly market, which is giving us some insight here. So, will Trump acquire Greenland before 2027 is the prompt. And now it's a 13% chance. So, that's down from 20 earlier this week. So, if you'd like to trade this market, you certainly can. The other market is, will the U.S. acquire part of Greenland by 2026? So, the first poly market is all.

David Hoffman:
[8:59] Part of Greenland. There are two different markets. One is all of Greenland. And then the second market is, will the United States acquire part of Greenland? Which It got up to 35% this week, down to 24% right now. But 24% where we just acquire part of Greenland, how would we do that? Would like, I don't know. I mean, remember in your history books,

Ryan Sean Adams:
[9:19] The Louisiana Purchase, you know? Oh, sure, sure, sure.

David Hoffman:
[9:22] Yeah, but those became like states and stuff. But like, what would it be? Would it be like Puerto Rico?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[9:29] I don't like a protectorate type thing, or would it become a state? I'm not sure.

David Hoffman:
[9:33] 56,000 people is fewer people than any state that we have.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[9:37] Also, who do you buy it from? Also, what about the sovereignty of the Greenlanders? Like, those 50,000 people should get to vote for this.

David Hoffman:
[9:45] Right? I don't know too many Greenlanders, Ryan. I'm guessing they don't really want to become part of the United States.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[9:51] I don't know. There's some protest clips. It's hard to know. Maybe we should do a poll. But anyway, so this seems to be resolved and abated, at least as of now. But this was the fallout in markets. This is kind of, I would call this more continuation of the capital flight, or somewhat mild capital flight, but like you saw it on the week, which is the dollar goes down, equities go down, primarily the U.S. Stock market, yields on bonds go up, U.S. bonds go up, and gold goes up. Silver, of course, goes up even more. And someone called this on Twitter, the capital outflow doom loop. And here's kind of what they mean, David. I was looking at some of the yields on the 10-year and what's interesting about this is, you remember in September, 2024, we started, the Fed started reducing rates, right? So it was, I don't know, five and a half, something like that. And then we've been reducing rates since September of 2024.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[10:49] While that was happening, the yield on the 10-year has actually increased. So again, the rates that the Fed decreases is kind of the treasury yield, right? It's the short-term rates. But the 10-year rates, which is like some kind of confidence of will America pay its debts? You know, what will inflation look like? That's been rising. So we've got higher 10-year rates than we started with. And Joe Wiesenthal, right? So we're reducing rates on the short end, but the 10-year rate, that's market controlled. That's do people want to buy our 10-year bonds, yes or no? And if no, then you have to give them higher yield. That's actually gone up. So this affects 10-year prices. This affects mortgage prices too.

David Hoffman:
[11:37] This is Joe Weisenthal. Isn't this an inverted yield curve? Isn't that what that means?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[11:42] Yeah, I don't know what technically that means, But it just means that capital is fleeing the 10-year at the same time we're lowering rates. And so this is not good for 30-year yield and mortgage rates.

David Hoffman:
[11:54] Yes. Not good for mortgage rates. The market is signaling that in the longer term, the dollar is going to be even less dominant than in the short term is how I read that.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[12:04] Yeah. You have to pay investors more to hold your 10-year bonds, which is kind of some mild capital flight. And that's all going to the debasement trade. But how did our debasement crypto assets hold up on the week? What's Bitcoin's price on the week?

David Hoffman:
[12:17] You don't want to know about that. Down 7.5% on the week, $89,400. Ether also not great, down 11% to $2,950, so we're below $3,000 on the mark. And this has just kind of been the story of just like, People like gold. And of all of the chaos and fear and uncertainty in the market about what this new future global status quo, global equilibrium is, people are going to gold, not crypto.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[12:47] You know, somehow, though, Michael Saylor found about $2 billion to go buy some Bitcoin. So he actually made one of the biggest buys, the fourth largest buys in history for strategy. 0.11% of all Bitcoin supply. He purchased that last week. So he is still bullish. He's waiting for his moment.

David Hoffman:
[13:06] So still some hope there. Did you listen to Michael Saylor on our friend Alex Thorne's podcast? I didn't.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[13:13] That was in my queue, but I never got around to it.

David Hoffman:
[13:14] I don't know if he went down just to interview Saylor, but maybe he did. He flew down to Saylor's home and interviewed him in Saylor's home.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[13:21] Okay.

David Hoffman:
[13:22] Which is kind of cool. Really interesting episode about how

Ryan Sean Adams:
[13:26] Saylor- He really puts in the work as a podcast. He does. Not like Bankless.

David Hoffman:
[13:29] Not us. We stay in the comfort of our own homes. But like really, it's like this whole idea, Sailor's whole idea is like, what does strategy do? Is it like unlocks this concept of digital credit? And that's what the Michael strategy does. It's like it builds strategy. You always say that. It's this digital credit facility. I thought it was a pretty interesting way to like frame it. I also think it's a complete narrative, which is not incorrect, but he's like creating an idea and selling that idea. Thank you.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[14:04] Bitcoin, I hate to break it to you, but Bitcoin is also just a narrative. It's narratives on narratives. It's narratives all the way down. All right, Yuval. So total crypto market cap, we're hanging at $3 trillion, $3.11 trillion. Let's talk about Davos because I think there was two interesting things that really played out, at least to me, that stuck out.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[14:25] One is Trump versus the world. Let's get the Trump side of things. This is Howard Lutnick addressing Davos and the international community. Here's what he had to say. We are here to make a very clear point.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[14:40] Globalization has failed the West and the United States of America. It's a failed policy. It is what the WEF has stood for, which is export, offshore, far shore, find the cheapest labor in the world, and the world is a better place for it. The fact is it has left America behind. It has left the American workers behind. And what we are here to say is that America first is a different model, one that we encourage other countries to consider, which is that our workers come first. We can have policies that impact our workers. Sovereignty is your borders. You're entitled to have borders. You shouldn't offshore your medicine. You shouldn't offshore your semiconductors. You shouldn't offshore your entire industrial base and have it be hollowed out beneath you. You should not be dependent for that which is fundamental to your sovereignty.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[15:45] He goes on like this for a while, David, but the message that the Trump administration, all the representatives Trump himself brought to Davos, the World Economic Forum, was like globalization, that era is over, America first, and by the way, all you other countries, you should do the same thing. What's really interesting about this, David, is this is such a departure from, I think, U.S. policy over the last 80 years or so.

