ROLLUP: $4 Trillion Market Cap | GENIUS Act | ETH ETF Mania

In this episode, we celebrate the crypto market reaching a $4 trillion cap, exploring the impact of the Genius Bill on stablecoins and digital assets. We discuss Polymarket's U. S. acquisition, Ethereum's ETF inflows, and the courtroom drama surrounding the Roman Storm trial. —- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🌐BINANCE | THE WORLDS #1 CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/binance 🦎 COINGECKO API | REAL-TIME CRYPTO PRICE & MARKET DATA https://bankless.cc/coingecko —- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 2:15 MARKETS https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/1948062927879131412 https://x.com/TheCryptoLark/status/1947212505039704467 8:45 ETH ETF Inflows https://x.com/Matt_Hougan/status/1948377319027998909 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1948375840737124460 https://farside.co.uk/eth/ https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1948352147050930196 https://x.com/JasonYanowitz/status/1947348010045780016 11:15 ETH Treasuries https://ethermachine.com/ https://x.com/jdetychey/status/1947278978454061240 https://x.com/fabdarice/status/1948395310310732184 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1948355494885622027 https://x.com/fundstrat/status/1948114342680879306 https://x.com/hughkarp/status/1948021401513771236 https://x.com/materkel/status/1948360988832461271 https://x.com/laurashin/status/1948166358832759016 30:00 GENIUS Act https://x.com/CoinDesk/status/1946292667098308757 https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1946632494855368917 https://x.com/paoloardoino/status/1946307158515069334 https://x.com/paoloardoino/status/1946292409068834935 https://x.com/SecScottBessent/status/1946283991562084432 https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2025/07/18/tether-ceo-says-he-ll-comply-with-genius-to-come-to-u-s-circle-says-it-s-set-now 38:45 Polymarket in US https://x.com/shayne_coplan/status/1947322129654927465 https://x.com/shayne_coplan/status/1948087129193751030 https://x.com/shayne_coplan/status/1948087129193751030 https://x.com/jespow/status/1947702880838029717 https://x.com/brian_armstrong/status/1947827460307087528 47:00 45M Gas Limit Block https://x.com/ChodoKamil/status/1947295096656794054 https://x.com/potuz_eth/status/1948068611341398286 52:45 Solana Bam Protocol and RICO Suit https://x.com/jito_sol 59:10 Coinbase Perps and PNC Partnership https://x.com/brian_armstrong/status/1947340416283537633 https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/pnc-bank-coinbase-announce-strategic-partnership-to-advance-digital-asset-solutions-and-expand-banking-services-302510790.html 58:30 Roman Storm Trial https://x.com/tayvano_/status/1946062228878508119 https://www.propublica.org/article/whats-a-pig-butchering-scam-heres-how-to-avoid-falling-victim-to-one https://x.com/tayvano_/status/1946062275871391924 https://x.com/amandatums/status/1948031555084972080 https://x.com/jchervinsky/status/1948037194909688230 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1948348407103299814 1:05:44 Zora vs Pump https://x.com/andy8052/status/1947791347538391199 https://x.com/smyyguy/status/1947291271401222593 https://blockworks.co/analytics/zora/zora-coin-platform https://dune.com/adam_tehc/memecoin-wars https://x.com/notthreadguy/status/1947793270169604321 https://x.com/ZeMirch/status/1948109514793689244 https://x.com/blocknewsdotcom/status/1948113825095458836 https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/pump-fun --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, it is the 4th week of July, the final week of July. It is time for the Bankless Weekly Roll-Ups. David, we got all-time high on the total crypto market cap. Did you know that? I just saw this while I was preparing the agenda.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. 4.001 trillion dollars.

• 0:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, yeah, that's great.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  Good.

• 0:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, for $4 trillion, it's incredible. Also, the Genius Bill was signed last Friday. The question is, what's next? I think this is a big, big, big deal. And what do you do if you're the White House, if you're Donald Trump? Well, first, you gotta throw a party with all the stablecoin bros. And he did that. We have some clips from those shenanigans. Also, the big question, what's gonna happen next after the Genius Bill? What next issuers are we going to see?

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. What does this actually do? What does this unlock? How are the TradFi players going to make their moves after all this is unlocked? Speaking of making moves, Polymarket is making moves into the United States. They buy an onshore exchange that makes them US compliant. We're gonna talk about that. Shane Compton on CNBC talking all about it. And then the ETH, the big story of the week, if you're on CT, this was the news of the week, was the ETH ETF inflows, god candles. The ETH Treasury companies are soaking up ETH, but so are the ETFs. The ETH ETF, ETH A, the BlackRock ETF, is now the 3rd fastest ever ETF to hit $1 billion. We're gonna go look at a chart. And spoiler, it's just a vertical line, so we're gonna talk about that.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  More ETH Treasury companies got announced this week. We're talking about that.

• 1:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  And lastly, an update. Roman Storm's lawyers are asking for a mistrial after, will you believe this? The government put up a witness who stole funds, probably didn't even use tornado cash, David. What are they doing over there?

• 1:48Speaker 01

  Witnesses that didn't use tornado cash? What's the point? What's the point of that?

• 1:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  All of this would be almost hilarious if a man's life wasn't at stake. So there's some big stakes here. And the Roman Storm trial, we'll update you on all of that and more. I gotta let you know, though, David is, he would be even higher energy, given ETH price point on the week. But my man's got a cold.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  I'm a little sick. I'm a little sick.

• 2:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  So if you're saying that in the voice.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  I'm here.

• 2:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're here and you're bullish, right?

• 2:13Speaker 01

  I'm still, I'm here and I'm bullish. That is correct.

• 2:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, in your most bullish way, can you give us the Bitcoin price in the week?

• 2:19Speaker 01

  Bitcoin price on the week, up half a percent on the week. We are currently clocking in at $119,000 Bitcoin. $119,000 Bitcoin. No, no new all time highs on the seven days, unfortunately.

• 2:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Unfortunately. Uh, how about, uh, ETH on the week? No all time high yet either, right?

• 2:36Speaker 01

  We still got 40% until the ETH all time high, but nonetheless, uh, pretty happy week for ETH holders. 9.5%. We're going to round up to 10.

• 2:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Round up to 10% on the week.

• 2:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  A little bit.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  So ETH up to $3,720 this week. Pretty good week.

• 2:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's been a really good run. Uh, David, I want to play this clip for you. I just enjoy Jim Cramer sometimes. Let me, let me tell you what Jim Cramer says about Bitcoin.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  Own some as a hedge against the $37, $8 trillion. They want to own a debt. They want to own it for their kids. And you know who else feels that way? Me. I don't want that debt. My kids, I'm worried about my kids. Worry about my kids. 38 trillion.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, we all do. We all do. So many different ways.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  Why don't you buy some Bitcoin or ETH?

• 3:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  I just, I just enjoy that exchange. He's just like, it's somewhat awkward. He's just like, turns to the other anchors. He's like, you worried about your kids? You worried about your kids with all that debt? Buy some Bitcoin. Why don't you buy some Bitcoin? Why don't you buy some ETH?

• 3:34Speaker 01

  I love how that's so simple. It's just like.

• 3:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do it for the kids.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  Do it for the kids. Buy, buy Ether for the kids. Do it for your kids.

• 3:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is the hidden genius of, uh, Jim Cramer. We've been talking about ultrasound money and this guy comes out and he's just like, buy.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Do it for the kids.

• 3:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, shilling ETH for the kids. That's what we gotta be doing.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  For the kids.

• 3:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  How about the ratio on the week? Are we, uh, greenish or?

• 3:54Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. Well, I mean Bitcoin up half a percent on the week. Uh, Ether up 9.5% on the week. So you know, you add those, you do the math, not a math genius, but I think that means that the ETH BTC ratio is up 9% on the week. That's kind of how that works.

• 4:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. And you said it in the intro, but we are about above a bill, uh, $4 trillion, right? We got an all time high.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  We're actually slightly below it right now, but you know, we're at 4 trillion. We're rounding up to 4 trillion.

• 4:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's the highest. That's the highest it's ever been. Four trillion dollars.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  The highest it's ever been has been this week. That's correct.

• 4:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I guess our previous all time high, what was that? When's that? Was that in December? That was December 2024. That was the previous total crypto market cap all time high. And then before that.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  The launch of the Trump meme coin.

• 4:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, before that, we had 2021, 2.8 trillion dollars was the top of the 2021 bull run. Where do you think? Where do you think we go on the top here?

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Six.

