ROLLUP: ETFs Flop? | BTC on U.S. Balance Sheet? | Polymarket Booming | Japan Tanking Markets

Bankless Friday Weekly Rollup 4th Week of July 2024 ------ 🍵MATCHA | NEW PRICING ENGINE https://go.0x.org/matcha-v2-pod ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙 KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🛞 MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🦄 UNISWAP | BROWSER EXTENSION https://bankless.cc/uniswap ⚡️ FUEL | EARN FUEL POINTS https://bankless.cc/fuel ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum https://%E2%81%A0https//bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🗣️ TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/toku ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/39?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 00:00:00 Intro 00:02:15 Why Did Markets Nuke? https://x.com/zerohedge/status/1816299674006855821 https://x.com/cburniske/status/1816304411892670769 https://x.com/RyanDetrick/status/1816323820032012345 https://pro.kraken.com/app/trade/btc-usd https://x.com/BitcoinNewsCom/status/1815478479263043974 https://x.com/DavidLRipley/status/1815880303254323603 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1815713932453028059 https://pro.kraken.com/app/trade/eth-usd https://www.coingecko.com/en/global-charts 00:09:33 L2 Updates https://x.com/JustDeauIt/status/1813634431804211426 https://x.com/JustDeauIt/status/1813634434782114299 https://x.com/JustDeauIt/status/1813634437885919679 https://x.com/JustDeauIt/status/1813634440809353596 00:11:56 Cycle Phase 2 https://imgur.com/a/UF8pspv https://imgur.com/a/zGqV0iC https://x.com/richwgalvin/status/1815174750668542279?s=46 00:19:19 ETH ETF Results https://x.com/NateGeraci/status/1815545262133399700 https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1815728515641213387/photo/1 https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1815747485505052950 https://x.com/JSeyff/status/1816061764926087481 https://x.com/JSeyff/status/1815958023317205232 https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1816077866208993653 https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1815890742457278751 https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1816232046249058604 00:24:12 Recap From Issuers https://farside.co.uk/?p=1518 https://imgur.com/cOK7F61 https://x.com/NateGeraci/status/1815506510564462933?t=jIri_bI8nEwT-ap1UFTWHg&s=19 https://x.com/NateGeraci/status/1815506510564462933?t=jIri_bI8nEwT-ap1UFTWHg&s=19 https://x.com/NateGeraci/status/1815556927918600209 https://x.com/BitwiseInvest/status/1815486131376370002 https://x.com/BitwiseInvest/status/1815716188447482341 https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1815775953554932076 Permissionless: https://blockworks.co/event/permissionless-iii 00:29:33 Kamala Pro Crypto? https://x.com/jchervinsky/status/1815131074097549776 https://x.com/DeItaone/status/1815813380256719213 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1816125576891031708 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1816213070047519153 00:36:05 Bitcoin Conference Conspiracy https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1816476366021316648 https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/wyoming-sen-lummis-plans-announce-legislation-strategic-bitcoin-reserve-nashville-conference https://x.com/Tyler_Did_It/status/1815428108092084254 00:43:43 Nic Carter Fight Night https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1816476721153282305 https://polymarket.com/event/nic-carter-vs-david-hoffman-Fight?tid=1721926760445 https://x.com/AltcoinDailyio/status/1815849283826114586 00:49:17 Is Polymarket Crypto's Killer Use Case? https://x.com/balajis/status/1815134501171060756?s=46&t=2ZINVXJQKx6xO_6Wiiu_2g https://x.com/yugacohler/status/1807424956529344989?s=46 00:54:19 Coinbase Tokenized Money Market Fund https://www.coindesk.com/business/2024/07/24/coinbase-asset-management-plans-tokenized-money-market-fund-a-hot-area-after-blackrocks-buidl-success-sources/ 00:54:41 Jito Restaking https://x.com/jito_sol/status/1816488798374830164 00:55:16 Really Interesting Survey Results https://x.com/thetrocro/status/1815491534550417525 https://x.com/thetrocro/status/1815491549704438090 00:59:26 Proton Wallet Release https://x.com/ProtonWallet/status/1816090220359475651 01:00:50 Meme Of The Week https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1816194402831982975 ------ 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.

• 0:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, it is the last week of July. It's time for the Bankless Weekly Roll-Up. This was the first week, the first weekly roll-up, I should say, where we have an Ethereum ETF.

• 0:14David Hoffman?

  Just like we said.

• 0:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Promises made, promises kept. Bankless always delivers, every time, except the weeks we don't.

• 0:21David Hoffman?

  So after two days of trading of the Ethereum ETFs went live on Tuesday this week, what do the numbers say? How did the ETFs perform? Is it all the buys in Wall Street, or was it a flop? Also, in addition to all of this, speculative rumors about Trump putting Bitcoin on the Fed balance sheet continue to heat up. Bitcoin as a reserve asset, not just in theory. What's going on with all this?

• 0:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Speaking of politics, Kamala Harris is now the de facto Democratic presidential nominee after Joe Biden stepped down. So the big question on everyone's mind, at least in crypto, on our minds, David, is, what's her policy on crypto? She's an opportunity to maybe pivot? Is she going to? What if we had both presidential nominees that were actually pro-crypto?

• 1:01David Hoffman?

  What if? What if? And I think we might be able to actually get that answer from Polymarket, which continues to just penetrate into the world of mainstream references. Polymarket has some incredible trading volumes, even more incredible than the ones that we talked about last week. So we're going to talk about them again. And also some survey results that Ryan wants to talk to me about, and I don't know what's going on, but he's going to inform me about something.

• 1:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's great, a great survey. Actually, this is really interesting. So it turns out, David, that Bitcoin owners might not be as hardcore right libertarians as it seems. This is really interesting. I want to get your take on it, some of the analysis here. Where do they sit politically, the Bitcoin holders?

• 1:38David Hoffman?

  Before we get into why the hell the markets dumped like late last night into this morning, a moment to talk about our friends and sponsors over at Matcha, who has rebuilt their trading engine from the ground up, now built for serious on-chain trading and trades, completely rebuilt their optimization engine. It is now the best place to get the best price on any size trade, whether you're a small DGEN or you are actually legitimately making multimillion-dollar trades. Congrats to you if you are. So it's a user-friendly app that can make sure that it is scanning all of crypto, all of the on-chain liquidity sources to make sure that you get the best price on your trade. Okay, so Ryan, yesterday, second day of the Ethereum ETFs, starting to get some numbers in, but towards the end of the day,

• 2:23David Hoffman?

  the whole market nuked.

• 2:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 2:25David Hoffman?

  The crypto markets, but also the mostly, actually mostly the tech stocks and just the trad markets. What the hell is going on?

• 2:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, look at this. This is the QQQ, David. That's the NASDAQ and you can see just like the steep drop off.

• 2:38David Hoffman?

  Oh my god, those are, those are some large red candles.

• 2:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Deep, deep red candles. I mean reminiscent of just a typical day in crypto, I would say, but like very, very deep red candles for crypto. So David, there's some speculation if you want to assign blame for this. Some people are just, you know, you want to, you want to find someone to blame? Well, you could blame Japan. This is zero hedge. Someone big in Japan is blowing up. That's a speculation. Taking down gold, crypto, the Nikkei, all of these indices and the NASDAQ with them. So that is the speculation here. And this is a Chris Berninski tweet. He says, "The market is making a fool of everyone, myself included." Somebody, an analyst, just updated me on how much risk is nuking in Japan is bleeding into cryptos.

• 3:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  The current action, his current action is he's not buying, he's not selling, he's just riding. You think Chris is maybe scared of something going on in Japan?

• 3:31David Hoffman?

  Well, every once in a while, markets will, you know, throw a sucker punch at you for some reason or another. I don't pay attention to what's going on in Japan and I'm guessing I'm speaking for the average crypto investor. So if somebody in Japan is all of a sudden fearful and that's reflecting through the markets, you know, markets are a global phenomenon. This is the first 2% drawdown in QQQ since we've had in since early 2023. So it's been over a year since we've had this kind of drawdown in the traditional equities market. And so at some point also, just like these things happen. This isn't an exceptional drawdown. This is a normal, normal sized, large drawdown.

• 4:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Normal sized large.

• 4:10David Hoffman?

  Normal sized, large drawdown.

• 4:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's no oxymoron there.

