ROLLUP: Trump’s DeFi Project | CFTC vs. Uniswap | Brazil Bans Twitter | Coinbase AI | Polymarket & Bloomberg

This week in crypto, Trump’s new DeFi project sparked debate—is it legit or a grift? After the SEC, the CFTC targeted Uniswap—what’s going on with regulators? Brazil’s Twitter ban also made waves—what does it mean for free speech and crypto’s role in resisting censorship? Markets are asking if the 4-year cycle is dead, and Ryan has three takes on the lackluster crypto prices and what it could mean moving forward. On the bright side, Polymarket is now on the Bloomberg terminal, and Coinbase is looking to bank the robots—an exciting step for AI and crypto. ------ 📣 SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ 🌊 KELP | Deposit ETH with Gain today https://kelpdao.xyz/gain/?utm_source=Bankless ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🦄UNISWAP | BROWSER EXTENSION https://bankless.cc/uniswap ⚡️ CARTESI | LINUX-POWERED ROLLUPS https://bankless.cc/CartesiGovernance 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT https://bankless.cc/toku ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ ⁠https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/58?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E⁠ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/58?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 2:03 Markets https://x.com/Negentropic_/status/1830685688662040961 https://outlierventures.io/article/token-trendlines-2-bitcoin-halving-the-four-year-cycle-is-dead/ https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1831316995691671641 https://x.com/Fiskantes/status/1831302629651042637 https://x.com/SplitCapital/status/1831317921089642915 https://x.com/iamDCinvestor/status/1831318267367145492 18:30 Trump revealed more about his DeFi project, World Liberty Financial! https://www.worldlibertyfinancial.com/ https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1829141447087648796 https://x.com/lex_node/status/1831084542377206220 https://x.com/lex_node/status/1831105068952961399 https://x.com/nic__carter/status/1831145983847137451 https://x.com/worldlibertyfi/status/1831348462635397271 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1829500453152837828 32:07 Brazil banned Twitter https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1829778143449698764 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1831015509384364428 37:17 Binance exec Tigran Gambaryan entered Nigeria court on crutches https://x.com/_RichardTeng/status/1830869029705441553 41:47 Arbitrum released Stylus! https://x.com/arbitrum/status/1831020553211089243 https://x.com/joeykrug/status/1831367181885698392 43:30 Euler V2 is back! https://x.com/eulerfinance/status/1831331399619756375 48:03 Celestia releases technical roadmap https://blog.celestia.org/roadmap/ 48:39 Bloomberg added Polymarket election data to Terminal https://x.com/M_McDonough/status/1829166689516442043 https://x.com/shayne_coplan/status/1830984489259901203 50:13 CFTC charges Uniswap with illegal derivatives trading https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/8961-24 https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/SpeechesTestimony/phamstatement090424 https://x.com/MinarikLaw/status/1831363800542634459 53:11 AIs are now paying other AIs with crypto https://x.com/brian_armstrong/status/1829623778726592804 56:32 MEME of the Week https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1831386476841726226 59:03 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?

  Bankless Nation, it is the first week of September. It is time for the Bankless Weekly Roll-Up. This is back-to-school edition on Bankless. Kids are back to school, so I feel like we should be getting back to school. Back to work. Summer's over. Prices can go up. All these things.

• 0:21David Hoffman?

  Oh, my God. As somebody who doesn't have kids, thank you for reminding me that kids go back to school every now and then. All right, what are we covering this week, Ryan?

• 0:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  We got, number one, Trump's new DeFi project. Is it a grift? Or is it the most exciting thing to happen to crypto yet? We don't know.

• 0:37David Hoffman?

  First, the SEC comes for Uniswap. Now it's the CFTC's turn to go at Uniswap. What is going on? What did Uniswap do? If anything at all, we'll cover all that news. And Brazil banning Twitter? Some big moves in the world of authoritarianism versus freedom. We're going to get some takes on that.

• 0:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Also, the markets are pretty important to talk about. The markets aren't feeling good right now. So the big question is, is the four-year cycle dead? Yeah. Some investors think the four-year cycle is dead, David, so I want to bring you into that. And also, I've got three takes on why crypto performance, price performance, is so lackluster.

• 1:11David Hoffman?

  Ryan, Sean's original takes.

• 1:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not original, you know, borrowed, but I think good. Curated by Sean Adams.

• 1:20David Hoffman?

  All right, Polymarket is added to the Bloomberg Terminal. We'll talk about that. And also Coinbase is working to bank the robots. The first-ever AI-to-AI transaction using crypto rails. A lot of big stuff happened this week, so we're going to talk about all that and more. But first, a message from our friends and sponsors over at Kelp Dow, who want to save you time with their brand-new product, Gain, so you can farm all the airdrops possible just using the Gain Vault. Gain will do it for you. You can deposit ETH, RSE, or other LSTs and get access to rewards from multiple Layer 2 networks, restaking platforms, or other DeFi opportunities with just a single click. So you can stop doing all that farming yourself and just use the Kelp Dow Gain Vault to do that for you. There is a link in the show notes to get started. You can withdraw as well at any time. It's non-committal.

• 2:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, let's get to the market this week, David. I'm feeling like we have a down week. Is that right? What are the charts telling us on Bitcoin?

• 2:08David Hoffman?

  It wasn't great.

• 2:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah?

• 2:10David Hoffman?

  Have an up week when on Monday, the trad markets just got clobbered by some just like kind of bearish macro news, something about the jobs. We don't have that in the agenda this week, but as a result, crypto markets also not doing so great either. Bitcoin started the week at $60,000, down 6.2% this week, currently at 56,600. So remember, okay, Ryan, last week, we did this whole segment about how October was the most bullish month for Bitcoin, like historically. It's the month that Bitcoin goes up the most, October. What month is it right now?

• 2:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's not October. I know that. And we started it's back to school September. Yep.

• 2:47David Hoffman?

  So it is actually, September happens to be the most bearish month for Bitcoin. In the same way that October is the most bullish, September is on average, apparently the most bearish month. So I don't know why we did that segment last week, but since this month is September, this is apparently allegedly the most bearish month that is has historical Bitcoin price.

• 3:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Our message was like basically just, you know, don't look at prices for September and come back in October. And that remains true. So I'm looking at this column for September. This is all the way Bitcoin price all the way back to 2011. And the most red on the monthly of any month is very much September. The most blue is October. Well, actually, blue, yeah, October is a pretty good month.

• 3:30David Hoffman?

  That makes sense that the worst investments are back to back with each other because then like October is just like the bounce back out of the September dump.

• 3:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. So I don't know. I thought September would be better, but not starting out promising.

• 3:43David Hoffman?

  It's kind of funny that the first day, the first Monday of September that the markets opened, just everything just crashes again in the trad markets. And then it carries over, spills over into the crypto markets. Ether started the week $2,530, down 7%, currently at $2,390. Lost $150 on the week about also the Ethereum ETF flows, Ryan, looking pretty abysmal, not great. The ETF, the outflows, the net outflows every day has been somewhere in the single two double digits for the month of August. There was one double digit outflows on the 26 where we lost $13 million in total AUM. The first two days of trading in September. The 3rd of September, negative 47 million, and then the 4th of September, negative 37 million.