David Hoffman:
[16:12] But it's not a departure from what Trump has been saying from the get-go.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[16:16] No, but now it's just being said in this type of form. And it's being said with the backing of policy like tariffs and like we're coming after Greenland and all of these other things that accompany it. But it's just kind of marking the end of the rules-based international order that the U.S. set up in the first place. I mean, the U.S. was very pro-globalization and has been. That's been a strategy. In fact, the Indian foreign secretary commented on this speech, the U.S. was the main force behind globalization. It was made possible in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Globalization was a product of the belief in the end of history in U.S. circles. Remember that book, Fugiyama book, The End of History, which is basically liberalism, globalism, international order. Like the rest of the world's going like, hey, didn't you guys set this whole system up? And now you're saying- You did this.

David Hoffman:
[17:10] You did this to yourselves.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[17:11] Yeah, you did this to yourself. And also, I thought it was a good deal for the US. There was also, on the other side of this, David, another speech that got some play. I won't play the full speech, but this is actually Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. And he basically said the same thing, that he said, wake up, the rules-based order is broken. He said, there's a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction in the beginning of a harsh reality, a reality that where great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage. If we're not on the table, we're on the menu. So stop invoking rules-based international order as though it still functions as advertised. Call it what it is. Nostalgia is not a strategy. He's basically saying middle countries, everyone who's not in the U.S., like wake up. Americans are doing something different now. Don't live in that fiction. The world has changed.

David Hoffman:
[18:03] Yeah. We have done a bunch of episodes in the past a while ago about the Triffin dilemma. And the Triffin dilemma being the world reserve currency being the United States dollar has this trap where it hollows out the middle crass, hollows out the manufacturing base. And what do we get from that? Well, we get to print free money, but we don't have any domestic manufacturing that goes and is exported to China. The weaknesses of that show up during COVID, when we don't have any masks, and all of our supply chains are realized that it's completely dependent on foreign powers. And then Trump gets elected based off of that. All of these swing states, Pennsylvania, all the manufacturing belt, all swing from blue to red elect trump and then trump does all of this stuff and then gold pumps then they're like hindsight 2020 like kind of makes a lot of sense there was a meme that i saw this week that i kind of think summarizes this like you you everything you said was very smart ryan here's the um explain it like i use crayons uh meme uh so for those listening it is a map of the world and there are three squares drawn on different regions of the world the americas have you heard of the thing that's been coined recently called the Don Rowe Doctrine

Ryan Sean Adams:
[19:15] Yeah.

David Hoffman:
[19:16] That Monroe Doctrine was basically saying the Western Hemisphere is our U.S. Don't touch it. Like that's that's our it's our manifest destiny to control that. Yeah. So being updated from the Monroe Doctrine to the Don Road Doctrine because of Donald Trump. So we have the Americas, you know, draw a big crayon circle around the Americas. That's Donald Trump land. Then you have the upper quadrant of like Russia and Ukraine and Eastern Europe, and that's Mr. Putin's. And then you have like Africa and China and Australia and Malaysia. That is Xi Jinping's. And these are the three powers. And this is the world. And this is how the world operates. And, you know, this is the three geographic domains and get in line under this new world order. Is that kind of aligned with what you're saying?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[20:00] Yeah, I think that's basically like rather than rules-based international order, It's back to power, back to power brokers. And this is like Mark Carney was acknowledging this. Like the thing about this map that you're drawing is just like Europe is not in some of the middle middling countries like a Canada or like even in India. Let's talk about in India. They have alternatives as well. Right. And they they are actors in and of themselves. And they can they can make maneuvers based on this type of a chop up of the world. And I expect them to in the future. But what this all means is just like end of an era. And what does that mean for the dollar, for treasury, Griffin dilemma that you mentioned? I think investors are going to have to take all of these things into account moving forward.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[20:44] One other thing that I noticed from Davos, which was fascinating, was crypto people, okay, like from the industry. The first time ever, maybe they were there in pockets before, but the first time ever, they had a seat at the World Economic Forum. They were a force.

David Hoffman:
[21:00] Crypto people were a force at Davos this year.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[21:03] With the big boys. So Jeremy Allaire was there. We had CZ was actually there, which is like so striking to me because like 18 months ago, CZ was in a U.S. prison. And now he's at Davos.

David Hoffman:
[21:15] And he got pardoned. He got pardoned.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[21:17] But this was a really interesting exchange between Brian Armstrong and a French central banker. I'm just going to play this.

David Hoffman:
[21:24] I trust more independent central banks with a democratic mandate than private issuers of Bitcoin, which have a very useful role.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[21:34] Bitcoin is a decentralized protocol. There's actually no issuer of it. So that's in the sense that central banks have independence. Bitcoin is even more independent. There's no country or company or individual who controls it in the world. And so anyway, I think it's a healthy competition because if people can decide which one they trust more. And I think it's actually the greatest accountability mechanism on deficit spending. I love that. I love that exchange. There is now pushback at the World Economic Forum on central bankers just getting the ability to say whatever they'd like. There's now pushback from people in crypto who are like, well, you guys don't run the world.

