ROLLUP: Korea Gets Liquidated | The AI Trade Unwinds | Crypto Holds Firm | Warsh Holds Rates

Korea’s leveraged stock boom imploded and the AI trade found a forced seller, but crypto held firm. Ryan and David unpack whether the winds are shifting toward BTC and ETH, Warsh’s hawkish Fed debut, and Ethereum’s 11th birthday. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔓NEAR | TRADE CONFIDENTIALLY, GET 20% BACK https://bankless.cc/near-pod 📊BITGET | TOKENIZED STOCKS 2.0 https://bankless.cc/bitget-stocks 🎯THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://thedefireport.io/bankless 👑BANKLESS PREMIUM | AD-FREE & BONUS EPISODES https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 0:17 Korea & AI Liquidation https://x.com/kobeissiletter/status/2082463897387257895 https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2082792020993536283 https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-did-south-korean-stocks-just https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-ai-bust-scenario-that-no-one https://x.com/tbpn/status/2082849965102219677 https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/30/leopold-aschenbrenners-hedge-fund-is-facing-steep-ai-losses.html https://x.com/amitisinvesting/status/2082860784242049407 14:39 Crypto Holds Firm https://x.com/micro2macr0/status/2081868142230286664 https://x.com/cryptunez/status/2081893515223535625 https://x.com/blknoiz06/status/2082560475951251789 20:27 Warsh, Rates & Global Liquidity https://x.com/YahooFinance/status/2082538170533519741 https://www.theblock.co/post/410092/fed-holds-rates-steady-three-officials-push-hike-crypto-market-stays-flat https://thedefireport.io/research/can-the-economy-handle-rate-hikes https://x.com/AlexCorrino/status/2082667540090859698 https://x.com/Barchart/status/2082683129681092931 https://x.com/wallstengine/status/2082551083583541287 https://capitalwars.substack.com/p/global-liquidity-and-cryptocurrencies 36:47 Clarity Act Stalls https://x.com/EleanorTerrett/status/2082127523249262881 https://polymarket.com/event/clarity-act-signed-into-law-in-2026/clarity-act-signed-into-law-in-2026 https://x.com/Cointelegraph/status/2082190857336205486 38:25 Ethereum Turns Eleven https://x.com/LefterisJP/status/2082771162942075080 https://www.theblock.co/post/410083/ethereum-cypherpunk-manifesto-author-ethereum-foundation-fourth-board-member https://x.com/ethereumfndn/status/2082437165233951223 https://x.com/AyaMiyagotchi/status/2082437879494488566 44:35 Robinhood’s Mixed Quarter https://dune.com/entropy_advisors/robinhood-chain-network-overview https://thedefiant.io/news/blockchains/robinhood-chain-tops-solana-in-tokenized-stock-volume-via-memecoin-pairs 47:52 New York’s Doxxing Scandal https://x.com/haydenzadams/status/2081740559694074248 https://nypost.com/2026/07/27/us-news/mamdani-names-all-nyc-property-owners-who-could-be-hit-with-new-pied-a-terre-tax 53:26 July Wrap-Up --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Welcome back to the station to the weekly roll up. It is the fifth Friday of July and we have all of Korea getting liquidated. $2 trillion erased. That's 1.2 million accounts getting margin called. The KOPSY, K-O-P-S-Y, this is the Korean stock market, down 40%. Imagine your stock market, Ryan, being down 40% in the month of July. Well, that's, that's what Korea's career has got going for it. And we also have breaking as of this morning, highly related, highly correlated. The poster child of the AI trade is now a forced seller because he took on a little too much leverage. Wow, this is like your first cycle, bro.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  It's a learning lesson.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  Learning, paying learning lesson, had to unwind his entire public book. We'll talk about who the buyer is and why that might be the bottom. Cause that is maybe why stocks are very, very green this morning after a pretty terrible month. But Ryan, in all of that, after all of that mess, the AI trade unwinding, maybe bottoming, who knows? The, the stock market coming off, yields going up, all of this bearish stuff. Crypto did not blink. Crypto is up this week, showing unique strength.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  That's crazy. That I, is you're saying on this week, it was actually a good thing to own crypto rather than AI.

• 1:21Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 1:22Speaker 00

  If you, if you owned crypto, not actually not all crypto, but if you owned Bitcoin or ETH, crypto blue chips specifically.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:31Speaker 00

  You are, you are a happy person this week.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  We'll talk about that. That, that might be, um, winds changing, like this month, winds changing?

• 1:38Speaker 00

  Changing? Is AI deflating and crypto just being a hard asset class? That's great.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Uh, also I want to get into the warsh. So Kevin Warsh as the Fed chair, his first FOMC meeting, there was a vote. What did they decide to do? What's he gonna do as Fed chair? We'll talk about that. Also, Clarity Act feels like it's stalling once again, but Paul Atkins, the chair of the SEC came in and said, he is ready, willing and able to do it for you guys. He'll just make regulation instead.

• 2:09Speaker 00

  Do it, is do it himself.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  I'll take care of clarity. Anyway, we'll talk about that. And also we gotta celebrate Ethereum's 11th birthday. But first, let's get to the main story, which is the KOPSY, as you said, so C-O-P-S-I, I should say. And I was just laughing, not at people getting liquidated, but you said all of South Korea, all of Korea was getting liquidated, which feels like a lot, but that's not too far off because there was a lot of retail involved in these recent market moves. And you said they lost about 40%, but that is because they were also up by about what? Like double or something like this over the past six months? Talk about this story.

• 2:47Speaker 00

  If you're, if you were in the Korean stock market, the Korean index, uh, before like two months ago, you're actually doing just fine. So it was up like something like two or 300% and then, and then it fell down 45%. You know, what goes up so fast must come down. I think anyone in the crypto industry is probably pretty familiar with a chart that looks exactly like that. But what is unique here is just the level of liquidations that happened to retail investors. We don't really know. So kind of in the same vein is crypto wallets aren't really one-to-one mapped with humans. Accounts are not one-to-one mapped with humans, more so than crypto wallets.

