ROLLUP: ETH's Big Pivot | Tariff Recession? | Bitcoin's Political Win | Worldcoin US Launch!

This week, Ryan and David dive into crypto’s dramatic new re-prioritization (pivot?) as Ethereum is shifting rapidly, prioritizing Layer 1 scaling in a move that has sparked intense community debate. Meanwhile, macro turmoil hits crypto with a looming tariff-driven recession and signs of American capital flight shaking global markets. Bitcoin tightens its grip on Washington, cementing itself as digital gold in the eyes of the Trump administration, and Worldcoin launches a U. S. rollout amid rising fears of an AI-driven dystopia. Plus, Sui surges on wild Pokémon rumors, Ripple’s bold move to buy Circle gets rejected, and Monero rockets after a massive Bitcoin hack. Is crypto entering a new golden age, or are these the early tremors of deeper uncertainty? Find out on this week's must-watch Weekly Rollup. ------ 📣BUILDBEAR | EASY EVM SANDBOX https://bankless.cc/buildbear ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🌐SELF | PROVE YOUR SELF https://bankless.cc/Self 🟠HEMI | BTC & ETH, ONE NETWORK https://bankless.cc/hemi ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 1:58 Markets 3:06 Movers of the Week https://www.bankless.com/read/whats-next-for-sui-in-2025 https://x.com/davewardonline/status/1877073873499197832? https://x.com/SuiNetwork/status/1914689214803009837 https://blog.sui.io/canary-capital-sui-etf/ 5:11 Macro https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1917575854961439151 https://www.apolloacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/042625-ConsumerandFirms_v2.pdf https://x.com/watcherguru/status/1917601209906520370 Meme: https://x.com/alifarhat79/status/1917585508818980906 https://x.com/RaoulGMI/status/1912554771644325905/photo/1 19:18 Ethereum Pivot? Or Reprioritization? https://x.com/ethereumfndn/status/1916883771280040264 https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/1917541325072916590 https://x.com/ethereumfndn/status/1916883782025482729 https://x.com/dankrad/status/1917678690852311333 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1917689036744835390 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1917564803909918856 https://x.com/hasufl/status/1917880676000411796 https://x.com/0xoxus/status/1917824751151600084 28:05 Base and Scroll Reach Stage 1 Decentralization Milestone https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary https://x.com/jessepollak/status/1917253415966798164 29:33 Worldcoins “At Last” Event in San Francisco https://www.ft.com/content/0c5c2b8d-b185-40b6-9221-b80ee130b92e?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://x.com/TheStalwart/status/1916277891299475462 38:45 Bitcoin Space Race https://x.com/BitcoinMagazine/status/1917271814356754459 https://bitcoinmagazine.com/politics/u-s-secretary-of-commerce-howard-lutnick-has-a-bitcoin-vision-for-america 42:20 What’s going on in Movement labs?! https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2025/04/30/inside-movement-s-token-dump-scandal-secret-contracts-shadow-advisors-and-hidden-middlemen https://x.com/hasufl/status/1917572935339888776 44:02 Monero likely pumped 50% due to suspected $330M Bitcoin theft https://x.com/zachxbt/status/1916756932763046273 45:51 Tether Now Holds 7.7 Tons of Gold to Back XAUT https://thedefiant.io/news/markets/tether-now-owns-7-7-tons-of-gold-to-back-its-xaut-token 47:09 US bank regulators pull back guardrails on bank crypto activities https://x.com/federalreserve/status/1915519104435224895 https://x.com/asvanevik/status/1915581219133415597 48:15 Senate Moves to Ban Congressional Stock Trading—Again https://x.com/HarrisonKrank/status/1916921283658252621 51:18 US DOJ seeks 20-year prison sentence for Alex Mashinsky https://x.com/cointelegraph/status/1917166974091534743 53:13 Circle rejected ripple takeover bid of $4-5B https://x.com/matthew_sigel/status/1917647009994993944 56:29 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

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

• 0:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Station is the first week of May is time for the Bankless Weekly Rollup, where we cover just about everything that happened in crypto, at least everything that happened that's important. David, man, we gotta talk about tariffs, alright? I wanna bring some macro into today's episode.

• 0:19David Hoffman?

  People have been looking for your macro takes.

• 0:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh yeah? Well, they're hot takes, alright? And GDP numbers just came in, and they're kinda, they're not looking great. So I've got three macro catalysts I think that Bankless listeners, crypto investors, should be looking out for. Catalyst, not saying they're good catalysts, they could go either way, but we'll get into that.

• 0:38David Hoffman?

  Go somewhere. We're also gonna talk about the Ethereum pivot, or just a strategic reprioritization, it really depends on who you ask, and we're also gonna talk about that as well.

• 0:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  WorldCoin also, they're rolling out the orb in the US, we'll talk about what that means, and I guess this is like, for people worried about dystopia and AI bot propaganda, I don't know which world is better, that world, or like, we're gonna all get orb, our eyeballs orb, so like, I may be up for this.

• 1:05David Hoffman?

  I think as AI has gotten more real, people are slowly coming around to the idea of WorldCoin more and more, we'll talk about that. And then also Bitcoin is just embedding itself deeper into American politics. A massive hack sends Monero up 50%, Stewie is up 60% on a bunch of speculation that they're gonna win Pokemon.

• 1:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 1:24David Hoffman?

  And then Ripple tries to buy Circle but gets denied, all of this and more. But first, before we get into all of that, a message from our friends and sponsors, Buildbear, this is, this one is for the Web3 devs. We know testing smart contracts, it shouldn't be a pain, it is a pain, there's a lot that devs need to go through to make testing smart contracts work. Buildbear lets you spin up your own EVM sandbox, so you can test, debug, deploy, all in one place. It's like GitHub for Web3, trusted by teams like Consensys and Gelato. So, if you want to, which you should, you can streamline your workflow and launch faster. Check it out at bankless.cc/billedbear. Alright Ryan, you ready to get into the markets?

• 1:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, let's do it, man. It's been a while since I looked at these charts, so tell me what's going on on Bitcoin.

• 2:04David Hoffman?

  Bitcoin up 4% this week, really a strong showing this morning, $97,000.

• 2:10David Hoffman?

  So slowly grinding up, trying to hit that $100,000 mark. Ether up 5% this week, 5% up to $1,850.

• 2:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  We'll take it.

• 2:19David Hoffman?

  Very different numbers. ETH Bitcoin ratio 0.019 and a total crypto market cap. Ignore the ratio. Total crypto market cap of 3.14 trillion. As a reminder, Ryan, the all time high for the total crypto market cap, I believe is just short of four. Yeah, it's like 3.9 trillion and we are coming in at 3.13 trillion today.

• 2:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, this is not looking so bad, right?

• 2:45David Hoffman?

  It's not looking so bad.

• 2:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Where's the blood here? I mean Bitcoin is down.

• 2:47David Hoffman?

  Oh, I know where the blood is. Oh, don't ask where the blood is.

• 2:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you gonna find some blood on this ratio? Oh God, look at this red chart on the ratio. But ignoring that, I mean Bitcoin's looking good. Crypto market cap's looking good. And there's some positive indicators. So overall, I mean, I don't think we're in a bear market, David.

• 3:04David Hoffman?

  Nope, nope, nope. First, before we get to your macro takes, we've got to talk about the movers of the week. And this section is brought to you by our friends and sponsors over at Uniswap. Sui is the mover of the week. A bunch of things going on in Sui land. The price rebounded about 40% in April to $3.6 after falling from its January all time high of $5.3. The market cap remains in the top 15. So Sui has cracked the top 20, top 15, peaking above 15 billion. Its DeFi ecosystem has surged recently with a TVL in Sui DeFi topping over $2 billion, driven by high yield protocols like Aftermath, SteamFi, and also some native stablecoin integrations.

