ROLLUP: Bitcoin on the US Balance Sheet? | Trump's US Crypto Stockpile | Banks Can Now Custody Crypto | Venice AI's Massive Airdrop

Joining us this week is Haseeb Qureshi who is here to help walk us through this week’s Weekly Rollup. We cover the major shift in the U. S. government’s stance on crypto, as Trump signs an executive order that establishes a national digital asset stockpile working group and bans CBDCs. The SEC also revokes SAB121, clearing the way for banks to custody crypto. Meanwhile, Venice AI’s token launch made waves, and Abstract Chain went live with a focus on creators and streamers. In markets, Nvidia’s $600B plunge rattled investors, and the Czech National Bank considers adding Bitcoin to its reserves. Plus, Gary Gensler lands a new job—back at MIT. ------ 💸 CRYPTO TAX CALCULATOR | CODE: BANKLESS15 https://bankless.cc/CryptoTaxCalculator ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | BUG BOUNTY PROGRAM https://bankless.cc/Uniswap-Bug-Bounty ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🌐CELO | BUILD TOGETHER AND PROSPER https://bankless.cc/Celo 🎮RONIN | THE FUTURE OF WEB3 GAMING https://bankless.cc/Ronin ----- ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/base:0x4be6cd4d402fed49eb2de95fbc8e737e8ffd3e7f/26?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 00:00:00 Start 00:02:10 NVDA and Deepseek Selloff https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/27/nvidia-sheds-almost-600-billion-in-market-cap-biggest-drop-ever.html 00:08:26 Why It Sold Off https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/1883935713877782884 00:10:56 Markets 00:12:28 Why is The Vibe So Off? https://x.com/intocryptoverse/status/1884408180014186958?s=46 00:16:53 Bitwise Files For Doge ETF https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1884349554256142735 00:21:01 Powell On Cutting Rates https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/29/fed-meeting-live-updates-traders-await-fed-chair-powells-comments.html https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/1884699251860553789 00:24:30 US Strategic Crypto Reserve? https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/strengthening-american-leadership-in-digital-financial-technology/ https://x.com/Geiger_Capital/status/1882534611693211932 00:29:21 Czech And Norway Invest In BTC https://x.com/DavidFBailey/status/1884491705841508708 https://x.com/BitcoinMagazine/status/1884901420677386243 00:33:28 SAB121 Repeal https://x.com/hesterpeirce/status/1882562977985114185?s=46 https://x.com/saylor/status/1882565582870270241?s=46 00:37:02 New Treasury Secretary https://x.com/USTreasury/status/1884377788263633262 00:38:48 Gary Returns To MIT https://mitsloan.mit.edu/press/former-sec-chair-gary-gensler-named-professor-practice-mit-sloan-school-management 00:44:01 Venice AI Token Launch https://x.com/AskVenice/status/1883925135825990091 https://x.com/ErikVoorhees/status/1883992467151663415 https://x.com/CoinbaseAssets/status/1884041161708356000 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1884320943008538781 00:49:08 Abstract Chain Mainnet Launch https://x.com/AbstractChain/status/1883939915169423777 https://x.com/pudgypenguins/status/1884708668366545143 00:50:33 Symbiotic https://x.com/symbioticfi/status/1884266642416492713 00:52:48 TRUMP Token, Good And Bad https://x.com/hosseeb/status/1883466906080088478?s=46 https://x.com/Jesseeckel/status/1884615422521020626 00:58:02 TRUMP Is A Celeb Coin https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-28/trump-s-memecoin-can-now-be-used-to-buy-watches-and-sneakers 01:03:45 Haseeb’s Podcast And Parting Advice ------ 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.

• 0:03David Hoffman?

  Bankless Nation, welcome to the weekly roll up today. On the episode, we got Haseeb Qureshi as my co-host for this episode. Haseeb, how are you doing, my man? Good to see you.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  I'm doing well, doing well. How about yourself?

• 0:13David Hoffman?

  Really good, really, really good. There's always just a mountain of news to go through, and I'm really happy to have you here, my man. Let's talk about what we're going to talk about this week. Trump Watch, Trump signed a crypto executive order called "Strengthening American Leadership in Digital Financial Technology," which included a bunch of things, including a working group for a national crypto stockpile. Hester Purse and the SEC revoked SAB 121, and which gives, of course, the green light to Bank custody crypto. This open-source AI platform, Venice, launched its token and made a huge number of people very happy this week, but also some drama around the Coinbase listing. Abstract Chain went live with their mainnet, and Gary Gensler gets a new job. Haseeb, before we get into any of this news in specific,

• 0:57David Hoffman?

  how would you give this week a vibe? What was the vibe of this week, just in a sentence?

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Chaotic. I think it's been a very chaotic week, yeah. It's one of these weeks where the outside world is really shaking what's going on in crypto. It's, you're feeling like you're inside the snow globe and seeing all the stuff getting floated up. That was the vibe this week.

• 1:18David Hoffman?

  Is that a combination because of Nvidia and then also politics?

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Yes, that's, I feel like that's going to be the theme of the year, is that a lot of stuff that's not related to crypto is going to be shaking up the crypto world.

• 1:28David Hoffman?

  Well, both Nvidia and politics are top of this agenda, so let's go ahead and get right into it. But before we do, I want to talk about our friends and sponsors over at the Crypto Tax Calculator. It's tax season. We know that's a stressful time for everyone in the Bankless community and probably you listeners as well. But that's why we like the Crypto Tax Calculator, because it takes away a lot of stress out of taxes. I have an accountant that I just pay, so I don't have to think about this, but they use Crypto Tax Calculator. So if you just want to reduce your suffering this tax season, you can use Bankless 15 to get 15% off. Or if you're a Bankless citizen, there is a link inside the Discord to get 30% off. You can go into the show notes and find those codes and those links. All right, Haseeb, let's get into markets. Let's start with Nvidia.

• 2:13David Hoffman?

  The big headline that I think rocketed around the world is Nvidia sheds almost $600 billion in market cap, biggest one-day loss in US history. That's 17% off of Nvidia. This was on the backs of this Chinese AI lab, DeepSeek, that unveiled this new open-source model that it claimed only took two months and less than $6 million to build. People are going back and forth on the validity of that claim. But what is basically well-understood is that the performance of this new chat GPT competitor is extremely strong and extremely real. DeepSeek got to the first place of the Apple Store charts in just a few days, which is pretty crazy. It is currently number one at the time of recording. And then David Sacks, of course, who is the crypto AI czar, says,

• 2:58David Hoffman?

  "DeepSeek R1 shows that the AI race will be very competitive. I'm confident in the US, but we cannot be complacent." Haseeb, when you saw this news come across your desk, how did you interpret it? What was your reaction?

• 3:10Speaker 01

  Honestly, one of my first reactions was, so I saw the DeepSeek R1 paper when it originally came out seven days ago, eight days ago now. So I saw that Wall Street had a very delayed reaction to this announcement. So nothing actually really changed between when the paper was actually released. Even the numbers, so people were talking about the $6 million model to train. That was actually a predecessor to R1 called, it was their V3 model, and that was released in December. So it's one of these things where you realize markets are just not efficient. Like, it just took Wall Street people over the weekend to actually understand what the fuck just happened, like what actually hit them. And I think the biggest thing is that there's so much misinformation that's out there now about DeepSeek,

• 3:55Speaker 01

  of people who just do not understand what it means to have, first of all, how AI labs work and like how much capex goes into actually building an AI lab. People are really fixating on this idea that it took $6 million to train. It took $6 million to train the final iteration of the model in GPU hours. But how much did it cost to acquire all the GPUs? How much did it cost to pay all the salaries? How much did it cost to do all the other training runs that failed? The reality is that-

• 4:18David Hoffman?

  That $6 million is built on top of a mountain of cash.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Almost certainly, they spent over $100 million on all this stuff, end to end. Now, to be clear, that's way less than OpenAI spending, way less than Meta spending. That's very significant, because it means that AI is a lot cheaper than we thought it was going to be. That's good. To be clear, that's good for you and me. That's good for almost everybody.

• 4:37David Hoffman?

  Consumers of AI products should be thrilled.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's bad for producers.

• 4:41David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  The NASDAQ is overwhelmingly weighted towards producers because Nvidia is one of the biggest companies in the world now. And yeah, it's really bad for Nvidia because in the same way, when oil prices come down, it's bad for Exxon. But it's good for us. It's good for everybody else. It's good for everyone who drives. So I think by and large, this deep sea thing is actually great for all of us. But the reality is that the balance sheets of the Fortune 500, the balance sheets of the NASDAQ, do not contain people spending money on AI.