• 4:27David Hoffman?

  So it's over 75 million dollars of outflows in the first two trading days of September. As bad as it gets.

• 4:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, actually, so before we get too depressed, if you look at these numbers, the vast majority, in fact, almost all of it, more than all of it in both cases, on September the 3rd and September the 4th were actually from ETH, which is nice.

• 4:46David Hoffman?

  Oh, yeah, right. It's just like, for some reason ETH just had just two big days.

• 4:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes.

• 4:51David Hoffman?

  And then yesterday, man, yesterday, there has been, some 3 million of the 40 million outflows went back into the grayscale ETH, which has the lowest fees, but 0 million, 0 million dollars went into all of the other ones. BlackRock didn't get anything, Fidelity didn't get anything, no inflows.

• 5:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so but basically, everything else, the inflows are kind of flat, but ETH continues to drain. That's kind of the story that we're looking at.

• 5:15David Hoffman?

  Exactly.

• 5:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's bleak, but it's just like not worst-case scenario bleak. There are some diamond hints on the institutional side.

• 5:21David Hoffman?

  If BlackRock was outflowing, that would be a different story. That would be worst-case scenario.

• 5:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  That hasn't happened yet. Well, wait for later in September, maybe, for that to happen.

• 5:28David Hoffman?

  Oh, God.

• 5:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Things could always get worse. Before they get better, the total crypto market caps, where are we at in the week?

• 5:34David Hoffman?

  2.07 trillion dollars, hanging on by our fingernails above 2 trillion dollars.

• 5:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, here's the big question. You know how crypto has traditionally gone in these four-year cycles, right? So the bull market, and then we have the bust, all in one, like, nice four-year unit, and then we kind of repeat. And we've done this a few times in crypto, like, you know, three times at least. You're like, some are calling this, like, the fourth cycle. But the four-year cycle is dead, according to some investors. This is a report from Outlier Ventures. And let me lay out the case for you here and get your response to this. Basically, the fact that, following the 2024 halving, Bitcoin experienced the worst price performance more than 125 days after the event. So the price is now, so halving

• 6:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  happened in April, right? It's April, I believe. The price is now down 8% compared to previous cycles. Last time, last few times this has happened... We had a 22% increase, so 8% down compared to 22% up traditionally. And the report continues, "We believe that 2016 was the last time the halving had a significant fundamental impact on Bitcoin price action." Every halving gets more muted in terms of the, you know, like total percent of Bitcoin supply, so that would kind of make sense. And they're saying, basically, 2020, the reason that prices, Bitcoin prices, went up in 2020, that was kind of just coincidence. It was more to do with COVID and the liquidity injection than it was to actually do with the halving.

• 7:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  So, the conclusion is the argument that the four-year cycle still holds in 2024, but that the Bitcoin ETF approval just pulled for the demand is flawed. It's not true, this report says. The Bitcoin ETF approval was demand-driven and the halving is supply-driven. Anyway, basically, the report is saying, it goes on to kind of like offer some more data points here. The four-year cycle is dead. It's not a thing anymore. What's your take on this?

• 7:35David Hoffman?

  I think that checks out. The four-year cycle is and always was going to die. Like, you can't just have algorithmic four-year price increases. Like, eventually, that gets priced in. Like, you know, markets are efficient. The fact that, like, the claim that the 2020 cycle was a coincidence, I also think is very strong. We just had this idiosyncratic event called COVID. Idiosyncratic money printing happened to line up with the four-year halving. And the claim that just like the reducing Bitcoin inflation is just getting, becoming a smaller and smaller impact on the market also just checks out. So, I believe it. It makes sense to me.

• 8:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm not sure yet, personally, whether I'm ready to abandon the four-year cycle. Just because-

• 8:16David Hoffman?

  I feel like it's concurrently being invalidated.

• 8:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 8:19David Hoffman?

  We're watching it being invalidated.

• 8:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right now, but it's September, David. It's always darkest until the dawn. And by the way, it's not because of Bitcoin halving supply. It's more kind of the global macro liquidity that Raul Paul talks about so much, right? So, the tides of liquidity ebb and flow, and that tends to happen on these four-year cycles as well. Anyway, that's something to look at.

• 8:42David Hoffman?

  Supposed to be like internally to the crypto industry. That's like what we do.

• 8:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 8:47David Hoffman?

  I think if explaining it, justifying it due to exogenous factors, I think also is antagonistic to the idea of like the Bitcoin, the four-year Bitcoin cycles, which the rest of the crypto industry follows.

• 8:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, this is the conclusion of the report. It's time for founders, investors trying to time the mark to focus on more significant macroeconomic drivers rather than relying on the four-year cycle. They're basically like, don't worry about the four years. Just like go focus on other things that are happening in macro. David, I've got three takes for you on the lackluster price performance that I want to run by you. These are like answering the questions of why isn't crypto doing anything in this market? So here's the first one. Maybe we are in the show me phase of crypto. So.

• 9:28David Hoffman?

  What's that?

• 9:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  My base case is still that we get a strong Q4, crypto rockets, 2025 is going to be good. Similar to, you know, you did that episode with Ledger. On kind of like charts and what that looks like. And he's like, hey, this is just the calm before the, the big bull market in 2025. That's still my base case, but there is another theory, which is we might be in the show me phase of crypto. There's a fair chance that we don't get the new inflows, the new attention from investors. We haven't seen retail come aboard this cycle like at all. It's all the old, you know, crusty people have been in crypto for a while from last cycle. We're still here.

• 10:06David Hoffman?

  I do feel crusty.

• 10:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  I feel a little crusty too. But until crypto actually shows the world the new apps, it won't actually get the new retail interest. And like, here's, here's a data point. You know, after the dot com bubble and pop, it took Amazon 10 years to reach all time high after that. Like 1999, all the way to 2009. That's Amazon. Different rules apply for crypto. I'm not saying it's 10 years. But I am saying there could be this show me phase that the market expects from us this time around. They're like, hey, we don't believe it anymore. You can't get away on that kind of the hype train. We actually have to see something. So

• 10:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  the first possible reason why we've had lackluster performance is maybe we're in the show me phase.

• 10:55David Hoffman?

  Okay, that I mean, that that I kind of think checks out the dot com bubble like brought awareness about the internet to everyone. And so like, I think that's what happened in 2021. Like, everyone knows about Bitcoin. Everyone knows about blockchains.

• 11:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 11:10David Hoffman?

  Like, like, everyone knows what crypto is now. It's no longer a lack of awareness.

• 11:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  And it was also pretty accessible.

• 11:17David Hoffman?

  It was all.

• 11:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, it's also been pretty accessible.

• 11:19David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 11:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  So that checks out to me. Okay, so that's the first one. The other is the Fisk and Andy's take. Basically, crypto isn't the cool kid anymore. Okay, this kind of pairs well with the first take. He says this, another point on why pure narratives won't save us. Crypto is not the coolest kid on the tech block anymore, so it needs real products that people use. This cycle, AI is firmly taking the spot as the cool kid on the block. As digital finance has nothing to do with a digital super intelligent god, basically retail and investors, they've pivoted to AI. You know, there was a time where there was kind of a gap, you know, we gone through our mobile phone phase. We obviously prior to that gone on the internet, we stretched all the the web two type use cases.

