ROLLUP: Robinhood's Announcement Sets off Stock Tokens Frenzy
Ryan:
[0:03] Bankless Nation, for all our American listeners out there, happy 4th of July. Happy 4th of July to you, David. How are you doing? You're not actually in America on the 4th of July, are you?
David:
[0:12] No, I am in France, where everyone celebrates 4th of July every year, right?
Ryan:
[0:17] I don't know, man. You tell me I've never been there for 4th of July. What are you doing in France?
David:
[0:21] Oh, it's ECC week this week. One of the oldest running Ethereum conferences. Is unofficial, like not thrown by the EF, just bootstrapped by the community. And it's been running ever since, like, honestly, I think before I even got into Ethereum.
Ryan:
[0:35] Are you guys responsible for this 7% ETH increase on the week? Is that you? Is that ETHCC?
David:
[0:41] I thought that was you. I thought that was you holding.
Ryan:
[0:44] Down the fork. I'm happy to take credit for 7%. All right. We're going to talk about that. We got a lot more. Actually, I want to talk to you more about ETHCC, but let's give them a tour for what's in store on the Bankless Weekly Roll-Up. Tokenization Week? David, what's all this about?
David:
[0:59] Three different companies all decided to launch tokenized stocks on different blockchains this week. Not just Robinhood, not just X-Docs on Solana, but also Gemini is entering the fray with tokenized stocks, both on Arbitrum and also on Solana. So just three different companies just coming in with tokenized stocks. I guess they chose this week to launch them all.
Ryan:
[1:21] Yeah, it was a good week to do it. also a big win for Ethereum this week. So that Robinhood news that you mentioned, that's all happening on an Ethereum layer too. First Arbitrum and then an Arbitrum chain. So you got to give us a download on that. And David, I want to tell you about Tom Lee. This guy is going on CNBC and he is pumping our ETH bags, my friend. And I actually think this is the most bullish thing I've seen happen to Ethereum this year. And I want to tell you why.
David:
[1:46] I would agree. I actually met Tom Lee like three days ago at Permissionless. And I was like, oh, Tom, great to see you. And like three days later, he launches the micro strategy for his version of micro. Oh, I think it was under embargo, probably.
Ryan:
[2:00] OK. I mean, yeah,
David:
[2:01] He could have said something. I would agree. It's a very unexpected, extremely bullish surprise for ETH.
Ryan:
[2:07] Yeah, this is a Michael Saylor strategy. That's effectively what he's doing. He's building a publicly traded treasury strategy. Also, Solana has its first staked ETF.
Ryan:
[2:16] So we'll talk about that and we'll see how it's going. And some big news in the US this 4th of July, we've got Trump's big, beautiful bill. All right. That may have passed by the time you guys are listening to this. And what's that mean for crypto? Also, is Trump trying to replace Powell? He's got some names floating around in the ring and he's kind of threatening in the background. So we'll talk about that, too. But before we do, David, tell me a bit more about ECC. Like, give me the vibes. How are we feeling?
David:
[2:40] Yeah, it's in Cannes this year. It's usually in paris except for last year it was in brussels because of the olympics but we're in cannes this year which is a beach town that it's my first time here extremely hot it is like 95 degrees every single day so everyone is just sweating but since we're all sweating together it's okay, very well received event and so nothing is like too no one's like too crazy no one's too euphoric Everyone's like kind of getting work done. ETHCC has been like the spawn of the side event meta in crypto conferences. But this ETHCC was different. I think people said some very positive words about the main Ethereum conference. And I just saw a lot of, I have so many talks that I have saved that I need to watch that I just haven't gotten to yet. I've been running around. The week was started off by Robinhood's event, which they started.
Ryan:
[3:32] They can throw an event.
David:
[3:33] They were shuttling people back and forth. Yeah, they booked this massive chateau. They had this whole entire, like, bit of, like, a James Bond bit of Vlad driving a sports car up the, like, chateau road.
Ryan:
[3:47] He was looking good, man.
David:
[3:49] He was dressed to the park. He was going after Bond.
Ryan:
[3:52] Okay, Casino Royale stuff, okay.
David:
[3:54] Yeah, yeah. So that was the big excitement of the week. And overall, yeah, people are having a good time. Yeah.
Ryan:
[3:59] So it felt sober. It felt buildy. i mean robin hood was the huge coming out of that event it's sort of interesting like it's weird in a way seeing them come to etc because that's sort of a off the beaten path traditionally that's been kind of a dev focused nerdy we're talking about zk you know like stuff you know cryptography deep cryptography protocol research and here is robin hood what is it a 70 billion dollar company coming from the u.s 85 85 you would know right
David:
[4:26] Depends on when you look at it.
Ryan:
[4:28] And they're like they're there this year, which is big in and of itself.
David:
[4:33] Yes. Sponsoring the main event, right? Not just throwing the biggest side event here, but sponsoring the main event. Yeah. And like there were so many reporters at the Robin Hood event, like kind of doing the live coverage and they've just been throughout all of this week. Yeah.
Ryan:
[4:47] Well, Vitalik appeared on a panel with the Robin Hood folks, which is interesting. Also may have front run you on this, David, which is I watched the Vitalik. It was like a 20 minute keynote at ECC.
David:
[4:57] I've already watched that. Yeah.
Ryan:
[4:58] That's the benefit of being remote. I can watch it as soon as it drops. You actually have to attend the event in person.
David:
[5:03] Why do I go to the conference when you're beating me to the content?
Ryan:
[5:06] Because I can't, because I don't. And we appreciate you doing that because obviously you got to talk, you felt the vibes, you got to talk to the Robinhood folks in person, Arbitrum folks.
Ryan:
[5:15] Anyway, we'll talk a bit more about that at the end of the episode. I think first, we got to talk about prices as we do at the beginning of these episodes. And it's looking more bullish on the week? Tell me about it.
David:
[5:26] Fucking green. Yeah, Bitcoin up 2.6% on the week. It touched $110,000, currently coming in at $109,000.
Ryan:
[5:34] $2,700 ETH up a little bit more this week. So Bitcoin up 2.6%, ETH up 6.7%.
David:
[5:41] So I'm going to go ahead and call this a Ryan Sean Adams week.
Ryan:
[5:45] Sure, do it.
David:
[5:45] Both Bitcoin and ETH are up in dollar terms, but ETH is up in Bitcoin terms. That's what I do. That's a Ryan week. That's a Ryan week. Well done, Ryan. You're welcome. Did your job. So ETH coming in at $2,595. And so overall, pretty happy times on the markets this week.
Ryan:
[6:04] All right, Bitcoin, we're just touching all-time highs, right? It seems like we've been range-bound, 100K to 110K, but we haven't been able to break all-time highs, but we're creeping close.
David:
[6:14] I think the technical term for that is edging. We are edging right now.
Ryan:
[6:19] All right. When is our last all-time high, you know, climax?
David:
[6:24] It was June 9th. It's like, yeah, you're nailing it, actually.
