ROLLUP: Circle’s $25B IPO Mania | Genius Act Passes? | Stripe Buys Privy | Polymarket Meets Twitter

This week, Ryan and David unpack Circle’s stunning IPO debut, soaring to a $25B market cap and triggering Wall Street’s stablecoin frenzy. They break down the landmark Genius Act vote, bringing unprecedented regulatory clarity to stablecoins, and dive into Stripe’s latest crypto bet, acquiring wallet innovator Privy. Polymarket goes mainstream in an official integration with Twitter, while SEC Chair Paul Atkins embraces DeFi as fundamentally American. Plus, Gemini quietly files for IPO, Plasma’s billion-dollar Tether chain ignites, and Trump unexpectedly endorses crypto at Coinbase. ------ 📣LIMITLESS | SUBSCRIBE & FOLLOW https://pod.link/1813210890 https://x.com/LimitlessFT 📣BANKLES JOBS | COME WORK WITH US https://x.com/i/jobs/1929889475783520481 https://x.com/i/jobs/1929890683927638133 https://x.com/i/jobs/1915861900677812658 ------ 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 🌐SELF | PROVE YOUR SELF https://bankless.cc/Self 🟠BINANCE | THE WORLDS #1 CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/binance ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 3:59 Markets https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/1932526577897595233 https://x.com/rovercrc/status/1930951805191778369 https://x.com/hosseeb/status/1931457548760334723 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1932695486684950962 https://x.com/DavidShapiro98/status/1932696393937785058 https://x.com/blknoiz06/status/1932072994731647435 https://x.com/nypost/status/1933109968510550430 15:02 US Senate is about to pass the GENIUS Act https://x.com/Cointelegraph/status/1932988965037978084 https://x.com/intangiblecoins/status/1932868994165354703 https://x.com/SenatorBennet/status/1932864987208249597 https://x.com/SenWarren/status/1932858887482507604 https://www.banking.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/20250611_warren_blumenthal_letter_to_meta_re_stablecoin.pdf https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1932877097623588922 27:35 Did Circle kickoff Stablecoin Summer? https://www.tradingview.com/chart/?symbol=NYSE%3ACRCL https://x.com/MikeIppolito_/status/1932070226939810164 https://x.com/TaikiMaeda2/status/1929538665560031641 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1932424510738673711 https://x.com/PlasmaFDN/status/1932072359080415702 https://www.barrons.com/articles/circle-ipo-crypto-retail-frenzy-06659b30? https://x.com/perkinscr97/status/1931032964349276313 39:54 Stripe acquired Privy https://x.com/privy_io/status/1932816495719166167 https://x.com/patrickc/status/1932817864450584939 42:41 Polymarket became official prediction market of X! https://x.com/xai/status/1932481207180406923 https://x.com/shayne_coplan/status/1931008087688614155 44:50 Morpho Labs will be soon fully owned by MORPHO token holders https://x.com/PaulFrambot/status/1930971485142761909 https://youtu.be/IJN_pgkKPjA?si=963i8GioANnNoVAR https://x.com/MorphoLabs/status/1933162070465208423 49:17 Paul Atkins defended DEFI as the foundation American values https://x.com/SECGov/status/1932137708068970924 https://x.com/SECGov/status/1932137708068970924 53:15 World Liberty Financial will acquire TRUMP for its treasury https://x.com/EricTrump/status/1931089248926490772 https://x.com/coinbase/status/1932836009034617183 54:38 Closing & Disclaimers 55:13 Moment of Zen https://x.com/BitcoinMagazine/status/1933172630099837134 ------ 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 is the second week of June. It's time for the Bankless Weekly Roll Up. We got Stripe buying another crypto company. We also have, David, I know you're gonna love hearing this, "Stablecoin Summer is in full swing."

• 0:16David Hoffman?

  Do you know how many times I've seen "Stablecoin Summer" on my feed this last week? It was assaulted like four times from people all across crypto Twitter.

• 0:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  What can I say? You heard it here first, alright? This is where the narratives are born. We got the Genius Act votes. We've got Circle pumping. We've got every bank in America, it seems like, talking about issuing a stablecoin. And there's a whole bunch of other tokens I think people should pack on Stablecoin Summer. I've got some takes on what that might be. David, I want to hear yours as well.

• 0:43David Hoffman?

  And outside of the world of stablecoins, Polymarket and X have an official partnership, which is probably, I think, one of the most mainstreaming things I've ever heard come out of crypto. So they have Polymarket/Prediction Market directly integrated into Twitter. And then we also got the SEC Chair, Paul Atkins, saying DeFi is as American as apple pie.

• 1:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's an exact quote?

• 1:06David Hoffman?

  Use it to my ears. That's incredible.

• 1:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's also the year of the IPO, David, 2025. I think that's what's going to, it's going to be remembered by. So who is next on the IPO list? And finally, we got Trump making an unexpected appearance at the Coinbase conference. He has a few words. We're gonna share that at the end.

• 1:25David Hoffman?

  Ryan, did you, so the Limitless Podcast where we now do the AI rollups. If anyone's curious as to where the AI rollups on Bankless went, it went on to the Limitless Podcast. Did you catch that one this morning?

• 1:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, yeah. I catch it every, like, it's the first thing I do on Thursday mornings. This is the second thing I do, but that's the first thing. I listen to it on Spotify, so people can get it there. They can also get it on YouTube.

• 1:44David Hoffman?

  Okay, what's the, what's the, um, the common consensus take about Apple's WWDC that you hear on Twitter? What is it?

• 1:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Everyone, everyone is sad about it. Everyone thinks Apple missed the boat on AI completely and they flubbed it. They flubbed the ball.

• 1:59David Hoffman?

  Okay, so one of our hosts, Josh, is a huge Apple fanboy, has been for years, continues to be. He has a completely contrarian take.

• 2:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  I know.

• 2:07David Hoffman?

  You listened to the episode, so I'm already telling you. He actually thinks that Apple is doing the like high IQ, high IQ 40 chess thing.

• 2:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  I enjoyed it. I think that, I think the show is fantastic. The AI rollup is just like a great way for me to get downloaded on AI stuff. And I also heard in that episode, David, you now subscribe to the $200 a month ChatGPT plan?

• 2:29David Hoffman?

  I pay $200 a month for ChatGPT.

• 2:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a lot. You're aware that's $2,400 a year, right? You just do the math?

• 2:35David Hoffman?

  I just ape into it because he just told me to.

• 2:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  And it's O3 Pro and it's, it's good, right?

• 2:40David Hoffman?

  It takes a long time to think. It takes like multiple minutes to generate an output. But the output is, I mean, it would have taken me multiple minutes to think that, so.

• 2:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  So as you guys were talking about this, I was like, I am not smart enough to actually generate a prompt for a PhD level.

• 2:58David Hoffman?

  The constraint is the quality of the human's input, not the output.

• 3:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's kind of a problem. If that's a PhD researcher, I don't know how to prompt a PhD level researcher. And so like, what? I posted this on Twitter and people were like, yeah, what you have to do is you have to ask it how to prompt it. And at that point, why am I even here?

• 3:17David Hoffman?