• 5:08David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  Because it just hasn't shown up yet as a line item on most people's balance sheets. It's only a cost right now. No one's making money on AI yet. Everyone's paying money to create AIs. But I think in the long run, this is only a good thing. I mean, this thing is open source. It's literally more open source than than Meta is. Like, they release all the intermediate models, not just the final model that they released like they did for Lava. So DeepSeek, I think, is an unalloyed good for the world. Super, super awesome, super bullish for AI generally, super great for the consumer. But just like with anything, you have to overlay it with geopolitics and fear and FOMO and all this stuff. So I think markets really got this one wrong in having a generally bearish sentiment on the entire market and on risk assets. Huge mistake. Definitely right that Nvidia's stock should go down.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  But absolutely wrong that anything else should make you less bullish on where this technology is going.

• 5:57David Hoffman?

  Yeah, notably, a number of crypto AI projects have already integrated the R1, the DeepSeek R1 model. Venice now has DeepSeek R1 in its products. And it's, to me, it's a little, it's, I'm happy that we are seeing the creations of these AI labs, which are very expensive, very hard to produce, as you said, tons of CapEx. You know, like, maybe it costs $6 million to train, but again, like you said, that's built on top of the shoulders of OpenAI and many other people, hundreds of millions of dollars to get to that last $6 million mile. And then it's open source. And so while OpenAI is truly closed, and so is Meta and Claude and all these other LLMs, we have this arms race going on between China and the United States.

• 6:40David Hoffman?

  But then if it continually ends up in the hands of the open source community just, you know, three, six, nine months later, and we get all these things for free because of this arms race competition, I'm pretty happy with the way that that kind of unfolds.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  I mean, it's deflationary. It's deflationary in the purest sense of the word. And as a consumer, you could not want anything more from technology than to deflate the price of goods. If you remember, back early in the AI arms race, there was a leak, there was like an internal document at Google that got leaked that basically said, there's no mode in AI. And that it doesn't, like, open source is so good and it's getting so much better so quickly, that even though the frontier labs are always two to three months ahead on the state of the art, open source catches up really fucking fast. And we have just seen that with R1. R1 is as good as O1. Literally, okay, so O3 is supposed to be the new OpenAI model, which is definitely better than R1.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  But R1 is basically 1/20 of the cost of O1, and it's getting the same performance. That's crazy. That's incredible. And that's awesome for everybody involved. What it tells you is that, so one thing, it means that the moats that these AI companies are supposed to have are not what we previously imagined. And also means the moat for Nvidia is probably not what we previously imagined. But what it is, is very good for decentralized AI. It's very good for open source, very good for homebrew. And this is the moat that, this is the part of the pool that we play in. You know, on the crypto side, we are all about the democratization of technology and what that can happen when that goes in the hands of individual users and entrepreneurs. A world where OpenAI owns all the intelligence, or Google owns all the intelligence, is a world that sucks for us. There's nothing for us to do because we've got all the crappy models, you know, sitting here in the reject pile.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  That's not the world we're living in right now. So that is something I'm, as an investor and as a crypto person, very, very excited about.

• 8:26David Hoffman?

  Haseeb, you said this is something that the markets got wrong with the response to Nvidia price tanking 17% on the back of DeepSeek. We did a podcast with this individual, Jeffrey Emanuel, who wrote this short case for Nvidia stock. He released this on Friday. And when we did the podcast with him, he talked about how this article, which it's a 60-minute read, it's very dense, it's very technical. This guy clearly knows his stuff. He was telling me about the Google analytics for this article where it started off just, you know, 50, 100 people reading it as soon as he published it. But over the weekend, it just ballooned to 2.5 million views, starting in the New York Manhattan area and then quickly moving to Silicon Valley.

• 9:07David Hoffman?

  And I can't remember the name of the town that Nvidia is in, but also a lot of right in the right where Nvidia headquarters are. And so he is actually taking the credit for the market movement because it happened. He wrote it on Friday and the market processed it over the weekend and then it dumped on Monday.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  I think it's correct, by the way. I think it's correct.

• 9:24David Hoffman?

  You think he actually did that?

• 9:25Speaker 01

  I saw this over the weekend. I think it was probably the spark that started it.

• 9:28David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  I don't know that it wouldn't have happened anyway at some point when Wall Street finally adjusted what this meant. Because clearly it has implications for Nvidia, right?

• 9:36David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  If the AI movement is all happening within the US, then Nvidia is is good. Nvidia is in great shape. If people are not open sourcing top tier models that are more efficient than OpenAI models, then okay, that's great for Nvidia. Nvidia wants everything to be closed and wants everything to be sold to commercial, you know, commercial enterprises that are going to be, um, you know, charging huge markups on their on their models.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  This is not the world that we're living in now. And Wall Street would eventually figure that out. I I think that being said, I I agree that Nvidia's stock should have gotten hurt. And obviously it did, right? But also the market realized that overreacted. So it went down 70% on Monday and then it went back up 9% the next day. Which was not only the biggest single market cap loss for any company ever in a single day. But then it was one of the biggest market cap gains for a company on any given day because it just rebounded so much the next day. Now it's still down from the high quite a bit, but I think the the the lesson of the story is that it dragged down a lot of other stuff with it, which is what I think was incorrect, right?

• 10:38Speaker 01

  Taking what the what the prospects for Nvidia and basically their moat in in hardware and saying, okay, this should affect how you think generally about risk assets. That is what I think is a mistake because I think it's actually good for all of the risk assets that AI is cheap. I think it's great for all of us. We actually don't want a world where AI is expensive.

• 10:55David Hoffman?

  Right. Totally. All right, let's get into the crypto native markets. Let's talk about Bitcoin. Bitcoin started the week at $101,000.5 and then it's up 3% on the week to where it is now at $105,000. Ether, not doing as great, started the week at $3,200, ending the week at $3,250. And then, of course, I think something to pay attention to is the Bitcoin Ether ratio. I don't know how closely you pay attention to the ratio, Haseeb, but it did very briefly go below the point 03 number. It is at above the point 03 right now, almost at point 031, but it did hit point 02999, which is where Udi Wertheimer and the famous ETH BTC breaking

• 11:38David Hoffman?

  down below a point 03 watch party. That was that famous level. Give me your sense of the crypto markets right now. Bitcoin's still pretty high, Ether doing the same thing it's been doing for two years. Just give me your sense on the markets, Haseeb.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there was a big sell-off triggered by the deep-seek fears over the weekend, and it doesn't feel like alts have really recovered. It seems like mostly everything's been bleeding for the last month. The only thing that really has had any kind of signs of life are Solana. Even Solana is way off the high. So it hit the 280s right after Trump joke and launch, Trump and Melania. And since then, it's just been, you know, it's done the best of all alts, but most alts across the board have just bled and haven't really seemed to be able to find their footing with respect to what there is to look forward to in this market.

• 12:28David Hoffman?

  Did you see this tweet from Ben Cowan? I thought this was super interesting. He goes, "The reason why the vibe is so off despite $100,000 Bitcoin is because the Advanced Decline Index, ADI, of the top 100 cryptocurrencies have been in a downtrend since 2021." Now, the Advanced Decline Index, that's not really a metric I see cited too often, but I think the general vibe is of the top 100 coins, most of them are in a just a downtrend for the last two years. And so there are some exceptions, like you said, Solana, Dogecoin is an exception, Ripple is an exception, Bitcoin is an exception. But other than that, everything is mostly on a pretty solid downtrend for the past two years, and that's why Ben Cowan is saying. The vibe just feels off vibes feel bad. So I'm calling this the middle of the market,

• 13:11David Hoffman?

  which is, you know, these are startups. These are startups that you and I invest in. This is people's jobs. This is, you know, the BD in the industry and the middle of the market has not really felt the same a price appreciation that some of the outliers have like Bitcoin, Solana, all these other ones. What's your take on this?

