ROLLUP: Memecoin Mania | Tornado Cash Win! | Pro-Crypto Trump Cabinet | Justin Sun & WLFI

Memecoin mania spiraled out of control this week, with shocking livestream rug pulls and Pump.fun disabling its livestream feature due to disturbing behavior. Meanwhile, Base and Farcaster hit record TPS and inflows as memecoin trading heats up. In Washington, Trump nominated pro-crypto Scott Bessent as Treasury Secretary. What does this mean for crypto policy? Plus, a surprising investor joins Trump’s World Liberty Financial raise—we’ll reveal who. And a major court victory for crypto privacy: judges ruled OFAC overstepped in the Tornado Cash case, declaring immutable smart contracts unsanctionable. Does this mean Tornado Cash is back? ------ 📣UNISWAP https://bankless.cc/Uniswap-Bug-Bounty ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🦄UNISWAP | BROWSER EXTENSION https://bankless.cc/uniswap 🪄MAGIC EDEN | HOME OF WEB3 https://bankless.cc/MagicEden 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🤖dYdX | UNLIMITED LAUNCHING SOON https://bankless.cc/dYdXUnlimited 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT https://bankless.cc/toku ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/104?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 7:12 Markets https://x.com/DegenerateNews/status/1859978611606102494 https://x.com/JacobKinge/status/1859979524487909769 https://x.com/saylor/status/1861033309934862601 https://www.theblock.co/post/328025/microstrategy-4-per-cent-of-bitcoin-bernstein-price-target-600-usd https://x.com/Galois_Capital/status/1861299857975046261 https://farside.co.uk/?p=1518 https://imgur.com/pUSaAQ2 https://l2beat.com/scaling/tvl https://x.com/HHorsley/status/1860397442547790105 26:00 Pump.fun suspends livestream feature https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-11-26/pump-fun-s-streams-show-the-dark-side-of-memecoin-trading https://x.com/crypto_bitlord7/status/1860989408092258441 https://x.com/_kaitoai/status/1860969504798302691 https://x.com/pumpdotfun/status/1861138234580869128 https://x.com/ChainLinkGod/status/1861091091585409400 https://x.com/moo9000/status/1860980423716659462 34:15 Base And Farcaster AI Agent meta heating up https://x.com/phantom/status/1861108202022318470 https://x.com/qiqileyuan/status/1861650662590947411 https://x.com/cryptotesters/status/1861216310631506364 https://x.com/jessepollak/status/1861434379270308195 https://x.com/dwr/status/1861595910498631928 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1861422824029647241 https://x.com/anoncast_ https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1860806662962954526 https://warpcast.com/superanon/0x5c38e09ce41560f3a469946c8e08bcf463f31469 https://anoncast.org/anonfun https://x.com/ChazSchmidt/status/1861539655620919497 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1861041911542223294 https://warpcast.com/cherdougie/0x2c3ba9646bc37de213953294076b1250acf8635b https://x.com/search?q=%24blonde&src=cashtag_click https://x.com/search?q=%24blonde&src=cashtag_click https://x.com/ayyyeandy/status/1861683577722909062 https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/aixbt-by-virtuals https://app.virtuals.io/ 48:00 Bankless disclosures https://www.bankless.com/disclosures https://x.com/iamdcinvestor/status/1861028893408317863 53:06 Big victory in Tornado Cash case as judge says OFAC exceeded authority https://x.com/BillHughesDC/status/1861545321450336342 https://x.com/valkenburgh/status/1861565828270846048 https://x.com/brian_armstrong/status/1861566807225532470 https://x.com/rstormsf/status/1861575644796330392 https://juicebox.money/@defend-roman-storm 1:00:01 US court struck down SEC broker-dealer rule https://x.com/BlockchainAssn/status/1859657449856463077 https://x.com/NateGeraci/status/1859678807600529892 https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/113529294640959784 https://x.com/jchervinsky/status/1861430542668886408 1:05:53 Trump Media files a trademark for “TruthFi” https://x.com/JoshGerben/status/1859689670986408392 1:07:10 Tron became the largest investor into World Liberty Finance https://x.com/justinsuntron/status/1861121947372773545 https://x.com/SplitCapital/status/1861794875668136104 https://x.com/Caitlyn_Jenner/status/1861123142439313714 1:11:37 Bankless has its biggest Black Friday offer ever! https://www.bankless.com/join 1:13:04 Top signals? https://x.com/HalieyWelchX/status/1861470493280206907 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1861053012573057285 1:17:15 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 Station is the last week of November. This is the week of Thanksgiving, so we're recording this on Wednesday, November 27th, in case we get some of the prices a little bit delayed for you. You're probably hearing it on Friday in the United States. This would be Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving, David. How you doing, man?

• 0:22David Hoffman?

  Good, good. I am back home in Seattle, once again in the room that I discovered crypto in. It's always a little bit nostalgic to be back here. It was a different era, back when I was assembling mining rigs in 2017.

• 0:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're just telling me that that's what you're doing, just like over to the right of you, over your shoulder.

• 0:38David Hoffman?

  Just to my right, yeah. Just pulling my hair out, figuring out how to get six GPUs on the same computer to work.

• 0:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Jeez, those were the days, huh? That was hard, when you had to actually like mine to get your crypto. You can't just like stake it.

• 0:51David Hoffman?

  You can just press buttons, yeah. You had to assemble hardware, yeah. Different era.

• 0:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, well, we've got a lot to be thankful for on the roll-up today, I think in crypto today. One thing I am thankful for is Bankless Citizens. We appreciate you guys. I know we say this every year, Thanksgiving time, but you are the reason we do this podcast and have kept up. God, four years of straight roll-ups? I don't know how many that is, but 50 times, like four? I mean, we've got to be over 200. We should go count sometime, but that's a lot. And you guys have been with us the entire time, so I'm thankful for Bankless listeners today and Bankless citizens.

• 1:27David Hoffman?

  There's a strong contingent of Bankless listeners out there who proudly beat their chest whenever they like come up to me or you at Permissionless or in real world and just say, "I have never missed a weekly roll-up."

• 1:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow.

• 1:39David Hoffman?

  And I'm like, "Wow, that is a lot of content."

• 1:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a lot.

• 1:42David Hoffman?

  Wow.

• 1:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  And you know what? We have never missed a weekly roll-up.

• 1:45David Hoffman?

  We have never missed a weekly roll-up.

• 1:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Every single Friday, holidays included. We're just talking about the...

• 1:49David Hoffman?

  Big shout out to Anthony Cizana, who taps in every once in a while, as needed, to make sure that that streak keeps on going. But yes, Bankless has never missed a weekly roll-up.

• 1:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's the only way we could do it. You can hear Murphy in the background, my dog. I'm just going with it because it's the holidays.

• 2:01David Hoffman?

  Murphy has also never missed a weekly roll-up.

• 2:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, no, usually we edit it out. We're not going to edit it out. One other person I'm thankful for, David? You, my co-host, David Hoffman.

• 2:12David Hoffman?

  Oh, thanks, man.

• 2:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  I was going down memory lane, actually, and I went up in our DMs to the very first DM, the very first time we exchanged a message, and here it is. Your first message to me, actually, in DM, Twitter DMs. "I do not understand the resistance to Ethereum on behalf of so many Bitcoiners. It is utterly confusing to me." That was December 1st, 2018. So what is that, six years ago, pretty much, like, pretty close to the day? And I replied, I said, "I've been trying to figure it out as well. At core, the value system appears so similar." I don't know why, we spoke very formally back then.

• 2:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is officially our first DM.

• 2:51David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think that's a lot of Bankless is downstream of that vibe of like, understanding Bitcoiner values, cypherpunk ethos that Bitcoiners definitely espouse and put into their blockchain. Seeing that same ethos in Ethereum, seeing that being disregarded in Ethereum. And now, like, I feel like, I bet you a lot of, I bet you there's that same DM in two Solana people who like, are like, "Why do the Ethereum people just do not see?" I bet you it has continued down the fractaling, like.

• 3:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm sure. There's multiple generations of this, but anyway, I, yeah, I'm thankful, I'm thankful. What we've said in previous during the bear markets is you gotta grab your bear market buddy during the bear markets, and during the bull markets is true too.

• 3:37David Hoffman?

  Bear market buddies turned into bull market buddies.

• 3:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  You gotta celebrate with somebody, so, you know, celebrating, like, the bull market with all Bankless listeners today. Let's talk about what we're gonna cover today on the weekly rollup. First, you know, last week, we started the weekly rollup with the, you know, dual-wielding middle finger 13-year-old, and we were kind of laughing at meme coin shenanigans. You remember that, David?

• 3:59David Hoffman?

  How absurd it was, yeah.

• 4:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it was absurd.

• 4:02David Hoffman?

  Absurd and entertaining and like, kind of funny, yeah.

• 4:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Kind of funny, right? Well, like, three days later, over that very weekend, things turned really dark. So it started with these ruggings from a 13-year-old and quickly spiraled into some deeply disturbing content. We'll talk about this on Pumped Up Fun. It got so bad that Pumped Up Fun actually had to disable their streaming service. So what's going on there? Also, I think related to this, Basin and Farcaster have experienced the largest TPS and inflows, transactions per second inflows, ever, I think, on the back of some of this. So maybe the meme coin mania is shifting somewhere else? We'll dive into that.

• 4:38David Hoffman?

  Also, in the world of politics, Trump picked a Treasury Secretary, Scott Besant. What do we know about him? What do we know about Scott? What can we expect from him? He's said to be pro crypto. What does that mean? And also, you'll never guess, Ryan, who became the largest investor in Trump's World Liberty Financial Raise. The raise is still ongoing, so we're going to check in on that rage. And a huge win for crypto decentralization and privacy in the courts. Judges ruled that the OFAC overstepped their authority in the tornado cash case. They ruled that immutable smart contracts cannot be sanctioned.

