ROLLUP: Post Election All Time Highs | Beam Chain Announcement | Devcon Recap | FBI Raids Polymarket CEO

Bitcoin keeps going higher… What about Ethereum? On this weekly rollup we not only cover markets and its election aftermath, we also vibe check on Devcon week, Justin Drake’s Beam Chain Announcement and Polymarket’s CEO being raided by the FBI? ------ 📣 LEGION | MERIT BASED ICOs https://bankless.cc/Legion ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🦄UNISWAP | BROWSER EXTENSION https://bankless.cc/uniswap 🪄 MAGIC EDEN | HOME OF WEB3 https://bankless.cc/MagicEden 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🤖 dYdX | UNLIMITED LAUNCHING SOON https://bankless.cc/dYdXUnlimited 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT https://bankless.cc/toku ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/95?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 04:08 Markets https://x.com/intangiblecoins/status/1856146168746479673?s=46 https://x.com/robustus/status/1856015427106701675 https://companiesmarketcap.com/assets-by-market-cap/ https://x.com/tier10k/status/1856720083684372950 11:28 ETF Flows https://farside.co.uk/?p=1518 https://x.com/NateGeraci/status/1854882220407701661 https://x.com/woonomic/status/1854910141067673631 https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1854281747082477696 https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1856346407856112115 16:15 Coinbase Number 1 in Finance Apps https://x.com/JasonYanowitz/status/1856745020230877668 17:58 ETH/BTC Ratio https://pro.kraken.com/app/trade/eth-btc https://www.coingecko.com/en/global-charts https://ultrasound.money/ https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1857068158281998357 21:59 Memecoins https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/peanut-the-squirrel https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/dogecoin https://x.com/TrumpWarRoom/status/1856500025037037606 https://imgur.com/362Df5M 29:50 FBI Raids Polymarket CEO https://nypost.com/2024/11/13/business/fbi-seizes-polymarket-ceos-phone-electronics-after-betting-platform-predicts-trump-win-source/ https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/investing/2024/11/13/polymarket-investigated-by-doj-for-allegedly-letting-us-users-bet-on-platform/ https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1856817245441401143 https://x.com/shayne_coplan/status/1856808022481539192 https://x.com/shayne_coplan/status/1856838409861386722 https://x.com/jespow/status/1856891151875268974?s=46&t=2ZINVXJQKx6xO_6Wiiu_2g https://x.com/jespow/status/1856891151875268974?s=46&t=2ZINVXJQKx6xO_6Wiiu_2g 38:24 Devcon Vibe Check https://x.com/EFDevcon/status/1856359485029445677 43:18 Devcon Announcements https://x.com/brantlymillegan/status/1855813557323178067?s=46 https://x.com/EspressoSys/status/1855973751982309624 https://x.com/bioprotocol/status/1856707895590846812 https://x.com/sjdedic/status/1856649048318464349 44:18 Justin Drake’s Beam Chain https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1856276664877010968 https://imgur.com/a/AKOzd8M https://imgur.com/a/DzWFeh3 53:15 Blackrock’s BUIDL Goes Multichain https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/blackrock-launches-new-buidl-share-classes-across-multiple-blockchains-to-expand-access-and-potential-of-buidl-ecosystem-302304035.html https://www.coindesk.com/business/2024/11/14/franklin-templeton-expands-410m-money-market-fund-to-ethereum-blockchain/ 54:15 Deutsche Bank Launches ZK Chain https://x.com/Memento_Bc/status/1854126014261272727 https://x.com/gluk64/status/1855480434706260146?s=46&t=2ZINVXJQKx6xO_6Wiiu_2g https://x.com/gluk64/status/1855480434706260146?s=46&t=2ZINVXJQKx6xO_6Wiiu_2g 56:18 Blur is Voting on a Fee Switch https://gov.blur.foundation/t/blur-improvement-proposal-1-bip-1-blur-fee-switch-veblur-tokenomics/1040 https://x.com/mikeippolito_/status/1856147009927033316?s=46 57:09 Bitwise ETH Staking ETF? https://x.com/bitwiseinvest/status/1856698856336969778 58:40 MicroStrategy Acquires 27,200 BTC https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20241111351255/en/MicroStrategy-Announces-BTC-and-ATM-Activity-Raised-2.03-billion-Purchased-27200-BTC-Now-Holds-279420-BTC-with-BTC-Yield-of-26.4-YTD 59:32 Phantom Update Cleared Users Wallet https://x.com/mememe69696969/status/1856518115947110780 https://x.com/0xFiyopi/status/1856728042225480139?t=tYq8LUbRdtswq_dAEjusIQ&s=19 https://x.com/0xFiyopi/status/1856728042225480139?t=tYq8LUbRdtswq_dAEjusIQ&s=19 https://x.com/phantom/status/1856796137665245455 1:01:42 Aave Launches a Wallet https://family.co/blog/launch 1:02:32 Meme of the Week https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1856523237208797221 ------ 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.

• 0:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, happy second week of November. It is time for the Bankless Weekly Rollup, the Bangkok edition, or maybe I should say the all-time-high edition, because David, we are at all-time highs again this week. How are you doing, man? You're over in Bangkok, so we're doing this with a 12-hour time zone difference. It's very late for you. It's like still in the morning for me, but it's very late for you. How are you feeling?

• 0:24David Hoffman?

  Pretty good, yeah. I've never, I have, in the existence of Bankless, Ryan and I have never been as far apart, ever, in the world, as we are right now. We are literally on opposite ends of the earth, which means there's only a small time window for us to record the Weekly Rollup, because Ryan's got to wake up and I got to go to bed. And why am I in Bangkok? It's because it's DevCon week in the Ethereum community. DevCon happens every once in a while. Two years ago was the last DevCon in Bogota in November. It is now DevCon week once again in 2024 in DevCon. So 20,000 people, Ryan, 20,000-plus people came to Bangkok. Yeah, quite a lot of people. There was a post on our Bangkok on Reddit saying, "Don't be alarmed about the invasion

• 1:09David Hoffman?

  of crypto bros, there's just the Ethereum Developer Convention in town." That was like the top post on our Bangkok.

• 1:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I'm sure that's kind of alarming to some people. So David, I got to check in with you, because you've been on the ground at DevCon. I've seen some things popping out of DevCon, including Justin Drake's Beam Chain Plan. This was a proposal. Some folks were pretty excited, some folks were not, so we'll talk about that. Also, all the other announcements that you've heard at DevCon. And David, I don't know if you've noticed, or you've been checking prices, but crypto markets have been on fire this week.

• 1:41David Hoffman?

  I have been checking prices quite a lot. I have checked my phone's prices at least a few times per hour, at the very least.

• 1:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so we got Bitcoin all-time high, like seven days in a row. This is unprecedented. The ETF floodgates are absolutely flooding, and they're even buying ETH. We got some good numbers to report on that side.

• 2:00David Hoffman?

  ETH is out of the hole.

• 2:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's out of the hole. It's into positive land. And Coinbase, the app, is trending on the App Store. So that is a sign of retail things to come.

• 2:11David Hoffman?

  Which is our first sell signal. Start counting them, because I remember last bull market, it was like infinite sell signals for a year. And this is our first one. We first got our first bell.

• 2:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Don't do it. Don't say it.

• 2:22David Hoffman?

  The clock has started. The sell clock has started.

• 2:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, fine, fine, fine. We're just getting started, though. But still, the sell clock has started, according to David. And I got to update you on this. So the FBI raided the house of the Polymarket CEO Shane. We were just talking about Shane last week. What is going on here? An FBI raid? We'll talk about all that and more. But before we do, we got to shout out to our friends over at Legion. What's Legion building, David?