• 4:14David Hoffman?

  No, not at all.

• 4:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I mean, markets are gonna do what they're going to do. So another answer to this is you can't, don't blame Japan. It was just time. It was time for a pullback. David wants to blame Japan on the week. And if you want to, you can. It's totally allowed.

• 4:28David Hoffman?

  All right, getting into more familiar territory, despite somebody going risk off in Japan. Bitcoin, at least according to these beautiful green Kraken charts, up 2% on the week. So starting the week at 63,600, currently the price of 64,900. So even though Bitcoin did take a little bit of a dip in the last two days, nonetheless, still up 2% on the week.

• 4:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  That surprises me.

• 4:53David Hoffman?

  That's great.

• 4:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I thought it was a, like, pretty bloody, I guess, two days for everyone, but I guess not in Bitcoin if you look at it on the seven day. This is, this could have something to do with it, which is Bitcoin ETF flows, of course. So this is an interesting stat. BlackRock, that's just one of the many Bitcoin ETFs. BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF has surpassed the NASDAQ tracking ETF, QQQ, in year-to-date flows. Isn't that crazy?

• 5:18David Hoffman?

  That is insane.

• 5:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 5:21David Hoffman?

  Isn't QQQ just the granddaddy ETF?

• 5:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it really, for the NASDAQ, right? I mean, there's S&P that are a little larger. So Bitcoin is, the iShares Bitcoin Trust is now number four. But the, if you, if you're going for the year-to-date, in terms of top ETFs, there's a few S&P. There's Vanguard, there's the BlackRock S&P, and there's your total stock market index, just everything. That's, you know, tech stocks and S&P and QQQ. And then number four...

• 5:48David Hoffman?

  And then there's Bitcoin.

• 5:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is the Bitcoin Trust, and that's above QQQ.

• 5:52David Hoffman?

  We have two S&P ETFs in one and two. Then we have the total stock market number three, and then Bitcoin is number four, and then QQQ is number five.

• 6:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yep.

• 6:02David Hoffman?

  Wow, wow, that's great.

• 6:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, pretty impressive in terms of volume. This is a take Matt Hogan actually gave earlier in the week when he came on the podcast, is tech investors who are very excited about QQQ are looking for an opportunity to diversify into the broader tech market. You can only get that with the Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs. That's kind of the crypto tech market. That's an adjacent tech market you can't capture in an index like QQQ. So I guess if you subscribe to Matt's thesis, not all that surprising that this is going on.

• 6:33David Hoffman?

  In other words, in the Bitcoin world, Kraken has finished their distribution of the Mt. Gox Bitcoin coins. And so now we actually get to see what's going on with the Bitcoin price as a result of the Gox distributions. It looks like nothing. They are not selling. No additional trading volumes have been picked up on Kraken or any of the other venues that have had the Gox distribution. It actually might just be Kraken. So while there have been some Bitcoin outflows, as in like people have sent the Bitcoin around, no one is sending it to the market. And so this is kind of what we were speculating on last week and now it's come to fruition and we're proven right that the Mt. Gox FUD is indeed just FUD.

• 7:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  I guess to summarize the Bitcoin story right now, Germany's done selling, Gox doesn't seem like it's a big deal, and spot Bitcoin ETFs continue to go up. This is your tweet, and you're just posting the spot Bitcoin ETF flows over the summer. I mean, really good June and July for Bitcoin ETF.

• 7:28David Hoffman?

  Crescendoing July Bitcoin ETF inflows, inflows.

• 7:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Inflows, net inflows. Because all of this red in the back part of the chart, that's all the

• 7:36David Hoffman?

  That's grayscale.

• 7:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Grayscale, kind of bleeding out, outflows, it's gone now. So it's just, everything that flows, flows up. Well, I guess it can go down too.

• 7:47David Hoffman?

  Well, this is speculation. On net, like the ETF, the crypto ETF flows will flow inwards for a very long amount of time. And by very long, I mean like decades.

• 7:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, wait, wait, wait a second. Now I'm looking at the Ethereum price on the week and I'm skipping ahead because I'm going to get you to tell me this, but like, we just looked at Bitcoin and it was up 2%. And this is Ethereum ETF week, and we look to be down. I mean, this is why I was feeling the pain in the earlier segment.

• 8:13David Hoffman?

  These Kraken charts don't look as good as the Bitcoin Kraken charts.

• 8:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, give us the bad news. What's Ethereum on the week?

• 8:18David Hoffman?

  Down 7%, starting the week at $3,400, currently at $3,150, $60. And so, yeah, Ether took a wallop. Why did this happen? Well, okay, so we got the ETF, flows on day one, surprisingly strong, flows on day two, also decently strong as well, but we are watching a faster outflowing of the grayscale ETH E-Trust than what we saw when Bitcoin ETFs started. And so things are really shaking up quicker, quickly, for the Ethereum ETFs. This is how I summarize it. We're going to go through all of this and more. But what we are noticing is that the Ethereum ETF volumes are surprisingly

• 9:00David Hoffman?

  strong, and so are the ETH outflows out of grayscale.

• 9:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a bit of a mixed bag. I mean, we'll do an entire segment on the Ethereum ETF. But the TLDR is from an issuer perspective and from the inflows and volume perspective, the letter grade is A. Like, it was a really solid launch. The second largest in history, net inflows and volume around 20% of Bitcoin. But the market, at least right now, still seems disappointed by that if we're down 7% on the week.

• 9:29David Hoffman?

  Total crypto market cap, 2.44 trillion. That's been flat for a while. Getting into some Layer 2 updates. Layer 2 is brought to you by Mantle, the Layer 2 ecosystem with the LST and LRT tokens on it as well. So some things we're going to bring up here. This is Michael Nato's tweets, one of the analysts that Ron and I definitely appreciate, who put in some Layer 2 focused tweets that I want to highlight. Layer 2s now have six times the active users that Layer 1 has, the Ethereum Layer 1. Arbitrum coming in at over half a million of daily active addresses, followed by Base at 350,000, followed by ZK Sync at just over 300,000, followed by Linea.

• 10:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's for the, this is all for the quarter, right? For Q2?

• 10:11David Hoffman?

  This is for the quarter. Q2 2024, followed by Linea, followed by Optimism, followed by Immutable, ZK EVM. Immutable, the first app-specific, gaming-specific ecosystem to get a bunch of users. Actually, makes sense. There's a bunch of users in the world of gaming. And then there's some economics that we'll pull out as well. And so as a result of 4844, the fees being charged to Layer 2s dropped $680 million thanks to BlobSpace. And so, of course, activity on Layer 2s commensurately increased with the drop of fees. And this is what we wanted out of BlobSpace. You take down the brakes out of Layer 2s, and all of a sudden you get more activity on the Layer 2s. And then the last one, you can also see which of these Layer 2s are pulling in the strongest margins.

• 10:56David Hoffman?

  So of their usage on their block space, and then subtracting the revenue, the fees that they have to pay to the Ethereum Layer 1 to settle. Coming in at almost $35 million on the quarter. So base pocketed $35 million, followed by Scroll as number two, just shy of $15 million, followed by Optimism, just above $10 million, followed by Linnea and Blast, right around $9 million apiece. Profitable business models.

• 11:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's your takeaway from all this? Because just like sum this up. What do you think this means?

• 11:28David Hoffman?

  The layer two ecosystem on Ethereum is like one of the most healthy things that I've we that I think see in this industry. Like active addresses are up only, TVL is up only, ETH-nominated TVL is also up. It's been stagnating for a little bit, but it's still like marginally up on the quarter. The layer two ecosystem is like a shining spot of like adoption.

• 11:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I guess it's not hockey sticking at this point.

• 11:50David Hoffman?

  It's not hockey sticking.

• 11:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's kind of just steady incremental up. And I guess maybe doing what it's supposed to. I guess zooming out to where we are in the cycle is sort of a question. There was a take I read in Pantera Capital that summarizes that they think we are entering into phase two. And so we have been in phase one. We are entering phase two, maybe we have just started to enter phase two. So when I explain this to you, you'll be like, oh, okay. I use different words, but this is what always happens. Basically, phase one is the Bitcoin. Every bull market, I should say, has a phase one and a phase two. At least it has historically. If you look at the 2016 bull market, the 2019, 2020 bull market, the current bull market that we're in, which maybe started in 2023 or so.

