ROLLUP: JD Vance Bitcoin 2025 | $425M ETH MicroStrategy | Tariffs Blocked | Stablecoin Summer

This week, Ryan and David break down the political storm brewing around crypto. From JD Vance’s fiery speech at Bitcoin 2025 to the Trump meme coin dinner that triggered bipartisan backlash. They dive into Ethereum’s biggest capital inflow yet, as a public company raises $425 million to buy and stake ETH, drawing comparisons to MicroStrategy. They also cover the court ruling that halted Trump-era tariffs, the Circle IPO finally moving forward, and early signs of a “Stablecoin Summer” as banks eye their own dollar-backed coins. Plus, the growing risks of copycat crypto acquisition vehicles, and why some say the next GBTC-style blowup could already be forming. ------ 📣 RE | REAL-WORLD (RE)STAKING https://bankless.cc/Re ------ 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 🌐CELO | PROVE YOUR SELF https://bankless.cc/Self 🟠HEMI | BTC & ETH, ONE NETWORK https://bankless.cc/hemi ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 0:37 JD Vance Bitcoin Conference 2025 https://x.com/cointelegraph/status/1927766577845305579 2:59 Crypto Prices 5:13 US court blocks most Trump tariffs, says president exceeded his authority https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/us-court-blocks-trumps-liberation-231041016.html https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114588777076099501 12:29 The microstrategy of ETH! https://cointelegraph.com/news/sharplink-ethereum-treasury-joseph-lubin-board-chair https://x.com/econoar/status/1927380671334404511 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1927344185595633687 https://x.com/hanni_abu/status/1927408350527922585 18:39 Gamestop & Trump Media Buying Bitcoin & SolSolStrategy https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/1927680683847119289 https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/1927352308859330651 https://x.com/SolanaFloor/status/1927408166922293535 https://x.com/mikeippolito_/status/1927450775870931015 25:26 Trump Dinner https://x.com/BillSun_AI/status/1925728406974443607/video/1 https://x.com/Mollyploofkins/status/1926098775233241537 https://x.com/justinsuntron/status/192576411185 9597602 https://x.com/USHouseFSC/status/1925625286818689066 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/senate-republicans-raise-red-flags-trumps-private-dinner-meme-coin-hol-rcna204293 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-22/protesters-yell-shame-at-guests-of-trump-s-memecoin-dinner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNJD-vKtrPc 36:22 The Annual Bitcoin (Stablecoin) Conference Week https://x.com/UnderCoercion/status/1927885141059260768 https://x.com/TheBitcoinConf/status/1927914310212407481 https://x.com/BitcoinMagazine/status/1926324131923976224 https://x.com/Cointelegraph/status/1927763954178150848 https://x.com/TPostMillennial/status/1927767083217039818 https://x.com/pete_rizzo_/status/1927509752931635256 https://x.com/BitcoinMagazine/status/1927479261780127747 https://x.com/DogCandles/status/1927879603055415557 44:08 Echo announced Sonar https://x.com/echodotxyz/status/1927422067801997336 46:18 Circle filed for an IPO on the NYSE https://x.com/CoinDesk/status/1927326167033356458 48:37 Some of the biggest US banks are about to launch joined stablecoin https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/crypto-stablecoin-big-banks-a841059e https://x.com/CryptoHayes/status/1925739441634652654 https://x.com/SecScottBessent/status/1925967578540781743 51:55 Closing & Disclaimers ------ 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?

  David, you remember last year around this time, we were talking about the Bitcoin conference? We played this clip from Donald Trump. And this was like an election promise at the Bitcoin conference. He was like, "If you elect me, I am going to fire Gary Gensler." Do you remember that clip?

• 0:17David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this was like when timelines seemed to diverge from the very bearish hole that we were in versus a very bullish, positive outcome with a potential election of Donald Trump.

• 0:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, absolutely. Followed by the most raucous applause I have ever heard at any conference whatsoever. Okay, flash forward to this year. This is J.D. Vance at that same conference.

• 0:37Speaker 02

  The thing that we did for this community, we reject regulators and we fired Gary Gensler and we're gonna fire everybody like him.

• 0:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow.

• 0:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  So there you go. J.D. Vance at the Bitcoin conference. Trump didn't show, but J.D. Vance did. And this is sort of a promises made, promises kept type of clip. And again, same amount of applause as last year.

• 1:01David Hoffman?

  It's crazy that we're already one year around the sun from that conference. I think they're talking about this is an even bigger conference, a Bitcoin conference, which makes sense because Bitcoin is like three times higher price than it was last year. But I don't think there will be anything ever as monumental as the Bitcoin conference from that year when Donald Trump said all those things. And like I said, there were two timelines and we chose the bullish one downstream of that.

• 1:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, but there are some repercussions for that. We're gonna talk about that with the Trump dinner and other things going on. But first, guys, this is time for the Bankless Weekly Rollup. Got a lot to talk about. Number one, David, the micro-strategy of Ethereum, is it finally here? I kind of think so. What is it? How much they buying? What's gonna happen next? And what other acquisition vehicles are hitting the public markets these days?

• 1:49David Hoffman?

  And what could possibly go wrong by too many crypto acquisition vehicles hitting the public stock markets?

• 1:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's right, nothing.

• 1:55David Hoffman?

  Also, courts have made a halt on all Trump tariffs effective immediately. So we're gonna get Ryan's macro analysis coming down the pipe here. And then also the Circle IPO. Is that story finally coming to a close? Will they IPO? Will they get acquired by Ripple? Or what? We're going to get into all of those topics and more. But first a message from our friends and sponsors over at RE. RE is a real world risk-taking platform that leverages RE insurance contracts to generate yield on staked capital. So users just deposit stable coins, USDC, Tether, DAI, USDE into risk pools. And in return, users earn yield that is uncorrelated with typical market volatility. To date, RE has supported $143 million in premiums and backs 26 different insurance programs in the United States.

• 2:40David Hoffman?

  So if you are peaked by this, you can earn real yield. Bankless.cc/re. That's R-E.

• 2:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's RE, just one E, right? It's not RE. It's not, it's not.

• 2:50David Hoffman?

  It's not RE?

• 2:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  No. Just one E, guys. It's just RE.

• 2:54David Hoffman?

  It's just RE. It's not RE, it's just RE.

• 2:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's get to prices on the week, David. Tell me about Bitcoin.

• 2:59David Hoffman?

  Bitcoin down on the week, down 3%. The all-time high for Bitcoin was set seven days ago, Ryan, at 111,800. $111,800. We are currently at $107,400. The low, low, cheap, cheap price of $107,400.

• 3:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  I thought we were going to get all-time high summer and it was just week after week on the roll up, just like all-time high, right? Bitcoin let me down this week.

• 3:24David Hoffman?

