ROLLUP: Ethereum’s Leadership Move | Solana’s Inflation Debate | Kraken’s $1.5B Acquisition | Crypto's Macro Struggle

This week, Anthony Sassano joins us to unpack Solana’s most controversial governance vote yet, Ethereum’s major leadership overhaul, and crypto markets wrestling with macro chaos despite promising policy shifts. Kraken makes waves with a massive $1.5B acquisition—but will it move the needle? We dive into all of this and so much more. Follow Anthony on X: https://x.com/sassal0x ------ 📣 RONIN WALLET | YOUR WEB3 GAMING ECOSYSTEM https://bankless.cc/Ronin_Wallet ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🌐CELO | BUILD TOGETHER AND PROSPER https://bankless.cc/Celo 🏦INFINEX | THE CRYPTO-EVERYTHING APP https://bankless.cc/Infinex ----- ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/coin/base:0xab88c7d76226cf4251bae07e74aa0d8877b6136a ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 1:39 Anthony’s Crypto Vibe Check 5:56 Markets https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/19/fed-meeting-live-updates.html 12:27 Ethena and Securitize launched a new chain https://x.com/ethena_labs/status/1901672646015856749 https://x.com/coinbase/status/1902031828912844992 28:13 Robinhood launched their prediction market with Kalshi https://x.com/Kalshi/status/1901634303768883377 https://x.com/vladtenev/status/1901703746033426919 34:52 Solana proposal to cut inflation failed to pass https://simd-votes.stakingfacilities.com/ https://www.helius.dev/blog/simd-228 47:07 SOL Futures on CME https://x.com/Cointelegraph/status/1901566174598398261 https://x.com/solana/status/1901279678620749997 51:25 Eth/acc & Ethereum Leadership Change https://x.com/matthuang/status/1902562363532046674 https://x.com/KyleSamani/status/1901769358273040806 https://x.com/ethismoneyHQ/status/1901734022646317213 https://x.com/adietrichs/status/1899607524581740576 https://x.com/megapot_io/status/1902419979196338386 1:06:07 Kraken Acquires NinjaTrader $1.5B https://www.reuters.com/technology/kraken-acquire-ninjatrader-15-billion-deal-2025-03-20/ 1:07:08 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04David Hoffman?

  Bankless Nation, welcome to the weekly Rollup. Each week I'm bringing on a different co-host to help me go through the news. And this week, I have the pleasure of being joined by Ethereum community chief Anthony Cezano. Anthony, good to see you, my man. How are you?

• 0:16Speaker 01

  Hey, man. I'm good. Good to be back after a little while here on the Rollup.

• 0:20David Hoffman?

  Yeah, you have been our regular substitute teacher. Whenever Ryan or I would need to take just a week off, and we would just always tap in Anthony Cezano. Ryan's been taking an extended sabbatical just to spend some very much quality time with his kids. So I've been doing my best to go around just like, it's so easy to come back to Anthony Cezano. So I had to get some differing, diverging voices out there. But it's really good to just tap you in formally. It was inevitable that I would bring you on, and it's good to have you back here, my man.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. Yeah, and I think it's a good thing to get broader, I guess, voices on the show, definitely. Like, everyone knows my brand, knows what I'm gonna talk about, like, knows what kind of tone I'm gonna take. So yeah, it's been great to see you kind of branch out there and get other people on the show.

• 1:06David Hoffman?

  So we've got a lot of news to talk about this week. Athena and Securitas are launching their own chain called Converge, which I think that's an ironic name, and I'll give my take about that. Robinhood partners with Kalishi, the prediction market competitor to Polymarket. Then two ETH people are gonna talk about the Solana governance debate. The two ETH people are me and Ryan. And then, of course, we've got some, excuse me, me and Anthony. And then Ethereum has some updates as well that we're gonna talk about. And Kraken makes a $1.5 billion acquisition just announced about an hour before recording. So that's gonna be the news that we talked about. But I just kind of wanted to zoom out and do a quick vibe check, Anthony. Just how are you feeling about where we are? It is March 20th, 2025. We got Donald Trump making crypto strategic reserves.

• 1:50David Hoffman?

  We have a actually competent SEC. Crypto sentiment is completely dogshit. And Ethereum's going through a transitionary period, taking longer to go through that transitionary period, but still going through it nonetheless. Overall, like, how would you kind of color this phase of crypto?

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think why people look, I guess, uh, the sentiment on crypto Twitter, you could say, I guess, is like not great is because I think people had these really high expectations of things. Obviously with Trump winning, everyone was like, oh, you know, everything's gonna be great for crypto now. We're gonna get Gary Gensler out, the SEC is gonna be friendly, we're gonna get all these good regulations and they're gonna let us do whatever we want and there's gonna be a crypto reserve. And for the most part, we got like most of that, right? We got most of that in place. But I think what a lot of people maybe miss is that, like, those things can happen, but their effects on particularly the market can take a while to play out, right? And when you have the opposing force, which is basically a lot of the uncertainty in the macro environment right now and the

• 2:49Speaker 01

  geopolitical environment, you have the positive force of all this positive stuff happening for crypto in, you know, in a vacuum, I guess. And then you have everything else outside of that, which, you know, if you read the headlines, if you read the kind of the media and everything, like, things seem not great, I guess, globally right now in terms of geopolitics and the macro environment and stuff like that. So you have these two forces going at each other, uh, and it seemed like for a little while there, the negative forces were, were winning in, in, you know, in a pretty big way because prices came down a lot on things. But we've leveled out at this point. I don't know where things are gonna go from here, but maybe we trend sideways for a while. I think the market's just digesting a lot of this stuff and the ecosystem's digesting a lot of this stuff. But I think with crypto natives, what really hurt was that everyone was expecting a regular crypto cycle. You

• 3:32Speaker 01

  know, BTC goes up, all time high price discovery, ETH does it next, and then we have like a quote unquote alt season, right? But I think this time around, what we had is we had BTC obviously be, uh, be very strong, ETH not be as strong as people expected it to be, and then meme coins, right? There was no alt season besides meme coins, really. And that caught a lot of people off guard. A lot of money was extracted out of the ecosystem and now we're at where we're at today. So I think it's, it's managing expectations. Uh, that, that's my main takeaway here. But generally on, you know, outside of the markets and on the fundamental side of things, I'm extremely bullish. Like especially as I mentioned, all the positive stuff happening in the US on the regulatory side, but especially within Ethereum. There's been a lot of developments over the last few months in the Ethereum ecosystem, which I'm sure we're gonna get into a bit later. You know, the Ethereum

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Foundation leadership changes, Ethereumize making a really big move, bringing Danny Ryan on. You know, those sorts of things, those again are huge things that have happened, but take time to play out in the market. So I think that if people zoomed out a little bit, reset their expectations, they would be a lot happier.

• 4:32David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's my take on it as well. My take is just basically that there's a huge dislocation between the fundamentals of the industry and sentiment. And if we talk about sentiment, you know, that's that's an emotional conversation like why? We are basically asking why the question, why are people unhappy? And happiness always is a divergence between expectations and reality. We expected one outcome and we got a different outcome. But the expectation, the outcome that we definitely did get is very strong fundamental growth in the industry. Bitcoin Strategic Reserve, a crypto pro crypto president, a pro crypto SEC and CFTC, pro cryptonist wherever we need, where we needed it to be, which is, you know, in the government leadership positions of the of the United States, including in Congress,

• 5:16David Hoffman?

  where we're about to get a market structure bill and a stablecoin bill. But nonetheless, like prices are down. And this is coming just from twofold, in my opinion, like Donald Trump's chaoticness for like whatever he's doing that is creating a ton of uncertainty in the market, up to the point of like actual trade wars, which of course is is bad for the market. So we have prices down for that. And that's just not even a crypto story. That is just all markets are down other than bonds. And then in addition to that, we've actually just had sustained high interest rates for a really long time, over two years now. And crypto has never been inside of a sustained high interest rate environment ever. And it's just continuing to be higher for longer when it comes to the interest rate.

