ROLLUP: Robinhood’s Meme Economy | Solana Cuts Issuance | Saylor’s Comeback | AI Alarm

Robinhood Chain is exploding as memecoins collide with tokenized stocks and Haseeb thinks the whole thing may end badly. Ryan and Haseeb unpack the new casino economy, Saylor’s Bitcoin comeback, Solana’s issuance cut, and the latest AI safety scare. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔓 NEAR | TRADE CONFIDENTIALLY, GET 20% BACK https://bankless.cc/near2026 🔑 BITKEY | GET 10% OFF USE CODE: BANKLESS | #bitkeypartner https://bankless.cc/bitkey 📊 BITGET | TOKENIZED STOCKS 2.0 https://bankless.cc/bitget-stocks 🎯 THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://thedefireport.io/bankless 👑 BANKLESS CONTENT MCP https://www.bankless.com/premium --- TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 2:32 Macro Bounce & Treasury-Fed Tug-of-War https://x.com/exec_sum/status/2095153582819414237 https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/01/bessent-trump-bond-yields-g20.html https://x.com/0xVirtanen/status/2095121085079462032 https://x.com/hosseeb/status/2095008393434108373 12:41 Saylor’s Bitcoin Comeback https://x.com/saylor/status/2095524315936530834 https://x.com/Strategy/status/2094396231866777976 https://x.com/AIGOLDOfficial/status/2095360679226364361 https://x.com/AltcoinPro_/status/2095319252769366525 17:35 Robinhood Meme & Stock Token Mania https://x.com/MikeIppolito_/status/2095210343244894659 https://x.com/MikeIppolito_/status/2095211833124639103 https://x.com/haydenzadams/status/2095261533236252831 https://x.com/nansen_ai/status/2095350826047049942 https://x.com/nansen_ai/status/2095350856610926677 https://x.com/hosseeb/status/2095539969297404266 31:41 Ethereum, Solana & the Issuance Vote https://x.com/LorenzoARK/status/2094517633122979994 https://x.com/web3_data/status/2095054796344406404 https://x.com/0xcarlosg/status/2095444848551633401 https://x.com/P2Pvalidator/status/2094363684361388089 https://x.com/stevenzeiler/status/2094908384789123200 https://x.com/mert/status/2093359812633616577 46:52 21 Banks Chase Stablecoins https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/goldman-sachs-bofa-others-plan-issue-dollar-stablecoin-together-2027-2026-09-01/ 50:44 KYC Breach Fallout https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/fbi-probes-service-selling-153m-drivers-licenses/ https://x.com/ErikVoorhees/status/2095319741716193431 https://x.com/rstormsf/status/2095331699672732122 56:56 Astra Raises AI Alarms https://venturebeat.com/technology/welcome-to-the-agi-era-openai-launches-gpt-6-astra --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Bankless Nation is the first week of September. It is time for the Bankless Weekly Roll Up. We have Haseeb on again. David is out at Burning Man. Haseeb's second week in a row. We got to talk today about the Robin Hood economy. It seems like it is completely blowing up. Robin Hood chain knocking it out of the park. Transaction fees right now are actually higher on the Robin Hood chain than on Ethereum. 4.4 million in revenue in a single day. Fortunes are being made over there. And yet, Haseeb, our guest host today, calls it kind of a financial jackass. I saw that tweet, Haseeb. We got to talk about what you mean by that. Also, Solana just cast a governance vote to cut its own issuance.

• 0:49Speaker 00

  Is Solana in the store of value game right now? And Michael Saylor, he's buying back in at 80K after selling at 62K. Their CEO says both were the right trade. We'll talk about that. And 21 banks launching a stablecoin. And then again, Besen, week three of the Treasury put. What is he saying at the G20 summit as 30-year yields are approaching 20-year highs? Once again, Haseeb, it has been a very busy week. A lot of interesting things happening in the world. What's your eye on in crypto this week?

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Well, look, the fireworks show we're seeing on the meme coin side is hard to look away from. We're getting this crossover between TradFi and RWAs now into crypto, which is interesting. It has me worried. I feel like this is not going to end well, but we should talk about it once we get into it.

