ROLLUP: Prometheum SEC Psyop Exposed

Bankless Weekly Rollup 3rd Week of June 2023 ------ 🚀 Unlock $1,000+ in Perks with Bankless Citizenship 🚀 https://bankless.cc/GetThePerks ------ 📣 CYFRIN | Smart Contract Audits & Solidity Course https://bankless.cc/cyfrin ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 🦊METAMASK LEARN | HELPFUL WEB3 RESOURCE https://bankless.cc/MetaMask ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🧠 AMBIRE | SMART CONTRACT WALLET https://bankless.cc/Ambire 🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE https://bankless.cc/uniswap 🎮IMMUTABLE | GAMING ECOSYSTEM https://bankless.cc/Immutable 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle ------ Timestamps & Resources 00:00 Intro 4:30 MARKETS https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/federal-reserve-interest-rate-decision-june-2023-pause-how-much-rcna88922 https://twitter.com/cryptobyrde/status/1667397644975742977 https://messari.io/screener 15:20 SEC Shenanigans #1 - Prometheum https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1669076846070341633 https://twitter.com/MattWalshInBos/status/1669061636953366528 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/laurashin_prometheum-just-got-the-nod-from-us-activity-7069417456787681280-3Xrj https://twitter.com/collins_belton/status/1669081113191391236 https://twitter.com/adamscochran/status/1669143092274888704 29:40 SEC Shenanigans #2 - Hinman’s Emails https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.551082/gov.uscourts.nysd.551082.831.70.pdf https://twitter.com/MikeSeligEsq/status/1668591059968950272 https://twitter.com/nic__carter/status/1668606359078567937 https://twitter.com/venturecoinist/status/1667172894307229703 35:00 SEC Shenanigans #3 - SEC Wants 120 Days https://twitter.com/iampaulgrewal/status/1668742688689070083 https://twitter.com/0xPolygonLabs/status/1667643925232852996 https://twitter.com/SolanaFndn/status/1667578529612017666 https://robinhood.com/us/en/support/ articles/cardano-polygon-solana-update/ 38:50 SEC Hypocrisy https://twitter.com/twobitidiot/status/1667488291216584705 https://twitter.com/twobitidiot/status/1668328519334780928 https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1667957205864202243 42:30 SEC Stabilization Act https://twitter.com/WarrenDavidson/status/1668305460368121857 https://twitter.com/WarrenDavidson/status/1668316484198596627 https://twitter.com/NTmoney/status/1666108498747457536 45:10 CFTC v Ooki DAO https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/8715-23 https://twitter.com/lex_node/status/1667351457861971969 50:37 Uniswap V4 https://twitter.com/Uniswap/status/1668603580184502276 https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-1153 1:02:10 Eigenlayer Mainnet Launch https://twitter.com/eigenlayer/status/1669065156427681792 1:04:35 Polygon 2.0 https://twitter.com/0xPolygonLabs/status/1668312616459030528 1:06:35 Optimism's Bedrock Migration https://twitter.com/hildobby_/status/1667097126482984960 https://imgur.com/f2hqf1q 1:07:05 NFTs Kraken is launching Kraken NFT https://twitter.com/krakennft/status/1666821582004846593 1:08:24 Blackrock will file for BTC ETF soon https://www.theblock.co/post/234910/blackrock-bitcoin-etf-coinbase-coindesk https://www.theblock.co/post/167392/blackrock-taps-krakens-cf-benchmarks-to-power-its-bitcoin-offering-exclusive 1:09:14 Hong Kong tells Banks to accept crypto https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/06/15/hong-kong-put-pressure-on-three-major-banks-to-take-on-crypto-exchanges-as-clients-report/ 1:10:10 Bank of China issues $28M in structured digital notes on Ethereum blockchain https://www.ubs.com/global/en/media/display-page-ndp/en-20230609-tokenized-notes.html?caasID=CAAS-ActivityStream 1:10:45 Taiko alpha-3 testnet is live! https://twitter.com/taikoxyz/status/1666429573737877505 1:11:23 Lens Protocol announced its $15 million funding round https://twitter.com/lensprotocol/status/1666804101580214275 1:11:47 Jobs https://bankless.pallet.com/jobs/bfe59a15-07a6-406c-b802-222efd113b66 1:15:19 TAKES https://twitter.com/jessewldn/status/1668209744505458693 https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1669329814568747009 1:17:48 What Are We Bullish On? 1:22:20 Meme Of The Week https://twitter.com/Permissionless/status/1666851078250328064 1:23:04 Risks And Disclaimers 1:23:25 Moment of Zen https://twitter.com/cocothecorncob/status/1669341697363304448 ---- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. 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.

• 0:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  And they're saying, why can't everyone in crypto be compliant like us? They don't even have a product that anyone's using or works. And meanwhile, David, you have Kraken, you have Coinbase.

• 0:12David Hoffman?

  Actual companies demanded by the market.

• 0:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Companies have been in the space servicing people in the crypto industry and protecting investors, giving them exposure to this asset class for over a decade. American-based companies, pristine reputations, and the SEC is busy sending them Wells notices. And somehow this guy gets in front of Congress. It just seems a little odd, doesn't it?

• 0:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, it is the third Friday of June and it's Friday morning. I said that twice. David, what time is it?

• 0:48David Hoffman?

  It's the Bankless Friday Weekly Roll-Up, Brian, where we talk the entire weekly news in crypto, which is always an ambitious endeavor, which is why I'm on my third coffee. How are you doing?

• 0:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  I drank a pot this morning, so I haven't gone to the second pot yet. Just a pot. You know, like a pot can be a different size, you know? This is probably like...

• 1:06David Hoffman?

  A pot is unequivocally a large size.

• 1:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  It has a lot of coffee.

• 1:10David Hoffman?

  Alright, topics of the week. Uniswap V4, we actually have some crypto news this week. So we got Uniswap V4 announced this week and why? I'm calling it the hook-centric roadmap to...

• 1:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hook-centric roadmap?

• 1:21David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 1:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, you think that's gonna catch?

• 1:23David Hoffman?

  I am forcing it. I am forcing the topic.

• 1:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Alright.

• 1:27David Hoffman?

  And while I'm very, very happy that all this crypto news has happened, in addition to Uniswap, we have Eigenlayer going live. We have the Polygon roadmap update. We have BlackRock that wants a Bitcoin ETF. These are all great news. And half of this goddamn weekly roll-up is going to be dedicated to the SEC shenanigans, which I'm sad to say, but they were extra shenanaginy this week. Shenanaginy is putting it lightly.

• 1:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  We love you, SEC. I don't know what's going on, man, but it seemed like the SEC may have put a Fed plant in front of Congress. Alright, that sounds like conspiracy tinfoil hat stuff, but we're gonna drop the details on that and you guys can decide for yourself what is going on. Also... The Hinman emails were released. This is the Ripple case. It kind of exposes the SEC was sort of two-faced with respect to its stance on whether ETH is a security or not.

• 2:20David Hoffman?

  It really undermines the SEC's current words with the SEC's previous words.

• 2:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's shenanigan season.

• 2:25David Hoffman?

  The court ordered the SEC to not edit or change anything about its historical statements out of fear that it might do that.

• 2:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  The fact that you have to say that as the court, right?

• 2:36David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 2:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, we got some shenanigans to deal with, but...

• 2:39David Hoffman?

  Lots of shenanigans and also Warren Davidson is fed up with the SEC's shenanigans and he has proposed the SEC Stabilization Act, AKA hashtag fire Gary Gensler and completely rebuild the SEC. That's literally, that was his hashtag, fire Gary Gensler.

• 2:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Fire Gary Gensler, wow. That sounds like something you would tweet out, David. Not me, of course.

• 3:02David Hoffman?

  I've tweeted out a little bit worse than that and that tweet is in the agenda.

• 3:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  I still want Gary on this podcast, okay?

• 3:07David Hoffman?

  He is not coming on this podcast.

• 3:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  I would welcome him, though, and I know you would, too. We would have a productive conversation. Gary Gensler, if you're listening, come on the podcast, let's talk a little bit.

• 3:16David Hoffman?

  We would have a productive words for him to hear. I don't know if we'd get them back. Anyways.

• 3:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Speaking of productive, you know what's really productive is having a smart contract with good security, making sure it's audited. Our friends and sponsors at Cyphren want to let you know that they are some world-class smart contract auditors, okay? So if you're building a protocol, Cyphren wants to make sure your code is secure and using the most modern tooling and best practices available. You know Patrick from the Cyphren team? He's a YouTube content creator, too, where he talks about solidity, blockchain development, and smart contracts. This is a lot of views on this content, alright?

• 3:56David Hoffman?

  He's been doing this for apparently like five, three years? Every, yeah. He's releasing, of course, every single year with a combined 5 million views, which, I mean, 5 million views isn't impressive. The 5 million views of onboarding solidity devs into Web3, that's a lot of onboarding work.

• 4:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 4:11David Hoffman?

  And so, not only can Cyphren audit your smart contract, it can also teach you how to be a good, secure solidity dev, because if you have 27 hours this bear market, because I'm sure you do, that's why they call it the bore market, you can go from 0 to 60 using Cyphren.

• 4:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go. Well, speaking of education, why don't you educate us on the crypto markets today? David, let's uh-

• 4:33David Hoffman?

  It's a bad, bad lesson this week.

• 4:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, bad lesson?

• 4:36David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 4:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Things go down?

• 4:37David Hoffman?

  Everything, things go down. The color is red. Blood in the streets. Bitcoin started the week at $26,700, down 6.5%, down to $25,000.

• 4:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  I've seen worse.

• 4:48David Hoffman?

  When, oof, Bitcoin down 6.5%, it's not great. That is not great.

• 4:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  I've seen worse though.

• 4:53David Hoffman?

  Ether, down almost double.

• 4:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ooh, now that's-

• 4:56David Hoffman?

  Starting the week at 1850, ending the week at 1650.

• 5:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  I do not like double digit-

• 5:02David Hoffman?

  1637 is where we are right now.

• 5:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Double-digit percentage down, feels bad.

• 5:05David Hoffman?

  Not great, not great. Yeah, the ratio of course takes a beating, down 5.5%. That was a lot for the ratio.

• 5:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can you tell me why?

• 5:12David Hoffman?

  Uh, why is the ratio down?

• 5:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, no, no. Why are we dropping? Like, what happened this week?

• 5:18David Hoffman?

  I, I totally think that this price action could have totally happened in a vacuum. We were talking about that mid bear market high that we have recently been to, that kind of matches where we were in 2019, if you're into that kind of voodoo stuff. And then also at the same time, Gary Gensler told us that basically crypto assets 3 through 15 on the crypto market cap are all securities. And so I think that has also set in as well. The mood is bad, and then like things become real when the price drops. I remember talking to you about this. Remember in March of 2020, early March? Everyone's talking, everyone was talking about COVID, but no one was taking it seriously.

• 6:03David Hoffman?

