ROLLUP: TRON's Massive Win | Dems Ignore Crypto | The $20M McDonalds Scam | Vitalik's Bull Post

Tron has been on a tear ranking second in stablecoin supply, highest number of token holders at 143.5 million, and has the second highest TVL among layer 1's at over $8 billion dollars. What's causing this big spike and... why? ------ 📣 GET 10% OFF PERMISSIONLESS TICKETS | USE CODE: BANKLESS10 https://bankless.cc/PermissionlessDiscount ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🦄UNISWAP | BROWSER EXTENSION https://bankless.cc/uniswap ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum https://%E2%81%A0https//bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🌐 OBOL | STAKE ON DVs, SCALE ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/obol 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT https://bankless.cc/toku ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 00:00 David's New Fighting Opponent https://x.com/Permissionless/status/1826245778098237923 05:35 Markets https://pro.kraken.com/app/trade/btc-usd https://pro.kraken.com/app/trade/eth-usd https://farside.co.uk/?p=1518 https://unchainedcrypto.com/blackrocks-ethereum-etf-surpasses-1-billion-in-net-inflows/ 09:17 Tron Taking Over? https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/tron 14:57 Fear vs Greed In Markets https://x.com/Barchart/status/1825970627011817561 https://www.coinglass.com/pro/i/FearGreedIndex 19:53 Dems 2024 Platform Release https://x.com/BitcoinMagazine/status/1825571943891792289 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1825620753783345308 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1825625975528501711 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1825619465339351144 https://washingtonreporter.news/editorial/scoop-kamala-harris-likely-to-nominate-gary-gensler-as-treasury-secretary-if-elected-senate-sources/ https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1825618904686739630 32:36 Trump Onchain https://blockworks.co/news/donald-trump-nft-royalties-memecoin-taxes https://edition.cnn.com/2024/08/15/politics/read-donald-trump-financial-disclosure-forms/index.html https://opensea.io/collection/trump-digital-trading-cards 39:02 Optimism Disabled Fraud Proofs? https://x.com/Optimism/status/1824560736657670314 42:47 Pump Dot Fun https://x.com/adam_tehc/status/1824994679265349802?s=46 45:33 McDonalds Memecoin? https://x.com/timo_bult/status/1826284191115530600 https://pump.fun/4BRummYdfvoEGQwYzTSmn5F6RyAFdrHUTFkeagobpump 50:02 Story $80 Million Raise https://www.story.foundation/ https://x.com/jasonjzhao/status/1826236451954286946 53:58 Sorella Labs $7.5 Million https://www.theblock.co/post/312222/paradigm-sorella-labs-ethereum-mev-problem?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social https://www.theblock.co/post/312222/paradigm-sorella-labs-ethereum-mev-problem?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social 57:20 Meme Of The Week https://x.com/vitalikbuterin/status/1826253901240431083?s=46 ------ 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 4th week of August. It is time for the Bankless Weekly Roll-Up. It's roll-up time. David, the Democrats dropped their 90-page policy platform.

• 0:13David Hoffman?

  And they mentioned crypto how many times?

• 0:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. We're not going to spoil it, okay? We've got to get to more details of the episode.

• 0:20David Hoffman?

  Everyone, guess your number. Think of a number, right now. How many times was crypto mentioned?

• 0:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and the question, of course, this week, as well as the last, was, was this the week for the Kamala crypto pivot? Or, here's the other side of this. Maybe she's going to nominate Gary Gensler for Secretary of Treasury. To pull the opposites.

• 0:40David Hoffman?

  Which one is happening? Also, in the world of crypto, why optimism disabled their fraud proofs? Good, bad, why is that even possible? What happens next? Why do they do that? And the new meta in crypto this week, Tron. All the meme coin traders are bridging over to Tron. And if you are hearing that line right now, and you're like, ooh, I better get on Tron, you're probably too late.

• 1:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Speaking of meme coins, we've got to talk about the Grimace coin, David. Is it a scam? Or is this something real that McDonald's has posted their Instagram?

• 1:08David Hoffman?

  From McDonald's Instagram. Scam or real? Everyone, place your bet. Scam or real?

• 1:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, these headlines, man, it's one of those weeks. But at least we got this, and you're going to have to wait till the end of the podcast. Finally, Vitalik makes an Ethereum bull post on Twitter. Maybe the ETH Bitcoin ratio is saved, David? Maybe there's some hope here.

• 1:27David Hoffman?

  That's Vitalik doing his best to save the Bitcoin ETH Bitcoin ratio. I'm also doing my part, announcing that me and Kane Warwick are fighting.

• 1:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is this going to say the Ethereum? Like, fighting, actual fight.

• 1:40David Hoffman?

  This Ethereum and Ethereum fight. Yeah, karate combat. It was once upon a time Nick Carter, but now Nick Carter, he's just like, way out of my league. He's already killed a guy.

• 1:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, he has not killed a guy.

• 1:53David Hoffman?

  And so I'm committing elder abuse by fighting Kane Warwick at Permissionless. On October 11th, the last day of Permissionless, yeah, so the fight's on. Getting back out of retirement that I never got out of in the first place to fight Kane Warwick. So if that interests you, if two crypto Twitter people fighting at Permissionless interests you, you should get a ticket.

• 2:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, that's another reason to go to Permissionless, of course, is to see you beat up Kane Warwick, right? Which is obviously going to happen. Let's get the poly market ready for that one.

• 2:27David Hoffman?

  To be fair, Kane has 30 pounds on me. He's like 6'2". I'm like 5'10". He's got like 3 to 4 inches on me. He is a bigger human than me.

• 2:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah?

• 2:40David Hoffman?

  But he's agreeing to come down to, we're fighting at 175, so I'm going up 15, he's going down 15.

• 2:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's gonna be down 15, it's all gonna be like lean muscle by no Kane. I mean, he's a competitive dude.

• 2:51David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah. When I was talking to him about potentially doing that, he was waiting for Suzu to get back to him about potentially fighting, but Suzu being the spineless fraud that he is just ghosted him. And so he gave Suzu like 72 hours and then Suzu didn't say anything. And so then he's like, okay, now we're gonna fight, now down to fight. I'm just trying to like close my saga on the like 2 months of training that I did with Nick. Like I did that, and now I would like to put that to use, even though I haven't done anything since then.

• 3:25David Hoffman?

  And then Kane has much less fighting experience, I'm assuming. But he's also apparently in really good shape because he's been like freediving for, he said he's in the best shape of his life, in cardio terms. And so I've got fighting experience, he's got cardio readiness, and we've got 7 weeks to train.

• 3:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's not a lot of time, dude, and I know you're in Argentina, so it's gonna take you a while to get back to New York.

• 3:50David Hoffman?

  I'm not gonna join in MMA gym in Argentina. I gotta wait until I get back to New York, so I have 5 weeks.

• 3:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, we'll see what the odds look like once the prediction markets kind of release them, but okay.