• 12:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  And blockchain was the next narrative big tech thing. Well, the world has moved to a different narrative, and that's AI. AI is getting all this AI is the cool kid on the block, no longer crypto. And so that's another reason for lackluster performance.

• 12:17David Hoffman?

  Also checks out. I also think that's right.

• 12:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, one here is a third take that is maybe optimistic in a way, depends on depends on what happens, I guess, post November. But the poster says from Split Capital, a more unpopular take, crypto has never had a product market fit problem. It has only had a regulation problem. If regulations were clear and flexible for new products to work at scale, financial institutions would integrate directly with on chain products. The take here is basically like, the other reason for lackluster performance is actually not product market fit. Like, we do have the killer apps, the regulators just won't let us deploy them. They won't let us like legalize tokenization in a way that brings this to the masses.

• 13:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  So until we get through that, we actually, we have the product market fit, but they're just like holding the entire industry back. And this probably applies.

• 13:09David Hoffman?

  That checks out.

• 13:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so those are the three reasons for lackluster performance, and all of those check out in your mind.

• 13:15David Hoffman?

  Yes, the bleak side of this is that all of those are very hard problems. Like, okay, in order to get out of the show me phase, we need real products. In order to get the real products, we need good regulation. And good regulation, even with a more favorable administration in the White House, still will take time. Like, we still need Congress to draft good regulation and pass it.

• 13:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  So, all of this might mean this cycle's gonna take a little bit longer. I mean, that would be the conclusion here. I mean, things after November could possibly accelerate things. If you had the regulatory tailwinds in our favor post-November, maybe you get this faster. I think that's gonna be important on the regulatory side. But to your point, it takes a while to build things. And the builders are doing things in the background. I mean, there's, you know, like, poly market, there's great things going on, the layer twos. But it'll take a while to build out the, kind of, the mainstream use cases, probably.

• 14:13David Hoffman?

  I do really like this last take, though, where, like, crypto never has had a product-market-fit problem. Even though everyone's, the meme's like, where are the users? Like, we do have a product-market-fit. That's kind of a contrarian take. I guess that's why he leaves it being unpopular. But there is this idea that, like, if this is true, which I do kind of think, like, tokenization's super real. Like, Wall Street tromping at the bit in order to, like, make this work. There is this, like, pent-up value that's being created, that's not being expressed in the tokens, because builders are still building, progress is being made by the industry. When we finally get the stars to align, if that takes one year, three years, five years, the longer it takes, kind of the more explosive the bull market is as a result of that. Like, once we clear some of these cloudy skies, and then AI is no longer cool, and then AI learns that it needs crypto, and then we also get rid of the regulation problem.

• 14:58David Hoffman?

  Like, all of those things, like, line up. The longer it takes, the better that everything will line up. It's kind of my hot take.

• 15:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  The question, though, for people listening is like, okay, like, what should I do? And I think this is sage advice from DC Investors, kind of the consummate holder archetype. He says this, "Look, I don't know when we go up. I just know that I've held through hell and back, and hell and back, and hell and back, again and again. And I simply don't fumble the bag during boring times like this, when everyone is getting angry and anxious and things..." It's all over. The worst possible time to fumble the bag.

• 15:29David Hoffman?

  Just accept the bleakness because that's what that's what happens. That's the last thing that happens before things go up.

• 15:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  October is coming, guys. What do we have coming up, David?

• 15:39David Hoffman?

  Coming up next, Trump's brand new DeFi project. We know more stuff now. Grift, revolution in crypto. It's definitely unexpected. We're going to talk about some of the details and let you decide for yourself. And why the hell did Brazil just ban all of Twitter along with some of other products out of the Elon universe? So what's all of that about? So all that and more, but first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. If you want a crypto trading experience backed by world-class security and award-winning support teams, then head over to Kraken, one of the longest-standing and most secure crypto platforms in the world. Kraken is on a journey to build a more accessible, inclusive, and fair financial system, making it simple and secure for everyone, everywhere, to trade crypto. Kraken's intuitive trading tools are designed to grow with you,

• 16:22David Hoffman?

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• 18:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  The Trump DeFi project that the Trump sons have been talking about. More information has been revealed about this. There's this mysterious page I have opened up. It's called worldlibertyfinancial.com. It's coming soon.

• 18:43David Hoffman?

  World Liberty Financial.

• 18:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 18:45David Hoffman?

  World's Liberty.

• 18:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Very American. And the tagline is be defiant. This has been the DeFi project. And like, it's been unclear so far what this is. And it's not now clear entirely what this is, but I think we have a few more hints, a few more detail. There was a time a couple of weeks ago where it seemed like maybe this was like a tokenized real estate type project.

• 19:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it turns out that was wrong.

• 19:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it doesn't. Tell us, what do we know so far, David?

• 19:13David Hoffman?

  Okay, apparently there's metadata on the website that says, "The only crypto platform supported by Donald J. Trump. It will connect users to decentralized finance's best tools for secure, high-yield crypto investments." Which I think tells us two data points. One, the branding is that it's the only crypto platform supported by Donald Trump. So branding, marketing that to whoever is compelled by that statement.

• 19:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 19:37David Hoffman?

  And then it's a tool to connect finance to secure high-yield crypto investments. And So it's talking to like the capitalists in Trump's orbits that just really like Trump. CoinDesk obtained excerpts of a white paper that's apparently not publicly available. It is built on Ethereum. It will include a credit accounting system using AVE to facilitate decentralized borrowing and lending, and will offer a smart account and a brokerage. So I'm getting kind of like images of something like Kane's Infiniti, which is a more centralized kind of thin front end that hooks into DeFi in the back and offers like, kind of like wraps up and productizes DeFi as a service.

• 20:23David Hoffman?

  And it's really good UX, because that's what it's like one role is. It's like kind of a centralized UX login with email and password. And then it gets like, you know, savings and yield and investment opportunities sourced straight from DeFi. So it's kind of like white labeling DeFi, if you will. That's kind of like the vibe that I'm getting.

• 20:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, a few things that are positive, I suppose, right? Because when you hear kind of Trump endorsed and like be defiant and they use DeFi, you're like, is this really DeFi? Well, it's on Ethereum and it looks like it's using AVE. So there's going to be some smart contract platforms. And obviously, AVE is a totally like legit money market DeFi protocol. So some good indicators here. But what about a token? What's, what's the word on the, the World Liberty token?

• 21:07David Hoffman?

  Why so curious about a token, Ryan?

• 21:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  I just wondering.

• 21:12David Hoffman?

  So reportedly, there will be a non-transferable governance token, WLFI,

• 21:19David Hoffman?

  that eventually, I'm assuming, will become transferable. Why, why would you ever release a non, non-transferable governance token? So eventually, there's going to be this token WLFI. There's this like weird association with Do Finance, which is a similar like borrowing lending platform. It's like kind of a compound of a fork derivative, which hadn't been hacked for previously by, for $2 million, although there's currently no indication that the vulnerabilities that caused the hack are now part of World Liberty Financial's tech stack. People will be looking at this thing. So we're going to get more details when there's actually more code to be released. Four people from Do Finance are listed as World Liberty Financial team members.