  And then the COVID dump day happened. And like the trad market dumped, crypto markets dumped, and then everyone started taking COVID extremely seriously after the markets reacted. I think that's kind of what's happening with the crypto securities is like, for the first couple of days, it was like, oh Gary, just sue in Coinbase and Binance, and now we're like-

• 6:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're gonna fight back.

• 6:22David Hoffman?

  We're gonna fight back, yeah. And now I'm like, oh shit, this is gonna be bad.

• 6:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  It could last a while.

• 6:27David Hoffman?

  I think that's what that was.

• 6:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, it could take- It could take a while for the US to turn course on this. Right? This is doing some damage, I would say, in crypto right now. So I think you might be right about that. It's the market sort of realizing

• 6:41David Hoffman?

  Coming to terms, yeah.

• 6:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Coming to terms with the fact that the US regulatory environment might look ugly for some time. We're still above a trillion, though, in terms of market cap. So there's that.

• 6:51David Hoffman?

  1.05.

• 6:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, should we go down market a little bit and take a look at the the other assets besides Bitcoin and Ether? So this is one of my favorite. It's not a chart exactly, but kind of like a metric to look at.

• 7:08David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 7:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Percent down from all time high, just to recap where we are. So

• 7:12David Hoffman?

  Just to really just be masochistic.

• 7:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just, just because we, we want to hate ourselves this week for just a second. And, and we'll bring some hope near the end of this episode. Bitcoin price down from all time high about 64%. Ether price down 66%. By the way, those on themselves, not too bad.

• 7:30David Hoffman?

  Those could be worse.

• 7:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, and they have been worse.

• 7:32David Hoffman?

  Which is insane to say 66, not that bad.

• 7:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's not that bad. I mean, this just feels like a flesh wound to me. But then we go down market and we look at some of the non-Eth, non-Bitcoin tokens. XRP down 85%. Interestingly, up 30% on, I believe, I don't know, the day or something.

• 7:51David Hoffman?

  Year to date.

• 7:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Year to date. Okay, that's year to date. So up on the year, which is interesting, but down 85%. Cardano down 91%. Dogecoin down 91%. Solana down 94%. Polkadot down 92%. There's definitely some pain down market. You even get to some of the, like, the DeFi blue chips. Uniswap down 90%. Wow. Still a lot of pain, a lot of blood in this market, particularly when you get outside of Bitcoin and Ether.

• 8:23David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the altcoin market cap has been absolutely pummeled. Holding, holding our alts in a bear market has proved to be very dangerous. And that was before Gary deemed them to be securities. So here we are.

• 8:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Thanks Gary.

• 8:37David Hoffman?

  Thanks Gary. Thanks Gary. I'm so protected. You know, something we actually haven't talked about in a while that was in this news, in the market news this week, Ryan.

• 8:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's that?

• 8:45David Hoffman?

  Remember the word inflation?

• 8:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:47David Hoffman?

  Remember the word raising or lowering or pausing interest rates?

• 8:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 8:51David Hoffman?

  Something happened this week. What happened?

• 8:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  The Fed had a announcement, basically. So the FOMC had their meeting, of course, where they tell us what they're going to do with interest rates. And you know what they did, David?

• 9:03David Hoffman?

  Tell me.

• 9:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Nothing. They decided to skip.

• 9:06David Hoffman?

  But that's news.

• 9:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's news.

• 9:07David Hoffman?

  That's news that they decided to do nothing.

• 9:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  That is actually big news that they decided to do nothing. This is kind of a skip the rate hike type of announcement, wait and see approach. They're holding at 5%. And the reason that's notable, that this breather is notable, is this is the first time they haven't raised of the last 10 times. So we've had 10 consecutive increases that stretch all the way back to March 2022, when the Fed basically capitulated at that point in time. They said, ah, yeah, inflation.

• 9:40David Hoffman?

  Inflation's not transient.

• 9:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a thing. It's not transient. It's getting out of hand. They had the previous summer, in the summer of 2021, been saying, ah, don't worry about inflation. It's transient. Don't worry about it. They had been kind of late to the game to start increasing rates. But then they did, and they did so 10 times, all the way up to 5%. And here we are, they're taking a break this particular time. And why? It's because the Fed says inflation appears to be easing, and they want to assess whether they've already raised enough. And I will say, inflation is at about 4% at this point in time. So it's definitely off of the highs.

• 10:16David Hoffman?

  Seems low, actually. That's a low number.

• 10:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  All things considered. Look at this chart, David. What are you seeing in this chart here? This is CPI.

• 10:24David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I am seeing a chart come down to a what was previously considered high, but in recent terms can now be considered very low. So, I mean, in 2022, inflation got up to 9%. It got in previous years, 2017, it gets to 3%. In late 2018, it gets to 3% again. It almost gets back to 3% at the start of 2020. And now we're down to 4%. And so it feels like we are in range of historic levels and we are down from 9%. So like, it looks good.

• 10:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  It is a trailing indicator. So let's remember that. Okay. This is all kind of past, past data. So we're not looking at kind of the current month inflation, but yeah, annualized at 4%. Not too bad. Now, keep in mind, the Fed's target is 2%. So the Fed is basically saying, yeah, it's a wait and see, but right now for this time, but we expect to continue raising rates later in the year. And I think the market kind of believes that. What's interesting about this is the, you know, stock market, equities, risk on type assets, they don't really know. I feel like they're in this undecided territory. Is it like a bull? Is it a bear? We don't know. And so on this news, you'd think a pause would be good news for stocks.

• 11:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Stocks traded like a little up, but basically flat. I think the market's trying to figure out what's going to happen next and hasn't quite decided on that yet.

• 11:48David Hoffman?

  I wonder if the trad markets forgot. I mean, I'm just speaking for myself. I've completely forgot about this whole like inflation, interest rates phenomenon for the last quarter. Like this is, this is once again, like, oh yeah.

• 11:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Have you forgotten about the bank runs?

• 12:00David Hoffman?

  Do you remember those? I do remember those. That was like, that was almost a quarter ago.

• 12:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 12:06David Hoffman?

  It seems like, but yeah, SEC has just completely dominated it. I wonder if the trad markets are hanging on tooth and nail to inflation like we once were. It just doesn't feel like people care anymore.

• 12:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 12:17David Hoffman?

  Am I being naive here?

• 12:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know. I, we've got a lot of interesting indicators in the economy right now. So we've got inflation, it's about 4%. Unemployment actually isn't so bad right now. 3.7% at this point in time, right? Does, we haven't seen the kind of the unemployment that you might see if we're creeping toward a recession. That said, there's like, just some weirdness in the market. I mean, go ask a millennial about like, who's trying to buy a house, how they feel about the current economy. Not too good. And so there's a lot of weirdness going on and I think the market's just trying to figure out where this is going. So that's the Fed, David. What do we got to talk about in the rest of this episode?

• 12:56David Hoffman?

  Oh my god, so we're gonna probably have to prepare the bank list nation for like 30 plus minutes of SEC shenanigans. It's gonna, it's a lot of shenanigans. There's a lot of shenanigans. Like we said, there's the Hinman emails. There's this Walmart SBF person that SEC loves to parade in front of Congress allegedly. So who the hell is Aaron Kaplan in Prometheus? And then the SEC also wants 120 days to respond to Coinbase. We got the responses from Polygon and Solana about being a security or not. Surprised they don't think they're a security. All of these things and more, including the SEC Stabilization Act, where we're gonna try and fire Gary Gensler. All of this and more, but first a moment to talk about these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible, especially Kraken, our preferred exchange for 2023,

• 13:40David Hoffman?

  the one that you see all the beautiful charts for while they go through the prices. So if you do not have an account with Kraken, consider signing up for one right now. Let's go here for them. Kraken Pro has easily become the best crypto trading platform in the industry. The place I use to check the charts and the crypto prices, even when I'm not looking to place a trade. On Kraken Pro, you'll have access to advanced charting tools, real-time market data, and lightning-fast trade execution, all inside their spiffy new modular interface. Kraken's new customizable modular layout lets you tailor your trading experience to suit your needs. Pick and choose your favorite modules and place them anywhere you want in your screen. With Kraken Pro, you have that power. Whether you are a seasoned pro or just starting out, join thousands of traders who trust Kraken Pro for their crypto trading needs. Visit pro.kraken.com to get started today.

• 14:24David Hoffman?

  Mantle is a brand-new, high-performance Ethereum Layer 2 network, built differently from the other Layer 2s you may be familiar with. Mantle is a modular Layer 2 built on the OP stack, but uses Eigenlayer's data availability solution instead of the expensive Ethereum Layer 1. Not only does this reduce Mantle's gas fees by 80% compared to other Layer 2s, but it also reduces gas fee volatility. Mantle has a decentralized sequencer set, eliminating the risk of downtime and censorship on the network. And because Mantle implements multi-party computation nodes, Layer 1 settlement execution is shortened from seven days to as low as just one or two. Mantle is the first Layer 2 built by a DAO and is backed by one of the biggest DAO treasuries in the world, BitDAO. Mantle already has sub-communities from around Web3 on-boarded

• 15:09David Hoffman?

  to help the growth of Mantle, like Game7 for Web3 gaming, or EduDAO for the world of D-Side, and Bybit for TVL liquidity and on-ramps. Check out Mantle at mantle.xyz and follow them on Twitter at @zeroxmantle.

• 15:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, guys, the SEC shenanigans, we're gonna go through them. The first one, one of the most bizarre things I've seen in crypto. It's kind of inexplicable and not exactly sure what is going on, but let's go through some facts. This is, I guess, a take from me of what it looks like. I'm not saying this is what it is because we don't know for sure.

• 15:42David Hoffman?

  It's a good summary.

• 15:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is what it looks like. "I think Gensler and Warren's anti-crypto army may have actually rubber stamped a shitty ATS quasi-scam alt 1 in order to hold up to Congress as an example of a compliant crypto exchange, but the work quality here is 2017-era ICO scam laughable." That's what I tweeted and I said, "This has got to be rock bottom." David, this tweet thread from Matt Walsh gets into the story. It's almost an investigative journalist type story. And what I mean, if this is true, if this is what it looks like, I think this is rock bottom for the SEC.

• 16:15David Hoffman?

  This is unreal. This cannot be a real story.

• 16:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, let's get into it. So this is Matt Walsh in the tweet thread. Do you want to kick this off for us?

• 16:25David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so Matt Walsh, I remember him actually talking about this on his On The Bring podcast that he does with Nick Carter every last week. So he was talking about how weird this was last week. And then apparently since then it's gotten even weirder, which is how he starts this tweet thread. He goes, "Has anyone actually looked into this beyond bizarre? Last month, in the midst of the SEC bringing cases on Coinbase and Gemini and giving the stiff arm to Robinhood and others, Prometheum gets approval for a first-of-its-kind special purpose broker-dealer for digital asset securities. Then Prometheum CEO somehow gets a seat in front of Congress yesterday and starts reading off pre-written notes clearly coordinated narratives with Democratic members of Congress or the SEC."

• 17:09David Hoffman?