  Yeah, these are the existential questions that we kind of ask a lot on the AI rollup. Anyways, so go subscribe to the AI rollup if you just want. It's bankless for AI. We cover the weekly news in AI. It's a ton of fun. Eeja and Josh are great hosts. And then we are also looking for a growth manager for Bankless because the AI rollup is doing very well. And we need to just hit the gas on that. And so if you are good at growth, podcast growth, Twitter virality, YouTube virality, we're looking for a growth manager. That's both for Limitless and Bankless. So there is a link. Look for a human person, a human growth manager, growth marketer, to just help press on the gas on this podcast. There's a couple of other jobs as well. There is links in the show notes to go check them out as well.

• 3:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Tell me about Bitcoin price. Yeah. What's the Bitcoin price?

• 4:03David Hoffman?

  Up 2.8% on the week, $107,600. Pretty good, pretty good. This last one. Week, the Bitcoin ETF became the fastest ETF ever to break $70 billion. That's BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF.

• 4:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look at this chart, man.

• 4:17David Hoffman?

  That's pretty nuts. That's pretty nuts.

• 4:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is for those that can't see, this is IBIT, the BlackRock Bitcoin ETF. And it's charted over time since, you know, it was first, I guess, released. And it's comparing to the gold ETF and some of the other big ETFs. And it just hits the, what was the key number?

• 4:36David Hoffman?

  Seventy billion.

• 4:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. It hits it so much sooner than all of these other ETFs.

• 4:41David Hoffman?

  Four times sooner. Granted, this doesn't account for inflation. So there's like, you know, two to three times more dollars out there than there were when those ETFs. But still, it's exciting.

• 4:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ah, very exciting. Tell me about ETH price in the week.

• 4:54David Hoffman?

  ETH price up 5.6%. So we're back to another Ryan Sean Adams week where things are up. And ETH is up more than Bitcoin. Call that an RSA week.

• 5:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yep.

• 5:04David Hoffman?

  Two seven, $2,738 is where ETH is at this week. But also, I think the ETH ETF story is telling some, a very interesting story. What is that story?

• 5:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, that story is about green, positive numbers flows into the Ethereum ETF. This is the Ethereum ETF from July 2024. That's when it was released. The July 23rd, 2024, all the way down. See, look at this table. Look, there's a lot of red on this table. And I'm going to keep scrolling down. We see lots of red, red, red, red, red, red. As we're finishing the year.

• 5:36David Hoffman?

  Because of the outflows of the grayscale ETH E.

• 5:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Trust. Exactly. When it's red, it's outflows. When it's black, it's inflows. And so let's look at this. Let's look at this like the last, you know, two, three weeks or so. It's all black. It's all inflows.

• 5:50David Hoffman?

  And so black is good. Black is green.

• 5:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Black is green. Yeah. So black is green. Black is good. We're confusing folks here. The bottom line is we've got a total of 3.7 billion in net inflows into the Ethereum ETF with some really strong performance over the last couple of weeks, which

• 6:05David Hoffman?

  Eighteen days in a row of inflows?

• 6:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. It feels pretty good. I mean, it's like, maybe the institutions are kind of changing their mind on ETH or the asset. Maybe they're starting to get bullish. What are they seeing that the rest of crypto Twitter isn't? That's what some of the ETH bulls are asking, and I'm among them. There's another, there's another metric. Do you remember? Jim Bianco.

• 6:25David Hoffman?

  Bianco, yeah.

• 6:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  You used to talk about this, which is like the amount of stable coins and how that is correlated to both DeFi token valuations and also valuation of either of the asset. Look at this chart here. How would you describe this chart?

• 6:40David Hoffman?

  We are looking at a two, two charts. We are looking at the ETH price overlaid stablecoin supply on Ethereum. I'm guessing this on Ethereum. And stablecoin supply, I mean, it dipped a little bit throughout 2023, 2024, not that much. And it's at all time highs now. We're coming in at $130 billion. And then ETH price is overlaid on top of that. And I mean ETH price, everyone knows what ETH price has done over the last four, five years. I do not consider these things to be correlated. Those don't look correlated to me.

• 7:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's, it's, I mean, you see kind of a bump in the chart, right? And then, and then ETH price follows. It's kind of maybe a lagging type thing. Maybe you can start to see the outlines of the correlation.

• 7:16David Hoffman?

  There was very strong correlation. That's because everything was up in 2021 to 2022.

• 7:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Maybe, maybe, or maybe stable coins are just net good for.

• 7:23David Hoffman?

  If we want ETH to be correlated to stable coins, it needs to go up. It needs to go up right now.

• 7:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Well, we're up 5% in the week. I'm, I'm, look, I'm staying humble. I'm staying humble this week. I'm not making that mistake. I did the week before last when I got all cocky.

• 7:37David Hoffman?

  I glow you up. You don't blow yourself up.

• 7:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Nope, nope. I'm just staying humble. Okay. So we'll see what happens, David. We just don't know. Should we do a quick macro drive by and what's going on in the quote unquote real world?

• 7:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 7:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk about the inflation numbers. So inflation rose, but less than expected, David. So that surprised some analysts. The, the forecast was about a rise of 0.3% for CPI and 2.9% for core CPI. And it came out, not, not 2.9%, but 2.8. So that means the annual inflation rate is 2.4%. So it's burning less hot than some people said it would. And of course, J D Vance, the Trump administration took no time to do a victory lap on this and call on Fed Powell, Chair, Fed Chair Powell to reduce rates. Inflation's not hot. You can reduce rates, this lady said. The president has been saying this for a while, but it's even more clear. The refusal by the Fed to cut rates is.

• 8:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Monetary malpractice, he said this on the back of the

• 8:36David Hoffman?

  Monetary malpractice, I like those words. I'm gonna use that.

• 8:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's pretty good. I bet he plugged that into ChatGPT, David, to get that. So, you know, others are saying, look, the forecast is reassuring. Inflation is not as hot as we thought, but we haven't seen the tariffs affect these numbers yet. And that is still to come.

• 8:53David Hoffman?

  Sure, sure, sure, sure. Yeah, the politicization of the Fed Chair is, I think, going to be a reoccurring theme throughout the rest of this year. I think there's been a crescendo of like Donald Trump wants somebody else to be the Fed Chair.

• 9:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Someone who's a bit more easy money than Powell.

• 9:08David Hoffman?

  A little more lenient, you know, a little more submissive, if you will.

• 9:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, all presidents want that, but Trump really, really wants that. He's making it very obvious that he wants that.

• 9:17David Hoffman?

  A while ago, we talked about during the tariff mania, we talked about the polymarket recession indicator, recession odds market, and it got up to as high as 60% during the depths of the tariff scare. It is clocking right now, Ryan, 26%, which in 2020, that's a recession in 2025. There's a 26% chance of recession 2025. Now, granted, we have like three months left in 2025 than we last did when we checked in when it was 60%. So, you know, there's 25% for only the last six months of the year.

• 9:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 9:50David Hoffman?

  But still, it's down.

• 9:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's down. So, no, I mean, polymarket thing, probably no recession in 2025. Maybe we'll see what 2026 looks like. And David, you know, last week, we talked about the breakup of Elon Musk and Donald Trump. And there was a lot of that drama late last week.

• 10:05David Hoffman?

  We cut the very beginnings of it, but we ended the roll up right after, right after we ended the roll up. Elon dropped that bomb, yeah.

• 10:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Pedophile.

• 10:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, he did call him a pedophile.

• 10:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, the relationship seems to be back on this week, or at least it's not as, it's not as hot as it was. This is Elon Musk, "I regret some of my posts about President Trump last week. They went too far," is what he said.

