Is Joe Lubin the Michael Saylor of Ethereum? | The $SBET Opportunity

Joe Lubin returns to Bankless to break down his latest bold move—launching SBET, a publicly traded vehicle designed to accumulate and deploy Ether as a strategic treasury asset. We unpack whether Lubin is stepping into the Michael Saylor role for Ethereum, how SBET might outperform Bitcoin-backed models, and why ETH is poised for a monetary renaissance. From regulatory wins to Ethereum’s evolving narrative on Wall Street, this episode explores how ETH can become a multi-trillion-dollar asset and a dominant store of value in the next economic supercycle. ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🌐SELF | PROVE YOUR SELF https://bankless.cc/Self 🟠BINANCE | THE WORLDS #1 CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/binance ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 0:38 Getting Sued by The SEC 7:55 $SBET 16:32 The Michael Saylor of ETH 23:25 $SBET (ETH) vs $MSTR (BTC) 27:16 Valuing ETH 28:30 Wall Street Narratives 30:52 ETH’s Performance 36:53 ETH as Collateral 40:07 Onboarding Others 46:52 ETH as SoV 49:18 What ETH Needs 50:52 Joining Forces 53:08 ETH’s Sentiment Shift 56:53 Genius Act 58:44 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES Joe Lubin https://x.com/ethereumJoseph SharpLink Gaming ($SBET) https://www.sharplink.com/ Consensys https://consensys.io/ ------ 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.

• 0:00David Hoffman?

  So my question to you, Joe, do you have what it takes? Can you become the Michael Saylor of Ethereum?

• 0:07Speaker 01

  Well, I don't, I don't think I need to answer that question directly.

• 0:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, we have Joe Lubin. He's the co-founder of Ethereum. He's the CEO of Consensus and most recently, he's now the chairman of a publicly traded company. It's called Sharplink, a company designed to purchase Ether, the asset, for strategic treasury purposes. Joe, welcome back to Bankless.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Thanks, guys. Feels like I've been here recently, but the vibe's a little different.

• 0:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, you know what? Last time you were here, I was just looking at this. It was just over a year ago. It was May, and I think you were in the process of getting sued, getting nasty grams from the SEC, at least Consensus was.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  Also suing, if I remember correctly.

• 0:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's right. I think that part was the part that worked out, actually.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  I think we're on the offense, actually.

• 0:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why didn't we actually start there, then?

• 0:59Speaker 01

  The ecosystem won that one.

• 1:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so what happened with that? So last time we talked, Gary Gensler was on his rampage. Consensus was kind of the next thing. They were actually talking about, it seemed like they were intent on making Ether the asset a security as well. That was some of the implication in their Wells notices.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was an inquisition underway, driven by President Elizabeth Warren.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  She and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party preferred to have large government and granular control over all human activity. Simultaneously, the bank lobby, some big banks that preferred to keep winning a red game, they made strange but happy bedfellows. So Jamie Dimon and Elizabeth Warren in sync on some actions. And, and they all felt that this new technology for decentralized protocols, which would enable disintermediation, lots of systems and empowerment to people and communities, was antithetical to their goals.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  And so Chair Gensler was essentially deputized to stop.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  Disintermediation to maintain control of all the things. And the way they intended to do that was to go back on what Bill Hinman, Director of Corporation Finance at the previous SEC, had said about Ether, that it's a commodity, not a security. And they went back on several things that the CFTC had been saying for a long time. Ether, commodity, not a security. So they secretly seemed to re-categorize Ether as a secret security. And then they proceeded to do all sorts of enforcement actions, an inquisition which forced many companies, including our own,

• 2:56Speaker 01

  to pay tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions in some. The lawyers to produce documents to defend ourselves for things that they were insinuating that we were doing. When it got to the point that they were subpoenaing and inquisitioning just independent researchers to try to figure out who to pin this reclassification on, then we got active. So we thought we might have to sue the SEC at some point, based on a few years of that sort of activity. And we eventually ended up pulling the trigger. So we sued them in the great state of Texas. And we pretty much tried to put them on their heels to answer our question,

• 3:41Speaker 01

  which is, do you consider Ether a security or a commodity? And they did some fancy work. And so they said, oh, bad, we're not actually investigating, or we're going to stop investigating your ecosystem. We're going to stop harassing researchers. And so by doing, and they sent out a letter, sort of apology letter, because they were forced to make a direct statement. And then the judge in that case felt that that was sufficient. And our case wasn't right enough to be seen in that particular court. And so he said, sorry, I can't look at this in Texas anymore. And so immediately after that, the SEC sued us in Brooklyn.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  They got on the E train, I think. They went from one jurisdiction to another jurisdiction, the one which they lost to Coinbase in. So they moved to a different jurisdiction. They sued us there for basically the same thing. And November 5th happened, Chair Gensler resigned. The complexion of government actions towards our industry has profoundly changed. And so that ended up getting settled.

• 4:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, did the Wells notice all that? Did it evaporate in a puff of smoke?

• 5:00Speaker 01

  So they sued us, based on the Wells notice. And ultimately, we basically won. We achieved our agenda in the first action. And the ecosystem won. It was liberated to a certain extent. And then they settled, we all settled. So the other action just disapproved.

• 5:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Have you met with the new SEC Chair? What's kind of the new SEC administration like?