• 2:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah, as we are in the world of making crypto great again, Legion is trying to bring back a very tried and true mechanism for distributing tokens. We all know the ICO kind of had this weird phase in 2017 where it got very popular a little bit too quickly. Legion is trying to make merit-based, MICA-compliant ICOs a thing. Public token sales. We like public token sales. I like to, that's my opinion. But now we are trying to make them great again in 2024. And with the Legion score, which is the thing that Legion is bringing to the table for all of you individual investors in the world of the EU or accredited investors in America, if you also want to join, you can get to have a Legion score,

• 3:27David Hoffman?

  which will tell a project that you might be interested in investing in your worthiness for being included in such projects. So you can get graded on your on-chain DGN-ness, your developer chops, your clout, to rate you as a potential angel investor in an ICO that is run on Legion. And so startups can pick and choose. And hopefully you get selected. So you can go to Legion and get your Legion score and potentially invest in some Legion ICOs, MICA-compliant ICOs, banklist.cc/legion.

• 3:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  And everybody should go do this. Even if you're not an accredited investor in the US, you could still get a Legion score today and you could share it on Twitter. See how you scored. See how you compare to David or myself or somebody else in your community. Just cloud it up here. David, let's talk market prices. We've got an all time high for Bitcoin. The highest Bitcoin has ever been. What are we looking at on the week? What's the growth here?

• 4:19David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we started the week at the so low, low price of $76,000. And we are up 16% on the week, almost 17% on the week.

• 4:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  We started the week at an all time high. We ended the week 17% up, also an all time high. This like, to think an asset that's over a trillion dollars could grow by like 17% in a week is like absolutely mind blowing. Bitcoin is just like crushing it. Is this all in the back of like the Trump news and everything going on there?

• 4:50David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's gotta be. And I think there's conversations out here that are alluding to this, but people are starting to think that like the war of the nation state fight over Bitcoin is like starting to happen. I don't really, I don't really know anything. I don't know any federal services or governments. What that means is that, you know, the tug of war, there's only, how many Bitcoins are there? 21 million.

• 5:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  I see.

• 5:12David Hoffman?

  Donald Trump, the man who just got elected for the next president of the United States, has said that we're gonna make a Bitcoin treasury. Like some of the writing is on the wall that some people are alluding to that, well, what if this kickstarts the nation state tug of war over the 21 million Bitcoins? Not that much Bitcoins. What happens? Price goes up. But what's the price happening this week? Well, it's all the D gens front running that. And probably, you know, hedge funds, people coming in externally, a lot of external capital, I would assume. The new all time high price, $22,450. Excuse me. $92,450. That was hit on November 13th, which was again, pretty incredible. A 16% day for Bitcoin is a good day no matter what.

• 5:54David Hoffman?

  But when that was on the backs of another like 10% week prior to that, it's pretty damn crazy.

• 6:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's actually, so Bitcoin on the 11th of November had its largest absolute value daily move in terms of like total number of dollars price increase up in one single day. It moved $8,343 in one single day, and that's the highest ever. The last record was set in 2021 when it had a $7,576 day. Okay, so these are really big moves. I mean, we're talking about hundreds, tens of, tens of billions of dollars and like potentially hundreds of trillions in kind of a week time and all of that in one day. I remember when the price of Bitcoin was like $8,000, David, and it just did that in a single day.

• 6:41David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 6:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Um, another flipping actually happened, which people like Dan McCardle have been waiting for, which is the Bitcoin flipping, which is the Bitcoin flipping of the asset silver on the charts, David. So

• 6:55David Hoffman?

  Deserved, deserved.

• 6:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, deserved.

• 6:57David Hoffman?

  Honestly, what is silver even doing there?

• 6:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Silver, in case you're tracking this, which, you know, the top assets by market cap certainly is, silver weighs in at about $1.7 trillion. And of course, this has been a store of value, a monetary unit of account and store of value in the past with, you know, previous civilizations. Wasn't too long ago, you know, the end of the 1800s.

• 7:19David Hoffman?

  Our ancestors.

• 7:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  The US was even, yeah, it was, it was bimetallism. They were, they were having kind of like debates about whether the US should be on a silver or gold strategy or kind of like, you know, split the difference, do a little bit of both. Anyway, Bitcoin has now flipped silver at a $1.7 trillion market cap. It is the eighth largest asset on the list of all top assets. It's still got a ways before it hits gold. Okay, so gold is clocking in at 17 trillion.

• 7:44David Hoffman?

  Actually, it is perfectly a 10x away from gold. We are at $1.75 trillion Bitcoin market cap and gold is 17.3 trillion dollar market cap. We are a perfect 10x away from gold right now.

• 7:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. Do you think it happens this cycle, David? You want to call a gold flipping this cycle?

• 8:02David Hoffman?

  Bitcoin doing a 10x. Bitcoin's got a lot of weight, dude. The eighth biggest asset in the world doing a 10x from here. That would put it at $900,000.

• 8:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 8:14David Hoffman?

  To flip gold in this cycle. $900,000. It's extremely expensive Bitcoin.

• 8:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  It feels like that would take some central bank buying in order for that to happen, some big nation-state buying, but...

• 8:25David Hoffman?

  How do you think gold got to be the number one? It's because it's on the central bank's balance sheets?

• 8:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  100%.

• 8:30David Hoffman?

  What did I just say? The nation-states are starting to do the whole nation-state tug-of-war.

• 8:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  But David, that took thousands of years. We're talking about this playing out in like two decades. That would be absolutely insane. Anyway.

• 8:41David Hoffman?

  Hey, we're accelerating.

• 8:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Mike Novogratz, Mike Novogratz is feeling so good. He is on CNBC, no, he's on Bloomberg Open Interest, looking like Steve Jobs here. You see Novo right there? Looking in the, the black rimmed glasses and the black turtleneck. So he is predicting, not quite a million-dollar Bitcoin, but he's, he's predicting $500,000 Bitcoin this cycle. So a little bit short of flipping gold, but...

• 9:03David Hoffman?

  50% of gold.

• 9:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Within range, within range. Um, let, let's hear what he said. Here's his, uh, here's his clip.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  I think Bitcoin heads to 500,000. Um, again, it's, it's a whole different paradigm because it forces every other country. And countries are already buying it. I've got a dear friend, the guy that actually turned me on to Bitcoin in 2013, who's in the Mideast right now, and he said he's never seen anything like it. He's, he's convincing more people to buy Bitcoin in the three days he's been there than any time in his whole career. Uh, and they're huge pools of capital. And so we're seeing something globally. When Trump advocated in Nashville that he was going to be a crypto president, a Bitcoin president, and now he's the president, let me tell you, other leaders heard that.

• 9:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go. He's making the same case that you were making. Other leaders heard, heard this. Uh, do you know the country of Bhutan has a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin? They, they've been stacking in the background. I just saw that this week. It just crested a billion dollars. So there are some countries that have been...

• 10:04David Hoffman?

  El Salvador. You know, what do you think's next after those countries? What country comes after that?

• 10:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think it could be the United States of America, David. At least they're probably not, they're probably not going to be selling the, what, you know, 200,000 Bitcoin they still own, at least, you know, post-January. Uh, okay, let's check in on the silver to Bitcoin's gold, maybe. Second place, anyway, which is, uh, our friend Ether, the asset. How's, how's little Eth doing on the, the week, David?

• 10:30David Hoffman?

  Hey, you know, we broke 3K, buddy. Ether, starting the week at $2,850. Got all the way up to prices seen plenty of times before. Currently clocking in the week at $3,150. Hit an interweek high of $3,400. Like I've said, we've seen that price. We've seen that price at least 800 times. Up 10% on the week.

• 10:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you want me to give you the bull take on this?

• 10:54David Hoffman?

  Uh, sure. Yeah, fuck yeah.

• 10:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's room to grow, David. We got lots of room to grow, okay?

• 10:59David Hoffman?

  It's room to grow.

• 11:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bitcoin did like an 8K day, one day last week, okay?

• 11:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I mean, this is how all cycles start like this, right? Like first Bitcoin and then Ether. This is what we saw in 2020. First Bitcoin broke all-time highs. It took Ether like three months to hit all-time highs. And then the ratio did something crazy. Yeah, we've totally seen this before.

• 11:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, yeah, like, we're just waiting for our 8K day. When Ether moves 8K in a single day.