• 5:18David Hoffman?

  They ruled that smart contracts are not businesses and are not persons and therefore cannot be sanctioned. Huge progress, huge win. Can we use tornado cash now? Wait, wait, wait. We're also going to talk about that. So all of this and more coming up in the rest of the show. But first, a moment to talk about our friends and sponsors over at Uniswap. Uniswap V4 is something I'm very excited about, Ryan. It is going to be live soon, TM, I think December is the rumor around Uniswap V4. They are launching a 15 and a half million dollar bug bounty for anyone that can find a critical bug in Uniswap V4. It's not just an update. We're not just shipping out Uniswap V4.

• 5:59David Hoffman?

  Uniswap has had $2.5 trillion in cumulative trading volume in V2 and V3 without a single hack ever. This is why the Uniswap brand is the Uniswap brand. It is trusted. It is secure. People put their liquidity there because they trust it. We're doing that same thing all over again to make sure that V4 is just as trusted as V2 and V3. And they're doing that with a 15 and a half million dollar bug bounty. So find a bug, get generational wealth. There is a link in the show notes, banklist.cc/uniswap-bug-bounty.

• 6:33David Hoffman?

  Making the shots.

• 6:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, guys, fifteen and a half million dollars.

• 6:39David Hoffman?

  That's nuts.

• 6:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  I wish I had the dev skills to go like black hat, white hat.

• 6:44David Hoffman?

  You think you could find the bug? You think you could find the exploit?

• 6:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, my God. This is like the largest bug bounty I've ever seen, not in crypto, like anywhere. And I guess it's it's almost like a prediction market for Uniswap. It's like a poly market of like, can you can you find a bug or not? And this shows how confident they are in their code, too.

• 7:00David Hoffman?

  Yes, yes. It's a little bit of just like, hey, like, we need to make sure that we put up capital to fund bug bounties. But also, it's a dare. It's like, you can't, you can't find a bug. You can't do it. You're not good enough. You don't, your skill issue, you don't, you don't have the skills.

• 7:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow, OK, so you could find out more about that. Link in the show notes.

• 7:16David Hoffman?

  Speaking of big numbers, Bitcoin almost, but not quite, hit 100K. I think it topped out at like 99 and a half thousand dollars, really giving us the tease. Really giving us the tease. But also, like, you know, round numbers are this big psychological barrier. I think it kind of in hindsight makes sense for a bunch of traders to sell at 99 and a half thousand dollars. Because once it hit that point, it got down to 92,000 dollars yesterday. But since this morning, it is back up to 96,225 dollars where we are now. So even though we bounced off of 1,000, 100,000 didn't get there, we're still showing a pretty strong performance in the week.

• 7:53David Hoffman?

  Bitcoin on the week, up 2.2%, which after its stellar performance for like four weeks in a row, being up yet another 2.2%. You know, you got to give a round of applause. The momentum is is still going good.

• 8:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Impressive, impressive.

• 8:06David Hoffman?

  The momentum has gotten so good that it has attracted the attention of Jim Cramer, who publicly just turned bullish on Bitcoin. He got a question about micro strategy on a Mad Money episode. Let's just play the clip. I don't have to read it. Let's just play the clip.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  Greg in Florida, Greg. Oh, yeah, Jim, how we doing? I'm doing well. How about you, partner?

• 8:26Speaker 03

  I'm doing very well. Alright, so here's the deal. I've owned this stock for a long time, since 2023. I'm up over a thousand percent right now. I don't plan on selling it. In fact, after today's correction, I plan on buying more. But I love what the CEO does. He's a man, the myth, the legend, Michael Saylor. The stock is MicroStrategy.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  We call MSTR, we used to call that Mr. MSTR. I've got to tell you, it's a Bitcoin play. I prefer to actually own Bitcoin. I know that shit trying to put some sort of sword on it.

• 8:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  All I can tell you is own Bitcoin, that's a winner. That's a winner. Ladies and gentlemen, the conclusion of the that's what people are saying.

• 9:03David Hoffman?

  That's why we bounced?

• 9:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, at that point, we knew we would never hit 100K.

• 9:10David Hoffman?

  What if Bitcoin's momentum is so powerful that it just blasts through the curse of Jim Cramer? And it's just like, nope, nope, nope, uh, I'm not stopping.

• 9:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, I like that.

• 9:22David Hoffman?

  Who's gonna win? Jim Cramer versus Michael Saylor's infinite money printer?

• 9:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, exactly. And we'll talk about that in a second. Like, I actually like that we haven't hit 100K because now we have something still to look forward to. I like, what are you gonna do if you're Bitcoin and you already hit 100K? Wait for a million?

• 9:37David Hoffman?

  Yes, the answer is yes. If you're a Bitcoiner, the answer is yes.

• 9:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not gonna happen this cycle. It's not gonna, you can't, a million dollar Bitcoin this cycle? Don't even.

• 9:47David Hoffman?

  That flips gold at current prices, which is

• 9:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh my god, yeah.

• 9:52David Hoffman?

  A million dollars Bitcoin is definitely far away.

• 9:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  100K, we still got that to look forward to.

• 9:56David Hoffman?

  Do you think we hit 100K this year?

• 9:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, we're just teasing it.

• 10:00David Hoffman?

  We got five weeks for 100K?

• 10:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't think Jim Cramer. By the way, Jim Cramer said good things about Ether this week, too. So, like, yeah, yeah. I didn't want to tell you that, but

• 10:10David Hoffman?

  Oh, I go, we don't, we don't have the Michael Saylor to help us break through that one.

• 10:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, we have EIP, you know, 1559, David, which is our Michael Saylor burn.

• 10:20David Hoffman?

  Blob spurred almost a million dollars of Ether this week. Not quite.

• 10:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, yeah. But they don't get the press that Saylor does. And, you know, like, for good reason. Look at this. Michael Saylor has acquired this week another $55,000. Or, sorry, 55 A thousand five hundred bitcoin, which is 5.4 billion dollars at a price just under 100K per bitcoin.

• 10:45David Hoffman?

  Ninety seven eight hundred dollars, ninety seven thousand eight hundred dollars. And then like right after this announcement is when bitcoin dumped. And so I think people were like, oh, the buying pressure has stopped. Like, we're not going to be able to get over 100,000.

• 10:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are we just depending on Michael Saylor to carry us to 100K to 250K to beyond?

• 11:02David Hoffman?

  Obviously, he's not the only one in the bid side of the market. But like, man, it's like, I don't know what percentage he is, but I'm concerned that it's a lot.

• 11:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  OK, well, let me give you some stats on this. MicroStrategy, this is actually a report from analysts at Bernstein. Analysts at Bernstein says MicroStrategy is on track to own 4% of all bitcoin over the next decade.

• 11:26David Hoffman?

  Bitcoin, 4% of all bitcoins is insane.

• 11:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is a, yeah, this is a projection based on they, right now, they have 1.7%. MicroStrategy has 1.7% of all bitcoin. And if they do the thing that they said that they would do, which is like raise all of these billions to purchase more, they're on track to hit 4% over the next decade.

• 11:47David Hoffman?

  And, and the 42 billion dollars that they said that they were going to buy to buy bitcoin over the next three years, they have accelerated, they are ahead of schedule. And so they've already bought like seven, six, seven, eight billion dollars since that announcement. So he's just like front running himself on his own timeline.

• 12:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, now, as to whether this all works out, it depends on a few things, the analysts say. Whether investors are structurally long bitcoins, obviously bitcoin has to go up for this to be a good idea. Also, keep in mind, MicroStrategy is not just buying bitcoin, they're kind of levered buying it. It's like a levered play on top of bitcoin. So you're sort of trusting Michael Saylor's ability to kind of like manage some of the leverage that he's doing here. And I don't know if you've gotten into all the intricacies of like what that leverage looks like.

• 12:35David Hoffman?

  I've scratched the surface, not really.

• 12:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't feel like anyone fully knows unless you're like part of the MicroStrategy, Michael Saylor machine as to like whether that leverages, quote unquote. Safe, but like leverage is leverage. So it's definitely depending on Bitcoin continuing to go up. And then of course, whether the firm, whether MicroStrategy can continue to get more of these bonds, these convertible notes in order to buy more Bitcoin. So if you think of MicroStrategy, it's kind of like, it's like a Bitcoin ETF, but with like more flexibility, but with like more leverage. So it's a levered play on a Bitcoin ETF, essentially.

• 13:12David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and there's, there's so many eyes on MicroStrategy. Everyone is watching what he's doing and no one's really triggering any like flags of like, this is too risky. He's like taking really low risk debt, low interest, zero interest debt convertible notes. Like, I don't know the financial engineering, but like people that do know it aren't like overly scared about whatever he's doing.

• 13:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  But he's adding more leverage to the system. Let's just say that it's not just spot Bitcoin. It's like levered.

• 13:39David Hoffman?

  It's borrowed.

• 13:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Speculation on Bitcoin price go up. Anyway, that's the Bitcoin story. Good week, even at 2%, even though we're under 100K. And like what a run it's been for Bitcoin. By the way, I saw like a legendary call from Dan Moorhead, who we're having on the podcast later in December, David, you know, Pantera guy?

• 13:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah, of course.

• 13:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  And it was an image of an email that he sent to everybody in, I think it was like June or July 2013. And he was like, hey, I'm backing the truck up at $64 Bitcoin. And I don't care if everyone thinks it's stupid, I'm doing it. And yeah, like that's how long.

• 14:14David Hoffman?

  And because he was, he was trying to get Pantera to buy it. And he was like, if I'm buying it with my personal funds, if Pantera doesn't buy it. That was like the end of the email. It's like, I'm doing this personally.