Ryan:
[6:28] Okay, so less than a month ago, we were all-time high, and we might be there momentarily, I I suppose. Maybe by the time people listen to this episode.
David:
[6:35] $2,000 off of all-time high.
Ryan:
[6:37] That's not the only thing that's moving on the week. Tell me about some movers of the week. It's always weird looking at these seven-day charts. What tokens do you want to call out?
David:
[6:45] Just if you happen to have Pengu, Arbitrum, the Arbitrum token, or Fartcoin, congrats, those are the big movers of the week. All those are moving beyond 30% in a single week this week. Don't know why Pengu did it, but Arbitrum obviously did it because of all of the Robinhood news. And then Fartcoin, you know, is the greatest macro asset of all time. We got some great macro news this week, which we're going to get into as well.
Ryan:
[7:10] All right. The triple point asset. I mean, all of those things,
Ryan:
[7:12] maybe there's a theme to them. Maybe the theme is just there's more liquidity in the market and numbers going up. Let's talk about this Solana ETF. So lots of folks in the Solana community excited about this. This is notable because it's the first spot Solana ETF, the first crypto ETF.
David:
[7:29] No one was really watching this.
Ryan:
[7:31] Yeah, I mean, I heard some rumblings from the Bloomberg folks and then suddenly it's here. So it's notable because we have an ETH ETF, we have a Bitcoin ETF, and now we have a Solana ETF, nothing else. And also, David, the second thing is it's staking. It's full staking enabled. So you're not buying the sole asset, you're buying the staked sole asset inside of this ETF. And so I think there's a couple questions coming out of this. One, how did Solana get the staked ETF before Ethereum? And then two, how's it doing? So update us on that. Yeah.
David:
[8:04] Yeah, there's a weird nuance here. There's just an unusual structure as it relates to like how ETF typically comes into being. I don't know why this, how this is different, but this is a C-Corp. It's a C-Corp under the 1940 Act. I don't know what that means, but it allows a staking rewards to be paid out as dividends. The taxes for this thing is not as kind as if it were more of a traditional vanilla normal ETF. And then of course, how did it get passed? The SEC didn't like give this the explicit thumbs up they just also didn't give it a thumbs down which means that they just got to do it so.
Ryan:
[8:41] They just didn't say no and
David:
[8:42] Didn't say no and then they were like all right i guess we get to do this yeah i've never heard of this issuer is rex osprey soul i don't know who this issuer is.
Ryan:
[8:52] Not black it's not fidelity this is way down in
David:
[8:55] File for s1 i don't even know if Fidelity did or not. They did. So 80% of the ETF is in spot, sole, and then half of that is actively staked. And then there's also a mix of like JITO, sole, a variety of other like sole.
Ryan:
[9:08] Oh, only half of it. Only half of it is actively staked.
David:
[9:11] Only half is staked, yeah.
Ryan:
[9:13] Okay, interesting. And the fees on this are pretty high too. It's almost 75 bips here. I guess it's notable though that it did seep through. I get the feeling that the SEC doesn't want to be the no SEC. see they don't want to say no to crypto and so that's why this thing just kind of seeped through i mean any overall odd
David:
[9:33] Though yeah i would be somewhat disappointed if i was like i don't know if like bitwise filed for us on the etf but there's like other issuers out there that have filed for us on an etf and i would be kind of bitter if i was them and i'm like an etf issuer and there's like.
Ryan:
[9:47] I don't know you know i guess there there was with other etfs it was a race for first right and there was a horse race you know who could be first who could get the most volume, I feel like probably all the ETF issuers are happy right now because this is an SEC that's not going to say no to crypto. And all of the things are probably going to get approved. I'm sure we see an ETH staking ETF sometime soon in the fullness of time. The volume on this was pretty strong, according to Eric Balchunas, about 20 million. So that's top 1% of ETFs for first day launch. So pretty, I guess it met expectations or exceeded some expectations. A note here, It's still kind of peanuts compared to the Bitcoin ETF and even the Ethereum ETF in terms of volume. So it's, you know, it's good for a down market asset. We should call it small potatoes. It's small. Look at this. So actually on Farside Crypto, you know these tarts we've been looking at? Oh, they've got the Solana one? Yeah. So they've got it here, right? So we'll be able to look at that and compare it to Bitcoin, which is absolutely massive. And then Ether has been seeing a tremendous amount of strength here recently as well.
David:
[10:51] I have just two comments about this. I think this is a pretty positive indicator towards the growing wave of down market ETFs that are definitely coming by the end of this year. So it's going to be the first of many. You're going to see a Dogecoin ETF. You're probably going to see a Ripple ETF. We're going to see this far side ETF charts just kind of populate. And then also, my take is that the staking component of these proof of stake network ETFs is marginal. And I'm not like bullish. I'm not more bullish because all of a sudden there's like a staking ETF. I don't really think that's going to create that much more demand.
Ryan:
[11:25] I pretty much agree with you that it's marginal, although I will note. So the cost of just holding like something like vanilla Solana, for instance, is negative 4.5% dilution every year.
David:
[11:34] Yeah, that's true. It's actually much more critical for Solana at an 8% issuance rate versus ETH, which is like a 2 point something percent issuance rate.
Ryan:
[11:42] Yeah, so Solana is 4.5% issuance, actually.
David:
[11:46] But yields are high. Yields are seven.
Ryan:
[11:48] Yields are higher because you're making money on MEV and fee revenue and that kind of thing. But yeah, but for, yeah, I guess that makes sense that you would include all of yields because that's a missed opportunity. Yeah. So we've got some other commentary on the SEC here too about tokenized
Ryan:
[12:01] stocks that we'll get to. But David, I want to ask you a question. How are you feeling about your job, man? You feeling good job security right now? What? Dude, we're business partners. This is to queue you up to talk about the jobs report because you should feel great about your job. The jobs numbers are looking good. The jobs numbers are looking great.
David:
[12:22] I keep my job?
Ryan:
[12:23] Yeah, I guess so.
David:
[12:25] Okay, I keep my job.
Ryan:
[12:26] Unemployment is only 4.1%. And these are estimates higher than what analysts were expecting. So they had expected 4.3%. It was actually 4.1%. So good macro indicators there. Here's a commentary. Strong unemployment report. Interesting initial market reaction. So what happened on the back of this was stocks went up, rates, so bond rates got higher, crypto went down. And so this analyst is saying, tells you the market believes crypto prices are more dependent on liquidity, whereas stocks are trading on fundamentals. And the chance of a July rate cut, Fed rate cut just got killed. So stocks on fundamentals and crypto prices, liquidity, that's kind of a take here.
David:
[13:08] It does feel like the stock market is the center of attention right now. And the crypto markets are kind of just trend following. That's what it feels like to me.
Ryan:
[13:18] Yeah, I could see that. And here's a chart that Mike Nato pulled up for me yesterday when we were going through sort of our monthly fundamentals episode. This is a cross-border capital.
David:
[13:28] I like those, by the way. Those are really great.