• 5:26Speaker 01

  They're outstanding. I haven't met with Paul, but I have interacted with Hester on some occasions. She's a superstar and I think we love the SEC.

• 5:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  You just say, "we love the SEC."

• 5:39Speaker 01

  We love the SEC. The SEC is

• 5:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  is doing really healthy things for the United States of America and the world, and very reasonable things for our ecosystem. People on our policy and legal team interact with them in a positive, constructive manner quite regularly. So it's a pleasure to work with them.

• 6:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow, what a 180 change. I'm just curious if you could maybe project forward. So let's say November had a different outcome and we got a similar administration to the one we had last time. What do you think? How do you think that world would have been different? That kind of reality exists maybe somewhere in the multiverse. Play that reality out.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  It's really hard to know, but we were very convinced that we would win in court. The judicial arm of government would end up being relatively independent and rational and do the right thing and set our ecosystem on a healthy course. I think it was the goal. Of Gensler and Warren and others to slow us down to to try to inject some things to co-opt our industry perhaps and and just try to do ridiculous and egregious things in case they might end up being able to win. So the spacing on the name of that that project Gary Gary's

• 7:04Speaker 01

  pet project that was already set up to treat ethers as security.

• 7:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  That was weird.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  This feels like a different timeline. It feels like we're not not living in that world anymore.

• 7:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, okay.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  I've reclaimed those brain cells.

• 7:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, exactly. I just like, let's leave that in in 2022 to 2024. And let's talk about the future. And part of the future is this new publicly traded company that we mentioned in the intro. The ticker is S bet. So this is on the NASDAQ.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  I should probably take this moment as our GC Matt Corva has suggested, I should probably say something to the effect that nothing I say here with respect to S bet the strategic bet on Ethereum should be considered forward looking statements. And I'm just talking big picture about why consensus was excited to be an investor. I'm certainly not licensed to to offer financial advice. I if there was a license to offer Ethereum advice, I'd probably be qualified.

• 8:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, okay. Well, disclaimers out of the way. S bet is the ticker. A strategic bet on ETH. I guess it was Sharplink before. Can you talk about?

• 8:15Speaker 01

  It is. It is sharp. Sharplink Gaming Inc. But again, everything I'm saying is hypothetical.

• 8:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Tell us about this. So tell us, as we understand it, there's the press releases is basically it's a former it's a gaming company, still is a gaming company.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  So affiliate marketing for sports betting, things like that.

• 8:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. And the the pivot here, the change here, or the the new capital raise is all about setting up a strategic treasury around ether, the asset, I believe $425 million, maybe to start. What's the strategy here? What's what's this vehicle actually doing?

• 8:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's two pronged. One, because it has its own mandate. It is very interested in making use of Web3 primitives to enhance what they do. So one could imagine, again, this very hypothetical prediction markets could be relevant to sports betting, maybe more granular kinds of propositions. We like to do peer-to-peer things in our ecosystem. I'll say no more on that front. And the biggie is that they're really excited to to bring Ether onto their balance sheet. About $425 million worth of Ether initially. They are very excited to to stake it, to re-stake it, to participate in DeFi.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  And essentially, Michael Saylor in his strategies, strategy, is doing some very interesting things with at the market, sales of shares, with the convertible debt offerings. He's able to create financial instruments that that are attractive to different cohorts of investors, like certain kinds of bond investors, attractive in the sense that he can dial up or dial down the ratio of risk to return in different kinds of investments. So we will look to do hypothetically, we'll look to do some of those things and and we can do so much more. So Saylor has this notion of Bitcoin yield,

• 10:22Speaker 01

  which is the amount of Bitcoin exposure for every fully diluted share the shareholders own. We have this notion of yield in the Ethereum ecosystem. It's called just earning Ether based on staking your Ether and stuff like that. So we're going to stick with that definition of yield. And I'm thinking there might be another definition like Ether concentration or something like that, where we keep doing these these different activities. And if you own one share, then you would see the amount of effective ownership of Ether continue to grow through the actions of the company.

• 11:00David Hoffman?

  So as I understand these acquisition vehicles, there's two sides of it. There's a pool of capital, which you guys are starting with $425 million. That's going to turn into Ether and it's going to be put on the balance sheet of S-Bet. And then there's the kind of the financial alchemy, the Michael Saylor-ing of the deal structure to make sure that just more for him Bitcoin, for you Ether, comes into the balance sheet at, you know, a managed risk. And so there's like two different ways to grow this effort. Growing the balance sheet, so getting more investment, getting more people, getting more Ether on the balance sheet, and then also the financial alchemy. Can you talk about both of those independently? So $425 million to start.

• 11:41David Hoffman?

  How do you just get, what was the strategy for growing that pool of capital?

