BTC ETF Approval with Eric Balchunas

The Bitcoin ETF was just approved. What happens next? How does this change everything? Which ETF can crypto expect next? When? Answers to these questions and so much more! ----- 🏹 Airdrop Hunter is HERE, join your first HUNT today https://bankless.cc/JoinYourFirstHUNT ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE ⁠https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum https://feeds.flightcast.com/%E2%81%A0https:/bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/Toku ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 4:00 ETF Day 6:05 SEC Twitter Hack? 8:40 Commissioner Statements & Votes 12:30 BTC ETF Volume 19:50 Size of BTC ETF 22:00 Flip Gold? 22:25 Spot ETH ETF? 24:20 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES Eric Balchunas https://twitter.com/EricBalchunas BTC ETF Approved https://x.com/BanklessHQ/status/1744830610370421029 ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠ https://www.bankless.com/disclosures%E2%81%A0

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

• 0:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yep, I got my cough going on, so I'll just mute when I can. Alright, thanks.

• 0:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, it is Thursday, January 11th, and the reason I give that day is it's an absolutely momentous day. The Bitcoin SPOT ETFs just got approved. This happened yesterday, and the markets went live with many of these ETFs today. We brought on Eric Balchunas, who I'm about to introduce and talk to. As you'll know, he's one of the main analysts, ETF analysts, who've been predicting the SPOT Bitcoin ETF and updating the Bankless community about where it is in the process. And he, I think, quite accurately predicted, he said many months ago, that with a 95% certainty, we would have a Bitcoin SPOT ETF in January, and indeed, now we do.

• 1:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  So I grabbed some of his time. He's on the circuit today, talking to many different organizations, but I want to get a market reaction on the ETF, how it's doing so far, check on volumes.

• 1:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Also, want to talk to him about which products might be winning, and like whether they're meeting expectations or not, and all of the other details that have come in last minute. So I'm going to get with Eric, we're going to have that conversation, keep you updated on the latest with the Bitcoin SPOT ETF, and celebrate this momentous occasion in just a minute. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including our number one recommended crypto exchange, that's Kraken, go check them out.

• 1:43David Hoffman?

  Kraken knows crypto. Kraken's been in the crypto game for over a decade, and as one of the largest and most trusted exchanges in the industry, Kraken is on the journey with all of us to see what crypto can be. Human history is a story of progress. It's part of us, hardwired. We're designed to seek change everywhere, to improve, to strive. And if anything can be improved, why not finance? Crypto is a financial system designed with the modern world in mind. Instant, permissionless. And 24/7. It's not perfect and nothing ever will be perfect. But crypto is a world-changing technology at a time when the world needs it the most. That's the Kraken mission, to accelerate the global adoption of cryptocurrency, so that you and the rest of the world can achieve financial freedom and inclusion. Head on over to kraken.com/banklist to see what crypto can be.

• 2:28David Hoffman?

  Not investment advice. Crypto trading involves risk of loss. Cryptocurrency services are provided to US and US territory customers by Payward Ventures. PVI, doing business as Kraken. Are you launching a token? Is it already live? How are you managing the legal and tax for providing token awards for your team? Toku simplifies everything about managing token grant compensation, and you can get started with them for free. You'll have access to top-notch legal and tax support. They handle the distribution and management of tokens for your team. Toku caters to every step of the process, from user-friendly legal templates for granting tokens to tracking vesting periods and calculating withholding taxes. Toku understands every grant structure: token purchase agreements, restricted token awards, restricted token units, token options, and all the other ones. Toku is already simplifying this today.

• 3:11David Hoffman?

  The leading companies like Protocol Labs, DYDX Foundation, Mina Foundation, and many more. You can learn more about how Toku can help you streamline your token management and get started for free. Visit toku at toku.com/banklist or click the link in the description below.

• 3:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Banklist Station, we have Eric Balchunas here. He is a Senior ETF Analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence. Of course, he has been keeping us informed of the spot Bitcoin ETF. And now, here it is. Markets have just gone live. Going to check in on that with him. Eric, how you doing?

• 3:42Speaker 02

  Good. A little tired, running on fumes, but these are great. These are once-in-a-while situations, so I enjoy the excitement. I've been covering this stuff for a long time, and there's long stretches of just normalcy. So the past week in particular has been really exciting, but tiring.

• 4:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I bet it's tiring. How does this match for excitement of other ETF launches in kind of your career and your history?