• 10:30David Hoffman?

  Well, you know, I wouldn't want to go up against the President of the United States either. He's kind of the most powerful man that exists right now. So I think this is kind of a logical outcome, especially when Tesla shares got rocked and then have since recovered. But also I've noticed Donald Trump just being a very, taking the high road on this, right?

• 10:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  No way, really?

• 10:52David Hoffman?

  Not twisting the knife. Yeah, he's not twisting the knife.

• 10:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  He didn't fire back?

• 10:55David Hoffman?

  He didn't fire back, yeah. He didn't, he didn't take a victory lap. He, I think he like opened his arms. I think, yeah, they are making up, kiss and make up.

• 11:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, so I guess the bromance is back on and maybe that's good for assets? It seems like assets were down at the end of last week as a result of the, the Trump and Elon breakup. But I don't know, maybe that's, it's all fine, who knows?

• 11:16David Hoffman?

  Why my coin stock was down because Trump and Elon broke up? I don't know.

• 11:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  We got a lot more to talk about in this episode, but there is a bold tweet that maybe sums up some of the themes right now as we're heading into the summer. What's this?

• 11:28David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this has even happened before the very recent Stripe acquisition of Privy. So even more of a plus one to what this tweet is trying to say. This says, this is Anne from Ansam. Appetite for crypto exposure has never been higher. Various entities alongside Saylor buying multi-billion dollars of Bitcoin. Circle IPO 25x oversubscribed, 5x on open. Plasma $500 million ICO opened within, filled within two minutes. That happened again, by the way, we're going to talk about that in a hot second. Another $500 million got opened up, got filled within 30 minutes. Government pushing act, regulatory clarity. I'm just like, this has been the sentiment going around crypto Twitter this week. People are just saying like appetite for crypto, very strong, very high right now, very good.

• 12:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why did you include this link, David? What is this?

• 12:11David Hoffman?

  This also came out this morning, just in case you were curious, is like what's going on in trad media? The New York Post put out an article titled, "How to Buy Pepe Coins."

• 12:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is not real.

• 12:21David Hoffman?

  And is it a good investment?

• 12:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is not real.

• 12:25David Hoffman?

  This is real. This is real. This is what the normies are reading. Pepe coin. It's not even a new meme coin. It's like an older one.

• 12:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, this feels very bull market vibes. Maybe alarming levels? Hopefully, we're not there yet. Hopefully, we've got a ways to go. But what's next in the roll up?

• 12:39David Hoffman?

  All right, coming up next, Ryan's going to talk to us about the genius act because we've got some, in addition to the very bullish appetite coming from TradFi, we have very bullish sentiment towards the genius act, which is, I think, from, I'm going to quote Ryan Sean Adams right before we started recording, "It's going to pass." So hopefully, he's not getting too bold about that one. And then he's also going to talk to us about stablecoin summer even more because he just really loves those words. Circle is live on the Nasdaq. We're going to check in on that. And we're going to talk about the second order effects of Circle trading at five times its IPO price and holding that price, by the way. Before we get to all of that and more, we're going to talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, like Uniswap, it's a browser wallet, it's a mobile wallet. It's also just the best place to do DeFi. Let's go here from Uniswap right now. Uniswap is your gateway to a more efficient DeFi experience.

• 13:24David Hoffman?

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• 14:08David Hoffman?

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• 15:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  The US Senate is on the cusp of passing the Genius Act. This would be the first major crypto legislation coming out of the Senate ever. Goes to the House after that, it'll likely pass there. And it is the first stablecoin bill. This is a senator on the floor showing his support, Senator Thune.

• 15:19Speaker 02

  This president's clear that cryptocurrency is here to stay. And it's time that we bring it into the mainstream. Passing the Genius Act is a good first step. The Genius Act would provide a clear regulatory framework for stablecoins. It would ensure Americans can trust who they're doing business with when they purchase stablecoins, allowing the American people to exercise financial freedom with confidence.

• 15:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  He goes on, he talks about the stablecoin.

• 15:47David Hoffman?

  Financial freedom with confidence.

• 15:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and this line is great. Like cryptocurrency is here to stay and it's time we bring it to mainstream. And the Genius bill is the first step.

• 15:56David Hoffman?

  The first step, you know? I love the nuances.

• 15:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's great. So what happened this week was there was another vote. You know, they have votes before the votes before the votes. This is not the final vote. The final vote will probably happen next week. But basically, because this passed in the way it did, 68 votes in favor to 30 against, it means it's pretty much certain that the Genius Act will get passed the Senate next week when they hold the final vote. So this baby's passing.

• 16:23David Hoffman?

  I'm expecting that Elizabeth Warren crossed arms meme to be passed around crypto Twitter quite frequently next week.

• 16:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think so. And she had some things to say. We should just, actually, before we get to her, we should recap what's in the Genius Bill, because this is probably going to be the law of the land after it gets through the House. And like, it's, it looks likely it will get through the House as well. The first is this, there are reserve requirements. So every stablecoin must be matched with one-to-one cash reserves in the bank, right? So these are all custodial-

• 16:56David Hoffman?

  Fully collateralized stablecoins.

• 16:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Fully collateralized stablecoins. Another thing, the issuer eligibility. So who can actually issue issue stablecoins under this act? Any bank that's regulated can do this. Any credit union can do this. And so you know what we've been noticing? We haven't really covered it in the rollup, but we've been noticing almost like every bank is like, oh, we're doing a stablecoin. I saw like one from Bank of America this week, just, we're doing a skip, stablecoin. It's because now they have the legal ability to do it under the Genius Act. So they're just trying to get ahead of that a little bit.

• 17:26David Hoffman?

  Importantly, tech platforms, tech companies, Apple, Amazon, cannot. They are specifically barred from issuing stablecoins.

• 17:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes. And that was something that Elizabeth Warren wanted to make sure happened, and she got her way on that one. But crypto and fintech firms can also issue stablecoins. It's not just banks and credit unions. What they do need, though, is a brand-new OCC license, okay? The licensing for stablecoins before this was like really weird. It was state by state. It was really crappy and confusing. And now all they need is this brand-new OCC license. There's also a state route as well, but that only is capped to $10 billion. Now, the thing I was really worried about in any stablecoin legislation, David, was AML KYC. All right. It's like, were they going to do a thing where you couldn't send

• 18:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  stablecoins from wallet, one wallet to another, not custodial wallet, without doing some sort of AML KYC check? This is like some of the legislation going on in Europe. So this was kind of a sticking point for the bill. Of course, there were many folks, Elizabeth Warren, who wanted additional, increased AML KYC. And where they finally landed on this is basically where we are now. That the issuers of the stablecoin would have full AML KYC rule set as they basically do today. So that means customer identification, right? If you're holding a stablecoin on an exchange, they need to know your ID, who you are. It needs to be government issued license. They're doing the SARS report under the Bank Secrecy Act.

• 18:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  So if there's anything suspicious, they file a SARS report. They're doing sanction screening, all of this. But we have preserved our ability to move assets from one non custodial wallet to another without any additional AML KYC.

• 19:14David Hoffman?

  And importantly, from a custodial wallet to a non custodial wallet, which is unlike Europe, because there are currently KYC restrictions on that right now.

• 19:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  I believe so. I mean, I'm not sure with kind of the latest that's going on, but that at least has been discussed. And that was my nightmare scenario for any stablecoin legislation, that they would try to AML KYC everything on-chain, everything in DeFi. Looks like we basically preserved kind of the rights that we have today, which is fantastic.