• 11:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they're not very independent in my mind. One fuels the other. And so we, we take in investments from different kinds of actors, VCs, et cetera, in our space. Consensus-led that investment round. What we're doing next is ATM at the market, sales of shares. So through a broker dealer, you can just sell, I was going to say tokens, but you can just sell these shares to retail, to institutions directly. And it was kind of funny that I was going to say tokens because another thing you can do is you can tokenize equity. So imagine a company that has a strategy like this, tokenizing a portion of their

• 12:31Speaker 01

  equity, making it available in a popular wallet potentially for end-users to purchase. There's this notion of token gated perks or mittens or things like that. In the traditional world, the DTCC operates company that's think is called Seed and Company, and Seed and Company owns all the shares, owns all the publicly traded shares. And, and there's I think an IOU between them and your brokerage and then between your brokerage and you, so you don't really own your shares. And that all happened for good reasons. There's a A paper crisis and you had to shut down the stock market a couple of days a week because the messengers couldn't get the stock certificates around.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  But imagine now that we can know exactly who owns a token that has ownership of a share. So they're really exciting things that we think we can do with that. Imagine any of the companies in the orbit of this company could offer perks or privileges in different kinds of contexts.

• 13:36David Hoffman?

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• 14:18David Hoffman?

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• 15:00David Hoffman?

  can create new pools at 99% lower costs. The best part, you don't have to do anything extra. Each trade is automatically routed through Uniswap X, V2, V3, and V4, so you get the most efficient swap without even thinking about it. Whether you're swapping, sending, on-ramping, off-ramping, or bridging, Uniswap's Web app and wallet gives you the tools to unlock DeFi's full potential on Ethereum, base, Arbitrum, Unichain, and more. Use Uniswap's web app and wallet for a more efficient way to use DeFi. One of the reasons why MicroStrategy, now Strategy, is what it is is because there's always been this premium for MicroStrategy stock compared to the NAV, right? If it's not, it's not a trust, but it holds a bunch of Bitcoin. But MicroStrategy stock, the value of MicroStrategy, has always been higher than the Bitcoin that MicroStrategy owns.

• 15:45David Hoffman?

  And this is what gives Michael Saylor the room to issue more shares and then turn those issued shares into revenue and then buy more Bitcoin with it. Now, I think we could spend hours, hours debating and unpacking why that there is exactly a premium. I'm not sure anyone truly knows why there's a premium. One of my answers is that because Michael Saylor is kind of this larger-than-life figure who has done a fantastic job promoting Bitcoin to the world in this very big way. And that's kind of what I think it takes to really allow S-Bet to work its way up to become sitting shoulder to shoulder with MicroStrategy, with Strategy and Michael Saylor. So my question to you, Joe, do you have what it takes?

• 16:27David Hoffman?

  Can you become the Michael Saylor of Ethereum?

• 16:32Speaker 01

  Well, I don't, I don't think I need to answer that question directly. I think what Michael Saylor's done is truly remarkable. I've had the privilege of being able to talk to him three times. He's been very generous with his time. He congratulated us on S-Bet. And he's just, he's a superstar in what he does. He's been incredible for the Bitcoin brand. And I think it's actually much more that's going on than just his cheerleading. I think it is, there are structural things that are in place in economies based on geopolitics and things like that. And I think we're in a paradigm shift. You may have heard me say that once or twice before.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  And the paradigm shift is enabling structural magic potentially to happen. And so if you go way back, World War II, the US emerges from that with the dominant military and industrial complex compared to the rest of the world. Bretton Woods, US becomes a reserve.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Currency of the world and these structural advantages turn into unfair advantages for the US where it trades a lot of kinds of paper for goods and services from companies around the world, papers, dollars and treasuries. It sets up this feedback loop where countries like Japan, China, et cetera, have to do something with that paper and they don't have the decapital industries, financial industries to make good use of that. So they end up feeding it back to the United States. And so you get a lot of cheap money for the US to keep building itself. And so one structural trade that happened there was was interest rates on treasuries just dropped for 30 years.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  Treasuries go up for 30 years, the prices. Another structural thing in the US was the weakness of the Japanese yen, driving 30 years of different kinds of carry trades, borrow cheap yen, invest in something higher yielding. And so I believe that as we come to the end of one super cycle, we're smashing against the rocks right now, and the start of the next super cycle, which I think will be dominated by decentralized protocols and AI, at least in the first couple of decades, you have this migration of the economy, because it has to, to decentralize rails.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  So the United States politicians just demonstrated that austerity is just not a thing in the US. We don't do austerity. Scott Besson takes that, he pivots, he says, okay, we're going to grow our way out of this debt deficit mess. What that means is the old economy is going to fall apart in pieces, seeing titters in treasury markets, and we're going to rebuild on the new economy, the decentralized protocol economy. And so we are seeing the US government get behind our technology. We'll see them paving the way for hopefully stable, stable coins and market structure will happen sooner rather than later. And they're going to use the technology because that's how they grow.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  We are now seeing with S-Bet and other projects, we're seeing TradFi being onboarded to Devi.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Because these things are, so let's think of them, to use a silly phrase, as perpetual motion machines for a little while, where because there is more demand for Ether and Bitcoin, because we've got more applications on this new kind of decentralized worldwide web. So more usage, price appreciation is likely to be significant. Tom Lee, a couple of days ago, said Bitcoin $3 million. It's an interesting number. So there's a lot of people that believe price is going to go up. You're sitting with your shares and you're seeing the Ether concentration go up when more and more people invest in this company that you're invested in. And what do

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Wall Streeters care about? All they care about is making money. And so if they see this thing working for a while, if they hear people in earnings calls talk about the details of Ethereum and the details of DeFi and this particular strategy, what are they going to do? They're going to become experts in our technology, just like we did, for different reasons.