• 3:25Speaker 00

  But there was an estimated 320 to 360,000 accounts were fully liquidated, zeroed out.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 3:33Speaker 00

  Which if you, if you do map that one-to-one, that is 3.4% of South Korea's adult population got margin called.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  To zero.

• 3:42Speaker 00

  In the month of July, to zero.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  To zero.

• 3:44Speaker 00

  To zero. Yeah.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 3:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, of over 500,000 accounts and, and that, that 320 to 360 estimate, that was from last week, not even, not even this week. So potentially like over half a million accounts fully liquidated because it went down 40% in 40 days. A very, very important part of this story was that the South Korea stock market recently introduced levered, single stock ETFs. So like, hey, Micron or hey, like memory stonk that you got there. And, and also by the way, South Korea has like an unprecedented level of exposure to memory stocks.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  In their domestic market, that, that's why.

• 4:26Speaker 00

  In their market, yeah.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  The markets have been moving on the memory stock trade downstream of the AI trade and all of that. A lot of that is located in South Korea.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, SK Hynix and Samsung being the two memory stocks that have outperformed massively. And combined at the top, those two companies represented more than 50% of the stock market. And so you put like the epicenter of all markets, which is memory stocks in the last like month or two. You add single stock leveraged ETFs and then, you know, well, you didn't really go to crypto conferences, Ryan, but like you would go and go to a crypto conference, hop in an Uber and then your Uber driver would be talking to you about like XRP or like Cardano.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:07Speaker 00

  Apparently that's what it's been like over there in South Korea is, is like their leveraged, single stock, memory stock ETFs.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:14Speaker 00

  Uh, and so it's just like an absolute bloodbath in Korea over there.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Uh, so $2 trillion wiped off the books as a result of this. A lot of, I'm sure margin being called in big trading desks as well. So a lot of people feeling this, I guess with the leveraged ETFs, what, you know, people were like, uh, rather than 5X, I could have 10X if I buy the thing that goes up and I'm just gonna buy the thing that goes up.

• 5:40Speaker 00

  Let me buy the leveraged ETFs in my margin account on margin.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  Oh my God. All right. Well, this does look like a crypto chart, so, and it sounds very much like a crypto story.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Is there a broader take on AI though here? So like, could this be the beginning of the AI? I'm gonna use the B word bubble. I know it's a charged term, but let's say the AI trade, the AI bubble unwinding?

• 6:10Speaker 00

  Unwinding, I think kind of implies that it's going backwards. I don't necessarily know if that's true, but like, I think it is a pretty strong point in the argument that it is the AI trades ceasing to be so dominant in the market. Like maybe the great AI repricing is, is starting to like be kind of over. Because prices is determined at the margins, I think you would kind of expect to see micro bubbles inflate and then get popped along the way. It could be inside of a larger bubble.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:42Speaker 00

  But ultimately I, I think you would kind of expect something like this to happen regardless. The timing, however, is interesting to talk about a few other things that are also happening in the market. Now, this is my personal speculation. I haven't like read anything about this, but I do think that Kimi K3 is illustrative or indicative of the reshuffling of where the market is perceiving value to be captured in the AI stack, in the AI like vertical. And Noah, our, one of our favorite writers, Noah Opinion, wrote an article about this, actually like back in December of last year.

• 7:21Speaker 00

  And the title is, of the article is the AI bust that no one sees, seen coming, very easy title. He gives like three scenarios to like the future of the AI industry. One is the virtual reality scenario where kind of like VR, we all know VR is a thing, but it's just not getting adopted. It's just kind of a bust of an industry. Maybe it'll come in the future, but just not really working out. And like Noah just kind of quickly moves on from this scenario. It was like, it's worth thinking about, but not really worth discussing because like, we know that people on a reoccurring basis come back to AI over and over and over again, unlike their dusty Apple VR helmet that they have left in their closet. So that's the first scenario. The second scenario is a railroad scenario.

• 8:04Speaker 00

  And railroads were super economically useful. There was a huge financial boom associated with the, the railroads. Nonetheless, even though railroads were created an economic boom downstream of them, and they were massively profitable for investors, there was still a huge bust in 1873 because the economic benefits didn't show up before railroad had to like pay their, pay their debt. And so there was financial over speculation on top of something fundamental. And I kind of, you can kind of see what's going on in the South Korea stock market. It's like over financialization, over speculation on top of something fundamental. And so I think there's plenty of evidence to say that that's definitely something that's also going on.

• 8:49Speaker 00

  But what could also be happening in addition to that is what the third scenario that Noah gives, which is the airline scenario, which I think is where Kimi K3 comes into the story. So that's the idea that AI succeeds massively as a technology, but the companies that make the AI models, OpenAI, Anthropic, just don't capture the value. Kind of in the same way that like farming massively critical or airlines, you know, critical to the modern economy.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  There's like no profit. It's commoditized.

• 9:19Speaker 00

  They just scrape for margins. There's just no profit.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:23Speaker 00

  Uh, and right now that if that if the airline scenario is anywhere true, you would see and be very worried about OpenAI and Anthropic taking on a ton of debt, selling a ton of stock, but then in this scenario, that stock is not valuable. And how are they ever going to repay their debt? And so it's just a reshuffling of the economics of like the AI investment cycle. And even if we are inside of a larger bubble, the South Korea memory stock bubble just popped. Still, memory prices are up, you know, still the AI trade might be on, but we just need to kind of reorient value in the chain.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  We've priced a lot of success into AI, right? And so the AI capex that's going through now is about, it would require AI income revenues per year of about 2.5 trillion to match the capex that we're spending. What we're doing right now with all of those frontier labs you talked about Claude and ChatGPT capturing the bulk of this is about 150 billion per year. We gotta be 2.5 billion to cover the capex. We're at 150 billion. So there's a delta here. And it felt like very much last year, we had sort of the chat revolution on AI. And that was kind of the run up for all of 2025. The beginning of this year, it's felt like the run up has been much more on the Claude

• 10:41Speaker 01

  code side of things, cowork side of things, the agentic narrative. That's like two rabbits out of the hat. Is there a third? Is there a third rabbit in the hat? I think it's part of the question. And also a story this week that is breaking as we talked about, you mentioned it, Leo Ashenbrenner, he's been called the AI wonder kid because he has created a hedge fund and front run all of the AI supply opportunities over the past three years. Saw it coming before anybody and run his fund up to like $20 billion from like under a billion, right?