• 12:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's a phase one that is dominated by Bitcoin, you know, ticks the bottom and then shoots up. All right, and that's the entirety of phase one. And then there's a marked difference where phase two gets activated. And that's really kind of the non-Bitcoin market, the altcoin market. So here's how they sum it up. Phase one is the early stage of a rally when Bitcoin is tended to outperform the rest of the market. Phase two is the later stage when altcoins, everything non-Bitcoin.

• 13:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Have tended to outperform the market. And so we believe we are entering phase two. This is sort of like if you look at the chart here.

• 13:11David Hoffman?

  Is there a phase three or is it just one and two?

• 13:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  One and two. We get two phases in this type of analysis.

• 13:17David Hoffman?

  Well, by the way, phase three is when everything goes down.

• 13:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, we don't talk about phase three, right? Because that's the bear cycle. But Bitcoin dominance in the first phases has historically increased 15 to 20 percentage points in the first portion of every cycle. And at this point in the cycle, evidence that we're in like phase one, it has increased by 17 percentage points. So that's what they think. So basically, what this means is Bitcoin has had the majority of its run, at least relative to other crypto assets. And they're anticipating the second phase being the non-Bitcoin assets. If it plays out the way it has played out in previous cycles, what's your take on this?

• 13:53David Hoffman?

  This is good hope, Ian. I hope this is the case. I would love phase two.

• 13:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 13:59David Hoffman?

  I'm a fan of phase two. Phase two is when the exciting stuff happens.

• 14:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, right now Bitcoin's looking real strong, though, I will say. So there's always that kind of the strong Bitcoin take.

• 14:08David Hoffman?

  Like, most likely to be elected candidate talking about putting it on the balance sheet. Like, no duds doing strong. It's insane.

• 14:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  It has been strong, the Bitcoin ETF. Like, it's been a Bitcoin-led cycle. But that's always what happens in phase one.

• 14:23David Hoffman?

  Yeah, phase one, I feel like, is really long this cycle, though.

• 14:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Phase one.

• 14:27David Hoffman?

  It continues to be a Bitcoin-dominated cycle.

• 14:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, on the charts, though, it's actually not that long. It's kind of commensurate with the other charts. Time might be weird.

• 14:37David Hoffman?

  Time is weird.

• 14:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Depends when you measure it. I don't know, when you start the charts.

• 14:40David Hoffman?

  Well, while Bitcoin is dominant, you know, the rest of the market, it just grows in fundamentals. And here is something that I think everyone is underappreciating, but everyone should appreciate, which is the DEX to SEC spot trading volume. We like our DEXs more than we like our SECs. It is at all-time highs. So we are approaching 15%, which we have never seen before. We've usually hovered just around 10%, maybe a little bit less, of DEX to SEC trading volume, where 90% of trading volume is usually happening on centralized exchanges. We are approaching 15%. For the first time ever of Dex volume to centralized exchange volume market share.

• 15:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is a big deal.

• 15:20David Hoffman?

  This is huge. This is a big, big deal. I want 50%. I will not sleep until 50%. The whole, the whole goal of, of going bankless is to have a dominant Dex trading volume to sex trading volume market share.

• 15:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I gotta say, I, I agree with you. This is a very bullish. It's very bullish on going bankless people taking custody of their own assets that, that decentralized exchanges are actually working. And like for people who've been here for like five, six years, uh, do you remember back in 2019? This is like when Uniswap was just barely starting and we had uh, protocols like 0X, which by the way, later kind of uh, built, built out the, the matcha system that we're just talking about.

• 15:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 15:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. And they were, they were trying, right? But people said Dexes would never work, that there wasn't like the value there, that we'd never get this on-chain thing. So to see us go from basically 0% where all of the centralized exchanges were the dominant way people traded assets, to see this money verb, the trade verb, go increasingly on-chain and to get to 15% uh, is just fantastic. And it shows that like this entire thing that we've been working on for so long is, is actually starting to work.

• 16:28David Hoffman?

  All right. Coming up next, Ethereum ETFs, two days of trading flop or not? We'll talk about all of these details and everyone's takes as well. Kamal Harris enters the race. What does that mean for crypto? Pro crypto or anti crypto? Is she gonna take Biden's previous stance and run with it? Or is she gonna change her tune? Uh, and then apparently Ryan has a conspiracy theory. Uh, what's your conspiracy theory?

• 16:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, I'll get into that in the next section.

• 16:51David Hoffman?

  All right. Well, let's get right into it. Uh, let's go ahead and hear from these sponsors and then make this episode special. If you want a crypto trading experience backed by world-class security and award-winning support teams, then head over to Kraken, one of the longest-standing and most secure crypto platforms in the world. Kraken is on a journey to build a more accessible, inclusive and fair financial system, making it simple and secure for everyone, everywhere to trade crypto. Kraken's intuitive trading tools are designed to grow with you, empowering you to make your first or your 100th trade in just a few clicks. And there's an award-winning client support team available 24/7 to help. Along the way, along with a whole range of educational guides, articles and videos. With products and features like Kraken Pro and Kraken NFT Marketplace and a seamless app to bring it all together.

• 17:33David Hoffman?

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• 18:16David Hoffman?

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• 19:00David Hoffman?

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• 19:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think we should start this section with the Financial Times headlines. Here's a headline from the Financial Times. "SEC Approves Ether ETFs As Crypto Moves Closer to the Mainstream."

• 19:30David Hoffman?

  Wow, wow, what a headline.

• 19:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bullish headline, right?

• 19:32David Hoffman?

  Wow.

• 19:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bullish headline. And that's what happened, indeed. The Ethereum ETF products have launched. This is Eric Balchunas posting all of the different issuers of ETH ETFs. I'm not going to read all these out.

• 19:44David Hoffman?

  There's nine of them.

• 19:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  ETH, E, E.

• 19:46David Hoffman?

  There's nine of them and they all start with ETH and then one more letter.

• 19:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. So the question is, we have a day one behind us. We have a day two behind us. We don't yet have a day three at the time of recording. Bankless listeners will probably have a day three under their belt. But let's recap both day one, day two, and talk about our progress so far.

• 20:03David Hoffman?

  Day one recap. Ethereum ETFs now have $10.2 billion in assets. Now, of course, most of that is coming from Grayscale. That's how we started with such a high number. Volumes on day one were over $1.1 billion from the group. Now, when we asked Matt Hogan, what would have been like a par for the course, met expectation, Ether ETF's trading volumes number? He said something around like 400 million to 500 million. That would have been par for the course. We got 1.1 billion. And on the first day, total net flows were positive 107 million. So we had $107 million of net buying pressure on Ether from the Ethereum ETFs on the very first day.

• 20:46David Hoffman?

  And also $484 million came out of Grayscale. So $484 million left the Grayscale Ethereum ETFs. And almost $600 million came in to all the other ETFs. And so that was just day number one. We, the $484 million out of Grayscale was a lot. So the tweet from Eric Balchunas says, damn, that's like 5% of the fund. So Grayscale lost 5% of the AUM on day one. Some of that went into the Grayscale Mini Trust, but a lot went to the other ETFs or were also sold. And so he, he kind of says like, not sure if the other ETFs can really offset this level

• 21:28David Hoffman?

  of outflows from the grayscale ETFs, but on the flip side, maybe it's just good to get this Band-Aid ripped off. Like, let's just drain that thing. So then everything can turn into inflows. It'll negatively suppress the price for Ether. This is what happened with the Bitcoin ETFs. But like, let's just get this done with. And that was, that was day one.

• 21:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  So the summary of day one was Ethereum ETFs did pretty darn well.

• 21:50David Hoffman?

  Killer. They did kill.

• 21:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Yeah. So Eric Balchunas gave this an A on the grade scale. Matt Hogan said that was a little bearish. He gives it something closer to an A plus, which is very impressive. And basically, the volumes were about 23% of what Bitcoin did on day one, which is good. The, the net inflows were around like 18%, something like this, which was also pretty good. And kind of as expected, and like trending, trending towards overperform, I would say. So let's get to day two. What happened on day two?

• 22:22David Hoffman?