• 4:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  If who wins, which one's bullish for Ethereum? Or is it just like bullish for Ethereum that we're having this fight? Is that how you're gonna say it, Rachel?

• 4:08David Hoffman?

  I don't know, man. It's just something.

• 4:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  If that wasn't reason enough to come to Permissionless to watch David beat up Kane, then we've got a lineup here, which is an incredible lineup. David, you should name a few guests. I know Chris Dixon is top of my list. Also, Balaji, Shrini Vasan. Who else we got, though?

• 4:26David Hoffman?

  The Permissionless lineup, I think, is one of the greatest lineups of a crypto conference that I've ever seen. Kiony from Monads, Rerom, of course. Ben Jones from Optimism, Nick White from Celestia, Harry from Arbitrum, Luca from Pudgy Penguins, Kane, of course, Vance from Framework, Tommy from Delphi, Santi from Empire Podcast and previously Parify, Haseeb, Tom Schmidt, Dan Robinson from Paradigm, Lucas from GTO, Tushar and Kyle from MultiCoin. Who else do you want? Oh, do you want Stani? Because we also have Stani. What else do you want? Samara Kohan from BlackRock, the queen of the ETFs. We got everyone. We got everyone. It's gonna be really, really cool. Three days, a lot of content.

• 5:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's somebody else on this list who I'd rather see fight. You should go fight Mert, David. Was that not an option?

• 5:14David Hoffman?

  I do not. I will not be fighting Mert.

• 5:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Of course, guys, if you don't have a ticket for Permissionless, you can go grab one. There's a link in the show notes. And if you're a Bankless citizen, you get, what is it, 30% off that ticket?

• 5:25David Hoffman?

  30% off. Bankless listeners, non-citizens, get 10% off. Bankless 10. Bankless citizens get 30% off on your guys' perks page where we put all of your guys' perks.

• 5:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Amazing. All right. Well, let's talk about markets this week, David. The Bitcoin markets. What's the price point? Are we above 60K? Looks like we are.

• 5:44David Hoffman?

  Yep, holding head and shoulders above 60K. 60,600, up 2% on the week. ETH price started the week at 2,640, ending the week 2,610, down 1% on the week. Call it flat for both, I would say. ETH Bitcoin ratio, not doing great at .043. But we won't talk about that. The Ether flows, the ETF flows are terrible. They're pretty bad.

• 6:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not great.

• 6:12David Hoffman?

  They're not great. They have been negative since August 15th. And so negative 40 million on the 15th, negative 15 million on the 16th, negative 13 million on the 19th, negative 6 million on the 20th, and negative 18 million on the 21st. Wow, oof.

• 6:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 6:29David Hoffman?

  Totalling of all time since inception, negative $458 million.

• 6:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  This was a bad week for net outflows of Ethereum. So like, and so when you say inflows, outflows, like not great. I mean, historically, they've been pretty good. I mean, if you look at all of the ETFs, ETH is like number five in terms of your best top performing ETFs.

• 6:51David Hoffman?

  Total new inflows, yeah.

• 6:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. The problem is, particularly this week, we got absolutely slammed with a whole bunch of outflows. All of that, of course, coming from grayscale ETH or ETH.

• 7:00David Hoffman?

  It's all coming from grayscale.

• 7:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, you could say, look, it's just accelerating. This needed to happen anyway. But the net of it is like last week, when we were saying these numbers, we were at, you know, 360 net outflows, right? We want to get that to zero and then we want to get that to positive territory. This week, we're at 460 million net outflows. So that's not feeling great. Do you think, do you think some of the bears were right? That like institutional investors don't care about Ethereum?

• 7:27David Hoffman?

  Well, I will say granted, the amount of time that we were all surprised about the Bitcoin outflows from the GBTC with the Bitcoin ETFs launched, that was like, that was about two weeks of outflows and like dashed expectations about the Bitcoin ETFs. And then things reversed. And we are at two plus, like a little over two weeks, two weeks. We started on the 5th, we were at the 22nd. So like, it's about the same amount of time before things reversed for Bitcoin. And also when the GBDC hole really got plugged. On the bright side of things, ETH A from BlackRock passed $8 billion in total inflows.

• 8:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's big.

• 8:05David Hoffman?

  So $1,404 million of total inflows into the BlackRock ETF. Fidelity doing great at 375, Bitwise doing great at 310. And then like, almost like no third, fourth place. VanEck is in fourth at 60 million. But it's really those, those three contenders here.

• 8:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  I guess I would say it's probably still too soon to tell would be the TLDR of whether this has been bullish or bearish, but it hasn't been bearish yet. I mean, I don't think the data is fully in. We just had a bad week, let's say, on that side of things. Total crypto market cap, 1.2 trillion, about flat from last week, I think. David?

• 8:42David Hoffman?

  2.2 trillion. That's why I do it.

• 8:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, did I get it wrong? It's 1.1? It's 1.2 trillion?

• 8:49David Hoffman?

  2. No, it's 2.2 trillion.

• 8:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  I was looking at this. What is this? Oh, this is Bitcoin. Yeah, that's why you do it, David. I was looking. Bitcoin is 1.2 trillion and total crypto market cap is 2.2. I can't believe I just like lost a trillion in there.

• 9:05David Hoffman?

  Brian just became a Bitcoin maxi. Temporary Bitcoin maxi.

• 9:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Everything else is shitcoin. There's only Bitcoin. Okay, well, I'm doing this section for you, David, because I know you are an enthusiastic Tron shiller and you're like pumper. And so, and this is not like, I'm being a little facetious here, but like, David, actually lately, you've been, you've been DMing me and you've been like, hey, do you see what's going on with Tron? Like, you should buy some Trons. Like, we should get some Tron. And you've been doing it on justifiable reasons, which is, you say the fundamentals are great. I don't know if your experience in Argentina is also confirming this, like if people in Argentina are actually using Tron, but here's Tron on the 7-day. 20% up, one of the top movers, number

• 9:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  four, just behind Ave, which also had a great week, and Polygon. But let's talk about Tron. Okay, in your words, explain to me, why is Tron doing things in the market?

• 10:04David Hoffman?

  This week or this year? Like, pick a timeframe for me, because there's two different answers depending on the timeframe.

• 10:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, are you bullish on the week or are you bullish on the year, David?

• 10:12David Hoffman?

  I'm more bullish on the year than I am on the week.

• 10:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Then there you go. Let's pick that time horizon.

• 10:18David Hoffman?

  Tron on the year is doubled. It started, and even, so going back two years, so like, call it January 2023, so a year and a half, Tron was at 5 cents, it's currently at 15 cents. So it's 3x'd in 18 months. Strong, outperforming the market. Hasn't outperformed Solana, but it's outperformed basically everything else on like just very strong network-based activity, largely stable coin transfers, and a lot of TRX being burnt. $271 million of Tron was burnt over the last year. How much ETH was burnt in net, Ryan, over the last year, would you say, do you think?

• 10:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, what's the number for Tron?

• 10:56David Hoffman?