• 6:00David Hoffman?

  So we had the FOMC meeting this week, happened yesterday. The Fed decides to keep interest rates at the target rate of 4.25 to 4.5%. They said that they could still see two rate cuts coming in 2025, although not as large as we've seen in the second half of last year. They said that they are expecting higher inflation and lower economic growth. And this is all just leading to just a harder money environment. I remember, Anthony, when you and I were getting into crypto, it was in the ZIRP era, the zero interest rate era. And that marked so much of the narrative that about why crypto is the way that it is. Like just poor monetary management by our leadership, by our by our money over our money czars. And that was the era of crypto.

• 6:45David Hoffman?

  And that era is over. The ZIRP era is over. And I do think there is some like relationship between this entering of a hard money era and the decreasing dopamine of the crypto speculators. Because what is bad for casinos is high interest rates and hard money. And so I think people's sentiments of just like, okay, cool. We've gotten everything we need as an industry to grow. You know, we have a crypto reserve. We have pro crypto legislation, but prices are down. And that dislocation is creating terrible vibes. But I think that's kind of to be expected when we have this like Zerp era being purged out of like the DNA of crypto speculators.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think so. And, and you know, I've been saying this on my show for a little while now is that when money is hard, as you say, when it's hard to come along, when there's not easy money, it's very hard for risk on assets, which crypto is still, you know, for the most part, pretty much everything outside of BTC is a pretty big risk on assets. I would even argue BTC could still be viewed as relatively risk on. It just doesn't do well in that environment. And it definitely doesn't do well in a very high global uncertainty environment, which I think is what we've been in for at least the last couple of months. As you mentioned, a lot of the stuff that Trump has been doing. You know, people talk about a new world order, not in the conspiracy kind of tinfoil hat sense, but in the fact that the US definitely seems like it wants to withdraw

• 8:12Speaker 01

  a lot of its influence from the rest of the world. So what does the rest of the world look like in 10 years from now because of that? So there's a lot of uncertainty there and people don't know exactly where to place their bets. So when there's so much uncertainty, usually people will be like, well, I'm going to sit in cash for a bit, especially since rates are so high. I can basically sit in cash and earn a pretty decent yield on it. It's not like it's 0% rates, right? And then see where the chips kind of fall and see where things fall. And then maybe I'll re-enter the market once things stabilize a bit. So I think that's the general kind of consensus right now. But you know, if you want to go counter consensus and make some bets and do it now, like you might be able to make a generational bet, right? This is where these kind of big investments can happen too. So it's about how much risk you want to take on as, as per usual with these markets.

• 8:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think that's right. I think right now the place in the market, both the equities market and the crypto markets is we've already just been completely pummeled. You know, even Bitcoin, Bitcoin is still in the, what is it, $85,000 range, but 85,000 still now feels low compared to like where it was, even though that is incredibly high. But then the rest of the market is just down so bad. ETH is below $2,000. It's at 1990 right now. Solana is at $130. So the rest of the market is just wrecked. And I think, and also if you're like an Nvidia holder, you're probably feeling the same thing. Like Nvidia is down like 30% or something off of the highs. And so I think the current phase of the market is like, like, okay, Donald Trump has paused chaoticness.

• 9:40David Hoffman?

  He can't go down anymore. Like ETH is already below $2. Like it can't go any lower than that, right? And so I think we're just kind of waiting for confirmation that Trump's trade war era is over and he's going to like let the stock market have a breather. And no one really knows if that's true or not. Like maybe he just resumes being chaotic. But I do agree with what you said, which is just like the current prices of crypto assets and like tech risk assets. Mr. Market is giving you a deal right now. And you know, you can choose whether to take it. This is a tweet from Chris Bernisky. Who says, "Yesterday's close was meaningful for Bitcoin, crossing the 20-day and 200-day simple moving average with conviction. Now to see if we can hold it. We're not out of the woods yet, but I like what I am seeing."

• 10:24David Hoffman?

  And so with Bitcoin over $84,000, Chris is saying, okay, we are in a good spot if we can hold this right now. So I think markets are starting to like settle to these new lower prices. We're going to hang around here for a little bit and then we're going to like slowly creep upwards if Donald Trump can like, you know, stop being chaotic. That's kind of my take.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I think so. And I think I said, you know, earlier how people's expectations may need to be managed here with timelines and everything like that. You know, the markets can go sideways for quite a while and they tend to actually do that. And people don't realize how long they can go sideways for because during the sideways period, it's usually boring. So you kind of tune out most of it. And then once prices start going up again, you forget the fact that we just had. Six months of sideways price action. Now you're like, oh, it's going up again. I'm happy. And then maybe it turns into like a little mini bull market or something like that, but we'll see. You know, I think what's on everyone's mind right now in particular is is the four year cycle dead. You know, the four year crypto cycle. I've been saying for a while, actually, that I thought think it's dead.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  I don't think it's going to be the same kind of cycles going forward, especially given that the alt season kind of phenomenon seems to have changed pretty dramatically from everything pumps to, okay, whatever's the hot flavor of the kind of season pumps. And we'll see if that that maintains going forward. But I think that is actually what kind of ruined most people over the last six to 12 months. Is that they had expectations for certain things and it just didn't happen the way they expected.

• 11:50David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and I'm kind of a fan of the four year cycle being over because it's too, you can't just have that forever. Like, it's too easy at some point. It needs to just go away. Okay, so let's get into some more crypto native subjects, but before we do, we're going to talk to our friends and sponsors over at Ronin. Ronin is one of the leading web three gaming ecosystems focused on growing gaming and consumer adoption. They are taking the walls down off of the chain. It used to be a permissionless chain going full permissionless. And now you can go explore that permissionless ecosystem by using the Ronin wallet. So check it out at bankless.cc/ronin underscore wallet. There's also a link in the show notes. Okay, Anthony, one of the big news of the week was this Converge chain, which is a partnership from Athena Labs,

• 12:33David Hoffman?

  the makers of the USDE stablecoin and Securitize. And Securitize is kind of like this tech service provider that is used by BlackRock to issue the Biddle Fund. Securitize has been around for forever. They've just wanted to make on-chain securities. Between these two companies, they are making Converge, a brand new chain, a brand new blockchain. And they label this, they brand this as the settlement network for traditional finance and digital dollars. And the tweet continues and says, "Our vision is to provide the first purpose-built settlement layer where TradFi will merge with DeFi centered on USD, that's the stablecoin from Athena, and USDTB." I actually don't know what that stablecoin is, all secured by ENA. Ah, Treasury bonds. Okay, so stakes, okay, stakes, dollars, dollars and stakes, dollars.

• 13:18David Hoffman?

  And then secured by ENA. So this new layer one blockchain. The staking token is ENA, which is the token of Athena Labs. It's like the governance token of Athena Labs. It is also a permissioned validator set, so it is not permissionless. You can't just stake like you stake on Ethereum or even on Solana. You actually are, it's a whitelisted group of entities, which is apparently just a bunch of institutions and centralized exchanges. Centralized known entities with like basically reputation on the line. They stake ENA and they validate the blockchain. I think any user can come to the blockchain, any user can come to Converge. So it's not a permissioned chain, but it's a permissioned validator set.

• 14:00David Hoffman?