  And so if you click into this, we won't play this clip because it's like a long clip, but there is a section where a Democratic member of Congress, Ms. Vilasquez, is asking questions that you, like, this is pretty common. I think we're like staffers will underhand questions to the congressmen or women. This congresswoman clearly does not understand the question. She is just reading the question. And you can tell because like, you know, crypto people know when you are not talking crypto language. That is very obvious. And so she has a scripted question, which she asks Adam, the CEO of Prometheum. And then as soon as the question ends, he looks down at his notes and gives a very scripted answer. The whole thing is scripted.

• 17:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Here's the answer from Aaron.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  ... system is the separation of banking and commercial activity. The Republican-led stablecoin legislation we are discussing here today seems to fail to recognize this separation for stablecoin issuers. This would allow non-commercial businesses to own a stablecoin issuer. Can you explain the harm to both consumers and perhaps financial stability that could arise from failing to clearly define this separation?

• 18:25Speaker 03

  Consolidation of consumer and banking activities can lead to conflicts of interest and potential systemic risk. Essentially, a lack of strong frameworks with properly regulatory oversight for the entities involved, particularly when they're co-mingling consumer and financial-based activities, presents additional levels of conflict and potential exposure to the underlying customers, either on the consumer side or the financial side.

• 18:52David Hoffman?

  Man, God, that is so cringe. And it just sounds like it's like Gary Gensler's like, like, son, like, giving these, these words.

• 19:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's definitely part of the Gary Gensler fan club.

• 19:03David Hoffman?

  Stump speech.

• 19:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, stump speech. And there's some interesting conflicts of interest here. You should go on with Matt Walsh's thread here.

• 19:10David Hoffman?

  Okay, so Matt Walsh goes, as Rodrigo points out, Rodrigo does legal and policy at Paradigm, this ATS will absolutely not work unless the projects first register the tokens with the SEC. And there are no tokens currently registered with the SEC because the regime is not viable for public blockchain networks. And so you know how Gary Gensler is always like, some projects have come in and registered? Why not the rest of the industry? Some have done it.

• 19:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  All bad actors and scammers.

• 19:37David Hoffman?

  Some people have come in and registered, right? It's totally possible because some people have done it. Apparently, it's this Prometheum thing.

• 19:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  The one that has done it.

• 19:45David Hoffman?

  Come in and done it, right? And so Prometheum is like, okay, now that Gary Gensler and the SEC has deemed Solana and Matic and Filecoin and XRP2B Securities, great, we have this alt-layer-one ATS blockchain exchange for you to trade your crypto securities on in a compliant manner. The point is, is that no, it's like Solana, Polygon, they don't, they don't want to trade on these platforms because they are decentralized global crypto networks. And they can't do that because of, of, that is against the whole entire point of the whole entire thing we're doing.

• 20:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  An ATS, so what is an ATS? This was a kind of a, an idea that was very much popularized in 2017. It's interesting, we'll get to this part of the story, but this Prometheum thing seems like a 2017 era, like almost ICO token launch. It's certainly a narrative and it has its roots there, which we'll get to in a second. But could you define what an ATS is for, for people who haven't ever heard that term?

• 20:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so this actually goes back to the world that I was in, in 2018. I was, I was in, I worked for a security token company. So we were trying to figure out how to issue security tokens. How do you do that? You do, you do your token issuance and trading on an ATS, an alternative trading system, which is a thing that exists before crypto, inside of crypto. And then once everyone realized that the ICO mania was actually like selling unregistered securities, every like ICO agency like stopped and started pivoting to a security token company because we were like selling unregistered securities. Uh, and so like there became this like rush, this gold rush towards ATSs. So like T0 was one of these startups. There were, there were, I can't remember all of them. I wrote blog posts about this. Uh, there was like five or six startups. I had to do market research.

• 21:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  No product market fit for any of these.

• 21:34David Hoffman?

  No, right. Because, because everyone wanted to issue their tokens in a decentralized public way.

• 21:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  But also because an ATS system, right?

• 21:42David Hoffman?

  It's walled garden. It's KY, it's KYC exchange.

• 21:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not only KYC, also it's accredited investor law. So if it, if it's not a publicly traded company that would be traded in the SEP. S and P or NASDAQ, right? If it's kind of like some sort of private placement, then you have a credit investor laws. It's basically you have to have over a million dollars net worth in order to actually access this stuff and use it. It's just a very small niche market that nobody wants, nobody's going to use. It's the reason it's never taken off.

• 22:08David Hoffman?

  No one in crypto wants this.

• 22:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  But here's this guy who's like, I came in with Gary Gensler, I met his office, like he's inviting everyone and I get my ATS license. And this is, we are a compliant exchange and, and the rest of crypto is non-compliant. You should just do what I did. And it seems like it is a plant. It seems like it is a setup. It seems like this guy works for the Fed in some capacity or has some hidden incentive here because this project is so bizarre.

• 22:39David Hoffman?

  This guy looks like a, can we go to the Laura Shin clip and play that clip?

• 22:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, okay.

• 22:43David Hoffman?

  This guy looks like a soiled slicked back suit.

• 22:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is, uh, this is, this is from a podcast that Laura Shin did with Aaron Kaplan.

• 22:53Speaker 03

  I believe that since the ICO in 2015, Ethereum has been an investment contract. And there is no legal precedent where a security, meaning an investment contract that therefore is a security, morphs into a non-security. There's been sort of ideas of sufficiently decentralized posited out there, but they're not really based in legal precedent. So once a security, always a security under the, you know, legal precedents that exist. And as such, while we're not announcing anything at this current time.

• 23:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Here it is.

• 23:26Speaker 03

  As Chairman Gensler has noted, and I'll sound like a broken record, the overwhelming majority of digital assets, basically everything besides for Bitcoin is a investment contract and therefore a security.

• 23:36David Hoffman?

  The whole point about crypto is that it is unprecedented.

• 23:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think that, uh, applying laws from 1933 and 1934, before the stapler was invented, to this new asset class in like digital assets to cryptocurrency is unworkable. It doesn't work. And Aaron Kaplan is, is not admitting that. So basically the things he said with Laura Shin. On her podcast, he reiterated the exact same thing in front of Congress. He said, Gensler is right. Basically, the SEC is right. Crypto securities laws are already clear. We don't need new laws. Everything but Bitcoin is a security. It's possible to be a compliant exchange. Just look at Prometheum and all the success that we've had being a compliant exchange.

• 24:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you know, if it was just that, that would be weird enough. It doesn't end there, though, David.

• 24:30David Hoffman?

  That is one half of the story. That is the tip of the iceberg.

• 24:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so it gets even more interesting. Remember you were talking about the 2017 narrative around ATSs?

• 24:42David Hoffman?

  Very short-lived gold rush for ATSs, crypto ATSs.

• 24:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yep, apparently Prometheum actually got their start right there in 2017. They got their Reg A plus license. They aimed to raise $50 million there. So that's where Prometheum actually started. The reason it sounds like a 2017 ICO kind of scam narrative because it kind of was a little bit. They were stacked, though, when it came to kind of former insiders, government insiders, people from the New York Stock Exchange, people from FINRA, people from the CBOEs. They're very plugged in. Oh, their COO from the SEC, that's quite interesting. And then what happened, David, is they went dormant for a period of time.

• 25:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so they went silent for years until about, even though they had, this was their roadmap. It's what they were planning to do. You know, they had a Genesis block and everything. This was a kind of blockchain ATS, of course. So you start in 2017, by 2019, you have your Genesis block issued with your fantastic ATS system. All right, so they go quiet for a few years and now they're suddenly back on the scene. It also turns out, David, they are funded by some very interesting companies. What does this tweet from Adam Cochran say?

• 26:02David Hoffman?

  Now, this is where Matt Walsh and Adam Cochran turn into investigative journalists. And there's just a lot to unpack here. I'm not, I'm not the one to do it, but I'll just summarize some of their findings. Their fundraiser was done with this affiliate from China called Wangjeng. Wangjeng, I'm sorry, I don't know how to pronounce this. A purported CCP affiliate. Okay, great, so the ties to China. They raised $48 million without a product, hired former SEC and FINRA people. They paid $1.5 million to this thing called Network One Financial Securities, which has a very dubious compliance record for people who care about these things. But the point is, is like, the big thing about Network One Financial,

• 26:43David Hoffman?

  do you remember when Long Island Iced Tea, you know, those beloved, liked ICs? That, and shout out DeFi Dave, who always wears this shirt. In 2017, they changed their stock ticker and company name to Long Island Blockchain.

• 27:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Blockchain, just to pump the stock price?

• 27:02David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so that was actually done by Network One Financial.

• 27:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, interesting.

• 27:06David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 27:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Those guys.

• 27:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the Iced Tea Company. And then they also had another offering that was another blockchain pivot that the SEC charged for fraud. So like, being connected to these people, not great. Like, and if you scroll up, you'll see like the, again, for people who care about compliance stuff, they have 23 disclosure events of things that just like, aren't great, like marks on their record. So it's just like, it's just not, it's just not pretty. It's just like, not a, there's not a cool.

• 27:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  So that's what's so weird about this, is suddenly they're just back and now in front of Congress.

• 27:42David Hoffman?

  Back in front of Congress.

• 27:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  And they're saying, we just got this ATS license. And they're simping for the SEC. And they're saying, why can't everyone in crypto be compliant like us? They don't even have a product that anyone's using or works. And meanwhile, David, you have Kraken, you have Coinbase.

• 28:00David Hoffman?

  Actual companies demanded by the market.

• 28:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Actual companies have been in the space servicing people in the crypto industry and protecting investors, giving them exposure to this asset class for over a decade. American-based companies, pristine reputations, and the SEC is busy sending them well.

• 28:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  notices and somehow this guy gets in front of Congress it just seems a little odd doesn't it

• 28:28David Hoffman?

  it really it's just weird it's just very weird Adam Cochran I think summed it up nicely with these three possible answers so why the hell this is happening one these are plants who have been given a sweet regulatory deal in exchange in exchange for engaging in the way the SEC wanted them to just like how Gary was working with SPF so there's precedent for that conclusion two these guys are using their SEC and FINRA connections to push an agenda to get certain assets deemed securities for them to be the only approved player to capture the market bold and three these guys are grifters who have been raising money from scratchy sources and for years have been twisting and will continue to grift so aka that they're grifters

• 29:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  so either grifters

• 29:10David Hoffman?

  I think it's all three

• 29:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  or plants and maybe it's some combination of all three very weird again who knows maybe the SEC maybe Genzler had absolutely nothing to do with this maybe that you know it just seems like something that the Elizabeth Warren anti crypto army is behind I don't know why it just

• 29:31David Hoffman?

  descriptive questions and scripted answers thing is like it's hard to look

• 29:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  oh weird and on top of that that is the first of a series of shenanigans that we've uncovered this week shenanigan number two more hypocrisy talk about Hinman's emails David what are we looking at here

• 29:47David Hoffman?

  so this came out of the Ripple case so Ripple has been in a fight with the SEC for a very long time the SEC deemed Ripple to be a security forever ago exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken like delisted Ripple like because they're like alright we don't want to fight that fight so like Ripple has been having their own fight with the SEC as a part of that fight a bunch of documents get released from the SEC that came from a famous speech that Bill Hinman in June of 2018 came and said where he said ether at the time of sale was perhaps a security but in its current shape and form when it is being traded on on a dexes or being traded on Coinbase or Binance or wherever is not a security then

• 30:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  and who is Bill Hinman remind people

• 30:28David Hoffman?