  You might have to just wait one more week. But on Ether, though, we are up. We are up 0.2%. Now, Ryan, I would usually say at 0.2%, I would usually say we are flat on the week. But since we are counting the weeks and we are five for five weeks of Ryan Sean Adams being back and the ETH US dollar price being green and the ETH Bitcoin price being green four out of five of those weeks.

• 3:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Never been down.

• 3:52David Hoffman?

  The streak continues. The streak continues. ETH has yet to go down in price since Ryan has, yeah, it's unbroken.

• 3:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, well, yeah, it's part of the blue money gospel. And actually, there's some really good news for ETH this week, which is, it kind of was down for a little bit, but then it popped back up. And you know what? I'm going to make a call, okay? 3K by the end of May. We gotta, we gotta hit that 3K number by the end of May.

• 4:13David Hoffman?

  You've got two days.

• 4:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 4:15David Hoffman?

  That's in two days, bro.

• 4:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's the call. Check me next week.

• 4:19David Hoffman?

  All right.

• 4:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  I've got the magic. I may as well use it. You said it yourself.

• 4:22David Hoffman?

  Are you sure you don't want to extend that to? Okay, so the 31st is Saturday, so June 1st, Sunday, June 1st. I think you should take that extra day.

• 4:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is the time to be bold. No, it rhymes. 3K in May, we're going with it. Ship this, don't edit it out. This is the clip. All right. Check back next week.

• 4:40David Hoffman?

  You are just taking your luck and you are just throwing it on the roulette table, bro.

• 4:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are we too risky with it? All right, we'll see. We'll see how we hold up. Total crypto market cap, what are we on the week?

• 4:50David Hoffman?

  What are we on the week? We're at $3.4 trillion crypto market cap. Yep, or 3.5, excuse me, 3.5.

• 4:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's exciting, right? Have we ever hit 4 trillion? I'm just, I can't even remember.

• 4:59David Hoffman?

  3.9, 3.85 or something like that? Yeah, we clipped it.

• 5:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  We've grazed 4 trillion, okay. We'll get there. I'm not calling for that in May, all right? Let's not get ahead of myself here. David, you want to hear about the Trump tariffs? You must have heard about this, right?

• 5:13David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is something that Haseeb even talked about when I had him while you were out on sabbatical. He gave a take on one of the two rant, rants about tariffs that he made, that the tariffs are unconstitutional and that the courts are going to deny them. And that's the news that we got this week, right?

• 5:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, basically. And the courts move a lot slower, of course, infamously, right? But they do move and they do have power in this country. Remember, three co-equal branches of government, at least that's what it's supposed to be.

• 5:42David Hoffman?

  In theory.

• 5:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  So what happened was US court blocked most Trump tariffs. Okay, so when I say most, I'm talking about the, you know, the 10% across the board tariff that was in place, the 20 to 25% rates on China, Mexico, Canada, all of those things, all blocked, David, effective immediately. And so this is a three, this is a lower court, a three-judge panel of the US Court of International Trade, issued a permanent injunction, not a temporary, permanent injunction, which basically wipes out all of these tariffs.

• 6:16David Hoffman?

  So even the 10% global reciprocal tariffs, even that is gone?

• 6:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I mean, the only thing that still stays is some of the more, I guess, niche tariffs, like on steel and some of these things, Trump still has the power to do that. The courts didn't take that away. But this is a permanent injunction across like all of the Liberation Day tariffs.

• 6:34David Hoffman?

  What was the premise?

• 6:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  The premise was that he doesn't have the constitutional authority to do that.

• 6:39David Hoffman?

  Oh, interesting.

• 6:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  That the power actually rests in Congress, that other branch of government that just like doesn't do very much.

• 6:46David Hoffman?

  But that's what his.

• 6:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Apparently, they have some power to just like do tariffs and Trump doesn't, at least according to this system. And this is nationwide. Okay, so this is like federal court. Of course, there's going to be a Trump reaction. Do you see the Trump reaction?

• 7:00David Hoffman?

  There was one? No, I did not see it.

• 7:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  There was one and Trump said, this is a truth social tweet. This is it. This is Trump. He's on a mission from God. This is the meme.

• 7:09David Hoffman?

  It's a meme. It's a picture.

• 7:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  From Trump, though, from the President of the United States. Nothing can stop what's coming, he said. Okay.

• 7:15David Hoffman?

  Okay, so this is a picture of Donald Trump walking down like what looks like a New York street with his.

• 7:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Tariff lane. It's tariff street in New York.

• 7:22David Hoffman?

  Yeah. He's on a, it sounds so Blues Brothers. We're on a mission from God. And nothing can stop what's coming.

• 7:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know. Some people like this. But what's going on in the background is basically Trump's legal team, the Justice Department, they're appealing this. So this lower court doesn't have the final say. So what's going to happen is there's going to be a fight. So the injunction is in place right now. So no tariffs as of now, David. Like, that's been completely lifted. The courts do have that power. And this is going to get escalated in the federal circuit. There's going to be some request from the Trump legal team to like pause this injunction. And that could come into play. Eventually, this could escalate to the Supreme Court.

• 8:01David Hoffman?

  Why aren't the markets sending? The markets are flat or perhaps even bearish.

• 8:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a good question. I think, I mean, I'll throw out some opinions on this, but these are just like opinions. Like, one opinion is basically the Arthur Hayes take of like the tariffs were sort of dead in the water anyway. Trump was on the way to like walking them back, you know, the Chinese negotiations, all of these things. They were sort of end of the line because Trump was spending too much political equity on them anyway. So maybe the markets just priced that in. The other possibility is that, you know, the markets are saying, look, this is just a lower court kind of injunction. It won't hold. Trump might win on appeal. The tariffs could come back. You know, Trump's going to bypass them in some way otherwise. So maybe the market is pricing that that factor in as well.

• 8:45David Hoffman?

  I'll also say the S and P 500 is 1% off of its all time highs. And so maybe, yeah, the tariffs, elimination of the tariffs or whatever has just already been factored.

• 8:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's right. Maybe the markets are on a mission from God, too, which is like all time high mission from God. I don't know. David, let's talk next about the Trump Dinner. Yes. So there were 220 attendees at the Trump Dinner. How was it? We're gonna fill you in. And I want to tell you about Ethereum's micro-strategy, David. Maybe, and the Michael Saylor behind it? We'll talk about all that and more.

• 9:17David Hoffman?

  Who is Ethereum's Michael Saylor?

• 9:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Who is it?

• 9:20David Hoffman?

  Who is it?

• 9:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Maybe it's my co-host, David Hoffman. I think he'd fill that role very well. All right, we'll get to all of that and more, but before we do, want to thank Uniswap. It's a browser wallet. It's a mobile wallet. It is the best place to do DeFi. Go check them out.

• 9:33David Hoffman?