• 11:17Speaker 00

  Saw it coming and allocated correctly.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Yes. Um, but there's word now that he is being forced, has been forced to sell all his stock positions. I think this story is still developing. This is a headline CNBC. This is also reported to the Financial Times. AI investor Leopold Ashenbrenner forced to unwind all public stock positions after steep losses. We know he likes a little bit of margin. So he does short some assets. He does long some assets as well. And now there's word of other investors stepping in to buy some of his damaged assets. What's the latest on this at the time of recording?

• 11:54Speaker 00

  Well, I think we're still waiting for precise numbers. There are people speculating that he was on some margin. There were other people saying that he was 4X leveraged, uh, and that's from Amit Investing.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Some of those Korean leveraged ETFs, huh?

• 12:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And like Leopold, how old is Leopold?

• 12:11Speaker 01

  He's 24. He's in his early twenties.

• 12:13Speaker 00

  It's a, it's an appropriate age to get over leveraged.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  You gotta learn. You gotta take your licks.

• 12:19Speaker 00

  I remember being over leveraged at 24, dude, like, that's the thing to do in your twenties. The, the big news coming out of this is that Citadel, Ken Griffin, bought the public book.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  And so that, that's a big deal. The, it's a classic story of this guy, I think, flying a little bit too close to the sun was

• 12:39Speaker 01

  He got all the calls right, but then he just

• 12:42Speaker 00

  Got all the calls right.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  Dialed into the margin a little too much, it seems like.

• 12:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, it's also very Three Arrows Capital-y in that you got a lot of things right early and then that, and then what did you do? You got super confident and then you just hit the leverage button at the top. And honestly, kind of created the top. I think this is one of the reasons why, like, if you go to the indices and if you go and look at the memory stocks right now, this morning, today, Thursday, July 30th, they're very, very green because he had such a big book that he was the forced seller that marketed, that called the bottom. The fact that Citadel, Ken Griffin, bought the book is drawing, it's, it's a drawing a bunch of speculation.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:24Speaker 00

  A little bit of conspiracy theorizing that Citadel called for, and Ken Griffin called for a surprise rate hike earlier this year or earlier this week. And then basically tried to spook the market into doing exactly this so that they could intentionally, intentionally buy Leopold's book. So now Ken Griffin and Citadel are exposed to a lot of the same stocks that Leopold had, but at way more favorable prices, uh, because of like the conspiracy of Ken Griffin, like working the market, which like Ken Griffin and Citadel, they're sharks. That's kind of like what they do. If that's real, we don't really know, but like, it's kind of fun to like speculate about.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  And we don't really know. We also don't know how big the damage was. I mean, you compared this to Three Hours Capital, who, you know, went completely defunct.

• 14:11Speaker 00

  I mean, yeah, exactly.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  This doesn't have to mean that at all. This could be more of a flesh wound that Leopold.

• 14:20Speaker 00

  Just a flesh wound.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  Just a flesh wound. You can just recover from this. I mean, this is part of the risk reward that his LPs, his investors have signed up for, right? Is just like, if you're going to accept incredible gains, sometimes it's going to counter trade. So I wouldn't count him out yet.

• 14:35Speaker 00

  They were up 2,000% and now they're only up 400%. Sorry, guys.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  But this has been part of the story. So the S and P is down about three and a half percent over the last 15 days or so. June has been, or July, I should say, has been quite the month. NASDAQ is down 10% from, from its highs. And crypto though, on the week and on the month, holding steady? What's our crypto prices on the week?

• 15:00Speaker 00

  So even in the middle of the, of this bloodbath, Bitcoin held flat this week. ETH is up this week. On the month, the numbers are even better. Bitcoin in 30 days, up 11%, ETH in 30 days, up 22%. So if you were invested in AI, you are licking your wounds right now. If you were invested in crypto blue chips, you're doing great. You're happy.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  This one month.

• 15:22Speaker 00

  When has that ever happened since the inception of like ChatGPT in 2023?

• 15:27Speaker 01

  Not that I can remember. I can barely remember those days.

• 15:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. But July of 2026 was a victory for crypto and a loss for the AI trade.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Well, we keep wanting to, to use the word bottom on the week. Has crypto bottomed? I don't know that if we have enough data to make that call and we've talked about it a lot, but let's talk in particular about the Ethereum ecosystem. So you put a chart in here, which is the, the uni token. This is a DeFi Ethereum protocol, uh, catching a bid lately. It is up 36%, 37% on three months.

• 16:06Speaker 00

  Up the highest that it's been in like a year.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Really? Okay.

• 16:09Speaker 00

  Like year, yearly highs, something in a, in a very long time. And like uni, uni's relationship with Ethereum and ETH specifically, I would say is very, very

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Positive, correlated, yeah.

• 16:20Speaker 00

  Because like Uniswap is the exchange of Ethereum. Maybe this is because of activity on the Robinhood chain, but I don't know. I think it's kind of all one basket of correlation. And so like when ETH price does well, I associate that with health of the Ethereum economy.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  When uni, when uni token does well, you mean? Or when ETH?

• 16:38Speaker 00

  Excuse me. Yes. When you, when, yeah, yes. When uni price does well, I associate that with Ethereum economy health. And you can also kind of see that in the ETH, ETH dollar price. What did I just say? ETH was up 2X versus Bitcoin.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  In this month, Bitcoin was up 11% versus dollars and ETH was up 2X versus Bitcoin. And there are some charters, and I've been looking at this as well. The ETH BTC ratio has been on a four year downtrend, a four year of terrible vibes.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  Look at this chart. This is a whole, this.