  Day two also came in a surprise, a surprise high trading volumes, and also kind of the same, same with the grayscale outflows. A lot of grayscale outflows as well. And so there were 1.1 billion dollars of trading volumes on day one, 852 million dollars of trading volumes on day two. About 75% of the total trading, trading volumes of the notional value of Bitcoin ETFs of that same day. And so the trend continued. Ultimately, day over day over these two days, there was a total outflow. So we have actually lost total flows. We have lost total AUM in the Ethereum ETFs due to the large outflows out

• 23:02David Hoffman?

  of the grayscale ETH ETR. So 811 million dollars have left grayscale. And then between, if you add up all of them, the total, the total outflows are just 27 million dollars. And so. And we are lagging $27 million over the two days. $27 million, call it a wash. We're kind of flat. But yeah, just like the grayscale is like just out, was like leaking ether. And then everything else is taking all of it back up, except for $27 million.

• 23:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  It seems like the grayscale drain, like, because obviously Bitcoin also had a grayscale drainage that was happening. It seems like that might be happening faster.

• 23:38David Hoffman?

  I think we're seeing the same story of the Bitcoin ETFs sped up, which makes sense.

• 23:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  We have to get some more days behind us, too, because right now, after day two, we don't know what day three looks like because we're not here. But like at day two, we're actually net negative. As you said, I just want to emphasize that point. We're net negative about 27 million. Bitcoin never went into a net negative territory when it was deflating the grayscale ETF. So maybe it's just happening faster on Ethereum, but we'll have to get some more days in us to actually like see what the net inflow versus outflow case is.

• 24:13David Hoffman?

  Meanwhile, it was pretty cool to see all of the trad marketing engines spin up. So all the websites for all these ETF issuers are up. Here's just a collage of them that I put together. You got Bitwise, VanEck, Franklin Templeton, BlackRock. Everyone just now has a new website for people who go to these websites to pursue financial investments. I guess you could stumble upon the Ether ETFs on the grayscale website now.

• 24:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Of course.

• 24:38David Hoffman?

  Or the BlackRock website. Also, another Nate Girardi tweet who shared a press release from BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager. Ethereum's appeal lies in its decentralized nature and its potential to drive digital transformation in finance and other industries. This was a press release from BlackRock about the iShares Ethereum Trust set to launch. And so BlackRock doing press releases for Ethereum. Pretty cool. Pretty cool. And then grayscale, they have their mini trust that is coming in at a whopping $3 a share. So you can buy the grayscale mini trust at $3 a share. This is the one with the 0.15% fee as opposed to their normal trust.

• 25:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Which is the lowest of any.

• 25:20David Hoffman?

  The lowest one. It's the lowest one. But the other one, the one with all the AUM, has 2.5% fees, which is why you're seeing just the flood of capital outbound out of the grayscale ETH trust. Bitwise, their ETH W also has some extra cool accoutrements. They donate 10% of their fees, of their 0.2% fees to the Protocol Guild and the Proposer Builder Foundation as well. So 10% of their money, of their profits, go into just funding public goods. It's really just a huge tip of the hat to them. And also, I think this move really works for them because Bitwise, coming in second after BlackRock, not far behind. BlackRock, something like $270 million of inflows, followed by Bitwise at just over $200 million of inflows,

• 26:06David Hoffman?

  followed by Fidelity at like 70 or 80 million dollars.

• 26:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  That was day one, right?

• 26:10David Hoffman?

  Bitwise is like nipping at the heels of BlackRock. Bitwise, he's a team of like 60 people, going toe to toe with the world's largest asset manager on the Ether ETF. You gotta just give them a hand. Like, well done, Bitwise. You guys pat yourselves on the back.

• 26:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, they're doing a great job. Matt Hogan says they talked to, do 20,000 different webinars and meetings on crypto ETFs. I know how that's possible.

• 26:36David Hoffman?

  Thank god they're doing that.

• 26:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 26:38David Hoffman?

  On the flip side of things, ETH ETFs won't be available in Vanguard, and that's why we don't care about them. Goodbye Vanguard.

• 26:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  But, I mean, this was not surprising. Vanguard also is not doing the Bitcoin ETF, so this is just like confirmation.

• 26:51David Hoffman?

  They're just the anti-crypto financial platform for all of you people who might be interested in that.

• 26:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  They think it's too soon.

• 26:56David Hoffman?

  Of which there are none of you.

• 26:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's funny to me because they think it's too soon, right? I guess like too much volatility or something is the complaint, but like there are assets in the QQQ, like Facebook, that have, I mean, they've gone down 83%. They had a larger dip than Bitcoin did during the bear market, right?

• 27:13David Hoffman?

  I know where Liz Warren keeps her money.

• 27:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Vanguard. They'll come around eventually. You know, there's a take when we had Eric Balchunas from Bloomberg on that he said, which is like, hey, when we were talking about the Ethereum narrative, we were going through different narratives. And, you know, his take was like, I don't really think the tokenization narrative for Ethereum is going to be the one that sticks because he's bearish tokenization. I think the reason he gave for that is because the ETFs already do a pretty good job tokenizing. Things and he's actually not wrong. You know how we've compared ETFs as like an ERC 20 wrapper? It sort of is. It's TradFi's version of an ERC 20, basically, and they're doing the like real world asset play only for like the real world asset is Ether and it's on chain and they're kind of they're wrapping it in an ETF. But here's

• 28:01David Hoffman?

  We also used to put the internet through the phone line, too.

• 28:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Well, so here's Nick Gerassi with a opposite take and Nate also comes from TradFi, from the ETF world. And his take says tokenization is the next step. This is what he says. What my TradFi friends are missing is this. Mutual funds was the past. ETFs is the present. Crypto is the future. Crypto ETFs are the bridge between the present and the future. Crypto will prove itself as a better investment delivery vehicle, among other things. My opinion, crypto is inevitable and it's truly that simple. It's just basically tokenization is kind of like the next step in this trajectory of making assets more liquid and tradable. Tokenization is kind of like just reimagining what ETFs would look like if they were digitally native and on the internet.

• 28:49David Hoffman?

  If they had like a business logic inside of the token, there's a way better form factor. Anyways, while now the Bitcoin and the Ether ETFs are just live and steeping, they're going to steep for a few months. We're going to have James Safer and Eric Baltrutis at Permissionless. And so we're going to give you guys the three month progress on the Ether ETFs, the six month, seven month progress on the Bitcoin ETFs. Prices, if you guys want to go to Permissionless and hear from these men, prices are going up. They are doubling on Monday. And so get your ticket now before they go up, especially if you're a bankless citizen and you have a very large discount on your perks page. So there's a link in the show notes. Make sure you don't get your expensive ticket on Monday. Get your cheaper ticket this weekend, today, whenever you're listening to this.

• 29:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  So everyone has seen, of course, that President Joe Biden has dropped out of the 2024 presidential race. It looks like Kamala Harris is going to be the presumptive nominee. And the question is, what's her posture going to be on crypto? You could just default, say, well, it's just Biden's posture, right? She's part of the administration. She's in the White House. She was like present for everything that was going on with Gary Gensler and the SAP 121 veto. And you could just default that to that. Or you could take a different view and more optimistic view and recognize that this is Kamala Harris's opportunity to pivot on issues where Biden was relatively unpopular. Crypto being one of those issues. I think Jake Chervinsky puts this take well.

• 30:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  He said, "With President Biden stepping aside, the Democratic Party has a huge opportunity to win back a big share of the crypto vote. This should be top priority for the new nominee in an election that will be won on the margins in states where crypto is a live issue." And then he goes through his rationale for why. But the TLDR is just crypto is important. Biden has been on the wrong side. He's not gaining any votes by being anti-crypto. He's certainly not gaining any political donations from the donor class. And so this is Harris's opportunity to set a new agenda and to distance herself from the Biden platform.

• 30:52David Hoffman?

  So now we're trying to really get like details. So like, what, how relevant is crypto in the brain of Kamala Harris? Like, is she even thinking about this? Does she even care about this? A tweet came out of Walter Bloomberg saying, "Mark Cuban says Kamala Harris can't reach out to him with multiple questions about crypto." Sadly, that's all that we know. But if indeed true, the fact that Kamala Harris is getting the nominee for the Democratic candidate, and then within like two days is like thinking about crypto at all, I think is like pretty, was a pretty strong indicator that like they're trying to think about how to approach this thing. And so the fact that it's even relevant in her brain space at all, I'm optimistic about.