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, there is definitely a bit of a vibe session going on right now where like, look, if you look in absolute terms, right? The biggest crypto assets, which are Ethereum, sorry, obviously not Ethereum, Ethereum has been bleeding, but if you look at Bitcoin, Ripple, Solana, BNB, those are actually doing fairly well. And then the big middle of the market is just really hurting. And things, a lot of things are down even from March last year, which is a little bit crazy, right? That was when the ETF launched and we were like, oh, well, maybe that's going to get us to this great bright future. You know, a lot of things haven't hit their high even, even after Trump got elected. They didn't hit the high from, from, from March last year. So it does feel like, okay, it's more than just macro. There's a general lack of enthusiasm about what's going on in kind of tech crypto

• 14:12Speaker 01

  outside of Solana. And I think that, I think that's likely to continue for a while until there is some real energy around it. The reality is that Bitcoin and the meme coin complex are really taking up most of the energy, which is one, you know, Bitcoin is this big macro political story. And then meme coins, I mean, now it's become a political story, but before that it was just kind of this, you know, frenetic, you know, up and down, you know, kind of retail consumer frenzy. And besides that, there's not, nobody really wants to hear about what's going on in the technology side. Yeah, exactly. Like, I mean, when's the last time you heard anyone get excited about ZK or anybody get excited about, you know, privacy coins or anything like that?

• 14:50David Hoffman?

  I think people are just tired about promises, like crypto loves to write promises and we don't really fulfill promises too much. And I think people like crypto outsiders and even crypto insiders are just kind of fatigued about all the promises that we write.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  I think that's right. I think there's also an element of, it's not that I think, you know, when I look at all these founders, they did build the thing, but they didn't get everybody in the world to use the thing. And that's one of the virtues, of course, of Solana is that they've been so focused on just getting users on the chain and getting adoption and getting into people's hands. And very few entrepreneurs are actually well-equipped to be able to do that. A lot of them don't really have the distribution advantage that a Binance or, you know, some of these big exchanges that, that really know how to get things in the hands of consumers have. So you've got, you know, the bases of the world, you've got the Solanas of the world that really have that direct relationship with consumers and can tell that bigger story about, hey, here's why this thing is going to go in your pocket and become a part of your financial life. Most people don't have

• 15:46Speaker 01

  that ability. And so I think you're seeing this kind of, this difficulty of entrepreneurs who really have, some of them really have the goods, but they're just not able to really reach people's wallets. And I think that, that does wax and wane over the course of a cycle, just because people are more interested in trying new things and people care more about some of these technology stories that are, that are undergirding this, all this stuff. But I agree with you. Most people feel like, hey, I haven't seen anything. All I see is, you know, tokens go up. So, all right, I'll play tokens go up.

• 16:16David Hoffman?

  Right. I'll play the token go up game. Despite the bad vibes, you're at $3.7 trillion in total market cap for the industry. I think that's just one, maybe $200 billion off of the all-time highs. So where you are nearing the market cap all-time high, I mean, that's definitely helped by the fact that Bitcoin is also at all-time highs. And then also, Ripple is just $80 billion from flipping Ethereum. I'm keeping an eye on that. We're gonna skip, sorry?

• 16:43Speaker 01

  An FTV, not a

• 16:44David Hoffman?

  An FTV, yes, an FTV, yeah, very different number on the Ripple side. We're gonna skip the Bitcoin and Ether ETFs this week because not too much action happened there. But nonetheless, there was some action in the ETF land. Bitwise filed for a Dogecoin ETF, which I always thought this just made sense as the third possible ETF to come into the fray. I know a lot of people want the Solana ETF and I'm sure we will eventually get one, but Dogecoin just has the lindy. It's been around for forever. And then we also, on the On the backs of that saw Tuttle Capital filed for 10 different leveraged crypto asset ETFs. So a 2X long XRP, 2X long Solana, 2X long Trump coin, 2X long Melania coin ETFs.

• 17:28David Hoffman?

  These are all ETFs, Cardano, Chaining, Polkadot, Bonk. So, I mean, I agree with the Bonk, or excuse me, the Dogecoin ETF. That one makes sense. And then we see a splattering of some leveraged long meme coin ETFs. So a tale of two very different stories here. Has he, give me your takes on the ETF side of the story.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  I don't know that I have that much of a take.

• 17:49David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Okay. What do you think about the Dogecoin ETF though? Does Dogecoin deserve an ETF?

• 17:53Speaker 01

  It makes sense. I think Dogecoin is liquid enough, global enough that, yeah, why not put an ETF around it? I think on some level, the SEC just doesn't want to. I don't know that it's like, oh, well, this is a non-registered security. I think it's just that, ah, ah, ah, just please don't make me do this.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  I think at some point, once the, because that's the thing is that once you list Dogecoin, how are you not going to list everything, you know? Are you not going to, are you going to say no to all the other meme coins? So I think there's some just kind of dragging their feet, most likely, when it comes to Doge. I think Solana, there's probably more appetite of like, oh, hey, this is a real thing. I can see why it's important to give retail investors access to this in a, in a ready vehicle. But I would kind of suspect before we get a Doge ETF and before we get a Solana ETF, I'd expect we'd probably see a MicroStrategy for Doge or a MicroStrategy for, for Solana. Like, I actually think if those were to, you know, some kind of zombie in the NASDAQ decides, you know what, we're just going to buy a bunch of, you're going to issue debt and we're going to use it to go buy some Doge. I think it would actually be super well received.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  And that would be the first way that you could go into a brokerage account and get exposure to Doge, get exposure to Solana. And I expect that's probably the order of operations, is that that probably happens first before we actually get the ETFs.

• 19:05David Hoffman?

  Why haven't we seen that? We, I have heard discussions of, oh, I'm building the, you know, MicroStrategy for Ethereum. Or I'm building, or this is the MicroStrategy for Solana. Why haven't we seen anything like that?

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Well, so one, there's not a lot of Michael Saylor type people out there.

• 19:20David Hoffman?

  You have to be a little crazy leader.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  You kind of need to be chest thumpy. You got to know how to like hype people up in Wall Street. It's a different skill than hyping people up in crypto. And so there is actually this thing in Canada that's like a Solana micro strategy.

• 19:34David Hoffman?

  Yes, I was looking at it yesterday. It's like Sol CF. But they do, they do a bunch of diversified investments in cannabis and like other.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know that much about it.

• 19:45David Hoffman?

  So like I thought, I was looking at this last night, funny you bring this up. And like, I'm of the mind that if they pivoted 100% to Solana and they sold all of their other stuff and they just only were a concentrated Solana bet, then I'm interested.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  It's currently at a 50 million dollar market. Trading at a big premium to NAV. Yeah. I mean, it's a huge premium to NAV, which is kind of like, okay, at this point, how much more of a premium NAV do you expect it to have when it goes full Solana? You know, it's already at like, what is it, 7, 8x?

• 20:09David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  Premium to NAV?

• 20:10David Hoffman?

  Mm hmm.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  Something like that, last time I saw it.

• 20:12David Hoffman?

  Something small, yeah.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, that's not small, right? If you're 7x your NAV.

• 20:18David Hoffman?

  Yes, but it's that, it's a very large premium to NAV, but its market cap is only $50 million. And so like, it doesn't have that much juice to fire into buying Sol.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  Fair enough, fair enough. Yeah. So, yeah, but that's the thing. Canadian capital markets versus US capital markets, very different. Right. So US is just so freaking big that if you can do, if you can, if you can target US retail and get them to say like, oh, I can finally buy out of my 401k some Solana or some Doge or whatever. I think, I think that thing would go crazy.

• 20:49David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. The price has moved in the last like two weeks or so since they are buying Solana. So I think people are making that speculative bet. Let's go into the FOMC. We had an FOMC meeting, which the recap says, central bank is in no hurry to cut rates again. So the Fed is keeping the interest rate target currently to where it is at 4.25 to 4.5%. It warned that inflation remains somewhat elevated. Analysts agree that the pause in the rate cut signals that the Fed is going to make a more cautious approach. Powell said that there will be a more patient approach to policy adjustments and they will need. See signs of clear progress on inflation or weakness in the job market to change their stance.

• 21:31David Hoffman?

  But also during the speech, Jerome Powell also made a comment about Bitcoin. Basically, kind of reiterating what the repeal of Sab 121 just says, which is banks are perfectly able to serve crypto customers. And we, as the Fed, are like totally fine with that. Haseeb, do you follow FOMC meetings at all? Like, what's your take here?

• 21:50Speaker 01

  I mean, I usually just see what happens afterwards. Unless it's a particularly spicy meeting, I think everyone kind of knew what the answer was going to be.

• 21:55David Hoffman?

  Exactly.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  Fed's not going to cut, they're going to take a kind of conservative stance of like, hey, we'll wait and see. So I think this FOMC meeting, kind of a nothing burger.