• 17:09Speaker 00

  This is a terrible chart. This is the world's most depressing chart. There's so many bad vibes contained in this chart.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  But if you zoom in, you can see it. You could see it. Is it breaking a trend line?

• 17:18Speaker 00

  ETH BTC is poking through this like four year downtrend. And so it's just kind of significant to, there's just this four years of bullying, of battering for any ETH holders, which I felt you are still, still feeling, Ryan. At some point I was like, I just don't want to feel this anymore. Uh, but like you're, it's poking out. It's poking out. And so then the next question is like, okay, if it's going to stop going down versus Bitcoin, the next question is like, where does it go to next?

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:47Speaker 00

  And I think you can, you can see it's like sentiment shift in the ETH, like traders, otherwise in different traders are piling into ETH. You can kind of see it on the, um, you can just see that, see that on, in BlockFi stores and just like news aggregators, but just like the sentiment around ETH is kind of positive right now.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  That, that poke on the ratio is kind of small for me. I would like to see that poke get a lot larger. It's very early. But what are your feelings? Like, you know, some people have said, hey, David's sentiment was the bottom. And the reason is because you, you're, you're kind of like an ETH bull. Have been for a very long time. So if David is selling, well, that is the last capitulation of seller exhaustion before this whole thing reverses. And maybe we're starting to see a bit of that reversal. Maybe David starts to look at ETH again. He's like, ah, I remember. I remember the love, the excitement that kindled in me when I, I bought my first ETH. Um, is it, is that anything like that sparking in you?

• 18:47Speaker 01

  Are you still waiting for this to become a bit more durable?

• 18:54Speaker 00

  I definitely see that. People are poking at me. It's like, haha, David sold the bottom. David sold the bottom. I'd like to remind people that I sold at 2,300. Yeah. Hold on, hold on. But directionally, I understand what they're saying is like, in the grand scheme of things, it will look and feel like a bottom sell.

• 19:15Speaker 00

  Fundamentally, the economics of ETH and the fundamentals of Ethereum, I don't feel are answered or solved. I also hold plenty of space for the fact that ETH can go up regardless of just that. It doesn't matter, actually. The fundamentals of ETH can continue to be unresolved or unsatisfied to my concerns about value capturing ETH, and ETH can go up anyways despite that. And that's kind of like what I am thinking about when I am looking at the breakout of the ETH BTC ratio is like, maybe I'm technically correct on the value capture, but incorrect on the actual price trajectory. That is totally possible.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think a good summary of the month was this chart from Ansem, actually, which we're looking at some crypto assets. We're comparing that to the memory stocks, Micron and SanDisk. SanDisk down 50% for the month of July, whereas ETH up 20%, as we said, Bitcoin at 10%, PumpFun up 32%. So crypto assets outperforming for the month of July. Let's lock it in.

• 20:22Speaker 00

  On-chain, on-chain took a big dub this month, especially towards the end of the month.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  We got more to discuss, actually. I want to get into the best article I read this week. It was from Michael Howell, outside the industry, talking about cryptocurrency. Also, we got to talk about Kevin Warsh and the FOMC meeting. This is the first time he's done one of these. What did he say about rates? What about inflation? What does this portend for the future of the crypto industry, David? A big subject to cover. We'll talk about all that and more, but before we do, we got to get to the sponsors that made this possible.

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• 22:30Speaker 01

  This is the new Chair of the Fed, Kevin Warsh. He's talking about his first family fight in the context of the FOMC meeting.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  So you're right. I asked for a good family fight, and I got one. That's the purpose. That's the design feature. I come into this meeting, even this press conference, heartened by what I've experienced the last two days.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  There you go. He is heartened by what he experienced the last two days, the FOMC meeting, the first family fight. What's he talking about? A family fight? Is it FOMC meeting? Are they just like one big family and they just fight at the dinner table?

• 23:07Speaker 00

  A family of 12 white suits behind closed doors.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  So hard one.

• 23:13Speaker 00

  So it was a split 9-3 vote. So nine voted to hold, three voted to raise, I think? Yes, raise. Yeah. So ended up holding rates steady at 3.5% to 3.75%.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  I think the big question going into this meeting was like, there's a 33% or so odds that actually the Fed would raise because of inflation, basically. So not the majority of the market, but a substantial portion, minority of the market, like, thought that this was the case. So what is Warsh's perspective on inflation? So if he's not raising rates, then does he think inflation is defeated? Here's a direct quote. "Let me reiterate," he said, "there is no soft inflation target. There is no soft implicit target, not on this committee's watch. There's only a target, and it's 2%." The inflation target for this Fed chair, David, is 2%, which is kind of curious because

• 24:09Speaker 01

  we're at like, what, 3.6%? We're in the high 3s, maybe heading towards 4%. A follow-up question asked him, well, what about the rates? Like, could you see adjusting those upwards to fight inflation? He said this, "If inflation continues to be elevated through the forecast period, interest rates could well be part of the solution." So he's keeping interest rate hikes on the table in order to fight inflation into the future. Indeed, like, I talked to Michael NATO on the week, the TDR. He still thinks there's two rate hikes that could be in store for this year because of the inflation issue. Doesn't think it's going away. There's another meeting in September. There's another in

• 24:51Speaker 01

  December. He would place the odds as pretty high that both of those have rate hikes. So it's not over yet, but the first meeting, Warsh and the committee decided to keep rates as they were, which is just kind of, does it feel like he's talking about it through both sides of his mouth? Like, inflation's a problem. We're going to get it back to 2%. It's overly high right now, and yet he's not increasing the Fed funds rate to manage that, right? Like, what's going on here?