• 21:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's why I feel very much is the story of MicroStrategy, Michael Saylor, is that it was kind of a megaphone. I mean, I remember when he started this, the price of Bitcoin from a market cap perspective was something like 200 million. So similar to the market cap of Ethereum today, and he started this in 2020. I think Wall Street kind of thought he was crazy. I think they had no idea.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  It sounds like magic and opium and Ponzi scheme.

• 21:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right. And what he continued to do with his strategy is just like, I mean, every couple of weeks, every month, we'd put like dollar cost average in, dollar cost average in. And now I'm looking at this, at the time of recording, he has almost 600,000 Bitcoin. There's almost 600,000 Bitcoin on the MicroStrategy balance sheet in the treasury. It's worth about $61 billion. If you talk about Bitcoin going to the millions, I mean, we're talking about a very large company. I guess my question for something like Sbet is, do you think that Sbet, that kind of a vehicle for Ether, the asset, can grow as large as MicroStrategy has in a five-year time range? So we're at about the same, you know, market cap now. Do you think that Sbet can do basically what a MicroStrategy did?

• 22:09Speaker 01

  Sure. So first, more props to Michael. Two things that he's been focusing on is focus, like be narrowly focused on Bitcoin and ensure that that focus brings volatility to the asset, to the share, because he's trading volatility in different forms. Also, to answer your question, which I kind of avoided, yes, I'm going to be very loud and consistently out there. For a couple of years, we were in a blackout period because the SEC was trying to pin this scheme to sell unregistered securities to Americans on consensus. So we had to be quiet. We used to, obviously,

• 22:54Speaker 01

  champion that Ethereum a lot in our marketing and everything we did. So one thing you're asking there is, is either going to flip? Another thing you're asking is Sbet going to flip in strategy? Let's think about it this way. I was inspired last night to retweet something that Robert Drosst of Eigenlayer put out. And I was thinking, we're trying to frame what the valuation model for Ethereum and Ether is. Discounting cash flow, we can discount that for a bunch of years, hopefully. That's not a healthy way to look at things. People think of Ethereum as an operating system,

• 23:39Speaker 01

  next operating system of the world. But I'm really loving the idea of framing Ether as framing trust as a commodity. We frame information as a commodity. So lots of virtual commodities are out there. If we think about how much value sprinkling some Ether dust or chunks of Ether or an Ether diamond, an Ether trust diamond onto a transaction, onto a relationship, onto an agreement on the Ethereum blockchain.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  The kind of facilitation that that brings, the kind of guaranteed execution that that brings, what does that do to the value of each one of these transactions or processes? I think it's more than 10% increase in value. I think it's kind of hard to, hard to imagine, is it 100%? Is it 1,000%? And so if you do that to the world GDP and, and if you recognize that you're packing more of these transactions into each unit time, or these agreements are easy to make, packing them into each unit of time, if you bring the power of compounding into that, then you're just creating, compounding more and more value.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  So gold 2.0, really valuable, and Tom Lee said $23 trillion above ground gold right now. What's the size, what's, what's 100 times, 1,000 times the size of global GDP running on Ethereum rels? I think SBT's gonna drive a lot of that.

• 25:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so let's, let's pull those two pieces apart and go into more detail. I mean, the first is kind of a valuation and how you think about valuing Ether, the asset. There's been a lot of conversation about this, like recently in, in kind of the crypto circles. And I think, you know, some people are advocating, you know, discounted cash flow because of the way you're staking, you're kind of like, okay, so, and others are saying, no, look, this is a monetary phenomenon, this is like a commodity, it's commodity money, it's a store of value, it's just like Bitcoin, don't have different rules apply. What's your answer to this? How should Ether, the asset, be valued?

• 25:50Speaker 01

  I think, I think the money premium comes from the nature of trust. So if Ether is seen as the gold standard in trust, the highest octane grade of trust, then it should have a very high monetary premium. And I think that's going to dominate the valuation model. There's, there's, I guess, memery, like, there's a ton of meme power in Ether. Bitcoin is still the biggest meme coin on the planet, biggest, most valuable meme coin on the planet. It has a store of value utility, but just like the US dollar, there's a lot of meme power.

• 26:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  How do you communicate this narrative to Wall Street? So, right now, it seems like Wall Street has this idea of Bitcoin as kind of gold, doesn't need cash flows, just the number just goes up, right? Whereas with Ethereum and Ether the asset, different rules apply, at least right now. It's some kind of a tech platform, and maybe it's like a high-performance growth equity. They are looking at DCF models and cash flows. Not all of them, but at least some of them. How do you kind of change that narrative or that model for Ether the asset in Wall Street to them?

• 27:02Speaker 01

  So, it is difficult. Bitcoin has an easy-to-understand value proposition. Solana ran up impressively on the back of the meme coin phenomenon, for better or worse. And Ethereum has always been the good middle child, building scalable infrastructure for the decentralized future. And, you know, we can say things like it's a civilizational technology, but it's a big thing to express, which is why we at Consensus have been doing a lot of work to writing up thought pieces. We're going to put out this idea of trust as commodity, quite measurable.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  But bottom line, I don't think we need to work too hard anymore to educate Wall Street, because we're going to demonstrate that there's this sort of magical perpetual motion flywheel thing going on. You do have to believe in order to appreciate this, what S-Bet can do, you do have to believe that there is a paradigm shift on, that we are moving from an old system, a dying super cycle, to a new system of the world. You have to believe that Ethereum will be the dominant foundational digital asset settlement layer, and also Web3 primitives on Ethereum will be a big part of Web3, the really centralized

• 28:28Speaker 01

  worldwide web. But I think it's going to be the simple things that gets Wall Street there. Watch, watch number go up for two or three quarters.