• 4:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Six? That is so bearish.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Six trillion.

• 4:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  That is bearish. That is David Cold bearish. I'm not going to accept that answer.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Six trillion, but I have a cold.

• 4:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you want to ask me? Ask me.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  I don't think I do. Let's move on.

• 5:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  10 trillion.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  10 trillion this, this cycle, like 18 months.

• 5:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, or however long it takes. I mean, could maybe it's six months.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  I was on, I was on a tradfi content producer, Amit. I was on a stream last night educating about ETH. Cause he, cause his audience was pretty large. There were like almost 2,000 people watching the stream. He was like, I, they, all my listeners were asking about ETH. And so I went on for an hour and talked about ETH. And then of course, they asked me, he asked me the price predictions.

• 5:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Don't tell me you gave him something stupid like 7, 7K.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  I said 7K.

• 5:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh my God.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  By, by the end of this year, by the end of, I didn't say that was a top. I said, and it was the end of year price prediction. I said 7K.

• 5:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bank station, we got to help me out here. Let's get David a bit more bullish. He's forgotten what ETH can do in a bull run, in a secular bull run. And, uh, you know, it's maybe it's the cold speaking, but I feel like you could, you could pump those numbers up, buddy.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  I, in addition to that, I also talked about the F word. Because not in the near term, but like he, he asked, like, would you think?

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Ether will ever F word Bitcoin.

• 6:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  And, you know, I didn't give a timeframe on that because I've been burned by that in the past. I don't want to be, I don't want to give out that level of specificity. But I said, the Ethereum is shooting for the number one spot. And it's doing it with all of the research and all the innovation and all the investment that the Ethereum Foundation has put into Ethereum. So the good, the purpose of Ethereum is to become the number one spot. And it's, and it's got the chops to do it. And time is on Ethereum's side. Bitcoin actually does not have time because time actually decays Bitcoin. It actually like falls apart every time with quantum in the security budget. But Ethereum, Ethereum has time on its side. And so I gave my bullish, uh, yes, eventually if the ETH takes the number one spot, take.

• 6:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, further into this episode, I'm actually going to invoke the F word, but, uh, but not quite yet. Okay. Uh, and we'll, we'll put that into context. First you got to tell me about some of these coins pumping on the week.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, we got some movers of the week. Athena, the big mover of the week. This was definitely downstream of the Athena Treasury Company that went live. Uh, there's a, there's a little nuances on that one because I don't know if it's specifically stacking E N A, the token.

• 7:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  They are a little bit, right? But for buybacks to kind of stabilize things, it's a thing, right?

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Uh, it's a thing. So Athena pumped 28% in the week. Pengu, the meme coin of the Pushe Penguins ecosystem pumps 25%. That price action is incredible. It's very large green candle. And then Uniswap, not often do you see Uniswap as a mover of the week, but up 13% on the line.

• 7:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do they add a fee switch? God, I wish.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Why isn't the Uniswap in the year of our Lord 2025? Why is the fee switch not on?

• 7:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Dow, help us out. Dow.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Somebody just paradigm and recent, just turn it on.

• 7:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's time.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  I'm still holding this goddamn bag.

• 7:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, uh, some good news for your altcoin bags as well. Uh, Google searches for altcoins just hit a four year high, according to Lark Davis. So you got that going for us and Google search. Does anyone use Google anymore though? You know, I want to see some chat GPT numbers. That's what I want to see.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, when, when Google, the altcoin term is in Google at all time high, I'm like, that doesn't make me feel great.

• 8:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, who searches for altcoins? I feel like crypto native people do that.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know. I bet you if you typed in the XRP search term for Google, it'd be also very high.

• 8:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't want to do that, dude.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  I don't want to do that.

• 8:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  I can't, I can't look at the XRP price on the week anymore. It hurts too bad.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  There's just an XRP bull market and we're just living in it.

• 8:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's pretty much true. Some numbers I can look at on a weekly basis and I will look at this week are the ETH ETF flows. You mentioned a god candle in ETH ETF flows and you were not lying.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Not that they have candles. If they did, it'd be god size.

• 8:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, I got a candle here. I got a candle in the agenda. Yeah, we can see candles. Okay, so this is Matt Hogan and this is stat for you. So between July 2024 and now, ETH inflows, ETF inflows were about $4.2 billion, an entire last year, $4.2 billion. Just in this month, July 2025, we exceeded that amount.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  That's so stupid.

• 9:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a god candle.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 9:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  A week now? Okay.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  So let me show it to you. Well, this is kind of how it looks on the Eric Balchunis charts.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  That's the vertical chart that I was talking about.

• 9:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, this is, this is ETH in green. What's interesting here is so I bit in orange. All right, so this is Bitcoin. This is just the, the, the BlackRock ETH A numbers, which is like 80% of all inflows into Ethereum. It's, it's got the dominant position in BlackRock as well. You can see, what, what did a Bitcoin ETFs do? They went vertical pretty much from day one. They were just shot right up.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  It was rates to one.

• 9:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like a SpaceX rocket, right? Not coming down. And what about Ethereum? Ether ETFs were slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, slow. It's been slow over the last year. It's kind of up and down, up and down. And then suddenly this month.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  It goes, it goes from like $5 billion in ETH A deposits to $10 billion in like four days.

• 10:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's doing what the Bitcoin chart is doing, just with like a one-year delay, at least so far. I mean, that's pretty impressive, right? And we also got a, this is where I'm going to use that for it. We got a flipping, okay, in daily inflows. So for the last five days, Ethereum ETF daily inflows have exceeded Bitcoin daily inflows.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  By like a whole lot every single day.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  A whole lot. Yeah.

• 10:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  So that happened as well.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the total ETF rankings Bitcoin $54 billion in Bitcoin ETFs. ETH coming in at $8.7 billion in ETF deposits. And since Solana is on there, it technically has an ETF. One of 105 million in Solana ETF deposits. That's the current ranking of the current horse race.

• 10:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, it does seem that if ETH just even catches up to its market cap size in proportion to Bitcoin's, got some going to do, right? That's what at least like 15 billion or so, something like that. And then maybe it exceeds that. So we'll have to see. Some more institutional purchasing of Ether on the week was this, David. We've got another ETH treasury company.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  This website is so aesthetic.

• 11:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's called the Ethereum Machine. No, sorry, the Ether Machine, because it's all about ETH the asset. And what's this? Who's behind it? How much are we talking?

• 11:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is a good friend, Andrew Keys. We had him on the podcast so long ago and we're going to record with him tomorrow. On Friday, that little episode will be out on Monday. That episode will add roughly $10 to $50 billion on to the capital cap. Looking forward to that one. So it's all about Ether, the productive asset. This is also something, Ryan, since you called me an ETH bear a second ago. This is also something I talked about on the stream last night. Again, with the kind of like trad5 retail audience. Ether, the asset, has a particularly strong resonance with crypto acquisition companies in comparison to Bitcoin, simply because Bitcoin is inert. It's just an inert asset. And that's its narrative, 21 million hard cap units. That's how it works.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  But ETH is productive. And so when these ETH acquisition companies come online and they take on debt, they take on debt that have to pay off like 2% to 4% to 5% in order to take on a debt. That's their debt payments. Well, they can pay that off using the yield that they get from the Ether that they purchase. And so there is this automatic repayment mechanism that Ether, the asset specifically enables for its acquisition companies. And this is exactly the narrative that Andrew Keys is leaning into with the Ether Machine. He wants to make Ether. The ether that the ether machine acquires as productive as possible in order to scale out how much access to debt, access to credit that he can finance and he's leveraging leveraging

• 12:56Speaker 01

  that. And so like literally the number one thing that they say on the website, on the website, we exist to make ether productive. And you know, the best part about this is that he's, there's, there's seven different ways to make ether productive, right? You know, and one of the biggest ones is that he's just going to take ether and he's going to inject it into DeFi. He's going to go get yield on Ave. He's going to go stake it on Ethereum, whatever ways in DeFi that ether can become productive, he will use. And I think like companies like this that are doing DeFi operations to get yield on their ether, they're just going to inject a whole bunch of TVL onto Ethereum DeFi, which is just going to give the whole ecosystem a boost. So there's a really just sexy flywheel going on here between ether, the asset being productive, putting it into DeFi, and then

• 13:39Speaker 01

  having that go on to Wall Street, having Andrew Keyes go on to Wall Street and then pitch this operation that he's doing to the boomers. So they, they can FOMO in to our backs. It's gonna be great.