• 3:44David Hoffman?

  And also Phantom Wallet, supported, has improved its onboarding into the Sui ecosystem. Sui itself pivoting hard into BTCFi, positioning itself as a Bitcoin DeFi hub with integrations like Babylon to enable Bitcoin staking. And then even beyond Sui, Sui is launching its own gaming console. Interesting strategy called the Sui Play 0X1. And then there was this massively speculative rumor, like found out by internet sleuths, connecting like terms of service between like a Sui webpage and Pokemon somehow.

• 4:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's all rumor, we should say.

• 4:18David Hoffman?

  All rumor. So that there's a rumor out there that they're maybe partnering with Pokemon on digital collectibles. And that has contributed to this Sui price action. All of this brought to you by the bankless writer David C., who put this into an article. And that is our movers of the week section, Ryan.

• 4:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Look at this too. Canary Capital advances first ever SUI ETF with an SEC filing. Just seems like SUI is like trying to speedrun all of the things that a blockchain is supposed to do to garner adoption. I gotta say though, look at this fully diluted valuation. That's almost $40 billion, David. $37 billion. Okay?

• 4:53David Hoffman?

  Well, $12 billion market cap, $37 billion fully diluted valuation. There's a big delta there.

• 4:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  What are we pricing in here? We pricing in like future fees? Is this, you know, DCF model? Is this monetary premium?

• 5:05David Hoffman?

  Only ask those questions about Ethereum, right? Other ecosystems, you don't have to ask those questions about.

• 5:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, or just pricing in growth. Let's talk about macro for a minute. Okay? So I've been just digesting what has happened since the beginning of this year from a macro perspective. And there's kind of three things that I'm keeping an eye on, David, and I think we should be looking at. Like, the first is tariffs in general, and this idea of a tariff-driven recession. All right. The second is American capital flight. This seems to be a trade that might be on, may not be. We'll talk about that, too. And the third is increasing global money supply. Okay, so that is the good old M2 monetary supply. These are the three things I think that are going to be really important for crypto investors over the next three to six months.

• 5:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  The first is tariff-driven recession. David, what's like your probability? How are you feeling about things, man? Like, what's your probability of recession right now?

• 6:00David Hoffman?

  I mean, I'm just gonna outsource my opinion to Polly Market, because I think that's the role of Polly Market. And Polly Market is pricing it in at increasingly high. Okay, so you got it. You just pulled it up, because I think you're of the same mind, coming in at 62% odds of a recession in 2025.

• 6:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, we don't know better than Polly Market, right?

• 6:15David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I'm not smarter than Polly Market. No way.

• 6:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so then you would basically defer to this and be like, hey, probably over 50% odds, 62% odds, that we're gonna have a recession sometime in 2025. You pretty much agree with that, okay? So GDP numbers came in just this week, and it wasn't great. So the consensus was, we're hoping for growth this quarter, this is Q1 GDP, of 0.3%. What we got was negative 0.3%. And keep in mind, January was actually a positive number. So we had kind of a shitty February, kind of a bad March to contribute to that negative rather than positive on GDP numbers.

• 7:01David Hoffman?

  So missed expectations by 0.6% feels large.

• 7:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it is large, right? And so this is, this is clearly the result of tariffs. And it's very difficult to, I think, spin this and say it's something else. This is tariffs.

• 7:15David Hoffman?

  Because Q1, like we started Q1 being very bullish and we, in the middle of Q1, tariffs unexpectedly happened. And so that's why, that's why we missed.

• 7:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, they did. And keep in mind that now there's a baseline 10% tariffs that America has just on basically everybody. And Secretary of the Treasury Scott Besant says that this is the new normal. So that's what's just generally in place. There is a next decision point on July 9th where, you know, ideally the US is negotiating with all of its partners, so EU, South Korea, Switzerland. It's said that these deals might take like weeks, not days. So maybe that, those deals could come in before the 9th. If not, then like, that's another decision point and, and the tariffs could increase for those partners there. And the China tariffs, they're just, that's, that's true tariff war between the US and

• 8:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  China is all part of this geopolitical struggle. So there's a report I read from a, you know, a fund, Apollo Report, they're predicting a summertime recession, David, and here's kind of how this works. So we got our April 2nd liberation day tariffs, right? And then we start to get, you know, container ships to US ports coming to a stop as these tariffs kick in. And then they, they kind of time box this out. Trucking demand comes to a halt that happens in May or late May. And then in early June, we start to see layoffs in trucking and retail industry and we get a summertime 2025 recession, right? That's how this could possibly.

• 8:43David Hoffman?

  It is May 1st. It is May 1st right now. That is not far away. That is almost here.

• 8:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so is this going to happen? I think that's what Polly Market is, is saying is that definitely. Only a possibility at this point and short term that's gotta be not great for crypto. Okay, like the short term expectations on that catalyst recession is probably not good. Crypto is generally a risk on asset. That's the perception so far. That's how it trades. So that's probably not going in our favor. The second thing, though, David, is American capital flight. Okay. And this kind of trade seems like it's on. You can sort of see it when US stocks go down. Bonds go down, like you know, bond yield prices, dollar goes down and then you have gold skyrocketing up.

• 9:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  People are leaving. Capital is just saying goodbye. Basically, the US has been the store of value. I mean, like for the entire world. So people store their value in the risk free rate. That's UST bills. The US stock market, S and P, it's been kind of the capital reserve, the property right system of the entire world since Bretton Woods, really. And maybe that's showing signs of reversing. And so the question is, does that trade continue? I guess like it could be worse. When you reflect on the year, the S and P is only down four to 5%. And of course, like indices like the S and P and the NASDAQ, NASDAQ's down 8%. These are future predictions, right? So it doesn't seem to be pricing in that much capital flight, at least at this point in time.

• 10:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  But bonds, of course, are stubborn at 4% 10-year treasuries. Scott Besson is trying to get bonds down as a result of all these tariffs and they're not really falling. So you got stock market down, you've got bonds kind of pricing up or being very sticky. And then you got, of course, we talked about total crypto, but then you have gold, which is trading at 33% up on the year. This looks like capital flight. Trump, of course, says this ain't my stock market. This is Biden's stock market. Do you see this tweet here? Dude, that was so funny. Everyone thought that was so clowning. You should just read it out. What did he say here?

• 10:53David Hoffman?

  So Donald Trump tweeted this out on Truth Social, his platform, his Twitter platform. This is a tweet from January 29th, 2024. So a little, like almost a year and a half ago. Is when he tweeted this, he tweeted out, this is the Trump stock market because my polls against Biden are so good that investors are projecting that I will win and I will drive the market up. Everything else is terrible and record setting inflation has already taken its toll. Make America great again. Okay. So that was his position that this is the Trump stock market a year and a half ago. He truths out just yesterday, this is the Biden stock market, not Trump's. I didn't take over until January 20th, which was nine days before that he tweeted out the last tweet that I just read.

• 11:36David Hoffman?

  Tariffs will soon be kicking in and companies are starting to move into the United States.

• 11:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Nine days in a year before.

• 11:39David Hoffman?

  Nine days in a year, yes. Excuse me, excuse me. So, you know, I think it's pretty classic. If it's going up, it's Trump, but if it's going down, it's Biden.