• 4:07Speaker 02

  This one definitely rings with Bitto, which was the futures ETF. But then we've had like, remember when Ark Mania was going on? There was a lot of, that was about a year where Ark was just doing things that were unreal, like supernatural kind of feats. That's kind of exciting. And then, I'm always excited by Vanguard. I've been covering them for a while. They're almost like a... Uh, like a slow-moving aircraft carrier, so they're not as jumpy or exciting, but what they're, the, the size and the sheer mass, I find exciting and I cover them a lot. So, um, there's definitely areas that are exciting, but, um, this is really unusual in that it's sort of like two worlds colliding. Um, and, you know, obviously, a lot of the data, uh,

• 4:52Speaker 02

  that we have on the terminal, it's cool, it's interesting to see them up there now and trading. Um, so the first day or two is big. Over the next couple of weeks, though, this will die down. There'll be like, the, the volume will settle, the excitement will settle. So we're, we're kind of, we're peaking off, you know, my, my engagement on this is probably at the peak the last two days, it's probably gonna start going this way over the next couple of weeks.

• 5:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that makes sense. And, and your engagement on crypto Twitter is, you've become, I think, a mini celebrity of sorts on crypto Twitter, and that's gotta be somewhat unique. You probably don't get that sort of, uh, public reaction with, um, the Vanguard, uh, ETFs. May, maybe I'm wrong about that, but I, I know the crypto community is, is pretty loud, at least on the social media.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. So, I went to the Bogleheads conference in, uh, like, after my book came out a year ago, and, um, some people had read the book there. So that, I will be known in sort of that audience a little bit, but not like this. And they don't, they're not, a lot of those people are not on social media. When it comes to social media, yeah, this audience, very engaged, very, um, vocal and creative, uh, and funny. Um, so it's fun. I mean, I totally enjoy it. Um, but yeah, there's really nothing to compare this to, to be honest.

• 6:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. So, so this was a little bit weird. I want to get your take on this. I don't, I don't know if this happened, you were, you were on air somewhere live, but this happened on Tuesday. The SEC's Twitter account appeared to announce that the ETF, the spot Bitcoin ETF, had been approved. It, it turned out that, um, as they said, that their Twitter account was compromised. This is maybe a hacker or some, some other, a person who got into the account and, and posted some misinformation. Like, what is up with that? Have you had time to digest that? How bizarre is that to happen at the 11th hour?

• 6:39Speaker 02

  Um, really bizarre. Uh, I was, my initial reaction was it's accurate because I, again, I never thought that particular Twitter handle would be compromised. It just didn't cross my mind. Then, um, the, the graphics, you know, I, I maybe I didn't read it close enough. Um, when I go back and read it, I'm like, okay, yeah, there's a couple of things on there, but kind of looked legit at first glance and I was expecting them to announce everything exactly 24 hours later. So I thought, I thought, okay, well, maybe they just want to get ahead of this, drop it as a PR situation. And then do all the, the backfill with the documents later. That way people aren't just like hitting this on their website and trash their website like.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  I could see that. And so I was like, oh, it's like an early Christmas present. You know, it's like getting a present on Christmas Eve. Now they're approved. I thought that was the whole plan. So then you find out what happened crazy. Um, just ironic, hypocritical a little bit because you know, they're, they're supposed to be into security. And then like, uh, the, looked like the X security, uh, safety people put out that it was, you know, they didn't have a two factor identification or what was that called authentication? So I don't know. Um, that's a little egg on the face for them for sure. On top of this whole gigantic delay on this stuff and then, um, uh, you know, they have their own issues on that.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  But that was a curve ball. Some people started to go, wait a second, they're going to have the FBI investigate. This is what they're going to use it as an excuse. Some people thought Gary was so maniacal that he did that on purpose so that he could then reject them. And he has, and he also had the staff working for three weeks straight, you know, uh, around the clock. So he could just go, well, we did the work. So I, I had to deal with a lot of people who had these theories.

• 8:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  And I.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  I just, I was like, it doesn't make sense. Gary directed all this work. I'm just gonna stick the obvious and it turned out to be right.