• 22:04David Hoffman?

  Exactly, yeah. Par for the course. All right, coming up next, the crypto executive order that Trump just signed. What is in it? Because it's more than just a national stockpile of crypto, although that was the main headline. The Czech Republic will vote on adding Bitcoin to their central bank reserves. And a different central bank holds $500 million of exposure to not Bitcoin, but micro strategy. Everyone place your bets as to what central bank you think that is. And we're going to get to all of this and more. But first, I want to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible, especially Uniswap. It's a browser wallet, it's a mobile wallet, it's a place where I trade my tokens. It's one of the best places to trade in DeFi. Check them out, we're going to go hear from them right now. Are you ready to swap smarter? Uniswap apps are simple, secure, and seamless tools that crypto users trust.

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• 23:31David Hoffman?

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• 24:14David Hoffman?

  Layer twos unify Ethereum, L1s fragmented. By becoming a layer two, Cello leads the way for other EVM-compatible layer ones to follow. Follow Cello on X and witness the great Cello happening, where Cello cuts its inflation in half as it enters its layer-two era and continuing its environmental leadership. Trump signed the executive order strengthening American leadership in digital financial technology. This happened last week and we also have crypto and AIs are David Sacks, who is just standing over Trump's shoulder, telling Trump exactly what he's about to sign.

• 24:48David Hoffman?

  I've had that experience.

• 24:51David Hoffman?

  And Trump says, "This is gonna make the crypto go up," right? And David Sacks goes, "Absolutely, under your leadership, sir." And I thought that was just hilarious. Okay, so what is in the executive order? Okay, so the first one is it establishes a working group. "We'll design a federal regulatory framework for digital assets, including stablecoins, to provide clarity and support for innovation in that sector." And it also mandates an evaluation of the feasibility of creating a national digital asset stockpile. It is not mandated to create a strategic reserve of crypto. It mandates the evaluation of the feasibility of creating a national digital asset stockpile. So a couple of steps removed.

• 25:36David Hoffman?

  But there's also a good number of other things that are in this executive order. I think I just want to kind of read them out.

• 25:43David Hoffman?

  I just read the first one, the second one. Protecting and promoting the ability of individual citizens and private sector entities alike to access and use for lawful purposes, open public blockchains without persecution, including the ability to develop and deploy software, to participate in mining and validating, to transact with other persons without unlawful censorship, and to maintain self custody of digital assets. Pretty much encompassing thumbs up to everything we do in crypto. The next one, promoting the sovereignty of the United States dollar, including through the development of dollar backed stable coins worldwide. Next, promoting fair and open access to banking services for all law abiding individual citizens and private sector entities. And last, prohibiting the establishment issuance, circulation,

• 26:27David Hoffman?

  and use of a central bank digital currency within the jurisdiction of the United States. Pretty much an overwhelming plus one to everything the crypto industry wants, stands for, believes in, and definitely a direct refutation of choke point 2.0. Haseeb, what's your take?

• 26:44Speaker 01

  I would actually take the other side of this. I think this, this executive order was kind of underwhelming. I mean, everybody, you saw markets kind of dipped a little bit after the signing of the executive order in large part because, one, markets are really anticipating executive order. When we didn't get one right when Trump did his first flurry of executive orders, crypto markets tanked a little bit because they were like, wait, what about us? I thought we had all these day one things you're supposed to do. And then the executive order itself, if you read the executive order, right? All it says is that, okay, I'm creating a committee.

• 27:11David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  And here are the things that I want the committee to focus on, is focus on, you know, no CBDCs, none of this, none of that. So the CBDC thing, I think, is kind of bullshit because it's a little bit of a, like nobody, nobody's been trying to do a CBDC anyway. Even Biden was like, don't do a CBDC. Nobody wants to do a CBDC. This is not a, wow, thank you, Trump, for saving us from all the evil CBDC creators. And so then, okay, like they want them to investigate the concept of a, you know, crypto stockpile. Which is like, okay, so we still don't know. So we have nothing, they're just going to sit together in a room and there's going to be a council and the end. So the answer is wait longer. So what you saw with Polymarket was that the likelihood of there actually being a strategic Bitcoin reserve

• 27:54Speaker 01

  or a crypto reserve or whatever, in the first hundred days plummeted to, I think it was like 14% after this executive order got signed, basically meaning like kick the can down the road. That's what this executive order means. There's nothing specific here. There's nothing that he hasn't already said on the campaign trail. It's basically, here's a committee. And it's kind of also what Biden did, right? Biden was like, oh, I'm gonna hear by executive order, I'll create a committee and that committee is gonna talk about stuff and never do anything.

• 28:16David Hoffman?

  Are you saying like the creation of a committee is kind of a way to just like defer and be like, look, I did something. I created a committee.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, he hasn't done anything. This is the definition of not doing anything. So it is it is an acknowledgement that like something will eventually happen. I'm not ready to do anything yet. Committees will meet and they will talk and TBD. So that's that's where we're at. So I mean, to be clear, it's not a ref, it's not a repudiation of his campaign promises.

• 28:40David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  It's a kick the can down the road, which is fine, but that's what it is.

• 28:45David Hoffman?

  Is it, would you agree with the idea that it is the weakest possible form of Trump being able to say that I've kept my promises?

• 28:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I think that's a good way. It's a good way to describe it, right? But it's definitely not what markets were looking for.

• 28:56David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  Markets are looking for something more concrete.

• 28:58David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Now, I think we we're likely to see that more from the SEC, from CFTC, from Treasury, right? They're more equipped to actually make rules and change the way that crypto is affirmatively regulated or treated, or, you know, same thing happening for the IRS, but it doesn't look like we're getting it from an executive order. So that's kind of, I think, why markets are a little disappointed because Trump could do that by executive order and he seemingly hasn't.

• 29:21David Hoffman?

  On in the European side of things, Czech Central Bank meeting on Thursday to vote, that's today at the time of recording, to vote on allocating up to 5% of its reserves to Bitcoin. This is an article in the Financial Times, which David Bailey screenshotted because it's behind a paywall. And so the Czech Central Bank wasn't expecting the Czech Central Bank to be looking to add 5% of its reserves to Bitcoin. 5% is quite a lot. And on the other side of things, Norway's central bank has revealed that it owns $500 million of micro strategy, not Bitcoin, but micro strategy. Interesting choice. And so I think this has led to people back on the United States, like Senator Cynthia Lummis, who's retweeting the the central bank of the Czech Republic news. If you're not first, you're last.

• 30:04David Hoffman?

  America must make a decisive action to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve and secure its place in the 21st century. CZ even tweeted out, imagine being the last government to buy on this news. Do you think that we as a United, as the United States, need to engage in the Bitcoin musical chair central bank game? Like, what's your position on this?

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Uh, my, my business is a little complicated. So obviously it's good for my bags.

• 30:29David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  That Bitcoin exposure. So I, I would love to see lots and lots of Bitcoin demand coming from wherever. And you know, it doesn't really matter where it's from. Um, the reality is like, this is not the vibe right now in DC. The vibe in DC is not let's spend more money. The vibe in DC is let's spend less money. Going and buying Bitcoin on the balance sheet as opposed to what most people think the Bitcoin reserve is going to be, which is just a moratorium on selling the Bitcoin that the government already seizes in criminal seizures. Which to be clear, the executive branch can do without Congress intervention. You don't need a bill. You don't need anything else. Trump could sign a thing tomorrow, an executive order that just says we're going to do that. But actually going out and affirmatively buying Bitcoin, like what the Czech Central Bank is proposing.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  That's insane for the US to do. There's no way it's going to happen, like absolutely no way. There's not the will for it in Congress.

• 31:20David Hoffman?

  And Congress controls the purse anyways.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  Congress controls the purse. So if you want to do new spending, you want to do new spending, that has to come from Congress. Trump cannot just do that on his own. He can stop things from happening, like stop these auctions that normally the Department of Justice does when it seizes, uh, you know, stolen Bitcoin or like Silk Road Bitcoin or whatever. Um, but yeah, he can't, he can't go and just be like, yo, let's diversify the government into some Bitcoin.

• 31:41David Hoffman?

  I think, Haseed, that's a very rational response. I think that makes a ton of sense.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Look, at the, at the end of the day, like it's also a question of what do you think the Fed is supposed to be doing? So this would be like the Fed going and taking some of the gold on his balance sheet and putting it into Bitcoin.