• 14:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just absolutely legendary, like email. So there's been some people that have been playing this for quite some time. But let's talk about Ether on the week. Give me some good news, David. I think we got green candles.

• 14:34David Hoffman?

  Ether starting the week at $3,070, up 16. Oh, 17% on the week.

• 14:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  What?

• 14:41David Hoffman?

  We are about to break $3,600. 17% on the week.

• 14:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is this it? Is this the pump that we were promised?

• 14:48David Hoffman?

  Ether has been leading the market for about 10 days, 10 whole days.

• 14:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  10 days it's been leading the market? There were some days last week, days this week, I should say, where Bitcoin and everything else was selling off and Ether was still up.

• 15:02David Hoffman?

  Ether was still up, yeah.

• 15:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't even remember what that felt like, but then I felt it this week and it felt great.

• 15:07David Hoffman?

  We have seen strength in Ether. No one get too excited. Everyone calm down, everyone calm down. We have seen strength in the ETH price. It might break 3,600 on this episode.

• 15:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, you said that's a 17% rise, a double digit rise in a week.

• 15:25David Hoffman?

  17% rise in one week. That's pretty good.

• 15:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so can we look at maybe the ratio first? We'll go back to the flows, ETF flows. But tell me about the ratio, some life, signs of life.

• 15:35David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the ratio has been up since the 19th, since the 20th. And so we are at like six days, what is it, the 27th? So we have seven days in a row of strength versus Bitcoin. It's still low, Ryan. Like, again, don't dance, but it has been up for seven days in a row. We are at 0.037. We hit the low of 0.032. We are currently at 0.037.

• 16:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I guess keep in mind to your point, like, we were higher on the ratio, like fairly, much higher on the ratio November 9th. So most of the month-

• 16:08David Hoffman?

  But also, we were much lower on the ratio November 5th.

• 16:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's true.

• 16:13David Hoffman?

  We can get more signal, I think we'll get more signal out of this like next week. But like, it doesn't, there is reason to be optimistic. A little bit, don't dance, don't get excited.

• 16:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  I wasn't going to dance, don't worry about that. I'll spare everyone this, but-

• 16:29David Hoffman?

  That was mainly for the listener.

• 16:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is a chart that maybe we should take a look at. It's ETH Bitcoin ratio, but on a different time horizon. I think I know who put this together. But what is this chart? Big, fat, heavy, thick candles, some up, some down. What are we looking at?

• 16:45David Hoffman?

  These are 12-month candles, so one-year candles. So one candle is 12 years.

• 16:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 16:51David Hoffman?

  And it just, there's a trend line. We touched it in 2015. We created it in 2015. We touched it on the bottom. When I sent you that message in DMs, Ryan, about like why we don't understand the Bitcoiners don't see what they see in Ethereum, that was about when the ETH BTC ratio was at the 2020 low, 2019.

• 17:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Way back in 2018, when we started ruminating on it.

• 17:10David Hoffman?

  Yeah, 2018, 2019. Yeah, touched it then at like 0.015117. Then we had a massive green candle, but then now we're back down to this trend line. So like, the message here is like, don't overthink it. On the 12-month candles, the longest of time horizons, the ratio has bottomed.

• 17:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  So maybe ETH's not dead after all.

• 17:31David Hoffman?

  Maybe ETH isn't dead.

• 17:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  This line reminds me of kind of like Ben Cowan's logarithmic lines. Basically, it's pretty similar, I guess, right? I'm telling you a similar story. Okay, how about flows? Should we check in on our flows? We're up, we're positive.

• 17:44David Hoffman?

  Flows, Ether, Ether, $40 million of flows yesterday on the 26th.

• 17:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  ETF flows, we're talking.

• 17:50David Hoffman?

  ETF flows, ETF flows. $91 million of inflows on the 22nd. The seven days prior for that was pretty ugly, but that was last week, so we already covered it. And also, interestingly, if you go to the Bitcoin ETF flows, on the day that Ether had $40 million of inflows, Bitcoin had $200 million of outflows. Excuse me, $120 million of outflows.

• 18:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, that's never happened. You've never gotten the reverse?

• 18:17David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 18:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's almost like these inflows just follow whatever the market price is, David.

• 18:22David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think that's largely the case. I think that's actually the case. Also, total crypto market cap, all time high this week.

• 18:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  All time high, another all time high week. This is the fourth roll up with an all time high.

• 18:34David Hoffman?

  3.48 trillion. We are not at 3.5 trillion. We are right below it. But there has been some down market coins that have materially pumped. Ripple, up 50% this week. Stellar Lumens, if you remember, that coin doubled in market cap over the last week. And these are like, these are multi-billion dollar market cap things. And so we have seen some like down market cap tokens really adding to the total crypto market cap here.

• 18:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, have you seen the joke? The joke is that like retail's back now, but they're not buying your bags, crypto native, sorry. They're going to Ripple and they're buying Stellar and stuff like this.

• 19:07David Hoffman?

  Cardano, I think Cardano's up this week, yeah.

• 19:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, do you believe that meme? Is that what accounts for this stuff?

• 19:13David Hoffman?

  I don't think anyone knows what Ripple, what retail is doing. Other than pumping Chill Guy on TikTok, we do know that.

• 19:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, that's a different cadre of retail, I feel like. It's not like, I feel like the cadre-

• 19:25David Hoffman?

  Are there different groups of retail?

• 19:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, the people who are buying like XRP and Stellar and some of that. That's like retail from the last cycle, who had some of these assets, watched them pump last cycle and then been sleepy until now. And then, that's what I imagine in my head, anyway.

• 19:42David Hoffman?

  I was talking to Igor from Synthetix about how, you know the meme about like sell or buy whatever, like the Uber drivers or the taxi drivers are shilling?

• 19:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 19:53David Hoffman?

  The taxi drivers, the Uber drivers have not moved on from Ripple and Cardano.

• 19:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, that cohort of people loves the same coins that they have always loved.

• 20:03David Hoffman?

  They have not moved on into like the whole meme coin meta. They just love, they love their Cardanos, they love their Ripples, they love their Dogecoin. That's just like the taxi driver, Uber, like coins that they just really like.

• 20:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, well, there's something for everyone in crypto. Another all time high in the week is an L2 update brought to you by our friends over at Mantle, which is a fantastic L2. You should catch.

• 20:27David Hoffman?

  Helped with this all time high?

• 20:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, they helped, they helped a little bit. So this is an all time high in total value locked inside of Layer 2s. We're just a hair above the all time high at 50 billion in total value locked. So some inflows coming to our Layer 2s.

• 20:43David Hoffman?

  Great to see. 50 billion in Layer 2s. That feels great.

• 20:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, another number we should call out, which I noticed on the week, I think you probably saw this too, is AVE just hit $30 billion in deposits.

• 20:56David Hoffman?

  That's awesome.

• 20:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  AVE, DeFi blue chip. We've been excited about AVE since probably the time like you and I just started DMing on Twitter, you know, 2018, 2019. It was that class of OG DeFi protocols. And they've just been steadily building this like money market, money Lego primitive inside of Ethereum and inside of crypto. And they are now at 30 billion deposits. So that's larger than thousands of banks. If it was a bank, David, AVE would be the 64th largest bank by deposits. That is fantastic. Look at how far we've gone. 64, looking forward to the top 10. It might happen this cycle. You know, AVE is a fantastic place to put your crypto assets for yield.

• 21:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  A lot of the risk has been kind of like burnt off of it. Just like a big, big number for AVE. That's happening in the background. It doesn't get a lot of credit all the time. But you know, they've been, they've been building very consistently.

• 21:53David Hoffman?

  Yeah, speaking of tokens that have had stellar performance, AVE has just crossed $200. It hasn't been this high since April of 2022. And AVE, I would say, is definitely leading the DeFi pack. AVE performance since, like, in May, it was under $100, May of this year, it's under $100. And now it's at $200. One of those tokens, it's, it's, it was an old ICO token, fully diluted, fully liquid.

• 22:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Remember that?

• 22:19David Hoffman?

  Eithland, remember, remember Eithland? Yeah, fully, fully liquid in the market. Like, I think this is a big, AVE itself is like a big shelling point of just like DeFi strength. So when AVE goes up, I think DeFi is leading DeFi, in my opinion.

• 22:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I agree, a DeFi renaissance, right? And it's like, but, um, so it's a market cap of 2.7 billion. All-time high was back in 2021, in those heady days, where it hit, very briefly, it hit almost $8 billion.

• 22:44David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that was a stupid high valuation.

• 22:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, this is a cash-flowing token, though. It's, uh, like, it's pretty cool. You can do a discounted cash flow and, and come up with a valuation. There were some fundamentals there, so, um, it's cool to see that perform.

• 22:58David Hoffman?

  We like the fundamentals.

• 22:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, we got a lot more. What else are we talking about, David?

• 23:01David Hoffman?

  Pumped.Fun had to pause their streaming future because of just a bunch of, a bunch of shit that I just do not want to be even, even like verbalize.

• 23:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not crypto.

• 23:11David Hoffman?

  We found, yeah, it's not great. We found a clip that I think we'll play to really just illustrate the point, because we're not going to show it, any of it on screen. What will they do now? And like, what does this mean for meme coins as a category moving forward? And now, also, since meme coins are getting so big, it's, it's partly a consequence of meme coins getting so big. Is, is it now flowing into other chains? So, did Base just catch the meme coin influenza last week? We're going to talk about all of these happenings on all of these different chains. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially Kraken. I prefer it placed for buy and sell, but mainly buy crypto in 2024. If you do not have an account with Kraken, consider clicking the link in the show notes to getting started with Kraken today.