• 31:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, Cuban says, I take it as a good sign. Hard not to take that as a good sign. He says, the feedback I'm getting, but certainly not confirmed by the VP, is that she will be far more open to business, AI, crypto and government as a service. So that's a take. There was also some rumor earlier this week that Kamala Harris would actually be speaking at the Bitcoin conference.

• 31:50David Hoffman?

  Considering speaking at the Bitcoin conference.

• 31:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right. And this was the in talks with Bitcoin conference organizers was kind of the rumor. This is the Bitcoin conference, by the way, that Trump is speaking at just this weekend.

• 32:02David Hoffman?

  Along with like RFK as well.

• 32:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  RFK. So we'll talk about that in a bit more detail, but it turns out, David, that that rumor does not have substance. This is David Bailey. He's the conference organizer. Kamala Harris, he says, will not be speaking at the Bitcoin conference. No surprise. What can she say to us when she's actively imprisoning developers, forcing our industries overseas, attacking proof of work? It would have been a disaster for her. All eyes on Trump now. So pulled out the punches.

• 32:31David Hoffman?

  David Bailey was also the guy that tweeted out the tweet that he talked to the Kamala Harris campaign, and they said that they will consider speaking at the Bitcoin conference.

• 32:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's true.

• 32:40David Hoffman?

  And then I'm guessing they got back to him and it's like, we're just not ready for this. We're not interested. They just said, no, we're not going to be there.

• 32:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's true.

• 32:47David Hoffman?

  And then he sends the, and then he sends this tweet.

• 32:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  So I asked David, do you have any idea why this rumor is circulating? And he did not reply, but Hayden Adams says it's because David Bailey actually tweeted this to drum up publicity for his own conference. So was stoking fires on the rumor. He says this, he started the rumor yesterday.

• 33:05David Hoffman?

  In the Kamala campaign's mouth.

• 33:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Basically. Fact is, she had never spoken publicly about or voted on a crypto relevant bill. It's true. Kamala Harris, you go to stand with crypto is basically neutral. It's like TBD. It's like, we don't know.

• 33:17David Hoffman?

  No information.

• 33:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Whereas Biden gets like a D or D minus or an F or something with respect to.

• 33:22David Hoffman?

  Deservedly low grade. Yeah.

• 33:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so Hayden says, "We shouldn't be so quick to fill in the blank with our own priors. She's likely trying to make friends, not enemies right now. There's a big opportunity." So Hayden's saying, "There's actually an opportunity for crypto to be nonpartisan, or maybe even optimistically bipartisan, start reaching out to Kamala Harris." And you don't win it by tweeting that, "All eyes on Trump," Kamala Harris is attacking crypto.

• 33:47David Hoffman?

  David Bailey is not a neutral commentator.

• 33:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  He's not at this point.

• 33:50David Hoffman?

  He is a very large Trump supporter. He is the advisor to the Trump campaign about Bitcoin, basically.

• 33:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  For sure, for sure.

• 33:56David Hoffman?

  So, yeah.

• 33:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  So, it was interesting too, David. I talked to Mike Novogratz yesterday, and he was convinced. He's actually betting on this. So, episode drops on Monday, by the way.

• 34:06David Hoffman?

  Betting on Polly Market?

• 34:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, he's not. He's betting with one of the Winklevosses, either Tyler or Cameron.

• 34:11David Hoffman?

  Oh, so, okay, money at stake. Counts.

• 34:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, no, it wasn't money. I keep disappointing you by saying this. It was like beer. You have to clout, "I'll be wrong on the internet," and I have to drink three beers in 15 minutes or something, so like, get drunk. It doesn't seem like much of a punishment. Anyway.

• 34:25David Hoffman?

  I'll do that. I'll do that today, anyways.

• 34:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Anyway, his point is, he is publicly putting his stake on the line and saying that people were quick to point out that he also has Luna tattoos. But that aside, he was saying, basically, that he anticipates Kamala Harris will flip pro crypto, and that we'll end up having two pro crypto nominees. Maybe not as pro crypto as Trump, because that would be hard at this point, but that would be bullish.

• 34:56David Hoffman?

  Honestly, so long as we get off of President Biden's D grade is a step in the right direction.

• 35:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I mean, here's the most bullish possible world. Why this is exciting as a prospect. If you have both presidential candidates fighting for us in this escalating game of like, "I'm more crypto than you." No, I'm more crypto, and they keep doing this, like, in this game of one-upmanship.

• 35:16David Hoffman?

  I mean, Trump is gonna win that. I would never want to play a game of one-upmanship with Trump about any subject.

• 35:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Me neither. But it might, it might kind of moderate the Democrat position on crypto, at least with respect to the White House. So that would be bullish. Lastly, I will say there are some that are saying like, even if Kamala Harris's talk is like, even if Kamala Harris pivots talk is cheap, and like, we demand actual action. So you gotta like, fire Gary Gensler. Like, blood sacrifice.

• 35:46David Hoffman?

  Gary Gensler's gotta go.

• 35:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. And so you're not serious until you do that. It's kind of all talk.

• 35:51David Hoffman?

  It's like the lowest hanging fruit. Like, you aren't even neutral to crypto until you fire Gary Gensler.

• 35:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly.

• 35:59David Hoffman?

  Okay, so Ryan, you have a conspiracy about this, the 2024 Bitcoin conference that's about to happen, starting today?

• 36:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. So it's not quite, like, I wouldn't say it's a conspiracy.

• 36:08David Hoffman?

  By the way, before you start, I'm, oh, it's not a conspiracy. I'm a huge fan of Ryan, John Adams' conspiracies.

• 36:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, well, so it's, it's a prediction. It's a tail event prediction. Okay? And so the last time I made one of these.

• 36:19David Hoffman?

  Yeah, okay, that's a euphemism, brother.

• 36:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  The last time I made one of these, it was about the Ethereum ETF approval, when people didn't think that was possible. Here's something that could happen. It's a, you know, a tail prediction, so it's not super high probability, but like, oh my God, if it happened, do you want to be out of the market if something like this happened? What if, so President, Presidential nominee Trump, he's going, he's speaking at the Bitcoin Conference on Saturday, Saturday at like, 2, I think, CES, something like this. So imagine if he was up here and he said this, if I'm president, I will buy, or he'll probably say, once I'm president, I will buy Bitcoin. There's actually, David, a chance, and I call it a fair chance, I'd call it maybe over 50% chance, that Trump makes a campaign

• 37:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  promise, when he's at the Bitcoin Conference in front of all of these kind of like adoring Bitcoin fans, to buy Bitcoin, to actually back the dollar. Okay? That would be like the perfect Trumpian-style announcement. Not only am I the pro crypto president, okay? You can't even touch me, because I'm the president that's actually going to buy Bitcoin and put it on the Fed balance sheet. All right? And if you blend that with Trump's probability of, of winning, plus like, he says this, and then you have to like, balance that with like, what's the probability that he follows through on his promise? But you push that all together, and you get like, a fairly likely outcome, not super likely, but above zero, maybe in the teens, to 20% outcome.

• 37:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Possibility that by the end of next year, the US will have Bitcoin, have purchased Bitcoin on the Fed balance sheet.

• 38:01David Hoffman?

  Like, I don't want to be a Ryan Tron Adams conspiracy theorist hater here. But like, can he, he can't just unilaterally do this. He has to, this, right? He can't tell the Fed what to put on their balance sheet, right?

• 38:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, here, here's some legislation that pairs nicely with this.

• 38:18David Hoffman?

  Right, it has to be legislation, which I'm giving much lower odds.

• 38:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know, there's so much they could do with executive orders. And like, you could just do an executive order and then it has to get challenged in the, in the courts. But, but this is Wyoming Senator Lummis, so she's been crypto friendly. She's actually planning some legislation for a strategic Bitcoin reserve. And she's going to talk about that at the conference, okay? So this adds even more evidence.

• 38:42David Hoffman?

  This is also allegedly, we don't actually know this, but we're like, kind of gearing up for it.

• 38:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and here's an analyst on CNBC was asked this question. So like, maybe he's going to be persuasive to you on this point. Here's what he said.

• 38:53Speaker 02

  So yeah, he's going to speak very positively about Bitcoin here at the conference.

• 38:56Speaker 03

  Do you think that these favorable comments could go so far as to indicate that he'd be open to it being a reserve currency for the US?