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• 10:16David Hoffman?

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• 10:56David Hoffman?

  And with Hemi's Proof of Proof, or POP consensus, users benefit from truly decentralized, censorship-resistant Bitcoin-level security. Since its recent mainnet launch, Hemi has rapidly ascended the ranks as one of the top Bitcoin chains. With a thriving global community and robust ecosystem support, Hemi isn't just building a network, it's shaping the future. Web 3, DeFi and beyond. Visit hemi.xyz slash banklist to learn more, discover ways to interact, participate in the leaderboard program and be part of the community that's uniting Bitcoin and Ethereum. Imagine if your checking account and DeFi wallet finally spoke the same language. That's Mantle Banking, an all-in-one fiat and crypto account. It lets you save, spend and invest all from one dashboard. Swipe for coffee, stake ME3 yield or even use virtual cards for payments through Apple Pay. So it feels Web 2 simple, yet stays Web 3 sovereign.

• 11:40David Hoffman?

  For allocators, meet Mantle Index 4, the S&P 500 of crypto. A tokenized institutional-grade fund seeded with $400 million from the Mantle Treasury and balanced across Bitcoin, Ether, Sol and yield-enhanced stables. One asset, broad exposure, pure DeFi composability. The momentum is real. ME faults, FBTC bridges and a $2.4 billion community treasury are all powering the next phase of on-chain finance. Mantle brings real-world access, yield and utility to digital assets. Ready for the next era of on-chain finance that actually belongs in 2025? Explore Mantle at mantle.xyz or follow mantelofficial. Mantle, bridging TradFi and DeFi so you don't have to. The MicroStrategy of ETH. SharpLink Gaming is the company,

• 12:22David Hoffman?

  which interestingly has no relation to Ethereum in this title. This was previously like a modest player in the sports betting and internet gaming market sector. Very modest. Yeah, I think this has, very modest. This has basically been converted, call it like an acquisition by Joseph Lubin. Joseph, his full name, huh? Joseph Lubin, yeah. He, who's of course the founder, CEO of Consensus. Yes. But this is not Consensus going public, which has also been like a long rumored thing. This is strictly being like turned into an ETH acquisition vehicle. So the company plans to use its proceeds to acquire ETH, positioning it as the primary treasury reserve asset for SharpLink Gaming.

• 13:07David Hoffman?

  Now, you might ask, what proceeds? They have announced a $425 million private placement. So they are raising $425 million for the specific purpose of buying ETH and then staking ETH. They want to go stake their ETH and so that they can go and do this again. So of This is how this works. They raise cash below net asset value. They buy and stake ETH. If the stock trades above the ETH per share, they raise more cash and then they repeat. S-Link Gaming jumped something like 500%.

• 13:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, let's look at the chart here.

• 13:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so it's currently at $43. What was it?

• 13:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, wow.

• 13:41David Hoffman?

  What was it just a moment ago? What was it? What was the price? You're looking at it.

• 13:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  What was it here? It was $3.

• 13:47David Hoffman?

  $3, okay, so we win $3 to $44. And I don't know what market cap that that puts SharpLink.

• 13:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Gaming don't know how to use these charts, yes.

• 13:57David Hoffman?

  But if it is above $425 million, that means that they can go issue more SharpLink Gaming equity and then they can turn that into more ETH and they can get that flywheel as much as they can. And they can just squeeze that juice and it can just turn into ETH on the balance sheet.

• 14:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a 14,000% gain, a gain for the folks at home.

• 14:14David Hoffman?

  Well, I think that's because the market cap of this thing prior to this was approaching.

• 14:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  So tall.

• 14:20David Hoffman?

  Approaching, I don't want to.

• 14:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, look.

• 14:22David Hoffman?

  It's approaching zero.

• 14:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a market cap. It was probably in the low, I don't know, 5, I'll estimate, something like that. It's pretty low. Now it's about $30 million market cap, right?

• 14:30David Hoffman?

  $30 million market cap. I think that needs to be higher. I think that number needs to go higher.

• 14:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I mean, when they buy the ETH, it will become higher because like it'll be worth at least as much as the treasury.

• 14:40David Hoffman?

  Raise the money first. Or they already raised the money and now they have to buy the ETH. I don't know. We'll keep tabs on this.

• 14:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  They get to buy it, which is nice. That's $425 million worth of buy pressure on ETH effectively.

• 14:51David Hoffman?

  Which is probably why ETH is up like half a percent and Bitcoin is down 3%. And so Ether has just been slammed against Bitcoin because Michael Saylor has just been buying billions and billions and billions of dollars of Bitcoin. Now we have one particular investment vehicle to do the same thing, but on ETH's side.

• 15:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's funny that this is like, some people could look at this and be like, it's a gaming company. So the ticker is not ETH. The ticker is S-Bet, all right? So it's S-Bet on the NASDAQ. That was just a public vehicle for making this happen, essentially. You guys remember MicroStrategy. Remember what it was? It was a business analytics software company.

• 15:29David Hoffman?

  Still is. They still.

• 15:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Kind of is.

• 15:31David Hoffman?

  They still make money selling software.

• 15:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, but Sailor is obviously kind of letting that slowly die in the background. And the main thing is the purchase of Bitcoin, right? So I guess, does this make Joe Lubin the Michael Sailor of Ethereum? Do you think he can carry that stature?

• 15:48David Hoffman?

  Now, I will say, Ryan, there are others out there. There are other like DEXs that I've seen and other like MicroStrategy Ethereum going around the space that are not yet public.

• 15:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 16:00David Hoffman?

  I haven't sent you the one that got sent to me yet because I haven't, sorry.

• 16:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, you were keeping that alpha from me? David, this is how I find out?

• 16:08David Hoffman?

  I'm not investing in either of them, and I don't think you want to either. But yeah, there are others. This is not the only one.

• 16:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, the game is basically, this is sort of a levered play on the purchase of ETH. That's kind of what it is for MicroStrategy. They sort of, and it's a public vehicle for that. What's interesting about the Fit versus something like MicroStrategy is there is no, I guess, investor-friendly, traditional mechanism to buy staked ETH because we don't have a staked ETH ETF. So we just have the vanilla ETFs of just ETH. And so if you stake ETH within this Sbet platform, then that's kind of the only public, like publicly traded way you can get staked ETH inside of your 401k portfolio. So even that alone kind of makes sense. There are a whole bunch of other public companies that have ETH on the balance sheet, by the way, including Coinbase.

• 16:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  But there's also BitDigital. This is ticker BTBT. Most of them have smaller amounts of ETH. So this is definitely the largest one, really making a play for the MicroStrategy.

• 17:10David Hoffman?

  Yeah, ticker BTCS. I can't remember where that goes for, but they're also doing the Ether MicroStrategy play as well. And they've already been like raising money.