David Hoffman:
[22:16] I think why the crypto industry, this clip just rocketed around the crypto industry on Twitter these days. And I think why everyone appreciated it was that, you know, Brian isn't being a zealot. He's not being like ridiculous. He's not being a crypto bro. He's just saying, you know. Matter of fact. You are correct, Mr. Banker, in that Bitcoin might just be irrelevant so long as all you central bankers are responsible with your monetary policy. And he didn't even have to say the between the lines of like, No one thinks bankers, central bankers are responsible with their monetary policy. No one thinks that. No one thinks that.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[22:50] That's great. And you know who also sort of had cryptos back as well is this guy, Mr. Fink, Mr. Larry Fink. This is his comment on tokenization. That's our guy. He's very bullish. Let me play him. I think the movement towards tokenization, decimalization is necessary. It's ironic that we see two emerging countries leading the world in decimals and the tokenization and digitization of their currency. That's Brazil and India. I think we need to move very rapidly to doing that. We would be reducing fees. We would do more democratization by reducing more fees if we had all investments on a tokenized platform that you can move from a tokenized money market fund to equities and bonds and back and forth. We have one common blockchain. We could reduce corruption. So I would argue that, yes, we have more dependencies on maybe one blockchain, which we could all talk about. But that being said, the activities are probably processed and more secure than ever. So there he is. Stick it up for tokenization. Now, there were a lot of Ethereum people who picked up on that one single blockchain.

David Hoffman:
[24:06] That's what perked up in my brain. I was like, it wouldn't be nice if you did have dependencies on one single blockchain to have a blockchain that hasn't gone down in over 10 years.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[24:15] What blockchain is he talking about? Or should we take him more figuratively on that? Was he just saying the blockchain space? Or was he talking about Ethereum?

David Hoffman:
[24:24] When you say dependencies on one single blockchain, You're no longer talking about blockchain, the idea or blockchain, the technology. You're talking about the blockchain that could actually invoke that sort of question.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[24:38] I think so, too. That's how I want to interpret Larry Fink. Can we talk about decimalization.

David Hoffman:
[24:44] Please? I've never heard that word before. I love it.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[24:48] No, he had to translate that. We'll do an entire episode on decimalization if we can try to understand it. One last news from Davos, of course, is Trump mentioned that he was really close to picking the next Fed chair. And the person that is rising in the ranks, 45% of Polymarket, is a guy by the name of Kevin Warsh.

David Hoffman:
[25:06] Kevin Warsh.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[25:07] You don't have to know everything.

David Hoffman:
[25:09] It used to be Kevin Hassett, but now being replaced by Kevin Warsh. So either way, Kevin's going to win this week.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[25:14] Yeah, Kevin Hassett's down to 6% though, David. So like Kevin Warsh has really surpassed him. The big question that every listener has is like, what's his status on crypto? What does he think about crypto?

David Hoffman:
[25:24] Who is this guy?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[25:25] Never heard of this guy before. He hasn't said too much. He's like kind of a fan of stable coins a little bit. He said that crypto is not really money, but something interesting. All right. he was an investor in the algorithmic stablecoin basis. Do you remember that?

David Hoffman:
[25:41] I do remember that. You know why I remember that? Because I remember that being the main inspiration for Do Kwon's pre-Terra Luna experiment. This is a fun fact that maybe listeners don't know about. Before Do Kwon did Terra Luna, he did another algorithmic stablecoin experiment.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[25:59] Not basis, though.

David Hoffman:
[26:00] Not basis. I think it did start with a B. Yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[26:04] It was a derivative. It was a crappier derivative.

David Hoffman:
[26:07] It was a crappier derivative. And it's kind of where he got the information to be inspired to do Terra Luna.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[26:13] Yeah. So I wonder what Warsh thinks about that, having been an investor in Algo City.

David Hoffman:
[26:19] I don't think he thinks about that. Also Bitwise. He also did invest in Bitwise.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[26:22] Angel investor in Bitwise. That's smart. 2021.

David Hoffman:
[26:25] In B-named things. Yeah. That's an acceptable portfolio.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[26:29] So much more to talk about. The New York Stock Exchange announcing their tokenization platform. Is that good for us? Do our dreams come true? Or is this going to co-op DeFi? Also, on-chain social thrown in the towel. But Vitalik wants to double down.

David Hoffman:
[26:42] Vitalik's like, let's do it again.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[26:45] All this and more. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

David Hoffman:
[26:49] The New York Stock Exchange launching a tokenization platform from their press release, saying the New York Stock Exchange announced its development of a platform for trading and on-chain settlement of tokenized securities for which it will seek regulatory approval. The new digital platform will enable tokenized trading experiences, including 24-7 operations, instant settlement, orders sized in dollar amounts. I think that means as opposed to like share amounts. You could just say, I want $1,000 fractional stocks. Fractional stocks, yeah. And also stablecoin-based funding. Pretty cool. This design combines the NYSE's matching engine, which is like their technology, their IP basically, with blockchain-based post-trade systems, including the capability for multiple chains for settlement and custody.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[27:35] Interesting.

David Hoffman:
[27:36] I think that could only mean public blockchains that have to be smart contracts.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[27:41] It's got to be. So you're saying all of this is on, is it going to be on public blockchains, you think? We don't know yet.