• 19:38David Hoffman?

  It's worth noting that that was actually a pretty big fight to fight. And stablecoins is one of those big like ask for forgiveness things where it moved because of the technology, the Overton window was moved. So like the correlate before stablecoins came out was like PayPal, right? Well, I had PayPal Bucks in my PayPal account. And if I wanted to send it to Ryan, Ryan would need to make a PayPal account and then give him his PayPal, his ID. With stablecoins, that technology enabled me to send Ryan USDC without him signing up for the Circle platform.

• 20:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly.

• 20:10David Hoffman?

  And so that was outside of the law. That was a legal gray area that we did not know, even though it makes intuitive sense for all people who got into crypto. It's like, oh yeah, I'll just send you USDC. You don't need to sign up. That's great. That's good UX. But that was outside of like regulatory certainty up until right now, which is pretty cool.

• 20:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. So there were 30 senators who voted no on this. Most of those were Democrats. You can, as you can guess, Elizabeth Warren was one of them. Also Chuck Schumer, Amy Klobuchar. Those are some names that you might recognize. They also voted no. Some of the reasons, of course, like Elizabeth Warren wanted far stricter AML KYC. She said like North Korea uses this stuff, you know, stablecoins are used for scams. So like we basically, she wanted to kind of regulate it very tightly, almost regulate it out of existence. But there were other Democrats who said things like this.

• 20:59Speaker 03

  Should be issuing crypto while they're in office or a vice president. There's no reason any person on this floor should do it. Or anybody in the House of Representatives should do it. And now in a partially regulated regime.

• 21:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  So this was Senator Bennett basically saying that, you know, I want an amendment on this bill that says vice presidents, presidents, members of Congress can't issue these stable coins or other crypto assets. So this is a shot at World Liberty Financial. It's a shot at the Trump coin. You could kind of understand.

• 21:31David Hoffman?

  I don't have a problem. I don't have a problem with that.

• 21:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, that piece of the amendment, I'm like, I agree with.

• 21:36David Hoffman?

  That's great. Yeah. Give them that compromise so that we can get more Democrats to sign.

• 21:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, it was already signed overwhelming majority without that amendment. So it looks like that amendment's not going forward. But you can understand. Yeah, you can understand the rationale for why it was wanted.

• 21:51David Hoffman?

  So presidents can issue stable coins?

• 21:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, they can, and they are. They actually are.

• 21:56David Hoffman?

  Wow, OK. All right. OK, so the final passage will happen on Monday. Monday is the vote. So I think that is the day to tune into this.

• 22:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  It could bleed into Tuesday.

• 22:08David Hoffman?

  OK, all right.

• 22:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  And on Tuesday, we have Senator Bill Hagerty on the podcast, who's going to be giving us an update, hopefully with some good news about the passage of this bill. And then it goes to the House, of course. If all goes well, this whole thing could get done by the third week of July. Could be on Trump's desk. He, of course, would sign it. If it doesn't go so well, it could be August or September. If there's some fighting in the House, that kind of thing.

• 22:30David Hoffman?

  Third week of July, that's six weeks away.

• 22:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's soon. This is soon. How long have we been waiting for this thing, David?

• 22:39David Hoffman?

  I've been patient.

• 22:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Years. It's been years. Six weeks. That's it.

• 22:44David Hoffman?

  So long as, so long as Ryan Sean Adams says it's going to pass.

• 22:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's going to pass, and we're going to get it during the summer.

• 22:50David Hoffman?

  OK.

• 22:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Which is because it's stable coins. And that's what happens during stable coins.

• 22:54David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 22:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  There is another bill, actually, I wanted to mention to you, too, that I've been kind of monitoring, but I haven't gone in deep on. We've talked about this before. That's the Clarity Act. And so this is sort of what's a, what's the difference between a commodity and a security when it comes to tokens? The House is a House bill. They're trying to provide clarity for this.

• 23:13David Hoffman?

  This is the market structure bill. Is it a stablecoin bill?

• 23:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  The market structure bill. Yes, it used to be called FIT 21. Now it's called the Clarity Act. It's kind of a revision to it. But it has a moderate chance of passing. It's not going to pass before the stablecoin bill. They're still kind of debating it. It needs to get through committee. But this is the most interesting piece of it, actually. There is a decentralization test right now in the bill. Okay, I think that's the most fascinating part.

• 23:38David Hoffman?

  That's going to be a big deal because there's going to be layer ones that pass or fail this test. And there are also going to be layer ones that are going to need to spend a lot of lobbying effort to make sure that their particular layer one passes that test.

• 23:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh huh. And this is a core part of the bill. It's not something that will be stripped out, at least the concept of decentralization test, because it's providing a bright line, right? So if you're on one side of the line, you're a commodity. You're decentralized. If you're on the other side of the line, you're a security. You are not decentralized enough.

• 24:09David Hoffman?

  You do not want to be on the other side of that line.

• 24:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so I plugged the text of the bill into ChatGPT. And there's a few things, there's a few criteria for being on the decentralized side of the line and being deemed a commodity. The mainnet has to be functional and live, can't be in beta, has to be like mostly done. There has to be programmatic operations, so everything is enforced by code, no off-chain discretion. This is interesting. Distributed ownership, so insiders can't own more than 20% of the supply.

• 24:45David Hoffman?

  Huh. I wonder how they define insiders.

• 24:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right, and they also have governance limits. So no one coordinated group can unilaterally change consensus or command greater than 20% of the on-chain voting power.

• 24:59David Hoffman?

  Feeling like that's pretty stringent. That's a pretty high bar.

• 25:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, so if you run it through like ChatGPT and you know ChatGPT, who knows how it divines this, but it says it's likely, if this were the criteria that gets in the finalized bill, it's likely that Bitcoin, ETH, Monero, Litecoin, some of these OG things pass. Because by the way, if your, if your asset was 2020 or before, some different rules kind of apply.

• 25:22David Hoffman?

  Wow, okay.

• 25:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so there's some different provisions. What flunks right now, according to ChatGPT, XRP would flunk.

• 25:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  BNB would flunk.

• 25:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, okay.

• 25:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Tron, Aptos, Sui would flunk.

• 25:36David Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 25:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Solana would flunk.

• 25:38David Hoffman?

  Ooh. Okay, so that, to me, that is the big line, is like, is the line before or after Solana?

• 25:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 25:46David Hoffman?

  Because I think, I think it's like, there's a Bitcoin, Ethereum, those two things are pretty easy to clump together.

• 25:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sure.

• 25:51David Hoffman?

  Then there's a line there, and then there's a, like, a bunch of the other ones that you also mentioned, like Monero, pretty decentralized, then there's a bunch of those. And then there's, then there's like a space for another line before Solana. And then, and then Solana, to its credit, has some amount of decentralization. And then there's a line after Solana, which follows like Sui, Aptos, Say, like, it's gonna be Monad, like all of those.

• 26:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right, and those are the layer ones, right? But there's also DeFi tokens too. How about Uni? How about AVE? How about DYDX?

• 26:20David Hoffman?

  Oh, interesting.

• 26:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Under the criteria, they don't pass either.

• 26:25David Hoffman?

  Ah, okay. Well, yeah, it makes sense to me that like Uni and AVE are not commodities. That makes sense to me.