  Bill Hinman was a director of the SEC he was an SEC Official at the time in 2018. So this is an SEC person making the statement. Gary Gensler and the current SEC administration have said that Bill Hinman's statements were his actions as an individual.

• 30:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just his own personal opinion.

• 30:46David Hoffman?

  His own personal opinion doesn't reflect the opinions of the SEC. And Bill Hinman said, like, perhaps the investment contract of Ether at the pre-sale, perhaps that was a security. But Ether, as it currently stands, being traded in the public market, is not a security. And so that was a statement from Bill Hinman.

• 31:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can I read his exact statement?

• 31:05David Hoffman?

  Sure.

• 31:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yep. Hinman said this, "And putting aside the fundraising that accompanied the creation of Ether, based on my understanding of the present state of Ether," again, this is 2018. "The Ethereum network and its decentralized structure, current offers and sales of Ether are not securities transactions." That is the exact statement. So the crypto industry was very excited, saying, "Hey, the SEC's finally given us clarity. Here's a very clear, pre-written script saying Ether is not a security in a speech from a senior SEC official." And you're saying what Gary Gensler and the SEC have since said is, "Oh, no, that was just his personal opinion."

• 31:40David Hoffman?

  Exactly. And all of this, all of this is not from the documents from the Ripple case. Here's what was revealed from the Ripple case. So here's an email of SEC officials, like, working together to come to consensus about what Bill Hinman ought to say. And so Bill Hinman put forth, in the emails, put forth what his, like, his speech that he will give. And he asked for comments from other SEC officials. And they say, "As written, the language remains vague as to whether ETH is a security. If you want to make an affirmative statement that is not a security, the language could be stronger, as in, just say it. If you don't want to take an affirmative stance, we suggest using language similar to what you use for Bitcoin. Read the disclosure regime to make it more consistent." And that's what one person said. Here's what a second person said.

• 32:24David Hoffman?

  "We thought you were going to say that you don't believe ETH is a security. We think that that message is a helpful message. This statement, on the other hand, appears to likely create more confusion about the status of ETH. To the extent that you don't say ETH is not a security, please consider confirming the policy of rationality of the disclosure regime of the federal securities." Laws as you did with respect to Bitcoin earlier in the paragraph. Basically saying, hey, Bill, what do you want to do? Do you want to say that ETH is not a security? Because just say it. And then, and then Bill then later made this speech and then just said it.

• 32:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just said it.

• 32:54David Hoffman?

  And then in an email, him and responded and said the language around Ether would be used if we are all in agreement. So he's like, okay, so guys, we're agreeing to say that ETH isn't a security here. And then he made the speech, which said that Ether wasn't a security. And now these ripple docs are revealed to show that makes it really hard for Gary Gensler and the current SEC administration to say that Bill Hinman was acting of his own accord. Because there's emails of the SEC saying like, hey, we're all in agreement about what we're going to say here, right?

• 33:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, this just makes it so obvious that the SEC, the current leadership, the SEC changed its mind.

• 33:30David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 33:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Changed things around.

• 33:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 33:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Had previously said Ether was not a security in 2018 and now want to retract that and take that back.

• 33:41David Hoffman?

  Yep. Yep.

• 33:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Very clear.

• 33:43David Hoffman?

  And so this is, this is why in the court, the judge for the ripple case was like, hey, the SEC is not allowed to like edit its previous statements. Not, it's not like changing on the record. As the SEC is not allowed to go say, but what we really meant was this. And so the, the court is sealing Bill Hinman's statements as real statements that the SEC cannot say like, that's not what we meant.

• 34:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Seems fair.

• 34:09David Hoffman?

  Right. So they, they are not allowed to go, basically no takes backsies is how I was. Is what the, the court said, no takes backsies on the Bill Hinman thing is what, that's this, that's a great summary, actually. No takes backsies.

• 34:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is Nick Carter saying, when this came out, the day has barely started and already a big setback for the SEC. They argued that Hinman was just a loose cannon going off in his own. Clear now that he got sign off from the highest levels. Great news overall. It comes to a court system holding our regulators responsible.

• 34:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  That is a good thing. Alright, so that's the second shenanigan that they find themselves in. Oh, and XRP is up on the news.

• 34:49David Hoffman?

  Interestingly, XRP is the only coin in the top 20 that was green. Because XRP is like, "Oh, you guys are all getting sued at securities too? Welcome, welcome."

• 35:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh wow, alright. No clarity, here we go. Last thing, real quick. What are they doing with this Coinbase thing?

• 35:07David Hoffman?

  Not quite the last thing, we've got more shenanigans after this. So this is shenanigans number three. The SEC wants 120 days to respond to Coinbase's petition. So, one, here is Paul Graywell's summary of the SEC's filing to the response last week in the Third Circuit Court. This has been the fight for clarity that Coinbase is like, "Hey, can a court please make the SEC tell us whether they're gonna make rules or not?" And the SEC's response to that was like, "We want 120 days." And so Paul just summarizes three, four main points here, saying that the SEC repeats the fallacy that they haven't made any decision on new crypto rules. Two, they refuse to commit to any deadline despite the court's explicit order.

• 35:49David Hoffman?

  Three, instead they anticipate and making a recommendation in 120 days. And four, they ignore the clear statements of the chair that confirm that they have no issue they have no intent to issue new rules and instead conflate the evidence of a decision those statements provide with an argument that the statements are themselves a decision, blah blah blah blah blah. They're just throwing Coinbase's around. I summarized this and basically the SEC just told us to go F ourselves.

• 36:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, this is called stonewalling. They're not gonna do it. No, you know, sorry. Like, they're just not gonna play ball with Coinbase, not gonna provide any clarity to the industry. And David, two weeks ago, do you remember? In those complaints filed with courts against Binance and Coinbase, they just called a whole bunch of crypto asset securities, including tokens like Matic, which is the token behind Polygon, tokens like Sol, which is the token behind Solana. And the token projects themselves have fired back, they are responding. What are we looking at here?

• 36:51David Hoffman?

  So this is a statement from Polygon. We also have a statement from Solana. Both of them basically say the same thing. It's like they disagree with the characterization of them as a security. Polygon said that they sold Polygon outside of the US, blah, blah, blah. Solana will say the same thing. Here's a quote from the Solana article that I really like. Here's from a Solana developer in a hacker house in New York City. Actually, I bet this is the one that's not too far away from me. The hacker said, "I don't think any developers give a shit. Sol being a security doesn't really affect anyone building on top of Solana." Which is just great cypherpunk fashion. The terrible thing, Ryan, is that Solana, Polygon, Filecoin, all these tokens that were deemed to be securities are not defendants. They are collateral damage, where the defendants are Binance and Coinbase. And so they don't

• 37:36David Hoffman?

  even, they don't even get to have a seat in the court, in the hearing.

• 37:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Really?

• 37:39David Hoffman?

  Because they are not the defendant. They are just being charged with being a security as like collateral damage inside of the suit between Coinbase and Binance and the SEC.

• 37:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  But can they be deemed a security without fighting that out with these projects in court?

• 37:53David Hoffman?

  I don't know. But that's, yeah.

• 37:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, let me ask you what you think about that. So the Solana hacker house guy said, "I don't think developers give a shit." Okay, that's true. However, look, Sol is down 94%. I mean, like, there's FTX, there's all sorts of other reasons why. I say it's all this, but this sure-

• 38:09David Hoffman?

  It also had an insane 2021.

• 38:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, but this sure didn't help. Okay? And so it does impact the economic security of these alternative layer ones, right? I mean, if all of these tokens are deemed securities in the US. But here's the thing, I think the rest of the world will continue to march on. Like, Gary Gensler is not the emperor of the world. And while he has some-

• 38:31David Hoffman?

  Networks are bigger than Gary.

• 38:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Robinhood, though, delisting. So-

• 38:36David Hoffman?

  Boo!

• 38:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Cardano, Polygon, Solana.

• 38:41David Hoffman?

  You are the only ones delisting, Robinhood.

• 38:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's unfortunate.

• 38:44David Hoffman?

  You're the only ones doing this.

• 38:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's unfortunate.

• 38:46David Hoffman?

  It's very unfortunate.

• 38:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  It would be nice if they joined the battle and fought the good fight like Kraken and Coinbase and others are doing, because we need all the ammo that we can get. Here's a tweet from Ryan Selkis.

• 38:57David Hoffman?

  This is what SEC protection looks like. And he basically, he's showing the Mazzari chart that we were showing up earlier, where everything's down.

• 39:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Everything's down, blood.

• 39:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is when, yeah, this is when the token's dumb. So, yeah, it's not great. It's not great.

• 39:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  He says, "Aren't you grateful your tax dollars go to Gary Gensler, who already made 100 million from Goldman Sachs?"

• 39:15David Hoffman?

  I hate the fact that I pay his salary. I hate that. I hate that so much.

• 39:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  So he can pull up the ladder behind himself and screw you.

• 39:21David Hoffman?

  Yeah, okay, so we are not, we have two more sections of SEC shenanigans.

• 39:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, God.

• 39:26David Hoffman?

  Can we play the clip of Gary Gensler in 2018?

• 39:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, yeah, this is a great clip.

• 39:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah, here we go.

• 39:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is Gary Gensler.

• 39:32David Hoffman?

  I love 2018 Gary, by the way. Over 70% of the crypto market is Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash. Why did I name those four "They're not securities"?

• 39:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Let's play that back, let's play that back.

• 39:52David Hoffman?

  Those four, "They're not securities." Oh, Gary Gensler! I love 2018 Gary Gensler.

• 40:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you sure that's the same guy? Looks like him. Could be deep fake, David, I don't know.

• 40:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 40:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  You can't trust these things.

• 40:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 40:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  My, how things have changed, though. This is your take. Me earlier, "I want Gary Gensler out of office." Me now, "I want Gary Gensler in prison." Well, he's not gonna come on the podcast now, David. Thanks a lot.

• 40:21David Hoffman?

  I have spoken.

• 40:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why do you feel this way?

• 40:26David Hoffman?

  Because Gary, it's one thing to be an incompetent regulator, but Gary has shown to be competent and to have positions and stances in 2018, and he has shown to understand crypto networks. He has shown to be a competent, functioning person who deeply understands this crypto industry. And now he's, as far as I can tell, exclusively playing the political game of climbing up ladders of power. And it is a single-player PVE game that Gary is playing inside of a world of people, of humans. Gary, we live in a society. You do not get to treat the rest of humans as your environment that you are PVE-ing,

• 41:11David Hoffman?

  but that is what he is doing.