David Hoffman:
[27:47] What I'm seeing is it is applying its proprietary matching engine to ingest tokenized things, tokenized assets from public blockchains. And I think you like deposit it with the NYSE and then you can trade those things on using their matching engine. The platform will power a new NYSE venue that supports trading of tokenized shares fungible with traditionally issued securities, as well as tokens natively issued as digital securities. Tokenized shareholders will participate in traditional shareholder dividends and governance rights. The venue is designed to align with established principles for infrastructure and with distribution via non-discriminatory access to all qualified broker-dealers. So it's kind of a meld of just like, hey, the trad world can now interoperate with the blockchain world via this brand new trading venue.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[28:39] I think it's pretty interesting, right? And just some context, the New York Stock Exchange, over 40 trillion in assets. That's the AUM.

David Hoffman:
[28:46] Oh, it's the biggest stock exchange ever.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[28:48] Oh, yeah. Yes. And it's like, I mean.

David Hoffman:
[28:50] Compare that to crypto. NASDAQ is like a second place, a healthy second place, but still not close.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[28:54] Right. Compare that to, say, Ethereum, assets under management, if you will, or TVL, right? Ethereum, it's about 90x Ethereum. Okay, so it's like really big. Also, one question is sort of what's different versus this than something like the NASDAQ. So the NASDAQ, we talked about this in the roll-up, which is another major exchange. They were talking about tokenization. What's different here is, this is Simon Taylor, maybe I'll comment. Everyone else is building infrastructure to tokenize existing assets. Like, remember the news of the DTCC? They tokenized existing custody securities, State Street News. They were tokenizing existing money market funds and ETS. And the NASDAQ too. They were tokenizing trading alongside of like traditional for existing tokenization. But the New York Stock Exchange and what they're announcing, they're building a new way to bring equities on chain and also a venue to trade them. Okay, so they're doing a whole separate blockchain thing that is instant settlement, 24-7, fractionalized equities,

Ryan Sean Adams:
[30:00] It's a bit, it's a bigger step than anything that's been announced by the NASDAQ or the DTCC. It's bigger in scope and it's kind of cool. I mean, a big question though is, does this kill DeFi? I thought that was what we were doing.

David Hoffman:
[30:17] Yeah, this feels very similar to like Tempo, where it's like, hey, fantastic blockchain technology and tokenization technology you guys have over there. It would be a shame if we just took all of that and used it for ourselves and none of the value of all that technology actually flowed into public blockchains. Is that kind of the question?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[30:35] Yeah, that's sort of Jeff Dorman's theory here. I'll read out this tweet. So he says this, crypto really is in an existential crisis right now. Everything we thought would happen on blockchain is now happening, but little if any of the value accrues to any stocks or tokens in our ecosystem. That protocol thesis is long dead. He goes on to say you have Bitcoin has nothing to do with any of this blockchain growth engine stuff and the real world assets. And then he just thinks that only a handful full of DeFi tokens will win, maybe stocks like Galaxy. And basically, TradFi is going to co-opt all of our cool stuff and they're going to make it their own. And I don't know, like DeFi is dead.

David Hoffman:
[31:17] Crypto is dead. Jeff, I think you're doing a lot of assumptions as to the success of this platform that got announced yesterday, of which we have very, very few details of. Yeah. Is it an EVM? Like, they won't want to use a blockchain. Is it an EVM chain? Like, anything about this.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[31:33] What chains are they using? We know nothing, right?

David Hoffman:
[31:34] So, I would agree with Jeff if this was a... Somehow some sort of statement of success of this platform and not a PR release of this platform, but we were in the very early stages of this. I'm more relating to the Alex Thorne take side of things where he asked the question, what advantage do you even get from trading tokenized stocks in CeFi without the ability to pull the stocks out, self-custige them, trade them peer-to-peer? Tokenized stocks will be regulated to a back office tech upgrade that 99% of investors won't even see significant benefit from. I think there will be some benefits to this, like 24-7, 365 markets, instant settlement. There will be back office upgrades and maybe the 24-7, 365 benefits traders.

David Hoffman:
[32:19] But I agree, this is not where the innovation is. And then Omid, Omid Malekin, who we had on the show a handful of times, he's a professor at Columbia, I think. He says, the New York Stock Exchange announcement is just mostly marketing with no substance whatsoever, key technical and economic details are completely missing. And he also added that the entire New York Stock Exchange business model depends on centralized regulated market structure and delayed settlement, which conflicts with how crypto and tokenization actually works. I see this as just like another debate that we've had since the beginning of crypto, which is the blockchain, not Bitcoin debate. And this is the blockchain technology is the cool thing, but public blockchains, not that cool. Don't think those are that cool. But in fact, as we've learned time and time again, it's actually public blockchains that are the cool thing and private applications of blockchain technology are marginal at best.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[33:14] This is why I'm not worried about this. This is why I think this is net bullish crypto because this is now Tradify kind of capitulating and be like, well, you guys were right about tokenization. So we're going to try our thing.

David Hoffman:
[33:25] Yeah. It's sort of like. But let's try the blockchain, not Bitcoin thing again now that we've given you this. Yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[33:32] But what they're not understanding is the thing that is different about crypto is it's permissionlessness. And it's open like the Internet. So this was as if this would be as if, you know, like AOL, let's say it was in operation for 40 years. But, you know, AOL, the closed border Internet was only open from like nine to five, no bank holidays. And now AOL suddenly announces that it's going to be 24 seven. We've got instant messenger and we've got the AOL ecosystem. So you don't need that other thing called the Internet. But that's just going to be a closed garden. All of the interesting things and the developers and the applications and the permissionless innovation, that's going to happen on the open network side of things. That's going to be all on the internet. And whatever TradFi does is not going to stop that. It's only going to help that and further that. So mark me in the camp of like, great, this is bullish. I'm not worried at all. Come to the party, TradFi. Try to compete against our permission.