• 25:21Speaker 00

  So reading through the Fed tea leaves, this is my interpretation. There's an interpretation that I found that I really, really liked, is that the Fed is going to manage inflation through balance sheet reduction rather than through rate hikes. And both of these two things change the yield curve. Rate hikes impact the yield curve on the short term. That's like what the market needs to pay for borrowing right now. And then balance sheet reduction is more towards the long-term structural end of the yield curve through like actual monetary destruction, like calling back money back into the Fed. And so instead of just increasing rates, what they're going to do is they're just going to allow bonds

• 26:06Speaker 00

  to expire and not buy any new ones. And instead, who are going to, who's going to have to buy the new ones? The private market. The private market is going to have to buy the bonds rather than slapping down the money printer and doing it inside of the Fed, who's price insensitive. We're allowing the private market to buy the auctions, and the private market is way more price sensitive, and they are demanding more returns on their yields than the Federal Reserve is. And at the same time that FOMC happened this week, we are seeing 10-year yields threatening to break through into new highs. It's at 4.7%. That is the highest that it's been in a long time. And the 30-year Treasury yield is at 5.2%.

• 26:51Speaker 00

  So, and that is the highest yield on the 30-year, Ryan, in nearly 19 years, the highest since 2008. And so this is a contraction of the money supply because instead of the Fed buying the Treasury's bonds, the private market is buying the Treasury's bonds. And instead of the private market taking that capital and pushing it down the risk spectrum, because the Fed is buying all the safe stuff, the private market has to buy all the safe stuff. And so that is pulling money out of the system instead of the Fed kind of just like doing, buying bonds. And so that is effectively quantitative tightening. And so the answer to your question is how are we managing inflation if we're not hiking rates? It's QT. We're doing QT.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  I think that's a good theory, reading between the lines of like what he's saying and what he's doing. However, there is a problem there, which is these rates. I mean, 30-year Treasury just hit the highest in 19 years, as you said. How high can it go before something in the economy actually breaks? I think that's a big question. We've got like federal deficit spending. Right now, there's, you know, Trump has requested 44% in increased military budget. That all goes into kind of the debt, and the US government's debt repayment increases every time the 10-year and 30-year goes up. And so how high can it go up before something breaks? And he's actually going to have to reverse some of

• 28:18Speaker 01

  these decisions. I guess the good thing about this, though, is he's letting the market kind of push him into a solution, and they're kind of leading the way, and then maybe he's just going to follow it. But at the end of the day, this has to result in some level of monetary inflation and debasement. You know, however he wants to run things, I think he's going to be forced by the market into that type of a position. It just might take some time. So, but yeah, like, I got to say, on reflection, like, hearing Warsh speak is very different than Powell, in tone, in like timbre, in the way he communicates things.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  So there's still a lot that we just like don't know about how he intends to run things. And I'll give you another explanation for where he might be thinking about inflation, which is, he's talked before, earlier this year, a lot about the deflationary power of AI. He actually might be a believer in that, David, which is like, AI productivity boom, the next industrial revolution, that could be secular deflation into the US economy. And maybe he's trying to cash some of those checks, too, and hope that that begins to happen. So it could be that he's basing at least some of this policy on the AI trade as well.

• 29:42Speaker 00

  I don't like that at all. I don't like that one bit. Because, because... As the Fed governor, aren't you supposed to wait for just hard data to come in?

• 29:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:53Speaker 00

  And what hard data do we have about AI?

• 29:56Speaker 01

  We don't.

• 29:56Speaker 00

  Very little.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  Look, that's some speculation on my part. Maybe that's just kind of a hopeful thing he's got in his back pocket. Maybe the main way he intends to impact inflation is through quantitative tightening, as you say. But, you know, I don't know. It's like, this role is balancing a lot of different like factors. And yeah, you got to thread, thread the needle here very carefully.

• 30:19Speaker 00

  For some reason, this, watching this FOMC and kind of just seeing the rhetoric come out of the Fed. And like now, we kind of started, are starting to have a decent amount of data about the Fed. I am kind of reminded of the structural change of the Fed's stance that happened in 2022, where we went from ZERP to very high interest rates very, very quickly. And what, what happened in 2022 was there was a complete sea change. Investors were not positioned for it. The interest rates went way higher, way faster than anyone kind of expected. And there was, and we all kind of learned, investors in that moment kind of learned what really, you know, interest rates are because they had been ZERP for so long.

• 31:00Speaker 00

  I'm not saying that that's happening, but it does feel like there's a structural change at the Fed.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:06Speaker 00

  And WASH is just looking inflation, staring it down and being like, I'm going to eliminate you. And I don't care what breaks. And as a, as a, there's some parts of this, I'm not a Fed governor. I will never be a Fed governor.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  Nope.

• 31:21Speaker 00

  But like some parts, some parts of this, I do appreciate WASH is like allowing the market to come to real rates. The market is determining the rates. That feels normal. I don't like, conceptually, we don't like top down determined rates because the only thing that can determine what the fair rate of interest is, is the market. And it seems like WASH is doing that. And in some sense, that's good. As a risk investor who's exposed to tech and crypto assets, I am scared. Because, because he's, he's like, oh yeah, I don't care. Something is going to break. And that's like, I'm, we're good with that. And maybe we're doing the hard thing of having responsible monetary policy, which means austerity, which means like lower capital into the stock market.