Ryan:
[13:29] Yeah, you like those? Okay. Do you listen to it?
David:
[13:31] You guys have only done. Yeah, I've listened to the first like half, but you guys have only done two, right?
Ryan:
[13:35] Yeah. Yeah. And toward the end, he gets to this chart, which is a weekly global liquidity. There's all sorts of different indices. This is one from cross-border capital. And you can see kind of an ebbed up to $180 trillion back just, you know, I guess, you know, that was probably May and now it's back down again. But this is the measure of if you believe that crypto prices go up when there's more liquidity in terms of, you know, dollars, money printing, all of these things, then you look at this chart. And I'm a big believer. I'm a subscriber to the idea that But all of these markets, especially in crypto, are all driven by this chart right here.
David:
[14:08] Because it's the denominator. Global liquidity is the denominator of especially crypto assets, which are commodity money assets. I'll add one more nuance that a lot of the Bitcoin or macro like an analyst that I pay attention to will all say that Bitcoin price is a two year lagging indicator of global liquidity. So global liquidity shows up and then two years later that shows up in the Bitcoin price. And this global liquidity indicator has been going up straight since December of 2022. And Bitcoin has been following that trend. The bull, the bull hopium that I will happily dish out here is that we have like another year plus of Bitcoin up and therefore crypto up because of global liquidity.
Ryan:
[14:51] I think that's true. And you can chart it as a straight line, but there are you notice in the chart these dips, right? It goes kind of like up and then there's a little dip down and then there's another there's. Yeah, it's a sawtooth. I like that. Man, you're a charter, aren't you? OK, so here's the thing that could affect global liquidity coming from the U.S. It's a one-two combo punch. So you got to look at monetary policy, of course, and what's Powell doing? What's the Fed rate doing? And then you have to look at fiscal policy, right? Because Lynn Alden told us nothing stops this train.
Ryan:
[15:20] So let's look at both. First, we'll talk about monetary policy on the week. So Powell has been, people call him hawkish. I don't know. Maybe he's just being normal. But Trump wants him to be very, very much more dovish. He wants him to cut rates. And he's looking at, he says, unemployment's, you know, doing very well. That's an indicator, you know, inflation CPI is kind of down. So he's like, Powell, why don't you cut rates? And this week, the conversation coming from Scott Besant and also Trump, I mean, he's always talking about this, is that a Fed Chair Powell's successor is coming in as soon as weeks from now. So indicating that Trump is going to name Powell's successor. Okay. Can you imagine that? If your boss was just like named your replacement, it was like, you know,
David:
[16:09] Well, you still.
Ryan:
[16:10] Have a job. Yeah. You suck. And I hate you. And we're going to hire this new guy. And I wish you weren't here. And here here he is. Like, that's what.
David:
[16:18] And his name is Rady McRate cut.
Ryan:
[16:21] Exactly. So I don't know. This the successor has not been named, but the successor could come, according to Besant, weeks from now. So there's a poly market, of course, for this. Who will Trump announce as the next Fed chair? And guess who one of the answers is? You'll never guess. Scott Besson. It's Scott Besson. It's Scott Besson. Oh, he's at 21 percent. Yeah. He's the second highest. So. So, yeah, that's one of the chief candidates is, you know, Scott Besson, 21 percent.
David:
[16:50] You can just put the Federal Reserve is supposed to be a nonpolitical organization. And Scott Besson is a member of Trump's administration. What's going on here? Yeah.
Ryan:
[17:00] Well, you just take the Treasury guy and you move him to, you know, a Fed chair and you could do that. We all know what Scott Besson would do. I mean, he's very much with Trump. He was with him with all of the tariffs, even though the rest of Wall Street thought that was a good idea. He's very articulate. He's a good communicator. I mean, you could totally see Scott Besson.
David:
[17:18] I enjoy Scott Besson.
Ryan:
[17:20] You enjoy his. He's he sounds so reasonable.
David:
[17:24] Yeah, I enjoy him. I think he's better than any Democratic economic advisor that I've ever listened to.
Ryan:
[17:29] So whether it's Scott Besson or whoever Trump names, what do you think he's going to do to rate cuts?
David:
[17:34] A Cuddy McCuddy face.
Ryan:
[17:37] Yeah, it's going to be Cuddy McCuddy face. All right. So now Powell's tenure goes to May of 2026. All right. And so there's technically there seems like there's no way to fire Powell. Right. And no one has ever done this. So no president in the full Fed history has actually named the replacement before while the guy was on the job. Right. So this is all unprecedented territory, but this points to, we're just looking at the liquidity charts. What do you think in the fullness of time, whether it's in the coming months and Powell capitulates and starts cutting rates or whether it's his replacement, rates are getting cut, right? Am I wrong here?
David:
[18:16] Like crypto prices are going up for the remainder of the Trump presidency if he gets his way.
Ryan:
[18:21] It feels very much the case. All right. So that's the monetary side. And let's check in on the on the fiscal side. So we've talked about this before. The big, beautiful bill.
David:
[18:30] The point I've made about Scott Besson being on the Trump admin moving into the Federal Reserve is the fiscal side penetrating into the monetary side. So it's really fiscal all the way down because nothing stops this train.
Ryan:
[18:44] Yeah, kind of. Exactly. And you know, you're you're civic. So Congress is supposed to hold the purse strings of the entire U.S. Government on, you know, the U.S. Government layer one and monetary and fiscal policy and all of these things. And they are looking at a bill.
Ryan:
[18:59] Probably by the time people listen to this, that bill will have passed the House. But we don't know. Bankless listeners are living in the future. Currently for David and I, it's up for vote in the House and it passed the Senate passed by one vote. OK, so they had to call in. it was really tight here.
David:
[19:15] The vice president.
Ryan:
[19:16] They had to call in J.D. Vance to pass it. So pass the Senate. Looks like it's going to pass the House. The reason I know that is because we've got some odds here, 92% odds on Polymarket that it will have passed by the time bankless listeners are listening to this. So let's assume it does. That's about $4 trillion to the deficit in the next 10 years because it's a combo of pretty big tax cuts, no tax hikes, and some expense cutting as well, right? So it's a deficit bill. It's caused some division in the Republican Party. Elon Musk has infamously or famously said, like, you do this, I'm going to launch a whole other political party. But it looks like it's going to pass. And so the U.S. Is essentially deciding to double down on its deficit and double down on its debt. This is the one-two combo punch, David, for global liquidity.
David:
[20:06] How much is the current amount of U.S. debt?
Ryan:
[20:09] I mean, 36 trillion, something like this.
David:
[20:12] 36 trillion. So we're just adding four more trillion. So we're adding, what is that? We're adding 10%? No. Yeah, 10%. Yeah, we're adding 10% onto the debt. Wow, that's a large number.
Ryan:
[20:23] You think that's a large number? I mean, it's all a large number, right? And I mean, the question is, what do you think? How do you think this ends?
David:
[20:29] We're adding four Bitcoins to the debt.