• 28:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is funny. This is very similar to what my brilliant podcast co-host says. Basically, number go up is Bitcoin's marketing, right? The number, the price point and the ticker, that's what gives all of that flywheel effect and that faith to Wall Street investors everywhere. Can we talk about the last two years of ETH price performance? And David and I have given our perspectives on why ETH performance has been lackluster, maybe not compared to the dollar, but compared to Bitcoin, certainly on the ratio. And also, you mentioned little brother networks, like the Solanas of the world and other smaller market cap alternative layer ones. Why do you think ETH has been in a malaise? And is that about to change?

• 29:20Speaker 01

  Well, it's already changed quite significantly. There's a lot of organic optimism in the ecosystem right now. So it's been a long slog. A lot of people put heart and soul into it and it's hard building civilizational infrastructure. You need to build layer and after layer functionality and scalability. And we've always been building for the future and I think the future is pretty much here. I think we've hit our broad man moment in the sense that we're horizontally and vertically scalable. Lockspace is affordable. Lodgebase is very affordable. User interfaces are good. They're going to get great as we infuse AI into our wallets and into our user interfaces.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  It hasn't been safe or smart for companies to use tokens, to issue tokens, to participate in DeFi in the United States. It hasn't been smart at all for the best and the brightest builders, entrepreneurs, to build applications for end users, for consumers and enterprises. But now it is and it's just so much better, so much less toxic to build of, by and for the community rather than build in an adversarial relationship to your user, which is the traditional economy and Web 2. So the best and the brightest will come, are coming to build in our ecosystem.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  Ethereum has been additionally in what I have been calling an awkward adolescent period where It built great technology, knew it wasn't scalable, tried to figure out ways to shard itself to bring scalability. We couldn't get that done, so we threw it open to the world in a divergent pace. We had some optimistic people. I know you guys are very optimistic people, build rollups. And then we had some ZK people do some research. We did a lot of research in consensus. We thought it was five, maybe eight years away before it would get practical to build a ZK rollup, but things moved incredibly fast, astonishingly fast. And so our R and D

• 31:28Speaker 01

  team turned into our linear team, our linear ZK EVM layer two rollup solution. And essentially, we built all these layer twos. They have not been accretive to the Ether token, so that there has been some extraction of value into the layer two rollup ecosystem. But that's fine. I think it was perfectly reasonable for Ethereum layer one to step back and enable them to have pricing power and build out their domains. They did, they did all come up with exciting technology. We're now in a convergence period where, where projects like Akross and other kinds of technologies are going to enable layer twos to talk to

• 32:13Speaker 01

  each other better, twos to talk to layer one better, SDKs, programming through AI interfaces are all gonna make building on Ethereum pretty seamless. It's gonna be less about fragmentation going forward. This is especially true when Glampster Dam comes around, probably sometime, let's hope it's mid 2026. It's a hard fork right after the next one, the Fusaka hard fork. In Glampster Dam, we're gonna see an enshrined native rollup technology. We believe that our own technology, Linear, is the only standing.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  Viable ZK EVM technology that can be donated to the Ethereum protocol. Every execution client syncs to it right away. It is as it's equivalent to Ethereum. You can take your Ethereum code at layer one and run it unchanged at layer two. So we believe we're going to be able to beef up mainnet very significantly. And we believe that through various mechanisms, we're going to see layer two support layer one much better. We in particular are going to be doing a TGE in the not too distant future. We're going to be rewarding our LXP, our very patient LXP token holders.

• 33:32David Hoffman?

  Is that breaking, by the way? Do people know this?

• 33:35Speaker 01

  Well, I'm not going to put a date to it. I think we've hinted at it on Twitter.

• 33:41David Hoffman?

  Fair enough.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  And we're going to, A, reward those people because they they put a lot of work into helping us build out and burn in our network. And we're going to do something in the in the tokenomics that is very directly supportive of Ether and layer one. We're hoping that that is a mechanic that other layer twos will follow and other applications too.

• 34:05David Hoffman?

  A lot of this is about Ethereum, the technology Ethereum, the platform, which has been just one of the more interesting stories, I think, from the tech side of things in the crypto space to follow how Ethereum scalability challenges have been faced and then solved. But I want to turn the conversation back to kind of the main character here, which is Ether, the asset. Both Ryan and I here had the same aha moment independently. I think about Ethereum and Ether, the asset, when we both deposited Ether into MakerDAO and we were able to mint DAI, mint a stable coin programmatically with smart contracts. And that was just this big breakthrough moment for me as an end user of Ethereum and its smart contracts and some of his applications that I could deposit ETH, deposit this asset

• 34:48David Hoffman?

  that was native to the blockchain, deposit it into one of its smart contracts on the blockchain that we just call MakerDAO. And there was a button that I could press that I could mint DAI and I could mint half of the value that I deposited. So deposited about a thousand. $500 minted 500 Dai stable coins. And that was like a power that no one had ever given me before. No, I no app, Robin Hood never gave me that. No financial institution ever gave me that. I never had the ability to mint my own asset. And it all came from the value of my collateral, the value of my deposit. Because kind of like how you said with your trust diamonds analogy, diamond being the logo of Ethereum. Maker Dow could trust me because I had deposited some ether into the account and I was able to mint Dai.