• 32:06Speaker 00

  It's just all of the hard stuff. We're doing the hard money thing and like tech and risk is, is not into that.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  I don't know that he's going to be hard money. Like I, I think that that could be possible, what you're saying. Another explanation for all of this is he's just like, he's talking BS a little bit, right? It's like, he's not, he says 2%, but it's actually never going to be 2%. Like, we just don't know enough in order to understand, you know, what his signals actually mean to the market. I will give some hope to you for crypto assets. And this comes from a fantastic article I read from Michael Howell. You know, Michael, he is the global liquidity index guy. All right. And he put, what I appreciate about Howell is he's outside of crypto. All right. So he's coming at crypto from a completely different vantage point. It's, it's sobriety.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  It's from the perspective of macro and looking at crypto as an asset class and saying, what does this do for me? And he's very, um, he's kind of the author of the global liquidity index. So he studies global liquidity, has done so for like many, many decades. And here's the bottom line take from his article this week. Again, it's probably the best thing I read. A 1% move up in global liquidity, that's how he measures monetary inflation and debasement is global liquidity. A 1% move up yields an 11% up move in crypto. Okay. So that's historically, that's like 15 years.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  He goes through a basket of mainly Bitcoin, but then Ether and Acela and some other assets. And he measures this correlation, 1% up in global liquidity equals 11%. So crypto is a fantastic hedge against monetary inflation, monetary debasement. So if you believe monetary inflation is destiny, maybe not now, but like in the long arc, right? Because right now, global liquidity has actually been on a downtrend. This is what Michael Howell is, is reporting. But if you believe there's more monetary debasement ahead, then crypto is an asset class that should appreciate 11% for every 1% in global liquidity that we get.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  And by the way, I should say this, that is 4X the performance of gold.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Okay. So as a monetary debasement trade, it's about 4X. And he goes to the charts, he correlates this, about 30% of all crypto move, either up or down, is related to global liquidity. So this whole story here, the whole thing, like all of the, you know, the, the weekly coverage we do and all of the stuff on crypto Twitter, the whole thing is sort of, it's just the simple message of if monetary debasement, then crypto appreciates in value. And the reason it's gone down is global liquidity is down right now as part of the cycle. And it will return when global liquidity enters the up cycle once again.

• 35:10Speaker 00

  Isn't what's happening right now with yields going up, 30 year, 10 year yields going up? And the Fed is like, yeah, that's, we want the market to tell us that we're cool with that. We're, you know, contracting the monetary supply. Or if you're saying that like you are bullish because of global liquidity, doesn't that mean that WASH and the Fed has to do whatever they're doing right now? And then they have to capitulate? And then there will be more monetary expansion because, because we're like priming, we're loading up the engine, we're putting fuel, you know, in the gas tank. And that's actually hard, that's bad for risk, bad for tech while that's happening. But then something breaks and then it all, all hell breaks, breaks loose. Is that what you're saying?

• 35:55Speaker 01

  That's definitely a way this whole scenario could play out. It's not the only way this scenario could play out, but that is definitely, definitely a way this scenario could play out. And that's kind of the scenario and base case that, um, uh, Michael NATO went through this week. That's basically how he thinks it's going to happen. It doesn't have to, but the, the only destiny is just like, do you think there's going to be more debasement in the future? Of, you know, fiat or not?

• 36:21Speaker 00

  It's a, it's a certainty.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:23Speaker 00

  It's just not, it's just a matter of not getting rattled out of the market between now and then. Granted, if you're a believer in four year cycles, you have a whole like quarter in a month or two ahead.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, you get a little bit more time.

• 36:35Speaker 00

  The theorized bottom. Yeah. So like, I think Ben Cowan is like, it's October, bottom, bottom in October. So maybe, maybe WASH just like beats us around trying to get down to 2% and then like capitulates in October.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, we'll have to see how this all plays out. David, let's talk about clarity. So that is, I think the Clarity Act seems like it stalled on the week, right? So they were going to have a vote in the Senate, a cloture vote. Is that what this is called? Where they kind of vote on whether they bring it to the House. A cloture vote, excuse me, it's a cloture vote on the Clarity Act. The potential for this to happen this week has faded. Polymarket of whether this gets signed into law, the Clarity Act on the week, down to 26%. Last week, we had some hope. It was up to 40%. Now it's down to 26%. This prompted, some of this, I think, prompted SEC Chair Paul Atkins to come out and basically say,

• 37:33Speaker 01

  well, if Congress doesn't do it, I could do it. I could do some of this through regulation. Let me play a clip.

• 37:39Speaker 03

  We are ready, willing and able to come out with rules, um, you know, that, that address the same issues in clarity and, and other aspects of the crypto market. Ultimately, we need the certainty of a statute.

• 37:54Speaker 00

  I suppose what he's saying is that anything and everything under the SEC's purview that's in clarity, we can just do manually. And the point of clarity is to like lock it into law, but we can still do it. And then, but it's just like under threat of like Democrat unwinding.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  The next scandal.

• 38:11Speaker 00

  If, if they ever choose to, which they might not, or they might.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. It doesn't feel great.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  It's not great, but it's, it's a nice consolation prize, I guess.

• 38:21Speaker 00

  It is, yes, it is a consolation prize. It is something. It is something. All right, coming up next, Ethereum turns 11 and we have a new individual joining the board of the Ethereum Foundation. That is something different than the executive director position. That is a position that elects the executive director. So actually a pretty, pretty big development in terms of Ethereum governance. And then also. Ryan, I want to tell you about shenanigans. I would like to raise a slight alarm bell about shenanigans happening in New York City, and I want to get your reaction to what's going on in my neck of the woods. All right, so we're going to get to all of that and more. But first, we're going to talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Some exciting news. We are launching a new podcast to help people figure out the crypto cycle, how to navigate it. The best crypto cycle investor I know, his name is Michael NATO. He runs the DeFi Report. This is the guy that sent me a sell alert before the 1010 price drop happened. His cycle analysis has been absolutely on point. I've been following him for years, and this year we started recording weekly podcast episodes. Each one, we get into his portfolio, what he's holding, the market structure, entry targets, fair market value of Bitcoin and Ether, and where we are in the cycle. There's new episodes that are released every Wednesday. They're 30 minutes, they're short, they're punchy. I think this crypto cycle is harder to navigate than most, so let's do it together. Go subscribe to this podcast, search The DeFi Report, wherever you get your podcasts,

• 39:43Speaker 01

  YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or find a link in the show notes. There's a new episode waiting for you now.