• 26:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  But if they're not commodities, are they securities?

• 26:34David Hoffman?

  I don't, I don't feel comfortable with that.

• 26:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right, you can't file a 10K for something that's all on-chain revenue, like, like AVE or Uniswap?

• 26:42David Hoffman?

  I do not envy anyone who has to deal with this.

• 26:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  They're getting into the specific.

• 26:47David Hoffman?

  This is so hairy.

• 26:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  They're getting into the specifics of defining decentralization.

• 26:51David Hoffman?

  Okay, so I was talking to Austin Campbell a while ago at Blockworks, the Digital Asset Summit. He thinks that the market structure bill, the Clarity bill, is too ambitious. It's going to get bike shedded, it's going to get argued all to hell, and it's going to get unbundled because it's just too big. That was his take.

• 27:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  So we won't have the bright line decentralization test at all because it's too messy, it's too hairy, there's too many vested interests.

• 27:17David Hoffman?

  Maybe we do, but it will get unbundled and argued inside of its own bill and then other parts of the market structure bill, because this isn't the only thing about the bill. There are other parts of this bill. So the bill just gets unbundled and passed separately. That's what he thinks.

• 27:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's definitely one to watch because this bright line decentralization test would shake things up in a big way. David, let's check in on Circle.

• 27:37David Hoffman?

  Circle.

• 27:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  So this is the stablecoin summit leader asset. Okay, what's the price of Circle in the week?

• 27:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so let's see, over or under $100. Bankless listener, place your bets while Brian figures out how to get Alex Honnold out of Tradingview. We are coming in at what is it? $110? $110, which is $25 billion. So Circle is holding the line, holding the line. A pretty juicy valuation, still 31, still 3 to 4X times its IPO price. And so the longer that it stays here, the more stablecoin summary it is. I feel like that's the rule.

• 28:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know what's funny is I don't think crypto natives are buying Circle.

• 28:17David Hoffman?

  I am not buying Circle at this price. There's no way. We talked about this last week. Like, they're $120 million of yearly revenue to justify a $25 billion valuation.

• 28:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  If it's not us, who's buying it? Institutions, right?

• 28:30David Hoffman?

  TradFi who is looking for a stablecoin. Well, because you said it, like, every single bank is trying to do a stablecoin, and then there are investors like, oh, stablecoins are hot. How do I get stablecoin exposure? You can't get stablecoin exposure via Coinbase because it's too muddy. Like, they got an exchange, and they got a layer two, and they got all these other things. Circle is just stablecoins. And so like, to me, I see, when I see Circle at $25 billion, I see people, people are aping in, people are not thinking, people are trying to buy a narrative, and Circle's the only way to express that narrative. Yeah, I see froth when I see...

• 29:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so but but but what's interesting about that is the people that are doing this, the people are buying into this, like in your words, they're not our people, they're not us.

• 29:10David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 29:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know what I mean? What's exciting about it is it's kind of a new cohort of buyers, is not people on crypto Twitter. This is the institutions that are FOMOing into this asset, which in and of itself is interesting. This is Mike Epelito, he says, "Circle is a great example of price-leading narrative. Two weeks ago, Circle was on its deathbed. Today, my timeline thinks it's better, it's a better buy than Coin." He's speaking about basically the crypto Twitter bubble, of which we are probably in as well.

• 29:35David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I was talking about this with Brad and John on the rollups. Like, is crypto Twitter right in their bearishness about Circle? Because we know the actual fundamentals and Wall Street is just like top blasting this thing that's clearly overvalued? Or are we just so disconnected from Wall Street and Wall Street appetite? And it's like, well, right now crypto Twitter is wrong because Circle's 5X the IPO price or whatever.

• 30:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  I just, I think crypto natives are going to FOMO into things that like appeal to them and appeal to their narratives and institutions are going to FOMO into things that appeal to their narratives. One of those is Kathy Wood, Arc Invest. So she purchased 4.48 million Circle across her ETFs.

• 30:14David Hoffman?

  She didn't FOMO in, she bought the IPO. So she is up for like 3, 4X because she bought the IPO. She's not top blast.

• 30:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, on the analyst side, some analysts are cautious, market cap 22 billion. Circle is selling at 140X earnings.

• 30:30David Hoffman?

  140X earnings.

• 30:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's less than Tesla. What is Tesla, 180?

• 30:35David Hoffman?

  Also a big narrative play, but yeah, I guess buying Tesla's worked out.

• 30:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, others say the intelligent investor should just wait, wait for like 90 to 180 days, wait for this thing to cool down post-IPO.

• 30:45David Hoffman?

  I'm not buying this right now.

• 30:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, maybe don't buy it during stablecoin summer. But that lends the question to like, are there other assets that are doing well on the stablecoin narrative? And I think the answer to that question is yes. And some of them are crypto native assets. So I put out this tweet because I was just brainstorming. I didn't actually pack my bags for stablecoin summer, you know.

• 31:06David Hoffman?

  You just talked about packing your bags?

• 31:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  I've previously owned some of these assets and just like they've been long-term holds, not all of them, but like many of them. But packing my bags for stablecoin summer, what do you buy? What do you buy for stablecoin summer? AVE is doing quite well recently, kind of like money market for DeFi. Maybe because of the ghost stablecoin, maybe people are just looking at the assets in Ave, you know, surpassing, what is it, $50 billion and just being like, okay, we're in the clear. Maker, now called Sky, Athena, doing quite well, Frax, doing quite well. Maybe there's a play for Ether, maybe that's why some of the institutions are buying that ETH ETF, David.

• 31:44David Hoffman?

  Maybe that's why ETH is up on the week.

• 31:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Some people are saying like Tron could be a good buy under these circumstances.

• 31:50David Hoffman?

  I'm looking at all these charts, one by one, as you say them, none of them are, oh, Tron, just kidding, Tron's doing great.

• 31:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 31:58David Hoffman?

  But none of them, other than Tron, are really expressing any sort of like, anything about Circle doing well. And Tron has been doing well for a while, so it just continues to do well.

• 32:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ave, Ave seems to be like just crushing it recently.

• 32:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's true. But also the ghost stablecoin is only at $220 million.

• 32:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. I don't know. What do you think about this? Do you think this is a play for people?

• 32:21David Hoffman?

  I think this is much more of IPO season than on-chain stablecoin-related assets season. Like Athena, Ave, like, none of them are responding, like I just said, none of them are responding to the Circle price. And so I think it's much more of just like, can we go public? And then I would also like to see like Kraken and Gemini go public and see where they get comps to, because I think their appetite for going public is downstream of Circle launching at like a Forex IPO price. But they're going to get comps to Coinbase, not to Circle.

• 32:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know, man. I don't know. I think we could see some animal spirits in stablecoin, summer narrative, on-chain assets as well. I mean, explain this one. So this is Plasma doing an ICO on Kobe's Echo platform, right?

• 33:06David Hoffman?

  What is Plasma? Kind of, okay. Plasma is a Tether-based payment chain, is a Layer 1 that is going to be optimized for payments. It's like, you know how like Tron is like 99% stablecoin activity, but Tron, Tron fees right now are like $4 to $7 for a transaction, so that's not great. So Plasma is making a Layer 1 that's dedicated for Tether, for Tron, or excuse me, for, for, yeah, Tether. And so it's a payments Layer 1. It's just, just for payments for, for Tether.

• 33:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  So it's kind of centralized, but it's super juiced.