  And during the explanation about like the design choice about this, it was explained to me by Rob from Dragonfly and also Carlos from Securitize that this has been requested by institutions in order to get them comfortable with having this place that they can control, where they feel comfortable issuing digital assets, you know, digital securities, you know, like real world assets and securities. And so this is the compromise that this design has made. We're going to give over the keys of this blockchain to institutions so that they feel like they have sufficient control over their own ecosystem, where they can feel comfortable to create, issue real world assets. Assets that, you know, you would find more in TradFi

• 14:43David Hoffman?

  that we all want to have on blockchain, but then they just need, they just need their own domain to feel control. And then the explanation here is that once it's on Converge, technology like Wormhole or any other, you know, cross, cross-chain interoperability layer will be able to take those assets, port them over to Ethereum, port them over to Solana, port them over to wherever blockchain there, there's demand for it. So that's kind of the, the simple rundown of the news. What's your take?

• 15:08Speaker 01

  I thought it was a kind of weird announcement, I guess, because it's an L1, right? Like as you said, brand new chain, L1. But I would even struggle to call it a blockchain. As you said, it's permissions, it's pretty locked down. It's extreme, like it's completely centralized. And I also wonder like why they didn't just do this as like a, just a centralized database instead, you know? Because making it a blockchain with consensus and everything, it just adds additional costs and overheads. But it does make sense and I suspected that it was definitely due to the institutions requesting this themselves because they are very new to this and they obviously want to get comfortable with it. They want to have total control over things. But the thing is, is you can still have total control over it even as like an L2.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  And I feel like the L2 model is just better generally from a number of different reasons. You mentioned things like bridging, you know, assets across the L2s work better with bridging than L1 to L1 does. You you get to basically lower your costs dramatically as well. I know that maybe the Athena was like, well, we could use an E and A for staking. And maybe we can kind of get, I guess, a more valuable E and A through that because there is like this perceived L1 premium on tokens. So, yeah, overall, like I saw that all the reactions to it, it was mixed, you know, it was very mixed. People are like, is this really needed? You know, this doesn't really make any sense. Shouldn't we just be settling on to Ethereum instead? And and they can still retain centralized controls through the token standards like Circle does with USDC or Tether does with with USDT, right?

• 16:36Speaker 01

  So overall, I'm going to say I'm in like a wait and watch kind of approach here. But this doesn't really excite me, to be honest. Um, I'm not in this industry for for this sort of stuff. Like, yes, I'm excited about reward assets and things like that. But I don't know if this is the right kind of instant instantiation of that. I think that hopefully if the institutions get more comfortable, they'll realize that there are better ways to do this than than than this way. So we'll have to, yeah, we'll have to see how that kind of plays out.

• 17:02David Hoffman?

  I do see the argument that there are some benefits towards being a blockchain rather than just a database. This is an EVM chain. And so there are some DeFi apps that they're going to launch on day one, like day one apps, right? Morpho, Maple, Pendle, Horizon from Ave. Uh, and so that's going to be these like financial tech stacks that are just built on this converged blockchain on day one. And and also it's permissionless access. So, uh, even though there are this permission validator set, you know, you, the user can still go to this chain and use some of the assets here. And in theory.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  What's the point of the permission validator set then if it's permissionless, right? Like, what are the, why do you need a permission validator set if you're going to let people, anyone come? Like, I don't, I don't buy it. It's not, it's not working.

• 17:45David Hoffman?

  No, I, I'm, I'm waiting to get to that point and I'm trying to give them some benefit of the doubt. Okay, so also in their announcement, they said there are three distinct pillars that are operating parallel, a fully permissionless. User access to a DeFi ecosystem, which in theory, there would be more like a larger diversity of like, you know, tokenized equities, tokenized securities, real world assets. And so maybe that's why people would come to this permissioned blockchain, permissioned validator set blockchain. But then it also said that there are permissioned apps where TradFi can interact with KYC parties. And that is like one of the features of this that might get more institutions comfortable with the blockchain. And then third, new permissioned apps built on securitized tokenized assets.

• 18:27David Hoffman?

  And so the permissioned network side of this thing is like really a big emphasis because it's not just at the validator set, but they want to also build permissioned apps. But I would take this, and this is what Rob from Dragonfly was explaining to me. He said, "Permission validators is an unfortunate truth of bringing more institutional counterparties on chain. We hear it across verticals." And so he's saying that he's gone around to institutions and say, "They have said to him that we need permission validation, permission validators in order to get comfortable." And I'm like, "Okay, I understand that that is what they are telling you. But why are we listening to them in the first place? Because they don't know what they want." Because when have institutions ever been right about how to build on a blockchain? The reason why I incorrectly labeled this a permissioned blockchain in a tweet

• 19:12David Hoffman?

  was because this is what institutions were asking for back in like 2017. We're like, "Okay, blockchain, not Bitcoin. You know, we're gonna do IBM Hyperledger. We're gonna make a permissioned blockchain. It's gonna be a settlement network between like permissioned parties." And that is what the industry listened to and tried to build for them, and no one cared about the end product. Because what is truly valuable in this industry is public permissionless ledgers, where individuals, un-KYC'd individuals and KYC'd institutions all operate in the same sphere. The thing that we are trying to fix in crypto is that the previous array of financial institutions are siloed servers.

• 19:52David Hoffman?

  And each Wells Fargo has a siloed server, BlackRock has a siloed server, JP Morgan has a siloed server. And all of these siloed servers have very high transactional costs because each one has a server, and we need to figure out how to get these servers to communicate, and that just creates a bunch of inter- intermediaries and a bunch of friction. The cool thing about crypto is that we are inverting that relationship where we are all building on the same server, the world computer. And this is why there is this cutthroat competition between Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin, whatever, to be that same unified server. And now I'm being told that institutions are just going to be a little bit more comfortable creating their own server. We'll call it Converge and it's going to be permissioned.

• 20:33David Hoffman?

  And I'm like, no, the whole point of this is to all converge on the same chain, not diverge away onto different chains. And I would like to contrast that with the announcement that came out of Coinbase called Privacy Pools. And so this is an announcement that came out of Coinbase this week. I actually didn't have this in the agenda, but I think it's very useful to explain. Coinbase introduced Coinbase Verified Pools, a trusted way to seamlessly trade on chain. Basically, using a Coinbase KYC attestation, which is like a token that's in your wallet that Coinbase uses to attest that they have your KYC. You and only you and other KYC users are able to provide liquidity through a Uniswap V4 hook.

• 21:16David Hoffman?

  And all traders in that Uniswap V4 hook can trust that Coinbase knows the counterparty. So I actually don't buy that we need a permissioned validator set because you can just build that logic into the app layer as Coinbase has proven that they were able to do with Uniswap V4 hooks. And so stop listening to the institutions and what they need because they don't understand blockchain. Just build it into the app layer. If you want KYC logic, build it into the app layer because we know that we can do that. That's why we have apps in the first place. I will end my rant. Anthony, what do you think about all that?

• 21:50Speaker 01

  No, no, I mean, I totally agree with you. And I guess, yeah, I was alluding to it earlier that it doesn't need a whole new chain. But also on the permissionless point, like I can't call a permission chain permissionless. And that also goes, like, people may think I'm a hypocrite here, but it also goes for L2s with centralized sequences. Like, I've been pushing for these L2s to obviously decentralize, you know, and I think that they will. I think that the major ones definitely will. And you have literally like an L1 blockchain with completely permissioned validators. And you say it's permissionless. Well, it's not because those permission validators can censor anyone they want and can do anything they want on the chain. So really, you're saying that, oh, you can come here and play, but at any time, we can, you know, rug you.

• 22:33David Hoffman?

  Yoink you, yeah.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  You know, you know, we can change the rules.

• 22:35David Hoffman?