• 17:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so I guess the flywheel is you raise cash below the net asset value of the stock price. You buy and stake ETH. And then if the stock trades above ETH per share, you raise more cash and you repeat. You just keep doing this. And as long as number goes up, things are fine.

• 17:34David Hoffman?

  As long as number, well, yes. And the difference here is if number goes down, things aren't necessarily bad. And that is, that is the crux. The fulcrum on which many of these acquisition vehicles will lay on because you know, this is technically, this is neutral like MicroStrategy pioneered this and because no one really copied Michael Saylor for so long, he was able to hoover up a bunch of lending credit in the market. There's only so much like lending dollars willing to be lent out to a MicroStrategy. Michael Saylor was the only player in town, so he got to absorb a lot of that lending demand for like pretty, pretty secure loans from MicroStrategy. But now there are many more players on the scene as well that are doing, that are turning into like acquisition companies. Yeah.

• 18:19David Hoffman?

  GameStop just acquired 4,710 Bitcoin for 510 million dollars this week. GameStop, of course, has still a decently large, real business, but they are also leaning into the Bitcoin acquisition strategy. Interestingly enough, GME, the equity of GameStop, dropped by 11% when this went out, which is Okay. the opposite of what you want. You need, you need the equity to go up, not down. Sure, sure, sure. But nonetheless, GameStop now has almost 5,000 Bitcoin on the balance sheet. Trump Media announces a $2.5 billion Bitcoin Treasury Deal. So Trump Media and Technology Group plans to build one of the largest Bitcoin Treasuries held by a public company. This is also the same company, the parent company of Truth Social.

• 19:01David Hoffman?

  And they are, have confirmed that they have raised $2.5 billion from around 50 different institutional investors, which will include $1.5 billion in common stock and a billion dollar, in billion dollars of convertible notes. This cash will go straight into buying Bitcoins. That's $2.5 billion of incoming Bitcoin buy pressure. The TMTG stock, the DJT dipped about 9% after the announcement. Again, not what you want. Yeah, you can't have that happening. If we want this to work, you need the equity to go up, not down. And, but again, this is not just for Bitcoin or even Ethereum. Solstrategie has filed a $1 billion preliminary base shelf prospectus.

• 19:41David Hoffman?

  No clue what that means. I think that TLDR is that they don't yet have a billion dollars, but they are like, it's a precursor of having a billion dollars to buy Sol. So this Sol strategy thing is, is trying to finagle its way into billion dollars. The listener is going to need to like go and do their homework on this.

• 19:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is on the Canadian Stock Exchange as well.

• 20:01David Hoffman?

  Canadian Stock Exchange, yeah.

• 20:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you remember there was a company called EtherFi that was listed in the Canadian Stock Exchange? And this is years ago. Not EtherFi, excuse me. Ether Capital.

• 20:08David Hoffman?

  Ether Capital, yeah.

• 20:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. So Ether Capital was kind of doing this play back before it was cool in the Canadian Stock Exchange. It's not as big a deal until you get listed on the New York Stock Exchange, or you get listed on the NASDAQ and you have access to that level of capital. So what's interesting to me is like, there are all of these levels of sophistication. So you mentioned Bitcoin has been running this play for the longest with MicroStrategy. Fun fact, he started in the year 2020 doing this. Before that, Michael Sayer was actually a Bitcoin skeptic, okay? So like, he wasn't bullish on the asset and so he started buying it. Fun fact, guess what the price, the market cap of Bitcoin was when MicroStrategy started doing this?

• 20:51David Hoffman?

  200 billion.

• 20:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Around 200 to 300 billion dollars, right? Which interestingly enough, is the exact market cap of Ethereum today. And so what you kind of hope happens is that if you're an ETH holder, you hope that Ethereum and Ether, the asset, just follows in the footsteps of Bitcoin. Okay, so this is the first one. This is like 500 million dollars of capital, that's half a billion dollars. That is size in the NASDAQ. You get some like, and so you start there at the same market cap, and then it continues, it rolls, you convince other treasuries to sort of buy ETH the asset, and it follows in the footsteps of Bitcoin. I mean, that's, that's the case for ETH holders, and Eric Connor puts it this way. "The upshot for ETH holders: supply compression, new narrative fuel,

• 21:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  potential leverage via an equity wrapper, and a bullish milestone in ETH's march to mainstream balance sheets." There is kind of a worry though in the waters in there, because all of these are levered plays on the underlying asset. And so whenever you see that, you have to ask yourself like, what could go wrong?

• 21:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah, a lot of people's pattern recognition, parts of their brain are perking up and correlating this to the GPTC wind up and then ultimate collapse of the last bull market. So as a trip down memory lane, the 2020 through 2021 bull market started with this GPTC, the grayscale Bitcoin trust, having this premium to NAV. And so you could take your Bitcoins, put it in the trust and then pocket some like 20, 30, 40% premium and then you could do it over and over and over again. That premium turned into a discount and then all of a sudden everyone was underwater. But that took like 18 months and during that 18 months, it fueled the yield of every single thing in crypto. It fueled the Celsius yield, it fueled the pool twos. It was this cascading like yield system. Three arrows capital. Yeah. Entire hedge funds.

• 22:43David Hoffman?

  All of that stuff, yeah. And the pattern, it's not a one-to-one pattern matching, but I think people are kind of like recognizing that there is a pattern here. And then the other thing that people worried about like, okay, Bitcoin, great, like it's a $2 trillion asset, feels like relatively safe to add leverage onto Ether, like same same, but like, once you start to go down the market cap stack, people are looking at like, okay, what happens when there is like a acquisition vehicle on something much smaller than this? And what happens if this becomes a little bit too replicatable for a little bit too long? And then also Michael Ebelito from Blockworks, I think he put out a pretty good tweet, kind of diagnosing the situation. And so he said, "Quick thoughts on the acquisition vehicle meta. It seems like we found the 2025 equivalent of GPTC.

• 23:26David Hoffman?

  To spell out the risk, if it's that if these acquisition vehicles accumulate a lot of crypto at much worse terms than Sailor, they might eventually become forced sellers." And then he says, "I'm not sure people truly understand how much of a wizard Michael Sailor is. Sailor financed the majority of his Bitcoin buys with converts, so there's plenty of equity risk for investors, but little risk of liquidation." Basically, Michael Sailor is the CTO, or excuse me, the CFO, Chief Financial Officer of MicroStrategy, and he's making sure that he's acquiring Bitcoin at very low risk terms. If we hurriedly copy and paste this crypto acquisition vehicle over and over and over again, and you don't, and you're not smart about your acquisition terms, then this can

• 24:10David Hoffman?

  turn into leverage in the system that will result in cascading liquidations.