• 33:37David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 33:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  It also has some kind of Bitcoin miner settlement to the Bitcoin blockchain.

• 33:42David Hoffman?

  Oh, wow.

• 33:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  The way Stacks does.

• 33:44David Hoffman?

  Interesting. Oh, yeah, they're trying to do, they're trying to be some like bit PM extension. That's more of a cherry on top, I would say, for what it is right now. Right now, people are just trying to get like, well, Circle is coming in at $25 billion. But I'd like to get exposure to Tether, which is like so much time, many times bigger than Tether, than Circle.

• 34:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right.

• 34:01David Hoffman?

  So Plasma is kind of like incubated by Tether. They had their first initial checks cut by Tether and they're not the other, the only ones or others as well. But their timing of this sale, and again, this deposit cap wasn't a sale. The deposit cap was people depositing Tether onto the Plasma chain. And there's like waiting room once Plasma chain goes live. And then when Plasma chain goes live, it'll have $1 billion of people's deposits, their tether deposits on the Plasma chain. So we'll start with a billion dollars of tether TVL to kind of bootstrap itself. And the people that deposited will have a right to access the ICO. So it's like you are buying a ticket.

• 34:39David Hoffman?

  You're not, you're not actually selling anything because you're not buying a ticket, but you're, you're reserving your right to buy into the pre-sale by depositing tether into the Plasma chain. And the appetite for this has been incredibly high. They first started with like a 200, 250 million dollar cap, got filled in instant, in an instant. They raised it again to 500 million. They raised it again to a billion dollars just this morning. It just got filled instantly. And so people are looking towards Plasma as like a way, a more crypto native way to get stablecoin summer exposure.

• 35:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's fascinating, right? Like just to, just, just to see that kind of the, the animal spirits jumped into this. And the construction here is very interesting. It's got some pieces of Ethereum too. It's like Plasma ref under the covers.

• 35:19David Hoffman?

  Oh, really?

• 35:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, yeah. So obviously we don't know. I mean, is this more narrative play in the short run? Or does a Plasma just dedicated layer one for tether actually make sense? I guess we'll have to see on that. But there, there are some others. So, I mean, that to me is animal spirits and kind of like crypto native assets around this narrative. We'll, we'll, we'll see if it picks up in other areas. But there's, this is certainly going to be the year of crypto IPOs to your point. So you mentioned Gemini.

• 35:45David Hoffman?

  One too.

• 35:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I mean, I think we're already seeing it, right? Like we've, we've seen, I guess Galaxy's not an IPO.

• 35:51David Hoffman?

  We've seen one, we've seen Gemini file to go public. They filed their S1 or whatever.

• 35:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Uh, yes. Yeah. So Gemini, just crypto from Gemini confidentially files for US IPO.

• 36:03David Hoffman?

  Confidentially.

• 36:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  They're going next. Uh, what do you think that valuation is going to be?

• 36:07David Hoffman?

  Um, I don't know many people who use Gemini still.

• 36:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  In 2021, Gemini raised at a $7.1 billion valuation.

• 36:18David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Well, in OpenSea raised at a $12 billion valuation.

• 36:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Over or under on that? And that was before, by the way, Gemini got rocked by the whole Gemini earn

• 36:26David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 36:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  thing with like, you know.

• 36:28David Hoffman?

  I don't know. I don't know the financials, but I'm going under on 7 billion.

• 36:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. I mean, there's some other names here, which is like Kraken could IPO. They've not filed paperwork, but you know, that's something that's speculation.

• 36:40David Hoffman?

  They've been wanting to do that for a while, going public.

• 36:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Phantom Wallet was also mentioned.

• 36:46David Hoffman?

  Really?

• 36:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Which would be fascinating, I think.

• 36:48David Hoffman?

  Really?

• 36:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Could be fascinating. Could be possible.

• 36:51David Hoffman?

  Seems odd.

• 36:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, if you're going to IPO though, 2025 is the year. I mean, I've had a successive circle.

• 36:57David Hoffman?

  Other people have named Chainalysis, Anchorage. Um, there's a few other companies. Yeah. But like, oh, there's also, we're going to talk about in a hot sec, just a very hot mergers and acquisition timeline right now. Not mergers, just acquisitions. Um, overall, there's just like a lot of, a lot of money changing hands.

• 37:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. So what are we going to talk about next?

• 37:16David Hoffman?

  Coming up next, Polymarket, fully integrated into Twitter, into X. Uh, so we're going to talk about what that means. Stripe, the thing that I just mentioned, Stripe buys a crypto company. Uh, and then also SEC Chair Paul Atkins, the anti Gary Gensler, he's ready to support the right of Americans to self custody in DeFi. Wow, that's, God, that feels so good.

• 37:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Very progressive, yeah.

• 37:36David Hoffman?

  Yeah. We're going to talk about all that and more, but first we're going to talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, like Frax, the stablecoin in celebration of Stablecoin Summer. Uh, they got their Frax stablecoin. They got some of the best yields in DeFi. Uh, let's go hear from Frax right now. In the wild west of DeFi, stability and innovation are everything, which is why you should check out Frax Finance. The protocol revolutionizing stablecoins, DeFi and Rolex. The core of Frax Finance is Frax USD, which is backed by BlackRock's institutional Biddle Fund. Frax designed Frax USD for besting class yields across DeFi, T-bills. And carry trade returns all in one. Just head to frax.com, then stake it to earn some of the best yields in DeFi. Want even more? Bridge your Frax USD over to the Fraxl Layer 2 for the same yield plus Fraxl points

• 38:18David Hoffman?

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• 38:59David Hoffman?

  Meet SELF, the on-chain identity verification protocol built for privacy and control. SELF protocol uses zero knowledge proofs to confirm your identity safely. Users prove key details like age or citizenship without revealing sensitive personal information. SELF never stores your data, it only generates cryptographic proofs. Here's how it works in three steps. First, register and verify. Use the SELF app to scan your biometric passport's RFID chip. SELF verifies authenticity with zero knowledge proofs. Each passport creates one unique identity. Second, you can share proofs privately. Third-party apps request identity proofs, like confirming you're over 18. You can also link proofs securely to public wallets for airdrops or governance participation. And then last, secure verification.

• 39:42David Hoffman?

  Apps validate your proofs instantly on-chain, like on Cello, or off-chain. Audited by ZK Security, the SELF app is live on iOS and Play Store. Visit self.xyz and follow SELF Protocol on X. Breaking as of this week, this happened on Wednesday, Stripe has announced that they are acquiring Privy. So Stripe, the payments company, is acquiring Privy. The good UX, embedded wallets, infrastructure company, backend infrastructure company. So Privy just makes it really easy for people who download an app to get a wallet that's native into the app automatically without having to do any seed phrase. And all that stuff.

• 40:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  A non custodial wallet, right?

• 40:18David Hoffman?

  Non custodial, yeah, that's right. And so if you ever use Friend Tech, that was enabled by Privy. There are a bunch of just applications that you might not even know are enabled by Privy.

• 40:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hyper liquid.

• 40:29David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 40:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 40:30David Hoffman?

  The banker bot people on Twitter would like everyone to know that they are enabled by Privy as well. Bankerbot is this thing you can just at on Twitter. And you have it, you have a, as a Twitter account, you have a wallet.

• 40:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Really?

• 40:41David Hoffman?