• 35:33David Hoffman?

  And so that's the thing I think that really pilled me and Ryan about DeFi. And the idea that ether is this collateral asset. And Ethereum is able to mint its own, create its own DeFi depository economy. And actually, what I see you doing with S bet with your strategic bet on Ethereum is try playing gaming is you're doing the whole collateral reserve thing without in the trad way with trad contracts, trad legal contracts. But it's still nonetheless a treasury asset for S bet. Maybe you could talk about like, why ether the asset is a good treasury asset for companies like S bet or people who are just interested in ether as a collateral on their balance sheet.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Bitcoin is a good treasury asset. Ether is a much better treasury asset because it's so productive and yielding. It is another analogy. It's the fuel, the oil, the gas, the electricity that powers applications and storage on the emerging decentralized world computer. So people are going to need it, just like they need a reserve currency in the current world to buy oil and wheat things. And there are so many ways to earn yield on this productive asset that I think it will be the token that just keeps giving.

• 36:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's nice is with, I guess with S bet, if you guys are able to stake it, that this is not available in ether ETFs right now, right? The staking features are not available. I don't know.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Currently no.

• 37:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, currently no, but.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  We think it's a few months away.

• 37:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, okay. Yeah. So do you think that there's room for other?

• 37:06Speaker 01

  But also we'll be much more aggressive than they can be while still maintaining prudent risk levels.

• 37:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  One of the things that was also beneficial about MicroStrategy's strategy and Michael Saylor's play is not only did they engage in this strategy, but they pilled others to do it too, right?

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 37:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so like GameStop, I think, recently just bought 4,000 Bitcoin, put it on the balance sheet. And there's others with this strategy. How many S-bets do you think can exist? And what is the path to get others to adopt Ether on their treasury? Is this kind of like a business development effort? Do you lead by example? Do you have to evangelize, be very loud on Twitter? You have to put AI memes together with Ethereum blue logo, the way Michael Saylor does? What's the plan here?

• 37:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, so in the 90s and in the aughts, there were web studio companies, also called interactive companies, companies like Razorfish, March1st. And they built websites, traditional companies, and they put information on those websites and then they brought them into e-commerce. So we believe that there will be at least one of these in any nation state that has a stock market of any significance. And probably more than one because it's going to be really exciting to implement different versions of how to accomplish this kind of onboarding of Ether to treasuries.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  What Consensus is going to be able to do is we're going to take our wallet, our different components. We will have a stack for developers, web two developers, web three developers, a stack for enterprise, a stack for financial institutions. We will help enterprises onboard tokens to their treasury. We'll help them issue tokens. We'll help them set up in Ethereum, Layer 1 DeFi, and Linear DeFi. We're actually going to put a pretty giant amount of Ether onto Ethereum and onto Linea because we will have a very vibrant

• 39:10Speaker 01

  Vex set up there very soon and we can help them set up homesteads, save spaces where they can operate on Web3, where they can make use of different kinds of web primitives, like decentralized identities and badges to identify who their employees are, who are members of different teams. We have a debit card that is a very exciting product. Essentially, you can put some, instead of the normal dynamic where you send your full paycheck to your bank in order to use your debit card and they immediately start earning a yield on your back and you don't earn any yield for a little month.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  But instead of that, you you put your salary on into your Linea account and you're earning yield up to the minute that it is debited. So any sort of transaction across the global MasterCard network can just take some stablecoin or some ether, don't use ether, just use stablecoins out of your, of your Linea account. We're working on a payroll system so we can close the loop on that. So we can help companies issue payroll through Linea or through blockchain networks. So this is, this is a playbook that we can help lots of projects do. And like Sailor, who's handholding a bunch of other companies, will want to do a lot of that.

• 40:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  You brought up Consensus, of course, and Consensus is a company that you founded that's basically building tools up the stack on top of Ethereum and other crypto networks, but particular focus and attention on Ethereum. I know there's been a lot of speculation and talk and rumors about Consensus actually IPO-ing at some point in time. And I'm sure there's like, if, I'm sure you have a regulation against what you can say about this, but I'm curious, we were talking earlier about the regulatory tailwinds that we now have. You said that SEC was fantastic to work with. We have the Circle IPO that's happening in a matter of days at the time of recording. So it will have already happened by the time folks get this. We've had Galaxy IPO recently.

• 41:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is now a good time for crypto companies to IPO? And can you say anything specific about Consensus on that?

• 41:28Speaker 01

  Well, yes, now is a very good time for blockchain companies to IPO. And no, I can't say anything specific about consensus.

• 41:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Perfect.

• 41:38David Hoffman?