• 13:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, he was on Wall Street too. Did you see him on CNBC? They asked him, okay, after you gave kind of similar pitch that you just gave, basically, they, they said, so Andrew, do you own any Bitcoin? This was his response.

• 14:01Speaker 03

  So you're an Ethereum guy. Do you own Bitcoin? I'm not, I do not own Bitcoin. None? I'd rather have an iPhone than a landline. Ooh.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Wow. Did you see what Andrew said after that? No, I heard him say, he went, ooh. So right after that, he goes.

• 14:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Burn, sick burn.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  I think that's what the kids call a sick burn.

• 14:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, you said that? Oh my God, that's so funny. Okay. Yeah. So it's Andrew Keyes there just talking about, you know, the, the apps and the economy that you could build on top of this productive asset called ETH. So a few other stats, this was to be the largest ETH treasury to date.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Was to be?

• 14:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I got, I got an update for you. Okay. So it was to be 400,000 ETH. Okay, that would be top of the charts. Last I saw the ETH reserve, last we were looking at it last week, Lubin and Tom Lee, they were having around 300,000 ETH in terms of supply. This would be 400,000 from Andrew Key.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Coming in, jumping in at the number one spot, but you said what?

• 14:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  That was the plan. That was the plan. Yeah, everybody's got a plan until Tom Lee enters and buys some more ETH. Okay, but first of all, I gotta, I gotta tell you what the ticker is, and it's a nice clean ticker. It's ETHM, E T H M. Alright, so it's not a former Bitcoin mining thing. You know, not a sports thing. It's just straight ETHM, which I sort of like.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  I think that matters, actually.

• 15:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  No.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Like versus Sharp Link Gaming. Granted, Joseph Lubin has done a great job, because whenever I-

• 15:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Strategic bet on ETH, yeah.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  When I think S bet, I think strategic bet on ETH, yeah. Uh, but then like Tom Lee's like Bitmine. I think the branding actually matters here.

• 15:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, a little bit, maybe. I don't know. Who knows? You know what does matter, though, is when you buy in size, and that's what Tom Lee did. So, breaking as of today, this is the time of recording, Bitmine Immersion, BMNR, added another 266,000 ETH to its balance sheet, bringing its total, you ready for this? New number one slot, 566,000 Ether on the balance sheet.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  That's number one?

• 16:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's number one, by a healthy margin here, okay? That's 2 billion. And if I were to run some math for you, remember we got into a little bit of the math last week, right? Tom Lee said he wants to buy 5% of all ETH. We're about one month in to the Tom Lee purchase engine. He's 10% of the way there. He's got another 90% of the way go, if, the way to go, if he's gonna hit, uh, if he's gonna hit that 5%. Right now, Michael Saylor owns 2.9% of Bitcoin. So Tom Lee is planning to almost 2X, 2 sailors' worth of ETH in proportion to, uh, your Bitcoin, in proportion to the amount that MicroStrategy owns. So that's a lot, and he's not gonna be able to always buy it at these prices, is he? I mean, if he does-

• 16:47Speaker 01

  You gotta get it below the all-time high.

• 16:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  He gotta, he gotta do that. Yeah. I mean, that's pretty, are we, like you were talking about, last time you were talking, you were talking about, oh, it's gotta be the race to a billion Ether, or sorry, a million Ether, right?

• 16:59Speaker 01

  Million Ether.

• 17:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're 50% of the way there on that race, too. We're just like a month or two in.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  You know what? New race.

• 17:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  10 million Ether. New race to 10 million Ether. Bitmine is 5% of the way there. Keep going, Tom Lee. You're doing great.

• 17:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think they'll get diminishing returns. It gets harder and harder to like, you know, like buy with Fiat as the price goes up. Right? I mean,

• 17:21Speaker 01

  10,

• 17:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  and you're, and you're heading 7K levels. Oh, my God.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  But wake, wake me up at 10 million Ether. The Bitmine immersion technology is up 10%. That was announced today, right? The acquisition that we just talked about?

• 17:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just this morning, on Thursday for,

• 17:35Speaker 01

  On Thursday, which is today. Yeah. 9.5% Bitmine techno, or no, yes. Uh, that's, that's what the stock price jumped today.

• 17:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. And you know what? When Tom Lee is schmoozing with people like Kathy Lee, who's also purchasing Bitmine and this guy, you recognize this guy?

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's Jason, that's Jensen from Nvidia. Tom Lee is such a funny looking guy, man.

• 17:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's part of the appeal, man. Just the, uh, the hair is working for him. You know, he's just,

• 18:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, something's doing it for me.

• 18:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. You like this?

• 18:06Speaker 01

  I'm into it.

• 18:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. You, you ready to revise your price predictions now?

• 18:11Speaker 01

  Okay. So, uh, I am a holder of Sbet, Ryan. I don't know if you are. I'm a holder of Sbet. And Sbet is down 40% on the week after it peaked out at $40. And like, I know that like Joseph Lubin is just dumping on me because he's going to issue shares to raise funds to go buy more Ether. And it's like a mixed feeling that I have of just like, okay, so I'm holding a stock and I'm, I'm adding to the premium and Joseph Lubin is going to sell this. And he's able to sell it because people like me are buying, but he's dumping on me. But it's okay because he's going to go buy more Ether. And then when he announces it, it's going to go back up. It's just like a weird, weird,

• 18:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  I got the perfect solution for you. You ready for this? Okay. Make sure you just still own some Ether, man. And he's dumping on you in order to buy your other,

• 18:56Speaker 01

  Buy my other bags.

• 18:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Cannot fail. Actually, comes the question. These are some questions from the Bankless Nation that our Discord, our private Discord for Bankless Citizens, they've been asking about the treasury. I want to raise some of these questions because, you know, like, when somebody starts saying things like "cannot fail," that was satire, by the way, okay? Don't clip me. Clip lords. Like, at some point, this is going to go in a direction where it's overpumped. And that was the first question that came out of Bankless Discord. "Is the hype around ETH treasury plays indicative of a bubble?" What do you think, David?

• 19:33Speaker 01

  A bubble seems like such a binary thing. So is it a bubble or not? Like, it's bubble-ish. It's definitely frothy. It's definitely like, you know, the euthanasia roller coaster. Like, we have one good thing, and then crypto has a pattern of taking one thing to its logical conclusion, which is incredibly distorted. I definitely see that that's what's happening. Litecoin treasury acquisition companies, like, come on. Like, let's be honest here.

• 19:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, come on. You're not a buyer.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so, like, this is a message that I sent inside of our Bankless Team Discord, just kind of like about my thoughts on it, just to like, kind of give everyone's a heads up of where I am with this meta, this bubbling meta. Like, at the end of the day, yes, this is a true unlock. Like, treasury vehicles are a net new thing, both for TradFi and crypto. There's a real primitive here that is valuable, that Michael Saylor has pioneered, and now we are trying to copy. And so, I don't want to discount that. When we look at some of the deals of the ETH treasury companies or the Bitcoin treasury companies, they are pulling forward demand. And so, we are borrowing from the future to have demand today. So it's kind of a shot in the arm. It's a little bit of a shot in the arm.

• 20:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  And in the process, reflexively creating net new demand that you wouldn't otherwise have.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Definitely that. And that is both, you know, there's a double edged sword. So we're reflexively reflexively, you know, causing marketing to happen, you know, that price is the best marketing. So we're buying it. We're bringing in net new buyers via that shot in the arm. And, you know, maybe that shot in the arm is especially what Ether needed to like get it out of its like REV meta from the ETH concerners and into the ETH as a global reserve asset meta that the ETH treasury companies are like taking it. So maybe we're elevating Ether into a better. Needed to happen. We're not even at all time high yet, right? Yeah. And so like, that's kind of how I'm thinking about this. It's a temper, it's a one time shot in the arm that we don't know how like, how large that shot in the arm is. Maybe it's very

• 21:28Speaker 01

  large. Like maybe, maybe like this, like race for crypto reserve assets is very large and maybe, maybe it keeps on going. This is something that, here's my cautionary tale, is that there is a, there is opportunity for grift in these treasury companies. Doesn't matter if it's a Bitcoin treasury company, an ETH treasury company, a Litecoin treasury company. But I think as you go down the market cap, the likelihood of it being pretty grifty goes up, or the surface area for grift goes up. And I'm going to hearken back to the days of the yield companies, Celsius, BlockFi, Gemini Earn, which no one really wants to be lumped in with Celsius, but Celsius was cheating. It was a Ponzi scheme that was cheating and it was truly grifty. And Celsius was so bad

• 22:11Speaker 01

  that they pulled in their competitors to kind of get into the mud with them. And so BlockFi really, in order to be competitive, had to do some things it didn't really want to do. And that got Zach Prince in trouble with BlockFi. But like, were they really bad to begin with? Not really. And then there's Gemini Earn, who was involved with, just in the yield arena, but they didn't lose any customer funds at the end of the day. And so these are the same three businesses. One was a full out scam. One was above board, but kind of got sucked into the mud. And then one was totally fine, but it was just in the same environment. And it's really about the leadership, in my opinion. It's going to be the leadership of these respective ETH treasury companies or crypto treasury companies that determines like whether this thing is the

• 22:55Speaker 01

  final outcome of each individual company. That's kind of my, my analysis on these things.