• 11:24David Hoffman?

  Exactly. Yeah, that's like, you know, in 2025, right?

• 11:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, well, actually, there is some good news on the ETF front with Ether. In fact, why don't we just lead with Ether on this? Because it is actually fantastic news. You know that thing we've been tracking, which is net inflows into the Ethereum ETFs? And every single week, we've been tracking since the summer.

• 11:44David Hoffman?

  And it has looked like dogshit. It has looked terrible.

• 11:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so like-

• 11:49David Hoffman?

  It started off like, there was a crest of hope, you know? It started off okay, and then the flows just kept on coming. The flows are out of grayscale. And the flows into IBIT and Fidelity was like, okay, but like, not great.

• 12:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  So just to recap this, like, I remember looking at this bottom-line number of like net inflows on Ether. And it's been ranging basically mostly negative 400 million to like negative 500 million.

• 12:15David Hoffman?

  Negative 600. It got up to negative 604. It was the highest I ever saw, yeah.

• 12:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  And we kept checking it every week and we're like, ugh. Like, making grimace faces and like, this isn't looking good. Okay, and some context for this, of course, is ETH, just like the Bitcoin ETF. So Bitcoin had a trust, grayscale trust product. It had to outflow into the lower-cost ETFs. That was part of the outflow process. But its inflows have more than compensated it, right? So there's been net buying pressure on Bitcoin. Ether is the same thing happening. Basically, there was net outflows out of the grayscale ETF. You knew that bleed was coming. But the hope was that other inflows into the other ETFs would more than compensate. And it's been net negative to this point. That's what we're talking about with the inflows. Okay, now, the good news.

• 13:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, for the first time, this is the first weekly roll up. We can report that net inflows into the Ethereum ETF are now positive. And not just positive, like-

• 13:12David Hoffman?

  Very, very positive.

• 13:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Very positive.

• 13:14David Hoffman?

  Bigly positive.

• 13:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Read out these numbers, dude.

• 13:16David Hoffman?

  We just wiped out the entire hole in a single week. Okay, no, when was the election? On November 5th? Yeah, November 5th?

• 13:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Something like that, yep.

• 13:25David Hoffman?

  Okay, the day after the election, the 6th, 52 million. The 7th, 79 million. The 8th, 85 million. The 11th, 295 million.

• 13:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  What?

• 13:36David Hoffman?

  The 12th, 135 million. The 13th, 146 million dollars. For a total positive net inflows of all time in the Ethereum ETFs, positive 241 million. You did it, Ether. All it took was one week. One week. Four months of digging that hole and it all got erased in a single week.

• 13:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go. Now, we expect that number to stay in the black. For like, like, this cannot go red again.

• 14:02David Hoffman?

  We're not going back. We're not going back.

• 14:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  We'll quit the roll up if this happens. We'll quit reporting it if this happens.

• 14:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 14:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Quit bankless, I'll leave.

• 14:10David Hoffman?

  But also, we also have to give his credit to the Bitcoin ETFs. Also, very large. Can we flip over to Bitcoin ETFs? Interestingly, on the election day, the 5th, Bitcoin actually had 116 million dollars of outflows. But 620 inflows the next day.

• 14:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow.

• 14:25David Hoffman?

  1.4 billion the next day. 293 million after that. 1.1 billion after that. 800 million after that. 500 million after that. Painting in some numbers. 1.4 billion dollars on a single day is pretty incredible on November 7th. Wow.

• 14:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  These are pretty big days. One of those days Ether may have had like about 30% of that inflow volume, but just nothing to compare. Yeah, this is cute. This is measuring the billions here. Okay, so now go compare it. The iShares Bitcoin ETF, that's the BlackRock ETF. It's now surpassed iShares Gold ETF, okay?

• 15:03David Hoffman?

  Wow. The Bitcoin ETF is bigger than the Gold ETF.

• 15:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  10 months. The iShares Gold ETF from BlackRock was launched in January 2025. That's how fast it's happening. We already got the ETF flipping on the Bitcoin side of things. So again, you know Bitcoin just can't let Ethereum have any glory here. It's just like stomping these numbers.

• 15:27David Hoffman?

  Well, the Ether ETF flows will start to beat the Bitcoin ETF flows when the Ether price ratio starts to also beat the Bitcoin price ratio. That's just logic.

• 15:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, of course. Yeah, that's logic. When's that happening, David? When's that gonna start happening?

• 15:41David Hoffman?

  I don't know, man. I don't know, man. We almost had it this week, but then got erased.

• 15:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, so Bautchunas chiming in saying Ether ETFs had the best day ever in flows yesterday in the week, almost above water in the year to date. That's what he was saying. Now we are above water, trending in the right direction, he said. So that is cute, as you say. Meanwhile, the iBit BlackRock Bitcoin ETF just had its biggest volume ever with 4.1 billion traded. Not only in flows, David, we're seeing some heavy volumes. This is like more volume than stocks like Berkshire, Netflix, or Visa saw.

• 16:15David Hoffman?

  And if you're noticing a sense of jubilance or euphoria, that might be true. And that will be noted by the fact that Coinbase is now the number one app in finance and the number 13 in the entire App Store. The Coinbase ranking in the Apple App Store has been one of the stronger sell signals that we've had in cycles past. Now Coinbase stayed in the top five of the Apple App Stores for many months in 2021. But if you had sold during any of those months in 2021, that would have been an advantage selling point.

• 16:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, I feel like, sure, it's a sell signal kind of later, but like, we just entered this. Like, what this signifies really is like, the question that we've been asking for a long time, is retail here? Is retail here? Are you getting texts from your like normie friends being like, oh, is crypto, are you still in crypto? Like, let's meet over coffee? Like, those kind of texts? That's an indicator that retail's here. And this kind of data set, which is like, how trending is Coinbase, the app in the App Store? And I think that, like, we have to get this to number one in total apps. And then you start to see, okay, this is like, you know, this is FOMO territory. This is like hype territory. Retail is really here and they're buying in size.

• 17:31David Hoffman?

  Well, look at the, look at the number of the apps. Number one Coinbase, number two Robinhood, number three Cash App, number four Crypto.com. Like, those are all crypto apps.

• 17:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's in the finance category.

• 17:40David Hoffman?

  In the finance category.

• 17:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  In the finance category. Yeah. Yeah. Overall, though, Coinbase is just like one slot below McDonald's overall. So I don't know what that tells you, but.

• 17:51David Hoffman?

  Yeah, not, yeah, that's good. That's not a sell signal. That's a buy signal.

• 17:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 17:55David Hoffman?

  Sell in Coinbase, close to McDonald's.

• 17:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  ETH Bitcoin ratio, we gotta be down in the week, right?

• 18:01David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we got, okay, we started the week somewhere around like 0.05, got above 0.04. We are currently back to 0.05. Sad. At least we're not below, though.

• 18:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's flat?

• 18:13David Hoffman?

  If you're below, that would be, it's flat. It's flat with a big old Christmas tree in the middle.

• 18:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, I'll take flat then. That's fine. Total crypto market cap is 3 trillion? Above 3 trillion?

• 18:24David Hoffman?

  All time high. All time high in the total crypto market cap. How's that feel?

• 18:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  All time highs. Look at that. Look at that. That's good.

• 18:30David Hoffman?

  How's that feel?

• 18:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  It feels great, David. I'm feeling pretty good. I'm feeling like we got some exciting months ahead, quite honestly. I don't see signs of this stopping. I mean, it's not to say there won't be retreats, there always are, but no signs of stopping. Another indicator that I'm keeping an eye on, and I know you are as well, is like, how much Ether is actually burning? So, you know, last week, we talked about these cycles where Ether is kind of like on a net positive issuance cycle, or it's on a burn cycle. And these things kind of happen in phases. And during bull markets, when Ether and block space demand goes high, then ETH tends to burn. And it's started to burn. So, a few days this week, it's into kind of like the burn territory. And I'll keep an eye on whether this like continues.

• 19:13David Hoffman?

  It has been a while.