• 11:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. He continued, this has nothing to do with tariffs. I'm not sure that the market is believing all of that, but um. So let's say the American capital flight trade continues, right? So it's tough to know what magnitude this is. It's clear that there's something kicking in here. What do you think? Is that good or bad for crypto?

• 12:05David Hoffman?

  People have noticed that Bitcoin has started to trade more like gold since the tariff announcements. And I consider Bitcoin as being in this like third body superposition between tracking the NASDAQ and tracking gold. And sometimes it tracks gold more, sometimes it tracks NASDAQ more. And in this moment, it has shifted to tracking gold more, but it still is exposure to NASDAQ. So I don't, I'm bullish on crypto if the stock market goes down. But if the gold is going up in response to that, Bitcoin does get that benefit. It does get to be positioned as a sovereign, non-sovereign store of value, which is what this current market is looking for as an asset.

• 12:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  I totally agree. I think the tariffs are negative in the short run, but this is, this is basically the trend that everyone in crypto has predicted. This is the entire thesis. It's the decades long thesis that a credibly neutral alternative to the US monetary system, to all the fiat monetary systems around the world, an alternative property rights system would kind of kick in. That's what we're seeing with Bitcoin. And I don't think it's just going to be gold and Bitcoin. I think it's going to be the rest of crypto too. But that might not play out over the short run. We have no idea. And so can that counteract the tariff recession like we don't know so you gotta take that in mind and the last thing is David increasing global money supply and look at this chart Raul Paul puts out this is global M2 it's a projection

• 13:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  on global liquidity basically all of the money in the system the fiat system across all countries and it charts this with with Bitcoin here and we are at the point we're at a bottoming zone of global M2 so the last few years we've had a cycle of actually decreasing global monetary liquidity in all of the fiat systems and now we've sort of bottomed out and we're starting a new cycle we're starting another Raul Paul thinks of these in four-year cycles a liquidity cycle and M2 is going up and if you get recession okay you get American capital flight what's going to happen the money printers are going to turn on so what's that my friend is that bullish or bearish crypto?

• 14:06David Hoffman?

  Mm-hmm Ray Dalio put out a really good tweet that we don't have time to cover but he titled it it's too late the changes are coming this is an essay and article that he wrote in inside of Twitter and his first big point is that we are on the brink of a new monetary order the domestic political and international world orders are breaking down due to unsustainable bad fundamentals that can be easily seen and measured I think what he's pointing to and what I think everyone agrees with is like okay yes new world order incoming trade imbalance is being fixed you know China's needs to become not dependent on United States debt United States needs to become not dependent on Chinese manufacturing that is going to cause pain and in no way is there at all any sort of need to not print a bunch of money in order to ease that pain

• 14:49David Hoffman?

  why why would we not do that?

• 14:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes.

• 14:52David Hoffman?

  And so if anything if pain is going to happen that is going to come out of the value of fiat currencies globally because we just are going to print ourselves into less suffering which has been the Bitcoin or thesis about monetary policy as since as early as I can remember.

• 15:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look and all the governments are going to do this because the more they print and the more closed they become the more isolated they become the more attractive a credible neutral monetary system that is permissionless and completely open becomes that is bullish crypto all right maybe not in the short run maybe we got through a summertime recession I don't know what it's gonna do but like long-term time horizons 12 months and further we gotta be going up.

• 15:33David Hoffman?

  All right, coming up next, things are changing in the Ethereum Foundation. They put out a blog post, a handful of blog posts, talking about the new leadership structure. This isn't new news, but it's really codifying into an actual reality and putting that into a blog post, so we're going to talk about that. We're also going to talk about, did Ethereum pivot? Or did it do a strategic refocusing? I do think the words matter. Basin Scroll, RRL Stage 1 Rollups, and also World Coins US rollout. Have people changed their minds about the Eyeball Scaling Company? Because now there perhaps is going to be an Apple-like World Coin retail store coming to a city near you. To get orbs. To get orbs. So you can just go walk into a World Coin orb store and get orbs. We're going to get to all of that and more, but first, a message from some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, like Uniswap.

• 16:18David Hoffman?

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• 17:02David Hoffman?

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• 17:46David Hoffman?

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• 19:12David Hoffman?

  the SELF app is live on iOS and Play Store. Visit self.xyz and follow SELF Protocol on X. The Ethereum Pivot or the Ethereum Reprioritization? This is the theme, I think, that has been going around the Ethereum ecosystem, starting with the Ethereum Foundation announcing leadership structure change. So, like I said, this is not anything new. Xiaowei and Tomasz are the new co-executive directors of the Ethereum Foundation. And with that comes just overall restructuring of the EF as a whole. So now there are four board of directors of the EF. That includes Vitalik Buren, Iyamaiguchi, Patrick Storschnegger, who is the

• 19:53David Hoffman?

  Swiss legal counsel and then also Xiaowei, who is also the co-executive director and that. And so the board oversees the Ethereum Foundation's vision, ensures alignment with his values, holds authority over the executive appointments, holds authority over the executive appointments. And of course, the executive appointments are Xiaowei and Tomasz, who I think everyone is very bullish on Tomasz coming in and providing some like leadership, operational excellence in the Ethereum organization. And so the Ethereum Foundation put out this blog post and also another blog post from Xiaowei and Tomasz about kind of a co-statement about what their near-term goals are.

• 20:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  What are those? What are those goals?

• 20:33David Hoffman?

  There were a handful of goals, but Tomasz specifically identified three things that Tomasz wants to bring for the next 12 months of time during his time as his, you know, first, first 12 months of as co-ED of the EF. Scaling the layer one, scaling blobs, improving UX. Now, these three things have kind of turned into an Ethereum tagline. This is the take that Hesse put out on Twitter this week is that, oh, this, these are very clear, precise three things that can represent a rallying cry for the Ethereum community. Scaling layer one, scaling blobs, improving UX. And to me, I'm kind of like wrapping this all up and calling it Ethereum's pivot towards a product-centric roadmap. So rather than the roll-up centric roadmap, which we are still, are still on,

• 21:17David Hoffman?

  it is now a roll-up and a strong layer one roll-up centric roadmap, which is the thing that Ansgar and Donkrad identified in my podcast episode with him. But I think if you can just really distill it down to what is Ethereum trying to do? What is it pivoting towards? What is it refocusing towards? It is refocusing towards a product-centric roadmap. What's your take?

• 21:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  I agree with that. So like, there was some debate, though, whether you call it a pivot or Reprioritization. I mean, the thing that I would say justifies a pivot in some people's minds, I would say, including mine, is this top one, scaling the L1. That did not seem to be, according to the roadmap, a priority. Three months ago, six months ago, certainly not a year ago. It was all about number two.

• 21:59David Hoffman?

  It had also been like culturally blasphemous to talk about scaling.

• 22:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Layer one at times. Well, I definitely felt that like I felt that last summer when we had episodes with people like Max Resnick, for instance, who is now he's on Solana and his reason for that is like, he's basically like, oh, Ethereum didn't scale that one. So I'm going over here to a place they will. So that feels like a change to me and I would hazard to call it a pivot. But what's the other side of this? Anthony Sisano says, look, it's not a pivot. We always had scaling the L1 as part of the roadmap, merge, surge, scourge, verge, purge, all of that stuff. And he's also not wrong and he's saying this is more of a prioritization. So you're just taking things that were out there and you're bringing it up here. So pivot, reprioritization, like, do you think this debate even matters?

• 22:44David Hoffman?