Ryan:
[20:33] That's one way of looking at it for sure.
David:
[20:36] Excuse me, only two Bitcoins. I forgot Bitcoin and how high Bitcoin is. Bitcoin's two trillion.
Ryan:
[20:41] There are some bulls on the back of this that say, look, you tax cuts, you stimulate the economy, we just grow our way out, right? And there's maybe some case out there that AI tech, the frontier here is so bullish. Look, man, I just got off a podcast earlier this week while you were out. Kathy Wood was telling me we're going to grow at seven to eight percent GDP,
David:
[21:00] Okay? The U.S.
Ryan:
[21:02] Is going to be on the back of AI and the full innovation set. If that's the case, maybe this doesn't matter so much. All right? So you could bet on that.
David:
[21:12] I cannot imagine ourselves growing out of $40 trillion of debt, accruing 4.5% interest.
Ryan:
[21:20] Well, that's what the strategy is. And unless something drastic changes, we can't grow our way out. So this means that God help anyone holding U.S. treasuries and bonds right now. I mean, that is just slow motion exit liquidity for doing that. And I think this is bullish for gold, for Bitcoin, for Ethereum, for commodities, for capital assets. Oh, God. When you went there. David, what do we have coming up next?
David:
[21:44] Coming up next, not one, not two, but three different companies launched tokenized stocks all across the blockchain ecosystem. We're going to talk about all of them. Leading with Robinhood, that's the event that I went to. So I can tell you exactly what that Robinhood event was like on the ground. In addition to the tokenized stocks products, there's a slew of other products as well. Very aggressively getting into the crypto space. You know, Robinhood and Coinbase were kind of in their own lanes for a good long while for this small section of like, you know, that you could buy Bitcoin and a few other cryptos on Robinhood.
David:
[22:13] Now they are very much breathing each other's air. So we're going to talk about that. And also the Robinhood layer two on Arbitrum, using Arbitrum tech, we're going to talk about all of that and more. But first, a message to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors.
Ryan:
[22:25] We got Robinhood announcing tokenized stocks and an Ethereum layer two. This is big, big, big stuff. And David, you know how I know is this is Vlad, the CEO of Robinhood. And he is armed with a smart guy chalkboard here. And he's doing some smart guy drawing on the chalkboard to diagram what I think he's describing, which is tokenized stocks on Robinhood. You were there for this presentation at ECC. Tell me what was going on. What is Vlad describing in this video?
David:
[22:55] He's just doing a good old whiteboarding session, chalkboarding session of drawing the diagrams of here's Bill. Bill wants to buy tokenized stock. Bill sends his money to Robinhood. Robinhood sends his money to the broker-dealer. Broker-dealer goes to the marketplace, buys a stock. Stock goes back and then like that's the basic like pretty normal but then he was like okay but here's what happens when it's after hours and bill wants to buy a stock because then it goes to the after hours exchange which is our exchange bit stamp that we bought but then also if it's a better price on arbitrum where we're deploying these stocks it's going to go to arbitrum and so he was just like you know drawing all the lines to like really.
Ryan:
[23:35] Enjoying your voiceover of what he's doing here on screen.
David:
[23:39] He did a great job. I was like looking at him and he was like, okay, he's using the correct amount of space on the chalkboard. He's not cramming his letters. Clearly he's done this a few times. Overall, their whole entire presentation was like one gigantic bit, which was like, it was pretty scripted. It was kind of cheesy at times, but I enjoyed it. It was fun.
Ryan:
[23:58] Yeah, okay. So this presentation or something like it, to catch a token, the presentation, 22 million clicks on Twitter, I think. A lot of people watching Vlad on the chalkboard.
David:
[24:07] They were streaming it directly on Twitter on X. And yeah, 22, like an X view is pretty...
Ryan:
[24:13] Cheap.
David:
[24:13] It's just like one click and one person watches it for one second. But yeah, 22 million people clicked in and looked at it for at least momentarily.
Ryan:
[24:21] Well done. I mean, that's just like smart guy vibes when you're drawn on a chalkboard in front of, you know, well done here. Okay. Tell us, I know you interviewed him, you talked to him, you also talked to the Arbitrum folks. What are the highlights of what Robinhood announced here? Tell us about the tokenized stock thing and anything else you want to cover. Yeah.
David:
[24:38] Overall, when I was talking to everyone, I was like, all right, like, did this event and all of its announcements, did they meet your expectations? Was it under your expectations? Where were all the announcements as it relates to your expectations? And almost everyone said it exceeded their expectations specifically because of the tokenized private equity, which is a derivative of their tokenized stock announcement. So we'll start with the tokenized stocks. They are doing tokenized stocks for EU citizens. So this is only for European Union citizens. and they just have the broker-dealer relationships. You can buy Apple, you can buy all the regular stocks and now they are deploying them as tokens on the Arbitrum One blockchain.
Ryan:
[25:18] Like 200 stocks, like a pretty good selection, right? US capital stocks, yeah. Indeed.
David:
[25:22] And like I've been talking to some EU people and they have they express that, like, apparently this is actually a difficult thing to do in the EU is access American stocks, which I was surprised to learn. Somebody was telling me of a story of like they wanted to buy NVIDIA and they had to go to their brokerage and they had to go like, please, I would like to buy NVIDIA. And they were like, no, it's too risky. And that's what it was. Yeah. I was surprised. That's like when you and I complain about going to our banks and we have to wire money and they're like, what is the wire for?
Ryan:
[25:52] So it's even more nanified over there? Yeah.
David:
[25:55] Exactly. Yeah. Awesome. Like NVIDIA, which is something that's publicly traded on the U.S. stock market, their brokerages don't allow. I don't know if this is pervasive. Maybe this was just this one individual story. I don't really know how pervasive this is across Europe. But apparently accessing U.S. equities is not trivial in the EU.
Ryan:
[26:12] And even for us, right? There's benefits in being on chain. So you've got fractional ownership. So you can buy a portion of a stock, right? With our tokenized stuff, you can buy any micro fraction of any of the tokens you want. In traditional brokerages, you have to buy the full amount or basically nothing. So it's more divisible in that way. Also, it's 24-7, 365. It's like crypto markets. It never shuts down. That's a benefit.
David:
[26:37] This is a really cool thing that showed me that Robinhood had done a very good job creating a pretty elegantly integrated ecosystem. So they have their normal brokerage, which gives them the stocks. Then they make a token. And that token can now go trade on Bitstamp, their exchange that they bought like two years ago. And so when the stock market is down, pop quiz, Ryan, about what percentage of time is the stock market not trading?
Ryan:
[27:06] I haven't quantified it, but it's gotta be more than 50% because you got holidays and then you've got just all of the non-business hours, right? Is it 60%?
David:
[27:17] It's 81% of time.
Ryan:
[27:19] God, that's stupid.