• 22:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, my take is I see that analogy for sure in terms of things that go out of hand, have gotten out of hand. But just to be clear, this is nothing like Celsius. You know what I mean? There are assets there, you know, what you really have to worry about is the MNAV premium on all of these treasuries. And there could come a time where that actually dips below one. And that would cause some unwind. And you don't know who's making bets and leverage and things in the background. Like, we didn't know that 3 Hours Capital was doing all this shit in the background on top of the GBDC, like NAV plays, right? And so you don't know until you get into like bearish territory and that could unwind in a hurry and cause some chaos. I guess my take around bubble territory is I'm like yellow. All right. It's not green.

• 23:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's not red yet. It's not even orange. It's yellow, moving to orange. What I do think that could happen is an after boom into Ether, though. You were talking about the, sorry, into DeFi, rather. You were talking about the productive capital uses. All right. This is Hugh Karp, Nexus Mutual. ETH Treasury Company is reaching out as they plan to deploy into ETH staking in DeFi and want to do it safely. Pretty bullish for DeFi generally. I think that's something to get ahead of, but I think all of that will happen. Like, we'll see DeFi do a run before this whole thing is over. So I still feel like we've, we've quote unquote, got some time. But you can see, things are moving in that direction a little bit more.

• 24:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  How in the world did Bitmine and Tom Lee just stack another, what, 250,000 worth of ETH? Another billion dollars, a cool billion dollars, without moving the market? You said we're up 9% on the week. I mean, shouldn't we be up like 29% on the week? With these kind of purchases? Which sort of makes you wonder like what the source of this actually is. You know, is this OTC going in the background? This is some speculation here. Did Justin Sun sell his ETH stack to Bitmine OTC, right? Justin Sun did some unwinding this week. I don't think that's necessarily the case, but I guess.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  I could totally believe it.

• 25:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  It is interesting, right? There's some stuff going on behind the scenes, OTC sales. There are some net sellers of ETH, or else you wouldn't have, you know, Tom Lee being able to purchase a billion worth of ETH without this massively affecting prices. It's only affected prices a little bit. So that's also interesting as well.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, eliminating cell pressure is the same thing as adding by pressure. Sbet absorbed however much the Ethereum Foundation just sold to them. So yeah, we didn't get Sbet buying ETH because they bought it from the Ethereum Foundation who would have otherwise sold it. So in the grand scheme of things, it actually nets out equivalently, like Justin Sun, if Justin Sun unwound his ETH and gave it to Tom Lee. Justin Sun was eventually going to sell that ETH for one reason or another, and now he's not, because now it's in a Treasury, ETH Treasury Acquisition Company, and his goal is to hoard as much ETH as possible. So I feel better about Tom Lee having Justin Sun's ETH than Justin Sun having Justin Sun's ETH.

• 25:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hypothetically. All that's rumor, I don't even, it's probably not the case, but substitute Justin Sun for somebody, some other OTC seller, and you get kind of a similar outcome. But buyer beware on these Treasury entities. Some more news that maybe the end is getting a little closer. This is Solana Bull, Joe McCann, you just launched a liquid fund. Oh, sorry, he just launched a Solana Treasury, 1.5 billion is what he plans to raise. So notable hedge fund manager, Joe McCann.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Notable, definitely notable this week.

• 26:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Certainly notable.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  Certainly notable.

• 26:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, we got a lot more to talk about, including the Trump party, the crypto party at the White House, as genius became law. Trump also met with Paolo, the founder of Tether. I think it's got to be the first time. That was a fun encounter.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 26:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Also, Polymarket, now available in the US. We'll talk about how that is. And a little bit later, you're going to tell us how Ethereum is shipping bigger blocks without a hard fork. How do you make that happen? But before we get to all of that, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including our friends over at Uniswap is the best place to do DeFi. They've got a mobile wallet. They've got a browser wallet. Of course, they have an exchange. Go check them out.

• 27:04David Hoffman?

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• 27:49David Hoffman?

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• 28:31David Hoffman?

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• 29:14David Hoffman?

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• 29:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Last Friday, the Genius Bill was signed into law. This is a bunch of guys, a bunch of members of Congress, I should say, watching.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  And a few Bankless Podcast guests.

• 30:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  A colleague, yeah.

• 30:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bill Hagerty.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  Uh huh. Oh yeah, there's Bill. Good old Bill. There's something funny about just eight dudes surrounding Trump, looking over his shoulder.

• 30:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Signing a piece of paper?

• 30:17Speaker 01

  While he signs a bill. Yeah.

• 30:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  That was it. So Genius Bill, signed into law, of course. So last Thursday, the House approved Genius. It was a 308 to 122 vote. 308 said yes. Not even close, man.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  That is a wow, blowout.

• 30:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  And after it was signed, they had a party at the White House. They called it a ceremony with a whole bunch of the stablecoin folks. Actually, maybe I'll play some clips. This is sort of a clip reaction with some of the names who attended there.

• 30:45Speaker 05

  My name is Michael Meepah. I'm the CEO at Mastercard. We just witnessed the signing of the Genius Bill.

• 30:51Speaker 06

  This is really the beginning of a financial revolution here in America. With the passing of this, we've got crypto stablecoins now that can be built right here in America to make every payment fast, cheap, and more global.

• 31:01Speaker 07

  Enables us to upgrade the financial system, make it fair, more accessible.

• 31:07Speaker 08

  The president was able to achieve one of the most important changes in the legal framework in the United States to allow the creation and the safely usage of stablecoins.

• 31:17Speaker 09

  This is going to mean fantastic benefits for individuals and businesses around them. Looking forward to the great results for crypto and for the US.

• 31:26Speaker 10

  This is a great day for crypto. This is a great day for the US dollar. And it's a great day for America.

• 31:32Speaker 11

  This is foundational legislation, foundational regulation that is going to unlock the power of the internet in rebuilding the financial system. Not only that, but it positions the US as the global leader in this new digital assets industry, which I think is incredibly important.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  So they just posted a Glaze video out of the White House main account.

• 31:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that was the out of the White House Twitter account. Okay, that's that's pretty incredible. And Trump, I get the sense that this is the actual, the first time maybe Donald Trump met Paulo from from Tether, but he called him out by name as part of the ceremony. Here he is.

• 32:11Speaker 12

  Paulo Ardino of Tether. Paulo, Paulo, thank you, Paulo.

• 32:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  How far has Tether come on his journey? Yeah, look at Donald Trump shaking hands with with Paulo here and and you get the sense that, wow, you know, I wonder if Paulo like just whispered to him, you know, do you know how many treasuries I own? He's Tether has more treasuries than the majority of G20 countries.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  Do you think Paulo is like, Trump, I'm your daddy?

• 32:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not quite at that level.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Not not very many people have leverage over Trump because like he's just like a big figure. But Paulo Paulo's got leverage.

• 32:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's kind of crazy that an individual of a like a corporate interest has that amount of treasuries.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  Hi, I own $160 billion of treasuries. You better be nice.

• 33:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is Scott Besant talking about the genius bill. Of course, the Treasury Secretary. Blockchain technologies will power the next generation of payments and the US dollar is coming on chain. Thanks to President Trump, Trump's leadership, we got the genius act. We'll help cement the US as the dollar as the global reserve currency for generations to come. That's really the message. There's a win win for the US year and also for crypto. We get the dollar as the reserve currency for generations to come. You know, my family members actually. Brought this up to me. They're like, oh, genius bill signed. Like, what do you think? You know, so I think this has gotten some mainstream attention. Not a lot. You don't, you don't get a lot of bills.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  Okay, so you have, you have three kids and a wife. Which family member?

• 33:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, no, no, extended family members. It was like, actually, my father-in-law, and he mentioned it. He never talks to me about crypto. And he's like, oh, genius bill. They passed. Tell me about that. So I.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  Whoa, your family members are asking you about the genius bill? And I'm asking you about like XRP or Cardano?