• 41:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  But you said something, you said something stronger. You said you want Gary Gensler in prison, all right?

• 41:17David Hoffman?

  He is using the authority of a public office to elevate himself and tear down an entire industry of hundreds of thousands of people.

• 41:28David Hoffman?

  He is misusing the authority given to him by his role for his own self gain. There's some law, I don't, there's probably some law out there. Find it. We can find it. He is doing something against the people. This is Gary Gensler versus the people.

• 41:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think what you're reacting to here, and of course, like before someone goes to, gets prosecuted, or there's criminal charges, there has to be evidence of criminality, right? So just because you don't like somebody, it doesn't mean like, I don't like this guy. Go to prison. You're going to prison. I think that if you looked hard, there would be evidence of corruption here. And I think that's what you are reacting to so strongly. It's not just an abdication of responsibility, of shirking your duties and playing a self-interested games. Like lots of people do that. CEOs do that. There's tons of psychopaths in corporations and government. I think that there is actual corruption that could be going on here.

• 42:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  And if we find evidence of that, that is a reason to hashtag fire Gary Gensler. That's where we're going next. Uh, this is-

• 42:37David Hoffman?

  I will settle for a firing of Gary Gensler.

• 42:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is Warren Davidson here. "Today I filed the SEC Stabilization Act." SEC stabilization. This is not stablecoins here. We're trying to stabilize. Why? Because it's gotten volatile, I guess? "Today I filed the SEC Stabilization Act to restructure the SEC and hashtag fire Gary Gensler." He put it in hashtags because he knows he wants it to trend, right?

• 43:00David Hoffman?

  Right, right, yes.

• 43:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Here he goes. "U.S. capital markets must be protected from tyrannical chairman, including the current one. It's time for real reform and to fire Gary Gensler as chair of the SEC." Warren Davidson is a crypto-friendly congressman, I believe. I, he, I often see his name associated with Tom Emmer, who we've had on the podcast before, who I believe is saying something similar.

• 43:25David Hoffman?

  Him and Tom Emmer have co-written that very progressive, productive crypto bill that Jake Shavinsky and other crypto lawyers are like, big thumbs up.

• 43:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Which one's that? Did you guys talk about that last week?

• 43:36David Hoffman?

  The Digital Asset Market Structure Bill.

• 43:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ah, right. And now they've got a second bill to fire Gary Gensler. Do you think this is actually like- Going to get legs, you know, I don't know how bills like these work, or is this just

• 43:47David Hoffman?

  If the Republicans win the 2024 election, then big, big time. Yeah.

• 43:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  But I mean, Gary's out anyway.

• 43:55David Hoffman?

  In 2025. Yeah, you're right. He is out.

• 43:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Okay. That's the SEC. We're done with the SEC shenanigans for this week. Anyway, my question to you is, do we have to start worrying about the CFTC?

• 44:08David Hoffman?

  The CFTC? Quickly, before we get there, here's a very quick, yeah, this is, this is why this is a, this is a Democrat versus Republican issue.

• 44:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 44:15David Hoffman?

  This is, this is a great tweet from Nick to Mano. The Biden administration's crypto timeline. First, Sam Bankman Fried is the second largest donor to Biden's presidential campaign. Second, Biden appoints Gary Gensler as chairman of the SEC. Third, Gary Gensler hosts meetings with SBF and FTX with no action letter discussed. Next, after winning favor with the FTC, FTX is exposed as the largest fraud in history by the crypto community. And last, the SEC attacks sound legal businesses that have been attempting to work in good faith with regulators for over a decade, Coinbase and Kraken. I sent this tweet to my very Democrat family and I got crickets back.

• 44:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, the problem is, look, I don't think that corruption is a right versus left, Democrat versus Republican issue. It's just corruption. And that's what this smells like. And that's what it looks like. And wherever it is, doesn't matter what side of the political spectrum you're on, you should be in favor of getting corruption out of government. It's certainly looking like it. Can we turn to that CFTC for a corruption free regulation? Are they, are they friends of crypto?

• 45:19David Hoffman?

  It's also not great. Okay. So this is the CFTC versus Uki Dow. This is something that a lot of the legal minds in the crypto space have been paying attention to as the thing to pay attention to, because what is being judged over here, what is being ruled is the liability of Dow members of actions of the Dow. So Uki Dow, formerly called BZX, I think was, it was BZX, it was exploited. And so there is, I think, a class action lawsuit against Uki Dow. This is all directionally correct. And so there, it's a suit over whether the Dow members can take responsibility. Ability over the damage caused by a DAO. The CFTC has won that court case.

• 46:02David Hoffman?

  The court has deemed CFTC to have won, which is bad, which is terrible.

• 46:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  We don't like that. This means, to be clear, if you had, like, if this kind of precedent continues, if you have a token in a particular DAO.

• 46:12David Hoffman?

  DAO governance token, yeah.

• 46:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  And something happens, the DAO does something in which you are, you could potentially be legally liable in the same way an equity holder or a partner is, if this was some sort of a, you know, corporate entity or a business entity in the US.

• 46:30David Hoffman?

  And it's basically the worst possible ruling for DAOs. Why are we not completely freaking out about this? So Lex Nod, who's another crypto lawyer, says that this is a default judgment. OK DAO didn't offend itself, so the CFTC won without needing to prove its theories. So that is very limited precedents, legal precedent. So that is why we're not freaking out about this. But if this, this could have been much worse. The OK DAO has to pay $645,000, OK DAO members. Basically, this is the CFTC calling a bluff on decentralization theater, specifically around OK DAO. But the worry is that this would happen again and the next one would fight, have more legal precedent.

• 47:13David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 47:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  It is important to know here that no OK DAO members were held personally responsibly, liable for anything in this particular case.

• 47:20David Hoffman?

  So it's a very mixed bag reaction, but the OK DAO story is now closed, I guess.

• 47:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, the idea that like a token holder has kind of like risk. Basically, that torches, I think, tokens in the US, like DAOs in the US in particular. And so, and it's interesting because token holders don't have the legal rights on the benefit side of things, they just have the downside, right?

• 47:44David Hoffman?

  So no investor protections, only investor liability.

• 47:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think it's a backdoor way to kind of like torch the asset class and really cause some harm here. Wow.

• 47:52David Hoffman?

  God, Ryan, I hate that we are 49 minutes into this recording and it's all SEC. I hate that.

• 48:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you know what? It's been that kind of year, though. It is a regulatory war year, but we got some great things coming up next, which is more build market material. Uniswap, version four, getting ready to ship.

• 48:14David Hoffman?

  It's awesome.

• 48:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Announced, some really exciting things. Eigenlayer hits mainnet and also the Bank of China just issued $28 million in digital structured notes on the Ethereum blockchain.

• 48:26David Hoffman?

  Awesome.

• 48:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's China trying to fill the void here. We'll be back with that, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including MetaMask. If you're not familiar with MetaMask, maybe you only use the wallet, go check out portfolio. MetaMask.io. I'm showing my portfolio now, David. I wish this was looking a little healthier, but here it is.

• 48:47David Hoffman?

  That's a lot of red.

• 48:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  MetaMask has a fantastic portfolio tool you could check out, too. Here they are.

• 48:52David Hoffman?

  Hey, the tokens that are green, those are stable coins.

• 48:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  The only ones that are green. Here's MetaMask, guys.

• 48:57David Hoffman?

  Learning about crypto is hard until now. Introducing MetaMask Learn, an open educational platform about crypto, Web3, self custody, wallet management, and all the other topics needed to onboard people into this crazy world of crypto. MetaMask Learn is an interactive platform with each lesson offering a simulation for the task at hand, giving you actual practical experience for navigating Web3. The purpose of MetaMask Learn is to teach people the basics of self custody and wallet security in a safe environment. And while MetaMask Learn always takes the time to define Web3 specific vocabulary, it is still a jargon free experience for the crypto curious user. Friendly, not scary. MetaMask Learn is available in 10 languages with more to be added soon, and it's meant to cater to a global Web3 audience.

• 49:41David Hoffman?

  So are you tired of having to explain crypto concepts to your friends? Go to learn.metaMask.io and add MetaMask Learn to your guides to get onboarded into the world of Web3. Immutable is at the forefront of Web3 gaming on a mission to bring digital ownership to every player, offering the world's best games and game development platform. Immutable lets Game builders and players focus on great gaming experiences. So build your next web three game on easy mode with immutable's leading full stack web three gaming platform. It's built in UX features like the immutable passports are designed for games to scale to the next billion players coming to web three. With immutable, players can sign up with an email, pay with a credit card and experience a frictionless purchase flow inside of games.

• 50:24David Hoffman?

  So discover your next favorite game and explore a network of 150 games building on immutable, including such titles as Gotham Chain, Guilds of Guardians, Illuvium, Ember Sword and Metalcore. So join web three's largest ecosystem of games and players. Build, play and connect at immutable.com. Bankless Nation, we got the fourth Uniswap, the Uniswap with the hook centric roadmap for Uniswap. That's what I'm calling it.

• 50:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Trying to make that happen.

• 50:49David Hoffman?

  I think it's a great meme.

• 50:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's pretty good.

• 50:51David Hoffman?

  You get it, right? Like Ethereum's roll up centric roadmap, Uniswap's hook centric roadmap.

• 50:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Tell people what hooks are so they understand.

• 50:59David Hoffman?

  So we'll start with Uniswap V3 and why we needed a V4 in the first place. So the idea behind Uniswap V3 was that V3 had certain features embedded into V3, into Uniswap V3 pools. One of them was like an oracle, for example. And so like the every single Uniswap pool, whether it's like Ether USD or Ether Dye, it came with an oracle in every single Uniswap exchange.

• 51:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 51:24David Hoffman?

  So anytime you ever swapped on a Uniswap V3 pool contract, you would update that oracle and that would cost gas. And so that is an opinionated feature that's costing money for swappers for perhaps a feature that not very many people are using, especially on the long tail of Uniswap pools. And so that is an example of a feature that's placed into Uniswap V3 that you cannot pull out. Uniswap V4 is a massively reduced feature eliminated base protocol with instead of features, hooks.

• 51:53David Hoffman?

  Hook, what are hooks? Hooks are just expressive ways to input new code into a Uniswap V4 pool contract. And so what does a hook do? It can do anything. That's, that's kind of the point. Uh, and it's kind of like a smart contract, not a full, not a fully expressive smart contract, but still very expressive way to make widgets for Uniswap.

• 52:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's almost like a smart pool, right? Or like a

• 52:20David Hoffman?

  Smart pool, yes, yes. Smart feature, smart widget. It's not fully Turing complete, but it's most of the way there.

• 52:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  The other reason I look, I like hook centric roadmap, you know, and compare that to rollup centric roadmap, which Ethereum mapped to is because this is like Ethereum in, in the way that the, the rollup centric roadmap for Ethereum made Ethereum modular. We've talked very much about modular Ethereum. This is modular Uniswap. This is the reason they're doing hooks so that the primitive can focus on kind of the base layer type stuff.