David Hoffman:
[34:30] You're almost there. You almost got it. You've almost figured it out.

David Hoffman:
[34:33] You're not quite there yet, but you're so close.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[34:36] What about this, David? Is this the end of on-chain social, at least the end of an era? Farcaster and Lens were acquired this week.

David Hoffman:
[34:45] What happened? Why does this always happen? There are so many weeks where there's two independent bits of news, and they are so congruous with each other. So this week, Nainar acquired Farcaster and Mask Network takes over Lens. Now, both of these things, Nainar and Mask Network, are teams that have raised money and are inside of the respective ecosystem of the thing that they are acquiring. So it's like something in the app layer that has the funds and the money acquires the platform that the app was built on in the first place.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[35:23] Feels backwards, right?

David Hoffman:
[35:24] Yeah, it feels like a little bit of like tail wagging the dog, like cart leading the horse, but like whatever. Nonetheless, we can talk about how that came to be. So Nainar has bought control of the Farcaster protocol app and related infrastructure from Merkle. Merkle is the company behind Farcaster. And now we'll run the network end to end, the protocol, the main client, and also Clanker. Clanker is like the most significant app in the Farcaster ecosystem, makes the most money. um nanar is a social infrastructure provider uh raised money from han ventures union square ventures coinbase ventures raised like 14 million dollars and that's where they got the money to acquire this um Why is this happening? Well, we've known Farcaster has kind of said, like, hey, we tried on Chain Social. Our best product that we've ever built is the wallet. So actually, we are now going to focus on the wallet. But it was kind of a capitulation. It was kind of throwing in the towel. And I think they just saw the opportunity to sell everything to Nainar, N-E-Y-N-A-R.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[36:18] And so- Yeah, that's hard to say. You know, Dan Romero, though, and his other co-founder, they've been at this for five years. Like, my perspective, you can't say they didn't try. And Lens as well. I feel like they really gave it a try here.

David Hoffman:
[36:30] Yeah, yeah. I did like this take from 0xFubar. He wrote, Farcaster is one of the more respectable wind downs I've seen in crypto. They ran a lean team with a healthy burn throughout. They took a contrarian bet on a huge market cap. They built real decentralized tech. What they didn't do was launch a useless, so can chill vaporware products and run copy pasta forks. Any of these alternatives would have drastically worse for users in the community. And so he kind of was just saying like, hey, they tried and they also didn't do like the shitty things that come with many of the frequently failing apps that we have in the ecosystem.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[37:05] Yeah, credit to both. And credit, credit, this is probably, it's probably going to be in better hands at some level. If the team has pushed as far as they can and now, you know, the kind of the apps are taking over, maybe this resurrects in some form. And that's possibly a hopeful future. There's also the take here, David, that this is like the end of an era.

David Hoffman:
[37:23] Like basically how can you believe in on-chain social at this point both of our two significant platforms are kind of like winding down how could you ever say that like we didn't try on-chain social that's

Ryan Sean Adams:
[37:37] Right that's right and you know chris dixon you would.

David Hoffman:
[37:39] Be silly to ever say that we haven't tried on-chain social and we should just try harder no one would ever say that right ryan well

Ryan Sean Adams:
[37:47] Actually so uh vitalik said that on the week um, Well, so like, you know, one take is like we tried it and it failed. Like the read, write, own era. That was part of Chris Dixon's platform, I suppose, was the idea that you own your own posts, that sort of thing. We tried that in crypto and it's dead or it's not going to work right now. The timing is off. Vitalik, on the other hand, posted this week and actually he's quote tweeting the Lens Acquisition News. So it's very relevant. In 2026, I plan to be fully back to decentralized social. What? So when they zig, you zag, okay? So Vitalik makes the point that, hey, we haven't, like, I know we've tried it, but we haven't done it, like, correct. It's been a lot about speculation. It's been a lot about token stuff. Crypto social projects, he said, have often gone the wrong way. Too often we in crypto think that if you insert a speculative coin in something, that counts as innovating. And he says, moving forward, what he's going to be doing is posting through aggregators. So it hits, like, all the social networks. And he's pretty excited about actually, you know, Lens and Farcaster into the futures as well. And he is encouraging others to basically use decentralized social. It's like, what's your take on that?

David Hoffman:
[38:58] My take on this is Vitalik wants to see a future world that is good. And this is how he sees us getting there. He sees us doing on-chain social to get there. This is also emblematic of a lot of Ethereum's malaise that it's experienced over the last two to three years is like Vitalik is a spiritual leader of sorts, you know, philosopher king of sorts about what's good.

David Hoffman:
[39:25] And like I trust Vitalik. I think he's got some of the highest moral compass that anyone has.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[39:30] It would be great if this worked.

David Hoffman:
[39:31] It would be great if this worked. It'd be great for Ethereum if this worked. It'd be great for humanity if this worked. It is not good product leadership for Ethereum when in the last two years, the Ethereum community has been like, we need product leadership. We need to turn this ship around. We need to ship on time. We need to be a little bit more aggressive. And so it's antagonistic to that. But, you know, Vitalik gets to do whatever he wants to do. You know, you could also just say that, like, you know what? Decentralized social, 10 years too early. You know? I think that could be true. Maybe it works out in the future as well. I will say, like, he says things like, you know, I encourage everyone to spend more time on Lens, Farcast, or broader decentralized social this year. We need to move beyond everyone constantly tweeting inside of a single global info war zone. And he's kind of like throwing shade at Twitter. It's like too loud, too messy. The algorithm is terrible. All that kind of stuff. I don't know if crypto fixes that. Like, do we need a blockchain for that? Or are there other adjacent technologies? Like, does the blockchain fix the malaise of Twitter? I'm not sure about that.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[40:37] I don't think it does. I don't think it does. I feel like we've tried it. Like, so if you were to ask, what is Ethereum for? And the answer to that question is, it's for decentralized social. I think you're going the wrong direction completely. You know what I mean? Like that can't be the answer. Like we tried that. And this is kind of a take I have about this. It's like we're 10 years into the Ethereum experience. And it's always been about finance. It's always been about assets.