• 22:00David Hoffman?

  Zachary Folkman, head of operations, Chase Haro, Strategies Lead, Octavian Longita, Smart Contracts Lead, and Bogah, a front-end developer, who is listed as an author in Do Finance's source code. So that is the World Liberty Financial team, apparently the previous Do Finance team members? Maybe this was an acquisition?

• 22:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that part's unclear, but it is clear that some of these are actual solidity, smart contract, DeFi developers. It doesn't necessarily bode well that Do was hacked in the past, although DeFi protocols get hacked. CoinDesk was reporting Zachary Folkman and Chase Haro. They've been involved in some other projects, one which is notable. Folkman previously registered a company called Date Hotter Girls LLC, and he posted seminars on YouTube on how to pick up women. He apparently has a history as a pickup artist. So he's the guy that's running operations there. Okay, I guess at some level the question is like, why are we talking about this? Another sort of Ave, Compound, Money Market, like fork thing? We've seen dozens of these.

• 23:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's because the possible next president of the United States is endorsing it. Has a DeFi protocol? It's kind of a big deal. There's actually a video for this thing tweeted from the official Trump account on Twitter. I'll play this in the background, but what is this? This is like clips from him glowing up crypto at the Bitcoin conference.

• 23:27David Hoffman?

  It's a promo video with a bunch of different clips of Donald Trump being Donald Trump. And then the speech in the background, the audio in the background is just excerpt from his Bitcoin 2024 conference speech. We were talking about Bitcoin, talking about crypto.

• 23:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, saying, "I want to make the US the crypto capital of the world." So he's like tying his campaign somehow to this project and promoting it in this way. Also, Eric and Donald Jr. will be involved. They're the Web 2, Web 3 ambassadors, I should say. Baron Trump has been purported as the DeFi visionary behind this. So a lot of members of the Trump family involved here. DeFi visionary.

• 24:03David Hoffman?

  Oh, my God.

• 24:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  One question I was asking is, is there anybody we know from crypto here? Like anybody who's been here, you know, in previous cycles? And one name popped up as an advisor. Corey Kaplan is an advisor to this project. Do you know much about Corey?

• 24:20David Hoffman?

  I don't know much about Corey. Other than that, he, I notice him whenever like I'm cruising through Twitter and maybe he like likes one of my tweets. I'm seeing one of his tweets. He's just got like my punk doppelganger. Him and I have the same punk, except mine has a smile and his has a goatee. And so I naturally know him because of, he just got my punk doppelganger.

• 24:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  You've seen him around though.

• 24:40David Hoffman?

  He's, he's been around. I've seen this guy for like multiple years now. And whenever I would look into this account, I'd be like, oh, I don't actually know this guy personally, but like it's just a normal person in crypto doing normal things, not grifting. I know that, like he hasn't grifted anyone.

• 24:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's right.

• 24:55David Hoffman?

  And so like been like a normal participant in the crypto, crypto Twitter universe.

• 25:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  He's actually a founder of a money market platform on Arbitrum called Dolemite, which I'm not used to before.

• 25:07David Hoffman?

  He was on, he was on the, um, the flywheel podcast with DeFi Dave, who I consider very trustworthy and legitimate. And so the fact that he was on that podcast means that he's like, passing some of my, passing my sift test.

• 25:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. So some legitimacy here, like this looks like a grift from the way it's kind of like marketed, yet we have real smart contract code. It's on Arve. Like what? Okay. So it's safe to say we have no idea what this is. Also, another person that we know, Gabe Shapiro, who's kind of like, yeah, a crypto legal guy on Twitter. He is involved. Apparently his firm is getting 1.3% of all of the WLFI token in exchange.

• 25:48David Hoffman?

  Probably even as like compensation for legal services.

• 25:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly. Um, and he said that, you know, not Gabe didn't do this, but his co-founder Alex did all of the legal work. And he said, I'm fully supportive of it while not knowing much about it. And I believe it's likely been a very thorough legal process with AM Law 50, law firm advising. So they've checked that box too. I mean, Gabe's outfit is a legitimate crypto legal company.

• 26:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  And the question I think people are wondering is based on this limited information, what is this? Is this a good thing? Is this just a grift? And I guess there's maybe two takes here. So the most charitable explanation of this and possibility, I think, is again from Lex note, Gabe Shapiro, who said, "My personal guess, and I hope it's presented accordingly, is that this is similar to the Trump NFT thing. It's a way for Trump supporters to signal their support and learn, experience a bit about DeFi at the same time. Aave is real DeFi. It just deposits into Aave, as far as I know." That's what Lex notes. So maybe it's just like DeFi, but for Trump supporters?

• 26:54David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Hey, do you like DeFi and Trump? Deposit into world financial, world liberty financial, whatever it's called.

• 27:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  So that is one possible explanation, but there are some more cynical takes as well, more on the grift side. This is Adam Cochran. He said, "You're supportive of it? The reskinned of the poorly coded Aave wrapper by a former YouTube pickup artist who had their protocol drained by doing no address validation on user-initiated loops. The hacker could just change the address to their own. You support that being promoted by Trump to a lot of clueless people?" Basically saying, like, this is just a me-too protocol by, like, you know, something that's already been hacked. This is a bad idea for Trump to promote this to, like, a whole bunch of people who are just going to deposit their funds without knowing the risk.

• 27:42David Hoffman?

  Nick Carter, who is very much in support of Donald Trump's candidacy and support of crypto, he says, "I think it generally damages Trump's electoral prospects, especially if it gets hacked. It'll be the juiciest DeFi target ever, and it's forged from a protocol that itself was hacked. It's also an obvious target for the SEC. At best, it's an unnecessary distraction. At worst, it's a huge embarrassment and source of additional legal trouble." I think, ah, what do I think?

• 28:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  He sees a lot of risk here. Like, this is-

• 28:12David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think there is a lot of risk.

• 28:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is keeping Nick Carter up at night.

• 28:15David Hoffman?

  Donald Trump is doing this flying in the face of the SEC. Like, what do you think Gary Gensler is thinking about Donald Trump? Like, does the non-transferable part of the token, is that going to stop Gary Gensler? Like, I don't think so. Like, that hasn't stopped him. Yeah, like, why wouldn't he?

• 28:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, if Trump gets elected, Gary's job is gone anyway. If he doesn't get elected, then Gary's coming after him. But so are a lot of people.

• 28:39David Hoffman?

  Gary versus Trump? That, I want that. I want that. I actually want that.

• 28:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  This, to me, this is a surface area for a lot of potential risk.

• 28:50David Hoffman?

  Imagine the most, the two most litigious people going after each other.

• 28:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, Nick Carter is going further. He's like, is there something that we as crypto Twitter can collectively do to stop the launch of World Liberty Coin? Like, this is keeping Nick up at night. He doesn't want Trump to go here at all. Because, like, okay, if this turns out to be some sort of a grift, a scheme, or a hack, I mean, imagine North Korea is looking at these smart contracts right now. And they're looking for holes. They're looking to probe this thing. If they can hack-

• 29:19David Hoffman?