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• 26:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Here's a headline from Bloomberg, Pump.fun's stream shows the dark side of meme coin trading. So, last week, when we were talking about Pump.fun, it was, you know, that 12-year-old rugging, like, a bunch of, on livestream, a bunch of listeners. And of course, we talked about Pump.fun is a meme coin launch place, been incredibly popular this cycle.

• 26:25David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it has been, it has been the focus point.

• 26:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Has been the focus point. And so, we've seen various, you know, shenanigans, but like, most of them, somewhat innocent, degen types of things. However-

• 26:36David Hoffman?

  Very funny. Yeah. Absurd, absurdist, absurdist funny.

• 26:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. There, there has been a darker side and to, to Pump.fun all along. And because there's a live streaming service, like, there's live streaming associated with the, the token launches, anyone can stream whatever they want. Suddenly, this weekend, it felt like it turned real dark.

• 26:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And it got real crazy, real fast.

• 26:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. So, let's just play this clip from, I guess he's a crypto influencer, Bitlord. He kind of is a synopsis, maybe parental advisory warning, like, there's some dark material that's covered. We're not going to show anything, but here's what Bitlord illustrates has been going on at Pump.fun.

• 27:14Speaker 04

  Guys, they cut somebody's head off on Pump.fun today. They've kidnapped dogs, cats, children. Somebody was holding a gun to a goldfish. Someone's holding a gun to a dog. If the price didn't go up, he was going to execute it. They ended the livestream. I think they shut it down, they caught it. And right now, today, somebody is on a 24-hour livestream of crime. He's going around, he's jacking cars, he's jacking scooters, he's broke into a bank, and he's doing that. He's livestreaming the whole thing now, and he's trying to say that he's doing it until he gets arrested. That's, that's the coin of the day, a 24-hour crime spree livestream. I mean, guys, this is, this is, this is wrong. This is getting out of control. This is beyond what we dreamed of. This isn't mass adoption. This isn't crypto. I didn't envision this shit.

• 28:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  He goes on and talks about it more, but that gives you a flavor for like what was going on in the streaming service. Like, I guess it's all attention economics?

• 28:08David Hoffman?

  I think it's, the addition of the streaming service into the chart with the dev, I think just really creates a bad mix of features to really incentivize this. You can see why Pumped Up Fun did it in the first place. Like meme coins, they're very social. Like you're in the trenches, you're usually doing it with friends. Like it's just a very social thing to do. And adding on a live streaming feature just really leans into that element. And it also kind of incentivizes some of the most like attention grabbing behavior, which, you know, is just kind of converges on like crime.

• 28:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  And that's what, that's what was happening. So obviously some dark things. So there was a, there was a huge sentiment shift. This is a Cato AI and they monitor kind of like Twitter sentiment, social media sentiment for Pumped Up Fun. And they're showing an all time low earlier this week on kind of like the sentiment for what's going on and Pumped Up Fun. And so there was a call from the crypto Twitter community to just like stop live streaming. There had been some moderation, I understand. Pumped Up Fun was like, kind of like moderating some of these streams. It was just like too much at once. They couldn't keep up with it. And so things were slipping by, obviously, on the app that-

• 29:23David Hoffman?

  Pumped Up Fun is not set up to be a social platform like Facebook or Instagram. And when Pumped Up Fun had a couple like very viral moments, like Chill Guy and also the kid, the kid we talked about last week, it just brought in a complete influx of new people and just kind of changed the meta of like people realizing what it takes to really get a token to pump. And so like, it's really this, there's this hot ball of money going around and there's like different strategies to get that hot ball of money to come to you. And so they have, they have since paused the live streaming feature and they set out a statement.

• 29:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  On Monday, right? They paused it.

• 29:58David Hoffman?

  Yes, on Monday they paused it. Yeah.

• 30:02David Hoffman?

  Good. That's definitely the positive outcome. Had this gotten any worse, definitely would have been a very bad mark against crypto in the, in the public sphere. Like I don't want many people to like associate my, my, my industry with that. And so this is definitely done in the best interest of the entire industry, I would say.

• 30:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I mean, it's Thanksgiving weekend. I mean, this was like on the cusp of hitting mainstream attention. There's obviously an article on Bloomberg, but like you heard what was going on, right? And it's like, there's already some animosity towards crypto and degen, like token behavior, a lot of things people don't understand. And so there's already that as the bedrock. And then if you start to associate this with like kidnappings and like, you know, people's threats against their family.

• 30:46David Hoffman?

  However, real or fake, like whatever, like, yeah, I think most of this stuff was like

• 30:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Fake, staged.

• 30:50David Hoffman?

  Fake, but it doesn't matter. Like, one out of a hundred is real. And like, that's what, like, we don't really want to move that over to Shifto there.

• 30:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Probably the worst thing I've ever seen to be like, to be associated with in crypto. Like, degen's making money from somebody doing something terrible on livestream, just like...

• 31:07David Hoffman?

  And like, kids are getting involved here. Like, this isn't, this isn't FTX, where this is happening in like a far-off, distant land in the Bahamas. Like, these are just happening in people's homes.

• 31:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, yeah.

• 31:18David Hoffman?

  Could be a neighbor, like...

• 31:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Could you imagine the headlines? Like, what is your teenager doing on a laptop in crypto?

• 31:25David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 31:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  You talk about moral panic, right?

• 31:28David Hoffman?

  Moral panic, I think, yeah, for sure.

• 31:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Anyway, would be a stain on our industry where this, to continue, this is the point Chainlink God makes. Pump Fund is going to be a massive reputational stain on crypto industry on par with FTX. It's devolved into a complete unchecked degeneracy and unmoderated streaming site that enabled kids to gamble and get scammed at scale, not seen since loot boxes. If not cleaned up, I foresee the feds taking the site down. Negative mainstream articles being written. This slant of community increasingly distancing themselves from the platform as they should. Stuff like this is why I'm telling people I'm not involved with crypto. Comes across as a massive grift. So this was the take, right? And so...

• 32:06David Hoffman?

  It's pretty harsh.

• 32:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. I don't know what he has said, Chainlink God has said, post the disabling of the streaming service. But of course, let's remember, this is the app layer, right? So an app like Pump.Fun gets to moderate, permission, whatever they want, on top of a permissionless blockchain. They can choose to moderate. Things if they want and like that's a good that's from my perspective at the app layer. That's a good idea.

• 32:32David Hoffman?

  That's their responsibility. Yeah. I mean, I think it's yet to be seen how much of a silver bullet just simply disabling the live stream feature is.

• 32:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sure.

• 32:40David Hoffman?

  Hopefully, hopefully it is a silver bullet because there's, there's like meme coin and meme coin trading and like that level of like however amount of degeneracy that people might be okay with. And then there's the live stream feature and like you can actually like separate these things. And maybe you can say like, well, the meme coin trading does incentivize attention. But like, the whole original point of meme coins is like incentivizes its attention by making really funny memes versus like live streaming, which creates a different set of incentives. So maybe the mechanism of live streaming was all of the evil here and just simply turning that off fixes this. I think we're gonna see how this unfolds over the next few weeks.

• 33:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's so wild to me because I also, it seems pretty dumb to me, like just like they're recording themselves online, like doing, like doing crime, right? And it's like, in exchange for what? To pump a token? But that's all like trackable on chain as well. I mean, I don't understand.

• 33:34David Hoffman?

  I don't think, I don't think the people who are doing this.

• 33:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  They're not thinking about it?

• 33:36David Hoffman?

  Yeah. The funniest one that the late live stream feature that saw was a no hands, no rug dev. And so this, this dev just pretended like he had no arms, so he wouldn't be able to rug you, which doesn't really make any sense. But like, that was his big claim. Like, I don't have any arms, so I can't press the sell button. And so he was like holding that piece of paper that said that under his chin. And then like, and then you just see him bring his arms out, press the sell button, dumps.

• 34:04David Hoffman?

  And I was looking at the chart, the guy dumped for like $20,000, which I know is like, that's a lot of money to a lot of people. But also if like, in the meme coins that like, I'm very aware of with like the billion dollar market caps. I was like, nothing.

• 34:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, my question on the back of this was like, is that the top? Like, has Pumped Up Fun and meme coins in general kind of like jumped the shark this cycle? And I think that remains to be seen. I don't know that that's the top or not, but I do know that some attention has been moving to meme coin energy, let's say, has been moving to the base ecosystem, at least on the week. And you've been pretty actually active in the trenches over there. But one thing-

• 34:44David Hoffman?

  I have pressed more buttons on my ledger in the last seven days than I have pressed all year.

• 34:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so you gotta tell us about that, but like a few things. One, we could look at kind of like inflows onto base, but this certainly was worthy of attention. So this is a tweet from Phantom. So Phantom, the big wallet, it's been huge on Solana thus far. It's basically the way people are buying Pumped Up Fun, like meme coins this cycle. "Today, we're rolling out to base, base chain, we're rolling out the base chain to everyone on Phantom. You can now swap tokens, access your favorite DeFi and NFT apps, and buy ETH and USDC on base." So Phantom didn't have, didn't support base before, and now it does.

• 35:25David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 35:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Which is a pretty major thing, I would think.

• 35:27David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Phantom supports Ethereum layer one, Polygon, and then also Solana. It started off as the main Solana wallet, then integrated Polygon, because that was like the other, kind of like DGEN chain for a while when Phantom was getting started. And now they are rolling out base. And also there being a conduit between tokens on base and Solana. I don't know how they're doing this, but you can swap between tokens on base and Solana, which is kind of pretty crazy. And this is a UX that users care about, as in like, they don't care about whatever chain that they're on, they just want to swap tokens.

• 36:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  The Phantom wallet is great. I mean, the UX has always been fantastic.

• 36:04David Hoffman?