  I think it, I think it does matter. The messaging does matter. And I agree with Hazu's commentary on this where he says, yes, you can point to Ethereum's 100 item roadmap and say, look, we have been working on all of these things, which is true. Scaling the layer one was always on the long-term roadmap for Ethereum. The pivot is that that long-term part of Ethereum's roadmap has been brought to the forefront. And there are people like Dunkrod and Osgar and Tomasz who are like, okay, we are going to emphasize layer one scaling now, this month. And really like zooming out, again, I will also talk about, cite Hazu's take here, where this is just like an ego thing. It's an ego thing where like, we don't want to admit that we were wrong.

• 23:25David Hoffman?

  We don't want to admit fault and we actually get to save face by saying it was always on the roadmap. And I think that is damaging because it's, it's good to admit that we got things wrong.

• 23:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's okay to change your mind?

• 23:39David Hoffman?

  It's okay to change our minds. We don't have to like, always say that we are infallible and we always got everything right. And so I think the market and the broader crypto industry,

• 23:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  They want to hear.

• 23:49David Hoffman?

  Which is becoming larger and larger where like, you know, there used to be a large amount of Ethereum dominance. There's now less Ethereum dominance. Most people do not align themselves with Ethereum messaging. It's good and okay for us to say it is a pivot because we got things wrong and we're going to make things right. And that is what the market wants to hear. That's my take.

• 24:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  I hear that take too. And I think Tomasz at the EF is clearly a pivot as well because this is somebody from the outside coming. In and changing things. By the way, Bankless listeners, we have an episode that drops with the two new EF co-leads. That's that's coming out on Monday, I believe. Already out for premium subscribers. Okay, so you can hear from the horse's mouth what they're what they're planning to do there. So that to me was like kind of a pivot in leadership. There's actually been some sort of cultural pivot at the EF and like things like this. So did you see this proposal from Dankrad? Dankrad, yeah. He put out, so this is EIP to scale Ethereum L1 100X over the next four years. All right, and EIP, this Let's go.

• 24:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't think this could have happened six months ago in kind of the cultural state that Ethereum was in. And I don't know, did you read his details, like the details as to why? He said, like, this was a very, my take was it looked like Ethereum is waking up, particularly the EF researchers. I mean, you and I, we're investors, we're podcasters, what can we do? We're just like, we're just talking heads, right? But the EF researchers kind of moving towards, well, let me just read what Dankrad said. He said, key considerations, why I think we should commit to the gas limit change. Oh, first he says this, the current way of doing things is likely to make Ethereum irrelevant over the next five to 10 years. And so instead, he said, we shouldn't just do the current thing we're doing.

• 25:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  We should aim to 3X the scaling on Ethereum, transaction throughput on Ethereum every year for the next four years. And basically guarantee that to the market, like that's the roadmap. And then back our way into like making that possible. And he lays out how he plans to, how he plans to do that. And he gives the reason, he said Ethereum layer one will always be the fee revenue driver. It's the moat for DA. If you have an unimportant layer one, then you lose the alliance of all of your layer two's. Layer two's want to join a layer one that is like actually winning, actually has liquidity, actually has DeFi.

• 26:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  And fragmenting the layer one liquidity across a number of layer two's is a good way to lose the battle. It was pretty stark and also pretty like objectively, like we can action this. We can turn this into an EIP and ship it.

• 26:26David Hoffman?

  I really like his line where he says, "Committing to a scaling timeline makes it clear what the goal is and lets us plan backwards from that goal," which I don't think is really the thing that has happened in the EF and all core Devs calls, where we, there was no, there's always incremental progress towards the future, but not goals to work backwards from. And I think Donkrad is advocating for like, "Let's make this very firm commitment and get there and actually get there."

• 26:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. What's Vitalik gonna be doing? Cause he put out some tweets as well about what his focus is.

• 26:59David Hoffman?

  So Vitalik tweeted out, "My personal focus is for 2025, one Ethereum, obviously, particularly number one, layer one, long-term roadmap, single slot finality, long-term VM statelessness, security resilience and decentralization." So interesting that Vitalik is emphasizing the long-term roadmap of the layer one. And then also full stack security, open source privacy, all the cypherpunk stuff. And then also two, big picture DAK. And so this is Vitalik saying, "Oh, I'm focused on defensive acceleration, DAK."

• 27:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Even stuff outside of crypto, right?

• 27:32David Hoffman?

  Outside of crypto, inclusive of crypto, outside of crypto, which is just like, you know, comms tools, things like Signal, infra and social layer mechanism design. And then, and then he listed some other things as well. And so that's what Vitalik continues to be like, kind of leading Ethereum via like philosophical blog posts. And I think that is what he is saying, like, "This is my direction for 2025."

• 27:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think overall, this is a good development. Most in the Ethereum community I've talked to seem pretty excited about these changes, re-prioritization or pivot. And I think it's gonna be bullish. Something else that's bullish for Ethereum, David, is two big layer twos actually got to stage, stage one on L2B with respect to their level of decentralization, a key milestone, something a lot of people said would never happen. They said these chains were not incented to ever become, you know, a stage one. Base got there this week. That was a big move. And also Scroll got there. So now we have like the top four chains by total value secured, and they are all stage one level of decentralization, which is like fantastic. Like, what is stage one?

• 28:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can you remind people of the difference between stage one and stage zero?

• 28:41David Hoffman?

  Stage one is just a measure of property rights as users have on these layer twos. And so a stage zero, I would describe as like a pretty trustful layer two. It's a pretty ruggable layer two, like the operators can, can kind of do. They have a large degree of control over users' assets on layer two. On, on a stage one roll up, there is degrees of protections for users. And so Base hit this milestone by having a fully functional Security Council of 10 independent entities across multiple jurisdictions. Upgrades to Base now requires 75% consensus between the Council, Base optimism, and then Coinbase and a few other things. So this has significantly reduced Coinbase's unilateral control over Base.

• 29:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right.

• 29:25David Hoffman?

  And, and so there's just like a very strong set of user protections for all users on Base now.

• 29:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Big step towards decentralization. David, tell me about the WorldCoin news this week. So they're WorldCoin coming to the US. I thought they kind of were in the US. What's been announced?

• 29:41David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so WorldCoin is kind of rolling out maybe like a boots-on-the-ground brand for itself. So the at-last event in San Francisco, WorldCoin's event that Sam Altman gave a keynote presentation at, he just rolled out a few key announcements. So of course, the US rollout, World is deploying orbs in six major cities. Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, and San Francisco, with a series of Apple-like in-person stores. So WorldCoin's like stores that you could go into. New users will receive 16 Worlds tokens upon iris scanning, and existing users will get a pioneer grant of 150 Worlds. Interesting. So there are some partnerships as well. So collaborations were announced with Visa, Stripe, and Match Group. Ryan, do you know what the Match Group is?

• 30:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you talking about like match.com, like the dating website?

• 30:29David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I'm actually surprised because you know, you're a married man.

• 30:34David Hoffman?

  Yeah, like

• 30:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  What else could it be?

• 30:35David Hoffman?

  Match.com, Hinge, Tinder. They are going to integrate World ID so that they can verify that you are talking to a human, not a bot, because they're

• 30:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, is that a problem on Match.com?

• 30:47David Hoffman?

  Apparently, there are

• 30:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, there's like dating bots that just like try to date you? Like, towards what end?

• 30:52David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 30:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Try to scam your money, or?

• 30:53David Hoffman?

  I don't know, I don't know. Yeah, but apparently there's bots on like Hinge and Match or whatever.

• 30:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so there's gonna be like retail stores in malls across America, the way there's, you know, Apple stores, where people can go in, stick their eyeball into an orb. This is what it looks like for people who are not familiar with this.