  $271 million of Tron was net burnt over the last 12 months. How much ETH was net burnt over the last year?

• 11:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  400 million.

• 11:07David Hoffman?

  We issued

• 11:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guess.

• 11:08David Hoffman?

  12 million. We issued 12 million. Ether was net inflationary year over year, whereas Tron burnt $271 million of Tron on dominantly stable coin transfer volumes.

• 11:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you saying?

• 11:20David Hoffman?

  All over the world. And so this is like not really activity in Europe, maybe it's a little bit in Europe, not actual activity at all in the United States, but like Eastern Europe, South America, Africa, like in Argentina, Tron is like the dominant blockchain for stable coin payments. I was like, I think I mentioned this on a podcast, The Weekly World, not too long ago. Tarun Chitra was in the country of Georgia not too long ago, and he said the whole country of Georgia just runs on Tether on Tron. And so this is how Tron has just like performed an outsized amount of just burning from network activity.

• 11:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and you're saying, you're saying burning, right? So it's just fees and then they burn a portion of that, that fees. That's why I was getting a little wrapped up. But it's actually just like total fees is impressive. So here's a chart for you on Token Terminal. David, Tron is in pink here. So Ethereum in kind of this aqua tech color, and Ethereum was crushing Tron in terms of total fees generating, generated.

• 12:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, well, during the bull market, was that a bull market? During March, you know, kind of April, earlier in the year.

• 12:25David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the ghost market.

• 12:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, you can see, it's all Ethereum, right? In terms of fees generated. And then Pink starts to take over for the past like three to six months. And now Pink is like dominant. So, uh, let's see, at the beginning of the last 90 days, Tron was pulling in just 44% of the revenue. Now Tron accounts for a staggering 93% of the top five chains revenue.

• 12:48David Hoffman?

  That's Ethereum, Bitcoin, Solana, Binance Chain, Tron. Tron accounts for 93% of the revenue.

• 12:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right.

• 12:55David Hoffman?

  And so this is why I've been like, I've been like pinging Bankless Ventures, being like, hey, we should just like buy, guys, we should buy some Tron. We should just put some Tron. We don't gotta, we don't gotta tell anyone. No one needs to know.

• 13:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Fundamentals, fundamentals is your, is your use case here. And then also, uh, let me give you another explanation for why Tron is up. Maybe on the week or maybe this is more than a month.

• 13:15David Hoffman?

  The week news is very different.

• 13:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, this is sunpump.meme. You remember pump.fun?

• 13:21David Hoffman?

  I do remember.

• 13:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Solana has that going on. It's still going. Well, Justin Sun, not to be outdone, has sunpump.meme. And, uh, it's doing some activity here. Uh, look, here's a Dune board.

• 13:33David Hoffman?

  It's incentivized, they are incentivizing memes on Tron. Uh, so there is like over $200,000, $300,000 of a prize pool based on performances of specific coins.

• 13:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 13:45David Hoffman?

  There's also a partnership between sunpump.fun and Polonyex, a centralized exchange. So if you launch a meme coin on Sun Pump and it maintains a million dollars of trading volume for three days in a row, it will get listed on Polonyex.

• 14:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  There, David, you feel good about that now? You feel good about Tron? It's just all meme coins and pumps.

• 14:05David Hoffman?

  Damn it, dude, I was really like having fun with my stablecoin, like fundamentals. And then we get meme coins.

• 14:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, we like, Pokétron on the level of decentralization, et cetera. Um, like that's all, you know, and Justin Sun, you could say all sorts of things about him, of course. You could say all sorts of things, but one thing that is impressive, you are right, is, is the fundamentals. Like people, users are actually using it. It's actually generating revenue. So you can't take that away. That's all on the on-chain data.

• 14:31David Hoffman?

  Mm hmm, mm hmm. And like, I think the meme coins are actually like the much less dominant price mover. It's the local price mover for this week because like it's getting some marginal new capital, marginal new users. Say what you will, like, there has been 250,000 new addresses in the last 24 hours on Tron. And so that's, that's kind of responsible for the short-term price action. But really, the big iceberg under the water is just like the, the fact that like Tron is like the world's stablecoin payment provider.

• 14:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, David, the meme coins aren't enough to restore investor sentiment in crypto, at least not yet. But, um, you know, the stock market's doing pretty well when it comes to sentiment. So it was just a few weeks ago, earlier in August, was that August 4th, August 5th, we got that like massive drop on a regular Sunday and then into Monday in the stock market. And, uh, the markets, the NASDAQ, S and P 500, all swang into extreme fear territory. Well, we are back to, uh, neutral in the stock market on fear and greed index, uh, market sentiment. So stock, stock market's kind of feeling good, willing to let the, um, the yen carry trade shenanigans, just like, uh, you know.

• 15:40David Hoffman?

  Gone.

• 15:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's gone. It's gone. We forgot about it. That's gone. Resume the bull. And Jerome Powell, you know, it looks like he's cutting rates in September. That has not been the same with crypto. So we are still in the fear territory in crypto, kind of lagging behind. Not extreme fear at this point in time, but steer still kind of fearful.

• 15:59David Hoffman?

  I think people are kind of just worried that like crypto just doesn't have momentum and we're losing momentum. Uh, and if we don't have, we, if we don't, if we can't continue to go up, then like, then therefore we go down. At least like, does it have to be that, that way? But traders might make it become that way. Like, oh, we stopped going up and let's sell. And then you have like another like liquidation candle. Like, sometimes that's how crypto markets work.

• 16:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do these people not see progress that we're making on sunpump.me?

• 16:27David Hoffman?

  How, how dare they deny the innovations that we have?

• 16:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, we got more coming up. The Democrats had their national convention this week, so did it include a crypto? I hope you have that number in your head of how many times crypto was mentioned in the policy. Also, the Harris campaign did say something about crypto on the week. Was this a pivot? Or is Gary Kinsler going to be the new Secretary of the Treasury? Also, some metrics for you, David. Do you know how much ETH Trump holds? Do you know?

• 16:57David Hoffman?

  A very much not zero amount.

• 16:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, yeah, we're going to give you that not zero amount in the next section. He's also like this on-chain entrepreneur with tons of recurring revenues. We'll talk about that, too. We'll get to all of that, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including our recommended exchange, which is Kraken.

• 17:16David Hoffman?

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• 18:01David Hoffman?

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• 18:46David Hoffman?

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• 19:31David Hoffman?

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• 19:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Democrats had their national convention this week. News media was abuzz and they released their 94-page policy platform. I've got the index here, David. So, the answer to how many times...

• 20:05David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I'm sure you read, you read every single word, right? Between you and I, you're the reader.

• 20:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  I read a few words, not every single words, but I did do a nice, you know, Ctrl F to search for a keyword, which is crypto. So, how many times, David, did crypto, was crypto mentioned in this policy paper?

• 20:21David Hoffman?

  Drumroll. Zero times.

• 20:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Zero times.

• 20:24David Hoffman?

  It was zero times.

• 20:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yep.