• 19:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and it's burning, remember it has two burn engines, which is interesting, like last bull cycle it didn't have these burn engines. The first burn engine is just like block space on Ethereum L1, right? The second burn engine is blob space and both engines have been actually firing and burning, more on the L1 side of things, but also blobs have been burning. So L2s are doing their part to contribute towards the burn as well. And I guess like my base prediction is, you know, everyone is in sort of the ETH has no value accrual, L2s are parasitic, right? And what will happen is in the months to come, when the burn starts firing and like L2 gas fees get more expensive, that narrative will switch to like ETH holders, ETH is just a rent extracting asset, do you know?

• 19:58David Hoffman?

  The Ethereum Layer 1 blockchain is extracting rent from its Layer 2 blockchains, oh no.

• 20:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly, exactly. So this is what typically happens during these, you know, burn type cycles. And I sort of anticipate the same, so we'll keep an eye on that too. Just by way of recap though, if you're keeping score, since the Ethereum merge, over the last two years and 61 days, Bitcoin has inflated by 56 billion of Bitcoin, at least in today's value. Ether has had negative issuance, 328 million, you know? So you'd think that would matter. This again is the first bull cycle that ETH is like not issuing very much. It's like still net deflationary, at least over the past two years. And issuance is like way down. You'd think that would matter at some point in the price, but so far like, even though ETH has had a couple of weeks, it's not keeping pace with Bitcoin.

• 20:49David Hoffman?

  And all of that burn, like you said, is largely due to Layer 1 block space burn. Blob space has gotten just underway. The blob fee market is slowly creeping in. We have burned $400,000 of Ether in the last 30 days, which isn't a whole lot, but when you compare it to the 30 days before that, which was zero, it's on, it's starting to get priced in. I'll take it. And again, when like many Layer 2s are still just getting themselves like stood up and there's also hundreds of Layer 2s that don't even exist yet. The plan for many, many, many Layer 2s is to all incrementally burn a small amount of blobs. And because there will be many Layer 2s, I actually expect in the not too distant future, blob space burn to surpass block space burn.

• 21:34David Hoffman?

  That is the Ethereum rollup centric roadmap in my mind. It's blob space burns more than block space.

• 21:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  The funny thing about everything you just said is I like, I think like, um, I don't know, less, uh, far less than 1% of all people in crypto actually understand what you just said. Yeah, this part of blob space burn versus block space burn. It's gonna like, one's gonna flip in the other. I mean, this is deep stuff. Like, it still remains a more difficult asset to understand.

• 21:59David Hoffman?

  Well, moving on to the extremely easy assets to understand, meme coins put in some absolute numbers this week. Uh, this brand new meme coin, or newer meme coin at least, called Peanut the Squirrel, was up a whopping 1,500% on the week. So congratulations to anyone who put a mere 20, $50 into Peanut the Squirrel. Uh, why it went up this week? I'm unfamiliar. I'm not in these particular trenches.

• 22:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, you don't know? Like, I would imagine this is the squirrel, like, swinging the election type meme, right? It's gotta be something to do with that.

• 22:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah, but it happened so late. So the, yeah, but that happened like, a week ago. Why did it magically like, start pumping on November the 11th? I don't know. I guess the, and-

• 22:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is the number 55th asset, largest asset in crypto?

• 22:43David Hoffman?

  So it went from a market cap of $128 million to $2 billion in three days. So any of the holders of Peanut Squirrel just collectively made $1.8 billion in three days.

• 22:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Dana, or David, what are we doing?

• 23:01David Hoffman?

  Wasn't you, wasn't Ryan? I bet you were not in this.

• 23:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why are we wasting our lives talking about ETH burn and like fundamentals and like issuance and all this stuff? We should have just bought Peanut the Squirrel.

• 23:13David Hoffman?

  Hey, man, I'm, I'm buying meme coins. I don't know about you.

• 23:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 23:17David Hoffman?

  I'm in the meme coin trenches.

• 23:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you buying Doge? Cause I had an exceptional like week as well, last seven days.

• 23:23David Hoffman?

  I did buy Doge going into the election, so I'm gonna pat myself on the back. I bought Doge trying to long the, the Trump victory and also Elon, uh, being the meme guy that he is. Uh, Doge is up 100% in two weeks, going from like 18 cents to 40 cents. Uh, it won't be long before we, uh, see a dollar. Uh, and this is all, of course, on the back of Trump tapping in Musk to lead the, the Department of Government Efficiency, AKA Doge, also with Vivek.

• 23:50David Hoffman?

  So it's weird that like two people are leading up the Office of Government Efficiency? That doesn't seem totally right. But because this is happening, Doge has pumped bigly. But those are not the only meme coins that have pumped. Coinbase has been listing the meme coins. So Coinbase tweeted out, "Man's best friend with a hat." Whiff is now available for trading. And that was after they also allowed Pepe to trade on Coinbase. So both Pepe and Whiff now trading on Coinbase for those who are owners of those. As a result, Whiff added a casual $1.25 billion in its market cap, up 30%. Pepe adds $3.5 billion to its market cap, up 45% on the Coinbase listing.

• 24:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's so crazy. You know, like I think the Overton window has really shifted in crypto where like meme coins are totally within like acceptable range, right? You have Coinbase listing them, which is just basically like they're all pumping. You got people like Murad saying like, "This is the meme coin cycle. It's like, it's all going up and like get in now." And so you know what even bats an eye anymore? There was a time where Coinbase listing meme coins, people would be like, "What? Really? Like this delegitimizes the thing that we're doing." But like, think about it from Coinbase's perspective. They don't want to miss out on fees. And also like, these are not securities, quite clearly. Pepe is not a security.

• 25:11David Hoffman?

  They're very safe.

• 25:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, very safe.

• 25:14David Hoffman?

  Have you seen that meme of, it's that girl watching a guy put the shaped blocks into the correctly shaped block, like receptacle? And there's like a circle block and you put the circle and you see like, okay, he puts the first one in and it's like a square. The square, the square go, the square goes in the square hole. And he puts it in the square hole and she gets it right. And then he's like, "Where's, here's the circle one." But the problem with this, I'm explaining a meme, I know I'm doing it terribly. He picks up the circle one and then he's like, "Oh, you put the circle one in the circle hole." And he goes, "That's right. You put it in the square hole." Because they all fit. For some reason, whoever designed this device, everything fits into the square hole. Doesn't matter what the size is, the triangle fits into the square. You can just rotate everything and it fits in the square. And so there's this one meme where it's like, "Oh, what?"

• 25:59David Hoffman?

  What cycle? What are we gonna rotate into next? Did you guess meme coins? That's right. We're all going back to meme coins. And then the other like circles are like ones like DeFi tokens, one's NFTs, one's like gaming tokens, and then like keep on picking up new shapes. It's like, oh, it's meme coins again. It's always meme coins. It's always meme coins. We never get any rotation out of meme coins. Meme coins just rotate into other meme coins.

• 26:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can we make it? Can we spare just a little bit of liquidity for my 2021 NFTs that are like way underwater and like have lost like 98% of their value? Just a little bit. I'm not asking for a lot.

• 26:36David Hoffman?

  Punks got the bid. Punks got the bid this week. I don't know if you noticed, punks were over $100,000. Yeah, I like, well, I told you, you should have bought a punk in the bear market.

• 26:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, my God.

• 26:45David Hoffman?

  Punks got the bid this week.

• 26:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  I should always follow your advice, right?

• 26:48David Hoffman?

  What NFTs you even own?

• 26:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  I could show you some things, David. You don't know about my, like, some of my 2021 wallets. We don't talk about those.

• 26:57David Hoffman?

  That is true. That is true.

• 26:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, some nasty JPEGs going on. We got a lot more to talk about, including this. The Polly Market founder just got his home raided by the FBI like 6:00 AM in the morning. Like, what is going on? Even Brian Armstrong is like saying WTF is this administration? Yeah, he did. First time I've ever seen it. Also, Justin Drake proposed the Beam Chain. I saw some reaction on my side. You were there for it, so you gotta tell me, and you gotta give me the update on DevCon as well. All this and more, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including our recommended exchange to go ride this bull. That is Kraken. Go create an account.