  Imagine North Korea hacking the president of the United States DeFi project.

• 29:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, there's just so much surface area for risk here. And, I mean, in the past, when Alex Mashinsky has effed around, and SBF has effed around, and Doquan, they've all, like, done this. All of the costs have been socialized to our industry. Like-

• 29:36David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 29:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  The shortcuts have cost us a lot.

• 29:41David Hoffman?

  Are you ready for, I'm ready for, to give my official opinion.

• 29:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's your official opinion?

• 29:45David Hoffman?

  I don't think it's a grift.

• 29:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  You don't think it's a grift?

• 29:47David Hoffman?

  I don't think it's a grift. I think it's, and, yeah, well, it depends on what you mean by grift. But like, I think that there's no intent to like, pump this token and then run away. Like, I think it's, I think it's, I kind of, I'm closer to Gabe Shapiro's, this is like a brand affiliation thing, where if people who like, want to just simp for Trump, want to deposit in some Trump's AVE front end, then they can go ahead and do that. And, and like, you know, some people buy JPEGs of Trump, and they love them. And I'm like, I don't know why you do that, but I'm not gonna stop you.

• 30:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  So you think it's something like, you know how Trump, like, has Trump steaks, and he brands them with the Trump logo or whatever, and they're just steaks, but because they say Trump, he charges a premium? It's something like that?

• 30:32David Hoffman?

  Is Gary V selling like, like, little tiny, like, marker drawings of things that gets you like, drinks with Gary V somewhere for like, a thousand dollars? Is that a grift? Like, some people don't like it. No one is like, feeling harmed by it.

• 30:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think the problem with that is, like, that's totally fine if you're just doing NFT collectibles, and you're just buying JPEGs and such. When people are like, depositing, I don't know, thousands of dollars, millions of dollars in this thing-

• 30:54David Hoffman?

  But that doesn't make it a grift. I don't think that makes it a grift.

• 30:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  It might make it a very bad idea, though.

• 31:00David Hoffman?

  That's a separate conversation.

• 31:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, we'll have to see. The World Liberty Twitter account put out a whole thread on this, David. Rumors are flying, but here's the real story. We know the magnitude of what we're building and its potential impact on both crypto in our country, especially with the upcoming elections. And they're saying, "We're not taking any chances. We're working with top security experts in the world," and they name them, and they go through this whole thread. And, I mean, there's something here. We want the US pegged stable coins remain the world sediment layer for the next 100 years. Hard to know. I guess we'll have to give it more time. We'll find this out.

• 31:35David Hoffman?

  The Donald Trump DNA is when it sees a business opportunity, it goes for it. And so that's kind of what I see here.

• 31:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Don't screw it up, though. Please. We can't afford another one of these things. Let's just not screw it up. We'll see what happens.

• 31:49David Hoffman?

  I mean, he had success with the Trump NFTs. I think he gets to take another shot.

• 31:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  One more?

• 31:56David Hoffman?

  He gets another shot.

• 31:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 31:57David Hoffman?

  The NFTs haven't done anything wrong. They've been totally fine. He gets to go again.

• 32:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just a little bit closer to the sun. Just a little bit more.

• 32:05David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 32:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, okay, Brazil banning Twitter. I saw this in my feed all weekend. Like, what's going on here?

• 32:14David Hoffman?

  Okay, so Brazil's telecommunications regulator suspended access to Twitter in order to comply with a Supreme Court order following a months-long case related to hate speech and censorship. The judge said it will remain suspended in Brazil until it complies with all related court orders, including covering a $3 million fine. The judge also frees Starlink's bank accounts in Brazil's.

• 32:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow.

• 32:37David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So like, really going after Musk. Twitter refused to comply with legal orders to block accounts accused of spreading fake news and hate messages. Twitter claims Judge Alexandre de Morales threatened to arrest their legal representatives in Brazil if they do not comply. Musk has shut down all of its Brazil offices because of censorship by the judge, but the service has remained available. Okay, so then on last Friday, Brazilian court required Twitter to name a legal representative in Brazil, but Twitter didn't do that inside of the deadline. Musk argued that the Supreme Court justice was trying to enforce unjustified censorship. The judge insisted that social media needs Speech regulations. Here's a quote from the article. This decision implemented in late August 2024 is part of Brazil's broader effort to combat

• 33:20David Hoffman?

  disinformation and regulate tech platforms. Musk criticized the move, framing it as censorship and judicial overreach, while the court framed it as necessary for enforcing Brazilian law and protecting democracy. Okay, so that's kind of the news.

• 33:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's quite, it's quite the juxtaposition. Is this censorship and judicial overreach? Or is this just a sovereign country, you know, of Brazil protecting their law and protecting democracy? Right? Like, I guess everyone's forced into an opinion on this. I'll say one thing that happened as well, that is, kind of crosses the line for me, is VPN. So if you're in Brazil, you're a Brazilian citizen and you're using a VPN to access X, there's actually now a fine for doing this, up to $9,000 per day.

• 34:08David Hoffman?

  For users, for individuals?

• 34:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, for individuals. So if you're using a VPN to kind of like bypass all of the, like, the blocks that they have set up, the fee is $9,000 per day for doing this.

• 34:22David Hoffman?

  Wait, so wait, you can, you can, it's still legal to use a VPN in Brazil? You just cannot use a VPN to access X?

• 34:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Correct, which I think is on the path to making sort of VPNs for things we don't like, de facto illegal, right? Or like, like fined, because the list of things that they're blocking could just grow and grow and continue to grow. And obviously, yeah, and like, how do you, how do you enforce a VPN block of this? Like, well, don't you have to start tracking, tracing and tracking how citizens are using VPNs? Who they actually are?

• 34:56David Hoffman?

  It ends up anal probe territory.

• 34:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Basically. So, I mean, I think we should all just be able to agree that making VPNs like illegal in some form or fashion is like bad. If you're doing that, that's just like not a good thing. But what one reaction that Brazilians had is actually to switch over to completely open permissionless protocols, like Blue Sky. That's the Jack Dorsey kind of Twitter thing, I believe. They announced on Saturday. They had registered 500,000 new users in Brazil over the two previous days alone. So it became the number one app in the App Store in Brazil. So citizens looking to kind of like bypass this speech censorship. I guess my take, David-

• 35:40David Hoffman?

  Current population of 220 million people in Brazil and 500,000 of them signed up for Blue Sky in like one week? That's a big move.

• 35:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's not nothing. My take on this is it's concerning. Again, it's kind of like the Pavel case we were talking about last week. Like, I don't like where this is going, right? You arrest Pavel Durov in France, you make VPN access of Twitter de facto illegal in Brazil. We've got tornado cash developers getting jailed. I feel like this honeymoon period that we've enjoyed on the internet over the last, say, 20 years, between governments and the internet where they're like, "It's innovation, it's job creation, it's great for productivity." I feel like that's coming to a conclusion in the 2020s. Like, that's over. Now they're like, "We want control, this stuff is dangerous." And so if it's not decentralized and if it can be controlled, it will be either controlled or it will be killed.

• 36:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think the world's moving in that direction and it's concerning.