• 20:25David Hoffman?

  Zero times. What about Bitcoin?

• 20:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bitcoin had zero times.

• 20:29David Hoffman?

  Zero times. What about blockchain? What about blockchain?

• 20:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Also zero. Do you want to give me some more?

• 20:35David Hoffman?

  Digital assets.

• 20:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Zero.

• 20:38David Hoffman?

  Hmm. Fuck, man, I'm out of ideas.

• 20:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's all of them. Yeah, no tokens, you know, like, nothing, nothing bad about crypto. Just like, nothing at all. Just complete silence.

• 20:50David Hoffman?

  Well, okay, inside of the Kamala campaign Democratic status quo, bad, like, nothing is bad.

• 20:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, that's how we have to interpret it because, I mean, nothing means, yeah, more of the same, which is bad. Now, some, some people are saying, look, this is a party platform document that was created before Kamala Harris, you know, took the nominee. Position. So this is under Biden, basically. So it doesn't include all of the the changes that Kamala might make. So maybe there's some opportunity for a refresh, but they they touch on a lot. They talk talk about corporate greed, housing, education, foreign policy, nothing on crypto. I'm a little jealous, though, because there is an AI section here. Look at this. Uh, seizing the promise and managing the risks of AI. I this is one of the sections I did read. I gotta say, it's not necessarily, um, great.

• 21:41David Hoffman?

  Is it positive towards towards AI or is it more like AI safety stuff?

• 21:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  There are.

• 21:46David Hoffman?

  Is it D cell or A cell?

• 21:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's feels more D cell than A cell to me. Um, you know, it's basically the first, the first line is AI holds extraordinary potential for both promise and peril. See? Promise and peril. So they're trying to split the difference here, but then then the remaining focus, uh, paragraphs mainly focus on the peril part of things. So definitely a little bit different.

• 22:08David Hoffman?

  So, okay, I interpret that as the bellwether for tech in general. And if they have a biased D cell towards AI, they're gonna have a biased D cell towards crypto even more so.

• 22:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, um, there, there was somebody who said, okay, well, point me to the Republican platform before you get upset, start pearl clutching around this. And, uh, the Republicans actually do have a platform on crypto. They have a paper.

• 22:32David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's the whole thing.

• 22:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, there's it's, I mean, it's not long, but it is good. So what Republicans in their platform on crypto, they say, we will defend the right to mine Bitcoin and ensure every American has the right to self custody of their digital assets and transact free from government surveillance and control. So nothing versus this statement.

• 22:52David Hoffman?

  Compare and contrast.

• 22:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a little bit better. And I gotta say, I, I was actually expecting something. I was actually.

• 22:58David Hoffman?

  Oh, you were. All right. You, you were expecting crypto to be in here.

• 23:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  I was expect, I mean, it's 94 pages, dude. Like.

• 23:05David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 23:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  AI got a section. I was expecting something like the AI section, promise and peril, uh, to be stated about crypto.

• 23:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Some good, some bad, but like something. So the silence has been kind of unnerving. And here's the context, David, is crypto has never been more politically active than this year.

• 23:24David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 23:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  I feel like we've shown Democrats votes. I think we've shown money. We've educated many of the policymakers on crypto policy. And this feels like, again, the silence does feel like a doubling down on anti crypto. Um, I, you know, so. That is what it is.

• 23:42David Hoffman?

  I do kinda, I do kinda think, okay, so, some, to put my head inside of like the Kamala campaign, for whatever, I can do that. They, like, they still want Kamala to be generic Democrat. They want to be like, they kinda wanna position her as like, as normal as possible. Same thing with the Vice President Tim Walz pick, like just-

• 24:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  I agree.

• 24:03David Hoffman?

  High school football coach, just be normal. And so the policy that they have is like, just middle of the road Democrat stuff. Just like, hey, Democratic Party, like, here's our party stance. It's what you guys expect and want. And I think if I was like, generic Democrat, like, active political person, and I saw like, crypto in there, I'd be like, what's that doing there? Like, that's weird. Like, I don't think she's trying, or the whole campaign, the whole party, is like, sticking their neck out about anything. So like, adding anything new, crypto or not, would be like, a weird move for them, because they are just trying to be very, like, no sharp edges, just like, generic Democrat. And so that kinda fits in that whole thing. I don't think we're gonna see anything, we're not gonna know anything about Kamala, until if she gets elected.

• 24:48David Hoffman?

  And then, we're gonna see what she does about crypto, and then I think everyone is like, rightfully worried, they're like, yeah, it's probably not gonna be good.

• 24:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. I think this is a sign that this is gonna be status quo, right? The fact that, like, I can see that case for why she wouldn't say anything about crypto or anything big, but like, in a policy document? In like, 94 pages of the Democrats' policy, it's not, they can't feign ignorance this time. I mean, Trump has made it a major political issue. There was the Sab 121 veto, that Biden, like, they're very aware that crypto is a subject in public consciousness. At least, they're aware of this kind of like, single-issue crypto voter force, and everything the industry is, is, is doing to kind of like, push back on these policies, and they say nothing to me. I mean, you could, I, I sort of interpret that as, as a spit in the face. Like, I interpret this as like,

• 25:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  we're keeping the, the status quo policy, and like, we're just totally ignoring what's going on on the other side. So, I mean, everyone can interpret this differently. And there was also this rumor floating around, which- Just like fits too perfectly, I think with the narrative here, which is Kamala Harris is likely to nominate Gary Gensler as secretary treasury if elected. Okay. So if you think crypto, if you think Kamala Harris campaign is kind of spinning on the face of the industry, this is definitely a headline that sends you to full fear, panic. Oh my God, our arch nemesis Gary Gensler as the secretary of treasury. Isn't this what he always wanted? Imagine that. And so my first question on

• 26:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  this, this is a publication called the Washington reporter dot news is, okay, is this true? This was a rumor circulating all around crypto Twitter. So I asked this publicly on Twitter.

• 26:30David Hoffman?

  Breaking Kamala nominates Gary Gensler as secretary. It's the truth. Don't like no source. Here's a picture.

• 26:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, yeah. From the insiders and people I talked to, David, it doesn't look like this is likely at all, that this is probably one of those things. Yeah.

• 26:46David Hoffman?

  The quote, the quote in here says, in an interview with a reporter, Tom Emma previously warned that Harris may pick Gensler or Senator Warren to serve as her secretary of treasury. That's the news. That's not, that is, that it was the rumor. Like, it's not that like we heard anything new. It's like one time this one guy said that she might do this. And that's what turned into a breaking tweet around Twitter. And then everyone like crypto Twitter being very viral and like knee jerky was like Kamala is the worst thing to ever happen to crypto because she's going to nominate Gary Gensler as the treasury secretary.

• 27:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Fits the narrative perfectly.

• 27:20David Hoffman?

  It fits the narrative so well. It's, it's fake news. It's just right up.

• 27:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  It seems like it's fake news and it's probably the type of news that's put out by a like political campaign injected into the media so that it goes viral. So now there's that seed of doubt.