• 8:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, absolutely. And so of course, spot Bitcoin ETFs were approved the following day, I guess, you know, officially, not by hackers. The way this was approved was interesting. So there were three commissioners. This is a total of five commissioners who I believe vote on these sorts of decisions. Three were for and two were against. And I'm wondering, did you have a chance, Eric, to read some of those statements? So Gensler was in the for camp, okay? Hester Purcey, another commissioner, in the for camp. There were some other, two other commissioners who were in the against camp. Did you read those statements from Gensler and Purcey? I mean, from my perspective on Gensler's statement was, it felt like he was really dragged into this kicking and screaming, particularly because of the courts. You mentioned kind of the grayscale court case. But what was your take on the statements coming out

• 9:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  of the commissioners for their individual votes here?

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Um, you know, they were all on brand. You know, Purcey was on brand. I happen to think like her. Give the people choice. And even Gensler, though, in the approval hinted at, well, look, if you're gonna do it, this is probably the best way, which is what we've been saying all along. If they ban crypto, fine, like outright. But if you're gonna let all these exchanges exist and like micro strategy stock and like GBTC, an ETF would be a more pure deal for something that tracks the price. I mean, it's just a better option. So that's where, as an ETF person, I knew that the whole time. So he kind of like discovered

• 10:06Speaker 02

  what we all knew for like eight years. And I went to the SEC first ever investment management conference about four or five months ago. I was invited there to speak. And I remember him speaking at the beginning and he went through all these things like the advisor world, the broker world, crypto, and he had all these ideas for like how to regulate them. And he got to ETFs and he didn't really have anything. He's like, good industry runs well. He didn't have any problems with it. So even he can't find anything wrong with ETFs. So when it was my turn to speak, Gary had left. So I was just speaking to the other people at the SEC and I pulled up GBTC's percent premium, which is all over the place. And then I pulled up the percent premium of the ETFs in Europe, which is like boom, because

• 10:51Speaker 02

  the arbitrage. And I said, just, you guys should trust the ETF more than you don't trust crypto. It sounds like he kind of arrived to that place with the courts nudging and I'm happy he did. The two anti-votes, first of all, I didn't think there'd be a vote. I was slightly wrong. Well, I was wrong. I said there could be, but there could also not be. The two anti-votes is interesting. You'd think Gary would have met with them. I, there's a very strong possibility that Gary met with them because they're all on the same team. They're all three Democrats. And they were like, Gary's like, we're doing this. We have to. But you guys write the anti. You can go full-throated with the anti. That way we're on record saying we hate this. Okay?

• 11:33Speaker 02

  And then, because we know the other two Republicans are going to vote yes. So off the vote yes, I'll be the swing vote, but at least we'll have, it won't be like some majority thing like we lost our minds. You guys do the no. I don't know if that's true. That would not surprise me at all. Because at the end of the day, this was all baked in. Gary was going to have to vote yes because he, again, he put everybody to work for like two months.

• 11:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, the, the statement that surprised me the most, like you said, Gensar's was on brand, felt like his arm was being twisted. Hester Purce was just like, we should have done this 10 years ago, that we should be a merit-based regulator. Crenshaw's statement actually, you know, kind of surprised me, took me aback a little bit because it was very anti-crypto. And I wonder what the future for, for some of these commissioners is. Obviously, at some point in time, Gary's going to vacate the chair. So it'll be interesting to see the dynamics play out because we've got maybe some more ETF products that we want to get out there, Eric, if they'll allow it. I mean, we've got Ether in the future. We'll talk about that in a, in a second. But one thing I want to talk to you about is how are we doing so far?

• 12:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Tell me about volume. I know you've got some tweets out this morning and this is emerging in real time, but at the time of recording here, what, what does volume look like? And benchmark this with historic volumes for other ETFs.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  I'm about to refresh my spreadsheet just for you. I'm going to give a totally updated numbers here. There's a lot of numbers flying around. So this is called the spot Bitcoin ETF rates, correct? So if I include just the spot Bitcoin ETFs. Uh, if we include GBTC, we get to 2.7 billion dollars traded so far.

• 13:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  In volume.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  That is enormous. If we kill GBTC, because it came over with volume, so. Cause I track new ETFs all the time. And when a new ETF launches, it has nothing going for it. It's like a little newborn being shoved into the Amazon. So to me, GBTC is not a real new ETF. So I'm really looking at the other 10. And they have 1.5 billion. So they've already smashed as a group, the world record, which was held by Bitto at a billion. In the first day of trading volume.

• 13:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  The world record for what? ETFs or just crypto ETFs?

• 13:44Speaker 02

  No, total.