David Hoffman:
[41:02] I'm sorry, Vitalik. That's what it is.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[41:05] The product market fit for our ledgers, which is like not surprising because they are ledgers. So you have debits and credits. They're ledgers, right? And you've created smart contracts around them. it's going to be assets. It's going to be money type use case.

David Hoffman:
[41:18] It's money, it's finance, it's DeFi, which is an incredible upgrade to humanity that we still have so much juice to squeeze.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[41:27] It's a big win. It's a really big win. My personal take.

David Hoffman:
[41:31] Eye on the prize. Eye on the prize.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[41:33] Stay focused. Stay focused. I really feel like, I mean, part of the bankless mission was just like about Ethereum focusing on DeFi. And I feel like our social layer sometimes gets distracted. I mean, we tried it.

David Hoffman:
[41:45] And I think we integrate, like, you know, on-train social, it'll be integrated in, like, your DeFi activities and everything will feed back in on itself. And it turns out, like, those were more... Uh, discongruent side quests, then we could actually wrap into like the decentralized finance experience.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[42:03] At least for crypto. I mean, crypto can't do everything. Ethereum can't do everything. And maybe it's just like, at least right now, it's not going to do decentralized, um, social, but it's got a lot to go, a lot more to do on the DeFi front.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[42:15] And, uh, I for one would love to see us continue to focus there. David, we got more to discuss. The Clarity Act seems like it's on pause. What's happening? And is the Trump administration mad at Coinbase for pulling out? Also, institutional investors and quantum fears, they're starting to sell Bitcoin because of quantum. We'll dive into a Jeffries analyst report on this, all this and more. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. All right, David. So the news on the Clarity Act this week is a delay. You know, we spent so much time talking about Clarity and the back and forth of it last week. This week, the update is, The bill is likely delayed until late February or March as the Senate panel pivots to the Trump housing push. So the Senate is moving on to other things and somewhat clarity act is in some purgatory.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[43:09] Remember the Ag Committee? They had their own version. We're talking about the Banking Committee's version in the Senate yesterday. Well, the Ag Committee did publish their version, so that's a step in the right direction. The problem is it was kind of like a bipartisan sort of publishing it. It was kind of the Republican leadership on that committee saying, well, this is our version. We can't come to agreement with the Dems on this specific committee. So we're just publishing our version separately, which is like not a good sign because like you obviously need bipartisan consensus and enough Senate votes to get this thing through and they don't have it yet. And so that's the status. Unfortunately, we're on pause. We're on ice for a little bit. The probability that the Clarity Act is signed in 2026, just dropped what we were talking about. On Polymark, it's a 39% chance. That was like 42% or something like that last week. So it's gone down a little bit, but it's pretty flat.

David Hoffman:
[44:04] And crypto definitely sold off on this news as well, especially the smart contract platforms. Ether, I think that's why Ether was down like four or 5% more than Bitcoin was this week. There's also, I think Coinbase is kind of being, maybe singled out isn't the right word but at least the White House I think is angry at Coinbase or is pointing their That was the rumor. Pointing their finger at Coinbase because Coinbase was the one that like we are drawing a red line at stablecoin yield and if we can't have stablecoin yield then like that's when they say that line a bad deal is worse than no deal. Yep. And like other people like I listened to the Chopping Block interview with Peter Van Valkenburgh who was singing the praises again maybe that was a little bit more Seeing the appraises maybe a little bit much, but like being very positive about market structure bill. And it's kind of just Coinbase who's like really hung up on the stablecoin yield aspect of this, which this current bill does not give them.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[44:57] I mean, but they're not wrong though, David. They're not wrong. The freaking banks shouldn't have stablecoin yields. Totally, totally. It's a separate thing. Clarity Act is not about that.

David Hoffman:
[45:05] I love Jake Stravinsky's point of this. Like there is no policy precedent to protect the banking yields whatsoever, bank deposits. That shouldn't be in policy. Nick Carter replied to Brian Armstrong's post about defending Coinbase's position to pull out the bill. And he's like, good job. Hold the line. It's critically important.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[45:26] Yeah, because hold the line on stablecoin yield. That would set back stablecoins for a generation if we don't get it, right? So there's some division here. In fact, Brian Armstrong is saying that, no, we're in sync with the Trump White House. But there was a reporter, Eleanor Otero, who's doing great work on this, I actually said the Trump admin was mad at Coinbase and just being like, if Coinbase isn't on board, doesn't get their act together, we'll pull out. That's a little back and forth there that we don't know what the truth is. But we do know this is Patrick Witt. He's an advisor to the White House. And he's quoting the no bill is better than a bad bill type of idea. And he's saying, what a privilege it is to be able to say those words thanks to President Trump's victory and the pro-crypto administration he has assembled.

David Hoffman:
[46:11] Let's not kid ourselves. Those are Trump words. I know Trump when I see it. That's Trump speaking.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[46:17] He does make a point, though. And basically his point, if you read this tweet, is he's saying, like, this is the best deal you're going to get. Because in the future, there's going to be more Democrats in Congress. You might not have Trump around. And so, like, you better take this deal because you don't want, like, a deal under, like, you know, President AOC or something like that.

David Hoffman:
[46:38] I don't. It's worth considering.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[46:40] It's worth considering yeah it's worth considering but anyway we're stalled out for now.