• 31:10David Hoffman?

  Still looks as dystopian as it always did.

• 31:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, in exchange for World Coins, so they get sort of paid for this, right?

• 31:17David Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 31:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  And then what? You get the World app, you're all set up, you feel good that, and then you have your own identity onto the world player, too.

• 31:24David Hoffman?

  You can open up Hinge and tell your prospective wife, partner, that you're real. Yeah.

• 31:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  And there's like, was it 10 million users have already been orbbed, something like this?

• 31:36David Hoffman?

  The, yeah.

• 31:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Population's huge.

• 31:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think more people are getting signal about the users of the World app more than the number of users that have been orbbed, because the World app is actually boasting, like, by far, the crypto's most active application. And so that's also part of the announcement here. So the World app will support USDC transactions through Circle, integrate Stripe for payments, and then also offer access to Kalshi's prediction markets, interestingly enough, as well. And then I also noticed this tweet from Joe Weisenthal, who I think he was a pretty

• 32:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  TradFi?

• 32:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah, TradFi commentator out of Bloomberg, also did a fantastic job covering the tariffs. So he's like, kind of grown, the Joe stock has grown recently. He was also recently on Chopping Block as well, talking about crypto. And he said, "On the Chopping Block podcast last week..." I thought that WorldCoin was the only thing in crypto that is really interesting to me. And so he reiterated this on a tweet. So Joe's tweet, his opinion carries weight here.

• 32:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so what do you, just what do you think about this? So for people who look at this orb thing, look at it on the screen, this guy looking into an orb. And it feels very dystopian to have the guy who is like, leading the AI race is also the guy behind the company that wants to like, biometrically scan your eyeball. So just stick your eye into this orb, like, don't ask too many questions, we got it all covered. This feels kind of dystopian. Okay, here have some tokens, we're paying you for this? Like, if it's so good for me, how come you have to pay me to do it? Yeah, I can just imagine that's like, the reaction, this really hasn't hit mainstream yet, but it will. Okay, so there's that, maybe dystopia, like, not sure, it seems kind of dystopic. But then I was listening to the AI rollup earlier this week, and you guys were talking about all of the Reddit propaganda bots.

• 33:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  These are bots, literally trained to like, methodically convince people of different opinions. Like, you don't even know you're talking to a bot, and it's basically 100% effective. The humans don't really know, on Reddit, whether they're talking to a bot or not. And you can unleash these bot armies, AI bot armies, to basically like, get the humans, get the squishy humans to believe whatever you want. And the thing is, we don't know who's a human online, and who's a bot, they all look the same. And that is just starting to hit us. That's dystopic as well. So which dystopia, like, do you want to choose? Maybe WorldCoin is actually like, the thing that we need right now.

• 33:59David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think the WorldCoin dystopia thing has really been overblown, because they've actually done a very good job, and they always have. The, like, many in the crypto community just kind of rejected it, largely because it's like, it had this, it was a massive, high FTV, low float coin. And so that always gives crypto people like, a bad taste. But like, the security practices around WorldCoin has always been like, top notch. Like, they actually don't store pictures of your eyeball, they just make a hash, they throw out the data. And so unless you think that they're lying, which I think is, onus is on you to prove that. Like, the actual dystopian nature of WorldCoin. Bitcoin is much more like cosmetic than fundamentals. And I think as people are realizing how bad AI is going to get.

• 34:42David Hoffman?

  And by examples that you've heard, the stories that we hear, the AI that's proliferating throughout all of our, our applications. That people are starting to be like, okay, no, we actually, this is actually very useful.

• 34:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  We actually need this?

• 34:53David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 34:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like civilisationally?

• 34:55David Hoffman?

  Civilization might actually need this, yeah.

• 34:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  And if we're not doing this, what's the other answer?

• 34:59David Hoffman?

  Right. Yeah. Yeah. Nick Carter tweeted out, it's a bad look to be the arsonist and the firefighter at the same time. But I also don't think that's a fair, it's funny take. I don't think it's a fair take because, I mean, Sam Altman is just trying to make AI happen along with Anthropic, along with DeepSeek, along with Claude, along with, you know, everyone else too. And so, yeah.

• 35:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. So you see, you see an orb store in your local shopping mall. You're just, you're just hanging out. What do you do? You go get orb'd?

• 35:26David Hoffman?

  I know, I, I told, I've said this take before that I will get orb'd when it becomes practically useful for me to get orb'd. I'm open to being orb'd, but I do not need to get orb'd. And so I will get orb'd at a future. I'm bummed I didn't get 150 World Coin tokens though. I don't know how many, how much that money that actually is.

• 35:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  So dude's not going to be the early adopter. He's going to wait for a few more millions.

• 35:47David Hoffman?

  I'm going to wait for utility. 150 World Coin, a dollar and eight cents a token is 150 dollars. Okay. So not that, not that crazy.

• 35:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. So you wouldn't do it for 150?

• 35:56David Hoffman?

  I wouldn't do it for 150 dollars now.

• 35:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Maybe a thousand. Now you're talking.

• 36:00David Hoffman?

  All right. Coming up next, the Trump administration is doubling down, tripling down on Bitcoin. We have even more interviews out of the White House administration, all about how bullish they are on Bitcoin. We got another Howard Lutnick interview and a few others. And then also Ryan, this is breaking news in the crypto space. There were some shenanigans this week. Shenanigans happened. Movement, Monero, all of these things, a bunch of shenanigans. So if you were ready, if you were missing the shenanigans in your life during your three month hiatus, let me tell you, I got some shenanigans for you. First, before we get to all of those shenanigans, we're going to got to talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, like Frax, the decentralized central bank of crypto. And the Frax stablecoins got some of the best yields on DeFi. It's like if.

• 36:44David Hoffman?

  Circle, Athena, MakerDAO, all had a baby and it's got a layer two, the Fraxl layer two. Let's go hear from Frax right now. In the Wild West of DeFi, stability and innovation are everything, which is why you should check out Frax Finance. The protocol revolutionizing stablecoins, DeFi, and Rolex. The core of Frax Finance is Frax USD, which is backed by BlackRock's institutional Biddle Fund. Frax designed Frax USD for best-in-class yields across DeFi, T-bills, and carry trade returns all in one. Just head to frax.com, then stake it to earn some of the best yields in DeFi. Want even more? Bridge your Frax USD over to the Fraxl Layer 2 for the same yield plus Fraxl points and explore Fraxl's diverse Layer 2 ecosystem with protocols like Curve, Convex, and more, all rewarding early adopters.

• 37:26David Hoffman?

  Frax isn't just a protocol, it's a digital nation powered by the FXX token and governed by its global community. Acquire FXX through frax.com or your go-to Decks, stake it, and help shape Frax Nation's future. Ready to join the forefront of DeFi? Visit frax.com now to start earning with Frax USD and staked Frax USD. And for Bankless listeners, you can use frax.com/r/bankless when bridging to Fraxl for exclusive Fraxl perks and boosted rewards. Imagine a world where your day-to-day banking runs on a blockchain. That's exactly what Mantle is building, powered by a $4 billion treasury and poised to become the largest sustainable on-chain financial hub. As part of their 2025 expansion, Mantle is introducing three new core innovation pillars that bridge traditional finance with decentralized technology.

• 38:09David Hoffman?