David:
[27:20] 81% of the time, markets are closed, which like the notion of a closed market is insane to me. Markets are a phenomenon. They are an emergent phenomenon. They don't, in theory, close. The fact that we just close our markets is just silly. And so with tokenized stocks that can trade on a crypto exchange, we now have stocks that can have like 24-7, 365 price discovery. About time. Because that's just the speed of the world that we live in in 2025. And then also, Robinhood can order.
Ryan:
[27:50] A route if
David:
[27:51] The price is preferable on Bitstamp the exchange or if the price is preferable on on-chain, like on Arbitrum, Uniswap or wherever. They can just go source the best price. So it's worth noting how impactful 24-7, 365 price discovery is. You can always kind of tell when something is happening in the world because Bitcoin will move on the weekend and that will inform the stock market on Monday. But now the stock market has a venue, which it's Robinhood, to trade 24-7, 365. Also, say, for example, some crisis, some global crisis did happen and Robinhood's the only place to get price discovery there. They get all those fees on Bitstamp or on their chain, which they announced, which I'll get into in a second. So overall, pretty cool.
Ryan:
[28:37] We'll talk about the structure of these things in a little bit, But the other thing I want to get to is it's I had FOMO already. I'm like, I'm not EU citizen. I can't access these on-chain stocks yet. But then also my FOMO just skyrocketed when I saw actual private shares of companies that I'd really like to own, like OpenAI and SpaceX here too. So it's not just the public companies. Robinhood also threw out some private company tokens as well. You can't access in US, you just can't access anywhere. What is this and how did they do it?
David:
[29:12] You, if you try really, really hard, you can go find a way to go get SpaceX shares OTC or OpenAI shares OTC. Just because they are not publicly traded does not mean that they are not tradable or sellable. It's just a little bit of a different dynamic.
Ryan:
[29:27] Like some peer-to-peer OTC desk type thing. Like you got to find the seller, you know, and it's an employee somewhere, right?
David:
[29:34] Mm-hmm. And companies can approve those sales or not approve those sales because that's just the nature of what happens when they're still private. But like, oh, SpaceX shares do trade with some amount of like frequency and volume that's not unheard of. OpenAI is the new one. Vlad said that they somehow had this relationship with some private wealth manager hedge fund that had access to some of these shares. And that's how they got a hold of these things. But they are now tokenizing private companies, starting with OpenAI and SpaceX. So they're doing this big campaign where they're going to just airdrop these tokens to EU citizens who sign up over the next seven days. Airdrop for free.
Ryan:
[30:09] Yeah.
David:
[30:10] For free, yeah, but it's probably only going to be like $5 or $10, but it's still pretty sick. But man, like, OpenAI, I would smash buy on that for up to a very high price. It's just pretty cool. And like, there's other companies out there, like OpenAI, SpaceX, also Stripe. These are some of the coolest companies. And the world of like, you know, private venture-backed trad companies, they're just staying private for longer. They are. They don't need to go public, which is kind of a bummer for people like me, you, the listener who wants to get our hands on these things.
Ryan:
[30:39] Yeah, that's the part that remains to be seen is how much access they actually have to this pipeline, whether it's just kind of a one time thing for promo purposes or whether that's sustainable and durable. There's actually a little bit of drama around this as well, where OpenAI actually tweeted this out. These OpenAI tokens are not OpenAI equity. We did not partner with Robinhood. We're not involved in this. Do not endorse it. Any transfer OpenAI equity requires our approval. We did not approve any transfer. Please be careful. What's going on here? Yeah.
David:
[31:08] So like I said, if you're a private company, you have the authority to approve or not approve sales of your equity of your stock. And so it really the how Vlad and Robinhood came to acquire these tokens really matters or what the nature is between the investor ownership over those tokens. I don't really think we know that story, but it would be a pretty big blunder for Vlad to just say that they have these things and then not actually have some amount of assurance that they do actually have them. So I'm going to lean with the benefit of the doubt. Like, yeah, Robinhood, Vlad does have a real claim on these things somehow. Maybe they're a derivative of a token. Maybe some market maker is just agreeing to set a price. I don't really know. But he tweeted out saying like, yeah, they're not technically equity. You're right. But they are one to one of the value. I think we're all kind of looking for more clarity as to how this works.
Ryan:
[31:59] Well, that's the thing. OK, so these tokenized stocks in all cases that we're going to talk about them aren't sort of like one for one equity. At least this is my understanding. So in the scenario with the Robinhood stocks, for instance, you're buying some sort of vehicle IOU. You're not buying the stock directly, right? You're buying a vehicle that is almost like a derivative to for the actual shares that Robinhood owns. And they're kind of issuing this derivative on-chain. And there can be weird things that happen with that, right? So when you're trading the market 24 hours a day, that sort of on-chain asset can not mirror exactly the price of the actual asset in real life because there is a different liquidity profile effectively. So there's some downsides to these assets. They're not as good as the the actual only the actual token stock in an exchange. I think there are a lot of people on on Twitter who are pointing that out as well, that this is almost like a beta version of the thing. You don't actually own the equity itself.
David:
[33:04] Yeah, it's likely a pretty convoluted process as to how a user will actually come to own these things. And like you said, the investor protection is probably not as strong. It's just not dissimilar from like, OpenAI is like the Federal Reserve and then they're looking at all the dollars in the offshore Tether bank account. And then they're saying those aren't really dollars. And technically they could make them not really dollars, but would they? And then also there's like another entity, middleman entity,
David:
[33:31] like making this whole thing work. So it's just a little bit convoluted. we'll see how good of a product these things are based on how much trading volume there is and how much like true price discovery there is and like you know there's a bunch of things to iron out but my big takeaway we're going to get into the remaining other two tokenized stock in companies but there's a just a big foot in the door like the overton window is moving here and the notion of accessing these companies and tokenizing stocks on chain is like very real this is a very real thing.
Ryan:
[34:02] And Robinhood, we should let everyone know, is a broker dealer for stocks already in a way that Coinbase is not, in a way that Kraken is not. I mean, that's their whole shtick. They've been selling stocks for, you know, not a decade, but like many years. That's the thing that they do.
David:
[34:16] Robinhood has been selling stocks for a decade. They came out in 2013.
Ryan:
[34:19] Okay. So let's talk about the second thing that moves the Overton window and is kind of a big shift, which is the Robinhood chain. So at first, my understanding is they're issuing these tokenized stocks on the Arbitrum chain itself, the Arbitrum chain, the one that you know that's been in Maynet for a while. In the future, though, they're going to have their own official Robinhood chain that uses Arbitrum tech, but is its own separate chain. One would assume completely integrated with Arbitrum one, but an official Robinhood chain, the same way that Coinbase has the base chain. Is that right?