• 36:37David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, there's just this consistent, like, rock and a hard place by everything like this these days. Like Musk's version of X is not the bastion of free speech that he touts it to be. Like, the algorithm is just like out of control, anyone on Twitter can see it. Does banning it, like, does a sovereign country banning it mean that's the correct solution? Like, ooh, also yikes. Like, neither of these things are great. I agree with your line that banning VPNs is like, now that's like objectively a bad thing. But like Musk versus Brazil, like, I don't, I don't really have, like, I'm not going to align up behind Musk here.

• 37:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's hard, it's hard. Yeah, I think there's a lot of these cases that are going to be difficult moving forward.

• 37:17David Hoffman?

  Sadly, this isn't the only topic of hostile governments approaching these new technologies. This was probably the worst thing that I saw on my timeline this week. The Binance executive Tigran, who has been in custody in Nigeria for like six months now, there was a video of- That surfaced, walking around limping on crutches as he was walking into court, demanding like commanding that he is innocent and that he cannot be treated like this. He's saying, I'm not okay. This is effed up in the video as a guard as he's like asking for assistance from a guard to go walk into his courtroom. He's been denied the use of a wheelchair. The fact that he needs a crutch or a wheelchair at all is like ridiculous because he was fine when they arrested him.

• 38:01David Hoffman?

  So these injuries he's sustained has been sustained in Nigerian custody. This is a United States citizen. This is a Binance executive who was a United States citizen. Tigran has a background in anti-money laundering and counterterrorism finance. He was an official, US government official. He's been in Nigerian prison for six months without due process and has not had any support of any of our American governments or officials. We need to go get this man and bring him back to the States. The fact that he has just been left in Nigeria without having any sort of due process, being abused in prison for six months and like no one, no government official in America is just like caring about this is kind of egregious.

• 38:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, I've seen, you know, French Hill, Representative French Hill, who we had on Bankless. He's spoken out about this. I've seen a handful of Congress representatives speak out about this. The White House has been completely silent on this. And this is again,

• 39:01David Hoffman?

  Is it because of their crypto stance?

• 39:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know. I don't know. Right?

• 39:05David Hoffman?

  We need to send people and go get him and bring him back home. And put him back with his family.

• 39:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Negotiate hard, like, I mean, we,

• 39:14David Hoffman?

  Do something.

• 39:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, because he is just,

• 39:17David Hoffman?

  He is a hostage. There is a country, there's a country that is holding a United States citizen hostage without due process. Go get him.

• 39:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think it's safe to say he'd be, I mean, he's a crypto political prisoner.

• 39:29David Hoffman?

  And, um. Yes.

• 39:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 39:31David Hoffman?

  He's a political prisoner.

• 39:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Anyway, um, hopefully things turn around in that situation.

• 39:35David Hoffman?

  Moving on to more exciting things that are less depressing. Coming up next, the CFTC is coming at Uniswap this week. Are they the new SEC? Uniswap is collecting all the four-letter agencies badges, but also some big releases in Ethereum land. Remember Euler, Euler, that DeFi lending protocol that got hacked? Well, it's coming back. Arbitrum is releasing its much anticipated stylist upgrade. What is that going to do for Arbitrum? Polymarkets inside of Bloomberg and AIs are using crypto to transact with each other. Really cool stuff, much less depressing. So let's go ahead and get into all that stuff. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. New projects are coming online to the Mantle Layer 2 every single week. Why is this happening? Maybe it's because Mantle has been on the frontier of Layer 2 design architecture

• 40:20David Hoffman?

  since it first started building Mantle DA powered by technology from EigenDA. Maybe it's because users are coming on to the Mantle Layer 2 to capture some of the highest yields available in DeFi and to automatically receive the points and tokens being accrued by the $3 billion Mantle Treasury in the Mantle Rewards Station. Maybe it's because the Mantle team is one of the most helpful teams to build with, giving you grants, liquidity support, and venture partners to help bootstrap your Mantle application. Maybe it's all of these reasons all put together. So if you're a dev and you want to build on one of the best foundations in crypto, or you're a user looking to claim some ownership on Mantle's DeFi apps, click the link in the show notes to getting started with Mantle. The Uniswap extension is here. The self custody wallet created by the most trusted team in DeFi, Uniswap Labs, designed to make swapping feel effortless.

• 41:03David Hoffman?

  This extension lives in your browser's sidebar, letting you swap, sign transactions, and send or receive crypto without ever losing your place on the internet. Plus, with human readable transaction messages, you'll always know exactly what you're signing. Navigate a multi-chain world effortlessly with support for 11 chains like Ethereum Mainnet, Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism. No more chain switching or token importing. All your assets are right where you need them to be. The Uniswap extension is designed to level up your swapping experience with other Uniswap Labs products as well. Easily onboard to the extension using the Uniswap Mobile Wallet. Begin managing your assets across platforms and take advantage of smooth seamless synergies with Uniswap Web App. So go and download the Uniswap extension today by clicking the link in the show notes. Just another way Uniswap is helping you swap smarter.

• 41:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Arbitrum releases Stylus. All right, what is this, David?

• 41:50David Hoffman?

  Okay, Stylus has been under development by the Arbitrum team for a very long time. It enables developing solidity smart contracts in any language. So if you're a developer that knows C, C++ Rust, Go, Python, JavaScript, Ruby, Kotlin, didn't know that that was a programming language, you can now become a smart contract developer. You don't have to go through solidity, you can just use your normal language. And Stylus will collapse everything down into the bytecode that runs on Ethereum. So no longer learning solidity. So that means yesterday, 30,000 developers who knew solidity could build smart contracts. Now with Stylus, 15 million, as in like all the people who knows all the aforementioned coding languages. It's kind of all of them, yeah.

• 42:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's the great thing about Wasm is it supports all of these languages out of the box. So if that's been a holdup for some of these developers, hey, I don't want to learn another language. I just like, I love JavaScript, or I love Python, or I love Go. They can now write smart contracts in those languages. This is a really big upgrade. David, I remember a time when entire Layer Ones were built on this premise of like, we are like Ethereum, but we're better because we have Wasm support. And we can onboard all of the developers over the world, whereas if you're developing on Ethereum, you have to learn solidity. So now that's come to Ethereum, which is pretty fantastic.

• 43:06David Hoffman?

  I don't know anything about like deep programming like this, but it seems really hard. Like you don't have to write solidity, you can just go like compile straight to bytecode with other languages. I don't know, I don't get it. But nice job, Arbitrum. Congrats on the release. I know you guys have been working on this for a long, long time now. I would like to see how this works in the wild. Like, does this actually attract new developers? Like, what are the big strengths here?

• 43:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Another big release this week, Euler is back. Okay, so what is Euler? You might recall it as a DeFi lending protocol, has some permissionless features. It's sort of like an Aave or a Compound, like it's spin up, like all sorts of separate. Tools and support other assets. But in March 2023, it was hacked. I believe this hack was associated with North Griv, like a Lazarus group type of attack.

• 43:55David Hoffman?

  That was everyone's first impression. It ended up being this like fricking kid who was just like sat in way like punching way above his weight class. And who ended up giving all the money back over the month or so.

• 44:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, it was a lot of money. It was like $200 million, something like this.

• 44:09David Hoffman?