• 34:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, no, other family members are doing that. That's like, you know, the text messages you get like after 10:00 PM.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  All right.

• 34:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  But what I'm saying is it's, it's pretty notable. It's national news. When Congress passes a bill with bipartisan support, that's national news, and they did it on crypto.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  There's also, we're talking about what Tether's plans are now that this bill has been signed. And so when we had Paulo on the podcast, we asked him a little bit about this. And he wasn't, I'm not going to call him cagey, but he's being patient with the Tether plans post the genius bill. I don't think he's in any rush. And the reason why he's not in any rush is because Tether has three years to comply with the genius bill. And there's two different ways to comply, as I understand it, Ryan. Maybe you can fact check me. But there is becoming a, there's being a foreign issuer, which Tether is going to be. So they're going to comply as a foreign issuer.

• 34:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  With the existing USDT, right?

• 34:49Speaker 01

  They, you know, they might go down that path. That with, yes, the foreign, the current USDT, as we all know it and use it, is going to register as a foreign issuer. And then Tether is going to spin up a US-centric coin, a new token that's going to comply with the onshore compliance. And why he's going to spin up a second coin rather than just like make Tether onshore? I'm not sure if we totally know one of, one of.

• 35:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think he wants to keep his options open, quite honestly, you know? You have the domestic one. It might not make sense for USDT to fully register, actually. Which would mean it would be effectively banned from US exchanges. But he might be fine with that. That actually might be the.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  I mean, like, is Heather on Coinbase anyways?

• 35:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, a little bit, right? But like, not in size, not in size. And it's it's almost you kind of wonder if it's actually a bug for USDT to be like formerly registered, recognized by the United States. Maybe the the holders of Tether don't don't fully want that. Maybe that's more of a bug than a feature for them. So he's been maybe he's just playing playing his options here.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it does mean that in order to be a foreign issuer, he's going to have to move away from Bitcoin, gold and corporate bonds backing Tether. And this is the existing Tether. And so he has to, he has to move all the reserves towards T-bills and cash-like instruments.

• 36:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, he might not want to do that either, right?

• 36:13Speaker 01

  But he's already, he already bought the Bitcoin at like $20,000 Bitcoin. Like, he's already bought cheap gold at like 40% cheaper than current prices. So he's already in a huge profit. So I don't think he's too bummed about that.

• 36:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, one, one of the other things I like about this is, you know, people outside of crypto, they they say things like, oh, crypto has no use cases. I mean, look, look at it. It's just, and they ignore it completely. Store value Bitcoin number go up because that's just Ponzi tech. So they ignore that. And they're like, it has no use cases. Stablecoins are an incredible use case. This is easily a 10 to 20x better system than, like, I was trying to do a wire last week from one bank to another, one of my banks to another. My God, it took days. At one point, the wire. Yeah, it took days. I talk, I don't know how many people I talked to on the phone to do this. It literally, at one point, the wire got lost. Some, one of, one of my.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  It's absurd.

• 37:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  It got lost. They had to.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  The notion of getting a wire loss is insanity.

• 37:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  I really don't understand how wires work, but I very clearly, I know when I move USD, USDC or stablecoin from one address to another, I could see the settlement on chain. And it happens instantly, 24 hours a day. It's easy. We don't need a whole back office, multiple phone calls to all these people to actually move, move funds around. This is a 10x improvement already. And that's just moving funds domestically. You're trying to get funds to somewhere else in the world. It's like impossible. Like. The banking system kind of sucks.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  It really sucks.

• 37:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is the reason we started this podcast, but it's actually true. It does suck and stablecoins are a 10x improvement at least on that.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  Whenever I hire a guide, guides are always is a pain in the butt to to send money to.

• 37:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  A mountain guide.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  Mountain guide, yeah, to climb. So it's always in a foreign country. It's usually in Europe or Argentina or something. Sending the money is a huge pain in the ass. And I don't really want to be like the crypto guy before I meet them. But then I go hang out with them for like three days in a row. And you have to talk to them about your life because you're spending three days with them. So he asked me what I do and I talk about crypto. And so I just teach about them crypto because they're stuck with me for three days. But then I always say, okay, I'm going to tip you with crypto. You always tip your guide. But I get them to download Coinbase or Kraken or wherever, whatever continent they're in. And then I get them to send me their U S T, their tether address. And then I send them tether and they're like, whoa, that was instant. And like, I didn't even have to give you any information and like all that stuff.

• 38:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is great.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think I pill them every single time about at least accepting crypto as as an option for payments.

• 38:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Stablecoins are great for payments. They sure are. Polymarket, David, is now available, going to be soon available to US users for the very first time.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  So I don't have to use a VPN.

• 38:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is Shane Copeland, basically saying, this pays the way for us to welcome American traders again. I've waited a long time to say this. Polymarket is coming home. David, how is he doing this? How is Polymarket coming home?

• 39:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they just acquired an exchange. So they acquired Q C E X, which had just received its CFTC license just weeks before the deal. And so this one, this other company gets the CFTC license and then Polymarket buys it. And that was probably, the deal was probably in the works prior to that. And so they just, they basically bought the registration. And so now that they, using that exchange, they now have the compliance that they need to service US customers. When this goes live, uncertain. I'm assuming it's not happening like immediately.

• 39:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, it's not.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  But Zoom TM.

• 39:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Waitlist in order to do this. So there's a place you can join in the US on a waitlist and they'll notify you when it's ready. But yeah, this is a CFTC approved. Actually Shane went on CNBC and explained this to

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Dude, ETH people on CNBC. We've just like dominated CNBC conversations over the last like 15 weeks.

• 40:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's hear him.

• 40:05Speaker 03

  You've been operating, we talk about poly market as if everybody can use it, but the truth is that most folks couldn't. Because you had to be out, you had to be in Europe.

• 40:14Speaker 13

  For trading. I mean, I think the way you guys talk about poly market, it's kind of like become the Bloomberg terminal for reality almost. And it's awesome. I'm humbled that every time I tune into Squawk Box, you're like, well, poly market. And you know, I was watching Eric Adams' episode and the first thing he said is like, whoa, the poly market for this. And I was just like, you know, I'm from New York. I went to high school right here and the mayor talking about our site is just incredible. But, but yeah, I mean, look, there's a ton of latent demand for people who want to participate in the markets, not just look at it. So for us, you know, where we sit, it was like a must have.

• 40:47Speaker 03

  And so what happens now?

• 40:50Speaker 13

  So obviously I think people are pretty surprised. It was like a big acquisition. And the simple, the simple way to put it is it's, it's kind of the perfect asset. So it's an exchange and a clearinghouse and you know, that lets us go and serve brokerages and FCMs as well as retail and institutions. It's really important. They all know and love poly market. When I get to meet these people, they say, oh my God, poly market's amazing, but I wish we could trade on poly market. And you know, ask and you shall receive, right? So

• 41:21Speaker 03

  So how much does this compete?

• 41:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's pretty great. I mean, his whole story arc.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  That's bullish.

• 41:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, Shane's story arc, like a year ago, he was being investigated by the FBI. I mean, they busted into his house. Now a year later, he's on CNBC announcing an acquisition, coming home to the United States. I feel like this type of thing also, if I were to put my money long-term, maybe there's a poly market for this. Of, you know, is poly market going to go public? Doing this kind of CNBC roadshow tour is part of the way you kind of build an audience for that. I don't know what's in Shane's mind. We haven't talked to him about this, but that could actually be a possibility for poly market to, to go public. I mean, this is an entrepreneur with some pretty big ambitions, I would say.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm sure Shane has some PTSD from getting raided. And as a founder, I think like going, being a public company on the public stock market is like raid insurance, like the next, the next Dem administration that comes in. Can't, you can't raid a founder of a public company. Like, that's ridiculous.

• 42:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're exactly right. Or somebody that's on CNBC, mainstream media all the time. In fact, actually, Andrew asked him that question and about him getting raided. This is what he said.

• 42:31Speaker 03

  Did you freak out that morning?

• 42:34Speaker 13

  Um.

• 42:36Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:38Speaker 03

  Like, that's, that's kind of crazy.

• 42:40Speaker 13

  Yeah, I mean, you know, I think you gotta make lemonade out of lemons. So that day was very crazy, but it was also an inflection, a milestone.

• 42:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Did you freak out that day?

• 42:50Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Like, he paused. He's like, you know, it's okay to say that you freaked out, bro.