• 13:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  Bitto had the most volume in the first day, right? At 1 billion.

• 13:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  So it's beating like gold 2004 type ETFs?

• 13:53Speaker 02

  Well, keep in mind, a billion wasn't the same back in 2004. If we adjusted for inflation. I still think it would be beating it, but gold would have, would look a little stronger. Gold's big claim to fame, GLD, rather, was. It was the fastest ETF to get to 1 billion. It did in three days.

• 14:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  And that is impressive in 2004 numbers. But, and that was always like the Joe DiMaggio record of, of ETFs. That's the guy who had a 57 game hitting streak that no one has broken since, the baseball player. It's like one of those sports record, like, then nobody will break it. And that was that DiMaggio record, but then Bitto got there in two days. Now, we have, um, the group is probably going to beat all of those records. The question is, will one of them beat those records? And. iShares looks good. Um, we're looking at 566 million dollars. That's over half a billion. So. The day's about half over. So we could have a bit of a, oh, I'm sorry.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  I bit, sorry about that. I'm looking at the wrong number. I bit is at 713 million already.

• 14:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's the winner so far?

• 14:58Speaker 02

  That, it's probably a near lock to pass a billion, probably by 2, 230 PM. Once it passes a billion, it's broken the volume record. And in flows tonight, all of this will probably get converted to flows in the first two days. So my guess is, I give a 80% chance that Bit, Ibit breaks Bitto's record alone. Throw in the group, you have like a doubling of the breaking of the record. So. All good signs. The only caveat to all this is that this volume. I don't know how much of it is like actually like this like uh unmet demand.

• 15:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hmm.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  That was like, oh, my God, I'm buying this versus these issuers lining up their clients and their investors saying, hey, buy our fund on the first day. Um, we'll find the answer to that at over the next couple of days and next week in particular, but nothing wrong with lining people up and having a big splash. It's good for everybody. It, you know, the ether futures were also in my mind because they were total flop. They traded a million or two dollars in one in the all of them together. So a million or two they traded in one day. And think about this, iShares alone is already at 700 million in a day.

• 16:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's incredible. So this is a record smashing ETF launch then for for Bitcoin. I guess Wall Street and these issuers have got to be happy with this performance, right? And um, maybe it's so who's iShares? Who's behind iShares? And how is how are some of the big entrants like BlackRock doing, for instance?

• 16:22Speaker 02

  Well, BlackRock's the one at 713 million, so they are leading.

• 16:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's Black iShares is BlackRock?

• 16:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, same thing. iShares is like the um, brand name for their ETFs. BlackRock does other things besides ETFs. But the brand name for their ETFs is iShares. They actually bought that iShares from Barclays, so they didn't make the name. Um, so that Barclays thought of the name iShares. Uh, but if we go to a sword here, I'll tell you who's number two. Um, number two on this is Fidelity. Um, at the at almost 500 million. So Fidelity could actually break the record of Bito, but still lose to iShares who breaks all that. So.

• 17:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do these first, do these first days matter at all? Does this kind of set the precedent usually with ETFs about who's going to win? So is the like the winners of the first three days likely to kind of be the winners five years from now?

• 17:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 17:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 17:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  You get a lot.

• 17:22Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. The first couple of days are really important. Um, the only thing I would say that's a caveat to that is that iShares, uh, BlackRock, which is iShares, a couple of times they put out ESG ETFs and they, they totally loaded up those ETFs with like a billion or two in the first day. And although the number didn't grow gradually like this, it was more one chunk. And then those didn't do much after. And so I want to see volume in the next couple of days uh, to really get an eye of, of, of this. But most of the time, I mean, again, I, there's an art to this. I would say that the, the way this day closes will be a great foreshadow for where they all are in a year.

• 18:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow. Uh, and, and how about Bitcoin price? So, you know, some have talked about this being a kind of a sell the news type of event. Uh, we saw a spike up now at the time of recording. Anyway, we're at, um, I believe 46K for, for Bitcoin. So a little down from kind of the highs. I think.

• 18:21Speaker 02

  I think I changed it. I, I opened up my screen today expecting to see some kind of huge sell off because everybody was like, the news is selling the news, selling the news, selling the news. Well, the news was yesterday. So I, I don't know why it didn't sell. Uh, yeah, it's weird. So then I put that out and it immediately started selling. So, um, which is perfect. Um, uh, I own that, but I, I was just, I was a little surprised because after Bito launched, there was somewhat of a selling of the news. Now that was a really, that is still the top, actually.