• 31:57David Hoffman?

  I don't think the Fed wants to do that. It just has a vibe.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. To be clear, I don't think the Fed wants to do that. I think Congress could tell the Fed to do that. It's usually not what the Fed, what Congress wants to be doing is like basically, you know, essentially like backseat driving the Fed and telling it how to manage its reserves. Normally we don't assume Congress knows what the hell the Fed should be doing because it's Congress and the Fed is independent. But in principle, yeah, that could, I, I guess probably that Congress could decide, hey, new law Fed has to have 5% reserves in Bitcoin. I think it would be, it would be kind of a bad precedent. I think for Congress to be doing that and just saying like, hey, we're, we're going to decide what should be in reserves because we're bullish on this asset or something.

• 32:35David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Look, I'm bullish on Bitcoin. That doesn't necessarily mean that I think everybody, every entity in the world should be, you know, kind of going and deciding to buy my bags. I think it will, like it does eventually make sense, but the reality is like Bitcoin is a super volatile asset.

• 32:50David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  The other thing, I think Lynn Alden pointed this out in an interview earlier this week is that. I don't also don't think it really matters that much. Like, the US dollar is not what the US dollar is because of what the Fed holds on its balance sheet. Like, it just doesn't really matter what the Fed holds on its balance sheet. Like, people buy US government debt not because of what our central banks hold in reserves. That's true for most other central banks in the world. People want to buy our debt because we're the US.

• 33:14David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Because of our enormous military might and our tax base and all the, you know, our incredible economy. I honestly don't think markets would care that much if we bought some Bitcoin or we didn't buy some Bitcoin. People would be like, wow, we need to do this for the strength of the American republic. It's like, that's not really true.

• 33:28David Hoffman?

  Okay, good, good takes. I like those takes. I like those takes. Let's turn to Heser Purse and the SEC. Heser Purse tweeted out on the January 23rd, which was last Thursday, last Thursday night. So this did not make it into last week's roll up. She says on Twitter, "Bye bye, Sab 121. It's not been fun." And then links to an SEC link of Staff Accounting Bulletin Number 122. Basically, repealing Sab 121. Rescinding Sab 121, which was the accounting rule that forced banks to treat Bitcoin and other crypto assets as a liability on their balance sheet. Meaning that if they wanted to custody Bitcoin, they say they would have to custody $100,000 of Bitcoin. They would need an additional $100,000 of just liability in order to backstop that.

• 34:12David Hoffman?

  Making it terribly capably inefficient to even serve that as a product. That is gone now. That is gone. Sab 121. We tried to repeal this last, in the last congressional year. Gained bipartisan support. Biden vetoed it at the last, at the last minute. But what does this mean for crypto? Banks can now custody crypto. They have the green light to custody crypto. And I haven't heard of any new banks just immediately opening their doors to this because this is now repealed. It's only been seven days. Steve, what was your, what was your reaction when you saw this news?

• 34:43Speaker 01

  I mean, it's just, it's just such a breath of fresh air that like, everybody wanted this. This was one of the most obvious Gensler overreaches. Was like, why? Why would you bake this rule? This is the craziest rule anyone's ever heard of, is that in order to custody assets, you have to have offsetting equity. No other asset is treated this way. If you're custoding paintings, if you're custoding, you know, firearms, like whatever. Normally, you custody something, all you have to do is hold the asset. That's it. That's what custody is. But they're like, no, no, no. Custody of crypto is so dangerous that you need not just 100 Bitcoin. You need, you need 100. You know, a hundred Bitcoin worth of dollars also.

• 35:20David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  On behalf of that customer. I'm like, wh- what? Do you know what custody is? Why would that make any sense? Like, it's just, it's just pure middle finger to the crypto industry. And it was, it was almost like, you know, it was the only thing that was bipartisan, even under the Biden administration, that, yeah, this is crazy. This is crazy. The only person who supported this was Elizabeth Warren. Both Democrats and Republicans were like, okay, I don't know about the rest of crypto, but like, this one is, is.

• 35:47David Hoffman?

  Ridiculous, right?

• 35:48Speaker 01

  So, just having this, you know, there's still a lot of work to do of like, okay, what does a actual SEC look like in a sane administration? But this thing was just like, okay, time to turn the page. I think that's what this represented more than anything.

• 36:02David Hoffman?

  How do you think this rolls out? Will I, in my Wells Fargo account, will I be able to see like a Bitcoin, like a Bitcoin balance? How do you think this actually rolls out into?

• 36:11Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, no. I don't think, no. I don't think they want to be custoding Bitcoin or crypto for retail investors. I think this is more of an institutional custody thing. Like, you know, for them to hold crypto for retail, like, they have to get comfortable with a lot of other stuff. Like, they just have to have their own infrastructure and stuff like that. So I think this was more affecting like State Street. That if you remember, a long time ago, State Street's one of the, you know, the biggest asset custodians in the world. They wanted to launch a crypto custody product and basically SAB 121 dropped. And they were just like, oh shit. Like, this literally makes it impossible for us to do this in any kind of business efficient way. Maybe it does eventually open the door for banks to do this for consumers. But I think for most of them, they were just using third parties, right?

• 36:56Speaker 01

  So they would have, okay, Coinbase is holding them on your behalf. And Coinbase is not a bank, and so therefore it's not subject to SAB 121.

• 37:02David Hoffman?

  Right. Last thing in politics section. Scott Besant was sworn in as the Treasury Secretary. This was known, this was accounted for, this is not a surprise. It is a crow, pro crypto appointee. He had a long career at the Soros Fund Management, including a partner and Chief Investment Officer of Soros Fund Management. So he knows how to manage funds. And he's definitely pro crypto. He has said crypto is about freedom. And the crypto economy is here to say this is, like I said, one of the many pro crypto appointees to the Trump cabinet position. Any, any takes on the, the appointee here?

• 37:35Speaker 01

  Very pro. I mean, Treasury is one of the most important roles. Obviously, Treasury oversees FinCEN, which is, you know, one of the, one of the most active overseers of illicit activity in financial markets. So how, like, the stance the Treasury takes is really important to what happens to us in crypto, especially when it comes to regulation and enforcement. But just generally, Besen is a really brilliant guy. Everything I've ever heard about him has been super positive. So it's a big difference between somebody like Yellen, who's kind of pure career bureaucrat, versus somebody like Besen, who's much more aggressive, comes from the private sector, has financial experience. And I think if you look at the cast of characters that Trump has put into some of these agencies, it's really bimodal.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  There are some who are incredibly effective, like really competent people who everybody's like, yeah, this person's a gangster. And then there's a bunch of clowns. And it's kind of, it's kind of like a toss up of what you get for each agency. You know, so you got the Cash Patel's, and then you got Scott Besen's. So for Treasury, it's like, okay, thank God, we got somebody who's like really competent and like a good communicator and smart. And then some other agencies, though, you have some crazy people and, you know, look, you just gotta call it what it is. But glad to see the Treasury is well

• 38:43David Hoffman?

  Right. It's one of the competent ones.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  One of the competent ones, because it's a really important role.

• 38:48David Hoffman?

  Well, Haseeb, I know you were just dying to know about the next steps for Gary Gensler. And I know Bankless listeners are just trying to figure out what Gary Gensler's next steps. He will return to MIT to teach. It's a headline here, "Former SEC Chair Gary Gensler Named Professor of the Practice at the MIT Sloan School of Management," where Gary Gensler will join both the Global Economics and Management Group and the Finance Group with a focus on artificial intelligence, finance, financial technology, public policy back at MIT. So I'd like to think, Haseeb, if you can't do, you teach. And Gary Gensler is now returning to his role as a professor at MIT.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  I mean, what's really interesting is that I have never seen a public servant, who normally, a relatively unsexy office, which is, you know, the SEC, becomes so widely reviled by young people.

• 39:41David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  Everywhere in the world. Like, compared to when he was originally a professor at MIT. Because he was a professor before he ended up becoming SEC Chair. And, you know, before that, he was CFTC. He was, I believe, a CFTC Chair in a previous administration. And CFTC is, again, generally pretty unsexy. Like, it's not the kind of thing that's gonna get you in the press all the time. As an SEC Chair, one of the most hated people of any public office I've ever seen.

• 40:04David Hoffman?