• 27:33David Hoffman?

  It's malicious fake news. Right. And targeting the virality of crypto Twitter and people's wanting to confirm their own bias.

• 27:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. I, I, it's now, I should say, it's probably not a 0% probability. I mean, anything could happen.

• 27:46David Hoffman?

  Certainly not.

• 27:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  You never know. But the idea that this is a serious contender for this position, I don't think that's ever been true and certainly hasn't been true this week, at least according to everything that we're seeing. And the wake of this though, David, there was, there was a bright spot. So there's this news headline here. This is in Bloomberg crypto. Vice President Kamala Harris will back measures to help grow digital assets, a policy advisor to her campaign said, highlighting efforts to court an emerging cryptocurrency industry. And the headline here is, if I can get past the paywall, the headline here is something to the effect of Harris supports policies to expand the crypto industry. Aide said. So this is like a breaking of the silence. This has not happened from the Kamala campaign.

• 28:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  This happened like Wednesday, Wednesday, the 21st. Yeah, it's a real statement, a real statement, a real post in Bloomberg. The question is, what does it mean? You have any takes on what it means?

• 28:41David Hoffman?

  Is it real, though? Like, what's going on here?

• 28:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so the guy who made the statement, his name is Brian Nelson. Actually, by the way, David, do you ever use perplexity.ai?

• 28:52David Hoffman?

  I have, I have started to recently use perplexity.

• 28:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's so, it's so much better than Google, right? It's like, you asked the question of like, I asked, who is Brian Nelson? That's this, this aide to the Kamala Harris campaign. So he's formerly in the Biden administration. And then what's his position on crypto? And the summary was just fantastic. Nelson's position appears to be one of cautious engagement with the crypto industry, focusing on addressing potential risks and illicit activities while recognizing the need for clear regulations. He's the type of guy to come to crypto conferences, to take crypto calls. This is a source from him at Consensus. This is Brian Nelson, and he gave a talk at Consensus in the wake of tornado cash. It was very much like, we don't want to destroy crypto innovation,

• 29:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  but look, AML KYC is necessary and all actors need to play by those rules. It's that type of conference. So it's not like comforting, okay? But he is not someone who's previously ignored crypto. He attends the events and like as kind of the cop on the beat.

• 29:57David Hoffman?

  Conference is like a huge like gold star from me. He's an aide to the Kamala campaign?

• 30:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, he's an aide and he's former Biden administration on the Treasury side of things.

• 30:09David Hoffman?

  This is how we get him. This is our in.

• 30:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's not, I don't think it is at all. I think he's actually kind of an AML KYC maxi, kind of a, you know, that type of person.

• 30:21David Hoffman?

  He's not, he's not a foot in the door?

• 30:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Maybe, I don't know, maybe, maybe there's hope. I gotta say, we've seen no evidence yet again, another week has gone by of a Kamala pivot. And of course, even these statements are just statements. There's nothing really substantial behind them. So that's the story, man. Oh, this, do you want to get a Nick Carter tweet on all this?

• 30:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  He says, from VP Harris, "Look, I understand that I'm currently in power and have the ability to change literally anything regarding our max hostile anti-crypto policy, but instead of doing that, I'm going to make an extremely vague promise about potentially changing things later, maybe." That's his cynical take on what the Kamala campaign is doing here.

• 31:00David Hoffman?

  Okay, the anti-take to that is that Kamala's the vice president, not the president, and as vice president, you only have as much power as the president lets you have. And so, but there's still a chance, but there might be a chance take is that, well, Biden's not going to do anything because why would he? Like, he's in his, whatever, few months left. And then Kamala might actually pivot, but Biden isn't, like, the Biden administration is the way to go. But like, this is what I'm saying. If Kamala gets elected, and it hasn't been with the support of the crypto industry, she's not going to then pivot.

• 31:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  I know.

• 31:39David Hoffman?

  Like, well, she's already in power.

• 31:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is the point of maximum leverage is right now.

• 31:42David Hoffman?

  Is right now.

• 31:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Which is so extremely disappointing for anyone who has hoped and dreamed of making crypto bipartisan, where you have both parties fully support crypto as a credibly neutral, open democratic technology for the world and for the United States. And that doesn't look like that's happening. Maybe there's a sliver of a chance. You and I are talking to Ro Khanna tomorrow, so he is a crypto-positive Democrat in Congress.

• 32:11David Hoffman?

  I think that's going to get us the best insight as to what we can do here, what the status quo is, what are the state of things. I think that's the best conversation we're going to be able to have to get a peek into what's going on.

• 32:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, you want to know?

• 32:21David Hoffman?

  And if you're a believer of just like, hey, in order to truly reform that Democrats be pro-crypto, they need to lose this election and so they can rebuild, it's going to be the Ro Khanna Democrats that rebuild the Democratic Party into the party that we want it to be in the crypto industry.

• 32:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  That is true. Yeah, so you've got to maintain that dialogue. And that's why we're having Ro Khanna on, obviously. David, meanwhile, Trump is doing things on-chain. He's making a lot of money on-chain, okay? Donald Trump.

• 32:50David Hoffman?

  And stark contrast.

• 32:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  He's the on-chain entrepreneur of the year, maybe. I'm not sure. If you think of this as, you know, good, but this, apparently he released his financials, or at least some of his financials publicly. I'm not sure that this includes tax returns, but Blockworks put together this chart. This is how much Trump currently earns on both NFTs and on meme coins. I actually didn't know meme coins were actually paying Trump. I thought there was like a bunch of fake meme coins, but apparently there are some meme coins out there in which every time they're traded, he gets 2% to the Trump wallet.

• 33:29David Hoffman?

  And, and they're not his meme coins. He didn't launch the meme coins. It's other people's meme coins that in order to gain legitimacy, pointed the tax to his wallet. Yeah, it took me, it took me a second to realize that. So we have the Trump NFTs.

• 33:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  These are not official Trump meme coins then.

• 33:45David Hoffman?

  These are not, these are not official Trump. There's, there's, I think there's three or four of them. One of them is called Save America. Another one is called Trump Bucks. There's a few others as well. They pay a 2% tax on all transfers, not trades, transfers. So if you transfer it, it goes, 2% goes to the Trump wallet. These meme coins have generated $354,000 in ETH over the past four months for Donald Trump. Donald Trump. Yeah.

• 34:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's a lot.

• 34:12David Hoffman?

  And then in addition to his meme coins, he's got $2.14 million of ETH from sales of his NFT collections, his three NFT collections, his three Trump cards, along with two more million dollars of royalty fees from secondary sales of these NFTs.

• 34:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  These David, these are the NFTs. These are the ones that he gave kind of name, you know, image license to and gets royalties from this.

• 34:36David Hoffman?

  These are official Donald Trump NFTs. Yeah.

• 34:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  The meme coins are not, but what's the total of that? So apparently in total, all of his assets.

• 34:44David Hoffman?

  The supply is huge.