  Imagine if your checking account and DeFi wallet finally spoke the same language. That's Mantle Banking, an all-in-one fiat and crypto account. It lets you save, spend, and invest all from one dashboard. Swipe for coffee, stake ME for yield, or even use virtual cards for payments through Apple Pay. So it feels Web 2 simple, yet stays Web 3 sovereign. For allocators, meet Mantle Index 4, the S&P 500 of crypto. A tokenized institutional-grade fund seeded with $400 million from the Mantle Treasury and balanced across Bitcoin, Ether, Sol, and Yield Enhanced Stables. One asset, broad exposure, pure DeFi composability. The momentum is real. ME faults, FBTC bridges, and a $2.4 billion community treasury are all powering the next phase of on-chain finance. Mantle brings real-world access, yield, and utility to digital assets.

• 42:20David Hoffman?

  Ready for the next era of on-chain finance that actually belongs in 2025? Explore Mantle at mantle.xyz or follow mantleofficial. Mantle: Bridging TradFi and DeFi So You Don't Have To. Imagine verifying yourself without handing over personal data. No hacked databases, no unnecessary personal exposure for airdrops, and no AI bots ruining community governance. Meet SELF, the on-chain identity verification protocol built for privacy and control. SELF protocol uses zero-knowledge proofs to confirm your identity safely. Users prove key details like age or citizenship without revealing sensitive personal information. SELF never stores your data, it only generates cryptographic proofs. Here's how it works in three steps. First, register and verify. Use the SELF app to scan your biometric passport's RFID chip.

• 43:05David Hoffman?

  SELF verifies authenticity with zero-knowledge proofs. Each passport creates one unique identity. Second, you can share proofs privately. Third-party apps request identity proofs, like confirming you're over 18. You can also link proofs securely to public wallets for airdrops or governance participation. And then last, secure verification. Apps validate your proofs instantly on-chain, like on Cello, or off-chain. Audited by ZK Security, the SELF app is live on iOS and Play Store. Visit self.xyz and follow SELF Protocol on X.

• 43:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  I maybe wanna talk about a discussion. That David and I have been having and was even a debate earlier on this podcast. So much of kind of the treasury strategy, I feel like for micro strategy or for S bet or for any treasury organization that intends to stack cryptocurrency and collect it. It's really about the store of value use case of the underlying asset. And it's been said to us, David and I have been Ethereum bulls for a very long time. It's been said to us, hey, ETH bulls, you gotta give up on this whole store of value thing. And the reason is because Bitcoin has already reached escape velocity as a store of value asset. It is a special snowflake.

• 44:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  And then everything else is in a different category. Everything else is maybe a DCF type model, has to earn fees. It's kind of a high tech equity. It's not a special snowflake. So there's Bitcoin is a special snowflake, Snow White and the seven dwarfs. Everything else is the seven dwarfs. It's not Bitcoin. And so it doesn't get monetary premium, is not a good store of value. Obviously, you seem to be rejecting that with your strategic bet on Ethereum with S bet. Can you tell us why? Is Ether the asset also a special snowflake? And like, if you think so, why do you think that?

• 44:56Speaker 01

  Anyone who tells you that there can be only one store of value has an agenda. And there's gold, there's diamonds, there's real estate, US dollars for however many decades. And all these things aren't guaranteed stores of value. So I don't know if I would want to be a special snowflake. Snowflakes are brittle. Along can come something that has a lot of productive utility and yielding power. And if you squint, has been going up for about a decade and is likely to keep going up. And so while it may be very volatile in both Bitcoin and Ether's case,

• 45:37Speaker 01

  both are outstanding stores of value on a sort of civilizational scale. So again, we're back to the flipping, flipping discussion in my mind. Ether is likely to be a more powerful store of value, in my opinion, than any other digital asset.

• 45:55David Hoffman?

  And before we get to a flippanting of Ether, of Bitcoin, we have to get to multi-trillion-dollar status and cross that trillion-dollar line with Ether, the asset. What do you think that's going to take? What does Ethereum need to do to become a multi-trillion-dollar asset?

• 46:09Speaker 01

  We need end-user applications. Really, our best set of end-user applications are in DeFi right now, and we'll work to bring more to consumers and to enterprises. But I think Sbet is going to drive a trend where it is going to be seen as safe and acceptable for people and organizations to tip their toe in. And you mentioned being blown away by the power that Maker gave you, but just doing a simple transaction, sending $1,000 to somebody in another country and watch it take a few seconds and cost you nothing, that's mind-blowing for a lot of people. So we need to get a lot more people to do

• 46:54Speaker 01

  that and then enable a lot more people to, and especially organizations, to participate in DeFi. Once that gets rolling further, because we really don't have a lot of users in our ecosystem that aren't crypto nerds, finance nerds, or art nerds, once we get real companies starting to benefit from the technology, I think it'll pick up steam.

• 47:21David Hoffman?

  Sure, there's, Sbet is not the only acquisition vehicle going after Ether. There are at least a handful of others, some that haven't been announced yet, but you're, there's a growing number of these acquisition vehicles. Now, anytime that there's multiple acquisition vehicles going after the same asset, it's splitting the efficiency of the lending market. So there, at least with the way that MicroStrategy works, is there are people who are willing to lend money to MicroStrategy and Michael Saylor, and that sucks up some of the amount of available capital that MicroStrategy does versus any other Bitcoin acquisition company like MicroStrategy. So it's a little bit more efficient if multiple acquisition facilities like Sbet.

• 48:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Or any other facility looking to acquire Ether would join forces and like merge together. Is that a future that you see? How do you? I don't know if you're in discussions with any of these that that you might be aware of or are unannounced. But where do you think this future goes? Because I don't think you're going to be the only one entering the game. There's going to be two, three, four more. What do you think about this?