  Honestly impressive.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  And now, like, he, I don't think he knows what he's in for. Going back and teaching, you know, undergrads or MBAs. He's gonna teach kids! Like, you just hate this guy. It's like, incredible. There's so many memes about him. So I'm just, I'm just so curious of what his lived experience of being on campus is gonna be, when everybody out there who's like, under the age of 40, thinks this guy is just an absolute clown.

• 40:27David Hoffman?

  There's gonna be at least one kid who is in his class at MIT, who is also on crypto Twitter in the future.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Oh, there's gonna be so many?

• 40:35David Hoffman?

  I want to bring one of those kids on as a guest. As they go through a semester of Gary Gensler's class, I would like to talk to that kid.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  Oh, man. I mean, the Finance MBA Group at MIT, all those guys are slinging meme coins in their, in their afternoons. Like, I guarantee you.

• 40:50David Hoffman?

  All right, Haseeb, we're gonna get into some crypto native launches this week. Venice AI launched and made a big splash. Abstract, the Abstract Chain, launched with their main net focus on creators. And then Trump Media launched Truth.Fei, as well as some of the meme coins. I got a meme, Haseeb, Trump meme coin take that I wanna get your take about here live, since I got it in the tweet form. So we're gonna get to all of that and more. But first, I'm gonna talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. So we're gonna go here from Frax and the Frax stablecoin's got some of the best heels in DeFi. It's like if Circle, Athena, Maker Dow, all had a baby. And then you can put it on the Frax sole layer too. Let's go here from Frax right now. With over $1.5 billion in TVL, the M-Eat Protocol is home to M-Eat, the fourth-largest ETH liquid staking token, offering one of the highest APRs among the top 10 LSTs.

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• 43:02David Hoffman?

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• 43:45David Hoffman?

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• 44:29David Hoffman?

  alternative that does not collect your user information. And they launched their VVV token, the Venice token, on a base, airdropped to over 250,000 wallets. The criteria for receiving the token was kind of interesting. If you own some of the AI tokens on base, like AI XPT, Virtus Token, Arrow, DGEN, or also you're just a Venice user, you got some of the Venice token. Upon launch, the the token price soared up to $2 billion, fully diluted, maybe about, maybe about $300 or $400 million. And then, and then it fell down a little bit, you know, some volatility on launch. But then the Coinbase Assets Twitter account announced that the token was trading live on Coinbase,

• 45:12David Hoffman?

  which I think raised an eyebrow in the community as to how that token got listed on Coinbase so fast, inside of 12 hours, especially in contrast to some longer term base projects like Virtus, the one that has spawned AI XPT, which the VVV token was airdropped to, and has been a token on base for well over a year now. And so, and this was also a pretty fat airdrop. Users and airdrop people got 10s to $20,000 just from holding some tokens on on base. So congrats to the Venice team. But then also, what do you think about kind of the drama or the controversy, or just really this this news event as a whole?

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Well, a couple of thoughts. So one, I think that obviously there was a lot of drama around that time about, okay, why isn't Coinbase supporting the base ecosystem? Which really is coded for just why, why aren't they listing Virtus? My guess is that it's probably a securities law thing is that virtual is just looks too much like unregistered security stuff of like, okay, A X P T, it's got a developer. There's like, you know, only a few things that are actually on there that are trading meaningful volume. And this thing, you know, virtual's recently announced they're doing like a buyback and burn type thing or something like that.

• 46:18David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  Where they're doing like some real actual, you know, revenue from the underlying trading interface that.

• 46:24David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  Like, so all this stuff, I think, you know, to be clear, I think virtual is probably doing the right thing for themselves as a startup. But Coinbase, you know, there's no rules yet. Like, just remember, yeah, okay, there's been a new administration, but no rules, no rulemaking. And they're bound by their guidance that they've received from the S E C. Unless the S E C changes their course or changes their communication, they're not allowed to say like, well, Trump is okay with it. So, you know, I kind of know that it's cool. So my guess is that they're not, they're never going to say that in public, but that's probably what's going on.

• 46:51David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Of why they're not supporting virtuals. Now for Venice itself, look, I love Eric. I think Eric is a G and I'm very interested in what's going on in this whole space. But I'm not a big fan of the storytelling here around Venice. Like, the reality is that Venice, I think, is a little bit, trust me, bro. I think, I think it was.

• 47:10David Hoffman?

  You're talking about the, the claims that is a private, private L L M.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think it was, who was it? The other Eric, shoot, what's it, Eric Wall? It was Eric Wall, I think, who came out kind of criticizing some of the claims that Venice was making publicly. Because Venice, if you just look at their documentation, basically what they say is like, look, we, we run these models on our own. They say they get the compute from decentralized sources. They don't really say what they are. There's no proof that they're getting from decentralized sources, could just be them themselves getting GPUs on the cloud. We don't, we don't know. And then they say, we use S S L, which, to be clear, everybody in the internet uses S S L. It's not, that's not unique. And then they say, we don't retain the data. And it's okay. How do I know you don't retain the data?

• 47:56Speaker 01

  There's no like, oh, we use, we use Intel SGX. We use trusted hardware. We have some kind of private computation. We have, we have MPC. There are a lot of answers you could give that would be satisfying to a crypto user of you're definitely not storing my data. They, they don't have any such thing. They just basically say, we don't store your data. I promise. Which to be clear is fine, right? That's like a duck, duck, go kind of thing. Duck, duck, go just tells you, look, we don't store your data. I promise. And that's good enough, but to my mind, like, okay, if you're dropping a token and you're like painting this as a crypto project, what's the crypto element? Like, as far as I can see, this is just a, this is just literally like duck, duck, go for AI, you know, serving AI models. So I, I, I think he's heard that feedback and I think there's probably some roadmap there that he's probably yet to announce as he's ingesting a lot of this stuff.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  But I think it's a lot of the reason why after the initial airdrop, you saw this growing degree of skepticism about, is this really the big story? About decentralized AI and private inference? Like, I, I don't think there's actually that much on the technology side yet to be able to prove that out in a way that is beyond just, hey, you can't trust deep seek, but you can't trust me.

• 48:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Yeah. And I do think the, the skeptical muscle of the crypto community is very, very strong. We know how to be very, very skeptical. So I think that's fair. So like kicking the tires of things. Abstract mainnet is now live. This is a pretty anticipated layer two from the Ethereum ecosystem. This is a ZK sync. It's a ZK layer two. That uses Celestia for DA, offers native account abstraction. And it really is just hyper focused on abstracting everything that makes a blockchain, a blockchain, and just tries to make it as usable as possible. I don't have too much here. It's just brand new. So now people are going on to abstract and playing around and kicking the tires. Any takes, any quick takes about abstract?

• 49:37Speaker 01

  Thumbs up. Mark's crypto is always good.

• 49:39David Hoffman?

  Cool. Abstract is also a part of just kind of an extension of the pudgy's ecosystem. We did a podcast with Luca Nets where we briefly touched on abstract and the philosophy there. Also out of the pudgy's ecosystem is a partnership with Pez. That's right. The Pez candy dispenser. And so the pudgy penguins Twitter account tweeted out, we're excited to bring Pengu to life with one of the largest candy brands in the world and join. The Pez lineup alongside Pokemon, Disney and others, really trying to flex the meme of Penguin's weight alongside, you know, Disney. Saying, look, it's Disney, it's Pokemon, and then it's also the Penguins. Do you like, do you have a Penguin, Haseeb? How do you like the Penguins?

• 50:17Speaker 01

  I do not. I do not. I don't, I don't, I don't have any.

• 50:20David Hoffman?

  Did you fumble the Penguins at the depths of the bear market in 2023? Because I definitely did.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  I, um, I fumble everything in crypto. I only do, uh, long-term successes, short-term fumbles.

• 50:33David Hoffman?

  Also launched this week, uh, Symbiotic, which was the, uh, basically the big Eigenlayer competitor. Uh, it's been developing and it's been test net. The, the main net is now live on Ethereum. They tweeted out, after two years of development, five independent audits and code competitions were first to launch a feature complete shared security protocol with slashing. Uh, the, uh, restaking meta, uh, I feel like is in the rearview mirror. I think that was a very big part of the first half of 2024. Now people don't really talk about it too much. Uh, overall, what's your take on either, uh, Symbiotic or the state of, uh, restaking right now?