• 18:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  That was like top of the cycle.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  That was the top of the cycle.

• 18:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Twenty seventeen?

• 18:53Speaker 02

  Maybe we'll be there now. But what I, I've been asked a couple of questions about this. The, the 1.5 billion that's in the spot Bitcoin ETFs today, all that's going to be buys. Like they have to buy Bitcoin with that money, but the GBTC volume is probably outflows only. Right? So they are kind of canceling each other out today. So even though the volume is really good, there's activity. You want volume long-term. It's good, healthy sign.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  This is a situation where you are having outflows from GBTC, inflows in all these, and it's netting out to probably zero. So the other parts of the price of Bitcoin are probably people doing other things. I don't know if the ETFs are going to move the price, given that cancelling out of those flows today. They're about even. So anyway, all this is a little hard to totally read.

• 19:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Zooming out, are you a subscriber to the belief that this just opens up a big pipe, a big bandwidth of capital into Bitcoin and into crypto? Though, like, if you look at sort of the, you know, the next 12 months, let's say, because that's been part of the bull case, that we could see this, I don't know, what's the size of this? Do you think we get Bitcoin to tens of billions of dollars inside of an ETF?

• 20:12Speaker 02

  Um, well, what's your timeframe?

• 20:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's do the next year, 12 months.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, Grayscale's got 30 already. Some of that will leave, but they'll probably be at least left with 10 by then. So let's just X Grayscale out. They're a unique case. Will the rest have 10 billion? I'd say yeah. iShares is gonna, is already gonna be over a billion in flows tonight. So, and it looks like Fidelity is gonna be half a billion. Bitwise is at 56 million, Argent 177. Again, you add this up, you're looking at a billion or two tonight already. And so we have 11 months, and ETFs are the vehicle of choice for many investors. So I would say 10 billion in non-GBTC assets is totally possible. I wouldn't be surprised. You throw GBTC in, I think you go to 20 or 25,

• 21:04Speaker 02

  because GBTC, again, remember, has 30 right now.

• 21:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Does GBTC just convert to an ETF?

• 21:10Speaker 02

  It did. It is.

• 21:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  It did. That happened as well.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  It transitioned.

• 21:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so transitioned. But you're not counting that as a launch, even though it is still an ETF, just because it's been existing for so long?

• 21:21Speaker 02

  It'd be like, I don't know, counting like, it's like steroids or something. I don't know. It's not, it's, um...

• 21:28Speaker 02

  I don't know. I've just watched ETF launches my whole career. And a true ETF launch, again, you're starting out with nothing in this tarradome. And so I really discount how hard it is. So if, depending on the category, like if, I don't know, a cybersecurity thematic ETF gets like 10 million in trade in the first day, I'm like, wow, that's interesting. Because it's hard to get trading on the first day. This is hyped up, so I'm gonna raise my bar for this. But it's already cleared it, in my opinion.

• 21:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you think we could flip in gold? ETFs?

• 22:03Speaker 02

  What do you mean? Oh, you mean in private assets?

• 22:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  I mean, it would take a couple of years, I think. Gold ETFs are like 90 billion, I think. So if with, if grayscale is 30 now, you're looking at another 20, but maybe grayscale sees some flows. Like I said, I would look at that as a five-year goal. Not a one-year, though.

• 22:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Eric, last 60 seconds we have, yeah, I know you gotta jump. Um, final question is, we gotta, we gotta spot Bitcoin ETF, okay? How about the spot Ether ETF? You know, markets are always forward-looking. And so we're looking to the future. And I recall a time where you and James said, maybe 70%, something like that, probability? In 2024? How's your prediction now? What, do you think we get this, over/under, and what percentage?