David:
[34:54] That is exactly right. And the way, like, it was a huge deal when Coinbase made the base chain, because it was the largest company, traditional company, equity company to make a blockchain. It was very validating of some of the things that we've said before is like, oh, yeah, financial entities will all use their own chain. They'll use chain, the blockchain to have their logic run on chain. It's gonna be great. But the difference here is Coinbase is crypto native. Robinhood is firmly in TradFi. Robinhood doesn't have to do this. Coinbase needs to invest in the ecosystem for their own benefit, right? They need to spawn products. They need to really expand growing on-chain. Robinhood doesn't necessarily have to do that. Robinhood is TradFi. They sell stocks. They sell, you know, crypto represents 30% of their revenue, but not 100. And so this was very optional for them to do. And they did it. And I think that is a huge vote of confidence to the notion that financial entities will make chains and they will put assets on those chains.
Ryan:
[35:56] Big win for Ethereum here. And it's also nice, too, that we have multiple competitors entering the fray. We got Base, we have Arbitrum, and we have the Robinhood chain. And as you said, this is a traditional company going on chain, which is a big deal. Okay, so by the way, the hood shares were up like 11% on this. The data announced Arbitrum's been catching a bit. We talked about the ARB token earlier in the episode. ETH completely flat. Well, I guess up 6% on the week, but not directly as a result of this announcement. So how this plays out in the market remains to be seen. What else did Robinhood announce? Just go through the list. Yeah, they launched Perpetual Futures for EU citizens.
David:
[36:35] And so they have this very slick perps interface, which, God, retail is just going to love. Retail already loves options on Robinhood. Options is where Robinhood makes a lot of their money. Perps, I think, is just options, in my opinion, but better. Maybe you can do some funny things with options, some more expressive things. But perps is just like, it's a leverage slider. Retail is going to love it. And they've built out the slickest perp interface. Again, only available for the EU, but you would imagine as soon as the CFTC greenlights this for the United States, they're going to just open this up for the United States. So perps is a thing. And then also just a few other things as well. Crypto staking. So you can now stake your ETH, stake your Solana inside of Robinhood and also a crypto credit card. So Robinhood already had a credit card. You get like 3% cash back, but now you can get 3% cash back that goes and buys your preferred crypto asset.
Ryan:
[37:24] Yeah, I should mention all of this is integrated in the slickness of the Robinhood app, right? It doesn't even feel like you're on chain. Remember, we talked to Vlad like three years ago when he came to a permissionless conference. That was our first conversation with Vlad, and it was clear that they were new to crypto. But he was telling us about the user interface and how important haptics were. You know, like a little buzz.
David:
[37:41] Yeah, haptics, yeah. You get a buzz feedback.
Ryan:
[37:42] In your mobile phone when something good happens in the app. I'm sure they're doing all of those things, which is pretty cool.
David:
[37:50] A mobile wallet with haptics to tokenize stocks. Robinhood, you guys have done great.
Ryan:
[37:55] We need more dopamine hits. This is DC Investor. In case it isn't clear, Robinhood and Coinbase are going to full-on compete head-to-head against each other to drive on-chain adoption on Ethereum via optimism and arbitrum. And they're not going to be the last ones to join the fray either. Bullish. I think the community sees this as pretty bullish.
David:
[38:13] I think the Robinhood versus Coinbase take is the pretty easy take to have. I just did an episode with David from Blackworks Research and Omar from Dragonfly. Omar representing Robinhood and David representing Coinbase. And we kind of like sussed out this conversation of like, how competitive are these two entities?
Ryan:
[38:31] And like the big takeaway from everyone there was like, actually, the swim lanes are pretty distinct.
David:
[38:36] Like they're mostly sticking to their own lanes. Coinbase is really trying to go to like crypto as a service and plug into like TD Ameritrade and like Fidelity and like all the boomer brokerages who are just never going to build their own crypto exchange. They're just going to plug into Coinbase and have crypto exchange via Coinbase. And so Coinbase is going to do a little B2B stuff. And they're also going competitive with Visa to do payments with BASE and USDC. And so Coinbase is actually leaning to be more of a service provider towards TradFi financial pre-existing entities, whereas Robinhood is strictly just we are retail, retail products, retail finance. And like the swim lanes are pretty distinct. And like, yes, now there's BASE versus Robinhood chain. They're both trying to do tokenized stocks. So now they are starting to actually like, you know, interfere in each other's air. But for the most part, there was consensus about like these two entities are definitely going to coexist pretty well.
Ryan:
[39:35] That's interesting, because when I look at this at a higher level, it just looks like pure convergence. But maybe there is some different place here. A few other points of convergence. That was not the only tokenized stock thing in the news this week. Xstocks on Solana, which is a partnership from Bakkt Finance. OK, this is the issuer of Xstocks. And Kraken and some others launched a similar tokenized stock offering, this time on Solana. And the way this manifested in my feed was tweets like this, this one from Mert, where I think Mert is swapping some fart coin for S&P 500. All right. Which you can now do on Solana using this vehicle.
David:
[40:11] I feel like you should go the other way.
Ryan:
[40:14] You should sell your S&P 500 for Solana. I guess if it's liquidity season. And you definitely have the option to do that. So not only this, but you also mentioned Gemini is launching tokenized stocks. I think we really need to dig into what these things are. We actually have an episode we're recording with one of the issues, Denari, and they power partially the Solana X stocks, tokenized stocks, and also this Gemini tokenized stock offering. And they were just approved as the first platform to be able to get their broker-dealer license and to offer tokenized U.S. stocks to domestic investors. So David, I don't even know what all of this means yet. And I feel like you and I need to do an entire episode to figure it out, like what these different tokenized stock offerings are, how good they are compared to existing stocks you buy in your brokerage, and what the future is here. This is a tweet thread from somebody who is kind of bearish.
David:
[41:10] This is Rob from Dragonfly.
Ryan:
[41:12] Okay. Yeah. What's Rob's take here? Why is he bullish on these offerings in general? Or bearish, I should say, on these offerings.
David:
[41:18] Yeah, he's basically saying there's just a lot of hurdles that these things need to get over in order to be effective products. Because when tokenized stocks trade during after hours, then without because there actually is not one to one backed, they're more of a derivative product. Then there's market, there's pricing risk that market makers have to account for. And overall, it's just blunt tool. Denari is one to one backed, but there's just a lot of details that I think everyone's trying to understand about these things. Like, for example, how does Denari not have a whitelist? Those are freely transferable blacklist tokens, whereas the Robinhood tokens, those are whitelisted. So, like, you need to have KYC in order to get your hands on those things. So how these work is going to be really interesting if Denari continues to offer stock, but, like, say, Lazarus Group hacks a smart contract and then all of a sudden Lazarus Group owns Apple. Sure.
Ryan:
[42:12] It's the tether problem, too. It's the tether problem, right? Yeah. So all of those kinks need to be worked out. I mean, at the end of the day, I think Rob is bullish, but sees these as kind of like, you know, early stage beta type versions of what will the future be.
David:
[42:25] Everyone's very excited.