• 27:33David Hoffman?

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• 28:17David Hoffman?

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• 29:01David Hoffman?

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• 29:45David Hoffman?

  the home of Web3 in real time. You can get there at magiceden.io to get started. All right, Ryan, so I read this headline on Twitter in the middle of DevCon, and I couldn't, like, dive into it because I was in DevCon. FBI raids Polymarket CEO's Shane Copeland's house. Apparently while he was, like, in bed, just chilling. Like 6:00 AM. I'm assuming, yeah, so, great, 6:00 AM, the perfect time to be raided. Can you download me, please?

• 30:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, okay, so I saw this breaking by Radha, a tweet, and it linked to this New York Post story, and the New York Post story goes like this, "FBI Seizes Polymarket CEO's Phone, Electronics After Betting Platform Predicts Trump Win," according to a source, okay? So it goes through, and it says what happened. So of course, we've talked about Polymarket this entire cycle. We've talked about, you know, Shane last week was kind of a glory week for Polymarket, massive success in terms of predicting election outcomes in real time, like praise everywhere, highest volume week, like so many things we've talked about, okay? So this is the guy, the co-founder, he's 26 years old, and I don't know if they knock on the door or they bash it in, but he was awoken from his sleep at 6:00 a.m. and the

• 30:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  FBI, I don't, the details aren't out as to whether they presented a search warrant, I assume they have to in some way, I don't, I don't know all the details of this, but the net effect is, they took his phone, they took his electronics, according to this article in the New York Post, they didn't tell him why, and according to a source as well, listed in this article, the source is not named, that there's some speculation that this was political retribution. Of course, I can't, we can't confirm that, we don't know, this has to go to trial, I have no idea why this is happening. And my first reaction to this, David, was like, "That's weird, we don't have all of the facts, but it looks really, really bad."

• 31:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  It looks, I'm not telling you this is what it is, but it looks like, as in, it could be perceived as like, "Political retribution?" Okay, again, I'm not saying-

• 31:44David Hoffman?

  I feel like the Occam's razor points there.

• 31:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, I'm not saying this is the case, but we're talking about, after four years of arresting and seizing property and threatening crypto founders, take, like, knocking out their banks, Operation Choke Point, one week after Trump gets elected, now is the time they decide to go raid Shane's house, the Polymarket co-founder? Like, why now? This seems very weird.

• 32:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 32:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Even if this is not political retribution, even if they had a very, very good reason for this, the optics here are absolutely insane. The optics are absolutely insane.

• 32:16David Hoffman?

  Like, "Oh, you just discovered Polymarket the four days after the election?" Like, weird timing.

• 32:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly. And according to another Bloomberg follow-up post, really, the reason why is the Justice Department is investigating Polymarket for allegedly accepting trades from US-based users, according to a person familiar with this.

• 32:36David Hoffman?

  But it already knew that. It already knew of that issue because they settled with the CFTC forever ago. So, again, bringing up that issue just a week after the election is also super sus timing.

• 32:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, doesn't it seem like, of course, they were going to give a convenient, they're going to say, this is political retribution. They're not going to tell you explicitly why. They'll find a reason here. And to your point, you remember, it was two years ago that the Polymarket settled an enforcement action with the CFTC and paid 1.4 million in penalty in addition to agreeing to block US users. That's why we have the geo-block. That's why, you know, we have a VPN block against all of this. So, what is going on here? Like, what's, again, tinfoil hat, couldn't be, like, we could get too conspiracy theory with this. And of course, we don't know all the evidence. We're just observing something that's happening like a week after the election on the back of massive attacks on crypto, and it seems pretty suspect. What's your take on this?

• 33:31David Hoffman?

  I don't know Shane Copeland personally. I've never met him, never talked to him. But from what I've heard is that he just wants to build Polymarket. He has this, grinds on Polymarket. What does he do last year? He built Polymarket. What did he do the year before? He built Polymarket. So, the idea that there's anything extra that's nefarious, again, I don't know Shane, but like, doesn't check out. He's a grinder, he's a founder who grinds. And again, timing, super sus. Like, what do they want to know? The only time that we've seen this also happen was, is like the tornado cash. So, like, maybe there's money laundering through a Polymarket? Is that possible? Maybe?

• 34:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  But anyone can charge anyone for anything. It, I don't, and I also, again, I don't know the exact, you know, way that this came about, but you can get a judge to allow FBI court order, like, with a very low sort of threshold, I would think, right? It's just like, these could just be Charges. And again, it could be enough that like, oh, we think that some US citizens are using polymarket, you know, like, and evading the geo block and like, using polymarket. And maybe they're acquiring his computer and this information to like, find US citizens.

• 34:48David Hoffman?

  See if they knew that and were willingly taking a blind eye is like, one possible answer.

• 34:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Dude, it's wild. So this is what prompted Brian Armstrong, by the way, the tweet was since deleted, to say, like, he said, WTF is this administration doing? Right? Because it looks like it's something coming from the administration. Again, we don't know for sure, but the optics aren't good at this point. Shane had like, one of the greatest responses to this that I've seen. So hours later, after this, this news listed, he tweets out, "New phone, who diss?" He was like, he's like, he's got a new phone.

• 35:21David Hoffman?

  Got his phone seized and he just goes and tweets with his brand new phone. Congrats on the iPhone 16, Shane. Well done.

• 35:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, he, his comment, "It's discouraging that the current administration would seek a last ditch effort to go after companies they deem to be associated with political opponents." So he's like, calling them out here specifically.

• 35:38David Hoffman?

  So he's saying it's political?

• 35:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yep. "We are deeply committed to being nonpartisan, and today is no different, but the incumbents should do some self reflecting and recognize that taking a more pro-business, pro-startup approach may be what would have changed the fate of this election. Polymarket has provided value to tens of millions of people this election cycle while causing harm to nobody. We're deeply proud of that." You know, there's pictures of Shane with like, Tim Walz. Have you seen this?

• 36:02David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I did see that.

• 36:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, he's gone to the campaign. I think he was like, I don't know Shane's politics, but like, he was definitely not a, you know, kind of like, full bandwagon on kind of the Trump side of things. I think Shane was trying to be politically neutral and like, just provide a prediction market to everybody.

• 36:21David Hoffman?

  Which is a good position to have for a polymarket, for a prediction market founder. And it's also, well, okay, so we have four years of Trump, who is like, grateful to polymarket. Polymarket heavily allowed the conservative right to get their voices elevated through the mainstream media, because the mainstream media wasn't going to do it. So we know that the Trump administration favors polymarket, and they're in power for four years. So at least he has four years of being in the clear here. The Democrats, I get if this is political. We're gonna see like, people like Elizabeth Warren, I bet Elizabeth Warren hates polymarket. I bet she doesn't like it at all. I bet she's gonna start to come out and start to talk negatively about prediction markets and them being a threat to democracy.

• 37:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, imagine if this came in the week after Kamala Harris won. And let's say there was like a blue wave. That would like, that would really freak me out, honestly. I mean, because what I felt Well, that don't matter though. Well, I mean, it matters because like now it feels like post-January, this type of thing is going to be alleviated from crypto founders. We're no longer going to have a hostile chokepoint regime, right? It's like, I don't know how you felt, David, but on the back of like, two, three, four years of this, having seen our friends, builders in the space, get like Wells notices, some get arrested, get their property seized, get harassed, get attacked by the administration,

• 37:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  right? It felt like last week, I felt like, oh man, this feels like a boot off my neck, or off our neck. What we're doing is no longer illegal, right? It's like, okay, it's fine now. And this kind of brought me flashbacks to like, wow, people are still getting raided by the FBI? Like legitimate founders? This is our most successful company this cycle. This is our most successful project.

• 38:07David Hoffman?

  Will we ever find out why they did it?