  So there's like a short story that I put together in a tweet that is putting a bunch of pieces together. That being Phantom Wallet, opening up base activity, it's a big one. TVL in base, the flows into base, has just been rocketing up for like two or three months straight now. We were at a little over $2 billion just last October, and we are now beyond $3 billion in base. All time highs. 25- $250 million of inflows came into base just on November 24th, just in one day. And so base and also Jesse put out this tweet, all time high in daily transactions on base by a lot.

• 36:44David Hoffman?

  There was like a big jump from like seven million daily transactions on base up to up to 10 million ish, 11 million. And so we're hitting 11 million transactions per day on base and then also fees have not moved at all. So base is hitting like new levels of adoption, new levels of stress, performing pretty damn well. And I think it all kind of begs the question, like, why now? Base has been in an uptrend, but it has really hit an inflection point in the last seven days or so. And I've personally felt it because I'm playing around on base.

• 37:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. So what's going on there?

• 37:18David Hoffman?

  Things to do there. Dan Romero, the founder of Farcaster, he's calling this programmable social. And so this is coming on the back of an announcement from this one app called Anon Cast. And we talked about this last week, actually, this was the Anon app. This is ZK, ZK app where if you have a certain, a sufficient supply of the Anon tokens, like 5,000 Anon tokens, you get to go to the website, connect your wallet, and it will let you tweet from this ZK app. And it'll come out of this Anon Cast, Farcaster and Twitter account. And no one will know, including the operators of Anon Cast, no one will know who wrote the tweet because of $0 proofs. So that's kind of cool. That's kind of like a fun little-

• 38:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  And you have to have the Anon tokens-

• 38:01David Hoffman?

  You have to have the Anon tokens, yes.

• 38:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Tweet this, this private tweet, basically.

• 38:05David Hoffman?

  Exactly. Yeah. And so there it's-

• 38:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  I did this, by the way, like fun fact, like I tried this out. Yeah, yeah. It was really fun. So I don't know if you saw my tweet.

• 38:13David Hoffman?

  I don't know. I don't know which tweet it was.

• 38:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, really? You don't? Well, it was funny. I said something to the effect of like, I have a, an Ethan Maxie podcast, but I'm secretly buying-

• 38:24David Hoffman?

  That was you?

• 38:26David Hoffman?

  I saw that one.

• 38:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  My podcast co-host doesn't know.

• 38:29David Hoffman?

  And I was like, that could have been anyone. Like, I didn't even think that.

• 38:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, you didn't know it was me?

• 38:32David Hoffman?

  No, I didn't.

• 38:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  It was me.

• 38:35David Hoffman?

  Okay, what did the tweet say?

• 38:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  It said something like, um, here, I'll read it to you. It said this, "Confession, I'm the co-host of a successful Ethereum maxi podcast." We're not maxi podcasts, by the way, but people think this. "And I secretly own millions of soul." And then I said, "I'm just kidding, David, I would never do this." Anonymously.

• 38:51David Hoffman?

  Okay, but also, when I read that tweet, I was like, this is somebody else masturbating as Ryan. Not Ryan masturbating as Ryan.

• 38:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, perfectly. It was fun. And you have, so you have to have the anon token, a certain amount of anon tokens in order to do this.

• 39:04David Hoffman?

  Okay, so that is Farcaster app number one. And this app is a Farcaster account. So like, we're seeing like, an integration of apps and accounts. So that's kind of cool. And that's just, that's just number one. The second one is this thing called Clanker. And Clanker is an AI agent. It's also a Farcaster account, so you can tag it and talk to it. And if you tag it, you can request Clanker to make a token. And you can say, "Hey, here's the ticker that I want. Here is the picture that I want. Can you please make a token out of this?"

• 39:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's an AI agent that just spins up a token for you.

• 39:35David Hoffman?

  It'll reply to you in kind of like this, like, snarky way. And then also talk about like, how this token, I hope this token like, entertains you for a moment while you like, distract yourself from the void. Like, very existential, uh, like, Nietzsche-like level of response from, from Clanker. But like, aside, aside is this bot, this AI agent bot.

• 39:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  I've not done this, I've seen it done, I think. Like, so with, for Clanker, you have to be on Farcaster, what?

• 40:01David Hoffman?

  Yes, you're on Farcaster.

• 40:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  So you're on Farcaster, and Warpcast is kind of the client for Farcaster. And you tag Clanker, and you're like, "Hey, Clanker, make, make me a token." You know, make it like, um...

• 40:14David Hoffman?

  Make, make the ticker this, here's the photo.

• 40:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, here's the photo. And then do you give it a theme or a vibe? Or like, do you set the, um, like, supply parameters or anything?

• 40:23David Hoffman?

  No, it does all of that for you. I think this is currently in development, so I think it's going to open up more like expressivity to it.

• 40:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  And it does all the on-chain work, it spins up the token, everything else.

• 40:34David Hoffman?

  It spins up a token and it spins up a Uniswap V3 pool. And so it also spins up liquidity. And then it takes some fees, I think like 40% of the fees.

• 40:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Clankr does.

• 40:47David Hoffman?

  Clankr does. And then the token deployer takes 60% of the fees. And so there's like regular payouts to token deployers. And, okay, so that's app number two, which many people are like using Clankr to issue their, like create their token, request their token. And so this has kind of turned into the pump.fun of, base of Farcaster. And so because it's like, you don't actually have to go, and with pump.fun, you have to go and you have to like fill out this form of this token to fill out. It kind of like filling out a Google form in order to make your pump.fun token. With Clankr, you just at the thing on Farcaster or on Warpcast and be like, hey, make me a token, here's a picture. And then it does it for you.

• 41:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you think pump.fun will just create that now? It will just do an AI agent version of pump.fun?

• 41:28David Hoffman?

  Well, so there are other, there's already a derivative out there, a Clankr derivative, that's on Twitter. And so you can tag it on Twitter and it will make you a token and also spin up a Uniswap V3 pool. So like this is also like going out into like other corners of the world.

• 41:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Interesting.

• 41:47David Hoffman?

  So that's app two, so Clankr is app two. What Dan Romero was talking about, Programable Social, is this thing called Anon Fun. And so you can, using Anon, write a tweet anonymously that talks to Clankr to issue a token anonymously. And so now we have this third competatorial thing of these two apps are now combined together to make Anon Fun, which is you can anonymously create Clankr tokens. And so this is why Farcaster, Dan is saying.

• 42:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hold on, hold on. Okay, so Anon, by the way, was a token created by Clankr as well.

• 42:23David Hoffman?

  And on itself was a token created by Clankr, correct?

• 42:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 42:26David Hoffman?

  Yes?

• 42:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  But now, now you can ask Clankr to create an anonymous?

• 42:32David Hoffman?

  If you have Anon tokens, you can anonymously, it looks like writing a cast via Anon. You can anonymously call the Clinker account and get it to create the token through Anon cast. So like rather than me.

• 42:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why would you want to do that? So I could like create, you know, RSA as a moron if I want and it could be from me. But like, like my, my, you know, ETH wallet or whatever, or my base wallet. And no one would know it was me because it's all anonymous.

• 43:02David Hoffman?

  Yeah, correct. Yeah.

• 43:05David Hoffman?

  And so this is just, now this is creating this like new third thing, which is like the anonymous creation of Clinker tokens. And so my imagination goes back to 2019 DeFi summer. Put out a tweet that said in 2019 Ethereum discovered money Legos. This, you can combine Uniswap with Maker and Ave. And we would have these financial primitives that could combine together to create net new on-chain financial products. In 2024, a Farcaster discovering AI Legos. I don't know if that's the meme that's going to stick, but like call it AI Legos for now.

• 43:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's cool.

• 43:38David Hoffman?

  AI agents or just like even just bot accounts. Because Anon's not an AI agent. It's just more of a, it's an app and an account. AI agents are talking together, offering services, building new gadgets. And so this is, this is kind of like the meta that I'm seeing of like people are building apps into these Farcaster accounts. That are allowing net new things to like kind of be combined together.

• 44:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's pretty cool. And what happens, it happens to be the case that many of these net new things are like expected with meme coins, right? Is like.

• 44:06David Hoffman?

  Many of them so far. Yeah.

• 44:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Although Anon is not, it's.

• 44:10David Hoffman?

  Anon is not. Anon has utility.

• 44:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a meme coin and but it also has some utility, like some function, right? And it enables you to create like anonymous messages and tweets.

• 44:18David Hoffman?

  That's right. That's right. I think this is also just the correct, the normal order of progressions. Like Ethereum, when we created the Ethereum blockchain, the first thing you could really do on it was make tokens. And then people learned how to like make apps out of those tokens. And this is what I think happens first. First, Clinker has this primitive of we just make tokens first and then we figure out how to make apps. Somebody, Cheryl from Seed Club, made blonde using Clinker. So she made this blonde token. I think the way that this started is I think there was already a chat called Blonding Curve with a bunch of just like. Women in Web3 who named their group chat Blonding Curve. And so I think they've already had some pre-existing lore about blondes in crypto.

• 45:02David Hoffman?

  But Cheryl decides to go to Clankr and mint blonde. And then all of the Web3 women who are on Base and Farcaster just thought it was a great meme. And so now there's like 500 people in this blonde Telegram. And it's just like a good story of B-cors. I have previously cast off the idea of meme coins. Because they're all over the place. You don't really know what it is. It's a grab bag of what you get. But I've always understood Dogecoin to be a really good example of a good meme coin of a bottom-up community. And then seeing it happen firsthand of just a bunch of women who identify with a meme. And they get really excited and they get into a group chat and they just have fun. It was hard.

• 45:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  It feels similar to the NFT energy from last cycle.

• 45:45David Hoffman?

  Very similar to NFTs.

• 45:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Energy and it's just all a vibe and seems like that's coming back. The interesting thing about this, or the tech breakthrough to me, is the AI agent piece. Which yeah, now it's dabbling with meme coins, but I don't think it'll stop there. I think there's something new there.