• 39:48Speaker 04

  Hey, Bankless Nation, it's David. If you're hearing this, that's because you are listening to the free Bankless podcast feed. Did you know that there is a premium Bankless RSS feed? The premium feed has extra interviews that I do for my own personal research and just deeper questions that I want answered about the crypto industry, questions that I want to answer so I can be more informed as an investor, both at Bankless Ventures and also just in my own personal portfolio, too. Also, there are no ads, which means if you listen to the premium feed instead of the free feed, you'll get about 20 hours of your life back every year because you choose to support Bankless directly. So if you're interested in getting extra content all while skipping the ads, or you just appreciate what we do here and want us to keep doing it, we'd appreciate it if you signed up for Bankless Premium. And there is a link in the show notes to get started. Cheers to a good 2026.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  We're recording on July 30th. It's the 11th birthday of Ethereum. This is a tweet. It's hard to believe it's already been 11 years. On July 30th, 2015, we launched Ethereum from a small scrappy office in Berlin. So much has changed since then. Ethereum is the world computer. This is the original crew that launched the Ethereum chain. We are 11 years into this experiment. Gone from a price of what for ETH? Like 33 cents or so?

• 40:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, 33 cents, yeah, to where it is now is just shy of $2,000.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so it's been a rough five years for ETH, but it's been a pretty good 11 years if you zoom out.

• 41:10Speaker 00

  Phenomenal 11 years, yeah.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  Also, you mentioned it, but a new EF board member was elected, and this was someone new. The name is Pascal Kavasakio, I believe. That's it. This is a pseudonymous name, so I guess if I get the pronunciation wrong, it's probably no big deal because this is a pseudonym. This is not a real name. Privacy and Security Maximalist, he is called. That is from the Ethereum Foundation. This is Aya Miyaguchi, who is also a member of the board. What he brings isn't just security and privacy expertise. He's a living example of what 100% crops alignment looks like in practice.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  Crops, of course, censorship resistance, open source, privacy and security. So notably, Pascal is part of SEAL 911. That is crypto's emergency security hotline. If you get hacked, something really bad happens, this is the group that comes and helps you and saves you. They are doing fantastic work. So what's your take on this? This would be, I guess, the third person on the board?

• 42:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, the third person, yeah, is Aya Vitalik, this individual. And then there's a Swedish lawyer, Patrick Stormbigger. But like, I think that's more just like admin and bureaucracy stuff. The significance is it's the first new person in addition to Aya and Vitalik. And so like, this person has an equivalent amount of governance over the Ethereum Foundation.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  On paper.

• 42:45Speaker 00

  Vitalik, on paper, on paper, as like Aya and Vitalik. Vitalik, I think, was occupying two board seats, and I think maybe this is now one of them. And so he's giving up one of his two board seats to this individual. So just in terms of just like EF lore, like it's kind of a big deal.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  You think this is Vitalik's alt account? So you know Pascal, he's...

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Probably not.

• 43:10Speaker 00

  This civil attacking EF governance?

• 43:13Speaker 01

  But I do think this is another like-minded individual, for sure. So we'll see if that manifests in any big decisions.

• 43:21Speaker 00

  Can I tell you, this is not on the agenda. Can I tell you a fun fact, Ryan?

• 43:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:26Speaker 00

  Does the name John Perry Barlow ring any bells to you?

• 43:30Speaker 01

  No, it's a great name, though. It sounds like a founding father or something. Who's this?

• 43:35Speaker 00

  Okay, who or what is my favorite band ever?

• 43:40Speaker 01

  Oh, the Sheepdogs, right?

• 43:43Speaker 00

  Oh, actually, they're pretty good close. I was looking for The Grateful Dead.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 43:49Speaker 00

  The Grateful Dead.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  That'd be my second thought.

• 43:51Speaker 00

  John Perry Barlow is a lyricist for The Grateful Dead.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 43:56Speaker 00

  He also wrote the Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  What?

• 44:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, you know that document?

• 44:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Grateful Dead band member wrote that?

• 44:06Speaker 00

  The lyricist, he didn't play, he didn't play any of the music, but he wrote the lyrics for a lot of Grateful Dead songs.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  No way.

• 44:12Speaker 00

  I didn't know this until this week, and I'm a huge fan of The Grateful Dead, and I'm also a huge fan of the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, and it's the same guy.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  Was that, and did they publish that in the early 90s? Or is that the 80s or something? When did that come out?

• 44:26Speaker 00

  That was 96.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, so true like cypherpunk lore.

• 44:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's the Grateful Dead lyricist. I thought that was crazy.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is crazy. Tell me about Robinhood earnings.

• 44:39Speaker 00

  Robinhood earnings, okay. So Robinhood reported quarterly earnings, and so I pulled out some of the, what I thought was useful. Revenue, $1.3 billion in revenue, up 32% year over year, which was a slight beat. Event contracts is $156 million of that.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  That's been a good one.

• 44:58Speaker 00

  That has been a very good one, yeah. I think now, I think we have four quarters of event contract data. So it's up 10x year over year, but like at the quarter one, it was like starting at zero. Crypto revenue, $100 million of crypto revenue, down 38% year over year, and that is the third straight quarter of decline. And so crypto is down to just 7.6% of total revenue for Robinhood.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's from 16% a year ago. But I mean, that's the story of a bear market, and a bear market exchanges make less money, right? One would expect that, lower volumes, lower fees, lower revenue.

• 45:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're right, you're right. Still, it's not exciting to see. Robinhood revenue chain, however, I don't think that made it into this quarterly earnings report because it's just one month old, but made $3.1 million of chain fees for Robinhood in the last one month.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  That's really good.

• 45:53Speaker 00

  Not bad.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  You scaled that out, and we're at like, you know, 25, 30 million or so, and that starts to, you know, move some of that revenue on chain rather than on the exchange.

• 46:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, so still early days in the Robinhood chain, but there's still a ton of activity going on there.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  I did see, the big question is whether tokenized assets will actually take off on Robinhood. And I did see the Dex volume, at least on the week, for tokenized real world assets surpassed Solana. So maybe that is a sign of things to come. It would make sense for Robinhood chain to have the world's largest volume for real world assets, considering that's Robinhood's bread and butter. We'll see if they can build on that momentum. Are you about to throw some cold water on that idea, though?

• 46:37Speaker 00

  No, no, no, no. Do you want to know what's going on at the frontier of innovation of both meme coins and tokenized stocks?