• 38:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm sure. I'm sure this is going to court. I'm sure Shane has kind of like lawyers looking into this. So more details will emerge again. Maybe, quote unquote, maybe there's a very good reason for this, but wow, the optics on this. I guess we'll have to see. All right, let's go to some better news, David. Give me the update on DevCon. So I've been watching from afar, but you're on the ground. So you've been attending the events. Like, first of all, let's do a vibe check. What's the vibe like in the Ethereum community?

• 38:37David Hoffman?

  DevCon, DevCon is one of two events that the Ethereum Foundation organizes, the other one being a DevConnect. And DevConnect is kind of like the mini version of DevCon anyways. And DevCon is always just, it's the deepest nerds of Ethereum who like see Ethereum as like this thing shepherding this future. It's like a lot of futarky stuff. Robin Hanson was actually here this I met Robin Hanson this week and it's a pretty like price agnostic conference. I remember going to DevCon Bogota when ETH was like in the 1,000 digit range. You know, right after Three Hours Capital, like still right ahead of FTX, actually. Prices were bad, but no one cared at Bogota. And now price is actually a lot higher. This is the highest ETH price that we've ever seen at a DevCon.

• 39:22David Hoffman?

  And once again, like no one really cares, actually. It's just like all these different like corners of Ethereum, which you kind of forget about, who are just retrashing in 100 different directions. A lot of cryptography things, a lot of EIPs, protocol upgrades, things that you kind of forget that Ethereum, the Ethereum Foundation is investing in. A lot of DSci, progressive cryptography, which I'm guessing most people don't even know what that is. But it's like this very futuristic version of cryptography that only Ethereum is really investing in. And I think my biggest takeaway is like, I frequently forget when I'm at home. Like Ethereum, EF is doing like these 10,000 different venture bets on research

• 40:03David Hoffman?

  in very futuristic technologies that are taking somewhere between five and 15 years to have like fruition, but only the Ethereum Foundation is doing it. And that is like their whole process of like growth by subtraction, where the Ethereum Foundation wants to get smaller, but they're trying to like grow these little like movements in different directions. And it's all, this is the festival, the cultural festival of Ethereum to kind of all see that hell happen at once. And the vibes are always just super good. Everyone's just super optimistic. Ethereum is this optimistic technology. Everyone gets to come and hang out and be in the same spot. I think my favorite thing, actually, this is like kind of a side quest, but there was this music stage that was coordinated in like the lunchroom. So everyone can kind of go hang out and relax.

• 40:47David Hoffman?

  And the EF put in just like music instruments, connected them to the speakers, piano, like saxophone, trumpet, drums, and they didn't get a band intentionally.

• 40:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  I saw you tweet this, yeah.

• 40:59David Hoffman?

  They just like put up the stage and then people who knew how to play music just went there and started jamming. And it sounded like a real band, but it was just like this very emergent coordination of like musicians. And I thought it was like pretty emblematic of like kind of what it feels like to be at an Ethereum conference.

• 41:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's so fascinating, yeah. Like, I've never gone, because as you know, I only go to one conference a year. But like, this would be the second one, like, I would love to go to. And I, you know, if it wasn't so far away, I would have.

• 41:30David Hoffman?

  You would nerd out. It's like a quarter of university classes crammed into four days. Because you can go, like, there are eight, there are eight stages, and they are all going at all times. And they're like, you can just fill your day with like, talk after talk after talk.

• 41:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, I saw some of the talks, too, super high-quality stuff. I'm like, learning, learning things. Like, we do this all the time, the podcast. I was learning about a new rollup improvement proposal that will like, improve interoperability across like, rollups without settling to the layer two, RIP 7755, which I deep dove into this after one of the talks. I'm watching this from afar, but yeah, it seems great. I guess, one criticism of it from the outside has been like, okay, but these are all dreamers. You know, it's pie in the sky, it's research, they're very disconnected from the app layer and from like, the builder. So it's all like, deep cryptography, ivory tower, academics, but like, where are the apps? Where are the users? Like, you know, did you get, what's your take on that kind of critique?

• 42:31David Hoffman?

  DevCon has always been about protocols and standards and like, kind of the deep tech stuff that is supposed to foster those things. I guess you could make the critique that like, yeah, now it's about time to look a little bit higher up the stack. But there's still a lot of, like, the investments, I was saying, in like, these more futuristic technologies that are still many, many, many years out. Like, cryptography still has a lot to go when it comes to like, what it can truly do. And so, that's kind of the, it's kind of the giga-brain stuff that, like, I wouldn't even know existed if people like Barry Whitehat or Gubcheep or Vitalik weren't talking about it.

• 43:07David Hoffman?

  And it's not all that. There is some app stuff. It's just like, there's just a lot left to grow. There's a lot of technology left to squeeze the juice out of.

• 43:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Number of things were released as well coming out of this. So ENS, the .eth domain names are going to be building their own L2. So Name Chain, it's called. Not a lot of details about theirs. There's some speculation it might be a based rollup. But we'll have to see.

• 43:30David Hoffman?

  I actually looked into that. I tried to ask around. I didn't get a clear answer because apparently it's like 80% ish of a base rollup. And I don't know how that works or what that means. But I'm looking more forward to details.

• 43:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Also, Espresso Network is launching. And Espresso is kind of a shared sequencer technology that is also working to defragment all the chains and unify all the chains. So that's cool. And then Deci, Decentralized Science, getting a little bit of attention. This is CZ and Vitalik in the same room, talking about decentralized.

• 43:59David Hoffman?

  CZ was at DevCon.

• 44:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's interesting. Some people you wouldn't expect, right? But CZ at DevCon is like something I didn't expect. Have you, has he given any talks or was he just attending side events?

• 44:11David Hoffman?

  I think it was just the Deci side events. I didn't, I didn't know if he was actually here at the actual DevCon conference. I did not see him. I did not see him.

• 44:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  The big thing, David, that escaped outside of DevCon was this Justin Drake proposal, proposing the Beam Chain. So I want to get your take on this. Let's, let's talk about this. So prior to DevCon, Justin Drake tweeted an announcement of an announcement saying he had his biggest, his personal biggest project ever that he was getting ready to announce. So there's a lot of speculation as to what that might be. I will tell you from my perspective, I was kind of hoping this would be some sort of like native ZK rollups on Ethereum type of play. Because to me, that's like the best representation of end stage Ethereum. So like, expectations were high. These were even my expectations like going into it.

• 45:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  And what he, what he talked about was something called the Beam Chain instead. We'll, we'll talk about maybe the, the reactions on the back of this presentation. But, but first of all, you were there and you live tweeted it. What is the Beam Chain? What is Drake proposing here?

• 45:17David Hoffman?

  The Beam Chain is an alternative way of looking at the Ethereum roadmap, where there have been and are a bunch of things on the Ethereum roadmap that Justin Drake is packaging up into what he's calling the Beam Chain, and proposing that we build and ship this thing all at once. So we are building a bunch of different features, like a single-slot finality, 4-second block times, snarkifying the Layer 1, which is the very big, hard thing to do, moving Ethereum into being quantum resistant, and also just a very big upgrade. And there are these things that we know that we have to do, packaging all of these upgrades, once we figure out how to code it up, how to engineer it.

• 45:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Staking too, I noticed this one. This is like lowering issuance and actually making it so that validators can stake with one ETH.

• 46:04David Hoffman?

  Yes, and so packaging this all up, doing this all at once, and then kind of doing something like we did with the Merge, where we pop out the Beacon Chain, and then we pop in the Beam Chain, and all of a sudden we have the faster, efficient, more performant consensus Layer 4 Ethereum. And again, all of these things are already on the roadmap. Justin Drake is saying like, "Hey, there's a lot of this incremental stuff that's on the roadmap, things like Centers to Resistance, things like execution auctions, smart issuance, all this kind of stuff. And we're gonna let all that stuff be, and it's gonna progress incrementally like we always do. And then also, all the stuff that we can tackle at once, let's package this up into one big thing and just ship it all at once." And so it's kind of a way to, I guess, to unbundle a part of the Ethereum roadmap,

• 46:49David Hoffman?

  and then rebundle everything that can be done all at once, and do it again all at once. I think the thing that really tripped people up was, the biggest thing was the timeline that he proposed for this, which was a five-year timeline. And so there's like testing for a year, there's like syncing and coordination amongst the consensus clients for a year. You add all the parts that you need to do in order to make this happen, and it adds up to like 2029, 2030. And then also the packaging for it. Justin Drake did this announcement of an announcement about something he's been working on very hard. And inside of the context of the ETH, big TC price being low, meme coins being on Solana, everyone's like, "Oh, the devs are gonna do something. Like, we're gonna fix Ethereum."