• 24:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and even even even MicroStrategy, Michael Saylor, a lot of people point to that and have some worries too. And he has probably, you know, like the best terms and has been doing this the longest. I don't know if you saw like Nick Carter, for instance, he's like, all this stuff is a ticking time bomb. Is his take on all of the like, kind of treasury asset type side of things. So I don't know. I like, in order to diagnose this, you really have to get into kind of the, all of the financial statements, all of the leverage vehicles. And it's just so much for for me to unwind, but it's just kind of raising an eyebrow at this point. We have a segment, I think, where Michael Saylor actually comments on this at the Bitcoin conference. We'll get to that in a minute. First, should we talk about the Trump dinner, David?

• 24:57David Hoffman?

  Okay, so the Trump meme coin dinner happened last Friday. This happened at his Trump National Golf Club in Virginia for the top 220 holders of the Trump token. It was promoted as the most exclusive invitation in the world. That was reminiscent of 2021 NFT clubs. So what actually happened at the dinner? Trump did arrive, although he was not promised to make an appearance at the dinner. He did make an appearance at the dinner. He delivered a 20 minute speech. From what I hear, it was normal Trump stump speech. I'm the crypto president, Biden sucks, blah, blah, blah, you know, normal Trump things.

• 25:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  I fired Gensler, I hope he said that.

• 25:34David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I fired Gensler, yeah, yeah. He didn't, he did not mingle with any of the guests. He spent 23 minutes at the event before leaving by helicopter again. So 23 minutes in and out.

• 25:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  He did dance, he had, did have time to dance the YMCA.

• 25:46David Hoffman?

  He danced the YMCA?

• 25:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes.

• 25:48David Hoffman?

  All right, that might have been worth it. That might have been worth it. Reportedly, most guests were disappointed, especially some people who spent large sums of money, but did not get to interact with Trump personally. It also featured a three course meal that TikToker Nicholas Pinto described as Wired as the worst food he's ever eaten. And the Trump speech at the event was pretty much like bullshit. Oof, ouch, ouch, rough words.

• 26:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know. I mean, what did people expect from this? What did they expect?

• 26:14David Hoffman?

  I don't know.

• 26:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a meme coin dinner, right?

• 26:16David Hoffman?

  I think you get to, I mean, if you invest in something, you want to be like aligned with it. I do know someone who was at the dinner. I asked him what his take was and I'll. And they said-

• 26:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Undisclosed source, right?

• 26:27David Hoffman?

  I'm, he didn't-

• 26:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Don't disclose it.

• 26:28David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I'm not gonna disclose it. I'm not sure it matters. I'm not gonna disclose it. It was pretty cool. Honestly, had some good conversations at the dinner with people I probably would not have met otherwise. A lot of market maker CEOs were there. Best part was definitely the VIP room and being able to be near Trump and have him give a short speech 20 to 25 of us before he went into the bigger ballroom. Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, and then the next sentence says between us, and so I weren't, I'm not gonna repeat that.

• 26:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know who else was there, David? Justin Sun, of course. And not only was he there, he is the largest Trump holder, top holder of Trump coin, okay? Which of course is what you need in order to get to this. You have to be top 220 owners of Trump coin in order to get to here. And not only was he excited to attend the dinner, he put out this fantastic influencer video about it. I gotta show you this.

• 27:11David Hoffman?

  Oh my god, Justin Sun, what a guy.

• 27:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know what? I just, I can't watch anymore, David. It's just like more of that. It's Justin Sun photo op at the-

• 27:31David Hoffman?

  This is the most Trump glazing I have ever seen. Even the music, dude.

• 27:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Never a wasted opportunity with, with Justin Sun over there.

• 27:40David Hoffman?

  That's incredible.

• 27:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, but let's talk about some of the controversy outside of crypto about this because it's not insignificant, right? Do you see this? Even in the Trump, you know, 20, 20 minute speech he gave, this is the presidential seal.

• 27:53David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 27:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is, and so when that seal-

• 27:55David Hoffman?

  He's giving a speech at a podium with a presidential seal in front of it.

• 27:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  And when that seal is present, it signals something, right? It signals that the present of, like, not just Donald Trump speaking, it's the president of- That represents the people of the United States of America who is here.

• 28:10David Hoffman?

  And this goes against the rhetoric that the Trump administration was saying, which is that Trump was there at the dinner in his personal capacity. So this is directly antagonistic to those statements.

• 28:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  So what backlash have you seen about this?

• 28:21David Hoffman?

  Oh my god, dude, everywhere. Like, everywhere in like mainstream media. So 35 Democratic lawmakers after, or right before this, sent a letter to the Department of Justice urging an investigation into possible violations of federal bribery laws and the Constitution's annulments clause. This raised concern that foreign actors, Justin Sun, could buy influence via the Trump meme coin and gain undisclosed access to the president. The letter demanded a press conference and public disclosure of the dinner guest list. Well, you could actually get that on-chain.

• 28:53David Hoffman?

  Just before the event, Representative Maxine Waters introduced the Stop Trading, Retention, and Unfair Markets Payoffs in Crypto Act, targeting crypto-related corruption by US officials. She cited Trump's and Melania's meme coins, the family World Liberty Financial-backed stablecoin, and Trump's proposed national Bitcoin reserve as risks of foreign influence. Even some Republicans, Ryan, Senator Cynthia Lummis, one of them-

• 29:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Huge Bitcoin supporter.

• 29:18David Hoffman?

  Huge Bitcoin supporter. Laser-eyed Bitcoin cyber hornet senator, Cynthia Lummis, was like, "Oh, this makes me uneasy. I am not really cool with this."

• 29:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Her quote was, "This gives me pause."

• 29:29David Hoffman?

  Gives me pause.

• 29:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Gives me pause. Even though I support the president, this gives me pause.

• 29:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah. During the dinner, there were protesters gathered outside chanting "shame" and calling it an illegal crypto party, and among other things. The way that this-

• 29:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm paywalled. I want to see this photo of the protesters, but I'm paywalled.

• 29:47David Hoffman?

  The photo, imagine a left-leaning-

• 29:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Somebody who hates crypto?

• 29:53David Hoffman?

  A left-leaning crypto hater with the words "shame," and just imagine what that looks like, and you're gonna get pretty close.

• 29:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  I got it. Thank you.

• 29:59David Hoffman?

  The way that I stumbled across the pushback here was from Ezra Klein, and I listen to the Ezra Klein Show every now and then. He's like, definitely like a Democratic liberal commentator. And also, I've mentioned this a handful of times, Sam Harris loves to bring up the Trump meme coin as a conduit for corruption because he also hates Trump. Ezra Klein also disposed to not like Trump. Did a one-hour and like 20-minute show on the relationship between Trump and crypto, and it was pretty thorough.

• 30:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  The entire thing was, the video is titled "The Growing Scandal of Trump," and what he means is-

• 30:30David Hoffman?