Ryan:
[42:26] He's pumping the brakes. Yeah, he's throwing some cold water on it. Okay. But you know who's actually, you know who actually hates it is traditional finance. This is the financial industry. They're pushing back on tokenized equity, urging the SEC to reject crypto firms exemptions because they say this is going to cause liquidity fragmentation. You're going to lose investor protection with these things they're not real stocks and this is all like risk to market structure and by the way to your point you know north korea compliance aml kyc's price discovery is going to suck don't let this happen sec so this is old traditional finance not new traditional finance like robin hood pushing back on this whole concept because their entire business is at stake david these banks do not want you know new entrants to go and chomp and, you know, software eat their entire business. So the big question is, what does the SEC think about this? You can imagine if this was the Gary Gensler regime, you'd already, like, none of this would be happening. Banhammer. Banhammer, just like speeches and tweets and all sorts of things. But this is Paul Atkins, who was asked on CNBC, this very question by the interviewer. And here's what he had to say. This is Paul Atkins, the new chair of the SEC. What do you make of these sort of tokenization efforts? I mean, it seems to me that we have rules. We could debate whether the rules are the right rules and maybe they should be changed. But given the rules that are in place and the intention of the rule today,
Ryan:
[43:51] It seems to me that the effort to sort of, quote unquote, tokenize something, you know, an underlying asset and to sort of use this structure is really effectively just a workaround to what the actual intent of the rule is. Well, I guess I disagree with that a bit because tokenization is an innovation. And we at the SEC should be focused on how do we advance innovation in the marketplace. And so I would argue here over the last several years, the SEC has been standing athwart efforts to innovate in the marketplace because things have been unclear. The rules have not been clear. We've had regulation through enforcement. That day is over. We are now, my whole goal is to make things transparent, you know, from the regulatory aspect and give people a firm foundation upon which to innovate and come out with new products so that they know what they're doing. David, this is not an SEC that's going to say no.
David:
[44:51] Wow. That is, this is truly a Overton window being pushed. It's one thing for them to like get our get their boots off of our neck, but to give not a green light, but like a keep going like wordage to tokenize stocks is huge. Andrew, like made a very good point. Like these things are workarounds. Yeah, they are. Yeah. One of the reasons why I'm in crypto is like some of the things that we do, the new things that we do in crypto are all kind of slightly illegal. And that's what makes it exciting.
Ryan:
[45:19] They're works. OK, they're workarounds.
David:
[45:21] You know, we're great. It's all gray areas. It questions a lot of the rules that we have in how we operate in the world. And now that we have workarounds, we have alternatives. And I see Paul Atkins being like, you know what? Why are the old ways the ways to do it? Let's do it in new ways. And I am a huge fan of that.
Ryan:
[45:41] So am I. We got more bullish stuff after the break. Tom Lee, I call him David, the Wall Street whisperer. He set up a micro strategy for ETH and he's calling ETH the next Bitcoin on CNBC. We'll talk about that. Also, Coinbase tucks in an acquisition.
Ryan:
[45:55] And is your crypto co-worker secretly working for North Korea? My God, that sounds like a BuzzFeed headline. We'll talk about all that and more. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. All right. I think this is the most bullish thing to happen to Ethereum this year. And we've had a number of bullish things, but this tops them all. This is Tom Lee. He is starting a ETH treasury company. He's going on CNBC. He's saying things like ETH is the next Bitcoin. All right. And he's basically pulling the micro strategy play. So he's taking a publicly traded Bitcoin mining company. It's called Bitmine. And he's announcing a 250 million private placement to buy ETH. So he's basically taking the shell of an entity. They're stopping the Bitcoin mining. And he's announcing a treasury strategy. It's very similar to, we just talked about Joseph Lubin, what he's doing with SBET, different business, but similar strategy. The raise is backed by major crypto traditional finance investors. You got your Pantera, you got your Galaxy, you got your Founders Fund, you got your Kraken. But the difference between this, and I think SBET and Lubin, is almost like the difference between where we're talking about Base and Robinhood. All right. So like Coinbase is a crypto native company. Joseph Lubin, he's crypto native. Of course he's going to do ETH. Of course he's. Is it a surprise that he's bullish on ETH and wants to stack more in a public entity? Tom Lee is not one of us. He is from traditional finance. He is a Wall Street guy.
David:
[47:24] He's one of them.
Ryan:
[47:24] He's one of them. Look at him. He wears a suit. Look at him. He is now starting this treasury fund. It's the first of its kind for Ether the asset. I think he's a TradFi KOL, David. The other thing is he's got a history of success. He's on CNBC almost all the time, every week. And he started talking about bitcoin in july of 2017 and do you remember him during the the bull run of 2017 that whole era of crypto he was like the only guy on cnbc saying things like at the time what bitcoin was you know trading in the the thousands he was saying that that bitcoin could cannibalize gold and it could be worth as much as 55 000 and in 2017 that was batshit crazy that
David:
[48:12] Was a 55x.
Ryan:
[48:13] Yes that was a 55x and it was crazy and he was saying it to trad find cnbc and they'd be like okay whatever but tell us about stocks all right so he's got that history almost 10 years back of of saying hey the bitcoin you remember when i made those calls when bitcoin was trading the thousands and now it's a hundred thousand now he's like
David:
[48:34] Doing it again.
Ryan:
[48:34] I'm doing it again except I'm going to like do this in a treasury fund and ETH is going there as well. And you know what? We should just play a clip. Let me tell you like his pitch. It's different than what our pitch would be for ETH
David:
[48:47] Or the asset. Let me guess. It's for TradFi.
Ryan:
[48:49] He calls stablecoins the open AI for crypto and Ethereum. Anyway, this is what he says. This is how he pitches it. Underneath the stablecoin industry is Ethereum. That is really like the backbone and architecture of stablecoins. So it's important to create a project that essentially accumulates Ethereum to essentially protect and have some influence on the network. So that's why we're creating this treasury vehicle to buy Ethereum. The more Ethereum that's accumulated, the more secure the network is. And I think it's also sort of the architecture that future banks will have. You know, when Goldman issues a stablecoin and JPMorgan doing it on Ethereum, as a layer one blockchain, they're going to want to secure it by staking Ethereum. So we're trying to get in front of that by creating a treasury. That's the pitch. You guys are already bullish on stablecoins, right? Most of the stablecoins are issued on Ethereum, okay? Most of the banks will issue stablecoins. those banks will want to have a stake in the network and buy ETH. And I'm just front running that. That's his entire pitch.
David:
[49:53] With Robinhood and Coinbase, like both of Robinhood's at all-time highs. Coinbase is very close to all-time highs. And those are the two big crypto companies as it relates to TradFi. And you have Robinhood making a chain, issuing tokenized stocks. People are very stoked about stable coins, circles through the roof, whereas all of circles, USDC is on Ethereum. And so like previously your and my like bull case would for ETH would be like uncensorable money, uncensorable DeFi, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, he doesn't.
Ryan:
[50:22] Say any of those things.