• 45:58David Hoffman?

  I think it only starts there. I think it starts there. Okay, not just on Farcaster, but on Base, speaking of AI agents. Have you heard of AI XBT, Ryan?

• 46:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Um, no. Okay.

• 46:11David Hoffman?

  Okay. AI XBT is an AI agent spun up by the Virtus platform. We talked about Virtus in the podcast previously when we did our episode with EJAS. And also Matt Stevenson. Luna is the Virtus AI agent that they made on the platform. It's them dog fooding their own platform. Virtus is an AI agent as a service kind of thing. AI XBT is now surpassing Luna, the most valuable AI agent on the Virtus platform. And it is an AI bot on Twitter that just tweets out really just useful stuff. It's a really great follow.

• 46:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is this modeled off of Zach XBT at all?

• 46:50David Hoffman?

  XPT is just kind of like this addition of like three letter. I don't know where XPT comes from.

• 46:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 46:56David Hoffman?

  But, uh, no, not, not Zach XPT. It just, it just spits out just data and metrics and you can engage with it on Twitter. And it's a really useful account and it has become the number two influencer on Twitter by engagement stats behind Ansem.

• 47:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, is this it? Number two?

• 47:12David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yep. That's right. Yeah. You should follow it. Yeah. And so like, it's just cool to see as like a KOL in crypto Twitter mind share metric. We have an AI agent in the number two position flipping a bunch of humans. And so that is coming also out of the base ecosystem as well.

• 47:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  AIs are coming for our job, David. This is pretty useful.

• 47:30David Hoffman?

  It's really cool. There's a lot of very cool stuff.

• 47:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, this is very cool. All right.

• 47:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So, so to answer your question about why base transactions are at all time high and why inflows are coming in. It's because like people are like me are playing around in like the AI. It's like this AI utility meme coin trenches. We haven't really like come up with the right words for it, but there's like a lot of cool stuff happening for it. And like it's, I haven't, I haven't been more on chain in the last like week than I have all year.

• 48:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  I've seen some of it. You've been making some bets. You've been pressing some buttons, which is a good time to mention our disclaimers, bankless disclaimers, disclosures, I should say. So we disclose all of this at bankless.com slash disclosures. We update this monthly. So we have a, you know, a disclosure policy. And since David, it seems like, and me a little bit, and you've roped me into some of this.

• 48:21David Hoffman?

  I have, I have purchased some, I have, I have sold some ETH to purchase some tokens.

• 48:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Dang, why? How could you? Uh, but getting a bit more active and like, I, what I should say is so you, you, you guys can see that, track that activity. We'll, we'll keep it updated. What I should say is, um, the way I know you do this type of thing in these cycles is you allocate a percentage of your portfolio to go play these kind of like whatever the meta type game is, meme coin game, whatever the newest token game type like is. It's a, it's actually a fun way to like experience chains to see how good they are from a UX perspective as well. And, But I do want to flag, this is not the type, like, not everybody should be in the trenches. And certainly, like, the percentage, if you are in the trenches, the percent of your portfolio

• 49:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  that you allocate to this stuff, like, I recommend that it's small. Like, do not denominate in this type of thing. So, this was a good tweet from a DC investor that I feel like kind of sums it up, right? Because we're talking to all sorts of people with different, like, time horizons and different risk preferences, and he said this, "This place," he's talking about crypto, "is absolutely insane, because you have people trying to turn $5 into a million, alongside people trying to turn 100K into 10 million, and 10 million to 100 million, and 100 million into 10 billion. It's often hard to tell who's who. It's no wonder each group, for the most part, thinks the others are absolutely insane." And that's kind of, like, you know, what it comes down to. So, obviously, in crypto, for the long term,

• 49:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  you should be stacking blue chip assets, the monetary assets, the things like Bitcoin, the things like Ether, we would say, overallocate in Ether, but that's like, kind of, the bankless thing. We think Ether is money. You may or you may not, but the DGEN games are being played by other. And I think you, hopefully, you're doing it in a healthy way, David. I don't know, I'm just checking in on you, brother. I'm your bull market buddy, so you're not gambling with, you know, 95% of your portfolio, are you?

• 50:18David Hoffman?

  With my savings? No. Well, the goal is always to take, like, my personal goal is to take, like, 10% of your portfolio, try to flip it into being coming 50% of your portfolio.

• 50:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 50:31David Hoffman?

  And then, and then reallocate it, put it into the savings, the piggy bank, and then do it again. See how many times you can do that inside of one, one cycle. If you can do it more than once, it's pretty good.

• 50:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go.

• 50:42David Hoffman?

  But yeah, don't, only 10%.

• 50:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  You got a big smile. You must be up on the week.

• 50:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's fun. It's fun.

• 50:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, what do we got coming up?

• 50:49David Hoffman?

  Coming up next, a huge win for crypto in the courts. Two, two wins, actually. Everyone is already talking about tornado cash, but there is a second big win in the courts that you might not have heard about. Treasury just backing down, and then Trump announces Scott Besant will be his Treasury Secretary. What do we know about him, and why is this role so important? And then Justin Sun, oh, I just leaked it, Justin Sun invests $30 million into Trump's World Liberty Financial DeFi product.

• 51:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Amazing.

• 51:14David Hoffman?

  What does Justin Sun want with that? We're going to get to all this and more, but first, I want 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 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.

• 51:56David Hoffman?

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• 52:39David Hoffman?

  They're solving UX issues by building products across every chain ecosystem, swaps, borrowing and lending, NFTs, perps, and more, all seamlessly cross-chain. Instead of hopping between countless sites and handling multiple wallets, just use Magic Eden. Save time and get to the meme coining faster. Plus, the ME token is coming out this quarter from the ME Foundation. If you've used any of their protocols, like the NFT platform, you can claim some. So check out Magic Eden today and watch them become a super DApp and the home of Web3 in real time. You can get there at magiceden.io to get started.

• 53:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Here it is, the big victory in a tornado cash case as a judge says that treasury has exceeded its authority. Okay, we gotta zoom out and talk about this because there's multiple tornado cash cases going on right now. This was a specific one, I believe, sponsored by Coinbase with some people that we know in crypto, one of which is Preston Van Loon, who is an ETH core dev, right? Responsible for the Prism client. And he is, I guess, a name on the case along with some others, going to treasury and bringing treasury to court because treasury has, of course, made the smart contracts, the actual immutable smart contract code, they have sanctioned those ETH addresses. It's like on the OFAC

• 53:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  sanction list. And Preston and some others associated with this case have claimed, "You can't do that. You can't, it's not property. You can't just sanction code. You have overstepped your authority." And it seems like the courts have agreed with that interpretation of the law. So what's going on here, David?

• 54:14David Hoffman?

  Exactly what you said. So the tornado cash contract addresses are on the OFAC sanction list. Their place, their existence on the OFAC sanction list has been deemed by the courts to be unconstitutional. So this begs the question, does this mean that you can just go use tornado cash now?

• 54:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 54:33David Hoffman?

  And I tweeted this out, asking some lawyers, and they said, "Hold your horses." Like, "Let's wait for this to also propagate out down into the lower courts." But the answer wasn't, and absolutely not. So my interpretation of this, and I'm not a lawyer, is that tornado cash is still on the OFAC sanctions list, so therefore you shouldn't go use it.

• 54:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Because treasury put them there, right?

• 54:54David Hoffman?

  Because treasury put them there.

• 54:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yep.

• 54:55David Hoffman?

  And that action has been deemed unconstitutional. But they are still on the OFAC sanction list. For now. And so hopefully that in the happy case OFAC removes them from the sanctions list because the courts have deemed them to be unconscionable. But as of right now, they are still on the OFAC sanctions list. And so we are in this like kind of mushy gray area where we need this court ruling to propagate outwards. And so like, hold your breath, we might get this. Very cool. Peter Van Valkenburg tweeted this out, "I'm loving reading through this opinion. Smart contracts are not contracts, nor are they smart, and that makes all the difference. Contracts in the legal case, as in a contract between two people. While

• 55:39David Hoffman?

  the Van Loon case is all about statutory authority, is also secretly a constitutional law case. OFAC tornado cash sanctions were an unconscionable stretch of the limited powers granted to them by Congress. Our constitutional separation of powers does not allow executives to simply make up the law, even where there are stringent circumstances or national security demands. It's what makes America great." I think that the really important thing that got ruled here in the constitutionality of this is that humans and businesses, persons and businesses can be put on the OFAC sanction list. As a result of this ruling, smart contracts have been ruled to not be persons nor businesses. They are something else. They are a new thing.

• 56:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's huge.

• 56:25David Hoffman?

  Which is huge.

• 56:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  An important distinction that we did not have before this case. Like Treasury just thought that they could sanction code, sanction autonomous smart contract decentralized protocol code living on Ethereum. And this court case says they can't do that. They don't have the constitutional authority to do that.

• 56:43David Hoffman?

  Okay, so question to you, Ryan. We recently just had Roman Storm on to advocate for his defense. He's going to court. He was threatening like potentially going to jail. What has changed with that case? What is anything different now? Is he going to walk free?

• 56:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Roman Storm is, as you guys will recall, is one of the developers of the autonomous smart contract code, which apparently now a court has decided Treasury is like unable to sanction. So, and he goes like for his court case and trial in April. So does... Will this make any difference to him? According to some of the crypto lawyers we've talked to, it's slightly helpful, but it's still separate. It's still kind of an apples and oranges thing. Because what the DOJ is alleging in the Roman Storm case is that Roman Storm is operating a service, right? So he was essentially one of those. The autonomous smart contract code may not be sanctionable, but the service, the UI layer over top that like he was providing,

• 57:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  or like maybe the torn tokens or other elements of things that he were doing, were breaking sanctions law. So it could be slightly helpful, but unfortunately, it's a completely separate case. So Roman Storm still needs to raise funds for his defense. We tried to help a little bit more with that like last week by drawing some attention to his case and for folks to hear his story. But just a reminder, that case could use some donation. He's trying to raise $1.5 million in order to protect himself. And it's great, like when we win these cases in court, all of crypto wins.