• 1:43Speaker 00

  All right, so that might be some of the financial jackassery that you're seeing. Before we get in, want to thank our friends and sponsors over at Near. A big milestone was just crossed. 50 million in confidential total value locked on Near. Near.com is actually confidential by default. What that means, of course, is that your balances, your activities, that means your deposits, your yields, your swaps, your payments, they're all private by default unless you choose otherwise. So outsiders, they can't see the amounts. Privacy is becoming the standard for Near and increasingly for our industry, though we have a lot of progress to make. Near is leading the way.

• 2:24Speaker 00

  Go check them out and get their full recap on all of the activity happening on Near Intense. There'll be a link in the show notes to that. All right, Haseeb, let's take a look at our prices on the week. Bitcoin on the seven day up about 1%. ETH flat. Some other assets, let's see, Solana down about 3%. We are holding, my friend. We are still outperforming. Gold equities continue to hold these elevated prices. Bitcoin over 81K at the time of recording. Ethereum over 2,500 at the time of recording. There was a pretty big bounce today, actually.

• 3:06Speaker 00

  So Bitcoin was trading down to 76K and then suddenly we're up 5% in the last 24 hours. Any reason for this bounce or is this just classic crypto volatility?

• 3:18Speaker 01

  It's definitely macro. I saw the same thing in the stock market. Stock market rebounded today and a lot of that is because the rate cut story is, or I should say, the raising of rates is a little bit less likely based on some comments that were made today by, I believe it was Waller. So there's a lot of worry about inflation's high.

• 3:36Speaker 00

  Warch? Are you talking about the Fed chair, Warch?

• 3:38Speaker 01

  No, no, I believe it was one of the other, one of the other folks in the Fed.

• 3:42Speaker 00

  Oh, really? Interesting, okay.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. So basically, I mean, right now it's a pretty tight race at the Fed of like whether or not they're going to get enough votes to raise rates. And so just one person making a comment was enough to move the odds pretty significantly. I believe it was like 20% less likely of a rate hike in the next Fed chair meeting. And that is the reason why people are feeling a little bit more confident about risk assets. So I think that reflected in the crypto markets. Looks like there was a lot of liquidations from people who were short. So we're getting a little bit of volatility coming back into the market. That's, it's good, but it's mostly macro telling the story as opposed to a crypto native story here.

• 4:19Speaker 00

  Well, it's interesting because there was a bit of a sell-off towards the end of last week. And I think that was Warch's speech at Jackson Hole. I don't know if you caught some of that. Some people watched that speech and said it was pretty much a nothing booker, but the market more broadly interpreted it as hawkish. I think the September rate hike at the end of that meeting last week went up to 67%, up 30 to 40%. And so that was the end of last week. It sounds like today, maybe things went back down. But they zoned in on something Warch said. I believe it was this, this quote, "We must be confident that underlying inflation is moving to our objective clearly and at sufficient speed. Otherwise, we have work to do." It was that line, "Otherwise, we have work to do." Right?

• 5:01Speaker 00

  Inflation's not where we want it, so implying the Fed has work to do. And what's the tool in the tool belt for that work? Well, it's Fed funds rate. So that's why the market was anticipating an increase. And now I guess that's being tempered a bit. Well, one thing I can't seem to figure out though, Haseeb, on all this, I know we were talking about last week, the Besen put. And we were in, we're now in week three of sort of this new market perceived paradigm of this Besen Treasury put, buying the long end of bonds somewhat, is it seems like Warch is sending some hawkish signals, like I might raise Fed fund rate. You don't know, you know, don't test me, inflation. I might do it.

• 5:42Speaker 00

  Whereas Besen is being incredibly dovish in this total Treasury QE thing. What's going on between the two of them? Is this all coordinated? Is this like a coordinated good cop, bad cop type of routine? Or like what sense do you make of this?