• 34:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, not crypto assets, but in total, he has 635 million in assets according to this. So not a billionaire according to this.

• 34:52David Hoffman?

  How do we know that?

• 34:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, that, that, that comes to the, these things right here.

• 34:57David Hoffman?

  Financial disclosure form?

• 34:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, some financial disclosures.

• 35:01David Hoffman?

  I thought he like was trying really hard to not give us that.

• 35:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't, I don't know all the details here, but I think these financial disclosures are here, but like everyone's asking for the tax forms and we don't have that. We do have these financial disclosures. So in summary, Trump has about $5 million in crypto. Most of that looks like it's Ether, at least the stuff we could see on chain. And it's a steady stream of revenue at this point. So it's like daily, he's getting like four to 5K a day at this point. And it's more than the amount of revenue he's doing for The Apprentice. You know, the royalty to The Apprentice?

• 35:33David Hoffman?

  Wow.

• 35:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Or the acting gigs he's done in the past, like you know, he was in Home Alones. You get some royalties on that. It dwarfs all of those revenue sources at this point.

• 35:44David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so he gets, he gets 10% of royalty fees for his Trump cards. I actually think he gets Polygon. I think he gets Matic Token, uh, cause they're on Polygon.

• 35:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I don't know, man. He's just the on-chain entrepreneur.

• 35:57David Hoffman?

  Donald Trump officially a Polygon bull.

• 36:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  What do we got coming up, David?

• 36:02David Hoffman?

  Uh, coming up next, optimism disabled their fraud proofs. Rattrow, uh, what does that mean? Uh, why is that a big deal? Uh, should you be concerned? Uh, McDonald's, the Instagram was hacked. Or maybe they just really wanted to launch Grimace Coin? I don't know. Uh, was Grimace Coin a scam? I don't know. Place your bets. Uh, and also a $440 million raise for a new blockchain. That's not the valuation. That is how much cash went into the bank account for this new layer one blockchain that you totally need to know about. Haven't heard one of them in these in a while, but we're going to get to all of this and more. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. 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

• 36:46David Hoffman?

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• 37:30David Hoffman?

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• 38:13David Hoffman?

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• 38:57David Hoffman?

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• 39:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  The Optimism Foundation Disabled Permissionless Fraud Proof. I thought they just enabled them. What happened here? What's the story?

• 39:10David Hoffman?

  There was a bug discovered in them. No funds were ever at risk. No funds were lost. A bug was discovered. And so they turned off the permissionless fraud proofs just so they could go and patch that bug. And why are fraud proofs important? Fraud proofs are the mechanism in which a Layer 2 becomes like totally user-soven, totally decentralized. If the sequencer is doing something that you do not like, you can use fraud proofs to prove fraud. If they are trying to push forward like an invalid state transition. So if they try to steal your money, basically you have a fraud proof backup to be like, nope, I can prove that that was fraud and I actually can exit my funds on the Layer 1. Exactly. So like, because of all the state in Layer 2, it gets like Merkellized. And then using a fraud proof,

• 39:55David Hoffman?

  you can trace the Merkle on the Merkle tree. And then you can prove to the system, the fraud proof system, that like an invalid state transition happened on a particular leaf of a Merkle tree. And then you can, you know, like actually either slash the sequencer, withdraw your funds, some technical stuff. But it's what it takes in order to have like fully autonomous Layer 2s that preserve user sovereignty. They are brand new technology. Like Optimism was one of the first ones, is the first one to ship permissionless fraud proofs. Arbitrum has fraud proofs, but it's not permissionless. A committee can submit a fraud proof, but not like the general public. But fraud proofs are really hard. There's like a lot of edge cases. There's a lot of permutations. There's a lot of weird, weird attack vectors. And so this was the first one.

• 40:40David Hoffman?

  So kind of rolled back a security measure so they could patch it and then release it. I don't even know if like perfect fraud proofs are, without a secondary measure, are like an actual possibility. Like you can have multi-client fraud proofs. Like you could have a ZK proof do validity proof and a fraud proof, both work. And if one fails, then the other one is a fallback. You could also have a third fallback as a multi-sig. So there's multiple ways of like kind of solving this. But I think people are kind of currently investigating like, can you actually really do perfect fraud proofs? And this is kind of the first hurdle, the first like.

• 41:22David Hoffman?

  Trip in the system that we're kind of like going through as these things become ready for primetime.

• 41:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  So there's a, there was a bug in it that doesn't feel great. The part that does feel good is that the optimism team was able to kind of like push a fix. And so right now, permissionless fraud proofs are disabled in a few weeks. Like I think in early September, they're going to push a patch and re-enable them. But this does bring into the conversation of, well, you like the optimism team, they have the ability to upgrade the code for optimism. And isn't that a centralization vector? And it totally is a centralization vector. And the reason you need it is because of situations like this. If, if we had hands off, if the keys were burnt, if there's no way to upgrade the optimism code, then basically this bug would be kind of like out until you had, you know, like,

• 42:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  I guess, I don't know, a fork of the entire system. It would be a lot messier. So I think it's going to take a long time to fully get these training wheels off. And when you have bugs like this, you kind of like remind yourself, wow, you know, bad stuff can happen. We have to give this years to sort of mature in the ecosystem without issue, without hack before we like make this fully decentralized with no ability to push an upgrade.

• 42:35David Hoffman?

  Yep, that's right. So the upgrade process will take about three weeks and then a new hard fork scheduled for September 10th will be the first phase of this getting fixed. And that's that. Ready for more pump.fon metrics?

• 42:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, yeah, I've been waiting for it.

• 42:51David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, holding your breath. Okay. I know, I know we kind of did a bit like this last week, but some even more data about pump.fon metrics of meme coin traders success, full meme coin traders have come out. Okay. Say like, say you make like a thousand dollars on pump.fon. Where do you think if you've, if you've made in profit $1,000 from pump.com, where does that place you on like the continuum, continuum of successful to not successful traders on pump.fon? Like better than 55%? Assuming like, you know, like base case, 50% of people have lost money, 50% of people have made money? If that's, if that's a possibility, where do you think making a thousand dollars places you?

• 43:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, a thousand isn't a lot. And we talked about this a little bit last week, so I feel like I'm more like prepared to make a guess, but it would definitely be. Under, you know, 1%, but still, 1,000 is not a lot. So I would just say like, I mean, that's a pretty low bar, a pretty low threshold. I mean, like you just, you just hold a crypto asset for like, I don't know, a few weeks. You can make, you can make that kind of money on just like something like Tron.

• 43:57David Hoffman?

  It could go up, it could go down.

• 43:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, exactly. Okay. So what's the answer to that? Making $1,000 or more, what's that hurdle?

• 44:04David Hoffman?