David Hoffman:
[46:45] So I know this announcement just absolutely rocked your world, Ryan. Gusto enables businesses to pay international contractors on chain. So Gusto, if you listeners don't know, is like an HR platform. You put all your employees in there. They set up their direct deposit in there and all their health care benefits and stuff like that.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[47:03] People would call it payroll. They do payroll.

David Hoffman:
[47:05] Payroll, that's right. Payroll HR services. Our COO loves Gusto because it basically does half of her job, assists her in doing like half of her job. So you can now pay people in Gusto with USDC on base. And so you can fund your Gusto account with USDC. And then when you need to pay your employees or your contractors, you can do it with Gusto. And just to tell you exactly how big of a deal it is, we have a quote from our CEO that I snapped right from our Discord. Where she says, this is the lamest news, but this is actually huge for me, lol.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[47:42] I think it's a big deal. It's stuff like this that happens in the background. Like, I remember when we first started using Gusto for Banklist. I was like, God, someday we'll be able to have stablecoin payments here. Yeah. Right? And here we are. And no one's really noticing it because it's happening in the background.

David Hoffman:
[48:01] It's just such a boring update.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[48:03] Yeah, I'm with our COO on this. This is very exciting.

David Hoffman:
[48:06] Getting stablecoins into Gusto is big. Like, hang on. We're going to cut this pause out. But I'm going to ask how much Gusto runs in payroll every single year. Tens of billions of dollars, Ryan, is how much Gusto processes through payroll. And now you can put some of that on chain.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[48:23] Amazing. What a beautiful time we're in, huh?

David Hoffman:
[48:25] What a beautiful time.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[48:27] David, let's talk about the time that Bitcoin is having with respect to quantum.

David Hoffman:
[48:33] Fantastic transition, bro.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[48:37] Okay. Christopher Wood dropped his 10% Bitcoin allocation because of quantum fears, quantum concerns.

David Hoffman:
[48:46] Who's Christopher Wood?

Ryan Sean Adams:
[48:47] He is one of the most widely followed Wall Street strategists. He created this, I believe it's a fund. No, it's a model portfolio called Greed and Fear. And in the Greed and Fear model portfolio, there are all the assets that you should want to own under greed and fear types of conditions. And previously, Bitcoin had been in that Greed and Fear portfolio construction at like 5%. But now, Chris Wood, again, he's at Jeffrey's, which is a big investment banking company, very respected. He said he's selling the 5% Bitcoin allocation and replacing that for gold. And the reason he gives is because of quantum fears and the uncertainty. And bankless listeners will know because we've talked about this a lot. We even had Scott Aronson on over a year ago to talk about this. Quantum, we think that quantum is a concern for Bitcoin right now.

David Hoffman:
[49:48] I think that's understating it.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[49:49] Yeah.

David Hoffman:
[49:50] Well, you overstate it then. Quantum could divide Bitcoin by zero. It could end Bitcoin.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[49:57] Wow, David, he's not mincing words here, okay? He's going straight to zero. All right, well, so yeah, what's interesting about this is an institutional investor starting to say that. So this narrative is kind of propagating. Coinbase's head of research, David Duong, agrees with Wood on this. So he talks about the 33% of Bitcoin supply that could be at risk from quantum attacks. Um, you know, El Salvador has recently, you know, this has been on their radar. They've actually moved addresses to be like in more quantum safe addresses. So what do you think this means for the market? Do you think that investors are really looking at the quantum concern and starting to price this in with net outflows of Bitcoin?

David Hoffman:
[50:46] So that's what Nick Carter has been saying on Twitter is like the malaise of Bitcoin, you know, the poor price action of Bitcoin over the last six months and three months, especially in contrast to gold, is the market pricing in quantum risk. And like, you know, to his point, you don't, the market doesn't need to price in risk loudly. Like people quietly, you know, looking and researching about quantum being like, you know what, I would like less exposure to that. Shows up in the market gradually. It doesn't have to be an acute event.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[51:17] I've actually heard this in pocket. So I've heard this from Ray Dalio. I've been, he's been on the circuit, I've been listening to a lot about him. And whenever he's asked about Bitcoin, which he often is, he always talks about Bitcoin's, having a hack type risk and so he doesn't typically talk about quantum specifically but he like he's like i like gold because it's got this history and it can't be hacked like it's not software is the point you know.

David Hoffman:
[51:43] Bitcoiners love to talk about lindy and like especially lindy with relation to every other crypto asset like bitcoin has the most lindy

Ryan Sean Adams:
[51:50] Yeah bitcoin's.

David Hoffman:
[51:51] Got 15 years 16 years that's not that that's not that long that's not that long at all that's very very short amount of time

Ryan Sean Adams:
[51:59] Yeah uh raul paul on one of these um comments um he also confirms this from what he's hearing i've had numerous concerned emails from people on this article already that was the jeffries article about quantum right so and he's in kind of the circles or uh investment macro fund traders who are like oh shoot quantum i didn't realize this could be a threat for the fixed supply of bitcoin or whatever they think totally.

David Hoffman:
[52:23] Uh coinbase is doing something about this So Coinbase this week announced their independent advisory board on quantum computing. This is Coinbase just doing things. So proud.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[52:33] Good job, guys. They're going to save Bitcoin.

David Hoffman:
[52:36] Good job. Good job, Coinbase. It's designed to prepare the crypto industry for potential security threats posed by future advancements in quantum computing. Three main objectives from this board. Publishing papers to assess the state of quantum computing and its impact on blockchains. Two, issuing recommendations to guide developers and organizations over to safeguard against long-term risks. And three, real-time responses. So providing analysis during major quantum breakthroughs.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[53:01] What about shipping code? We got some code to ship on the Bitcoin core side, huh?