David:
[50:24] The most pragmatic, the most effective bull case for ETH that I'm seeing like evolve is just like ETH is where stable coins are. ETH is where asset tokenization is. ETH is where all the institutions are making layer twos on. It's just the like there's been like an effort to try and have this like rigorous ETH value capture conversation from the John Charbonneaux's and all those and I'm like intellectually interested in those conversations but then there's just the eh, ETH is just proximate to the bajillions of stable coins and to like the Robinhood chain and the Coinbase chain and to all the other like players that are doing it. And it's just ETH. It's just that's the ETH. It's the institutional asset. And I see like a growing amount of energy. Oh, yeah.
Ryan:
[51:06] It's very it's very left and right of the curve, which makes sense. It's not an overcomplicated narrative. And the stock price is doing pretty well on this, as you might guess. BMNR is the ticker. It jumped about a thousand percent on the back of this news. So doing kind of well on that. Also, Sharplink, of course, which is Joseph Lubin's treasury. Every week, they're doing kind of the microstrategy. It jumped like 38% yesterday. Did it really? Oh, that's nice.
David:
[51:33] Yeah, it went up big. I was like, I guess I didn't see this announcement, but I guess when you announce that you're going to buy 200,000 more ETH, you go up 35%.
Ryan:
[51:40] Well, it also helps when the ETH price jumps, you know, 7%, and then you get an amplifier effect on top of that. So they're just buying every week.
David:
[51:49] We have just been completely Stockholm syndrome as the ETH price movements. We are like, ETH went up like 7%. We're at $2,600 now. Like, hang on, we're going to go up like $300 in a day. And we're going to remember what a true pump is like. We had it not too long ago, but we forget what frothing this can look like in ETH price.
Ryan:
[52:10] Oh, I know. I mean, I made this comment. There's an entire generation lost in crypto who's never felt an actual ETH bull market. And that's why none of them believe that it's happening. And because the last four years, right, from 2022 up to now, if you entered crypto, it's not been great.
David:
[52:27] ETH goes down is what ETH does.
Ryan:
[52:29] ETH goes down.
David:
[52:30] Still on the TradFi side of things, the design app Figma, it has filed to go public. This wouldn't otherwise be news, but they are doing so with $70 million of Bitcoin on the balance sheet. Just moving the Overton window of Bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset for public
David:
[52:44] companies. So that's pretty cool.
Ryan:
[52:46] That surprised people, right? It's like they're going in public and, oh, we got 70 million on the balance sheet in Bitcoin. Kind of nice. Oh, yeah.
David:
[52:51] By the way, we own a ton of Bitcoin.
Ryan:
[52:55] And then on crypto native news,
David:
[52:56] Coinbase has acquired their fourth company in 2025, Liquify. Liquify is just a token management platform for early stage tokenization process. So if you're going to issue a token and you need compliance, you need token ownership, tracking, vesting, distribution, all that kind of stuff. It's just a compliance platform for token creation. Uniswap Foundation uses it. OP Labs uses it. Athena, Zora, they use it. And now that's integrated into Coinbase. So Coinbase is expanding their suite of offerings.
Ryan:
[53:24] And lastly, this is ZachXBT saying there might be as many as 900 workers in crypto, like maybe some of your co-workers, bankless listeners that aren't who they say they are, that are actually working for North Korea. And they might do something nefarious with your code base, steal your assets. Who knows? And this is these workers have somehow gotten through the interview process.
David:
[53:46] Yeah, between 345 to 920 possible jobs are actually done by North Koreans. Zach alleges that crypto firms have paid at least $16.5 million in salaries to North Korean IT workers since the start of the year. That's wild. Monthly payroll of $2.75 million. Is it really an exploit if you're just working a job?
Ryan:
[54:06] If they're doing good work?
David:
[54:07] They're just working. They haven't gotten fired. Is that an exploit?
Ryan:
[54:13] I mean, taking time bombs. They're definitely looking for exploits.
David:
[54:15] They're definitely looking for exploits, but it seems like they might also just be clocking in to work every day.
Ryan:
[54:21] I don't know, man. But you know how we always talk about crypto is front running the opportunity. It's front running things in general. OK, I think like this type of thing is starting to happen with the AI companies. Do you hear about this Indian worker who is like working for like four or five different firms at the same time?
David:
[54:37] Why was he doing that just to collect salaries?
Ryan:
[54:40] I assume so. Probably. I don't know that it was as nefarious as what we might expect from the North Korean regime. But yeah, that kind of thing. We're just front running things. I mean, this is going to happen all the time. I mean, do you really know who you're working with if you haven't met them in person? We've met.
David:
[54:56] We've met.
Ryan:
[54:57] Yeah.
David:
[54:58] I haven't seen you in a while. You've been off the radar for.
Ryan:
[55:03] A while now. Am I still me?
David:
[55:05] I feel like we need to do a yearly checking. Technology's adapting really quickly. Yeah. Yeah.
Ryan:
[55:09] Some proof of humanity is required. Look, man, I'll just do Sam Altman's WorldCoin thing. I'll get my eyes encoded and we can work from there. All right. One thing I did want to talk to you about is I do think you should
Ryan:
[55:21] go check out this Vitalik Buterin keynote that he gave at ETHCC, David. So I know you missed it, but he had this great line in here, which is talking about the purpose of decentralization. He says, look, the purpose of decentralization is to make users free. And it really brought me back to like, man, he's really good on that subject. He's fantastic on talking about the why we're here type of a subject. And he basically said this. He put up this meme.
Ryan:
[55:48] He's like, first, in the first era of crypto, we're decentralized because we have the top decentralized KOLs as advisor, right? We're decentralized because others believe we're decentralized. And then the next stage is we're decentralized because we use decentralized tech. You know, we have ZK tech and we have cryptography and we're a layer, whatever, and that makes us decentralized, all right? And that's kind of the next level. But now crypto really needs to move to this third level, which is we're decentralized because we make our users free. We have actual like property rights guarantees that if the things disappear, users still have the ability to access their assets. Users still have the ability to move assets from one place to another without any third party interference. Right. And he's like, this is the thing that crypto really needs to focus on now. It's kind of a message to like hey the decentralized theater kind of like that got us here but there's still a lot of that now let's actually do the thing crypto was meant to do which is make our users free sovereign individuals of the internet and i think sometimes we're talking about at least this year for me there's a lot of exciting things going on with stable coins and real world assets and all of these things that are exciting i every once in a while want to get back to the why we're here,
Ryan:
[57:03] Like why we're going bankless, what this is all about, and what the unique thing that crypto is bringing to the world. No one better to talk about that than Vitalik. So I guess I'm just, I'm shilling this episode. Maybe we'll put a little clip from, yeah, I'm shilling the talk. Maybe we'll put a clip from Vitalik in the talk in the moment of Zed, but you got to check this out.
David:
[57:21] Yeah. The link to the talk will also be in the show notes so y'all can go watch it right now.
Ryan:
[57:25] There you go. You all know that 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. So basically, you know, level one, we're decentralized because we have the top decentralization KOLs as advisors. Level two, we're decentralized because we use decentralized tech. Level three, we're decentralized because we make our users free. So if you're building something, the first question to ask is, are you making your users free?
Music:
[57:56] Music