  First is their Enhanced Index Fund, aiming for $1 billion in AUM by Q1. It provides optimized exposure to Bitcoin, ETH, Solana, and USC, complete with built-in yield opportunities. Next, Mantle Banking promises to revolutionize global value transfer through seamless blockchain-powered banking services, bridging crypto into your daily life. Finally, Mantle X blends AI with DeFi to deliver an intelligent, user-friendly experience for everyone. And the best part is that this is all in addition to their already-launched products like Mantle Network, ME, and FBTC. Ready to step into the future of finance? Follow Mantle on X at @mantleofficial and join the on-chain revolution today. And we're back. President Trump's executive director says on camera on an interview that

• 38:51David Hoffman?

  there is a space race amongst countries to accumulate Bitcoin. Wow, what a statement. Let's go hear it straight from the horse's mouth.

• 38:58Speaker 02

  We structured the executive order that we recognize Bitcoin as being unique. And we've said repeatedly that we view Bitcoin as digital gold. And a question that I get from journalists all the time is how much do you want? And I think that's really a silly question. That's like asking any country, how much do you want of any asset with intrinsic stored value? You want as much as you can possibly accumulate. You know, there are stipulations in the year, we must do this in budget neutral ways. It didn't cost a taxpayer a dime. But as the president likes to say, we have a lot of high IQ people in this administration, specifically over at Treasury and at Commerce. And I'm very confident in the leaders in those buildings to come up with extremely creative ways for us to accumulate. And we're very excited about that. And certainly, we want to move as expeditiously as possible to do that.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  You know, I think that there is definitely a sort of space race as it pertains to accumulation of this asset, no different than there is with gold, right? So.

• 39:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  A space race when it comes to accumulation, David. Bitcoiners have fully infiltrated the White House at this point.

• 39:55David Hoffman?

  Yeah, no different than with gold. So it is, there's a little bit of a hedge there. It's like, yeah, it's Bitcoin and gold, you know, Bitcoin's not alone. But it's also positioning gold as this extremely legitimate asset.

• 40:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, according to CoinGecko, if you're looking at the charts, governments now hold about 2.3% of the total Bitcoin supply. So like 2.3% is not nothing. It's still just like not a lot, which if you're bullish on this, that means there's a lot of room to potentially grow. Of course, the US has it and it's mainly these countries own it, the US and China. They own it because they've acquired it from nefarious actors in the past year. But like, are you surprised at how far Bitcoin has gone? I mean, like, this is the White House now talking about, yeah, we view this as digital gold. This is a space race. We're going to get as much as we can without like, quote unquote, costing the taxpayers anything. Like, it's incredible how much progress the Bitcoin story has made.

• 40:52David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is always been the Bitcoiner thesis that I remember being given to me in like 2018, 2019. It seemed incredibly far-fetched then. I think the thing that I did not account for was that Bitcoiners could ride the pendulum swinging from the Biden administration to the Trump administration, which was all about the oppression of crypto, but like more so about the market beyond Bitcoin. It wasn't really about Bitcoin. It was more about Ethereum and everything else. Like you saw that clip maybe going around about how Gary Gensler talked about how Bitcoin was a special snowflake and all the Bitcoiners like Gary Gensler is a Bitcoin maximalist. And so the thing that I did not account for was that the United States government was going to come with the absolute ban hammer during the Biden administration

• 41:35David Hoffman?

  on crypto. And then Bitcoiners would leverage the swinging of the pendulum to their gain to win the Donald Trump administration, to like totally capture the Donald Trump administration.

• 41:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  It was masterful, incredibly well played.

• 41:48David Hoffman?

  It was well done. It was well done. Yeah.

• 41:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, very impressive. I mean, it's not just that official saying it's Howard Lutnick, who's the Commerce Secretary. So he sat down with Bitcoin Magazine and emphasized the same thing. Bitcoin by this administration is going to be treated like oil or gold, not as a currency. So major support for Bitcoin, acquiring Bitcoin as a reserve asset coming out of this administration.

• 42:10David Hoffman?

  I think that's a big plus one to your blue money thesis for Ether as well.

• 42:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's coming from behind though, isn't it?

• 42:17David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we are a little bit behind on that one. Yeah.

• 42:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. Tell me some shenanigans, David.

• 42:22David Hoffman?

  Shenanigans.

• 42:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  I was missing all this when I was off.

• 42:25David Hoffman?

  All right. What is going on with Movement Labs? Movement Labs, which is the company, the organization, the development team behind the Move Layer 2, is under investigation after 66 million Move tokens were dumped the day after launch, causing a $38 million sell-off. Tokens were loaned to Rentech, a shadowy entity tied to both Web3 Port and the Movement Foundation. Web3 Port is a market maker in crypto, under a deal initially flagged as predatory, but later signed anyways. Co-founder Ruchi Manj, who pushed the agreement, is now on leave, and both Movement Labs and the Foundation are implicated in using The same market maker to offload tokens, raising serious questions of insider self dealing. So that is the accusation going towards Movement Labs.

• 43:09David Hoffman?

  I think everyone at Movement is saying, there's just a bunch of lying. Movement is actually the victim in this scenario. We got, they got taken advantage of by this market maker. And so Movement is kind of declining the legitimacy of this story. But they are nonetheless kind of on the defensive as a result of this story that got broken by CoinDesk this week.

• 43:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's kind of a question is like, were they actively participating in the scamming? Or are they just like incompetent and negligent with this market maker, right? And like both scenarios aren't great. I mean, it's just a shady market making deal, just like designed to dump tokens onto retail, whether it was the market maker or Move, or like the both of them in cooperation. It's not a great look, David.

• 43:50David Hoffman?

  It's definitely not, definitely not a great look. Market making and new tokens, especially the high FTV, low flow tokens, has left us sane on people's feelings about this industry. All right, you ready for the next strand again?

• 44:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 44:02David Hoffman?

  When's the last time you heard about Monero?

• 44:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's been a long time, like 2017 era, right? It's like privacy coins were catching a bit. It was Zcash, it was Monero. And like the thing that Bitcoin, Ethereum were missing is like privacy at the base layer. And so these chains were sort of the future of that. And that is probably the last time I left Monero.

• 44:21David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, there was always, Monero always had like a pretty hardcore Bitcoin or like ideology around it. It's like privacy is actually the number one thing, not the 21 million. Anyways, Monero pumped 50% due to a suspected $33 million Bitcoin theft. This was ousted by Zach XBT, who identified a $33 million Bitcoin theft, and then identified that the transfer of 3,520 Bitcoins was going to be going through Monero, a privacy, the privacy focused cryptocurrency. The stolen funds were rapidly funneled through six exchanges and then converted to Monero. And that once people identified that this person was selling Bitcoin for Monero,

• 45:03David Hoffman?

  that caused Monero price to surge by 50%, so peaking at $339 before settling around $274. So I mean, that was always the thesis around Monero is that like, if you need to hide your Bitcoins, you gotta buy Monero.

• 45:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's interesting the lengths that hackers will kind of like go through to sort of, you know, protect their privacy. But when they use Monero, my question is like, so you get those assets, you get that value onto Monero. First of all, you're going to spike the price if you saw it. So that's going to be massive slippage costs, et cetera, to do that. And then what do you do when you're on Monero? Like, there's not much of an economy kind of surrounding Monero. But we've seen similar attempts with like tornado cash and trying to like launder money through through other privacy tools. So yeah, it's interesting that it pumps price, though.

• 45:51David Hoffman?

  All right, coming up next, Tether now holds 7.7 tons of gold to back their tokenized gold token. 7.7 tons of gold? How much do you think that's worth?

• 46:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  How much? Just like off the cuff? So I'm not a gold bug. I have no idea. It's like, yeah, 7.7 tons.