  200 million dollars, yeah. And Euler just did a fantastic bang up job recovering all the money, like contacting FBI. They totally figured out who the exploiter was. It was, it was, I can't remember if it was like a high schooler, some really young guy. Who just got totally outplayed by Euler. And then they were able to manage to recapture, re give all the money back. There was this huge like distribution process where like victims of the Euler hack were able to get their, their money sent back to them. But it also just like caused a really big stain on Euler, the system, because they got hacked. It was a permissionless, like immutable code system that if it gets hacked, it's like pretty catastrophic. Cause it's not like Ave or Compound, which are governance based lending markets.

• 44:53David Hoffman?

  This one has always been built as governance minimized, governance reduced. And so like hands off, no oracles, very, very bankless and but also very fragile. And so they have been heads down building V2 for ever since then.

• 45:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, cause usually after a hack like that, you'd throw in the towel, it'd be over. But like, you know, Michael Bentley, he put a blog post about this of how difficult it was. I read through that and he just like.

• 45:18David Hoffman?

  Just had his first kid when it got hacked.

• 45:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely terrible, but they're back and they have a pretty major release. This is a V2 of the protocol. So what does V2 do?

• 45:28David Hoffman?

  Okay, so V1 was just a similar lending protocol, similar to Compound and Ave, but just with different risk parameters. In V2, they're calling it a meta lending protocol. It enables builders to create highly customized borrowing and lending vaults. It also opens up the use cases for on-chain credit and eliminates fragmentation and capital inefficiencies related to isolating lending markets. So I'm going to call this similar to Morpho, a newer borrowing and lending application on this, on the scene with a different backend. Construction to kind of maximize ROI and minimize risk, but also really leaning into the same thing that Morpho is also leaning into, which is governance minimization. AVE has kind of dominated the centralized liquidity model of AVE, the centralized pools. So like all pools, everything is kind of pooled together in AVE.

• 46:14David Hoffman?

  Morpho is really segregated accounts. Euler's a little bit in the middle, but also really leaning into just as little governance as possible. So some benefits that Euler claims for its users. You can choose between risk-isolated lending pairs or cross-collateralized vault clusters, which is where it's similar, but also different than AVE. You can opt into passive lending or fixed parameter vaults and manage your own risk. Vaults can support ERC20 tokens, real-world assets, synthetic assets, or even NFTs. It's totally open and some other cool bells and whistles as well. Tons of audits, as you could imagine, 31 audits. 31 audits, wow. I hope that's enough. And then there is a 1.25 million dollar audit competition that completed,

• 46:58David Hoffman?

  and a 3.5 million captured the flag with HAZ Finance. So they just audited the shit out of this thing. There's also a bug bounty program as well. So honestly, Michael Bentley and all of the Euler team, who kind of went through hell to like live through Euler V1, its exploit, and then Euler V2, and then bring Euler back and deliver V2 over just like however long it's been, over a year and a half now. That is some, that's some of the biggest grit I have ever seen in crypto. Welcome back. That is impressive. Well done, guys. Yeah, I hope you guys feel really, really good. Brand, brand new type of protocol. I know like V1, we've seen a little bit of V1, and V1 was, adoption was doing really well in 2022 and even into, into 2023.

• 47:42David Hoffman?

  And so like adoption was growing before like, A, the hack came, and then 20, we all know how 2023 went, so really hard market. And so I'm kind of, I'm looking forward to seeing how well Euler V2 can compete in the market. AVE is this gargantuan. Morpho is also pretty damn big now. What can Euler do in this market with this brand new construction? I am curious. David, you pointed out that Celestia has released their product roadmap as well. Anything notable here? I'll call it a technical roadmap. The way that they have it constructed is very similar to the way like Vitalik illustrates the Ethereum roadmap.

• 48:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  A little more polished here.

• 48:18David Hoffman?

  A little more polished. They have, Vitalik drew it himself. I think Celestia has a, some designer with him. So three, three main tracks that they have categorized theirs. Abundant block space, verifiable block space and frictionless block space. There's a link in the show notes if you want to see Celestia's technical roadmap. I hope somebody does an episode about that, maybe it's us.

• 48:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Kind of a cool box to check here too. Bloomberg, the Bloomberg Terminal, do you see it? Have you ever had access to one of these Bloomberg terminals?

• 48:47David Hoffman?

  No, every time I only, only see it through screenshots.

• 48:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's so old, right? It looks like something from the 1980s.

• 48:51David Hoffman?

  It seems so old.

• 48:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  But it is like legendary. I mean, this is still a financial service that, you know, it's hundreds of thousands of financial professionals subscribe to.

• 49:01David Hoffman?

  What is it? What is a terminal?

• 49:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's from the eighties, dude. It's got all the financial information. Anyway, now that, now that we've denigrated it, they've added Polymarket to the terminal. So if you want to search for Trump versus Harris and the prediction markets there, or any, any market that Polymarket has is now integrated into Bloomberg. So that's just kind of a cool box to check. This is Shane, founder of Polymarket, saying, "The Bloomberg Terminal has now integrated Polymarket entering mainstream news and finance before our eyes. What was once a fringe sci-fi idea for transforming the flow of information is now becoming the new normal as tens of millions of people have it around, relying on Polymarket forecasts as a source of truth."

• 49:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think this is actually true because once it gets in Bloomberg Terminal, there's nothing like more blue chip finance than getting there, right? And so all the financial analysts will start referring to the Polymarket data source.

• 49:58David Hoffman?

  Very legitimizing.

• 49:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, very cool.

• 50:00David Hoffman?

  I wonder how strong of a top of funnel that'll be for Polymarket.

• 50:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know. It'll be great for the propagation side of the information that prediction markets are putting out, though. Let's get to the CFTC thing. So I saw this tweet in the story originally. I was like, what is going on? So there's something going on. It's not as bad as it first sounds. So the CFTC has apparently charged Uniswap with illegal derivatives trading. What is this?

• 50:29David Hoffman?

  Okay, so the way that I think this works, pretty sure, is that inside of the Uniswap front end, you could go buy a leveraged token. So the Uniswap front end listed and showed a leveraged token. So users of Uniswap could go buy that from the Uniswap front end that Uniswap Labs controlled. As a result of that...

• 50:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  An example of this, David, would be like if I wanted to do like a 2X ETH or something like that. 2X long ETH.

• 50:53David Hoffman?

  2X FLI ETH, yeah. There are many of these leveraged tokens where there's leverage built into the token. Yeah, and you can go buy one of those on Uniswap, and the Uniswap Labs didn't remove those from the front end, because why would they? And the CFTC has said, "Well, now you guys are offering leveraged trading to US retail investors." Uniswap Labs just agreed to settle for a whopping $175,000. By whopping, I'm being facetious. That's very small. And this is specifically in a no admit, no deny settlement. So I'm thinking they're saying in this settlement, they're not like accepting like fault. They're not like, this is not a guilty plea. They're just settling for $175,000 to make this thing go away.