• 39:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there were some rumblings of that on X this week. It could be something that's very difficult to get done, but it is possible. The Justice Department holds about 200,000 units of Bitcoin. So the United States is the largest holder of Bitcoin. And so they could easily just move that over to the Department of Treasury and start right there and have 13 billion worth of Bitcoin on the balance sheet. So it is a possible move, it just could be tough to get done. But what happens is, is the Justice Department in holding these units of Bitcoin, they've been a random seller in the space. And so if they move from being a random seller at times, which could push the price of Bitcoin down, over to being a long-term hodler. Well, that could be really good for the space.

• 39:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  He doesn't even have to buy it, David. He just has to take all the confiscated Bitcoin and just put it on a different ledger within the US government.

• 39:57David Hoffman?

  If we are to ever confiscate Bitcoin, we just give it to the Fed. We just give it to the Treasury. I like that. That's better. Also, the fact that, I just want to highlight the fact that Cynthia Lummis is actually penning real legislation is a very credible path to putting Bitcoin on the balance sheet.

• 40:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so let's say, if that happens, David, I mean, you've got to acknowledge that that would be mega bullish territory. If Trump goes and he says that on Saturday.

• 40:23David Hoffman?

  Yes, it was mega bullish. I still think I'm categorizing it in the world of crypto Twitter hopium.

• 40:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Crypto Twitter hopium. Is it similar to the Kamala Harris rumor?

• 40:35David Hoffman?

  Yeah, like the crypto, like Twitter in general, like was like Biden was like not, couldn't be found for two days because he had COVID. And then like immediately went to the conclusion that he was dead and they were like, like weekend at burning him around. And then he's like totally fine. Like Twitter is just like a weird place right now, bro.

• 40:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Too many conspiracy theories for David's brain. So just like this one is just, you know.

• 40:58David Hoffman?

  And I'm usually the conspiracy one.

• 41:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, this is a more rational take that I kind of liked. If you were hearing this entire section where we talk about Kamala Harris, we're talking about Trump and this pro crypto rhetoric and you're just kind of shaking your heads and being like, but guys, are the politicians going to actually deliver on crypto? Like what is their incentive? What is their motivation? Like, think about why they're doing this. Ben DeFrancesco has a great take. "I'm embarrassed that it took me this long to realize that Trump's pivot on crypto isn't about winning single-issue crypto voters." An assertion I've always found hard to believe because there just aren't that many of us in swing states. Instead, it was about winning over the donor tech class who saw Biden's administration aggressive.

• 41:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's anti-crypto as a tent pole and a broader anti-tech and anti-innovation turn from the left. So Trump isn't embracing crypto, but rather he's just trying to signal to wealthy Silicon Valley types that he will be pro-tech writ large. And it seems to have largely worked. Goes on to say, and then maybe the Democrats will pivot into this. And if they don't, you know, Trump and the Republicans will kind of like punish them. So I gotta say, this rings somewhat true for me after listening to the, you, you listen to this, right? Mark Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, their podcast, the very first thing of why they support Trump. Again, Silicon Valley of Silicon Valley, they are the preeminent venture capitalists in the world. And they, number one was crypto.

• 42:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's basically this administration-

• 42:26David Hoffman?

  Democratic treatment towards crypto.

• 42:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, this administration, the Biden administration, has been needlessly hostile on crypto. And it's one of the important, it's, it's kind of a front runner of how they're going to respond to other tech initiatives like AI.

• 42:38David Hoffman?

  Crypto is a canary.

• 42:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly. And so I think that's what Trump is actually like going for. He's obviously trying to get, you know, these donations. Maybe the crypto voters don't, don't bring it in, but he is, he is tilting Silicon Valley in his favor by this. And as we've pointed out numerous times, Democrats are basically giving him free real estate. So we'll see if Kamala Harris continues in that, but that's probably the pragmatic reason as to why, as to whether you can trust them? I don't know. I mean, they do have an effect though, right? Biden can just veto a Sab 121 repeal. And there, there, there are things that you can do to support crypto, or at least stand out of the way from the position of, of, of president. So I guess we'll have to see. I, I mean, why

• 43:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  wouldn't they follow through on at least some of these commitments though, is my question.

• 43:27David Hoffman?

  At least with Ben's take, I think it's less of an either or, and it's more of a yes and, like it is a crypto vote, and it's the donor class, and it's like one nice package. Like it's, it's both of these things.

• 43:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. And it's not that hard to just be pro crypto.

• 43:41David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's free words. Since we're talking about the Bitcoin 2024 conference that starts today, shout out to Nic Carter, who is stepping into the ring tonight. So it'll have already happened by the time the-

• 43:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  This could have been you, David?

• 43:54David Hoffman?

  This could have been me. This could have been me. He's fighting a different individual, Cody Kuhn, who doesn't have a broken rib. And so, and Polly Market, actually, since Polly Market, not just for politics, has him clocked in- At 69% winning odds, and so, oh, actually, it just jumped up to 75%. I have been watching, so like Nick and I follow each other on Instagram. And as soon as I broke my rib and I had to call off the fight because I was gonna fight him like six, seven, eight days later.

• 44:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 44:24David Hoffman?

  He started posting his training because like I would have otherwise seen it. And like he, he has not stopped training since our fight.

• 44:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, but he's posting this, but Cody can see it. Cody can see his training.

• 44:35David Hoffman?

  I don't think he's friends with Cody on Instagram.

• 44:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, okay.

• 44:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I'm guessing. And so he's been like, just like going through these fight camps for, what is this now? Like almost four months. Like he's an extremely trained individual. So it makes, it makes total sense that he's clocking in at 75% odds versus Cody Kuhn. I will say the Polymarket volume for the Nic Carter fight is at $5,000, so not too much volume. People really wanted to see my fight with Nic Carter because it's got $167,000 of volume.

• 45:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  The people still want to see this fight, by the way. So who are you betting on?

• 45:13David Hoffman?

  So I'm betting on Nick. I'm for sure betting on Nick.

• 45:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so in the Polymarket, you would bet on Nick?

• 45:17David Hoffman?

  Okay, so you've, you've got, you've got your Uniswap wallet.

• 45:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 45:20David Hoffman?

  Okay, the brand new, we talked about this last week, the brand new Uniswap wallet. The nice thing that we liked about this wallet on Bankless is because when any other browser extension wallet would pop up, we can't share it on the share screen. But because of Uniswap, it has a little sidecar. It has a little sidecar. So it's on the screen. So you could actually watch Ryan take some of his USCC in his Uniswap wallet and make a little bet on Nic Carter. Yeah.

• 45:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm not ready, I'm not ready to bet on Nick yet. I gotta do my research here. Yeah. Maybe I'll do this later, but I think the question people want to know is, are you gonna, are you gonna sign up for another opportunity to fight Nic Carter at a future conference?

• 45:58David Hoffman?

  If the opportunity presents itself, if the opportunity presents itself, I kinda owe it to Nick. And, and everyone else, and the $167,000 of people that bet on, on me in the first place.

• 46:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not just Nic Carter. Uh, there's somebody, there's another celebrity sighting-

• 46:12David Hoffman?

  Not just Nic Carter!

• 46:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  At the Bitcoin conference.

• 46:14David Hoffman?

  The Hawk Tua girl is gonna go and watch Nic Carter fight at Karate Combat.

• 46:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow.

• 46:20David Hoffman?

  And Nick, you know, like, pressure is on, dude. Hawk Tua girl's gonna be watching.

• 46:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, this is, uh, the stakes have never been higher.

• 46:28David Hoffman?

  They have never been higher.

• 46:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  We got more-

• 46:30David Hoffman?