  You are beholden to the validators.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. So, so it, it may be permissionless until it's not. Like, I think that might be a better way to put it, rather, you know, if you look at something like Ethereum L1, I mean, it's truly permissionless, right? It has thousands of unique node operators. A lot of people would have to collude in order to censor you and they wouldn't even succeed for many, many reasons, which I won't get into now. Um, and, and yeah, as permissionless validator said as well, and it's, everyone can run their own full nodes. So, yeah, I, I just. As I said, like, I mean, a wait and kind of see approach with this, but I don't think it's the right approach. I think, as you mentioned, Coinbase's approach is, is the correct approach and will be the winning one, uh, you know, long term.

• 23:16David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah. And I think that's a good argument about like layer twos. Layer twos and the stage zero centralized sequencer capacity have similar fault, like, um, failings as this. But the point about being a layer two, even if you're a stage zero layer two, and Austin Federa from, uh, formerly Solana, he said like, well, the actual like. Nomenclature of a layer of a stage zero layer two is actually not that different from a layer one with a bridge, like, point taken. But the idea of being a layer two in the first place means that you are on the path to going into becoming a stage two. Like, that is your path to be. And so if you, if you like stop at stage zero forever, then yes, understood the point. But like, no, like a commitment, commitment towards being a fully permissionless layer two.

• 24:01David Hoffman?

  Uh, being on that path is, is what matters here.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, definitely. And then, yeah, Converge doesn't seem to be on that path, right? They just said, what permission validator said, you know, have fun.

• 24:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyways, um, I, it just throws in the face of like, what the hell are we even doing here? Like, why are we doing this?

• 24:18Speaker 01

  I mean, I can, I can see, like, if I'm playing devil's advocate, like, I can see it from, from their point of view. They want to get a product in, you know, they want to get institutions involved with products. They want to bring them on chain. If they're asking for this and it's non-negotiable, you'd rather land the partnership than you give it up, right? So I understand that. Like, I, and, and I, I think it's, it's, that's probably what happened, to be honest. But at the same time, I would love for them to be in the background, keep pushing these institutions to, hey, there's a better way, there's a better way, you know?

• 24:44David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  But we'll see, because there's financial incentives too involved, right?

• 24:48David Hoffman?

  Right, yes, because now Athena is a layer one. So like, not only is it a stablecoin like MakerDAO, but now it's a layer one as well. Uh, and so they also get the layer one premium. Uh, and so I think, uh, that incentive can't be ignored. Anyways, we can stop, we can stop ranting about Verge. Uh, we're going to talk about the Robinhood partnership with Kalishi. We're going to talk about the Solana governance updates, and then we're going to talk about Ethereum. Uh, we're going to get to all of that and more, but first, a message from some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Imagine a world where your day-to-day banking runs on a blockchain. That's exactly what Mantle is building, powered by a $4 billion treasury and poised to become the largest sustainable on-chain financial hub. As part of their 2025 expansion, Mantle is introducing

• 25:30David Hoffman?

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• 26:12David Hoffman?

  Cello is transitioning from a mobile-first, EVM-compatible, layer-one blockchain to a high-performance Ethereum layer-two, built on OP stack with EigenDA and one-block finality. All happening soon with a hard fork. With over 600 million total transactions, 12 million weekly transactions, and 750,000 daily active users, Cello's meteoric rise would place it among one of the top Layer 2s, built for the real world and optimized for fast, low-cost global payments. As the home of the stablecoins, Cello hosts 13 native stablecoins across seven different currencies, including native USDT on Opera Mini Pay, and with over 4 million users in Africa alone. In November, stablecoin volumes hit $6.8 billion, made for seamless on-chain FX trading. Plus, users can pay gas with ERC20 tokens like USDT and USDC and send crypto to phone numbers in seconds.

• 26:56David Hoffman?

  But why should you care about Cello's transition to a Layer 2? Layer 2s unify Ethereum. L1s fragmented. By becoming a Layer 2, Cello leads the way for other EVM-compatible Layer 1s to follow. Follow Cello on X and witness the great Cello happening, where Cello cuts its inflation in half as it enters its Layer 2 era and continuing its environmental leadership. You may have already heard about InfineX. InfineX has, in my opinion, the nicest cross-chain swap and bridge feature that you will find anywhere. It is called Swidge, swap and bridge, and we're going to show you what it looks like. First, we're going to log into my InfineX account with a passkey. Now, there's no seed phrases in InfineX. This is just a one-click setup with biometric passkeys. But in addition to that, my InfineX account is fully non-custodial. So bam, I just logged in. It was two clicks and I'm already into my InfineX account.

• 27:41David Hoffman?

  So let's go make a Swidge. I'm going to go Swidge my USDC that is on base, and I'm going to buy Bara Chain, which is a completely different chain. So we're going to Swidge this. I'm going to press that button, and then InfineX is going to execute this order, this cross-chain order for me. And now it is done. But actually, I'm not really feeling bearish anymore, so I'm going to go from Bara to Penguins. I'm going to buy a Penguin on Solana, so I'm going from the Bara Chain to Solana. See, no transaction signing, no gas to worry about. You just Swidge across whatever chain that you want with InfineX. That was so easy. Go check out InfineX and try your first Swidge today. Robinhood continues to expand their product offering with a prediction market now with Kalishi. Kalashi is this kind of like aggressive poly-market competitor, a non-crypto poly-market competitor.

• 28:26David Hoffman?

  And so they actually, Robinhood's crypto, but it's mostly not crypto, and Kalishi's not crypto. It all. And so this is, I think, just us kind of keeping an eye on our non crypto competition. And so with Kalishi now integrated into Robinhood, Robinhood now actually has a prediction markets hub within its app. Via Robinhood derivatives. First, it will center on politics, economics and sports. But of course, Robinhood's plan is to just provide markets to anything. Robinhood wrote in their press release, "We have been in close contact with the CFTC over the past several weeks and look forward to continuing to work with them to promote innovation in the future derivatives and crypto markets." Kalishi and the CFTC have been litigating in court whether Kalishi can offer contracts betting on US elections. I think that was like the Elizabeth Warren.

• 29:12David Hoffman?

  Like tirade over Kalishi where she thought she just really didn't like betting markets as are related to politics. I think that has now been in the rearview mirror. Vlad Tenev, when he announced this, he said, he wrote on Twitter. "As a former mathematician and physicist, I am motivated by the search for objective truth. How can we make sense of all the information out there and who can we trust? Prediction markets are the application of capitalism to the pursuit of truth." Robinhood rose about a percent in the equities market after the announcement. Any takes with all of this, Anthony?

• 29:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, maybe a broader take here. I think there's two major companies in the US targeting that have traditionally targeted different market segments. There's Coinbase that has been all in on crypto. Then there's Robinhood that has been all in on TradFi. But over the last kind of couple of years, accelerating in the last year, you've had Robinhood go, come into crypto and come more aggressive into crypto, right? They want to be in crypto. They want to offer more and more crypto products. They want to do more and more crypto stuff. And then you have Coinbase, on the other hand, going more TradFi, being like, we want to do more TradFi stuff. We want to bring real world assets on chain. And they did the verified pools thing that we just covered. So it's an interesting dynamic right now where you have TradFi wanting to be more crypto and crypto wanting to be more TradFi.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  And those kind of two things are converging, I guess, for lack of a better word there. And kind of meeting, meeting in the middle, which is, which is interesting to see there. But in terms of like prediction markets, there was obviously A lot of fanfare around them during the election because that's usually what happens. People love to bet on the election. There were some pretty big markets there. In a poly market was obviously the leader in that one. And this competitor here kind of came a bit later, but as you said, is quite aggressive. When it comes to it, like I just view it as another betting market, to be honest, like in general, like, I don't know. I'm maybe not like red pilled on prediction markets just yet because they just look like betting markets to me at the end of the day. And a lot of them have not really been able to get to the truth.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  And there's a lot of issues with resolving certain markets because there's always like something in the wording that someone harps on about. Right. Yeah, so I'm wondering like if we're just gonna get like these centralized prediction markets will be the things that take off. Because then the centralized people behind it can just resolve the markets however they see fit. Because in a decentralized context, then Orga, one of the original Ethereum projects, had a really tough time with this. What ends up happening is that you go through like multiple rounds of trying to get to the truth of the truth, right? You've got to keep going down this rabbit hole of truth. And then if no resolution happens, you're basically gridlocked because you're trying to do it in a decentralized way. So that's, I guess, an interesting part of prediction markets to me.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  But I do think that they're gonna keep growing. I do think people love to bet on anything. You know, in crypto, obviously, we have various different ways of betting on things outside of prediction markets. But in terms of like information markets and betting on certain things, especially things that happen outside of crypto. So in crypto, you can bet on like tokens, right? That's inside crypto, you're buying a token, betting it's gonna go up. But outside of crypto, that's what prediction markets do. They look at the information outside of crypto, the stuff happening there and saying, okay, we'll bring this into crypto. And then all the crypto people can bet on this as well and we'll see the wisdom of the crowd there. But as I said, I'm yet to be convinced on how accurate this kind of stuff is versus normal betting markets.