• 58:19David Hoffman?

  We all win.

• 58:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  All US citizens win. And this is like the way to do it, to curtail the administrative like power to try to prevent our decentralized use of these public goods. We need to win in the court system. This is part of how the system was constructed.

• 58:35David Hoffman?

  So we just got the tornado cash removed. We got smart contracts protected as neutral technology.

• 58:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 58:43David Hoffman?

  What we did not protect is developers' freedom and ability and right to write open source software. That has not been protected. That is a separate issue. So we part of, we are chipping away.

• 58:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  And just as bad, right?

• 58:57David Hoffman?

  Is just as bad. And so like Farin said, this has, this might be able to bolster Roman Storm's defense a little bit, but it is materially a separate issue. He is still under threat of going to jail. He still needs funds. And we still need to protect Roman Storm and open source software devs everywhere.

• 59:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 59:14David Hoffman?

  We got, we got some donations in post-episode. We did a Twitter space. We still need a lot more. How insane would it be if the? OFAC, we got tornado cash off the OFAC sanctions list and Roman Storm went to jail.

• 59:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 59:28David Hoffman?

  I would feel terrible. That would be insane. That would be the federal government using Roman Storm as an example, as a scapegoat when he ought not to be. And we need to donate, we need to donate. We need to donate more money to make sure that open source software devs stay out of jail, including Roman Storm.

• 59:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, can you imagine if we ended up in this place where like, sure, the autonomous decentralized codes, code couldn't be sanctioned, but basically if you're a developer,

• 59:53David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 59:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  you know, deploying it and writing the code and then, then you go to jail? I mean, it's kind of the same type of like effect, right? The same chilling effect.

• 1:00:01David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  As if we lost this case. So like definitely more work to be done. And speaking of more work to be done and court wins, we got another court win. The US court struck down the SEC broker dealer rule. And so what they were trying to do, what the SEC was trying to claim is that Uniswap automated market makers, these type, if they're controlling more than $50 million or even liquidity pools, if you're an LP in a Uniswap pool, there's more than $50 million, you are a broker dealer. And this was one of those side issues like we talked about with some of the crypto lawyers, but it's going on in the background. What it would de facto do is like make all the Uniswap pools, everything in DeFi, kind of SEC controlled, broker dealer, AML KYC, everything that goes along with that. Anyway, the courts struck that down too.

• 1:00:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  So another win on the week. This is Blockchain Association CEO Kristen Smith. She said, "Today's court ruling is a victory not just for the Blockchain Association, but for the entire crypto industry. The dealer rule was an attempt by the SEC to advance its agency's anti-crypto crusade, unlawfully redefining the boundaries of its authority granted by Congress. And following this ruling, we've rolled it back essentially, protected from this unlawful rule." So another win this week. We're just stacking them up.

• 1:01:14David Hoffman?

  Can't stop winning. It's, we're just winning left and right. Oh, man. I'm so tired of winning, Ryan. I'm so tired.

• 1:01:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  I gotta say, I was telling you before, like before this, it's like one of those Disney movies at the end where like the villain is defeated and like the land was enchanted with like the darkness or the, you know, the cold, the freeze, and it's just like all suddenly melted away. The evil is like, that's what it is. It feels like very much. Okay, so someone else who will be influential in the... Oh, by the way, you got your court case against Treasury.

• 1:01:42David Hoffman?

  So like we, the beautiful thing about this whole Treasury thing is like we had two shots on goal here. And the first shot on goal went in. So, great. I still get my shot on goal. Mine's still coming. But I mean, we already got the goal. And so it would be nice to really drive this point home.

• 1:02:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, for people who don't know that, this is a, David is actually involved in a similar lawsuit to the one that we just talked about.

• 1:02:06David Hoffman?

  Highly overlapping, yeah.

• 1:02:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  But Coin Center is sponsoring it and paying for it. And it's like basically Hoffman and some others against Janet Yellen and Treasury, right? And so like that would be a second opportunity to kind of win and further cement this precedent.

• 1:02:21David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:02:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Don't lose, man. You can't lose now, though, right?

• 1:02:25David Hoffman?

  No, no. Okay, so the tea is that the Coinbase case was given a more favorable circuit. My case was given a less favorable circuit.

• 1:02:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, you're gonna have to work for it.

• 1:02:35David Hoffman?

  TBD, TBD.

• 1:02:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, it's not you. It's, you know, all the talented lawyers over at Coin Center doing the work, right?

• 1:02:40David Hoffman?

  Thank you, Coin Center. God's work, God's work.

• 1:02:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  God's work, for sure. Okay, so things could be different under the new Treasury Secretary. David, you gave us the name earlier. Should we just actually play the clip and get Scott Bessent? He's, he's been named as the new Treasury Secretary. I want to hear his take on crypto. And this is the only thing we've publicly heard him say about it. So let's just hear it in his own words.

• 1:03:03Speaker 05

  I've been excited about the President's embrace of crypto. And I think it fits very well with the Republican Party, the ethos of, it's, crypto is about freedom. And the crypto economy is here to stay. The Democrats are running from it because they're trying to wash off the stench of Sam Bankman-Fried and his family's donations to the Democratic Party. So they're willing to take down a whole industry because of bad behavior on their part, bad behavior on one actor. And I think that everything's on the table with Bitcoin.

• 1:03:48Speaker 05

  And to me, one of the most exciting things about Bitcoin is for a generation of investors who maybe...

• 1:03:59Speaker 05

  Post the great financial crisis, have been looking for investment opportunities, or maybe they'd soured on markets. Crypto is bringing in young people, it's bringing in the people who haven't participated in markets. And, you know, having a market culture in the US and people believing that markets work for them is a centerpiece of capitalism.

• 1:04:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, that is- That's pretty bullish. That's pretty bullish. That is the person probably second to the President of the US who has kind of the most executive authority sway-

• 1:04:36David Hoffman?

  So this is the new Janet Yellen. The current Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. This is the man who would replace Janet Yellen.

• 1:04:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, this does not sound like a guy-

• 1:04:44David Hoffman?

  That's a big swing.

• 1:04:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  -who would, like, go and put-

• 1:04:48David Hoffman?

  Sanction tornado cash.

• 1:04:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  -autonomous smart contracts on the OFAC sanction list.

• 1:04:52David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't think so, anyway. This is Jake Chervinsky on this pick. Scott, the next Treasury Secretary will make crucial policy decisions for the future of crypto in the US. For example, Scott Besant could undo OFAC's unlawful sanctions against tornado cash in order to-

• 1:05:08David Hoffman?

  God, we have so many bullies in the chamber.

• 1:05:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right? You know, it's very good. A broader question is, of course, like, you know, Treasury's responsibility is far beyond crypto. So what is the new Janet Yellen, the new Treasury Secretary, what's his position on all things like monetary policy and financial status of the US? And this is Raul Paul's take. Scott Besant, the new Treasury Secretary, is in favor of a weaker dollar and lower oil prices to drive US and global growth. Okay? That is all you need to know.

• 1:05:40David Hoffman?

  That sounds like inflation and put money in the stock market and buy assets. That's what that sounds like to me.

• 1:05:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, Raul Paul says, steal the art. Scott is good for your bags. He comes out and says it. I've known him for a decade and he gets it. So there you go. That's the new Treasury Secretary selection.

• 1:05:57David Hoffman?

  All right. Not done with Trump yet. Trump Media files a trademark for TruthFi. They want to trademark for computer software for use as a digital wallet, payment for processing crypto, fiat and trading in digital assets. And it also mentions that it wants to cover market analysis data and statistics for financial research and financial custody services like maintaining possession of financial assets for others for financial management purposes. So this is TruthFi. This is the TruthFi trademark. So these are potentially the things that World Liberty Financial is getting into. So there's your alpha from that trademark.

• 1:06:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, that's actually, this is actually different than World Liberty Financial, David. So this is from the

• 1:06:40David Hoffman?

  Oh, this is for, oh, the TruthFi, the Truth Social. Oh, excuse me.

• 1:06:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:45David Hoffman?

  He's also getting into a Truth Social?

• 1:06:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yep.

• 1:06:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yep, very much.

• 1:06:51David Hoffman?

  TruthFi. Oh, is he going after like a polymarket kind of copycat thing?

• 1:06:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know. I mean, he's just doing, it's a trademark.

• 1:06:59David Hoffman?

  SocialFi, TruthFi.

• 1:07:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Who knows? But it's separate. But the news on the week for World Liberty Financial.

• 1:07:05David Hoffman?

  He's trying to do an ex polymarket. I don't know.

• 1:07:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Baby, who knows? He's trying to do more in crypto, or they are, the Trump Empire is. Speaking of that, so this is your lordship, Justin Sun, who's tweeting this up. "We are thrilled to invest $30 million in World Liberty Financial as its largest investor. The US is becoming the blockchain hub and Bitcoin owns it, owes it to Donald Trump. Tron is committed to making America great again, leading innovation. Let's go." It's like not one to miss an opportunity.

• 1:07:37David Hoffman?

  Yeah, not to be outdone.

• 1:07:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  To grift his way into power. Sorry, Justin. Hopefully you don't drop a lawsuit on me. I mean, this is Caitlyn Jenner, by the way.

• 1:07:49David Hoffman?

  Did I tell you they wanted to sponsor the Bankless Summit?

• 1:07:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Did they really?

• 1:07:52David Hoffman?