  Buy, buy this application called Bankerbot and it uses Privy. And so you can just go at Bankerbot. And if you don't have a wallet yet, it'll give you one.

• 40:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, that's impressive. That shows how easy it is to actually like spin up a non custodial wallet using Privy.

• 40:53David Hoffman?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so everyone on Twitter has a Ethereum wallet, thanks to Bankerbot. You just add it and say, and you have to add money to it, obviously, but you can just like tell it to buy. It's a, it's a, one of those like AI things. So it has to, it interprets what you want and interprets your intent. And you can go buy me this like shitcoin and it'll take the funds in your wallet and go buy it. It's pretty fun. And anyways, acquired by Stripe, so details undisclosed. So I wish I kind of knew the, the, the actual valuation that they bought it for. But, um, I mean, six to, or seven to eight million businesses use Stripe.

• 41:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Everybody uses Stripe.

• 41:27David Hoffman?

  Every use of Stripe. And so I don't know if they are just like using Privy just to integrate their wallet infrastructure straight into Stripe would make sense.

• 41:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  I love it.

• 41:34David Hoffman?

  Pretty big, pretty big acquisition.

• 41:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Apparently, apparently Privy has about 75 million accounts. So that's probably 75 million non custodial wallets that spun up over time. I mean, some of these will have very small dollar amounts, but, um, you know, seven to eight million businesses in Stripe. This is the non custodial wallet infrastructure API SDK play. Remember, was it, was it earlier this year or was it last year, David? When did they buy Bridge? They brought Bridge this year, right?

• 42:00David Hoffman?

  This year, yeah.

• 42:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. And so Bridge was basically a, um, a stablecoin play. So Bridge has its own stablecoin and it enables companies to create stablecoins with reserves in US treasuries. And it handles all the compliance and regulatory stuff. And since they acquired Bridge, they've really expanded it. So Bridge now active in 101 countries through Stripe. And allows people to hold balances in, in stablecoins like USDC and their own Bridge stablecoin. So you got non custodial wallets, you got Bridge, you got Bridge level, stablecoin stuff. It seems like Stripe is like just going all in to stablecoins.

• 42:39David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it really doesn't take a big imagination to put those two things together.

• 42:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's wild. Okay, what's happening with Polymarket, speaking of imagination?

• 42:46David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so I also want to start to actually see this roll out, please. But they announced X and XAI. So this is a Twitter. XAI actually technically isn't X. It's a separate company, but I think they're trying to fold it all together. Have announced that they are integrating Polymarket straight into Twitter. And so this is a this has been a theme that has been brewing around the media space where I mean, I think kicked off by Polymarket. I think everyone in crypto was talking about post-election. They that they were watching the TV, watching the news, but they were really watching Polymarket report the news way faster. And so media companies of which we would be familiar are all talking about

• 43:28David Hoffman?

  there's something about prediction markets and markets generally that need to be integrated into news sites. And I think this is downstream of that. So Twitter and Polymarket, X and Polymarket formally integrated. So you're going to be able to just see Polymarket things on Twitter. And I would imagine, I would hope that there is a way to just easily see some sort of outcome and be like buy, sell. To express some bet on that outcome pretty natively in Twitter. I don't know how that would work, but details will come out, I'm assuming, over the time. And so, pretty, pretty crazy partnership from Polymarket.

• 44:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Maybe with like a privy wallet inside of Twitter, right?

• 44:07David Hoffman?

  Within reason, yeah.

• 44:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  X already uses Stripe, like under the covers as well. So maybe that's something that they could do. Right now, you can also see Grok in the Polymarket UI. So I think that's happening too. And so in the Polymarket UI, on the Polymarket side of things, if you have a question about a certain prediction market. So what are the odds of US or something? Tell me more about this prediction market than Grok is right there to tell you more too. It really makes sense, like the AI plus X Citizen News plus prediction market team up. It's like, pretty good synergies here.

• 44:39David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Shane Copeland, the CEO of Polymarket tweeted, "The top two truth-seeking apps on the internet are stronger together." It's a pretty, pretty good synthesis, I would say.

• 44:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, like that. David, tell me about Morpho Labs, because according to you, they are doing the whole DeFi token thing right. Tell me what they're doing.

• 44:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so they've always done this pretty well. Maybe I'll start with actually something slightly unrelated, but definitely related. Do you know that all the Morpho founders, when they started Morpho, they all signed a contract with each other to not angel invest and not advise other companies?

• 45:12David Hoffman?

  I don't know how long that contract stands for, but yeah, they're like, yeah, we're not going to get distracted by anything else. No distractions.

• 45:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  No divided loyalties.

• 45:20David Hoffman?

  No divided loyalties, just Morpho. No one's gonna, we're not gonna use our position as Morpho execs to gain access to exposure and just Morpho. And so down in spirit of that, they have always been pursuing this idea of just like this single asset to control and own Morpho.

• 45:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Full alignment.

• 45:38David Hoffman?

  Full alignment. This is in like kind of contrast to the equity token split that we see at Uniswap Labs versus the uni token. There's this misaligned incentives there. And like, I'm not gonna like, people love to harp on Uniswap for this. They were born inside of the Gary Gensler era. That's downstream of that environment. I'm not really blaming them at all. It's unfortunate. It is what it is. There's no malpractice there. Morpho was not, well, they were created in the Gary Gensler environment, but really at the tail end of it.

• 46:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  But the Uniswap example shows divided incentives, right? Because there's Uniswap Labs with separate kind of equity, separate set of holders, and they're optimizing things for Uniswap Labs, right? And then there's the Uniswap token, which is the uni token, which some people feel like it gets kind of the leftovers. It's not fully aligned, at least with everything that Labs produces.

• 46:27David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it doesn't have a big voice. It doesn't have, Uniswap Labs is not advocating for the uni token. And so the front end fees and Uniswap.com is owned by Uniswap Labs and the Uniswap.com fees goes to Uniswap Labs. And then the token holders are like, but what about us? And so there's no like strong leadership that's like advocating for the uni token holders specifically. And so again, this is like a byproduct of the Gary Gensler. You can blame Gary Gensler for that. I totally love.

• 46:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm happy to, yeah.

• 46:54David Hoffman?

  Morpho built just later, like a couple, couple of years later after really, it was like started like two, three, three years ago. There's only one asset for Morpho. There's just a Morpho token. And they made a blog post around this, which is like really trying to focus on just like their, the Morpho Labs entity is owned by a structure that is controlled by the token, which is pretty cool, pretty cool. So no equity alignment issues. And then also, they also released Morpho V2. So there's a second version of Morpho coming out on the back of this, which It's not technically correct, but like, think about it as like an order book for loans. So you have bids and asks for loan terms, and then they have like, kind of a matching engine.

• 47:38David Hoffman?

  Again, these things aren't technically true, but they're directionally true. And so there's like, a lot of modules here, so KYC and compliance, so that institutions can come in. Just like a lot more expressive features in Morpho.

• 47:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think this is about more than Morpho, right? It's about sort of converting our DeFi tokens from sort of, you know, lemons with divided loyalties into sort of unified, aligned, like, assets that you want to hold to get all of the upside of both the initial product and the protocol and any other product or protocol that the team spins out. The way you get with equities, you sent me that, a link to a presentation of a Bankless guest that you had on the podcast when I was out. Felipe from Thea Capital. And his point was, he called like, a lot of existing DeFi tokens sort of like lemons, right? They're sort of neutered. They don't have, you know, like, the full alignment that equities have.