• 32:37David Hoffman?

  There needs to be some sort of like sufficient liquidity, sufficient number of market participants really in order to make prediction markets work. And I think we saw that, we saw prediction markets truly work with the election between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, because there was that one French trader who just like started doing phone calls and sponsoring polls to get information direct to the source. And then he just, they just made a very large concentrated bet because he thought the market was wrong. And that's exactly how prediction markets ought to work. But that was at the like, literally the most number one ever in the world in history. Most liquid, most bet after, most participated in prediction market. And I think in order to make prediction markets work, we need that size. Prediction markets have to operate at size.

• 33:22David Hoffman?

  And I think like we're going there, Polly Market, even though it came down off of the post-election highs. The volume's still pretty good and it's way higher than it was before going into the 2024 election. And I think like you could, I think it's fair to be like maybe a little bit nihilist about the current state of prediction markets because they are just betting markets. But there is a top of the rabbit hole there with prediction markets. That is the futarchy rabbit hole where prediction markets can actually start to be a little bit more prescriptive about future outcomes. And there's just like a whole entire world of futarchy where there's like prediction markets. You can imagine prediction markets inside of like a Dow or even a corporation that is being allowed to be bet on by employees or team members or stakeholders.

• 34:07David Hoffman?

  And that can actually create like a, an outcome, a directional outcome for the decision making of some organization. And so I think there's, there's that, we're actually kind of just like kind of scratching the surface of prediction markets and we just have to start with building out liquidity in this world. And then we open up doors to this whole theorized vertical called futarchy, which that's like the optimistic case.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no, I'm definitely open to being convinced and, you know, showing the power of these things. But I, yeah, I just think up until this point, it's been relatively niche and small and really, I mean, it had its breakout, obviously, with the election stuff. But yeah, I think if we can get to that point of what you just described, I would probably be convinced at that point, if we can get there.

• 34:52David Hoffman?

  All right, this is the point in the agenda where two Ethereum people talk about Solana's SIMD 228 proposal. So this is the biggest probably proposal that's ever existed in Solana. And then there's other people out there who are saying this is actually the biggest governance event in crypto history. We'll talk about SIMD. Anthony's laughing. I think there's an okay argument about that. Maybe I'll skip to the fact or the claim as to why that's true. Something like 74% of all Solana voted on this proposal. So take the market cap of Solana, take 74% of it, that amount of capital voted on this proposal. Now, there's no like slashing, or there's no like-

• 35:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that amount of capital is concentrated in very few validators.

• 35:41David Hoffman?

  It's true. That's true. That's very, very true. Yes.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  Like, you know, so it's like top 20 validators have like 33% of the stake, so-

• 35:49David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so individual humans or individual entities, much lower. But like, it is still like 74% of a very large market cap ecosystem. So you could, you could kind of see why, why this is like a big deal in terms of like crypto governance.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  But also crypto governance goes way beyond on-chain governance. And I, you know, you know what I mean? Like, if you're just looking at the on-chain portion of it, you're missing like a whole ocean of off-chain portions of discussions and everything. I don't know. This was, I don't know. I'm not just saying this because of Solana. I just don't think this is the biggest. I think Ethereum has always had the biggest governance kind of debates around things. You know, I think like our issuance debate, like if we were to have a proper one, even, even the small bits and pieces we've had with, with the recent kind of issuance discussions, they blow up like massively. So, yeah, but I didn't follow this too closely. I just, yeah, I saw the aftermath and I was like, okay.

• 36:44David Hoffman?

  Okay, so this is a monetary conversation for Solana, but it's also kind of a crypto economics conversation as well. Because of course, if you tinker with the monetary policy of Solana, you're also tinkering with the economics of validators. Okay, so what did SIMD 228 propose for Solana? It wanted to change Solana's issuance curve decay to be able to flex up or down. So Solana has like a Bitcoin-esque decay function in the issuance rate. It just like the issues less over time. Now, there is a more, call it precise, version of monetary policy that was proposed by 228. And this new mechanism, it would have reduced current inflation by 80% and then also targeted 50% stake rate.

• 37:27David Hoffman?

  So if there is more than 50% of Solana staked, it would decrease issuance. If there's less than 50% Solana staked, it would increase influence. So this is something like stake targeting. The arguments in favor of this was increased network security due to the dynamic increasing inflation if staking participation dropped too low. Also preventing overpaying for security by just decreasing the overall amount of issuance. And then by decreasing issuance, you're encouraging people to un-stake, which allows for Sol to flow into DeFi. So it was thought as a subsidy to like Solana's DeFi ecosystem. Those are the arguments in favor. Arguments against is that smaller validators will be less profitable because smaller validators really depend on that high Sol inflation in order to be profitable.

• 38:12David Hoffman?

  So this is kind of like chopping off the tail end of smaller validators. And because only like more, only larger validators could be really able to be profitable here. And then the higher yield is an important component for ETF buyers in Europe, even though that's nominal. And those are really the big things. The result of the voting is that 74 of the stake supply voted against this proposal. So the proposal was failed. So this is meaning that Solana inflation will continue to be high. And so from my point of view, as like a money person, I'm like, okay, increased Solana inflation, less good for the money-ness of Sol, less good for the The DeFi ecosystem of Sol, and so that's like a negative.

• 38:57David Hoffman?

  But then also, I'm happy that the long tail of validators of Solana are still profitable. Cause that means that Solana will be able to be more decentralized than it would had it been able to, had it actually passed this. So I'm kind of like of two minds of this. It's like, it's less good for Sol is money. But I don't even think the Solana ecosystem really cares about Sol is money. And it's better for the decentralization of Solana, which is something that like, I don't really think they can really afford to decrease that much already. Like I'm already not satisfied with the state of decentralization in Solana. And so at least we are keeping viability of like long tail validators. And so the monetary policy of Solana will not change.

• 39:37David Hoffman?

  I think this is probably going to be iterated on and re-proposed, but as, as of now, there's no change to the Solana monetary policy. Anthony, what's your take?

• 39:45Speaker 01

  There's a lot to unpack here, I think, and I'll try not to be too ETH maxi about it. I think first and foremost, you can't claim to have economic security on your chain if you have no slashing, like as a proof of stake chain. I just, I strongly believe that because there's no punishment, right? So it's, it doesn't, it doesn't equal any economic security in, in my, well, maybe not any, but like, it's just very low. Especially compared to something like Ethereum that actually has slashing in place. And that goes for all the chains that don't have slashing, all the proof of stake chains. I just, I don't consider it to be, you know, the equivalent there. But, but the thing is, you, you talked about smaller validators. The, the, the problem with that is that the Solana Foundation runs a subsidy program where they give Sol to the long tail of validators

• 40:28Speaker 01

  in order for them to be profitable, even with the high inflation. Now, I don't know the current state of that program because there's not much transparency around it.