• 51:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  I got it. Yeah, I think a concern here is like, what's going on? Is the CFTC becoming a bit more like the SEC, where this is just an enforcement action, right? It was not necessarily like a warning. There's no kind of like a comment period or anything. It's just going straight to enforcement. And this is the CFTC's director, Ian McGlinley, saying, "The CFTC's Enforcement Division will vigorously enforce the CEA as digital asset platforms and DeFi ecosystems evolve. DeFi operators must be vigilant to ensure that transactions comply with the law." There are some dissenters, though, David. A couple of commissioners who actually said that this enforcement was not a good idea, not in the best interests of the CFTC. So Commissioner Summer Mersinger said, "It was my hope that

• 52:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  one day soon, the commission would consider rulemaking, or very least guidance, making clear how DeFi protocols could comply with them. Unfortunately, today is not that day." He's basically saying, "We should cooperate, provide guidance, rather than doing this enforcement action." Caroline Pham is another CFTC commissioner. She also dissented. She said, "It was a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act for the commission to establish such sweeping interpretations in administrative settlement orders rather than engage in notice and comment rulemaking." Notice and comment is where you say, "Hey, here's what we're thinking. Here are the rules. Industry can comment on it. The public can comment it." They didn't do that. They went straight to enforcement. So she said, "I'm puzzled how we can charge the respondent, that is Uniswap,

• 53:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  based upon no evidence beyond the word 'leverage' appearing in the names of these tokens." So it seems like some at the CFTC are taking a chapter out of the Gary Gensler playbook.

• 53:12David Hoffman?

  All right, coming into the last and perhaps the coolest news of the day of the week, the Coinbase developer program, platform, excuse me, updated their MPC wallets to enable LLM or AI models to conduct payments. So this is an article that was released by Brian Armstrong on Twitter. And it starts this week, "This week at Coinbase Dev, we witnessed our first AI-to-AI crypto transaction. What did one AI buy from another? Tokens, apparently. Not crypto tokens, but AI tokens." This is a, what do you call it? It's like a double entendre, kind of a pun or something. Tokens are like this thing in LLM models that are like how like LLMs work. Yeah, so the fact that we use tokens in the crypto world is like also kind of funny.

• 53:55David Hoffman?

  So Brian Armstrong in his article says, "AI agents cannot get bank accounts, but they can get crypto wallets and they can use USCC on base to transact with humans, merchants, or other AIs. Those transactions are instant, global, and free. This is an important step to getting AIs to get useful work done," he says. And so Brian is saying like, "Hey, there's like frictions. AIs can't use Stripe. They don't have credit cards. They don't have bank accounts. But smart contracts, Ethereum, blockchains, speak the same language as AI, which is code. And since they're permissionless, then AIs have all the tools that they need to pay for the services of other LLMs. I use ChatGPT. I pay for it. It's a great service, but AIs cannot do the same."

• 54:37David Hoffman?

  And so Brian is saying, "Look, we just had this one AI, but pay for the services of another AI using USCC on base." On base. And I think this opens up, you just use your imaginations, imagining all these AI agents who are providing value to us humans start to provide value to other AIs. And all of a sudden, we can get this AI economy growing.

• 54:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I mean, it's entirely possible that Ethereum turns out to it starts, it's bootstrapped by humans, but it turns into like a property rights system for the machines. I totally see AI agents can't walk into a like Wells Fargo and get a bank account. They don't have a citizenship. They like, it's just not, it's not set up for them. Right. But programmable smart contracts and programmable basic smart contract based accounts are effectively what they will use to bank and communicate and exchange with one another. Right. And a lot of this will be bot to bot, agent to agent kind of driven in the future. In fact, this was like a thesis that, you know, seems pretty obvious and is going to play out. And this was originally what you and I wanted to talk to Ellie Zerikowski about. Do you remember that?

• 55:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  This was like our agenda. We were like, okay, cool.

• 55:42David Hoffman?

  Before he sends us on the three month detour.

• 55:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, we were like, hey, Ellie Zer, like going to that, yeah, you're very familiar with AI. You can tell us about the latest and the greatest. And we've just built this thing in crypto that we think is going to be a great digital property rights system for autonomous AI machines. Yeah, AIs are gonna love it. And then about five minutes into that conversation, we realized that he actually thinks AIs are gonna come destroy us. And like we, you know, it's not a good thing from his perspective that he's created a money system.

• 56:12David Hoffman?

  This is bad. They're colluding to take over the humans.

• 56:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, yeah. He's like, made me feel sort of sheepish, like, oops, maybe we just created a financial system for, you know, alien species that wants to destroy us. Anyway, hopefully that doesn't happen.

• 56:28David Hoffman?

  It'll be sick.

• 56:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hopefully that doesn't happen. So we end with the meme of the week. David, what are we looking at?

• 56:35David Hoffman?

  Okay, so this is my meme. My mom just texts me out of the blue, this article from some website, Financial Review. And the title is crypto owners are more likely to have psychopathic traits, study says. And then her comment to that is just, ha, ha, ha. That's all she sends me.

• 56:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Did you read this study, by the way?

• 56:58David Hoffman?

  No, I did not read that study.

• 57:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a real study. I actually read the, um, the, the study itself. It was like a NIH funded grant to study this.

• 57:07David Hoffman?

  Oh, it's actually like a well-done study?

• 57:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, well, I mean, well done is, I guess, a, you know, subjective somewhat, but they go through like the Machiavellian, you know, dark triad personality traits, and they're like, oh yeah, you know, crypto holders have a lot of these, and they're predominantly male, and they go through a whole psych, um, analysis. They, they get their news from non-mainstream sources and all of these things. You know, not necessarily, uh, uncomplimentary, aside from this one, you know, the Machiavellian traits and the psychopathic traits, but it's a, it's a real study that your mom is seeing in mainstream news here.

• 57:43David Hoffman?

  So, for context, my mom is a forensic psychologist, so she knows extremely well just the world of stats and studies around psychology-related subjects.

• 57:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Forensic, too.

• 57:54David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. She goes to court and shit.

• 57:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, wow. Well, you should, like, you should send her the actual, like, get her to read the actual study and give her a professional take on it.

• 58:02David Hoffman?

  She didn't just send me the headline. I'm sure she read that.

• 58:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Was there any back and forth, or does?

• 58:07David Hoffman?

  No, I did not respond to this. I did not respond to this.

• 58:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  She thinks you're a psychopath now. I was wondering. It's in the back of her mind, David. All right, let's close this out. We're gonna get to risks and disclaimers in a moment, but if you were watching on YouTube, there is, or even on Spotify, there's something, there's a QR code somewhere here that you can go, uh, scan and get access to the Bankless Premium Feed. We call this the, the Citizen Feed, and we publish a lot of extra material on there. It's like bonus content, our debriefs after the episode. Um, it's fantastic. It's no ads, by the way, so if you are, if you've gotten to this point in the roll-up, I know you are a dedicated Bankless listener, and if you're hearing this, you, you're not yet on the Bankless Premium Feed. There's opportunity to go get that and do that. I think we have Spotify 10?

• 58:53David Hoffman?

  It's the more fun feed.

• 58:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's the, it's the better feed. Spotify 10 is a discount code where you can get 10% off that, and, uh, you scan the QR code to make that happen. All right, we'll end with this. Of course, you know, cri- It was risky. You could lose what you put in, but 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.