• 52:51David Hoffman?

  The primitive can be primitive, yeah.

• 52:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  And you can, it's much more expressive. You can build all sorts of other things on top of it, just in the same way that the beacon chain in Ethereum really focused on the consensus layer, the core stuff that only Ethereum could do. And it was like outsourced execution to the rollups. And that's what Uniswap is doing with these hooks.

• 53:09David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's, that's exactly right. So like, what can you do with hooks? Like it's really your oyster. You can do, you can make a transaction that does DCAing over blocks for a year's long worth of time. You can put back in that oracle that I was talking about. You can do anything. There, I think there's going to be like two classes of hooks. There's going to be hooks that almost everyone uses because they're just so good and useful that most Uniswap pools use them. And then there's going to be completely customary custom hooks that maybe just one Uniswap pool wants for one specific purpose. So it's kind of like having a generalized optimistic rollup or an app, roll app or app chain, except for app hooks, right? Does that make sense?

• 53:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it does. Now we should say, this isn't live now.

• 53:51David Hoffman?

  Correct.

• 53:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  A lot of the code is out there, but it's on GitHub and Uniswap is doing a different approach with respect to the launch of V4. V3 was just like, boom, it's here, launched on mainnet. Uh, V4 is like, hey, here's what we're doing. Go take a look at our code, go read our white paper, give us some commentary and we'll roll this out in the months ahead. I don't know. Do you think like Hayden, we had Hayden Adams on the podcast earlier this week. Do you think that V4 is going to release by the end of this year? Do you think it's that soon or could it take a little bit longer?

• 54:23David Hoffman?

  It's gonna take, so it's got a dependency. It needs this thing called transient storage from EIP 1153. Okay, so what does transient storage do? Does? I have to explain one more feature, which is called the singleton construction. This is a design term in computer science. A singleton contract is just a single contract that hosts all of the logic, as opposed to many different contracts for every single pool. So Uniswap V3 and V2 were all done with unique contracts. So when you spun up, every single token on Uniswap V2 and V3 has its own Uniswap contract address. With a singleton contract design, Uniswap is one single contract address that pools, exchange pools are inside of that one

• 55:06David Hoffman?

  contract. So instead of one contract per token, it's one global contract, a singleton contract. And so what does that do? That reduces minting new pools, the cost to mint new pools by 99%.

• 55:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  99%.

• 55:19David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so new pools cost 99% less to mint. I mean, that's a one-time fee. So it's just like the long tail of crypto assets get cheaper Uniswap pools.

• 55:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes.

• 55:29David Hoffman?

  But then importantly, it makes this thing called flash accounting. So with every single Uniswap pool is under one single contract, it makes order routing between all of the Uniswap pools extremely efficient. And then this flash accounting thing is what they need transient storage from EIP 1153 to do. And so when we rebalance all of the pools, because everyone's doing all these trades all at once, the transient storage allows for flash accounting so that every, all the Uniswap pools can all settle without making a big footprint on the Ethereum Layer 1. Why are you smiling?

• 56:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm just smiling because imagine a crypto noob just listening to what we just said there. There's so many words there that they're like transient storage and like flash, what did you just say? Flash?

• 56:12David Hoffman?

  Flash accounting.

• 56:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Flash accounting, all of these things. Give us like the, the really... Explain it like I'm five, kind of version of this too.

• 56:21David Hoffman?

  Okay, how to explain Uniswap like I'm five? There's just two main, there's two main things. Apps, which are the hooks.

• 56:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yep.

• 56:26David Hoffman?

  So Uniswap has apps now and they're going to be developed by the open source world. It's free and permissionless to build apps for Uniswap. So Uniswap's gonna have apps. Flash accounting, it doesn't cost anything to trade across multiple Uniswap pools at once. And it used to. And so the complexity and gas costs and fees of trading throughout the uni, Uniswap uni-verse is almost zero.

• 56:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Alright, that's good.

• 56:57David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 56:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  More pools, better pools, more liquidity. That's what we're getting. Better DeFi.

• 57:02David Hoffman?

  Overall, it's a huge emphasis on gas reduction. So gas reduction is a huge theme in V4 and also expressivity. So I have two big questions, Ryan, that we want to bring up. Here's the Discord. This is from Scotty. Scotty from the Bankless Nation Discord. What's up Scotty? Ryan and David, do you see Uniswap V4 as a boon or a consolidation? I love the architecture and the composability. However, the hook concept could turn any competing AMMs into a Uniswap surf by reducing their product to a hook that feeds the Uniswap engine.

• 57:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a smart question.

• 57:34David Hoffman?

  It's a very smart question. I actually went into the Discord, I was like, yo, bro, that's a really, that's a really great question.

• 57:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Scotty, you should be asking questions here, not asking.

• 57:41David Hoffman?

  Scotty continues and says, the comparison to Ethereum is apt. Thank you, Scotty. Roll a hook-centric roadmap for Uniswap. Put that one in your brain, it's now a meme. But breaks down because Hayden and company own the fee switch. After V4, when all competing AMMs collapse into hooks and Uniswap has captured most on-chain liquidity, what do you expect V5 or V6 or the fee switch to look like? Does this centralize or decentralize Uniswap in your mind? Do you have an answer? Because I definitely do.

• 58:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Go for it. You start with this one.

• 58:08David Hoffman?

  Alright, first, let me drink some more coffee.

• 58:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  He's preparing his answer, Scotty. Get ready for it.

• 58:13David Hoffman?

  I think Scotty is just like, he's got the bead, he's on the ball right now. Okay, so, do you see Uniswap V4 as a boon or a consolidation? The answer is both. And I want to put this into alt layer one terms.

• 58:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Does he mean a consolidation of what? Of liquidity?

• 58:29David Hoffman?

  I think Scotty is saying like, all of these alternative AMMs that have different design structures and patterns are now like made obsolete because they can just become a hook onto Uniswap.

• 58:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, V4 is going to eat those. In the same way, I think that rollups kind of eat sidechains.

• 58:44David Hoffman?

  Rollup-centric roadmaps eats up all the Layer Ones.

• 58:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, I'm with you.

• 58:48David Hoffman?

  It's the same pattern. So like, why would you spin up a lot... Here's the words of the ETH maxi, right? Like, why would you spin up an alternative Layer 1? Just make a rollup on Ethereum?

• 58:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, why?

• 58:56David Hoffman?

  Why would you make another AMM with different logic, just make it a hook on top of Uniswap? And so it's both a boon and a consolidation. I think, as an Ethereum bias person, that the rollup-centric roadmap to Ethereum is a boon for many, many networks because they do not have to be burdened with having to deal with the complexity of the decentralized nature of the Layer 1. Hooks on Uniswap do not have to deal with getting new liquidity, becoming a completely resistant hardened protocol. Like, you just hook into Uniswap and you have all the liquidity. It's going to be easier to get your logic built into liquidity if you just make a hook on top of Uniswap.

• 59:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, you know what?

• 59:36David Hoffman?

  I think the patterns are so strong.

• 59:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm much less worried about kind of consolidation and network effect and one particular thing owning like 90% of Mark's share, that sort of thing, if it's a credibly neutral, public good, primitive, right? And I'm not saying that Uniswap is as much that as Ethereum is, because it's not. All right? There's like a Uniswap Labs type entity, there's other things. There's uni-token governance, there's kind of fee switch. They have not-quite open source licensing. It's like, you know, like a four-year thing, then

• 1:00:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  it becomes open source. But it's pretty close, and maybe as close as we've seen of any DeFi protocol. There's things like Curve that are very close to the bare metal too, and I love those things. But so I'm less worried about kind of consolidation of Uniswap as long as it preserves those core properties of decentralization.

• 1:00:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and I think a lot of those core properties about Uniswap are like, that's not an option. They don't have the turn on centralization switch on Uniswap. They just have turn on the fee switch. And so like, yeah, if you want to be like, kind of cynical about it, I think the the idea of, what did Scotty say? That Hayden and company have the fee switch. I think that's a little bit of a cynical take. It's like, well, like, tokens start somewhere. Hayden invented the protocol. He invented it in a way that you cannot make it centralized. Like, yeah, he has a lot of uni tokens, but he's also one of the biggest airdrops.

• 1:01:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Anyone can spin up a pool, right?

• 1:01:15David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 1:01:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  And the fee switch is configured based on the pool?

• 1:01:18David Hoffman?

  Like, the...

• 1:01:22David Hoffman?

  I don't know about that one.

• 1:01:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  I've got more to learn about this.

• 1:01:25David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Okay, now, another question from SpartanSolution.Eth. Uniswap V4 announces hooks this week. One of the hooks discussed in the podcast was the ability to enable trades using T-WAP for buying and selling tokens. Would this hook be something someone can use to DCA into a token on Uniswap? Yes, and that is actually the exact point of what that app was talking about. You can use a hook to do DCA into Uniswap, and it's actually just one transaction, and you can set the logic, and it's only, you only have to buy once.

• 1:01:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Dollar cost averaging, that's what DCA is. If you want to

• 1:01:55David Hoffman?

  Right, exactly.

• 1:01:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Put a little bit of your paycheck every, every two weeks into crypto, you can do that.

• 1:02:01David Hoffman?

  That's exactly right. Okay, if you want to listen to the podcast with Hayden, we had an hour-long, hour, hour and 10 minutes with Hayden, and talking all about it. So that podcast is, well, it's already in your podcast feed. So, so here's, here's Hayden. Okay, are you ready? Eigenlayer, Eigenlayer mainnet launch. All right, Eigenlayer is on-chain, is on mainnet. So there are three milestones to the Eigenlayer mainnet. We are at milestone number one. So we are off. What is milestone number one? This is when 3,200 of each of the following staked ETH tokens are allowed to be deposited into Eigenlayer. That's Lido, Rocketpool, and Coinbase wrapped staked Ether. So SE ETH, RE ETH, CB ETH. 3,200 and each of them can be deposited into Eigenlayer. They all got filled up within hours of mainnet launch.

• 1:02:47David Hoffman?

  And so now it's awful.

• 1:02:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  So you can't do anything right now.

• 1:02:51David Hoffman?

  So now you can't do anything because it's too late. They already did it. They're going to open up that more. It's like very guarded, slow launch, very protected, very secure. So that's phase one. And so I guess milestone one is already done. Milestone two is when operators join the network and these are the people who do the actual validation tasks of restaked networks, AKA doing the work. So that's what's coming up next. And then in milestone three is when we launch actual services. So these are the actual Eigen networks. Some of them are already like being worked on. Some of them are just theoretical, but totally up to the free market to build. That's Eigenlayer data availability, espresso, which is shared sequencing, Witness Chain, Omni.

• 1:03:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's gonna be so cool. I can't wait. This is gonna be an explosion. This is as big as rollups. And we talked about this two weeks ago. We had our episode with Sriram about restaking. You basically you take your ETH, you stake it, you stake again.