• 46:12David Hoffman?

  It was currently $2,300 per ounce.

• 46:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, I'm gonna guess like 50 million? This is a shot in the dark.

• 46:21David Hoffman?

  You gotta pump those numbers up, baby. $570 million of gold.

• 46:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  No way!

• 46:26David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 46:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  I guess 7.7 is a lot of tons. Where is this? Is this not like Tether corporate office holds this, right?

• 46:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's right in under Palo's desk. Yeah. Yeah, he's sitting on it as a chair. No, it's in a Swiss vault. It's in Switzerland. And so 7.7 tons of physical gold to create the XAUT token, which is the gold-backed token issued by Tether. So Tether is in the business of issuing treasuries and now also gold. I wonder how they monetize that one, though, because they can't monetize it with the interest from from the yield markets.

• 47:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a good question. It's also good to remember, this is, of course, an IOU for gold, right? So it's like, we think it's in the Swiss bank. I guess it is. It's not like a on-chain crypto asset. How about this one, David? This is good news. US bank regulators, they pulled back guardrails on bank crypto activities. So this is like a Biden administration thing that was like hanging over crypto. Basically, anytime a bank, right, any bank wanted to do something with crypto, there was guidance from the Fed and FDIC and the OCC that said, no, you just can't do that. You have to come ask us for permission first. And did they ever give permission? No. The answer would be no, or like, we're not home.

• 47:39David Hoffman?

  You have to come ask for permission and the answer is no.

• 47:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right? So like, nothing really happened. Well, that guidance has been reversed under this new administration. So the Fed, the FDIC, the OCC, they officially said, "Guys, you don't have to ask. You can just like, do stuff with crypto now."

• 47:56David Hoffman?

  Stop asking, just do it.

• 47:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like, that's a big move. So here's a comment from Alex Svanovic. "Regular banking oversight still apply, but the path is way clear for banks to enter crypto." So, there you go, David.

• 48:12David Hoffman?

  You don't have to ask permission. That was always allowed, apparently. Okay, coming up next, the Senate moves to ban congressional stock trading. Again, this has been tempted before. So Senator Josh Hawley has introduced the Preventing Elected Leaders From Owning Securities and Investments Act. Preventing Elected Leaders, P E L, Owning Securities and Investments Act, O S I, otherwise called the Pelosi Act. Love it. You know, Ryan, okay, so there's two stablecoin bills going through Congress. You know what they're called?

• 48:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  I should know what they're called. What are they called?

• 48:47David Hoffman?

  The, one is the Stable Act, and the other one is the Genius Act. Remember these words?

• 48:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are they trolling us? Like,

• 48:55David Hoffman?

  No, no, they're trolling Donald Trump. The Stable Genius Act. Remember, like, I'm a very stable genius? I don't know how that's ended up trolling Donald Trump, but it did.

• 49:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  I feel like US government used to be way more serious, you know? Now, things are done for like-

• 49:09David Hoffman?

  I think they might have always done this.

• 49:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's always been like this?

• 49:12David Hoffman?

  I wonder, I wonder how many of them are putting this into ChatGPT? And then also, like, maybe it's like the staffers? Like, the young, you know, millennial Zoomer staffers who are like, "I bet." What should I, what should I call this bill? Also, make it stand for Pelosi.

• 49:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so the Pelosi Act prevents Congress from owning securities and investments, or at least has some restrictions around that. Of course, like, Congress has been running wild. Particularly, the members of Congress have been just like insider training. That's at least the allegation. So this kind of like, puts a stop to that. Now, let me ask you, this is coming from the Republican side, okay? So, do you think Democrats, you know, when they regain your control of government- Do you think they come after crypto in a similar way? I mean, they gotta be like, I saw you post on Twitter, like, from the Daily Podcast, and they were talking about like, the inherent corruption. I mean, you tell me, in like, the Trump meme coin.

• 50:06David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 50:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  And like, that's a vector for like, all sorts of insider trading. And we were talking about this last week, but like, that's also a vector too. So it's not just securities. It's basically any asset that you can like, profit off of. That allows corruption to seep into the system. So Democrats will just come back and just be like, oh, call it the Trump Act. And it's like, you know, tokens, I don't know.

• 50:25David Hoffman?

  Don't launch meme coins.

• 50:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, something like this.

• 50:29David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that we should have an act that is inclusive of presidents and government leaders issuing crypto assets and having crypto businesses that are good conduits for corruption. Like, it's like-

• 50:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Feels like the same thing?

• 50:44David Hoffman?

  It feels like, yeah, it's the same thing. And like, I don't think anyone is defending Trump's actions with like, the Trump coin and all that stuff.

• 50:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  So like, what I kind of expect is like, Democrats to take charge and just be like, okay, no one in Congress or government can own any crypto. And like, we get a bill like that instead. Instead of something measured and like, actually reasonable.

• 51:02David Hoffman?

  Mm-hmm, yeah.

• 51:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Faith in government is not an all time high right now for me.

• 51:06David Hoffman?

  The only crypto assets that government leaders are allowed to own is Bitcoin. How about that one?

• 51:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Nice.

• 51:14David Hoffman?

  Brought by Bitcoiners. Bitcoiners love this one.

• 51:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, let's go check in on Alex Mashinsky, David. So for people who don't know, for people who were in Celsius-

• 51:25David Hoffman?

  I wish I was you.

• 51:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  I bet you knew.

• 51:27David Hoffman?

  Ryan knows who Alex Mashinsky is.

• 51:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  He's the guy running a crypto scam company from like, circa 2022 that blew up after FTX, called Celsius. And he is in front of the DOJ. The DOJ is seeking a 20-year prison sentence for the Celsius founder. I was always like, wondering why this case has taken so long? Like, Sam Bankman-Fried's been prosecuted, like, many of the other cases have already been prosecuted. I have no idea why it's taken so long for Alex Mashinsky, but it seems like they are unleashing everything they got, asking for a 20-year prison sentence.

• 52:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 52:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  $4.7 billion in crypto user losses here.

• 52:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the DOJ cited his role of a year-long campaign of lies. Mr. Chesky did admit to leading this fraudulent scheme and personally pocketing over $48 million. I think that means that he has pled guilty in some of these accounts. Sentencing is set for May 8th, which is seven days from the time of recording. So that's coming up pretty damn soon here. The other conversations going around, Ryan, is that talking about SBFs. SBFs like 25-year sentence without parole. But then also people are looking at, well, actually FTX with their like investment in Anthropic and then billions of dollars that were able to be recovered actually is paying back its users. And then also the bankruptcy lawyers are walking away with $1 billion of profit for themselves.

• 52:51David Hoffman?

  So some people, some of the conversations looking back towards Sam Bankman-Fried to me like, huh, I wonder like, since everyone is getting paid back, do we really need to sentence this guy for 25 years? I don't really have an opinion here, but that is the conversation that's going around.

• 53:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, do you think some future president just like pardons him or something like that? That feels like a long shot.

• 53:12David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I don't see, no, there's not, like, there's not enough global sympathy for Sam Bankman-Fried. Where I like compared to Ross Ulbricht, who had so much, who had so much sympathy? Like, there's no sympathy for Sam Bankman-Fried.

• 53:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, what's the last thing we cover?

• 53:25David Hoffman?

  Last news of the week, Circle rejected a Ripple takeover bid of $4 to $5 billion. This is kind of breaking this news. This bid did not happen this week, but Ripple tried and failed to buy Circle, apparently, for $4 to $5 billion. And this is Ripple just kind of buying their like, first they pumped their token, and now they are buying assets that make it a valuable business, which is a strategy.