  Like, dollar sign Trump.

• 30:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  #TrumpCoin.

• 30:33David Hoffman?

  Trumpcoin, yeah. But not just that, he talked about World Liberty Financial.

• 30:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 30:36David Hoffman?

  David Bailey got mentioned as well, and like, there were clips of David Bailey being like, "We, the Bitcoiner community, can use Trump as a conduit to make Bitcoin go to the moon." And it's like, pretty- Unfortunate clippings of David Bailey talking about Trump as a way to get the Bitcoin community to make Bitcoin go to a million dollars.

• 30:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  You sort of see, I sort of see the dry tinder for like an epic backlash here. Okay.

• 31:03David Hoffman?

  I see the same thing.

• 31:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  And that it's not going to happen immediately, it's not going to happen now, but the Trump coin in itself is probably the most notable of, but like, there's other things too. So it's like, you know, we just mentioned earlier in the episode, was the Trump media acquiring $2.2 billion worth of Bitcoin, $2.5 billion of Bitcoin. What's sort of interesting is like, we've been talking about kind of treasury policy, which may be effectively to inflate US treasuries away at some level, right? It's kind of interesting is like, you're the president, you inflate treasuries away, while you're buying an alternative store of value. It's like, remember, like, okay, crypto is the escape boat. So you're loading up on the escape boat while you're in charge of like.

• 31:48David Hoffman?

  You, the leader, are getting on the ark while you are also potentially causing the flood at the same time.

• 31:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's, it's one of those. And so, okay, so like, tell me about this episode. I don't know if I'm going to watch it, but like, what was the?

• 32:02David Hoffman?

  Dude, it was really thorough. They even went into the Trump baseball card NFTs that he launched in like 2022.

• 32:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 32:08David Hoffman?

  So they just touched on everything he's ever done with crypto. And of course, they, they put it in a pretty like bad light, but it's also a light that's like.

• 32:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not wrong.

• 32:16David Hoffman?

  It's accurate. Yeah, it's not wrong. Like, they're not, they're not making up lies.

• 32:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do they, do they other side it a little bit? Do they, do they talk about how like shitty like Gary Gensler was and how like terrible?

• 32:27David Hoffman?

  They talk about Gary Gensler, but not that he, no, they don't talk about how shitty

• 32:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  They don't talk about that. That's what frustrates me so much.

• 32:34David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 32:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  But, I mean, I think.

• 32:36David Hoffman?

  But this is, this is, this is what we did. This is what we, this was the bargain. We got the crypto president, we got everything we wanted.

• 32:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Did we?

• 32:42David Hoffman?

  We're also getting the crypto president grift too. Got to pay the grift tax.

• 32:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yep.

• 32:47David Hoffman?

  And there is like, we, the industry are going to, in the future, have to.

• 32:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Reckon with that?

• 32:53David Hoffman?

  Reckon with this in the future.

• 32:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Well, we'll see how it goes. I still think the alternative may have been worse and probably would have been worse.

• 33:00David Hoffman?

  Alternative was worse, but there's no free lunch.

• 33:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bullish?

• 33:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk about what's next. More on the Bitcoin 2025 conference. Who attended? What are they doing over there? And Circle, are they going to IPO? Is that what's happening now? I think so. We're going to talk about that and more. But first, I want to tell you about Frax, some of the best yield in DeFi. This is like Circle, Athena, Maker had a baby. They were at the Bitcoin conference. Sam was at the Bitcoin conference. So let's go hear from them now.

• 33:26David Hoffman?

  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 best-in-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 and explore Fraxl's diverse Layer 2 ecosystem with protocols like Curve, Convex and more, all rewarding early adopters. Frax isn't just a protocol. It's a digital nation powered by the FXX token and governed by its global community. Acquire FXX through frax.com or your go-to Dex.

• 34:11David Hoffman?

  Stake it and help shape Frax Nation's future. Ready to join the forefront of DeFi? Visit frax.com now to start earning with Frax USD and staked Frax USD. And for Bankless listeners, you can use frax.com/r/bankless when bridging to Fraxl for exclusive Fraxl perks and boosted rewards. Imagine verifying yourself without handing over personal data. No hacked databases, no unnecessary personal exposure for airdrops and no AI bots ruining community governance. 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.

• 34:56David Hoffman?

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• 35:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Time to get into the annual Bitcoin Conference, Bitcoin 2025. It was in Vegas this year. Let's tune into a little bit of a compilation clip of what exactly was talked about at the Bitcoin Conference. Let's go hear from this clip.

• 35:45David Hoffman?

  Stablecoins. Stablecoins.

• 35:47Speaker 03

  From Stablecoin, Stablecoin, Stablecoin. Stablecoins.

• 35:50David Hoffman?

  Stablecoin, Stablecoin, Stablecoin. Stablecoin.

• 35:53Speaker 03

  Stablecoin for Bitcoins. Stablecoins, Stablecoin, Stablecoin. Stablecoin, Stablecoin, Stablecoin.

• 35:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  This clip goes for over a minute. It goes for a whole minute.

• 36:02Speaker 04

  Stablecoins.

• 36:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  These faces here, I mean, this is Robbie from BlackRock. It's a huge who of financial leadership. Who did I just see? A CEO of Robinhood, right? Who else did I just see? Vlad, Robbie from BlackRock. Yeah. There's Paul from Coinbase, there's Cynthia Lummis, Pete Rizzo's Stablecoins. I think he's turning him, so like, there's Sam from Frax at the 32nd, 31 second. There's, who else is there? Oh, Representative Emmer here? Tom Emmer, yeah. Tom Emmer, yeah. Stablecoins, Stablecoins, Stablecoins, Stablecoin, yeah. Okay, okay, okay. So are you implying that... Oh, and JD Vance, JD Vance to finish it as well. Yeah. Are you implying that this was like a lot of talk at Bitcoin was about stablecoins? I mean, I just saw this clip. I wasn't, I'm not at Bitcoin, at the Bitcoin Conference. This is, this has been the meta of crypto.

• 36:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  But like, you know, Bitcoiners don't necessarily like, they're not anti-stablecoins because more stablecoins makes Bitcoin even better. Yeah. I feel like it's very, it's very, it's very nice for Bitcoiners, like, from a narrative perspective to promote stablecoins because that feels very US-aligned. Like, the government gets stablecoins and we get Bitcoin. It's non-threatening to Bitcoin, obviously. Like, no one cares about, you know, so Bitcoin and stablecoins, that's sort of the Bitcoiner barbell here. So it makes sense that there would be a lot of, but this, this is a three-day conference, happened in Vegas this year. 30,000 attendees registered, okay? 5,000 companies, 400 speakers, a whole bunch of people.