• 47:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's Ethereum 3.0!

• 47:33David Hoffman?

  It's Ethereum 3.0. Yeah, everything's gonna be fixed. Like, we're gonna have super strong execution on Layer 1, 1-second block times. And so that's what the anticipation was. The room was absolutely packed for Justin Drake's talk. Like, you couldn't, people couldn't get in. And so everyone was kind of expecting with this announcement and this hype to have this, like, "The devs did something" announcement. And we got this, like, five-year update of, like, things that are already on the roadmap, and we're just gonna package it up and ship it all at once. It wasn't exactly what people were hoping for. Nonetheless, it is very cool. It's like, just adjacent, it's like, kind of removed from what people were looking for in this, like, present context of crypto.

• 48:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  It felt more incremental, and I get the timeline up here. Of course, the full Beam implementation would be sort of over the five years, but every single year, there was, like, work towards that, incremental work towards that, that would be, like, deployed into Ethereum. The other thing that I think tripped people up is, this was, and even me, this is not like the full Ethereum 3.0, like, the next-gen Ethereum type of vision. This is just the consensus layer. So this had nothing to do with the execution layer, right? And so, like, ideally, for me, when I'm thinking of the Ethereum that's five years away, it would be encompassing not just the Beam chain and consensus, which I think Justin did quite well, but also, like, where's execution going?

• 48:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Where are my Enshrine, ZK, EVM rollups? You know, like, that's also what I want as part of this. And just because it was only the consensus layer, I think that left people, like, what... This did not play well on Twitter, is something I'll say. It's, like, really hard to kind of, like, package up.

• 49:13David Hoffman?

  No, yeah, a lot of people are like, "Why the hell does Ethereum have to have five years to ship a product? Like, what the hell are you guys doing? Just build it and ship it." Which is, like, in my mind, like, a very naive take. This is a consensus layer upgrade to Ethereum. How many consensus clients does Ethereum have? Five, which means five consensus clients needs to build and ship this independently. And then they need to sync with each other, because the consensus clients need to have consensus. So they have to test the connections between all the permutations of all the consensus. Clients. The reason why people are expecting like, why can't we just ship this in like, you know, a year, two years? Well, maybe that's coming from the perspective of people who are working on a blockchain that only have one consensus client. And so that's why they're thinking this like, this is what a decentralized system looks like.

• 49:58David Hoffman?

  If we want this thing, it's going to have to have, you know, rounds and rounds of testing on the blockchain with the majority of users and the majority of assets and the majority of TVL and smart contracting systems. And so like, we're going to go slow and just going to be careful. And so, yeah, the people who are like, deliver the product is like, join a web two company.

• 50:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  One thing I think to note about this presentation is it's just a proposal. This is how Ethereum works. So Justin was not, you know, staking out the roadmap. He was just like making a proposal. So there'll be some commentary on this and some back and forth. And like, maybe some merging with other ideas. Overall, I felt like it wasn't a bad proposal at all. It was, it was bullish to me.

• 50:37David Hoffman?

  It's not what people were really looking for in this present moment. Like, sure, it's cool. Great.

• 50:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  The meme packaging was just like, not, not ideal. We will be having Justin on Bankless to actually talk about that. And maybe we'll talk about the reception and maybe the broader idea of like, is Ethereum 3.0 a thing? Could it be a thing? If it was a thing, what could it include? So we'll be doing that soon as well.

• 50:57David Hoffman?

  All right, moving on to what's coming up next. Deutsche Bank has dropped a testnet to a ZK rollup settling to Ethereum. Whoever would have predicted that banks would use rollups to settle to Ethereum? Whoever said that? I have never heard that before. Blur is also voting on their fee switch, which is just giving more and more credence to this DeFi renaissance and how Phantom update, the Phantom wallet, cost some users, some Phantom users, millions of millions of dollars. Yikes. Make sure you write down your seed phrase, people. All of that coming up and more, but first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that makes this show possible. New projects are coming online to the Mantle Layer 2 every single week. Why is this happening? Maybe it's because Mantle has been on the frontier of Layer 2 design architecture

• 51:39David Hoffman?

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• 52:24David Hoffman?

  with liquidity. Experience trading like never before with all the trading tools you know and love all on chain. And then there's MegaVault, your gateway to automatic liquidity and yield. Just deposit some USDC and start earning yield immediately. It's so simple and DYDX Unlimited comes packed with so much more. Leverage, prediction market perpetual futures, instant deposits, and there's even a revamped trading rewards program to get rewarded for every time you make a trade. So go ahead and check out DYDX on Twitter at DYDX to get notified once DYDX Unlimited launches. Launching a token? Worried about the IRS? Talk to Toku for five minutes to learn how to save hundreds of thousands of dollars for you, your team, and your investors. Now, if you do an initial consultation, Toku will cover the cost of your token valuation, which is what you need for your launch. So don't wait.

• 53:08David Hoffman?

  Reach out to the team right now at [email protected]. That's team@T O K U dot com. Coming in hot, Aptos, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Optimism, and Polygon are the new blockchains that will host BlackRock's new Bittl Fund. Bittl is being shipped on all of these different blockchains. Carlos Domingo, the Securitae CEO, said, "With these new chains, we'll start to see more investors looking into leveraging the underlying technology to increase efficiencies on all things that we do now." The BlackRock Bittl Fund, of course, on the Ethereum Layer 1 is now moving to its Layer 2s. And also Aptos? Interestingly that they added Aptos because Arbitrum, Avalanche, Optimism, Polygon, all EVM chains. One of these are not like the other. Aptos is a move chain, a move Layer 1.

• 53:51David Hoffman?

  So they decided to go out of the way to support a completely different execution environment. And that's like custom code. They couldn't just copy and paste their code. So congratulations to Aptos, I guess.

• 54:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a big win. Also Franklin Templeton is expanding. Did you know they weren't on Ethereum? Now they are. So they had a money market as well, similar to the Bittl Fund. It was, it started on Stellar, I believe. It's available on some other blockchains and they are expanding to Ethereum as well. The big news that you were talking about before the break was Deutsche Bank. So they have launched a ZK chain testnet on Ethereum. Deutsche Bank is one of those big banks, David. They've got $1.5 trillion worth of assets. Okay, so these are big banks. So some key features here, a soulbound token-based digital identity. So they get the AML KYC via soulbound NFT. Paymaster functionality. They're going to have their own block explorer.

• 54:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  And also it's going to be private as well with interop to other private chains. And of course, the rest of the Ethereum ecosystem. So this is on the ZK sync stack. This is a pretty big win for the elastic chain.

• 54:54David Hoffman?

  Oh, my God.

• 54:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, yeah. So again.

• 54:56David Hoffman?

  Can we go through some of this stuff? A soulbound digital token identity. So they're going to have users on chain that they are going to have KYC. They're going to know their users. Paymaster functionality. What does that mean? They're paying for gas for their users. Custom-built block explorer, like that's just a front end for their users, like assets and accounts and all of that stuff. Tokenized fund creation and issuance. Okay, they're going to put the funds on the ZK chain. And then interoperability capabilities. I don't know what that means. That's like a whole entire bank ecosystem on a chain.

• 55:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you remember this idea? And it's like, we've seen many blockchain bank projects in the past that just like didn't make sense. Now they're starting to make sense. And do you remember that meme from like, I don't know. It was like 10 years ago or something like this, which is the basic idea that. Yeah, private blockchains, all the banks, all the financial institutions would have their version of a local area network, like a LAN that connected to the wide area network, the internet, right? And so each of them would have their own private blockchains that were connected to the public Ethereum network. Now it's actually in the early stages of maybe starting to happen.