• 1:03:42David Hoffman?

  Take it again.

• 1:03:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Another network and that transmutes some of the economic security of Ethereum's validator set into the new thing that you want to bootstrap, an oracle, an app, a chain, whatever you can think of. It's such a fantastic concept and the fact that this is coming out already is very exciting. I remember when we first learned about rollups, we had to like wait for like three years.

• 1:04:07David Hoffman?

  Oh, my God. Way too long. Way too long.

• 1:04:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Restaking.

• 1:04:10David Hoffman?

  That is actually a really good point. The inception of knowing about Eigenlayer to it going to mainnet, I learned about it in October of 2022.

• 1:04:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why didn't we think of this earlier? Sriram, why didn't we think about? Yeah. Why didn't we think about rest? I guess we had to have staking first and that like happened relatively recently.

• 1:04:26David Hoffman?

  That is true. That is true. Well, the other thing is like, okay, so yeah, we waited forever for rollups and now we finally have them. People were building their Eigenlayer restaking components before mainnet was even around.

• 1:04:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's impressive.

• 1:04:39David Hoffman?

  There's infrastructure ready to go to be using Eigenlayer data availability.

• 1:04:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Polygon, just an announcement as well. So our vision for Polygon is simple, to build a value layer of the internet. They're doing an announcement where they're kind of, starting with a series of announcements, I would say. So what is ahead of us for the next month or so? A few things.

• 1:05:02David Hoffman?

  We have an announcement of four announcements.

• 1:05:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:05:06David Hoffman?

  Okay, so the week of June 20, or excuse me, the week of June 19th is when they are going to be talking about the future of the Polygon proof-of-stake chain. I'm going to guess that it's going to become a ZK rollup. I'm just making that prediction. The week of June 26th, the next week is the architecture and stack of Polygon. There's a bunch of other networks, maybe they get tied together. Then July 10th, the utility and evolution of the native Matic token. And then the week of July 17th, the transition to greater community governance and protocol in the treasury. It sounds like a very holistic, large move by Polygon, all in all. So this kind of feels like the big one.

• 1:05:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  The biggest one I'm excited about is any idea of the Polygon proof-of-stake chain turning into a ZK rollup, a ZK EVM. That would be absolutely amazing. That would be a like, promises made, promises kept type of moment. And would just cement rollups as, cement Ethereum's rollup-centric roadmap is, hey, it works! We had a big kind of like sidechain type thing convert.

• 1:06:07David Hoffman?

  Interesting that the branding on this tweet, "Our vision for Polygon is simple, to build a value layer of the internet."

• 1:06:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ooh, does that?

• 1:06:14David Hoffman?

  Didn't mention Ethereum.

• 1:06:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Does that trigger you? Do you think they should have said Ethereum?

• 1:06:18David Hoffman?

  I mean Ethereum is the internet.

• 1:06:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  I saw lots of people getting upset at this, saying like, Polygon is kind of disaligned or like, you know, the market and that kind of thing. I'm not seeing it yet, but it's a takeout there. I will get to this, like, the current mood and the vibe of crypto.

• 1:06:35David Hoffman?

  Say that for later. We'll talk about that soon.

• 1:06:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, what's optimism?

• 1:06:38David Hoffman?

  Last layer two thing, optimism Bedrock got released last week. And so now we are able to check out some of the data on the gas fees. So if you open up that doom board that comes up next. So we can just see that gas fees on Bedrock are like one-third, one-half reduced versus the legacy optimism. Lovely to see. And this is all before EIP 4844. So when you reduce optimism gas fees by more than half before 4844, gosh.

• 1:07:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Gas fee is getting low. David, over to NFT stuff. Kraken, out of beta, Kraken NFT, new gateway to buying, selling, and learning about NFTs. What is this about from Kraken?

• 1:07:19David Hoffman?

  So they have their new NFT platform that is launched, buying, holding, selling, and learning about NFTs, they say. They're integrated with Polygon. You also can trade Reddit collectible avatars. Reddit is having its blackout moment, but you can still trade snooze on Polygon using Kraken. Cool. So you can also pay with whatever. You can buy and sell NFTs using your credit card or crypto, which is interesting. And then also, they have their F1 car. So if you want to get your NFT, perhaps if I do this, my crypto dickbutt, on the Kraken F1 car, you can put your NFTs into the Kraken NFT platform. So congrats on Kraken for getting their NFT platform out of the gate. And of course, disclosure, Kraken is also a sponsor of the podcast.

• 1:08:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Also should mention, because we talked about Uniswap earlier, that Uniswap is also a sponsor of the Bankless Podcast, as you've probably noticed. And I'm an advisor to Matic, and David and I are both advisors for Optimism. We've mentioned all of these projects. So want to keep disclosures always front and center with you guys. As always, bankless.com/disclosures, you can find out what we are doing in crypto at any given time. David, this is pretty big news. BlackRock filing a Bitcoin ETF soon.

• 1:08:31David Hoffman?

  Close, close to filing. Soon TM.

• 1:08:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  But that would be huge.

• 1:08:35David Hoffman?

  But the reason why, yes, BlackRock, like biggest asset manager on the face of the

• 1:08:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Buy a lot.

• 1:08:41David Hoffman?

  Real hard for Gary Gensler to ignore. Like, you're gonna deny that one, Gary?

• 1:08:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Aren't they like?

• 1:08:46David Hoffman?

  Yeah, right? Yeah. And so there's two partners here. Both CoinDesk and Kraken have been partnered with this. So Kraken is providing the pricing data, and Coinbase is being the custodian. So Coinbase will store the Bitcoin, Kraken will provide the pricing, and BlackRock will provide the ETF, and Gary Gensler will approve it.

• 1:09:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Will he?

• 1:09:04David Hoffman?

  Right, Gary.

• 1:09:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Will he?

• 1:09:05David Hoffman?

  Right, Gary.

• 1:09:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Who's stronger? Which influence is stronger? Is it kind of the big asset manager institutions?

• 1:09:11David Hoffman?

  Really good question.

• 1:09:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  It is. I mean, this will be, this will be fun to watch that squirming happen. Very exciting, though. We certainly need a Bitcoin ETF. David, Hong Kong is putting pressure on three major banks to take on crypto exchanges as clients? Hong Kong?

• 1:09:25David Hoffman?

  I saw, this is so, I'm so jealous. Let me read this to you. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority is putting pressure on HSBC Standard Chartered and Bank of China to take on crypto exchanges as clients. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority is putting pressure on its own banks, saying, quote, "Due diligence on potential customers should not create undue burden, particularly those for setting up office in Hong Kong to look for opportunities here."

• 1:09:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Imagine that.

• 1:09:54David Hoffman?

  I am so jealous.

• 1:09:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Imagine that.

• 1:09:56David Hoffman?

  God.

• 1:09:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  I, like.

• 1:09:57David Hoffman?

  Imagine if you had, like.

• 1:09:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think it's a matter of honestly, you know, the US ZIGs and Hong Kong Zags. I think that's what's, what's happening and China's going the opposite direction right now.

• 1:10:05David Hoffman?

  For a season. So Hong Kong, China, kind of the same, also not, though? This isn't mainland China, this is Hong Kong.

• 1:10:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, Hong Kong is kind of like the financial innovation center, I would say, of like, you know, China now.

• 1:10:16David Hoffman?

  But Bank of China issues $28 million in a digital structured note on Ethereum, also out of Hong Kong. So they, there's a $28 million digital structured note, I don't know what that means, on Ethereum, issued by Hong Kong. That's pretty cool.

• 1:10:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  That is, yeah. That is interesting. Why are they doing that?

• 1:10:33David Hoffman?

  That's interesting. That's interesting.

• 1:10:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, there are some releases.

• 1:10:35David Hoffman?

  First Chinese financial institution to issue a, issue a tokenized security in Hong Kong.

• 1:10:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Big deal.

• 1:10:41David Hoffman?

  Using public permissionless rails to issue securities. You can totally do that.

• 1:10:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  As long as you traded on an ATS from Aaron Kaplan.

• 1:10:48David Hoffman?

  No, no, no ATS, just human swap.

• 1:10:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is a release this week. Tell me about this. Taiko Alpha 3 testnet is live. What is Taiko?

• 1:10:56David Hoffman?

  Taiko is another layer two on Ethereum. It is a ZK EVM. It is, of all the layer two ZK EVMs that are out there, ZK Sync, Era, Polygon, Scroll, and then Taiko, Taiko's the furthest behind, the newest on the scene.

• 1:11:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  The baby brother.

• 1:11:11David Hoffman?

  Also, sitting shoulder to shoulder with the rest of them, I believe the social categorization, all of all that. So they are now on testnet. So congrats to Matthew Feinsen and the team.

• 1:11:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Very cool. Oh, Matthew's from that. Formerly Loopring, right? In GameStop?

• 1:11:25David Hoffman?

  Formerly Loopring, formerly GameStop, yeah.

• 1:11:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Lens just beefed up a raise. Today, we are excited to announce our $15 million funding round to accelerate the adoption of the next generation of internet-powered by human connection, the people-powered social layer. This is a Lens protocol. Very cool. Dabbling in Web3 social, for sure. And, I don't know, hopefully taking some market share from the Twitters of the world.

• 1:11:48David Hoffman?

  Yes, yeah. Should be easy these days.

• 1:11:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  David?

• 1:11:52David Hoffman?

  We got a very special job this week. I'm gonna dance in a second, but first I'm gonna show this job. Senior analyst slash token hunter. So we are looking for a senior analyst inside of Bankless who can lead the research for our team, hunting alpha, tracking investment opportunities, who can also write for the newsletter, but also inform me and Ryan to give good takes on perhaps the weekly roll-up, like you are hearing right now. So if you are listening to this, and you have some analyst chops, and you know how to write, there is a link in the show notes to apply. That is a senior, this is the most senior writer that we will hire for.

• 1:12:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  And if you do get this role, you will be working on this bad boy. This is the Token Hub that we have open, which is our buy, sell, hold ratings on tokens in crypto. A fantastic product. We just rolled out on the Bankless website, and we need some more help with it. We need some more senior analysts.

• 1:12:46David Hoffman?

  We are assembling a team.

• 1:12:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're building a team here.

• 1:12:49David Hoffman?

  We want you to lead it.

• 1:12:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  But David promised to dance. We got some other jobs for you. A senior backend software engineer at Center Pixel. Otterspace needs a Web3 front-end engineer. Phantom is looking for two software engineers, mobile and front-end. Premia is looking for a Web3 product management and architecture lead. Denare is looking for Denari, I think. Smart contract engineer. Uniswap Labs needs some engineers as well. Oh my gosh, there's so much more. Lots of devs being hired right now. Bankless.pallet.com/jobs. Go check it out. David, what do we have coming up next?

• 1:13:20David Hoffman?