• 46:45Speaker 01

  Oh, do I ever?

• 46:47Speaker 00

  Okay, so in an AMM, Ryan, and you want to buy a meme coin, what is that meme coin typically paired with?

• 46:55Speaker 01

  Well, it depends on the chain, doesn't it? I mean, USDC, I guess ETH in some cases.

• 47:02Speaker 00

  Usually ETH, right? So it's always paired with something. The pinnacle of innovation in meme coins is that you can pair a meme coin with a stock? A stock token? And so people are trading like meme coins, but like the base pair is like Nvidia? Or like, I don't know, some stock token?

• 47:22Speaker 01

  That's new. We haven't been able to do that in TradFi. You can't do that in TradFi.

• 47:31Speaker 00

  But I think that's actually one of the reasons why Robinhood chain's stock volume is up so big is because meme coin traders are using them as like base pair. So you can have underlying exposure to stocks while your meme coin runs up or down.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  Well, I guess there's a hopeful view on that is that's just how we bootstrap things, right? Maybe there's a more cynical view too. We don't have to get into that. David, I saw this on the week and you titled this under what is happening in New York City? This is Hayden Adams saying, "This is the worst mass doxing I've ever seen. Just personally searched several high-end apartment buildings that include people I personally know, their primary reverent residents. Not only were their units listed, but nearly every unit in the entire building was listed. F absolutely everyone involved in this. This is incredibly dangerous." That is Hayden Adams, founder of Uniswap, talking about something that just

• 48:25Speaker 01

  hit New York, which is they published the names and addresses in a searchable public database of all properties, people with properties over a million dollars or more. I think a the average or something like property in New York City is like 800,000. So it's a lot of people, right? It's like

• 48:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's it's it's your the majority, not the majority, but just like a fat chunk of people. Yeah.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  This is almost a million properties in ownership reference publicly doxed. And so that's why Hayden is calling this the worst mass doxing I've ever seen. Of course, this touches on something in crypto, right? Which is like, we believe in privacy and there have been rent attacks in our industry. And they have happened in some ways in countries that have publicly listed asset ownership and public address information. It's just like, not a good thing to see this trend, to see the New York State, or sorry, New York City publish this type of material because it can lead to people getting hurt.

• 49:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. If you tell me like, there was a mass doxing that happened, like my first reaction is like, oh, some tech company got hacked and they had their data stolen from them. This is the city of New York voluntarily just publishing people's names and addresses above a certain wealth amount for people that have a second home in New York. They're just publishing it. And that's just fucking wild, dude. That's just crazy that we're doing that. Don't do that.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. Their stated reason was state law. So there's a statue on the books, apparently creating a surcharge requiring the D O F to publish property rule for public inspection. So owners can check the status. So they said they were just following state law here. I mean, if they were, if they weren't, this is a bad state law.

• 50:21Speaker 00

  It's a bad idea either way. Yeah. Yeah. And then like on top of that, did you see the the five incoming New York City ran grocery stores that are going to like, charge 30% under retail prices on like essential like food?

• 50:37Speaker 01

  I did, yes.

• 50:37Speaker 00

  The fact that this is happening

• 50:39Speaker 01

  I know this gets under your skin, David.

• 50:41Speaker 00

  This gets under my skin. The fact that this is happening all at once. We have state city ran grocery stores intentionally undercutting the like private market prices. And then also we're doxing rich people in New York. It's just like, it's all happening at once. And I think that that we should just note that it's sus.

• 51:02Speaker 01

  David is not enjoyer of the things going on in New York City.

• 51:05Speaker 00

  I'm not an enjoyer of what's going on in New York.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  You stay in there, though? Or are you gonna flee? You stay here?

• 51:10Speaker 00

  People, not me, are indeed actually fleeing. There are people going to Miami either for like tax reasons or oppression reasons. I have no intention on leaving, but I mean, I rent, so I can get up, I can get up and go whenever I want.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've always been following that, kind of like the right to exit, like the exemplar of the right to exit for me is like Balaji Srinivasan, who I don't know if you saw his post this week, but he, there was a, I don't know, some kerfuffle journalist, a hit piece about him and he responded to this. But anyway, he's now a Singaporean citizen. Do you know that? So right to exit, he exited his US citizenship and is now a resident.

• 51:52Speaker 00

  He abandoned his US citizenship?

• 51:54Speaker 01

  Yes. Which of course is a big step.

• 51:58Speaker 00

  He paid so much in taxes to do that.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  Well, for context on that, for some like Balaji, right? It's when you exit the US, not only do they publish your name to a list, by the way, Senate maintained list. And there's about like 4,000, 5,000 people that do this every year, but they also, not quite an exit tax, but you may as well call it that, which is they take the the realized value at the current price of all your unrealized assets and then do the capital gains tax on that. So it's like 25%. For someone like Balaji, who's got like angel investments, VC type stuff, you have to market value all of that and then pay taxes, things where you don't have cash. Like, it's not insignificant, I would imagine, to go do this.

• 52:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a very, I mean, it's very on brand for Balaji to do this.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 52:46Speaker 00

  But it's in terms of just like the level of bureaucratic and financial like pain and cost, that's huge.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, I mean, a different ways, you just like kind of move around in the country that you have. And in the US, of course, there's all sorts of what, 50 different experiments happening at any one time, including all the cities in those experiments. So you get a lot of options, David, if you if you don't like the grocery stores. But I think you should go shop in one first, before you make a judgment. And you can see if you like it or not.

• 53:16Speaker 00

  Buy all the cheap groceries. I just don't want to, I just don't want to stand in line for

• 53:21Speaker 01

  Buy them, tokenize them, and then arb opportunity, my friend. That's what you could do.

• 53:26Speaker 00

  All right, Bankless Nation, that is it for this week. Fifth week of July, one of the few months that have five weeks in them. We'll be back and it's going to be the first week of August. Next week, crypto is risky, but that's why we're here. The institutions have landed, so we are leaving and going even more west. This is a frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.