• 40:35David Hoffman?

  It's like government handouts for the pores of the Solana validator set.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. So, and as I said, not much transparency around that. People found that on chain based on information that was given a while ago about this. So there's all those, there's kind of things going on when it, when it comes to this. And, you know, as you said, like the high inflation obviously is not good for, for monetary properties here. I don't really buy the argument that if you were, if you had less Sol stake that would just flow into DeFi. I actually think people would just sell it because if the the the problem with a high staking rate is that why is it high to begin with, right? There's a lot of different reasons, but what's the number one reason? Well, I think it's because the inflation rate is high, right? You see, wha- whatever the issuance rate is, I think it's like, what, seven or eight percent or something like that? It's quite high. You see that as a normal retail user, you're not accounting for the inflation. You're just seeing seven, eight percent.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  You're like, oh, I can earn this on on Sol, right? Like, I'll buy Sol and I'll stake it. And it's not just Sol, it's it's the other proof of stake networks that have high inflation rates as well, right? So that I don't really buy the argument that if the inflation was lower, that Sol would un-stake and then flow into DeFi. Maybe some of it would, like a very small portion of it. But I do think that the stake rate is so high because people don't care to do anything else with that that those tokens. They're just staking it. And this is true across pretty much like most of the delegated proof of stake networks out there. Cardano has a really high staking rate last time I checked. Same with like Polkadot and a bunch of other chains that that use this kind of similar mechanism here. Whereas it's very different in Ethereum, which doesn't have delegated proof of stake.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  And ETH is used as a proper money within the ecosystem, is used within the DeFi ecosystem, is used as collateral. And people love using ETH. And that's why, well, one of the reasons why ETH staked is at, what, whatever it is, like thirty percent or something like that these days, right? It's it's a very, very small percentage there. ETH issuance is lower as as well, and that that kind of discourages staking there. But ETH's use as a money and as a as a kind of like a collateral asset within DeFi has been very strong for a very long time. So I think, as I said, there's a lot of different kind of moving parts here. Um, and it was kind of funny to me that that this was, I don't know how long this was in the works for, but the timing was just poetic where the Sol price suddenly started going down a lot. And they're like, break, you know, break glass in case of emergency, this proposal.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  But I think this proposal had been worked on for quite a while. I just thought the timing was was funny. But yeah, I I think the small validator's point is probably the most important in that because Solana is a very expensive network to run because the hardware requirements are quite high. You're going to naturally get centralization because of that. And then at the same Time, you're gonna need subsidy programs and you're going to need the high issuance to to offset that as well. So it just doesn't really make for good economics, doesn't really make for a good sustainable chain, in my opinion. But hopefully I wasn't too eat maxi about that because I do think that Ethereum isn't perfect, but it's it's pretty good right now. The way Ethereum works on its economic side.

• 43:35David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I know one of Anatoly's points to like kind of counteract you like FUD about Solana's decentralization. He made this point was like, well, over the years, Solana actually has become meaningfully more decentralized. Because more validators have come online, more like as long as validator count is growing over time. And so he's saying.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  It actually went down by like a thousand over the last eighteen months.

• 43:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so that was exactly my point. So like that is expected behavior when sole price goes up. Because simply it's more economical when sole is prices higher to be able to spin up a validator. Like more when so sole price goes up, more people can put up validators. As sole price price collapses, and you see this in the same thing with the Bitcoin mining set of miners. When prices go down, things centralize. And that has always been the critique of proof of work is like, okay, sure, you can afford more a more diverse set of miners. When Bitcoin price is going up, but when Bitcoin price is going down, it converges. It collapses down on the most efficient miners. And that's the same thing that's happening with proof of stake validating when you juice up the hardware requirements.

• 44:39David Hoffman?

  And so, yes, there has as sole price went from seven dollars post FTX up to like two fifty dollars, two hundred and fifty dollars, almost three hundred dollars. You would expect more validators to come online because there's just more fees to accrue. It's more economical, but as prices converge and collapse, then the values that also collapses. And if you keep your hardware requirements up, the natural convergence towards centralization is just accelerated. Versus if you just keep your hardware requirements down. Ethereum has the same convergence towards profitable, only profitable validators. And so it has the same effects that Solana has. But since Ethereum has like one one hundredth of the hardware and bandwidth requirements. The impacts of that effect are just so much slower.

• 45:24David Hoffman?

  So it allows time for other like mechanisms to come in and take over and allow for people to join the network.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  And it's funny that you mentioned revenue, you know, because stakeholders don't just get the inflation, they also get revenue from whatever the chain generates, that's true for every chain. I remember I had like debates with, you know, Solana people a while ago now, maybe like over a year ago, where they were discussing, well, you know, fear of new will eventually get so high that will just cut sole inflation down because the fear of new will make up for that. But what ended up happening was that the fear of new did go quite high for a little while there, obviously because of the meme coin mania. But now the fear of new is very, very low. So maybe this proposal would have passed like six months ago, because everyone was looking at the fear of news being like, oh, they're so high, right? But I remember looking at them, and I actually said this to you, David, we

• 46:15Speaker 01

  were talking about this, where I said, this looks exactly like ETH did during the NFT mania, where so much money is just like extracted out by the MEV mafia, and that comes from the fear of new, and then it just collapses, which is what we've seen here. So I wonder if this proposal would have passed six months ago, because the validators might have been like, well, if inflation is going lower, but hey, we have a lot of fear of new coming in, that will make up for it. Because that was, as I said, one of the things that I debated with Solana people a while ago. And my, my, my kind of side of the debate was, guys, I think like most fear of new is just going to get internalized by apps, because most fear of new comes from MEV. So you actually just need a sustainable tail issuance. But the problem for Solana is that it's incredibly expensive to run

• 46:57Speaker 01

  chain compared to Ethereum. So they need more tail issuance, which, yeah, which, which is not good for, for money, right? Or not good for, for the longer term kind of price of the asset.

• 47:07David Hoffman?

  In a different world of Solana news, Solana is actually getting sole futures from CME. And this is the first step, the first known step that we have seen both Bitcoin and Ether go through before they get their actual ETF. So first, first Solana futures, ETFs, and then, and then, is that an ETF? Maybe not an ETF. But anyway, so Solana's getting futures. And then actually, excuse me, it launched, did launch. The day one volumes were well below of Bitcoin and Ethereum volume. So on the Bitcoin futures debut in December of 2017. $102 million in volume in day one launch when Ethereum Futures debuted in February of 2021. It had $31 million on day one launch and then Solana had $12.3 million of trading volume on day one.

• 47:53David Hoffman?

  But nonetheless, that is the first foot in the door for Solana to get an ETF. Which I think this administration is much more open to the idea of ETFs. And so that, and then also, since we're just on Solana, happy for fifth birthday to Solana. That happened on March 16th. So congratulations Solana for being five years old.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  They're still in mainnet beta, that's why I'm laughing.

• 48:17David Hoffman?

  I don't even know what mainnet beta means at this point.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  I think, I think they're just running with it as like a meme at this point, like. But it'd be hilarious if they finally took it off and the chain went down again. It would just be, it'd just be like CT would, would go nuts over that.

• 48:32David Hoffman?

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• 50:45David Hoffman?

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• 51:29David Hoffman?

  This tweet is not news, but I thought it was a nice tweet. This is Matt Hwang from Paradigm tweeting out ETH ACC, ETH Acceleration. And then in this tweet, we have Danny Ryan on the far right, Tomas, who is the incoming co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, Onsgar, Georgios, Brian Armstrong, Matt Hwang from Paradigm, and I actually don't know this lady on the left.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  She's tagged in the photo.

• 51:52David Hoffman?