  If you make it, if you are in profit on Pumped Up Fund by $1,000, you are in the top 3% of all people who have ever played on Pumped Up Fund. If you've made over $10,000, you are in the top 0.5% of all wallets. Which I think people have started to realize, like, Pumped Up Fund is not an even playing field. It is a lottery ticket. Like, it's not, it's not roulette, where like, you know, you lose some, you gain some. It's not blackjack. It is, the odds are just like, it's not invested. The odds are like, you default, lose, but there's a very small chance that you make a lot of money. And that's actually, I think people are coming to terms with like, meme coins are kind of like that.

• 44:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's also different from a lottery in that if you are positioned to make a lot of money, it's probably because you have some information arbitrage, or you're an influencer, or you're like, like one of the devs in the project.

• 44:53David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 44:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  So it's, it's not even like-

• 44:55David Hoffman?

  You created the token?

• 44:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's not even like a lottery, which like, hey, the odds are bad and it's gambling, everyone knows this, but at least it's like, credibly neutral. I mean, there's some randomization of like, who wins the Lotto ticket? There's not that here, which kind of feels bad, man. It's like, you know-

• 45:11David Hoffman?

  You never hear anyone about like, rigging the lottery numbers. Like, that doesn't happen.

• 45:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right. But I guess, you know, the, the hope that you're gonna make a million dollars on meme coins is just like, not happening for a lot of people. There was a notable release on Pumped Up Fund, though, this week, David, and that is Grimace Coin. What I have to assume is McDonald's official coin.

• 45:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  For their lovable mascot.

• 45:43David Hoffman?

  An official legitimate meme coin from McDonald's. What's Grimace, the word Grimace have to do with McDonald's?

• 45:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you remember, do you remember this character? This is like early 90s lore, I think, like this guy, this.

• 45:55David Hoffman?

  The big purple fuzzy guy?

• 45:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Purple fuzzy creature, like no one's really sure what sort of creature he is or what he's supposed to be. This is Grimace. You know, he used to team up in the early, like late, late 80s, early 90s with like Ronald McDonald's. Yeah, his name's Grimace. It's part of like ancient McDonald's lore. I don't know. So this is, and what we're looking at right here is the official McDonald's Instagram account. And it says this, a McDonald's experiment on Solana with the eyeball emojis. And then they link to it and.

• 46:25David Hoffman?

  A Solana address.

• 46:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's a Solana address and it is the, what appears to be, because this is the official McDonald's Instagram account. This appears to be the official McDonald's Grimace coin. They even got picture, have pictures of Grimace with Ronald here. And, you know, and people are excited, right? So if this is real, this is insanely bullish is one of the, the top comments here.

• 46:49David Hoffman?

  Okay, okay. So it was launched on pump fun because of course, token, the token went up to 200, $20 million market cap. Before nuking straight back down to below $650,000. The hacker of the, obviously, because this is not actually McDonald's.

• 47:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, thank you for saying that. Okay, this is not the official Grimace coin.

• 47:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, this is not the official Grimace coin. There is no official Grimace coin. The hacker of the McDonald's Instagram account, not even the Twitter, the Instagram, got about $700,000 out from this scam. He, they used pump to fund to snap up 75% of the total circulating supply and then spit it out between 100 different wallets. And then sold those wallets into the, the pump that happened. Okay, here's my question. I'm sure both are correct, but what is more correct? People saw this on Instagram and they were like, oh my God, McDonald's is launching an official Grimace meme coin I have to buy.

• 47:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 47:48David Hoffman?

  Or, or people saw this on Instagram and they saw, oh, the Solana Instagram was hacked. I'm going to go buy this before everyone else and then I'm going to dump it. Which is more correct?

• 48:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you asking me whether innocent people got hurt in this?

• 48:04David Hoffman?

  Yes, yes.

• 48:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  I have to, I have to believe very few innocent people actually got hurt in this. Maybe there's a few out there that are like, hey, I've been waiting my whole life for the Grimace coin on Solana. And they also know how to use like a crypto wallet and are experienced enough to go like, from this Solana address, go buy that on like in the Solana exchanges. So maybe.

• 48:28David Hoffman?

  Okay, so you've, you've got the chart pulled up. Can you zoom into the charts? Okay, so we've zoomed into where this token was launched.

• 48:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's green candle.

• 48:37David Hoffman?

  This green candle is a spike at 11:15 a.m. And then it goes all the way back down, like most of the way back down. It's kind of hard to tell because it's not in log, but like by 12 p.m. So this happened, most of the activity happened inside of 45 minutes. Like are normies who don't know what the, what's up with meme coins and pumped up fun buying this thing inside of 45 minutes because they saw it on Instagram? Or is it people with their finger on the trigger because they're like in the meme coin trenches and they're just like ready to go? I think it's the latter.

• 49:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  I do not think any sweet old ladies got hurt in this, like fortunately. Although I will say, I mean, that's quite the price. You go and you hack a corporate social media account and you make a cool 700K. It's putting quite the price tag on like for all of these hackers.

• 49:24David Hoffman?

  Exports.

• 49:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, to make this amount of money.

• 49:26David Hoffman?

  So on the way out the door, after this is all decided done, the hacker of the McDonald's Instagram page edits the Instagram bio and says, sorry, my N-word. You have just been rug pulled by India X Crew. Thank you for this $700,000 on Solana.

• 49:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ooh, just asking for it. That level of hubris, huh? Just asking for it.

• 49:48David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 49:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go. That's the legacy of Grimace Coin. Maybe we'll have a real official Grimace Coin at this, like at some point in the future, but it is not.

• 49:55David Hoffman?

  And we're all just gonna, we're all just gonna let it go by because we're gonna be like, that's a scam.

• 50:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  We'll really miss out on the opportunity. All right, let's talk about some raises of the week. This was an absolutely major one, massive one.

• 50:07David Hoffman?

  Monster.

• 50:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  It feels very, very bully.

• 50:10David Hoffman?

  Largest of the year?

• 50:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so this is announcing $140 million from the Story Protocol. That's the raise amount, that's not the valuation. This is a Layer 1 blockchain called Story, which is the world's IP blockchain. Okay, and some notable investors here, A16C.

• 50:28David Hoffman?

  The world's IP blockchain?

• 50:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, Bollages, Srinivasan, like some notable investors here. The actual, this was actually a Series B, so it was 80 million. So I think they're announcing their bigger amount, which is 140 million total. This amount specifically was 80 million, but they've raised 140 million total. So it's an IP, it's a Layer 1 IP blockchain. I have to admit.

• 50:48David Hoffman?

  What is an IP blockchain? They, did they just make that up? They just made that up?

• 50:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's programmable IP. So I imagine it's, I don't know, it's things like trademarks.

• 50:59David Hoffman?

  Programmable IP.

• 50:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Things like, I don't know, what other IP, they just, different copyright licenses, I suppose. Could be patents, you know, programmable IP.

• 51:11David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 51:14David Hoffman?

  There.