• 37:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  We mentioned JD Vance was there, you know, senators, Bo Hines, Eric and Donald Trump Jr. were there. So, sons of the president, not the president. Of course, you had Michael Saylor's there and all of Bitcoiners, Jack Mahler's, Adam Back, CEO of Tether. So, and they spent three days. They talked a lot about stablecoins, I'd imagine, but pretty much talking about Bitcoin the asset. A three-day conference, talking about Bitcoin the asset. Well, they're not talking about Bitcoin the blockchain, let me tell you that.

• 37:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so I mean, have you ever been to one of these conferences?

• 38:01David Hoffman?

  I have, yeah. I went to the 2019 Bitcoin Conference in San Francisco and then the 2021 in Miami. But I didn't actually, I went to the 2021 one very briefly. I went to mainly the side events.

• 38:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's very impressive, the amount of-

• 38:14David Hoffman?

  It's a big conference. It's the industry's biggest conference. So I'm close.

• 38:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and just like the, the energy there, the excitement there. This is JD Vance. We'll play another JD Vance clip from his speech.

• 38:24Speaker 02

  50 million Americans own Bitcoin, and I believe that's going to be 100 million before too long.

• 38:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  100 million Americans owning Bitcoin is just a doubling. We got 50 million with Bitcoin right now.

• 38:39David Hoffman?

  David Sacks, the AI and crypto czar, he was also there at the conference, interviewed by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. He said that while he can't promise anything, a pathway does exist for the government to buy more Bitcoin, which again, this line was cited in the Ezra Klein Show as like the corruption, a corruption vehicle is like, oh yeah, like Bitcoiners paid Trump, now the government, the government money is the biggest money out there. And if you can get the government money to buy your Bitcoin, that's bullish. But anyways, the question is, David Sacks continues saying, the question is, can we get either the Treasury Department or the Commerce Department to get excited about that? Because if they do, and if they can figure out how to fund it, they actually do have presidential authorization. So.

• 39:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  So the president's on board.

• 39:25David Hoffman?

  It's bullish. It's on board.

• 39:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  The president's buying Bitcoin. He's definitely on board with this, right? So they just have to get the Treasury Department, which is basically the president's cabinet, and Commerce Department on board, and then it's going to happen, according to David Sacks. Senator Lummis, actually, she had kind of a sequence of events. She's like, first we get the stablecoins bill, then we get the market structure bill, which is, you remember, FIT defines what's a commodity and what's a security. And then she thinks we get Bitcoin in the US Treasury. So she's still bullish on that last piece.

• 39:58David Hoffman?

  She's really burying that under a pretty tall, like, order. The stablecoin bill will get passed relatively easily. The market structure bill is, it's not trivial for that to get passed. There is a lot of work to be done on that one.

• 40:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I was actually-

• 40:11David Hoffman?

  There's not a guarantee.

• 40:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, the Genius Act, right? It didn't really move very much this week, right? I think, what's, what's the status of this? I was actually in chat GPT.

• 40:19David Hoffman?

  Yeah, what is that?

• 40:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Nothing legally changed this week. The bill is just in momentum. It's still kind of in a holding pattern.

• 40:24David Hoffman?

  Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, the fit bill or the market structure bill, Austin Campbell has some pretty spicy takes. He thinks that that thing is not going to get passed as is. He thinks it's going to get unbundled and like pass in like piecemeal fashion, which will take a lot longer.

• 40:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I guess that's less important immediately, given the current SEC, right? I mean, under the Gensler SEC, it was, it was really critical.

• 40:46David Hoffman?

  Yeah, true.

• 40:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, Michael Saylor was there and maybe we should continue the discussion we were having about what happens if MicroStrategy starts trading at a discount to NAV price? And NAV price is like, I guess, the, the book value price of all of its assets, right? That's NAV for MicroStrategy.

• 41:04David Hoffman?

  So the market, the market cap of MicroStrategy was less than the value of all the Bitcoin that it owns.

• 41:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly, exactly. Yeah, well played. And so right now it's trading at 1.7X premium to Bitcoin.

• 41:16David Hoffman?

  Which is the premium that they just keep on juicing and they keep on turning into that premium into Bitcoin on their balance sheet.

• 41:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  So what happens if that goes negative? That's kind of the nightmare scenario that people worry about. This is Michael Saylor commenting on that.

• 41:28Speaker 05

  GBTC and Grayscale went below one times NAV before. And what they miss is that Grayscale was a trust company, a closed in trust. And we're an operating company and a trust company doesn't have the option to refinance or take on leverage or, or to sell securities, buy securities, recapitalize or buy their own stock back.

• 41:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  So this is Saylor saying, we're not like GBTC, it's not going to happen this way. And the reason is that trust had no options, basically.

• 42:00David Hoffman?

  Right, it was rigid.

• 42:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, Saylor saying, look, if worst case scenario happens, you know, we get into some like trouble here. We got all sorts of, we can print more stock. We, I can find financing, like I can figure it out. And I think that's probably true if it's very short term, let's say. So you get months like this, I'm sure he can figure it out. I mean, if that ever turned to years, I think maybe then you have more of a problem. But he's probably right that he does have more options than a trust. It's just like, the question is, is all of that dry powder enough? Depends on the severity of the discount to NAV.

• 42:38David Hoffman?

  Right. Part of the crux of the issue, I think, is sailors' commitment to always be buying. And if you are always buying, like if that is what you are doing, you are never really giving yourself padding. And so if there was like a moment where a sailor had enough Bitcoin and he just stopped buying, I would feel a lot more comfortable with it. But I think if you will make a commitment to always be buying, you are also simultaneously making a commitment to like potentially put yourself under duress in an extreme situation.

• 43:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's right. David, Echo announced Sonar. What is this?

• 43:11David Hoffman?

  Okay, so Echo is Kobe's startup, which allows for people to like create groups to invest in deals. You still need to be an accredited investor, but it's a way to like democratize access to like early-stage investing.

• 43:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like kind of like an angel list for crypto, would you say?

• 43:26David Hoffman?

  Crypto-native angel list. That's right. Yeah. They have since announced Sonar, which is, I think, even more of like a trying to be an open platform. So their Echo was designed with kind of these rigid groups that people said that they didn't really like groups. They just wanted to invest as an individual into opportunities that they found exciting. So Sonar, think of this as like a compliant ICO platform. So Kobe with Echo and now Sonar has trying to bring back, trying to bring back ICOs, which I love ICOs. I think ICOs are great. I wish crypto would go back to ICOs. And so this is what-

• 43:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just like better ICOs, right? Like fair, more transparent.

• 44:03David Hoffman?

  The ICO mechanism is solid, and I'm sad that we ever got away from that. Why did we get away from that? Securities regulations. We can get back there. Kobe's doing it like compliantly. So there's still like KYC, AML. You still need to be accredited investor, all that kind of stuff. But it does open up access for like founders to kind of just route around venture capital if they so choose and just go straight to Sonar to do a public sale.