  She is tagged in the photo, and this is Alana, Alana from Paradigm. Alana from Paradigm.

• 51:58Speaker 01

  This is the COO.

• 51:59David Hoffman?

  The COO, COO of Paradigm, COO. Paradigm, apologies Lana. And I just really wanted to just like use this tweet as like an opener up of like this Ethereum conversation. Tomas, incoming new executive director, co-executive director along with Hesiau, I think that's the big news. We have a to be scheduled podcast with Tomas and Hesiau, not totally confirmed. We haven't gotten the 100% confirmation yet, but I'm pretty sure it's happening. And then also Danny Ryan, I do a podcast with him tomorrow and Vivek about Etherealize. And then since we're on the subject, Tim Baker will be coming out on Monday, I believe, to talk about the future of Ethereum. Overall, Anthony, there's been just a lot of churn in Ethereum, a lot of changing up of vibes and sentiment and leadership. Overall, what's your take?

• 52:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just love that we went from shitting on Solana to now pumping up Ethereum, but this is cool. This is my vibe. We can do this, right?

• 52:51Speaker 01

  So, I mean, obviously, like, I'm just gonna be biased here, but at the same time, I'm gonna give my reasoning behind it. I think over the last few months Ethereum has repositioned itself for success, like, as a TLDR there. And it's done this in various different ways. I think, as you mentioned, you know, the new co-directors of the EF are gonna bring much-needed kind of refreshing energy to the Ethereum Foundation, especially with, you know, Tomas already being so active on Twitter. He's putting his calendar out there on public. It's like, it's just raw dog in the calendar, man. Like, that's crazy. I would never do that. But he's doing it. And he even did it as like a shitpost reply to Kyle Samani, because Kyle Samani was like, no one in the EF takes any criticism from anyone seriously.

• 53:35David Hoffman?

  Here's the tweet. Kyle Samani tweets out, "I can confirm that the EF leadership is not interested in hearing dissenting opinions from their loudest critics." And then Tomas replies, "Hi Kyle, appreciate you bringing this up. We're hoping to hearing different perspectives, critical or otherwise. Here is some additional availability for the critical ones," and then adds his calendar publicly on Twitter. Just on Twitter, here's my calendar, please come and talk to me.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  Yep, that's just insane, right? So that's the kind of vibes and energy that I'm liking. I'm liking seeing because it really, and especially because it's in public, right? It really gets the people going, if you will, there. But it's not just Tomas, it's not just Xiaowei at the EF, but it's also Etherealize, right? They've made a huge name for themselves in a very short period of time. As everyone probably knows by now, they brought on Danny Ryan as a co-founder along with some other people as well. So there's four co-founders, I think, in total, Vivek, Grant, and the fourth one, I've forgotten the name right now. They're gonna, but yeah, there's four co-founders. And obviously Danny Ryan was, you know, everyone's pick for the EF kind of leadership position.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  But I actually think that he's much better suited to Etherealize than the EF for what he wants to do and wants to achieve. And at the same time, he has a close relationship with the EF. So essentially, Etherealize and the EF are like the dynamic duo. We're Etherealize targeting all the stuff that the EF is not equipped to target, and the EF doing all the things that Etherealize is not equipped to do. So that just makes me incredibly bullish on that front there. But I also think generally on maybe the core development front, the core research and development front, there's been a real push, obviously, to accelerate things, even with the L2s, and accelerate the right things. Because you can say, well, let's accelerate things, and then be like, oh, let's accelerate better since your resistance for Ethereum. It's like, okay, yes, that's good, that's critical, we want that, but we can wait for that.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  What we can't wait for is scale. We need to accelerate things like blob scaling, right? The gas limit scaling. So there's been a reprioritization around what to actually kind of focus on as part of that Ethereum acceleration effort. And from what I've seen, everyone seems to agree that we should be focused on increasing blobs, increasing the L1 gas limit, just scaling Ethereum as much as we can, capture as much market share as we can, and worry about, you know, things later, other things later. That's my general take on that. But yeah, the vibes have improved greatly. Like, I'm sure people have felt that over the last couple of months. Even though the price hasn't done much, the vibes have been really good there. And I think that's definitely due to these more kind of like public changes in leadership.

• 56:02Speaker 01

  But also, you're seeing more EF people be more public as well, which is great to see because people want to hear from the source. And core developers generally, even the ones that work outside of the Ethereum Foundation, like you had up on your screen there, Terrence, who works at Prilabs, who is part of Offchain Labs, which builds Arbitrum. They're just tweeting more, tweeting more stuff out publicly and getting that energy out there.

• 56:25David Hoffman?

  Yeah, there's a tweet from Uma Roy, which has turned into Ethereum copypasta, which I'm trying to find right now. But it was basically just talking about the vibe shift at the EF and how it's starting to permeate outwards. And I think you can kind of see it in different corners of Ethereum land. It's actually worth noting that Tomas has actually not started his job at the Ethereum Foundation, for whatever reason. He was going to start, I think, on the 14th, and he got punted by a week, so he actually starts next week. I can't find this tweet from Uma.

• 56:56David Hoffman?

  And so there's like early, like, it feels like the AIA era of Ethereum, the EF, was like, we did that. That was like, you know, mission accomplished. We did the whole addition by subtraction thing. And that thing went to its logical conclusion, and now we can like check that box. And now there is two new EDS who are going to come in with a different mentality, a different mandate. And because of that new change of leadership, there's been like a reorging of like just how Ethereum communicates with itself. And so like, it is worth seeing, like, there's a little culture set from the top, now there's new culture. And this is all happening so early because, like I said, Tomas hasn't even started his job at the EF.

• 57:41David Hoffman?

  And then one more thing in the Ethereum land, the Ether Guild has launched. And so the Ether Guild is EthasMoneyHQ on Twitter. It's this kind of community effort to supporting EthasMoney. Think of this as like this community grassroots guild of people who all want Ether. To be a monetary asset. And this is, we talked about this actually at the Bankless Summit. Ether's money dot X Y Z is kind of like this layer two beat for for ether, the asset. And so it kind of gives you metrics and stats and figures about ether, the asset and how it's being used as money, where it's being used as money. And this is just a kind of community effort with a large push from the

• 58:22David Hoffman?

  Grow the Pie folks, really, really Chad team over there, as long with some community body up adoption from Anthony Sassano here. Also Ryan, this was a Ryan brainchild. And so if you want to support ether, the Ether Guild, the, there is a link in the show notes, so you can get started and you can also join the guild. You can apply to join the guild. Basically, if you believe in Ether's money, that is you. Any comments or commentary about this?

• 58:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I like how the Ether's Money effort that Ryan started kind of evolved here into the Ether Guild, because the Ether Guild is being broad strokes now. They're basically trying to bring the different, I guess, areas of Ethereum together. The Ether's Money area, the Ethereum as the world computer kind of area, the kind of regenerative stuff, the public goods funding stuff that Ethereum does. Just bringing this all together under the Ether Guild and doing that in a community driven way. They have these concepts of quests that people can go on and complete different things and just, you know, adding a bit of gamification to it as well. But there is definitely a very heavy focus on the Ether's Money side and ETH's value kind of accrual properties and stuff like that. Which is another thing that I didn't mention earlier.