• 22:45Speaker 02

  Well, James and I haven't put our, our full, our full forces behind investigating this. But my, my logic, and it's probably pretty solid, and from everything I've heard. If they were approved Ether Futures, they, they kind of have to approve spot, or they get sued. They could get sued. And maybe Grayscale wants to convert their Ether trust. And it's like, look, we don't want to, you know, just talk to them, hey, we don't want to sue you. You have to approve these, because the same rationale would apply. If you, you let Bitcoin Futures out, you got sued, and then you have to do spot Bitcoin. You let Ether Futures out. Well, it just seems like ipso facto, they kind of have to do it at this point.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  Any coin beyond that, definitely way more up for debate. But I would be optimistic, not like 95% at all, or anything like that. Maybe a little over, you know, half, maybe up to 70% that they will approve this. Also, remember, who was the first one to file, and whose, like, um, final deadline is in May? BlackRock. BlackRock is-

• 23:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  BlackRock has filed for an Ethereum ETF.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, and like, if, if it was some random, like, no-name issuer, I'd be a little more pessimistic, but- Again, they're not dumb, you know, they got this done, you know, they're looking at the next one. Um, so I would probably hitch my opinion a little bit to BlackRock in this case. Um, and they haven't filed any others. There was that fake XRP filing, but if they did that, I'd look at it more seriously. But for now, I'm just, I think those, this one, and then the Ether, and then I just don't see anything for a while.

• 24:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Amazing, Eric. Thank you so much. Congrats, and thank you so much for your coverage on the, uh, the crypto ETFs. We'll be bringing you on to speculate more about the Ethereum ETF in the future if you're willing. So it's been great. Thank you so much.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, thanks for having me. I'll talk to you later. Bye.

• 24:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, take care. Bankless Nation, gotta end with this, of course. Risks and disclaimers. Crypto is risky. You guys know that. Uh, 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.

• 24:48David Hoffman?

  Mantle, formerly known as BitDow, is the first DAO-led Web3 ecosystem, all built on top of Mantle's first core product, the Mantle Network, a brand-new, high-performance Ethereum Layer 2 built using the OP stack, but uses EigenLayer's data availability solution instead of the expensive Ethereum Layer 1. Not only does this reduce Mantle Network's gas fees by 80%, but it also reduces gas fee volatility, providing a more stable foundation for Mantle's applications. The Mantle Treasury is one of the biggest DAO-owned treasuries, which is seeding an ecosystem of projects from all around the Web3 space for Mantle. Mantle already has sub-communities from around Web3 onboarded, like Game7 for Web3 Gaming, and Bybit for TVL and Liquidity and OnRamp. So if you want to build on the Mantle Network, Mantle is offering a grants program that provides milestone-based funding

• 25:33David Hoffman?

  to promising projects that help expand, secure, and decentralize Mantle. If you want to get started working with the first DAO-led Layer 2 ecosystem, check out Mantle at mantle.xyz and follow them on Twitter at ZeroXMantle. Arbitrum is the leading Ethereum scaling solution that is home to hundreds of decentralized applications. Arbitrum's technology allows you to interact with Ethereum at scale with low fees and faster transactions. Arbitrum has the leading DeFi ecosystem, strong infrastructure options, flourishing NFTs, and is quickly becoming the Web3 gaming hub. Explore the ecosystem at portal.arbitrum.com. Are you looking to permissionlessly launch your own Arbitrum Orbit chain? Arbitrum Orbit allows anyone to utilize Arbitrum's secure scaling technology to build your own orbit chain,

• 26:16David Hoffman?

  giving you access to interoperable, customizable permissions with dedicated throughput. Whether you're a developer, an enterprise, or a user, Arbitrum Orbit lets you take your project to new heights. All of these technologies leverage the security and decentralization of Ethereum. Experience Web3 development the way it was always meant to be: secure, fast, cheap, and friction-free. Visit arbitrum.io and get your journey started in one of the largest Ethereum communities. Cello is the mobile-first, EVM-compatible, carbon-negative blockchain built for the real world. And now, something big is happening. Introducing the Cello Layer 2. It's a game-changing proposal that's going to bring Cello's rapidly-growing ecosystem home to Ethereum. Vitalik has shared its excitement for the Cello Layer 2 on the Cello forum, so has Ben Jones from Optimism. But why? The Cello Layer 2 will bring huge advantages,

• 27:01David Hoffman?

  like a decentralized sequencer, off-chain data availability, and one-block finality. What does all that mean? Rock-solid security, a trustless bridge to Ethereum, and more real-world use cases for Ethereum without compromise. And real-world adoption is happening. Active addresses on Cello have grown over 500% in the last six months. With the Cello Layer 2, gas fees will stay low, and you can even pay for gas using ERC20 tokens. But Cello is a community-governed protocol. This means that Cello needs you to weigh in and make your voice heard. Join the conversation in the Cello forum. Follow @celloorg on Twitter and visit cello.org to shape the future of Ethereum.