  We got some more, we got some more Polymarket content. Uh, the Polymarket popularity contest continues. We're gonna talk about all the things that mainstream has been talking about, about Polymarket. Uh, but also Coinbase entering the tokenized T-bills game. Coinbase trying to put some, some real world assets on-chain. And then also, this is where Ryan talks about, uh, how Bitcoin holders aren't as hardcore right libertarian as you might think. All of this content and more, but first, I'm going to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially Mantle, the full stack ecosystem, the Layer 2, the LRT token, the yield-bearing ETH. If you haven't tried out Mantle, there's a link in the show notes, you can get started. New projects are coming online to the Mantle Layer 2 every single week. Why is this happening? Maybe it's because Mantle has been on the frontier of Layer 2 design architecture

• 47:13David Hoffman?

  since it first started building Mantle DA, powered by technology from EigenDA. Maybe it's because users are coming on to the Mantle Layer 2 to capture some of the highest yields available in DeFi, and to automatically receive the points and tokens being accrued by the $3 billion Mantle Treasury in the Mantle reward station. Maybe it's because the Mantle team is one of the most helpful teams to build with, giving you grants, liquidity support, and venture partners to help bootstrap your Mantle application. Maybe it's all of these reasons all put together. So if you're a dev and you want to build on one of the best foundations in crypto, or you're a user looking to claim some ownership on Mantle's DeFi apps, click the link in the show notes to getting started with Mantle. Launching a token? Don't let complex legal and tax issues slow you down. Toku provides specialized support to optimize your launch

• 47:55David Hoffman?

  and ensure that you as a founder, and your team, and your investors, get the most tax-efficient outcomes. The Toku team understands the crypto space inside and out, and will ensure your token launch is fully compliant while maximizing tax efficiency. Toku can connect you with the best attorneys if you need them, to make sure that you have the best advice, and Toku can help to optimize- minimize your taxes so you pay the least possible amount of taxes while still maintaining legal compliance. With Toku's guidance, you can concentrate on building your company while Toku handles the logistics. Token launches don't have to be complicated. Talk to Toku today to get a free initial token valuation. The Uniswap extension is here. The self custody wallet created by the most trusted team in DeFi, Uniswap Labs, designed to make swapping feel effortless. This extension lives

• 48:35David Hoffman?

  in your browser's sidebar, letting you swap, sign transactions, and send or receive crypto without ever losing your place on the internet. Plus, with human readable transaction messages, you'll always know exactly what you're signing. Navigate a multi-chain world effortlessly with support for 11 chains like Ethereum Mainnet, Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism. No more chain switching or token importing. All your assets are right where you need them to be. The Uniswap extension is designed to level up your swapping experience with other Uniswap Labs products as well. Easily onboard to the extension using the Uniswap Mobile Wallet to begin managing your assets across platforms and take advantage of smooth seamless synergies with the Uniswap Web App. So go and download the Uniswap extension today by clicking the link in the show notes. Just another way Uniswap is helping you swap smarter.

• 49:17David Hoffman?

  Another big account tweeting out how Polymarket is the news. This is Balaji tweeting out how Polymarket priced in the chance of Biden dropping out appropriately far before there was even a debate where the rest of the world was like realizing Biden's age. And then he's also saying meanwhile, legacy media claimed Biden's senality was a conspiracy theory while Polymarket was pricing in the odds of Joe Biden dropping out.

• 49:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think this is really cool. This, you know,

• 49:45David Hoffman?

  It is really cool.

• 49:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  I have, some of my Canadian family have been actually like texting me. There's like, what's going on in the US? Like, who's going to win the election? That sort of thing. I just send them the Polymarket prediction because I genuinely think it's like the best prediction on the planet. Right? Right now, the chances, it's anticipating the chances of Trump winning at 63%. And I think that's most accurate considering what we know right now. Of course, this can change and will change on a dime if Kamala Harris gets, you know, like all sorts of steam and her campaign really picks up. It'll be reflected in the price of Polymarket, which is brilliant. And people ask like, what's, what's different versus this, this crypto Polymarket prediction market versus others? Liquidity. There is so much volume on these

• 50:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  markets. It's actually insane. Crypto people love trading markets, don't they? And they love gambling on these like outcomes. And so we've brought that liquidity here as well.

• 50:39David Hoffman?

  Yeah, when Kamala Harris was named by Biden, like nominated by Biden, I think Donald Trump had some sort of like 70% likelihood. So people's like, oh, like, well, if Biden can't do it, like the Democrats' party in shambles. And so it started off at 75%, but then apparently Kamala Harris drove in like hundreds of millions of dollars of donations and is giving out like rally crying speeches to the left and the left is like rallying behind. So you're seeing that immediately drop down from 70 down to 62%. You're just seeing real time news. Like, do you want to have the best digestion of information and data possible without having to consume hours and hours of news? Just go to Polymarket and they'll spit out a number.

• 51:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and also, so here's what I love about this. It's like stake on the bet. So someone disagrees with that and they're like, there's no way convicted felon Donald Trump is going to win like another term. Merk is not going to do this. There's no way Kamala Harris is like 99% certainty that she's going to win. Okay, bet on it.

• 51:36David Hoffman?

  That's free money for you then. That's free money for you to believe that.

• 51:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Because everyone has an opinion on things, but unless they have some sort of stake backing that opinion, what's the opinion worth? And so, yeah, I love, I love this kind of like truth source for, for media and for outcomes like this.

• 51:52David Hoffman?

  I really liked this post, this short post, longer than a tweet, shorter than a blog post from yuga.eth. I'm going to read it out. Polymarket's astronomical success is the most important story in crypto right now, but it's so obvious that we are ignoring it when we should be screaming it from the rooftops. Prediction markets are the purest technological manifestation of liberal democracy. They take free markets and free speech as inputs and output truth. In an age where centralized control of information is a systemic risk, prediction markets offer a way of cutting through misleading narratives and viewing the unvarnished truth. Prediction markets are freedom preserving technology that moves societies forward.

• 52:33David Hoffman?

  It is monumental for crypto that Polymarket is being consistently cited by mainstream media for election probabilities. The seamlessness of which this has happened speaks to its product market fit. No one talks about the fact that Polymarket is built on crypto because the product is so good. Of course, underneath the hood, it makes total sense why a prediction market should be built on a decentralized financial network. The US presidential election is volatile and many actors are incentivized to obfuscate reality. For most of us, there is no single trusted source of truth. But for those who have followed Polymarket knew that the replacement of the Democratic candidate was always a possibility. Quietly, Polymarket has served as a bulwark against manufactured consensus and sanctioned misinformation.

• 53:17David Hoffman?

  Like other products in crypto, prediction markets face an uphill battle with respect to regulatory clarity in the United States, but their utility as applications of crypto is second only to money and finance. If you are a supporter of crypto, the next time you find yourself in a discussion about politics, refer to your friends to Polymarket. I thought that was such a great punchy post, and it really just speaks to just like when a crypto app gains adoption, we have more freedom in the universe as a result of that. I thought that was great.

• 53:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  You want to hear a deep irony then here, David?

• 53:47David Hoffman?

  Oh.

• 53:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's blocked in the US.

• 53:49David Hoffman?

  Oh.

• 53:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  So you have to use a VPN.

• 53:55David Hoffman?

  You have to use a VPN. Also a freedom technology.

• 53:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right? I mean, the CFTC has to reverse course on this. It's absolutely insane that we don't have access to these types of markets and they're trying to protect it and you like view it as gambling, that sort of thing. Anyway, more work to do. I mean, that would be an important act of an executive order to kind of like reverse the blocking of prediction markets like Polymarket.

• 54:18David Hoffman?

  That's right. Getting into the world of tokenization, Coinbase Asset Management, I guess, bet you didn't know that Coinbase had an asset manager, is creating a tokenized money market fund. And so this is Coinbase getting into the world of tokenizing a yield-bearing assets on-chain. This is following in the footsteps of BlackRock's build-its-success. So they're trying to eat their piece of the pie. Also, in Solana land, Gito has announced a restaking platform. So Gito is now also like an MEV boost. It collects MEV and puts it into their Gito Sol, which is their staked Sol derivative. And now, they also have a restaking platform. So continuing to be of like very full-stack integration.

• 54:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  They're building everything.

• 55:01David Hoffman?

  They're building everything. Yeah, I mean, it makes sense to like, put it all in one stack. It's kind of like, all right, this is getting to be a monopoly here. But like, whatever. And so it's a hybrid staking, resaking, and LRT module. So resaking coming into the world of Solana via GTO.

• 55:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, David, you ready for those interesting survey results?

• 55:19David Hoffman?

  Cool, let's do it.

• 55:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, so this is some survey proof that Bitcoin owners are actually not as hardcore right libertarian as you might think. They're actually-

• 55:26David Hoffman?

  I'm shocked.

• 55:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  I am actually a little surprised by this.

• 55:29David Hoffman?

  Oh, are you?