• 51:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it definitely feels like there's something of a low. Um, I think there's just a, there's not as much interest in financial engineering of staking and restaking and all that kind of stuff. There was a lot of excitement, but I think the market is waiting for receipts. And it's like, okay, you know, show me, show me where all the demand is for AVS is, show me where all the demand is for shared security. Um, I, I do think it, it, there's a good chance that it does materialize, but it's one of these things that it was kind of overhyped. And that always scares me as, as an investor, when I see there's too high expectations, almost always there's going to be, um, a, a come down and markets don't like come downs. Uh, and I feel like that's kind of what happened with Eigenlayer and to some degree with Symbiotic is that there was just too many people who thought

• 51:46David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  Things were already ready and it just takes time. I, I don't think, I don't think it's a reason to be bearish on any of these concepts. It just means that like, hey, it takes time to build an ecosystem, takes time to make shit work. Um, that's been true for every ecosystem that we've seen really successful is that. You gotta, you gotta mature, you gotta, you gotta, you know, earn your stripes.

• 52:01David Hoffman?

  I do think one of the reasons why it got so hyped back then is because there was just nothing else to do. Like in 2024, we had the Bitcoin ETFs. And then we, then we just kind of rotated around like infrastructure metas and resaking just, it was a net new primitive, it is a real thing. But then everyone else was just like bored, looking for things to do. And I was like, all right, I guess we'll just turn a mania into.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's the thing, the meme coin meta really started in like November of 23.

• 52:29David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 52:29Speaker 01

  So it wasn't true that people had nothing to do. People had plenty to do. It was, I think.

• 52:34David Hoffman?

  Not everyone likes meme coins, though.

• 52:36Speaker 01

  That's true, but okay, well, if people had nothing to do, what are they doing now? Who doesn't, who don't like meme coins?

• 52:40David Hoffman?

  AI, well, now, now we get to say that AI coins are not meme coins.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  Maybe that's your, maybe that's a, maybe that's a decent explanation then. I could buy that. I could buy that.

• 52:48David Hoffman?

  All right. Speaking of meme coins, this is a tweet that I got on, on your wall. You said, this was a tweet about the Trump at Melania meme coins. And when these things were released, they were touted as just a mass onboarding event. Hundreds of thousands of new wallets. The stats from Moonpay, which is where people without crypto assets are. Moonshot, excuse me. Moonshot with, that was where people would go get the Trump meme coin if they didn't already have like a Solana wallet. Or they didn't even know what a wallet was because you could buy it with a debit card, right? And so Moonshot users just exploded. Solana activity also exploded. But then 10 days later, after the launch of the Trump meme coin, we're able to look at some of that data. This is you retweeting Rob Haddock from I Believe Chain. No, this is, oh, this is a Dragonfly guy.

• 53:33David Hoffman?

  Oh, excuse me, he's your GP, he's your partner. Excuse me. And this is looking at the Chainalysis report about the Trump token. And you tweeted out, disappointing data here. Seems like less than 1% of the users who came in through Moonshot to buy Trump or Melania are doing anything else on chain. If this was the Olympics, the tourists are not doing anything else in the city before they leave. Basically 1% GDP retention. Just elaborate a little bit more here about just your takes and reflections about the Trump meme coin launch.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, so honestly, this was kind of what I expected. I was surprised to hear a lot of other people saying like, oh, this is a great mass onboarding event, this is going to bring a lot of people in. I remember having a debate on another podcast where we were talking about whether or not this was really going to be a good first impression for people into crypto. And I think it was, I think it was Robert Lechner who was saying, you know, everybody gets into crypto through one speculative moment. Maybe it was the ICO bubble for you, maybe it was DeFi summer for you, but for everybody, there's like some speculative thing that gets you in the front door. And everyone starts that way, and then eventually you find your way into the broader world and you start doing other things. And like, that's, that's, that's how everyone starts. You seem to get your front door. Yeah, exactly. And so this is no different than any of those. This is also this kind of, you know, onboarding event. And my feeling was that, no, this, this really feels different, right?

• 54:45Speaker 01

  This feels like, one, it's not about crypto, it's about this dude, you know, like Trump kind of made it about him and not about crypto or a technology. Like very clearly, Moonshot itself abstracts the technology away from you and is like, no, no, you can't, you don't want to touch Lana, you don't want to touch private keys, you don't want to touch any of that stuff. Here, use a debit card and we'll charge 1% fees for you to do all your trading and never have to leave the app, right? That's, I mean, that's basically Moonshot. Now, what people told me, this is the counter argument that I heard that I didn't believe at the time, I thought this is crazy, is that no, some percent of people will take their keys out or they'll transfer to it, to it like a phantom wallet or something, and they'll go explore the on-chain economy. You know, these are like the people who come for the Olympics and they travel through the streets of Paris and they go to the boulogneries and like, you know, why not? You know, let's see what's around.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  Basically, a rounding error of people did any of that. Now, it's only been a week, and so, you know, some people are like, well, you know, maybe it's too early, you gotta give it time. I think the right way to understand is that, no, no, this is a funnel, and if people aren't converting in a week, they're never going to convert. Like, these people, most of them lost money. And maybe this is part of the story, is that if they made money, maybe they would have stuck around and be like, oh, what else can I DJ about? Well, I can make money here, I'll make money there. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so if you think about DeFi summer, I think this is the best counter argument. They're like, well, if the Trump coin had gone up, then it would have been a good onboarding event, but it went down, so it's a bad onboarding event, the end. But I think this, I think it's just the irrational optimism about this thing. I think that net-net, the Trump token is going to end up burning more people than it ends up onboarding into crypto.

• 56:14Speaker 01

  And that burning, it takes, it takes a lot of work to undo that damage. That's my take on the Trump token and I've been pretty public saying that I think it's been a bad thing for crypto writ large. And I think we haven't paid the real cost yet. So, okay, it went up, it went down, but the Trump team hasn't unlocked yet. They unlock in three months.

• 56:34David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 56:34Speaker 01

  In those three months, then they're going to start selling a lot of this token. They own eighty percent of the supply. And we know what happens when a dev owns eighty percent of the supply. And they sell and sell and sell and sell. It's just absolute carnage. And I think that's what's going to happen. And the people that are going to be held holding the bag are not crypto natives. The crypto natives, they all understand FTV. They all understand the supply charts. They all look at the bubble charts. They all like, they understand all this stuff. They're the ones reading Twitter all day. And seeing like, oh, my God, look on chain, the guy, the devs are selling. It's the normal people who came in through moonshot.

• 57:03David Hoffman?

  Who just think it's funny, like, yeah, let's buy the Trump meme coin.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  Exactly. I love my president. I want to support him. You know, of course, he's I'm probably in good hands. You know, it's those people who are going to end up getting hurt.

• 57:12David Hoffman?

  Right. And I was talking to some of my non crypto friends who all saw the Trump meme coin news. And I think they anticipated, they naively anticipated, like, oh, everyone in crypto thinks this is great. And then when they asked me about it, they're like, David, you know that this is a terrible look, right? Like, this is a bad look. And so I think universally, people outside of the the Trump meme coin circles are like, that that looks bad. That's a bad look for crypto. And even internally, people are like, this is a bad look for crypto. Now, previously, meme coins have been touted by like many in the Solana community or just the meme coin trader community, that meme coins are the onboard, the retail onboarding mechanism. This is this culture coins will, you know, take crypto mainstream because they're

• 57:56David Hoffman?

  just so relatable and accessible. How do you think that this relates to that take? Is this now that this is here, do we think that this is validated?

• 58:05Speaker 01

  Let's be really clear. Trump, the Trump token is not a meme coin. It's a celeb coin. We've had celeb coins, right? You remember Mother, you remember like all these other like, we know what celeb coins are. Celeb coins are, there's one person. Who's responsible for keeping this token up, they own a huge portion of the supply. And there's not, there's not a meme, like, what's the meme?

• 58:24David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  Trump is not a meme, it's his fucking name, it's, he's got his face on it.

• 58:29David Hoffman?

  He is kind of a meme, though.

• 58:30Speaker 01

  No, no, no, but, no, no, this is not the meme of Trump, this is the man.

• 58:35David Hoffman?

  Okay, you're right.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  He owns, like, MAGA, remember MAGA token?

• 58:39David Hoffman?

  MAGA token.

• 58:39Speaker 01

  Or Trump token, like, the previous Trump token, those were meme tokens.

• 58:42David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  Those were actually memes.

• 58:43David Hoffman?

  Cause they weren't made by him, right?