• 42:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's traumatic. I'm sure that was traumatic.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Side note, David, do you remember this? He wasn't the only guy that got raided. Only, the only crypto person that got raided, actually Jesse Powell, the founder of Kraken, got FBI raided. Around the same time, maybe a little earlier, actually. And he was also vindicated. So the FBI has dropped all charges against Jesse Powell. This is sort of a weird thing. It wasn't related to Jesse's activities at Kraken or crypto. It was allegations centering around a nonprofit that he was part of. He was part of the board and there were allegations of hacking and cyber stalking that Jesse did. And so they raided his, his, his house, basically. And they took dozens of electronic devices. For me, this was actually in 2023, but you know, similar timing-ish. They

• 43:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  stole laptops, cell phones, all of these things. And now Jesse, all charges were dropped against Jesse as well.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  You know, I don't really care what excuse the FBI says that they have when they raided Jesse from Kraken and they raided Polymarket, these anti-democratic, I don't know, actually, no, excuse me, Shane was just neutral. Polymarket just reported on the truth, which I think was offensive to the Democrats. I don't, I don't believe what excuse, I don't care about the nonprofit that they said that they raided about. Like, I'm, I'm calling shenanigans.

• 44:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  It felt like that, you know? We don't know all the facts and circumstances. Certainly in Shane's case, it was that. In Jesse's case, it felt like that. Brian Armstrong even said about Jesse's case, we still need more progress, but obvious moves like this, which is vindicating Jesse, are a good start cleaning up past lawfare. Man, if that's what that was, lawfare against crypto, which it seems like it was, I'm very glad to call that era over. Although, we're not done yet. Coming up next, we got to talk about the prosecution of Roman Storm. And the DOJ brought a witness to the stand who apparently had nothing to do with Tornado Cash at all. We'll talk about that. Also, Ethereum blocks getting bigger and Zora getting a little pump on the week. David, you want to compare Zora and pump, don't you?

• 44:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  The actual pump. Maybe there's some competition brewing. We'll get to all that and more, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including Frax, the decentralized central bank. It's like Circle, Athena maker, they all had a baby. Go check them out.

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• 47:00Speaker 01

  The Ethereum mainnet just processed its largest block ever, 45 million gas units. That's up from where it was just 12 months ago at 30 million. So Ethereum blocks are 50% larger than where they were just like six to nine months ago.

• 47:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  How did that happen?

• 47:17Speaker 01

  No, I'm so glad you asked. Ethereum block sizes can actually get voted up or down by Ethereum validators. So this is an in-protocol feature that Ethereum can scale or contract its chain based on a voting of Ethereum validators. And so more Ethereum validators have been voting, saying, hey, we're ready for more capacity. Let's give us some more capacity. And when sufficient, you know, critical mass of validators signal for higher gas sizes, then Ethereum, the protocol increases the gas size. And so it trends upwards. It doesn't like violently move in any direction. It just kind of slowly trends. But we just had our first 45 million gas block on Ethereum Layer 1. And people are targeting for more. They're asking for 60 million in the near to medium term. I bet we hit 60 million by the end of the year.

• 48:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's like, what, a 25% jump in terms of when you're saying block sizes? You're basically talking about transactions per second, right? The amount of transactions.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  Total throughput.

• 48:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so a 25% jump just on that.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  50, 50, 30, 32, 45% is a 55.

• 48:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, 30, okay, okay. Very good.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  I mean, it was 36 initially, but like it was, it's been 30 million gas for a long time. And then it jumped to 36 recently. And then it continued going to 45 where we just, it's not holding 45, but we are getting, we're getting 45 million blocks at a time.

• 48:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is a part of the Donkrod proposal, basically, to kind of 3X TPS on Ethereum Layer 1 every year for the next five years, right? This is part of that process.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's worth noting that there has been a meaningful shift in priorities for Ethereum protocol upgrades. This is Pota is tweeting out, he's an Ethereum developer. He says, "Two forks ago, we did not have cheap layer twos. Two forks from now, Ethereum will have perfect parallelization of execution." That's called a block access list, right? "Order of magnitude, more gas limit." That's what we're talking about right now. "Orders of magnitude, more blobs." That's pure DAS. And then "better censorship resistant." That's FOSSIL. There are some very big things that are getting shipped to Ethereum that really round out the protocol in a very big way. And so we're getting parallelization. Ethereum Layer 1 is going to, it's continuing to scale, and especially with parallelization, I think

• 49:33Speaker 01

  that like, it's going to be able to fit quite a lot of activity, both meme coin traders and TradFi, you know, treasury acquisition operations, all on the Layer 1. And that makes me pretty excited.

• 49:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, for sure. I'm speaking of networks that are not sitting still. Solana is talking about a large tech upgrade that's incoming. It's called the BAM protocol. And this is Gito introduced this. So Gito, you know, to me, Gito, if you're coming from the Ethereum world, it's a bit like Lido and Lido plus Flashbots plus Geth. So it's almost like they do client work, they do MEV protection type work, and they're also a staking protocol. That's where, you know, like, most people know them, like, like Lido. And they are proposing something called BAM, which is a structure that really trying to fix or take a crack at fixing the MEV problem on Solana. And I very much like you, you know, transactions

• 50:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  per second, that's definitely, you know, you need to increase that in order to scale block space, like decentralized transactions per second. It's very important. The other thing that's important, actually, is minimizing MEV on chain, because that's a scale limiter as well. Institutions, users, they're not going to deploy on chain if they're getting basically raked over the coals.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  Things that are illegal in TradFi, like, most MEV activities are like illegal to happen in TradFi.

• 50:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and it's legal or illegal. It's just like, it's bad practice, you know? I just spent, you know, you cost me a dollar in slippage for this, you know, $10 trade? That sucks. Okay, anyway, some people are, Mert has said that this is the biggest change in Solana history, private encrypted mempool, app-specific sequencing and verifiable ordering so institutions can build without worrying about MEV. I didn't get into all of the details of this, but as I understand, this is very much inspired by a Flashbots type of design on Ethereum, and this is GTO kind of adopting some of these practices and trying to implement it into a future Solana hard fork. Is that right?

• 51:26Speaker 01

  That's right, yeah. Specifically, the builder net from Flashbots where they do a lot of expressive, rules-based order sequencing, transaction sequencing inside of a TEE. And then you get all of these pretty, pretty good properties. BAM stands for Block Assembly Marketplace, basically like Flashbox builder net, like I said. And yeah, I was like, this feature specifically is like one of the, in my opinion, going after Solana's weakest link is like the MEV and order, transaction ordering supply chain. And so I think this is like a very important upgrade for Solana.

• 52:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  I agree. David, speaking of Solana, so I ran across this, there's actually a civil case that was recently filed against some of the people we were talking about, GTO, also Solana, the Solana Foundation, and also Pump. In fact, the whole thing centers around Pump. And this is, we've seen a lot of court cases before, including civil cases. This is the first time I've seen a civil case of this type, okay? Which is, they are, they are charging, they are alleging that these entities, so Pump on the app layer, Solana and GTO, together inspired to create an unlicensed on-chain casino. So they're invoking RICO laws. RICO, the R in RICO, yeah, that stands for racketeering.

• 52:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Basically racketeering laws. If you're not familiar with that term either, it means it's when you combine wire fraud and illegal gambling and unlicensed money transmission all together. That's called racketeering. Well, it's like casino license type rules. You know, stuff the mob was doing before, that's racketeering. And they're alleging that these entities conspired to racketeer. They created conditions for an online casino, essentially, a meme coin casino, that turned Solana into an unlicensed algorithmic slot machine for meme coins, costing the plaintiffs here.

• 53:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Billions of dollars, you know, and so the reason, the way they got to billions is all the fees from pump plus, interestingly enough, the MEV fees in GTO, plus the price appreciation of sold the token, they got to like, you know, three billion or so.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  They're lumping all these things together?

• 53:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  They're lumping it all together, which is interesting. They're saying all of these entities together are creating basically an on-chain casino. And they, they pulled up some quotes, you know, so of course you got the pump fun founder. Here's a tweet, greatest casino. It's all part of the experience. It's a privilege. The pump dot fun CEO on August 8th, there is a tweet in the, in the complaint here. You also have people like Mert that were quoted here. This a lot of fee model is a stochastic on purpose to naturally simulate a casino environment. So on the one hand, this looks like it could be a frivolous lawsuit, right? It's just like, oh, here's some money, you know, here's meme coin casino. We're going to go after the money and see if we can do. And I think that's probably the base case

• 54:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  of what this is. On the other hand, I get worried that this could set a precedence, not for a civil case, but for a DOJ type case, you know, a federal case at some point in time, if the climate in the US changes to something like it was back in 2023, 2024. So it's going to be an interesting case to watch for sure.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay. Um, when I hear class action lawsuits in crypto, my mind immediately goes to the pull together frivolous lawsuit, uh, where somebody just like added, put money in to pull together law, lost it and then sued them for being like an unregistered lottery.