• 55:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is the Nakamoto Institute who put out this survey, so definitely like Bitcoiners. And they found a few things. So this is, first of all, a robust survey. This was a survey of over 3,500 adults in the US. And they were looking at their Bitcoin ownership and what are the demographics or characteristics? So a few findings to highlight. Number one, this one won't surprise you. There was no strong correlation across many dimensions of Bitcoin holders for race, ethnicity, religion, relationship status, income. It's not skewed towards like wealthy or not wealthy or financial literacy.

• 56:03David Hoffman?

  Wow, so it's equally distributed amongst all of those things?

• 56:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, the only demographic where it's not equally distributed is it is skewed young and male in the US. That probably doesn't surprise you.

• 56:15David Hoffman?

  You didn't need to tell me that.

• 56:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  So that's the demographics, but otherwise, apart from being young and male, it was just like pretty distributed, which was neat. And this was actually maybe the biggest shock. Many people thought that Bitcoin ownership would skew towards the political right, toward libertarianism. Apparently, according to these survey results, that was absolutely wrong. By far, the largest holder of Bitcoin in terms of political orientation was basically the moderate. Those that are neutral, those that are somewhat liberal, somewhat conservative, kind of that fat middle. Very conservative or very liberal were actually the minority. Interesting. Very liberal. Are you seeing these numbers?

• 56:54David Hoffman?

  Yeah, very liberal is like 40% higher than very conservative.

• 57:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes.

• 57:00David Hoffman?

  Whoa!

• 57:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, of the total Bitcoin owners in the survey, which is representative sample size, and they cut across all demographics. So I mean, like, I looked at the data, it seemed like a good survey. 14% of Bitcoin owners are very liberal, which is shocking to me.

• 57:15David Hoffman?

  And 10% is very conservative. Wow, that is shocking. I guess it's just the very conservative ones that are super loud.

• 57:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  And then lastly, they ask how people perceive Bitcoin. And again, this is comparing, all of these results are comparing owners versus non-owners, which is sort of interesting. But this is not a surprise. But if you are an owner of Bitcoin, you definitely believe that Bitcoin is good, net good. So this is a chart of trust in Bitcoin or moral perception of Bitcoin. Let's look at moral perception of Bitcoins. I find that interesting.

• 57:46David Hoffman?

  Moral perception of Bitcoin.

• 57:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so owners, like, is Bitcoin good or bad? Like, net good, net bad? If you own Bitcoin, definitely you tend towards the strongly agree.

• 57:57David Hoffman?

  Duh.

• 57:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  The vast majority is strongly agree.

• 57:58David Hoffman?

  This is just a chart displaying cognitive dissonance.

• 58:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right.

• 58:01David Hoffman?

  Or the lack of it.

• 58:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  But it's kind of, it's kind of interesting. It's like, and so 46% of people that don't own Bitcoin are like more neutral in their moral perception of Bitcoin. But on the, we think Bitcoin's evil side of things, if they are non-owners of Bitcoin, 14% think Bitcoin is evil. If they own Bitcoin, it's like 1%. Imagine you're the, by the way, that 1% of Bitcoiners who own Bitcoin, you still think it's evil. But there are, there's like 1% of the Bitcoin holder population that actually believes that, which is kind of interesting, right? But like, not a surprise that people who own Bitcoin also think it's good. Yeah, it's one of those correlation causation things, because maybe the trick to getting more people to believe that Bitcoin and crypto is good is to just have them buy crypto.

• 58:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Maybe that's the simple political formula, you know? It's just...

• 58:52David Hoffman?

  I think it's probably a chicken and egg problem.

• 58:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 58:54David Hoffman?

  Like, as soon as you are convinced that Bitcoin is good, then you will buy it. And that will happen in the same moment. Or vice versa, like, you decide to buy Bitcoin and all of a sudden, like, you can't hold the cognitive dissonance of like owning Bitcoin and also thinking it's bad. So therefore you change your mind and you think it's good.

• 59:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a bit of both. It's reflexive. It's probably both things. But it seems to be there's correlation and probably some causation. When people own crypto, they tend to think it's good. So that's why the work that we're doing here in evangelizing for crypto matters, David. It manifests in our politics.

• 59:23David Hoffman?

  Bitcoin is good. Bitcoin is good. This is true.

• 59:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  And lastly, on Bitcoin news on the week, Proton Wallet. So do you ever use Proton, the email service?

• 59:32David Hoffman?

  Proton Mail?

• 59:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 59:33David Hoffman?

  Proton Mail?

• 59:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Proton Mail. So pseudonymous email encrypted, fantastic privacy tool. I have some Proton Mail accounts. And yeah, just-

• 59:43David Hoffman?

  You've never emailed me with those?

• 59:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, those are my secret accounts that just like no one knows about. Or maybe I have and you just don't know who I am, right? Because it's not, that's the idea. It's not tied to my identity. So-

• 59:52David Hoffman?

  Well, I don't check my email, so that's how I get my privacy.

• 59:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, what's interesting though is Proton Wallet is one of those tools like Signal where they are crypto adjacent, but they haven't gone all in on crypto. They haven't really rolled out a crypto product until now. So the Proton Wallet. David, this is a Proton email rolling out a Bitcoin wallet, which is non-custodial, open source, as you'd expect, completely end-to-end encrypted and integrated within the Proton Mail app. So you can basically send Bitcoin the way you would send email. I think not revolutionary, of course. There's lots of different crypto wallets out there. But it's very cool to see a privacy-centric organization start to embrace crypto. I've long thought that there's an alliance there. We just haven't made, you know, people like Signal, people like Proton Mail.

• 1:00:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  And this is a good signal with their development of this app. And I'm looking forward to trying it.

• 1:00:41David Hoffman?

  This is what Vitalik would call defensive acceleration, accelerationism. All of Proton's products, I would call it defensive products.

• 1:00:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, totally, totally agree. All right, meme of the week.

• 1:00:52David Hoffman?

  You're gonna have to explain this one, actually. This is a you meme.

• 1:00:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  So apparently you signed me up to play pickleball in Permissionless while I was out. So I was out earlier this week. And now I come back and we are booked to play Permissionless.

• 1:01:04David Hoffman?

  We have a pickleball team.

• 1:01:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so like, I've not talked to you about this, but like, how's your pickleball game, man? Because like, mine's not great. I'm not gonna lie to you right now.

• 1:01:10David Hoffman?

  Mine's, mine's pretty good.

• 1:01:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Really?

• 1:01:12David Hoffman?

  Did you know, did you know that pickleball, the phenomenon that is pickleball, was created on Bainbridge Island, Washington, of which my family has a vacation home?

• 1:01:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  No way.

• 1:01:22David Hoffman?

  And so my mom, I'll call my mom right now. I'll call my mom right now and be like, hey, mom, how's your day going? And she's gonna be like, great. I just played like three hours of pickleball.

• 1:01:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh my God. My parents play pickleball too. They love it. They live in Florida. Yeah, my, my dad was just here and he offered to just be like, hey, if you need training for this, you know, come down to Florida and I'll help train you. And I do, because I don't, how often do you play?

• 1:01:44David Hoffman?

  Oh, I have only played very few times, but it comes very naturally to me.

• 1:01:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 1:01:48David Hoffman?

  So I'm not stellar, but like, it sounds like I'm better than you.

• 1:01:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, probably. You've got some racket sports, though, like, you know, just tennis or, you know.

• 1:01:57David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, well, so we're gonna need to practice some pickleball.

• 1:02:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:00David Hoffman?

  So get to Permissionless early.

• 1:02:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, all right. Well, I gotta do some practice here because, you know, I'm not gonna... I guess we're on a team versus, is it Mike and Jason from Blockworks?

• 1:02:09David Hoffman?

  I don't know how this works. It seems appropriate that we would go up against Mike and Jason. Apparently, Mike has a bad back, though, so like, you'll go up against Mike and I'll go up against Yano.

• 1:02:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. Well, I'll be excited to see what the Polymarkets look like for this historic pickleball game at Permissionless.

• 1:02:27David Hoffman?

  Another reason to get your tickets before prices go up. There's a link in the show notes. And if you are a Bankless citizen, again, you get like 30% off, so go to your perks page. Get your tickets before the prices go up. And also, the point of this meme is that like, you can also sign up to play pickleball. This is like an open tournament.

• 1:02:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Thanks for mentioning that. All right, risk is just climbers, of course. You know crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. Not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.