• 56:04David Hoffman?

  Because they all tried to do Layer 1s. It makes a ton of sense when they are Layer 2s.

• 56:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, a decade later, it's starting to make sense now.

• 56:12David Hoffman?

  And also when they don't have to build their own blockchain tech and they let people like Alex Glukowski do it for them. Blur, the NFT platform that came and ate OpenSea's lunch, has a proposal to turn on the fee switch and VE Blur Tokenomics. So a 0.5% fee on trading is potentially being turned on if the Blur token holders wish it so, which is pretty cool. And again, it's a big plus one to the idea of a DeFi renaissance. So congratulations to Blur token holders if you guys do decide to turn that thing off.

• 56:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  You gotta imagine too, OpenSea's looking at this, they're waiting for their Wells notice to evaporate before they issue a token. I mean, that's gotta happen, right?

• 56:51David Hoffman?

  They got a Wells notice.

• 56:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, like, but anyway, all of like, this is why there's going to be a token res- renaissance, some sort of DeFi renaissance is because just like Gary Gensler is gonna be gone.

• 57:03David Hoffman?

  Nope, nope, nope, meme coins again. It's meme coins.

• 57:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Meme coins, alright.

• 57:07David Hoffman?

  It's meme coins.

• 57:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  This week it is. This is some interesting news. Bitwise is planning to expand their business. They just acquired an ETH staking service company called Attestant. Attestant's been in the space for a while. You remember Jim McDonald from Attestant? He was talking about ETH staking like years before the beacon chain actually launched and ETH staking was a thing. He was kind of an early thought leader. He was one of the co-founders of Attestant. They provide non-custodial staking services, okay? So if you stake with Attestant, you're not giving them custody, you're not giving up your private keys, you still have all the withdrawal credentials, access to your private keys. All they do is they just run the boxes rather than you running the boxes out of your house. So they've been providing the service for a while.

• 57:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Now Bitwise, again, issuers of an Ethereum ETF have acquired this self-custodial staking company. And you gotta imagine, David, that they are just looking and they're seeing the potential for an ETH-staked ETF that could be coming in the future.

• 58:04David Hoffman?

  That's the only kind of math that I see. An Ether ETF issuer buys an Ether staking organization. I can't imagine any other outcome. What do you get when you put those three things together?

• 58:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly. This is Steve Berryman from Attestant saying, "Staking is a major selling point for Ethereum. It would allow ETF investors to earn about 4% per year by having exposure to ETH through a fund." So even the Attestant folks are kind of alluding to this possibility in the future. So more infrastructure being developed there.

• 58:36David Hoffman?

  Ryan, guess what happened this week?

• 58:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, well, I know prices went up, but what else?

• 58:41David Hoffman?

  Uh, MicroStrategy acquires another 27,200 Bitcoins. Uh, they bought more Bitcoin. MicroStrategy bought more Bitcoin in another week. Uh, bought 2 billion more dollars of it. Is this part of, uh, his 34 billion dollar plan? Or however much, 42 billion dollar plan?

• 58:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  I can't keep track of it. Just like if there's Bitcoin available on the market and Michael Saylor has money, he just goes and buys the Bitcoin. Like, it's a...

• 59:05David Hoffman?

  Dude, how can any token compete with Michael Saylor's infinite money? He has infinite money, bro.

• 59:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know. He is just like the bull of all bulls. He is like a Bitcoin burn engine in and of himself, right? Bitcoiners don't have the burn as a mechanism. They have Michael Saylor instead. He's just like chomping on all of that, um, you know, additional issuance, so... Yeah, I don't think he's gonna stop until he's, until he's, you know, like, done. And I don't know when he's gonna be done. Did you see this, though, this week, David? This was very unfortunate, okay? So, looks like, here's a tweet, "Looks like a new Phantom update cleared everyone's wallet in the app. Retail cooked." Okay, so this is a, a screen that says "Welcome to Phantom", as if you're installing it for the first time. So what happened is, a whole bunch of people have the Phantom wallet. Many of them skew retail because they're doing meme coin stuff on Solana, that kind of thing, right?

• 59:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  And they, when they set up the wallet, they don't back up their seed phrase. You know, you get that 12, 24-word seed phrase? And, and what surprises me of some wallets, apparently Phantom, it doesn't have a required option to like back it up on your device? Or like back it up into iCloud or something like that? Apparently you can bypass that and it's just like, "Hey, did you write it down?" And you're like, "Yes, I wrote it down." And then, you know, it proceeds. Anyway. Yeah, what happened was, there was an update, an auto-update. So if you had your auto updates on Phantom, it, it sort of, uh, reinstalled the application and like deleted your private keys?

• 1:00:32David Hoffman?

  A fresh copy. No, didn't store any of the data.

• 1:00:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  So if you didn't have your seed phrase, again, these are bearer assets. This is cryptocurrency. This is what it means to have the responsibility to go bankless. It was just gone. So there are reports of people losing a million dollars. Again, this is skewing meme coins. So who knows? When the person set it up, maybe they weren't thinking. Maybe they were early on crypto. Maybe they just put a thousand dollars in, didn't expect it to grow as fast and just didn't get around to the seed phrase thing. But people lost a lot of money like this. Reports of 50,000, reports of hundreds of thousands. One guy said a million that was gone as a result of this update. Can you imagine just like waking up, looking at your phone?

• 1:01:10David Hoffman?

  Getting a million dollars yoinked?

• 1:01:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  God, that's so painful.

• 1:01:14David Hoffman?

  You don't have to pay taxes on that, do you?

• 1:01:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's kind of a boating accident type of incident, you know, with the IRS. It's like, yeah, prove it's Eli, prove you don't have the private keys. How do you do that? How do you prove you don't have the private keys?

• 1:01:28David Hoffman?

  Yeah, wow, yikes. Nightmare fuel, dude. Yeah, this is a call to action. If you have a wallet that you use on your phone, go just double check that. If you've written down those private keys, just make sure you've done that.

• 1:01:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, good PSA. And hopefully wallet providers like require this a bit more moving forward. One of which does, which launched last week is a new wallet called Avera. This is in the Ethereum ecosystem. This is from the Ave family of applications.

• 1:01:56David Hoffman?

  So Ave building out its third product. First Ave, the DeFi protocol. Second, Lens, the social protocol. And now Avara, the wallet.

• 1:02:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  I love like, Stoney and team just don't, don't stop shipping, don't stop building. Actually, I downloaded this. It's really good, David. Like complete chain abstraction, crossed all chains. Like it's a, it's a fantastic user experience, very easy to set up. It does like back up seed phrase. Again, like automatically doesn't let you go through without, it stores it through, through like a passcode on the phone. Or you could also back it up to iCloud. So it doesn't have the, the issue that we were just mentioning. It's a pretty good UX. Well, David, I know you're tired, man. We're gonna let you get some sleep, but I gotta show.

• 1:02:37David Hoffman?

  I've never done a podcast at one in the morning before.

• 1:02:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, dude, I'm sure you're exhausted after a week of conferences. By the way, for Bankless Sisters, this man just had food poisoning, okay? In Thailand. I don't know if I was supposed to share that. Okay, but like, I want them to see the dedication. We do not miss a roll-up, okay?

• 1:02:55David Hoffman?

  Actually, the number of people that had food poisoning at DevCon is like, kind of too high. It's like, everyone kind of gets their turn.

• 1:03:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, meme of the week, we just have Elon Musk's tweet with the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE. He actually has a logo. It's a cute, like, DOGE icon. I can't believe this is real life. Elon Musk launching a...

• 1:03:16David Hoffman?

  If you're wondering why DOGE is up like 40% on the week or whatever.

• 1:03:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is why. This is why. Anyway, meme coins are risky, but so are Bitcoin, so are ETH. You could lose what you put in. 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.