• 55:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  Uh, which pull together is not a lottery.

• 55:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  And that one turned out to be political, right?

• 55:05Speaker 01

  That was like, yeah, turned out that person worked for Elizabeth Warren. Uh, and it was just, it was very frivolous and opportunistic lawyers. So when I see a class action lawsuit, especially in crypto, I'm like, okay. All right.

• 55:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Who's trying again?

• 55:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've seen this before, like, class action lawsuits can become a big payday for lawyers. And then they're advocating, you know, they're representing millions of people who lost billions of dollars. And then when it's all said and done, and say the lawyers win the lawsuit, the average individual gets like a $7 check. And the lawyers walk away with like $100 million.

• 55:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  For sure.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  I don't know. I don't know who's what's going on here.

• 55:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Could be that.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  It could be that. And I think, I think it should be considered that until proven otherwise.

• 55:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just worrisome. I mean, this kind of lawsuit could be brought against Ethereum, let's say, right? And it could be brought against layer twos, you know, all sorts of things. If, you know, this goes forward, I think, I don't know, could pave the way for some other nasty stuff. David, Coinbase offering perp futures to US citizens for first, your Bitcoin or your Ether, you can get them on perps in Coinbase. That's, that's new. You ever trade any perps, David?

• 56:17Speaker 01

  I am a expert perp trader.

• 56:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you?

• 56:20Speaker 01

  I, I. Yeah, that's right. Everyone knows I'm the world's greatest perp trader. Everyone, everyone, they tune into the podcast, they hear about the perp trader.

• 56:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  We finally got them in the US because all of this has to be CFTC regulated and now it is on Coinbase.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  Now, now we get to watch perp volumes on Coinbase compete with hyper liquid perp volumes. And then also when Robin Hood rolls it out, Robin Hood too, that's going to be interesting to watch.

• 56:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  There was more news from Coinbase. PNC Bank and Coinbase announced a partnership. What's going on with this partnership?

• 56:54Speaker 01

  Okay, so I recently did an episode, Coin versus Hood. It was a very, very illuminating episode and we, on the two guests, really drilled down the strategy that Coinbase is doing, where they are trying to basically be the crypto backend for TradFi institutions who don't want to do it themselves. And so PNC Bank looks like is one of those, but you could imagine like Fidelity or anyone who wants to allow their customers to trade crypto, they kind of just whitelist Coinbase and plug into Coinbase in the backend. Looks like that's what's happening here. And so Coinbase is being the crypto backend for PNC Bank. Is that, is that what's going on?

• 57:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's what's going on. I feel like every bank is going to, first of all, post Genius Act, they're like, okay, you know, stablecoins crypto is, is fine. It's fully regulated. Game on. So now they have to have a strategy. Are they going to build out all of the crypto functionality? Do they have the teams? These are banks, man. They, they do not have the, the teams in place to deploy the custodial technology, the exchange technology of the Coinbase. So what are they going to do? They're going to open it for their customers, but they're going to use entities, crypto native entities like Coinbase on the backend. That's great. And the relationship works the other way too, which is Coinbase gets a good banking partner on their side too. So gives them a bit more being debanked insurance, I suppose, you know, in the future, if you have.

• 58:06Speaker 01

  I wonder how much TTSD from the last four years is like indicative, like Shane, Shane wants to take Polly Market public rather than issue a token because he wants insurance. Brian Armstrong wants as many banking partners as possible because he doesn't want to be debanked. I wonder how much, how much.

• 58:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Never again, right? It's gotta be a never again type attitude.

• 58:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, we should update folks on the Roman Storm trial. So it is the, the second week, the first full week. And it's really been the prosecution so far. Were you following some of the highlights from this?

• 58:36Speaker 01

  I, I was reading it loosely. I think you pay attention to it more than I was though.

• 58:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I, I did. So the big news on the week, the big thing that kind of blew up, which was very interesting to me is that we almost got a mistrial. Okay. This is at least what Roman Storm's defense attorneys were calling for. They were saying, all right, this has gone too far. We need a mistrial.

• 58:57Speaker 01

  On what grounds?

• 58:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, on the ground. So you remember last week, we talked a little bit about some of the witnesses that the prosecution was, um, will bring to the stand. Well, one was a very sad story of a Katie Lynn. It's an air quotes. It's student anonymous, I, I imagine, who made five total deposits totaling roughly 20, uh, $250,000 to a sketchy platform called NTU Capital. This is called a pig butchering scheme. Okay. Have you heard of that pig butchering scheme?

• 59:24Speaker 01

  I'm assuming we're not literally talking about pig butchering?

• 59:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, we're not. Okay, it's a, it's a common scam scheme. It's called pig butchering. And the, the idea is you, you fatten up the, the pig and then you slaughter them. Okay? So, you know, the, the pig in this case is, is the victim. And it, it's a pretty, you know, traditional scam. And it usually begins in a Telegram chat. In this case, it was a WhatsApp chat. Somebody pings you and they're like, hey, how are you? We just ran across one another and suddenly, David, they've got this incredible investment opportunity. They kind of get to know you, back and forth. They build trust that way. And eventually the victim sends them funds into this fake opportunity that seems real to them at the time. And then of course they steal all of their money. And at the end, they usually, uh, try to manipulate them into investing more before that.

• 1:00:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, and then they end up, um, cutting, cutting the victim off. And, uh, oftentimes just making fun of them after the fact, like, ha, stole all your money, see you later. Right? It's kind of sad.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  What does this have to do with tornado cash?

• 1:00:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly. Okay. So, so.

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  Let me guess, let me guess, let me guess. The, uh, exploiter, the, the criminal used tornado cash.

• 1:00:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. That's what, that's what they were claiming. So they had a sad story from Katie Lynn, a legitimately sad story. We've heard this so many times. This is not just crypto. This is just like everyday, uh, type scam. And what the prosecution was saying is, and then they use some of the funds, some of the proceeds that the hackers and the scammers through, uh, tornado cash. And when Katie Lynn emailed the generic tornado cash, you know, email, bounce back, generic thing, she didn't get a reply. All right. So that was the case. But what they were trying to do is they were trying to tug on the heartstrings of the jerks, right? Look at all the bad things happen. Roman Storm, he enabled all of this. All of these scams, all of these victims, all of these, you know, pig butchering schemes, it's all happening. Okay.

• 1:01:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  But there's only one problem with that, David. They didn't even use tornado cash in this instance.

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  Wait, what?

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  What? What? What did they? What did they use? What was the purpose then? If they didn't? What was the association?

• 1:01:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  The DOJ apparently thought that maybe tornado cash was being used. But when it turns out, we've got the best super sleuths in the business in crypto Twitter. Okay.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  Well, you've got Taylor Monahan pulled up. Oh, that's.

• 1:01:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Zach XPT, people like Taylor Monahan, they went through and they traced it. Okay. And according to this very case, the $250,000, there's no evidence that any of those funds went to tornado cash. There's evidence that some of these funds went to exchanges. Uh, I won't name them, but there's a few exchanges on the list. They're not on the stand. None of it went to tornado cash.

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  Okay. So you're telling me the prosecution brought on this sob story?

• 1:02:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  God's jury to sob as hard as they could. And then they were like, and here's Roman Storm.

• 1:02:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes. Yes. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So they basically were blaming Roman Storm for like somebody getting scammed in crypto. Right? And you're painting him as the perpetrator here.

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  Why didn't they go after the scammer?

• 1:02:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Great question. Uh, also there's other parties involved. I mean, you could blame the internet. You could blame the Ethereum blockchain.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  I do blame the internet.

• 1:02:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  You blame the internet. The internet made all this possible. Who can we get the CEO of the internet and hold them responsible for this? I mean, that's basically what's going on in this case. Now, the defense demanded a mistrial, basically. And then the prosecution, last minute, they parachuted in a witness, an expert witness, an IRS agent that said, no, no, no, actually, you know, I do see part of this 9.78 ETH of this $250,000 went to tornado cash, is what he tried to say. Yeah. And then under the cross-examination, the, um, the expert witness actually admitted that, um, this doesn't prove the hacker actually did the tornado cash. And, you know, experts on crypto Twitter are like, they're doing it wrong. We can see it on chain. We're tracing it in the correct way.