• 58:45Speaker 01

  They weren't made by him, he didn't own it, it was just people being like, oh, isn't it funny? Like, we're gonna make a MAGA token, it'll go up and down, instead of the prediction mark. That was funny, people talked about it, it was like, community owned. And there was no single person who was gonna win or lose, right? It's like a big Ouija board, and we all control it together. That, to me, is a game, it's a game that we all understand what we're playing, right? What Trump is doing with, with Trump token, that's not a game. That's him making the rules of the game, it's him saying, you know what? Put your money in this piggy bank, and underneath it is an open bottom and his hand. That's what Trump token is, okay?

• 59:18David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  That's totally different from a meme coin. I have no problem with meme coins, I think they're basically zero sum, and they're just a game. If you wanna play that game, totally, it's a better game than a lot of other games out there. But, what Trump, what Trump is doing with Trump token is, is a totally different ballgame. And I think it's, it's in a way, fatuous, and gives away the entire game, to allow him to tell us, yes, I think that you own 80% of the supply of, is a meme coin. That's not a meme coin, that's a celeb coin with your name on it.

• 59:46David Hoffman?

  I do really like the delineation between a celeb coin and a meme coin. I think that's kind of an aha moment for me, I really like that. Cause, yeah, I've just, previously, any single person who has the influence over a price, always kind of gives me the heebie-jeebies. And that is not what meme coins are, meme coins are, like you said, like, everyone has their fingers on the Ouija board. I really like that metaphor. But, Haseeb, what about the possibility that you can use the meme coin to buy Trump watches?

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  Oh, thank goodness.

• 1:00:12David Hoffman?

  And sneakers, does that change your position at all?

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  I was worried I might not be able to buy watches and sneakers with my Trump token. No, it changes nothing, I mean, this is, again, this is like the celeb coin playbook, right? It's like, okay, token started going down, I now have to give it some semblance of value. You know, so, I think the same thing that Iggy Azalea did with Mother, is that she's like, oh, I'm gonna create an MVNO, which, okay, who, what? So I'm gonna get an MVNO, and you can pay your bill for this MVNO using my meme coin. Okay, now, it's like, okay, you can buy watches and sneakers from my online store, using my meme coin. Okay. Fine, I could also sell your meme coin for money and use it to buy the watches and sneakers. That's not a problem.

• 1:00:51David Hoffman?

  Right, right.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  So, to me, this is obviously a distraction from like what the main thing is about this meme coin is that he owns 80% of it and he's gonna dump it in three months, right? Or start dumping in three months.

• 1:01:02David Hoffman?

  Totally.

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so.

• 1:01:04David Hoffman?

  Let's look on a.

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  I've said enough, I'll stop ranting.

• 1:01:06David Hoffman?

  Yeah, totally. But, okay, one last Trump watch thing, and this is actually gonna be the last thing of the episode, is the World Liberty Financial continues to just dollar-cost average into a bunch of ETH. And so this is just Jesse Eckle tweeting out transaction after transaction, some like 12 hours ago, three days ago, five days ago, a week ago, of 4.7, 5.2, 4.9 million dollar clips of ETH, just going from Cow Protocol, actually of all places, into the World Liberty Financial DeFi app. I think everyone loves to say like this is Trump buying ETH, it's not actually Trump buying ETH. But then I also don't know who is behind World Liberty Financial and where this money is coming from. Overall, just what's your take about the activity, the on-chain activity of World Liberty Financial?

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, so for one, I think, well, so very clearly, we do know who the world, like, go to the website, it'll show you.

• 1:01:56David Hoffman?

  We know the team, yes, but we don't know their customers. We don't know where their, because they're, my understanding is they have customers who give them money and then they go invest it on-chain. That's my understanding of how this thing works.

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  Uh, no, no, the product's not live. So, they did a crowd sale. The crowd sale was doing very badly before Trump got elected. Trump got elected, Justice's son gave them like 60 million or something, you know, some very large sum of money, and then all of a sudden, the entire, I think, $200 million raise was filled, which I have heard, kind of a rumor, I've heard that a lot of this was Saudi money, that came in and basically was like, oh, here's a way that we can, you know, maybe buy access or something.

• 1:02:30David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  I don't know, total rumor, so I don't know if any of that substantiated, but the idea that suddenly a clip of 100-plus million showed up very, very late in the game after Trump launches meme coin. And after the election, so like even after the election, this thing was basically dead. There was like, you know, 10% of the crowd sale that was filled. Now they're taking that money and using it to buy crypto assets, which is great. Like you said, it's not Trump. It's obviously Trump affiliated. We know that Barron is very closely involved. So this is like Barron's pet project or something. And I guess Donald Trump Jr. is also involved. So it's like a Trump family thing.

• 1:03:04David Hoffman?

  Right. Trump himself is on the governance board over.

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  He's an advisor.

• 1:03:08David Hoffman?

  He's an advisor. Yes.

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  Supposedly, supposedly. Although normally his presidency was to divest from all your financial interests. Doesn't seem like he's doing that.

• 1:03:15David Hoffman?

  Trump is just making more financial interests, not less.

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  Exactly. So like, you know, launching a meme coin two days before you're inaugurated is a pretty gangster move relative to what most presidents are doing two days before they're inaugurated. So in no way is this an ordinary process of what we expect from a president. And I think this is par for the course. So, you know, obviously, right? We're playing this game of like, oh, what asset is we're literally financial gonna buy? But it's not Trump. It's, you know, three steps removed from Trump in terms of the actual decision making. Like these, these guys are crypto natives.

• 1:03:44David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Yeah. See, my man, it's been a pleasure having you on the weekly roll up. I couldn't do it without you. I need a buddy to go through the news with me and you've really been helpful here. I believe you might have already done a, this is the second podcast of the day for you. Maybe you, maybe you're doing chopping block tomorrow. But if listeners are not familiar with chopping block, tell them about it. And where can they go hear more of you if they just like to send your voice?

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  So every week, me, my partner, Tom Schmidt, and then Tarun Chitra and Robert Leschner from formerly Compound slash Robot Mentors. We do a podcast together every week, kind of like this, where we just talk about the news and what's going on in the world. So you can find it on the Unchained Podcast, run by Laura Shin. We do it, we do it once a week and they were a bunch of VCs. So we're, we have a very different perspective on the market than most of the people who are more trading oriented. But if you're into that, that's what we talk about.

• 1:04:31David Hoffman?

  Yeah. It's one of the few podcasts I have that I do not skip on a weekly basis. So thank you. I always appreciate other people making crypto content out there because I think more crypto content needs to be out there. And so tip of the hat to you, sir. We'll get all those links in the show notes. Yeah. Cheers. Just any last thoughts about just like, you know, we're in the last day, almost the last day of January in crypto. What are you looking forward to in 2025 in crypto land? What are you paying attention to? What's Dragonfly investing in? Just open, open ended question here.

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, look, I think there's been a lot of malaise in this market. Obviously, we've been whipsawing a lot from, okay, is Trump gonna do this? Is, you know, Trump token, what's going on, da, da, da? I do suspect that the rest of the year is going to be a little more calm. I'm always a little hesitant to say that because this month has been absolutely, it's just insane. But I do think like, okay, now all eyes are going to be on what do the agencies do? Is there going to be any specific rulemaking? And when do we get a strategic Bitcoin reserve? Almost certainly it's not going to happen soon now that we've had this executive order of, you know, hey, committees are going to figure this out later. So I think things are going to be a little more calm, which I think is good because the market could use some calm. And the reality is that in most crypto markets, bull cycles and bear cycles, like all the stuff that we see that's set up for crypto is really, really good. Everything is super bullish, right?

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  Like, things really could not be better from a regulatory perspective, from a demand perspective, from a vibes perspective. Macro is looking pretty solid. And so I think what all this should tell you is that be patient. Like, not everything's going to happen quickly. Just because Trump got elected doesn't mean that, okay, hey, everything's going to go to the moon all of a sudden and everything should be ecstatic. So I think on some level that impatience often finds its way into crazy assets, crazy narratives, you know, things going up and down really rapidly. As a VC, having been through many, many cycles and having invested through the long and shorter things, number one advice that I give to entrepreneurs and also give to just anybody who's in this world is be patient, you know? More things can happen in a couple of years than you think and fewer things are going to change in a month than you think. So I'd say chill.

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  I think it's going to be a good year, but it's going to take its time.

• 1:06:32David Hoffman?

  Wise wisdom from a guy who knows a thing or two about investing in crypto. Haseeb, thanks so much, my man.

• 1:06:37Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:06:38David Hoffman?

  Bankless Nation, you guys know the deal. Crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you are with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.