  Yeah, they reached out to me and I was like, I don't think that's appropriate, guys, sorry.

• 1:07:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Caitlyn Jenner replied to Justin Sun's tweet and said something to the effect of, oh, great move to Justin Sun. So, Justin Sun is always one to try to, like, buy legitimacy. You know what I mean?

• 1:08:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah, inject himself, yeah.

• 1:08:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  An attempt to do that, I'm sure.

• 1:08:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, oh, by the way, he also named us an advisor. I should have mentioned that, that was in the news this morning.

• 1:08:18David Hoffman?

  I think if you donate, how much, millions of dollars?

• 1:08:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Donate, it's not a donation, it's investment, my friend.

• 1:08:22David Hoffman?

  If you invest $30 million, he might be able to finagle his way into becoming an advisor.

• 1:08:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Boy, I gotta admit, I don't love all of this. No, I'll just put that out there. It's definitely a little bit of a pay-to-play type game over there in DC.

• 1:08:35David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I mean, is this, is this what it costs to win as much as we're winning?

• 1:08:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  I, probably.

• 1:08:42David Hoffman?

  We're winning quite a lot, we're winning quite a lot. Is this, is this what, the pound of flesh that it takes?

• 1:08:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, speaking of that, you know, the guy that we're just talking about, Howard Lutnick, who was elected as Secretary of Commerce, right? He was in the running for Treasury, didn't get that, but he's Secretary of Commerce. So, he is from Cantor-Fincherold. It was reported this week that Cantor-Fincherold has acquired a 5% stake in Tether for up to $600 million. You know what, so you know what this is.

• 1:09:11David Hoffman?

  I didn't know Tether was like, I mean, I guess everything is available for the right price to the right buyer.

• 1:09:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, it's interesting because like what this gives Tether is basically, in my opinion, just reading between the lines here, that this gives them insurance that the US government's not going to come after them, right? You have the Secretary of Treasury, Cantor-Fincherold, they now own 5%, you know. Cantor-Fincherold gets to somewhat front-run the opportunity around stablecoins because now they own a portion of Tether. You know, so that's the way it's played, I guess. So, you tell me if this is the cost of doing business over in DC.

• 1:09:49David Hoffman?

  I like this one, this is okay with me.

• 1:09:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like, one thing I will say, now that it feels like we've won this kind of battle, I feel like we're almost setting up the lines for the next war. Like crypto has very clearly, at least corporate crypto, has infiltrated DC. And so I think the good part of that is, I don't think crypto will ever face existential risk in the US again. I just don't think so. It's already become too powerful. And so I think we can celebrate this win because the previous regime was trying to choke off crypto in the US, right? It really was. Like, we had to do something. But now I'm a little more wary of like, this new class of crypto banking elite that

• 1:10:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  could slowly try to close the door on the bankless type things that we care so much about. And I'm already seeing like-

• 1:10:42David Hoffman?

  The people that protected us and advocated for us turn into the banks that become too big to fail.

• 1:10:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Regulatory capture, baby.

• 1:10:53David Hoffman?

  Regulatory capture, yeah. Like, I could totally see it. I could totally see it. Like, this is what I'm saying. This is what it costs in order to get out of the hole that we got into in 2022 and 2023. Now we're out of that hole and now we're like, hey, Coinbase is great. They're aligned with our interests.

• 1:11:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Don't become evil. Don't become evil, everybody.

• 1:11:13David Hoffman?

  But Coinbase is a bank incentivized by the shareholder model, which we did an entire year of podcasts about the toxic relationship of the shareholder equity model and why tokens and DAOs are better. I mean, like, we've seen this movie before.

• 1:11:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so just eyes wide open. I mean, let's celebrate this win, but like, let's also remember we're not totally free. The mission's not complete until we're bankless and have the right and abilities to go bankless.

• 1:11:41David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 1:11:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, speaking of that, okay, so it is Thanksgiving. We open with this. Do you know today, bankless listener, you're hearing this on Black Friday, which is a holiday in the US where everything is discounted if you're international. And so, uh, bankless citizenship has also been discounted. This is the biggest, the best deal we've ever offered. I think we've, previous Black Fridays, we've done like 30% discounts. Right now, you can get a bankless citizenship, uh, on a yearly basis for a 40% discount.

• 1:12:09David Hoffman?

  40% off, yeah.

• 1:12:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  What does this get you, David?

• 1:12:11David Hoffman?

  You, you can listen to this podcast as you have, ad-free, forever. Well, for one year, for one year, uh, 40% off. Uh, you can also get into our Discord and come and hang out with us. You can get the Token Hub, you can get the Airdrop Hunter, uh, there, you can get Bankless Claimables. There are a bunch of things, all in this package. Uh, something that we have, it's definitely fit for you. Uh, the, the debrief episodes, people have told me, Ryan, that sometimes they skip the Monday episodes and they just listen to the debriefs to the Monday episodes because they enjoy there's more. So if you want the, the extra podcast content that we put out on the premium feed that doesn't make it to the, uh, to the free feed, you can get that as well. Um, did I miss anything?

• 1:12:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  I only listen on Bankless Premium now. I don't know, you don't like, I listen to episodes. I listen to your episodes.

• 1:12:55David Hoffman?

  I, I record the ads. I don't need to listen to them.

• 1:12:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  You don't want to listen to the, to the other feed. Anyway, that is available for you guys right now. There's a link in the show notes, uh, and it's a Black Friday only deal. So make sure you do it now before it expires. Um, all right, let's close this out. David, do you believe in top signals, my friend? Cause I feel like we're starting to get into that territory.

• 1:13:14David Hoffman?

  Dude, I remember seeing a year of top signals all throughout 2021 and at no point in time did any of them actually cause, the only top, the only actual signal was the Fed reversal of, uh, interest rates.

• 1:13:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 1:13:26David Hoffman?

  All, all the top signals of 2021 did not create a top.

• 1:13:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hawk2a girl, tell me if this alarms you. Hawk2a girl is apparently launching a meme coin.

• 1:13:36David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  And, uh, mentioned it in an episode, podcast episode with Mark Cuban. I'm giving a meme coin in NFT communities, uh, 100 free plus, uh, whitelist each. Who should I pick? Hawk2a with a meme coin. Is that not a top signal?

• 1:13:51David Hoffman?

  No, I think it's fine. I think it's fine.

• 1:13:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  See, that's the problem with top signals. Once they come, you're so like, you know, enamored by the bull market.

• 1:14:00David Hoffman?

  Like, we, again, we saw a year of top signals in 2021. So like, what I think you can do, and this is why I think it was, it was last week. That I said this is maybe two weeks ago, start the sell clock.

• 1:14:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 1:14:12David Hoffman?

  You're gonna be hammered with sell signals for the next year. And so they're like, the clock has started.

• 1:14:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're not bull market drunk yet, but you're one, like maybe you're one beer in.

• 1:14:21David Hoffman?

  We're taking, oh, I don't know, maybe you're one beer in, I'm definitely two or three.

• 1:14:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so you gotta have your plan, gotta have your designated driver. And this was one in more sober times, I actually tweeted out, this is from March 1st of this year. I said, let's agree in advance, the minute we see a crypto project on the Las Vegas Sphere, we sell it all. Okay, on the Sphere. And I saw this this week, David. There's apparently Bonk, Slana meme coin Bonk is maybe teasing a Vegas Sphere ad that might be coming.

• 1:14:52David Hoffman?

  They're finally doing this?

• 1:14:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  It might be coming. So I'm just saying, in very sober times, I said that. And if we actually see a meme coin on the Vegas Sphere, it doesn't mean good things.

• 1:15:06David Hoffman?

  But are you actually gonna sell though? Are you actually gonna do it? Because you can talk about doing it, but actually doing it is a different story.

• 1:15:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, actually doing it is hard.

• 1:15:16David Hoffman?

  Okay, there is something to note about all people who maybe have not gone through their first complete bull market. I will not count, if you came into 2021, you are the class of 2021. I do not count as you having seen an entire bull market. In order to have seen an entire bull market, you would need to have been at the very beginning, which started in 2020.

• 1:15:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right.

• 1:15:35David Hoffman?

  Practice pressing the sell button. So everyone wants to hold on to their crypto as long and as hard as possible. Because collectively, we create FOMO.

• 1:15:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sure.

• 1:15:48David Hoffman?

  When you have a material amount of money, practice hitting the sell button. Put that into USDC. Send it to Kraken, send it to your bank account. Practice pressing the sell button and then putting the money in your bank account.

• 1:16:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Change those neurons in your brain.

• 1:16:04David Hoffman?

  You don't have to do a lot, but you do need to make sure that your psyche is aware that that is an option. And that you need to carve that behavior.

• 1:16:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's real money.

• 1:16:16David Hoffman?

  It's real money. It's not real until it's in your bank account.

• 1:16:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, wait, wait, this is a bankless podcast. What are you saying?

• 1:16:23David Hoffman?

  I still have a bank account.

• 1:16:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sell to fiat sometimes, right? For your daily. Also sell to a denominator that you appreciate. For me, that's Ether. It still continues to be, you know, against maybe the impulses of the bull markets. For some people, it's Bitcoin. So that's kind of the long-term storage stash.

• 1:16:44David Hoffman?

  Yes. But if you are thinking about all of these like Lambos that you want to buy, or this house that you want to buy, if you're going to buy a house, you need to have cash in your bank account. And so you have to get cash in your bank account in order to do that. And so like, this is how you don't F up a bull market and like round trip it and have to wait for the next one. Because then you just become a bear market, like, you know, then it just sucks. Like, we have seen, we have seen this movie before. Everyone does this. And so get into that mental space now.

• 1:17:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know, guys. It felt like David was talking to himself a little bit in that, in that speech. Very good. Well, and with this, of course, as we usually do, got to let you know that crypto is 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.