• 59:28Speaker 01

  There's been a real big community kind of outcry that more focus needs to be put on ETH, the asset, rather than just Ethereum, the network. And I think I've seen some people calling for it to be basically some organization or some kind of team to literally just be out there, kind of spreading the message of ETH itself. Not even talking about Ethereum, just talking about ETH, the asset. Because typically, when we talk about ETH and Ethereum, we talk about them together, right? And we do put a pretty heavy emphasis on the network, because the network is honestly the most interesting and exciting part, right? Like the network, it makes the money exciting. It's not the kind of like other way around. So I think. There's been a pretty big push there and I think Ether Guild wants to be part like a

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  main part of that as well, but I'm hoping to see more of that going forward, especially more of that from EF people. I know Ansgar recently put out a tweet about this where he said that he's been relatively quiet on the ETH front, but he wants to be louder about it going forward once the L1 kind of reprioritization stuff that they've been doing with the roadmap is kind of finalized there, which I think it's going to be very soon, actually. They've gotten to the point where they feel pretty, pretty good about it, pretty comfortable about it. And that L1 reprioritization effort is like probably the next five year roadmap essentially for Ethereum. So yeah, pretty, pretty important stuff going on.

• 1:00:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah, there's never been complete holistic community consensus in the Ethereum community about Ether the asset and promoting Ether the asset. There's like some, some of the developers in Ethereum who got into Ethereum so early, like 2015, 2016, because they saw Ethereum the vision and really just saw Ether the asset as a means to an end of elevating the world computer. And I think my message to them and my message to the broader Ethereum community is that if you believe, if you're here for Ethereum the computer and Ethereum the network, supporting Ether the asset is 100% aligned with that goal. The Ethereum computer, I think you have seen with the DK of the Ether market

• 1:01:24David Hoffman?

  cap, you have seen a DK of the coordination incentives around Ethereum the computer. When, when the Ether market cap is lower, you get stupid stuff like Converge, building a new layer one instead of building a layer two on Ethereum. If, if the Ether market cap was higher, you would see more layer ones being interested in becoming layer twos on Ethereum. You would see more apps being grown. You would see the Ethereum the computer grow higher. And so I think that Ethereum, the Ethereum is a world computer mission, people we are 100% in alignment with. And I think that we need to also have the perspective that a valuable Ether is, helps that mission more. And so it's like,

• 1:02:08David Hoffman?

  it's not like Ethereum, the world computer is a first class citizen and ETH is money is a second class citizen. They are both first class citizens. What would you say to that?

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  No, I I mean, I completely agree. It's it's a message that we've been pushing for a very long time now. And I I I'm I'm quite puzzled sometimes by people who are saying, you know, are indifferent to ETH as an asset or or saying that oh ETH going up is, you know, gross or cringe or not something we wanna see. I think the only negative to ETH going up is that the people who don't own ETH are gonna be sad. Like, I don't really, there's no other negative to it. Like, the the more ETH goes up, the more secure the network is, the better coordination we have, the more economic bandwidth we have within the Ethereum economy to use, the more attention Ethereum gets, the more people wanna build on Ethereum. Like, there's literally no negatives here. And I've been saying this for like a long time now. It's probably like six years at this point I've been saying this.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  There's just no negatives here for ETH going up. And funny thing is, is that ETH going up means the Ethereum Foundation has more money. Like, if if if nothing else convinces you, that should convince you. So I think I think that's important there. But I I I I think it's, there's also a a related but interesting discussion topic. We don't have to get into now. I know I know we're coming up on time here. But just for something for people to think about is that, I think in in Bitcoin, the reason why the BTC's digital gold narrative stuck is because anyone who didn't believe that was purged from Bitcoin. And the reason why it's easy to purge people from Bitcoin is because it doesn't do anything else.

• 1:03:33David Hoffman?

  There's nothing else.

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  It does nothing else. Whereas in Ethereum, like, not that I want to purge people, but you actually can't be purged because there's so many different areas of Ethereum. If you don't care about ETH's money, or ETH's store of value, whatever, you can go do something else in Ethereum. Like, and and be free to do that. No one's going to stop you from doing that. No one's going to shame you for doing that. Whereas in Bitcoin, if you don't believe in BTC as digital gold, you are shit out of luck. There's nothing else you can do with with Bitcoin, right? So I I think that's an interesting topic that I don't think gets brought up en- enough.

• 1:04:02David Hoffman?

  I wanna quickly delve into the Ethereum app layer. This is a cool project that I saw a guy get announced this last week called Megapot. Uh, and I think the the pitch behind Megapot, the idea behind Megapot is just incredibly easy to understand, is a global internet lottery. Uh, and I I think maybe people just started thinking about pool together recently, which is a no-loss lottery. Pull together, it is not pull together. Straight up a mega pot. This is a straight up lottery as in like you buy a ticket. If you don't win, you lose your money. Whereas with pull together, you would get your money back. And so this is the idea here is that this can be a global lottery, larger, a superset of all previous previously existing lotteries, not, not the jackpot, not mega millions, like not whatever,

• 1:04:44David Hoffman?

  which are also, I would say, very toxic because the expected value of a ticket, like you pay $1 for like the expected value of returning 23 cents. With this one, you actually get to either buy a ticket, like $1 ticket to win $100,000 or something very, very skewed like that. Or you act as an LP and you can be the house. And so you, as this is not something that you can do in like the mega millions or mega jackpot or whatever, the trad, trad lotteries, you actually never get to be the house. That's the, the house is the company. And so with mega pot, you either get to speculate as a DGEN or be the house as a LP. I thought that's kind of cool. Did you see this announcement, Anthony?

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did. And, and the thing is, is that I've actually been saying for years now that I don't know why someone didn't build a proper lottery.

• 1:05:30David Hoffman?

  It seems so obvious.

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  It's, it's a no brainer. I think maybe the main blocker would be regulations or not wanting to get in trouble with law enforcement over this. But you can do it anonymously too, right? You can, and, and the code can be on chain. So anyone can verify it. So they know they're not going to get rugged. But yeah, I'm glad to see this finally happen because it's such an obvious thing.

• 1:05:49David Hoffman?

  This has been in like the early idea, ideation of Ethereum since 2015. The fact that it's taken 2025 to somebody to actually like build this is kind of like crazy to me.

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  Yep. Yeah, definitely.

• 1:06:00David Hoffman?

  Yeah. I'll add the disclaimer there that the mega pot is a bankless ventures portfolio company. We're a minority investor in it as well. Last news of the week, just really quickly. This came out right before we got started. Kraken to acquire Ninja Trader for $1.5 billion. It's a $1.5 billion deal. I actually had no idea what Ninja Trader is.

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  No, I had no idea.

• 1:06:19David Hoffman?

  I had no idea. Apparently it's a leading US future, retail futures trading platform. I think this is largely a licensing play, maybe and also a user acquisition play. But the idea here, like why did they do this is they, Kraken wants to unlock global regulatory licensing and growth, especially in the futures market. So now crypto futures and derivatives can be provided inside the United States. Big, big, I think this is, makes it the biggest deal. I think we had that 1.1 or 1.2 billion dollar bridge acquisition by Stripe for stable coins. This is now the number one M and A deal that crypto has ever seen.

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's massive, like 1.5 billion. For something I never heard of, but I guess it's a US-only product. That's probably why I haven't heard of it.

• 1:07:03David Hoffman?

  I mean, I'm in the US and I still had no idea.

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, you've got no excuse.

• 1:07:08David Hoffman?

  All right, Anthony, really appreciate you coming on to the Weekly Rollup this week and helping me go through the news. Anthony, you do The Daily Gue, which is one of the few podcasts that I listen to on a daily basis. Or, you know, whenever you don't rug the Daily Gue community and you skip an episode. If people like the sound of your voice, like your takes, where can they go find you on the internet?

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, just Twitter is the easiest place, sasol0x on there. You can find it pretty easily. I'm sure you'll link it in the show notes. And you can find my podcast there, which is called The Daily Gue. I do Ethereum education related kind of episodes three days a week now. It used to be daily, but it's just too much doing it daily. It's a crazy ecosystem, so it happens three times a week. But as David said, sometimes I'll miss an episode. But hey, it's totally free, not monetized at all. So yeah, you can go consume it whenever you see fit.

• 1:07:56David Hoffman?

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