David Hoffman:
[53:05] Yeah, but that's kind of the issue is the Bitcoin core people are just being like, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, not real. Plug my ears, stick my head in the sand, which is like the typical Bitcoin core developer response. This board actually has some chads on it. So Scott Aronson, like the quantum guy. Like Ryan said, we had him on the show. We had him on the show with Justin Drake. If you want to learn anything about Bitcoin and quantum, go listen to that episode.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[53:32] And that was a year ago, and so much has changed since then. It's accelerated.

David Hoffman:
[53:36] So I think, I don't want to put words into Scott Aronson's mouth, but I bet you if we had him back on and we asked him like, yo, it's been one year. Have we done like maybe more than one year's worth of advancements of quantum? And I think he would go like, yes, we certainly have.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[53:51] Yeah, he'd be like, hell yes. Yes. And it's interesting, like he wasn't, he was sort of vaguely aware of crypto now. Now he's on the board that you're talking about that Coinbase is assembling. So he is like neck deep in the crypto stuff. Yeah.

David Hoffman:
[54:02] Dan Binet, he's like a cryptography Chad over at Stanford. Justin Drake, who we know, Sriram Kanaan from Eigenlayer, and then a couple other names who I don't recognize. So I'm optimistic about what these people are doing. I need to be more optimistic about what the Bitcoin core developers are doing. Because right now, to Nick Carter's point, which I got into like a very short argument with him about like a couple of years ago, weeks ago, like he was saying, like, if Bitcoin falls due to quantum, it's going to drag the rest of the crypto market down with it. And I was like, yeah, maybe in the short term, but like eventually all the quantum resistant blockchains that did the work to protect themselves will like rise from Bitcoin's ashes and actually will perform well. But right now, Ryan, we are in the short term in which Bitcoin drags all the other blockchains down. And I think that's kind of also what's been happening lately and why our bags are set.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[54:53] Yeah, they should just fix it. Now, there is an element, though, I should say. Okay, like I will say, right? They should just fix it. They should just fix it. Okay, but there is an element of this where like I think narrative is following price. So maybe Bitcoin was always going to sell off this year. And now people are like, well, because price is down, it's because quantum.

David Hoffman:
[55:17] So I don't want to underplay that. I think price could follow a narrative on this one because I do think that quantum- I think it's a fundamental.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[55:22] I agree.

David Hoffman:
[55:22] Quantum isn't going to actually impact Bitcoin for three plus years. Yeah. And people are becoming aware of the narrative of quantum and then price is following suit.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[55:31] Well, I guess what I'm saying is I think this narrative is not just FUD in that it can be a FUD that is dismissed, but it could go quite a bit more- Too far.

David Hoffman:
[55:42] The pendulum can go too far.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[55:43] And that could be the story of this year. It'd be like Bitcoin could hit like, I'm going to say sacrilege, but like. Oh, no. Michael Nato is talking about this. 65K, okay? It's like Bitcoin hit 65K. And why? If it's trading at that price, it's because of quantum. It's because of quantum. That's why. And there's no solution. Blah, blah, blah. Right. We'll probably get out over our skis if this heads in a negative direction.

David Hoffman:
[56:04] Maybe that's what it'll take to get the Bitcoin developers' heads out of their asses.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[56:08] Yay. There you go. Well, you know what, David?

David Hoffman:
[56:11] Because we would know from the Ethereum community.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[56:13] We should become Bitcoin developers. Just go solve this, okay?

David Hoffman:
[56:16] I am a Bitcoin core dev I don't know if you knew that just vibe code

Ryan Sean Adams:
[56:19] It just vibe code some quantum into Bitcoin, The U.S. government will add seized Bitcoin to its digital asset reserve. They always said they would. And now Treasury Secretary Besant is actually doing it. So there you go. So it's all the seized Bitcoin. They're no longer going to be selling it. They're going to stop all the auctions.

David Hoffman:
[56:42] I hope they put out a new map of the globe. And instead of having the Western Hemisphere blanket in the America flag, they just have which countries own the most Bitcoins.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[56:52] Oh, my God. Go kidnap their leader and take their Bitcoin.

David Hoffman:
[56:56] Yeah, take their private key.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[56:57] Jeez, that's a dark future.

David Hoffman:
[56:59] Out of the more serious end of crypto, Ondo is expanding its ecosystem. Ondo, for those that don't know, they issue tokenized securities. You can go buy half a million dollars of Google on Ethereum right now, and it's an Ondo token. Pretty cool. Low slippage. Very low slippage, yeah. They are also coming to Hyperliquid and Solana. Why are they doing that thing? Well, for obvious reasons. Hyperliquid has perps. So now we have tokenized equity perps on Hyperliquid. That's pretty cool. No other TradFi platform has that, including Robinhood or Coinbase. And then also on Solana as well, to run them into like Jupiter and all that other stuff. So pretty good, pretty big expansion out of the Ondo universe.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[57:42] Yeah, it's like an open finance answer to what the New York Stock Exchange is doing.

David Hoffman:
[57:45] Exactly, it's the public blockchains. Public blockchains.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[57:48] Well, we don't know if 2026 is going to be bullish or bearish where we're going to end the year, but I do know, I have this confidence, David. This is going to be the year of tokenized securities. All right. We're seeing that everywhere. Totally. And the real world assets.

David Hoffman:
[57:59] Tokenized securities and quantum.

Ryan Sean Adams:
[58:02] Quantum fun. We got to leave it there. Of course, you know, crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot. No. Dave, don't do it. Don't do it. That was a strud of podcast, okay? I don't need to be canceled. Oh, my God.