• 48:25Speaker 01

  I think there'll be, there'll be a bunch trying it out. So I think we will all be mutually supportive as well as competitive. And I do think that there are different ways to bring Ether on Treasury. And so may appeal to different audiences, different use cases. In our particular case, we believe that we're a thought leader, we've been the Ethereum company. We will be the Ethereum company for a long time, or their first pan ecosystem company. We'll drive thought leadership. So we will enable retail and institutional investors to, to have the top professionals at Consensus, at Galaxy, at Parify, at Sbet.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  We'll bring in the professional investor approach to this. And so we, from a competitive perspective, we think we're in pretty good shape. But we will also, I think, want to collaborate and support a bunch of these companies. I do think you're probably right. I think there'll probably be some consolidation after a while.

• 49:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  We, we mentioned maybe the Bitcoin ETH ratio has seen a bottom, at least a local bottom. It's, you know, it's shown some momentum recently, here recently. Hard to know how long that will persist, or whether we're due for another dip, or what's going to happen. But there does seem to be a momentum shift with respect to sentiment around Ethereum. And particularly, I'm noticing that in the Ethereum community, there's been some big changes. Sbet was very cool, very well received. But even before that, there's been changes at the Ethereum Foundation. We've got new executive directors, new leadership, a clearer, more focused roadmap, it seems like. At least it's been communicated as such. We've got other third-party groups like Ethereumize,

• 50:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  which Vivek, I believe, is in front of Congress as, as we're recording this. And he's talking about Ethereum, he's talking about decentralization. These are things that it's felt like Ethereum has not had in place before and has lacked. And I'm wondering your reaction to this. So changes the EF, you know, institutions that are still early, but like Ethereumize. Are you feeling that momentum change? And how do you view all of this?

• 50:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, the change has been organic over the last little while. It's actually been going on inside the Ethereum Foundation for perhaps a year, where they've been thinking about how to reorganize and interviewing people, et cetera. Been in discussions with leadership, a whole bunch of them, and I'm so excited with how they have re-formatted themselves and how they're approaching their major goals and how they will interact more actively with the world, whether it's developers or potentially policy people in governments. I think the Ethereum ecosystem is back in a pretty big way.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  If you think about the long trajectory of this adventure, I have likened it to how Google had done years and years of bleeding-edge research in AI, amassed all the best talent, built some truly brilliant things, domains like chess, et cetera. But they had a lot to protect, first of all. They had a lot to lose. They had no clear indication that if they exposed the world mainstream to this profound new technology, that it would go well.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  And so they needed a young upstart like OpenAI, who didn't have that much to lose, to sort of create a sense of urgency for Google. And Google's just crushing it right now with Gemini, Notebook, LM, et cetera. And they're just going to keep crushing it because they've done so much good work. And I really feel like that sounds like the Ethereum ecosystem. We have the best and brightest, the best technology. We've been building for a, but felt like a distant decentralized future. And it took a young upstart or some loud Bitcoin maxis to wake us, not really from a slumber, but from this idea that the future is distant. I think it's really now.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  And I'm very confident that S-Bet is going to make that very clear to Wall Street and then soon Main Street.

• 52:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Speaking of now, we're also on the cusp of some stablecoin legislation maybe going through under the Genius Act. Of course, Ethereum is home to a lot of the stablecoins, the majority of stablecoins in terms of value and I believe also volume. Is this going to be a near-term catalyst for Ethereum at all? Or do you think this is kind of a sideshow?

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I think, I think once we get stablecoin legislation, it's going to be a real shot in the arm for Ethereum and for the ecosystem. I think stables backed by assets in centralized institutions is a great vector for growth and adoption. I'm also a little concerned about it. I think what we really need to see is Ether to go up in price very significantly and Bitcoin to go up in price very significantly because they both represent decentralized bandwidth, economic bandwidth. It's possible that one of you even invented that phrase. I didn't invent it. Is that you, David?

• 53:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, that's Ryan.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  Oh, it's Ryan? Oh, sweet.

• 53:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm Money Lango's. He's economic bandwidth.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  Got it. So in terms of maker, we can have pure natively decentralized stablecoins. And we need that because we can't rely on centralized institutions potentially pulling the rug out from under us. So fingers crossed Bitcoin 3 million, Ether follows it.

• 54:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Quarter million.

• 54:24Speaker 01

  And there will be ways to keep Bitcoin where it is, where the maxis like it and still make, deploy it and DeFi on Ethereum.

• 54:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  I, for one, am very much looking forward to that future of an Ethereum resurgence because I think it's a very boring, unfulfilled world if what we have, the focus of crypto, is just Bitcoin on one side without the kind of the DeFi and centralized stablecoins on the other. It's kind of not why we're doing this whole bankless thing. So hopefully Ethereum gets some more wind under its sails. And maybe your bullet posts will be part of this, Joe. I look forward to seeing those on Twitter because what I heard in this episode is a renewed commitment to get loud about Ether the asset.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  I got a new job.

• 55:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, we will see you on Twitter then. Joe Lubin, thank you so much for joining us today on Bankless.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  Awesome. Thank you, guys. It's fun.

• 55:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, got to let you know, of course, none of this has been financial advice. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.