  Coming up next, we've got the takes of the week, of course, and then what Ryan and I are bullish on, along with a moment of zen at the very end from El Choco. God, I love this. I don't know if you've listened to this, Ryan, but it's hilarious. All of that and more coming up as soon as we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Arbitrum One is pioneering the world of secure Ethereum scalability and is continuing to accelerate the Web 3 landscape. Hundreds of projects have already deployed on Arbitrum One, producing flourishing DeFi and NFT ecosystems. With a recent addition of Arbitrum Nova, gaming and social dApps like Reddit are also now calling Arbitrum home. Both Arbitrum One and Nova leverage the security and decentralization of Ethereum and provide a builder experience that's intuitive, familiar, and fully EVM compatible.

• 1:14:05David Hoffman?

  On Arbitrum, both builders and users will experience faster transaction speeds with significantly lower gas fees. With Arbitrum's recent migration to Arbitrum Nitro, it's also now 10 times faster than before. Visit arbitrum.io, where you can join the community, dive into the developer docs, bridge your assets, and start building your first app. With Arbitrum, experience Web 3 development the way it was meant to be: secure, fast, cheap, and friction-free. You know Uniswap. It's the world's largest decentralized exchange with over $1.4 trillion in trading volume. You know this because we talk about it endlessly on Bakeless. It's Uniswap, but Uniswap is becoming so much more. Uniswap Labs just released the Uniswap Mobile Wallet for iOS, the newest, easiest way to trade tokens on the go. With the Uniswap Wallet, you can easily create or import a new wallet,

• 1:14:50David Hoffman?

  buy crypto on any available exchange with your debit card with extremely low fiat on-ramp fees, and you can seamlessly swap on mainnet, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism. On the Uniswap Mobile Wallet, you can store and display your beautiful NFTs, and you can also explore Web 3 with in-app search features, market leaderboards, and price charts, or use Wallet Connect to connect to any Web 3 application. So you can now go directly to DeFi with the Uniswap Mobile Wallet. Safe, simple custody from the most trusted team in DeFi. Download the Uniswap Wallet today on iOS. There's a link in the show notes. Jesse Walden, how to actually get through a bear market. Jesse Walden says, "Maintaining your psychology is one of the hardest parts of building/investing in crypto. Frontier tech is hard enough, but pundits love to kick us while we are down.

• 1:15:33David Hoffman?

  This is cyclical, along with the market. Maintain thesis, focus, a dose of stoicism, and they'll call it luck." Great take.

• 1:15:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  That is a great take. Here's another take from David Hoffman. The current meta of crypto just feels so weird right now.

• 1:15:48David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's a little bit downstream of the conversation that we just had. It's like, I can't really put a pin on it. It just feels weird to be in crypto at this present moment.

• 1:15:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think crypto feels a little lost, is one thing I'd say. Crypto Twitter at least is more grumpy than usual, a bit more reactionary. Everything gets put under the microscope. It seems hard for us still to separate like our friends from our enemies. Maybe we're just reeling from the trauma of 2022, where some people in crypto turned out to be kind of enemies of the values of this space. I feel like we're more divided than we should be, or we could be, again, in the face of kind of a common set of challenges. We have challenges, not just from regulatory, which are immense, but also in terms of a

• 1:16:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  shared voice, like a shared message, showing the world what crypto can actually, the value it can actually deliver. Prices are down too, so I think people get like grumpy when that happens. I'm not sure. It's kind of a weird vibe right now. What do you think? How would you describe it?

• 1:17:00David Hoffman?

  I think it's also because we're seeing a crescendoing and building, but also an even faster crescendoing of FUD, and like real FUD, like Gary Gensler's SEC FUD. And I don't know, like, how people, I don't think people are figuring out how to come to terms with it. I think we see parts of the crypto community come together. Like, I'm doing my best to try and come together with the Solana community. I'm really trying here. And then other parts just seem to be falling off. It's like crypto feels like I'm trying to hold water in my hands right now. And it's been that way for like a year. I don't know what to do about it. I don't know what it is like. Crypto hasn't been faced with these challenges before. I think you said this earlier, 2021, the class of 2021 and the class of 2017 just aren't like vibing very well, I think.

• 1:17:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a generational gap there. I think there is. Yeah, there's definitely some of that. I have a solution for you, but it's in the what I'm bullish on section. But I'll start with asking you the question. What are you bullish on this week?

• 1:17:53David Hoffman?

  Okay, I'm bullish on crypto lawyers.

• 1:17:58David Hoffman?

  I think our lawyers in this industry are absolute just chats and chat ads. I think they are just, I think they're just savage. I think they're some of the coolest lawyer, I don't, I don't know the full spectrum of industry lawyers. But I think crypto lawyers, freedom fighter lawyers, Paul from Coinbase, Jake and Amanda. I don't know if you listened to that episode, Ryan, but it was awesome. We have Rodrigo. Yes, yes, yeah. I think we have some of the most just like savage lawyers that are out there who are like lawyers, but also just like freedom fighters, like technological freedom fighter. I never thought that we would have cypherpunk lawyers, yet here we are. Like lawyers that embody cypherpunk values. Shout out to all the crypto lawyers out there.

• 1:18:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a good one. I appreciate lawyers.

• 1:18:44David Hoffman?

  That's what I'm bullish on.

• 1:18:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bullish on them too.

• 1:18:46David Hoffman?

  Thank you for sticking around because if you guys didn't stick around, we'd really be in trouble.

• 1:18:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  True.

• 1:18:51David Hoffman?

  Ryan, what are you bullish on?

• 1:18:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is kind of an answer to like if crypto is feeling weird, here's what you should do. And it's what I'm bullish on. Grab a bear market buddy. Do you know who taught me that? My bear market buddy, you. I just, I've been feeling like, honestly, guys, if you're listening to this, I guess you are. Crypto is hard enough. It's really hard. You got the volatility. It's mentally exhausting. You have kind of constant attacks. Your relatives think you're crazy. You're down bad right now. Like all sorts of things.

• 1:19:21David Hoffman?

  Gaslighting you.

• 1:19:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. And then for me personally, you also throw media on top of that. And what that means is also social media for me and like, social media is notorious. It's toxic. It's hard. It's hard out there. And so I feel like sometimes every single week, I feel like under attack. You're like by somebody. It's just something happens and you're just like, I didn't mean for that. I didn't mean to say it in that way. And like.

• 1:19:45David Hoffman?

  This is, this is not the event that I wanted to be handed.

• 1:19:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right. And as a somebody in crypto and also a content creator, and I'll speak to the content creation part of this for a minute. It's very difficult to separate two things. Who are the good faith critics and who are the bad faith critics? All right. Cause the bad faith critics, you want to separate them and like just cast them aside. Like you don't need to listen. To them. This is just the hater crowd. I mean, they're doing it to grow their influence. They'll be happy to spread information. It's just bad faith attacks on you. But if you throw out all of the critics, then you also throw out the good faith critics too. And in there, you have like people who disagree, right? They're good faith critics. They disagree. Well, that's a great chance for you engage and to learn something from them. And then you have people who misunderstand your perspective.

• 1:20:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, that's a good opportunity for you to learn how to communicate better. So you like clarify things, right? And so that's good faith too. You want that. Uh, and then there's some people who genuinely like understand you. They just think you're wrong and you did something wrong. And these are helpers. They sort of help you improve. And you absolutely want to listen to that last group of people. They're the ones that hold you accountable. Probably like the questioner from, from earlier, asking us about disclosures, that sort of thing. So you always want to listen to your helpers. But what's really difficult to do, David, I think in bear markets, when everyone's feeling grumpy. And you have these types of reactions is like, listen to any critics. It's like hard for me because there's so, the bad faith and the good faith are all mixed together. So it all sounds like noise.

• 1:21:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  And my solution there, the only one I found is bear market buddy. All right? You need a council. Pass it back and forth. You need a group. You need people who are going to like call you on your BS, right?

• 1:21:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  And also listen to your decision. A group of people you can also be a little bit like crazy with, right? And so that for me is secret through getting through 2018, 2019. That for me is actually the secret right now. I can tell you honestly, David. I wouldn't be doing this podcast without you. Like I Feelings mutual, brother. There's no chance. I could not run this thing. Like it's just impossible. And so I just want to extrapolate that to anyone else who's listening is don't travel alone. Okay? Never do that. Go find some friends. Go find some people who are on the crypto journey that believe similar things that are here for the right reasons. Now's the time to find them because it is a settlers market. The tourists are out. I don't know where they are. They're gone. It's a settlers market.

• 1:22:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  So find your bear market buddies and just hang on. Could be months. Maybe years. Hopefully it's just months. Years? I don't know. We don't know. But settlers don't care. They're going to be here and that's what I'm bullish on. You want to get to the meme of the week? Meme of the week. Let's do it. All right. Here we go. What are we looking at?

• 1:22:35David Hoffman?

  Da na, da na, na na, na na. We got Gary Gensler as a shark and man, those eyes are really far apart. And the innocent little lady swimming on top of him.

• 1:22:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is the Jaws.

• 1:22:46David Hoffman?

  Our security.

• 1:22:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is Jaws' poster. There we go.

• 1:22:49David Hoffman?

  We also, like I said, have a moment of zen from Coco the Corn Hub.

• 1:22:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, this is so good.

• 1:22:54David Hoffman?

  Singer, it's so good, it's so good. I cherish every single one of these. I doubt that they're still going to be available, but these are a mint on manifold. I believe there's 150. I definitely minted one. So yeah, we're gonna go here from that moment of zen as soon as Ryan tells you about risks and disclaimers without going west.

• 1:23:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, get ready for it. This is elcoco.eith. It's the bear, it's called. This'll get you in the mood for a good bear market where we are right now in the settlers market. Risks and disclaimers, of course, gotta let you know, ETH, Bitcoin, these assets are all risky, so is crypto. You could definitely lose what you put in, but we're 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.

• 1:23:35Speaker 04

  It's the bear, it's the bear, it's finally here. Well, I swear I'm so happy 'cause it's the bear.

• 1:23:44Speaker 04

  Now, the crypto bear is one to fear. He'll eat your soul if you don't take care. When the tide goes out, he smells the air. And if you're not wearing clothes, you'll be a souvenir of the bear. It's the bear, it's finally here. Well, I swear I'm so full of cheer 'cause it's the bear. But no one's scared 'cause we're all out of fear. And you could say LSD and a platypus appears. And friends are made that'll last for years. And it's easier to find your dream career. And it's also when normies think we're weak, can they mount their attacks? It's gay, they ingratiate, it's funny if they still don't see it clear. We get stronger when times are more severe 'cause it's the bear. It's the bear, it's finally here. Well, I swear I'm so full of cheer 'cause it's the bear.

• 1:24:36Speaker 04

  Well, the bar's when you find out who you are. If you're here for the bow, usually won't go far. And it flushes out anything subpar. And the noise dies down so you can pre-part for the next little run whenever it comes 'cause you've got your scars. And you're no longer dumb, and you're down so far that you've become numb. But it's not about the money when you've lived among the bar. Well, it's the bar, it's finally here. Well, I swear I'm so full of cheer 'cause it's the bar.