• 53:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  That is like the true, like, I think that's the true strategy of fake it till you make it, right, basically, because like Circle does have massive utilities. Circle, of course, issues of USDC, which is like the most used stablecoin, at least in the US. I mean, second to Tether still, but it's absolutely massive. And they did it on the back of the value of XRP, right, in their treasury and the meme that it's created. I mean, it's like not much USDC like does anything. On Ripple right now, on XRP chain, right?

• 54:20David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 54:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  But you have to imagine if they acquired Circle instead of Circle going public for $4 to $5 billion, it would have all been on XRP, it would have all been on Ripple. I mean, at least they would have given massive preference towards their own chain, right? Because that's in their interest. So that's a reality we could have actually lived in. Imagine if Jeremy Aler is just like tweets out, announces, "I'm so excited, I'm joining the Ripple chain." Like, wow.

• 54:49David Hoffman?

  I know you were out when they released it, but Circle is filing to go public, right? Did you get a chance to poke open their S1?

• 54:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, I didn't. What's good there?

• 54:59David Hoffman?

  So the thing that people are taking away from the Circle S1 is the gap between Tether. And Tether has like maybe 2 to 3x the market size of USDC. So there's like 2 to 3x more USDTs than there are USDCs. And then Tether is printing something like, something like a billion dollars a day, dude. Like, it's like an insane amount of money. And then Circle, because they have an incredibly high operating overhead costs, is making something like $1 to $200 million a year. And so even though the gap between Tether and Circle is only 2 to 3x in terms of size of the stablecoin, the revenue, the profit of the respective businesses is hugely different and way more positive to Ripple.

• 55:44David Hoffman?

  Oh, excuse me, not Ripple, get Ripple out of my mind, to Tether.

• 55:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so when you have that level of treasury, it allows you to use that capital to buy political influence. Okay, I'm not making any allegations, but of course, like Howard Lutnick is the Commerce Secretary. And like, he is very much into Tether world, right? And there's like lots of financial incentive there, which makes it difficult for Circle to kind of make regulatory inroads and do like, in a Machiavellian way, what's in their best interest, which is like, oh, the dollar should only be, and the only regulated coin should be USDC, and we're going to block Tether. And it's very interesting how all of this is working. We're definitely, crypto is definitely in the geopolitical arena now, like I've never seen it.

• 56:28David Hoffman?

  Yeah. All right, that's all the news for the week and we are coming up, we thought this was going to be a hugely long agenda. I thought we were going to go 10 minutes over.

• 56:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're getting efficient.

• 56:36David Hoffman?

  Yeah, welcome back dude. Okay, so last week you came back for your first episode, but it was still kind of like a meta episode about like Ryan and his break and like what you've been missing. And so now this is actually back into the, just like, we are trying to cover as much news as possible. Uh, how does it feel to be back?

• 56:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, it's good. It's like kind of where things left off, to be honest, just like some of the things have, like, one thing I've been focused on is getting that fighting spirit back in Ethereum. Ethereum, as I mentioned last week, is still kind of like one of my first loves in crypto and I feel like it's, um, it's undervalued. And, uh, so I've been spending some time doing that, like writing some articles. Otherwise, um, I mean crypto is just kind of like, just watching it, you know, further invade the public sphere. But stablecoins and Bitcoin seem to be like the main thing, I guess. Like, I'm not really into meme coins, but, so not a lot has changed is maybe one answer to this.

• 57:30David Hoffman?

  Mm hmm. Yeah, I think that's right. I think you and I have been going back and forth about like, what does Ethereum need to do? And I think that we're like slowly coming up to like you, like, it's interesting that you and I have this, uh, grown a divide of, of focus. We don't have a mutually exclusive opinions, but like I am very interested on establishing and strengthening Ethereum, the product. And you are very interested in establishing Ether as a global reserve asset. And we have different focuses right now.

• 57:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. And the reason I'm more focused on ETH asset rather than the, the network and the product is because I actually feel like the product is now post reprioritization slash pivot going in at like a very positive direction. And also like, I can't contribute towards that. Like, I'm not a dev. I, you know, I can't, um, like submit an EIP. And so the thing that I feel like Ethereum is missing is all of the inroads that you can clearly see Bitcoiners have, have made, which is like memeing the asset into something larger, uh, like a global world reserve currency. And they did that through kind of like a small cult that just chanted and believed and they kind of like worked their way up.

• 58:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  And the same surface area exists for Ethereum to do something similar. Like it has the properties to be a global store of value, uh, reserve asset, but it just doesn't have the religion. And so incepting a bit more of that, I think is important. The network's always going to be important and the network actually is the differentiator versus Bitcoin in the end. So it's not not important. It's just like something I'm focusing less on because I just like I have less impact there.

• 59:09David Hoffman?

  I, I think there's a lot left to work left to do on the whole pivot thing. Uh, I think there is a lot of old culture of Ethereum that needs, uh, to be overpowered by the product focus side of Ethereum. So like, you know, Bitcoin had their big block, small block wars, right? Is, is Bitcoin a payments currency or is it a store of value and the store of value side won? To me, the, the division that I'm seeing in the Ethereum community right now is that you have the, it's product centric roadmap people. And then you kind of have this older, uh, ideological, uh, holier than thou side of Ethereum, which I'm, I'm trying to like, trying to like

• 59:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  dislodge?

• 59:50David Hoffman?

  Dislodge. And I think that in order to like, the, the money side, the side that you want to build for Ethereum, the, the blue money cult needs to be established on a very strong product. And so like, this is something that we've kind of like gone back and forth on. Like Ethereum has always been this balanced ecosystem. Like take the middle road, don't be too extreme on one end. And that is true for the Ethereum product. We need to have convexity in the product to enable concavity in the like religious fervor ness around the asset. But we do not have convexity in the product because we do not have people thinking of Ethereum as a product. We have people thinking of Ethereum as an ideology and that needs to change.

• 1:00:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think the thing on that to watch, uh, for everybody listening is what does Tamas do at the ES? Uh, so in our episode with him, he said, we're going to deliver like upgrades forks every six months. Okay. Will that happen? Look for that. Look for that organization. Look for that coordination. If that happens, it's bullish that you're right, that the product pivot is like fully instantiated. The other thing I think is people like Donkrad's proposal. Four years, 100x? How is that received? And is it actually actioned, right? Even if it's just 50x over four years, you have to kind of scale back. Or if it's 100x, but it takes five years, something like that.

• 1:01:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  If you get signs like that, then I will feel secure that Ethereum has kind of reprioritized the right things. And yeah, you're right. It's not like, it's not over yet. Like, it's just like, some of this is still talk.

• 1:01:26David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:01:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  And we have some new leaders, we have some cultural changes, but it needs to be put into action before you can say like, yeah, mission accomplished. This pivot happened.

• 1:01:36David Hoffman?

  I feel very good about the presence of Tomasz's like operational leadership. Because he, Nethermind is his old company, still his company, but he's like, you know, focusing on the EF now. And so he's bringing a founder, CEO, product mindset to the Ethereum Foundation and to the Ethereum like organization, which is great. In addition to that, I deeply trust Donkrad's direction and leadership direction for the change, the protocol changes that needs to happen to Ethereum. And so I hope the Ethereum community elevates Donkrad more. Because I, from what I hear, he is still in the minority. And I think Ansar and Donkrad are definitely on the target for what needs to happen with Ethereum.

• 1:02:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  We'll see how it plays out, guys. Of course, got to let you know, all this stuff is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.