• 48:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so, I mean, he made the point that if, like, something like Amazon spun out a different, you know, token, essentially, a different equity asset for every business it created.

• 48:46David Hoffman?

  Right. AWS token.

• 48:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, imagine that.

• 48:49David Hoffman?

  Amazon Fresh token.

• 48:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:51David Hoffman?

  What would you invest in? How would you get Amazon exposure at the end of the day?

• 48:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly. There would be like, an Amazon book token, and then when it expands, you have different equity for every single thing. That's not the way equities work. The way they work is kind of compounding gains from the successful product launch of two, three, four, and five. Anyway, our DeFi tokens don't quite work like that, and he wants them to. So I guess Morpho is a good example of, you know, something Felipe would approve of.

• 49:16David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And again, a lot of this is downstream of the SEC. And the reasons why we can't have nice things is because of the SEC. Which brings us to talking about Paul Atkins and the SEC. What happened with Paul Atkins this week?

• 49:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  He said some pretty bullish things about DeFi. So, he said this, "DeFi," this was the speech title, "DeFi and the Americas." In spirit, okay, he said this, the American values of economic liberty, private property rights and innovation are in the DNA of DeFi or decentralized finance. The movement prior, the prior administration, we know he's talking about discouraged Americans from participating in blockchains by asserting through lawsuits, speeches, regulation and threatened, threatened regulatory action that participants and staking as a service providers may be engaged in securities transactions. And he goes on, basically, he's going to stop all of that.

• 50:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  But think of that line, David, the American values of economic liberty, private property and innovation are in the DNA of DeFi. That sounds like something straight out of a bank list like circa 2020. Yeah. This is the chair of the SEC saying this. This is pretty cool. I did wish he would say the privacy word. I don't think he said, I don't think I heard privacy. One step at a time, one step at a time. But think of, okay, this is a complete 180 from Gary Gensler. Totally. Around this time last year, do you remember the whole sab, you know, like 121, where the SEC led by Gary Gensler was trying to sneak an obscure accounting rule to stop banks from custing crypto? It's had to go to the Senate. The Senate voted, said this was like,

• 50:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  you can't do this. SEC doesn't have the authority. And then Biden vetoed it? That's what we were dealing with 365 days ago. We were all like, Biden's gonna pivot. He's not, he's gonna not veto it. And then he totally vetoed it. He totally vetoed it. Little loser. It is a complete, it's a completely different world. And so this, this speech, by the way, was given at a panelist, a kind of a, or sorry, a panel of roundtable. So Jill Gunter was there, Peter Van Vulcanberg from Coin Center, Eric Voorhees was there, and also Paul Atkins, Hester Purce, Caroline Crenshaw. So that's, they're, they're talking about it. And I know, David, you've had questions about like, what is the SEC actually doing? So it's nice to hear the speeches, certainly, but what are they doing?

• 51:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  So one of the things they're doing are hosting roundtables on tokenization and DeFi. So they're talking about this stuff with crypto industry leaders. So something we asked for, that is something we asked for, that is action. Also, they're rolling out. FAQ sheets on crypto. So they're giving more clarity to the extent they can. I know they have talked about, and we've talked about this on the roll up. They've signaled carve outs for regulatory ATSs, right? So these are brokers that can spot list Bitcoin and Ether. So like merging together the ATS kind of regulation, regulation in crypto. I think what we can expect next is some more proposed rulemaking around Hester Purse's, innovation sandbox idea.

• 52:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  So when crypto projects start, they're not automatically securities. I think they'll do more around token classification rules. So we'll get some more clarity that way. And ultimately, I think they'll give their take, independent of the clarity act. They'll give their take on which assets are securities and which are like free to trade like commodities. So I think we can expect to see a lot more clarity out of this SEC.

• 52:41David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah. And which is not to say that like I'm disappointed with the progress from the SEC. That's not true at all. I know that it's a very unwieldy hairball of BS that like Hester Purse has been delivered from previous, the previous administration. And so it's just, I, yeah, I just want all things to happen like now and like immediately. And I know it just doesn't work that way. Anyone who I've ever talked to who has like interfaced with Hester Purse is like, oh, they are just doing exactly what we wanted them to finally. But also at the same time, I'm like, okay, let's, let's actually put pen to paper and like do something.

• 53:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, well, Donald Trump is doing something, David, and so is the World Liberty Financial team.

• 53:21David Hoffman?

  I'm relieved.

• 53:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  So there was, there was news this week that World Liberty Financial was acquiring Trump, Trump the meme coin for its treasury. So of course they hold other crypto assets. I think AVE is in their treasury as well as Ether and now also Trump. So any hot takes on this?

• 53:39David Hoffman?

  Trump's World Liberty Financial DeFi app is acquiring Trump's meme coin.

• 53:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes.

• 53:46David Hoffman?

  To me, it just reads like he's taking pocket, money from one pocket and putting it in a different pocket.

• 53:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  I just don't think this helps us right now.

• 53:53David Hoffman?

  No, no. All of the great things. All of this stuff is a deal with the devil.

• 53:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it definitely doesn't help us. I guess, I mean, we talked about this, I feel like we talk about this every week. It's, it's a lot better than the previous administration.

• 54:06David Hoffman?

  It's a lot better than the previous administration. I wish he stopped at NFTs. NFTs are fine. Nothing wrong with the NFTs, but meme coin, World of Refinancial, their incoming stablecoin, it gets really hard to defend.

• 54:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I guess we'll have to end it there. It is good to have a bullish crypto.

• 54:25David Hoffman?

  Look at that Nick Carter tree, right below it.

• 54:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  What do you say?

• 54:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is Trump shaking hands with Trump, signed by Trump?

• 54:35David Hoffman?

  That's great.

• 54:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think we'll have to end it there for the week. I mean, bullishness, I think we're in bullish season for sure. Oh, by the way.

• 54:44David Hoffman?

  We have a moment of Zen, I believe.

• 54:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  We'll include this in the moment of Zen. So President Trump, actually unexpectedly, at least I didn't expect it, showed up at a Coinbase conference. So we'll play you a snippet from his speech because he gave a speech, but think of this, the President of the United States attending a Coinbase conference and saying some positive words on crypto. That's where we are in 2025. We'll leave it there. Of course, you know, none of this has been financial advice. Crypto is risky. 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.

• 55:13Speaker 04

  ... at the Coinbase State of Crypto Summit. I'm delighted to speak to some of the greatest visionaries and pioneers in the fields of tech and finance who are working to build a future powered by crypto. Many have called me the first crypto president. That's an honor. I really do consider that a very big honor, actually. And starting on day one, we ended the Biden administration's war on crypto. It was an absolute war and very unfair. And we unleashed American innovators to do what you do best, lead the world into new frontiers. We ended Operation Choke Point 2.0. I created the first presidential working

• 55:57Speaker 04

  group on digital assets. I named a pro-freedom, pro-innovation SEC Chair, a great man named Paul Atkins, and we created the US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and the United States Digital Asset Stockpile. But we are not done yet. My administration is working with Congress to pass the Genius Act. Supporting the creation of dollar-backed stablecoins. And we also will be working to create clear and simple market frameworks that will allow America to dominate the future of crypto and Bitcoin. Congratulations to everyone at this exciting time in your industry and

• 56:39Speaker 04

  in our country's life. I wish you all the best of luck.