• 51:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  If you don't have something nice to say, David. There is more information about like the thesis behind this from one of the founders here, Jason Zhao. And then he actually goes through why it had to be a Layer 1. Apparently, they tried with optimism first, so they wanted a smart contract protocol. Again, like here's a bull case, maybe. IP is just another type of asset. You know, you're a believer, aren't you, David? Aren't all of us that all real world assets will eventually be on chain? So that obviously includes IP, patents, this kind of thing, licenses to songs, all of this. And they tried to do it in a Layer 2 at first. Turned out, they couldn't kind of get that working, wasn't as programmable as they needed. They had to build it from scratch.

• 51:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  And then you have a Layer 1, the world's first IP blockchain. So you should, you should read the entire.

• 52:04David Hoffman?

  I have, I have not read this.

• 52:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  You gotta read it.

• 52:06David Hoffman?

  Some of these premises do not fit inside of my model for how blockchains work.

• 52:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, I know they don't.

• 52:12David Hoffman?

  The Layer 2 is as equally as programmable as anything else. Like, there's no loss of programmability because of the Layer 2.

• 52:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Maybe I misstated that. I'm like, I've kind of skimmed it. I need to give this more thought, too. But that's what's going on. I think your model, it doesn't fit in your model because you're probably reminded of, as am I, like chains like Flow, for instance. Remember, Flow was going to be kind of the gaming, NFT, collectible.

• 52:36David Hoffman?

  It's like the NFT Layer 1.

• 52:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Blockchain Layer 1. And that really just hasn't amounted to anything. It was an absolutely massive raise, like during the peak of last cycle. So I think you're probably getting flashbacks or something like that.

• 52:49David Hoffman?

  That's right.

• 52:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know. Open mind, I suppose. But that is a massive raise, and we haven't seen the likes of this for a very long time in crypto.

• 52:57David Hoffman?

  Okay, since we are talking about IP on the blockchain, this is not the first time that this has been, like, worked on. This is not the first idea of bringing IP on the blockchain. People out of the DCEI space have just contributed this open source standard called the IP NFT, so Intellectual Property Non-Fungible Token, to provide a secure and immutable proof of ownership for intellectual property on chain. These tokens ensure the details of IP ownership are unique, transparent, tamper-proof, enabling researchers to asset ownership, raise funds, and monetize IP. This is from like this open source document out of the DCEI community for like a legal, smart contract structure to host IP inside of an NFT. And this is an open standard that people have worked on.

• 53:42David Hoffman?

  People in the Gitcoin community have worked on this. Vida DAO, the DAO trying to build like longevity tech in this space, has worked on this as well. So I would also like, since we're talking about IP, I'd also like to point over to that open standard, which exists and is maybe worth your attention as well. Second raise on the week, Sorella Labs raised 7.5 in a seed round to solve MEV on Ethereum and also specifically Uniswap.

• 54:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, obviously, like, solving MEV is a pretty large, like, design space here, but they're doing it in a cool way. What are they up to?

• 54:16David Hoffman?

  So this is specifically around Uniswap in Uniswap V4. They're building a hook to kind of solve the like impermanent loss. The arbitrageurs eating away at liquidity inside of Uniswap from largely sex dex trading. So like since Ethereum has 12 second block times or just any block, any even layer two has slower block times than like say Binance, which Binance doesn't have block times. It's just like real time. And so because blockchains lag Binance, LPs and Uniswap get their liquidity nibbled away from sex dex arbitrage. It's a very big problem. It's one of the reasons why like LPing in Uniswap has not been able to be as profitable as it could be because they're getting eaten by arbitrage bots.

• 54:57David Hoffman?

  So Sorella Labs is building a hook on Uniswap V4 that LPs can deposit their liquidity into Uniswap through the hook. And then traders, if they want to access that liquidity through the hook, have to trade through the hook. And the hook is an extension of Uniswap. It was discussed when Uniswap V4 was announced. It reorders the transactions. It does the MEV, but it points the MEV back into the LP positions rather than giving it to the LP bots. So rather than LP bots capturing 99% of the arbitrage, the MEV, the hook captures 99% of the MEV and points it back into Uniswap liquidity providers with the goal of trying to make LPing in Uniswap great again. That's the deal.

• 55:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I mean, I think this is an example of like in the background, the builders are continuing to build and solving some big problems. You remember we were looking at dex volume a little while ago as a percentage of a total market volume and like when we first got into crypto, you know, at least DeFi was launched, you know, 2019, 2020, there was nothing, there was no activity on dexes. It was just like it was below 0%, it was below 1%, right? And now we're at about 15%. So 15% of crypto market trading volume activity now happens on dexes. But that still leaves 85% is happening on sexes. That's where the price discovery is. That's where the deep liquidity is, all of that. If we're, if we want to get that to 30% on chain or 50% on chain or completely invert

• 56:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  that and get this to like. 85% on-chain, 15% on sexes, then you need to make it attractive for capital to locate here and liquidity to locate here. And solving this type of infrastructure problem does that. Anyway, it's bullish. I think we're going to get beyond 15% in the coming years as we solve problems like this, like towards 20%, towards 25%. And then the majority of our trading at some point in the future will be bankless, on-chain, transparent. That's kind of how we solve this, right? Incremental gains like this.

• 56:54David Hoffman?

  Getting price discovery on-chain is like one of the most important landmarks that we can claim as an industry. Right now, DEX trading, DEX like on-chain price discovery lives in the shadow of Binance. We need that relationship to invert. We need Binance to respond to what is happening on blockchains, not the other way around. And mechanisms like this, designs like this are crucially important to making that happen.

• 57:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, we got the meme of the week, David. This is not only a meme, it is a Vitalik bull post. Quite literally, what are we looking at here?

• 57:30David Hoffman?

  Vitalik says, "I have been told on Twitter, I have been told that I need to do less philosophizing and do more Ethereum bull posting. Hence, here is an Ethereum bull post courtesy of stable diffusion and in painting plus gimp." And there's a picture of a bull with a sign around its neck saying Ethereum is good.

• 57:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you see the traction that this got? Like, just like so many retweets, so many likes, so much more than-

• 57:53David Hoffman?

  2.5 million views.

• 57:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, he said it defeated. He wrote an essay this week, too. I don't know if you got caught up on that. It's a long one. It's like 10,000 plus words.

• 58:01David Hoffman?

  It was a long one. I read about 3,000 of them.

• 58:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, this destroyed the engagement of that long post in like just like three minutes, he said. So there's your Vitalik bull post. That's all he's willing to do. He never comments on price, David, does he? Like, very rarely.

• 58:17David Hoffman?

  The last time I saw him comment on price was when Solana was $8 and then he tweeted out like, "I hear there's a lot of really good builders on Solana" and that tweet perfectly marked the bottom of Solana in 2022. Yeah.

• 58:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  What was that other famous tweet? Was this in 2017? Have We Earned It tweet? That was the other time I'm recalling of Vitalik commenting on price.

• 58:39David Hoffman?

  He top ticked Ethereum and he bottom ticked Solana with his two price tweets.

• 58:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Honestly, Vitalik should take up trading. Yeah, for real.

• 58:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, gotta end with this. Of course, you know crypto is risky, including meme coins. 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 in the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.