• 1:03:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  None of it went to tornado cash. Even the expert witness says he may have been wrong, but this prevented a mistrial. So that's some of the shenanigans going on right now. I think Jake Trivinsky had a, had a great take. An update from Roman Storm's trial. He said DOJ had years to prepare for this. And so far, their case is basically crypto is bad. Their first witness had literally nothing to do with Roman Storm or tornado cash. DOJ is trying to imprison a DeFi developer, and this is the best they can do.

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  Well, I'm not in the jury and so I have a lot more context and like education about crypto than

• 1:03:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  They're seeing none of this, by the way, right?

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  Likely that the jury does.

• 1:03:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  But I hope that the jury understands enough that they should be fucking annoyed that they are there. Like, why are you wasting our time?

• 1:04:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, even the witness.

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  Prove that he's guilty or get out of here.

• 1:04:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Even the witness, okay? She had to like relive all of her trauma, went through this, right? The DOJ told, and Turnover Cash wasn't even part of that.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, she's like, why is she there?

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  I'm not a lawyer. I'm not Roman Storm's like defense counsel, but like, I'm kind of like, they can ask for a mistrial. But like, if it's a mistrial, can't they just, can't the prosecution just go back and try again? But if they lose the case, then they can't go back and try again.

• 1:04:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  And so I'm a fan of this teetering on the edge between being a mistrial and not a mistrial. Because if it's so close to being a mistrial, then it's likely that he's going to be just like excused.

• 1:04:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, we'll see. I mean, it depends what the jury thinks about this. They still have some ammo on the prosecution's side. They're trying to say that Roman had control over the front end. He should have taken it down. They're calling expert witnesses from the government who are saying, no, this is how Turnover Cash should have worked to prevent any, you know, money laundering, that sort of thing. So we'll have to see. Meanwhile, Roman Storm is getting debanked like all the time. Gusto just canceled his like payroll stuff, right? Like, that's happening in the background. But next up, next week, the defense presents the case. And then closing arguments could be mid next week and a final verdict could be on the table on Friday. So big week next week.

• 1:05:23Speaker 01

  Eight days from the time of recording.

• 1:05:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and I think we're going to be trying to talk to some of the reporters who've been covering this fantastically well at The Rage. Shout out The Rage. They have been covering the Turnover Cash case very well. There's a link in the show notes and we'll hopefully be talking to them next. So, David, Zora versus Pump. What's, what do you want to get into here?

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  There's a pretty strong juxtaposition going on right now between Pump Fund and Zora. And Pump Fund has had a ton of attention ever since the Pump token launch. So maybe to recap some of the details, there was a very large ICO for the pump token at $4 billion valuation, sold out within minutes. And then you know, something like a $700 million raise, both from private VCs in the private sale. And then also on the public sale to end individuals, $700 million, sold out very quickly. The pump launched at like 5 billion, so an immediate 25% return, got up to 6 billion. Things looking pretty good. And since then, there's just been a lack of communication out of the pump team.

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  And also since then, there's a new token launcher, token launchpad called Bonk. Bonk and Bonk is taking 60 to 70% of token launchpad volumes. And so pump is actually as of, as of July, the month of July. Pump is not the dominant launch token launchpad volume, based on volume on Solana. Pump, the pump founder Alan went on to the live stream with Thread Guy. And it was very watched live stream. I think there was something like 5,000 or 6,000 concurrent live viewers, which kind of gives you an indication about how many people are watching this. People were asked, like, waiting for clarity, like, okay, what happens next? Because there was a pump airdrop that was promised.

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  We're looking for the pump live streaming future. Overall, there's a lot of the community that we're looking for. Indication as like, what happens next? A lot of people invested into pump at $4 billion. And there was just a lot of missing communication, I think people felt from the pump team about what happens next. During the pump live stream, right as Alan said that there was going to be an airdrop, but not in the immediate future, there'd be no, there's going to be an airdrop, but not in the immediate future. Is when the pump token loses, goes from $4 billion in value to $3 billion in value. And so there's some frustration on the pump side of things. And overall, I'll, I'll blame the very high expectations that a $4 billion valuation leads to.

• 1:07:55Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  And so like at $4 billion, where like people gave $700 million of the money to, that's, that's the bar that's set. Now let's go over, let's go over to the, to the flip side of things. The Zora, Zora app mints are up only, and there's no second best in the Ethereum landscape. I bet you it doesn't actually hold a candle to Solana launchpad. So like Solana launchpads are just launching much more assets in general. But you got me onto the Zora app once again for like the third time today.

• 1:08:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, you were saying last week, you were just saying, no, Zora is not for me. You're saying that.

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  If you download the Zora app, you can just imagine normies having a ton of fun. And it's exactly like FriendTech. So when you, when you go on to Zora, you can launch your token. And then, you know, I bought some Ryan, Ryan bought some of me. I'm at a humble $112,000 market cap. And then I launched, I launched a picture. So I posted a picture and it's got like a $1,000 market cap. And there's like 36 buyers of it. I've earned $13 from it. It's, it's just fun. And the, the, go ahead.

• 1:08:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's interesting that you're comparing them though, because I see Zora as completely different than versus pump like.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  I see them as the same dude.

• 1:09:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why?

• 1:09:04Speaker 01

  Alan is all about creators, creating like tokenizing creators, using tokens and running with attention.

• 1:09:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's not like wrapped in a social network, right? It's just, or I guess maybe that's what they're doing. They're saying they're trying to disrupt switch. You know, Twitch, right?

• 1:09:18Speaker 01

  To disrupt Twitch. That's right. And so they're going after streaming, but Zora is going after like social media.

• 1:09:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  They're both trying to reward creators by having tokens and capturing attention. Now, the difference here is the Zora token market cap earlier this week. So Zora started the week coming in at a market cap of just about $38 million. Now, that's not fully diluted. Fully diluted was maybe something about, uh, uh, 400 million. So $400 million. It has pumped in the last seven days, 300%. 300%. So it's, it went from a market cap of 34 million up to 175 million. And I think it's just because the expectations are totally different.

• 1:10:05Speaker 01

  Like pump has a huge expectations of $4 billion. Now it's clocking in below $3 billion. And everyone's kind of written off Zora. All the trench people have like kind of written off Zora. But the Zora app is so polished and it's so good.

• 1:10:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  I got you.

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  It does the same thing. It does the same thing as pump.

• 1:10:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's, I've never been a heavy pump user, but I did engage in the FriendTech experiment and it reminds me so much.

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  Have you ever bought a token on pump fund?

• 1:10:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, I've never done.

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  No, you have not.

• 1:10:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, not at all. Uh, not even been tempted. I like, I just, I just don't really care. But like, I don't know. It was, Zora is kind of fun. Now I will tell you this, I have no idea what to like post on Zora. I just haven't figured that out. Like it's I like I know how to tweet on Twitter. I know what Instagram is like. The post on Zora, there's almost like for me, there's like the pressure of like, oh, it's gotta be good because people, people spend money off in this thing.

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  So what do you post?

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  I think it's iconic memes. I like truly iconic stuff, like viral moments. Like if we posted a clip of Sam Bankman-Fried getting rattled under the focus of Eric Voorhees.

• 1:11:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  That would have gone super viral.

• 1:11:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  It has to be at the time, probably, right?

• 1:11:17Speaker 01

  It has, you have to capture it.

• 1:11:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Fast.

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  Yes. It's highly related to attention, in my opinion. And yeah, I think you're on to something where like instead of the, the content form factor that's resonant with Instagram or the content form factor that's resonant with TikTok or Twitter, every medium is its own modality.

• 1:11:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  I think that's a correct segment. And so, uh, so like what goes viral on Pump or Zora is gonna have its own kind of form factor and like Zora native creators are gonna figure that out and they're gonna be the leading creators on Zora.

• 1:11:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  We'll see what it does. Wait till they get, it's all crypto people there still, right? You, you need some big, um, big celebrity type creators to kind of like, um, get this thing off the ground, but maybe that's coming next. We will end it there. Guys, of course, none of this has been financial advice. It never is. You know crypto is risky, so are meme coins, pump token, Zora, treasuries, all the things.

• 1:12:14Speaker 01

  I've lost five thousand dollars on Zora this week.

• 1:12:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  There it is in the disclaimers. 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.