• 44:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 44:27David Hoffman?

  This has pros and cons, of course. Like there are reasons why VCs are VCs. But if you don't think you need VCs and you just want to go straight to like, why does a distribution is possible? Then maybe Sonar makes sense for you.

• 44:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's pretty cool. I mean, Kobe's very passionate about this, right? To the extent that he said, hey, like he doesn't do podcasts anymore. He's like, hey, I'm willing to come on the Bankless Podcast and do an episode.

• 44:49David Hoffman?

  If you guys make an Echo group, yeah.

• 44:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  So we did.

• 44:52David Hoffman?

  Which we did make. We actually already had our Echo group like in process. Yeah. So I actually think- I actually think Kobe owes us because of coming on the podcast. I think that's how this lays out.

• 45:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  I wonder where his takes are, just so like in the market. He's always got really like interesting reasonable takes and yeah, we'll have to ask him when he comes on, right? Because he owes us.

• 45:10David Hoffman?

  That's right.

• 45:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, Circle and the IPO, what's the status?

• 45:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, okay, so I think Circle is moving forward with the IPO, declining the Ripple acquisition, and I think therefore also declining the Coinbase acquisition, even though Coinbase already owns like a quarter of Circle to begin with. So they are offering 24 million Class A shares, and the shares are going to be priced between 24 and 26 dollars. They're looking to raise 624 million-ish dollars, which would make the value of Circle around 6.7 billion dollars.

• 45:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 45:43David Hoffman?

  6.7 billion dollars.

• 45:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's pretty cool. I mean, another publicly traded company. Obviously, we've got Galaxy in there now, crypto company. We had Coinbase. There's a lot of smaller ones, but this would be a pretty large, like market cap size, public company on the NASDAQ, I imagine. So this IPO is expected to occur next week, it looks like, June 2nd, is that right?

• 46:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's the, I'm reading the same notes, yeah.

• 46:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm almost surprised, though, David, that Coinbase didn't like snipe this. You know, there's conversation about Ripple, but like maybe in some way because they have an ownership percent, maybe they felt like we don't need to.

• 46:18David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I don't know if they need to.

• 46:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so like what's interesting is USDC is primarily distributed through the Coinbase wallet, and so the deal that Coinbase, the deal that Coinbase and Circle have for USDC yield proceeds is that Coinbase receives 100% of the USDC when it's held on the Coinbase exchange in custody. Okay, I don't know if you knew this, fun fact. If you hold your Coinbase in custody on the exchange, or if you hold your USDC on the exchange, then they get the yield. But if it's off-platform, it's split 50/50 with Circle. So that means if it's on base layer 2, or if it's in the Coinbase wallet, their revenue share gets cut in half. And this is not a small amount of revenue for Coinbase. You know, it's like 13% of their revenue.

• 47:03David Hoffman?

  It's a large amount of revenue. Coinbase printed on this deal.

• 47:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and so that's it's kind of interesting. It just I wonder if that's going to if Circle is going to stay a separate entity. And that's the Coinbase play or like what's going to happen long term?

• 47:18David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah. When you're buying, when you're buying a share of Circle, you are buying affiliation with Coinbase.

• 47:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  For sure.

• 47:24David Hoffman?

  Coinbase will always be in the room with you.

• 47:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  The distributor, the distributor. There was this, this seems almost like a rumor, but the question is, what are the big banks going to do? In the the stablecoin summer meta right here? This is big banks exploring a venture into the crypto world together with a joint stablecoin venture. So this is JP Morgan. This is Chase. This is Bank of America. This is Citigroup and of course, our friends Wells Fargo reportedly in a deal. Or sorry, reportedly in a joint discussion about launching a venture, a joint venture around stablecoins. And the idea here is to create a digital dollar alternative that could be used across all of these banks.

• 48:02David Hoffman?

  I am so bearish on this. There is no way that they are going to be able to coordinate and cooperate with each other on a joint venture. You know, banks do not innovate. They this, this, I'm getting the same vibe as this as when like the central bank or the Federal Reserve said that they were going to research and produce reports about their potential experimentation to CBDCs. The same energy, like nothing is coming out of this. This is never going to hit like mainstream that they're never going to release this. Not going to do it. It's not going to work.

• 48:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Some people disagree with you, Dave, including Arthur Hayes. He said, this is bye bye Circle. Thanks for playing. He is basically, Arthur thinks that the banks control kind of the world and they're going to control. You know, the stablecoin, they certainly control the dollar and banks will win the long game here. And it's just like only a matter of time for Circle.

• 48:53David Hoffman?

  Who were, who is inside of these banks? Who's an employee in these banks that has the innovator's juice or the hunger to make this product?

• 49:04David Hoffman?

  Because if you have that, you don't go work at a bank. They don't have the talent. The way that I could see this working is like some sort of SWIFT system, where like they all can mint the same stablecoin. And whoever mints like 40% of the stablecoin has 40% of the governance, which is kind of how SWIFT works, kind of how Visa came to be.

• 49:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sure.

• 49:21David Hoffman?

  I could kind of see that, but no, like it's, I don't, I'm betting against this.

• 49:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so the thing is.

• 49:27David Hoffman?

  My gamble is that we never talk about this on the weekly rollup ever again.

• 49:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  If we have any, anybody from these banks that listens to Bankless is probably trying to get a job in crypto. If they are, if they, if they haven't already, you know? So there is definitely a brain drain because it's gotta be so hard to get anything done in these, in these banking systems. So we'll have to see. In the meanwhile, David, let's end it here. I do think stablecoin summer will be a big deal. Once this genius act is signed, I don't think anyone else is saying stablecoin summer. So like, I guess I'm saying it, but Scott Bessent.

• 49:58David Hoffman?

  That's the worst summer.

• 50:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Secretary of the United, yeah, no one's excited about that because price stays flat. But I think stablecoins are going to be a big freaking deal. We should end the rollup on this clip and then I'll read out the disclaimers. Here it is. Scott Bessent, US Secretary of Treasury. When asked about stablecoins, here's what he said.

• 50:16Speaker 04

  I've seen estimates that just over the short term, stablecoins could create 2 trillion of demand for US treasuries and treasury bills. To put that in context, the number is probably about 300 billion right now.

• 50:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  If that doesn't get you excited about stablecoin summer, David, I got, I got nothing else for you. Scott Bessent's voice.

• 50:37David Hoffman?

  Stablecoin summer. What? What? Anything else, dude?

• 50:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Gotta let you know, written disclaimers.

• 50:44David Hoffman?

  Flat technology summer. Let's go. Our wealth is staying the same.

• 50:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  And fiat, you have fiat denominated. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in. Maybe not stablecoins, though. 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.