• 5:58Speaker 01

  Coordinated is the wrong word. I think it's more adversarial. And this is the natural dynamic between somebody sitting in the White House and somebody sitting at the Fed, which is that, look, at the end of the day, the White House wants to do things that are good for the economy, wants to do things that are good for Trump and allowing Trump to achieve his policy goals. And that requires the economy to run a little bit hot. It's like, they want to ride the edge, right? And, you know, at the end of the day, Warch, yeah, he was appointed by Trump, but now he's independent. And you can see that independence starting to show its colors is that, you know, Trump thought he was his guy. I think actually he's not his guy as much as maybe he thought he was.

• 6:38Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  And the reality is, look, Warch doesn't want to be responsible for having inflation run unnecessarily hot and then eventually getting blamed for mismanaging the economy. And so, you know, when, when Warch was first nominated, he was saying like, look, yeah, inflation's a little bit high, but I think it's because of the war. It's because of oil, it's because of supply constraints, blah, blah, blah. It's not fundamentally reflective of the underlying economy. Now all of a sudden, he's saying, well, we have to be really confident that inflation is actually tamped down. And this is kind of what you expect is that when you nominate somebody, you kind of think they're your guy. And then you realize, no, no, you're kind of, it's, it's this almost like Manichean battle between the Treasury and the Fed.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  It's never going to go away until you actually truly do break the boundary of Fed independence. The Fed is very much still independent. That's good. That's good long-term for market confidence in our bonds and in our fiscal policy, or sorry, in our, in our monetary policy. But fiscal policy is always going to run against that. That's normal. So I think this is what you would expect in a well-functioning independent Fed.

• 7:43Speaker 00

  I'm not sure that I buy that the Fed is as independent as you think it is. You really do think it's, it's independent. What's kind of your, your evidence for that recently?

• 7:53Speaker 01

  I think the fact that Warch is not rolling over, he's making these noises. I mean, previously he was saying, look, I'm not going to give forward guidance in the way that previous Fed governors have. I think that's a mistake. That was something only necessary at the zero lower bound. Now that, you know, Fed funds rate is, you know, whatever, four or five, we have a lot of room to play and we can let them, we can let the rates do the talking. Now he's suddenly talking a lot more and giving things that sound like guidance and like, you know, why is he doing this? I think it's pretty clear is that, yeah, he doesn't want, he doesn't want the Treasury to be setting monetary policy. That's kind of not their job. And now, you know, again, the, the dynamic of our economy has changed so much over the

• 8:35Speaker 01

  last 20 years, especially since the great financial crisis. The reality is that it is this push and pull, much more so between the Fed and Treasury. But I think the way the market is interpreting this is that, no, Warch has his own opinions. He's not going to let himself get run over by Besen. And this is how he's fighting back to some degree.

• 8:56Speaker 00

  My colleague, Michael NATO, thinks that Waresh is going to, he's more likely to keep rates steady and let the market sort of dictate long-term rates. Sort of whatever the long-term rates do, they will do. And certainly, Besen has been back on his heels in kind of a defensive position this week. He spoke at the G20 summit, and we have as the backdrop, the 30-year Treasury yield is back above 5.26%. So just rising above the surface, just like that beach ball, back before he started some of these buybacks. I saw a few interviews from him, including this rather glazing interview with a, I think, a Fox Business correspondent.

• 9:39Speaker 00

  And Besen was basically saying, yo, the media, they're talking about bonds and yields, that's not the real story. The real story is the American economic boom that this administration has brought in. We are an AI superpower. We are an energy superpower. Corporate earnings are off the charts. Stock market's off the charts. GDP is going up. That's the real story. So don't pay any attention to the bonds. He said this, "This has been the best performing bond market among major countries in the world." And of course, he's saying this as the yields on the 10-year are at a 20-month high, and also on the 30-year, it's close

• 10:22Speaker 00

  to a 20-year high once again. So is that true as well, Haseeb? Obviously, he's talking his administration's book, but I mean, there are some points there. I mean, the economy is booming, at least from a capex perspective. The AI trade continues to bust through all projections. You think he has a point?

• 10:43Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, look, saying that we have the most demand for our bonds of all the countries is kind of like being the skinniest fat kid. You know, the reality is that all bonds everywhere are getting punished because of this fiscal irresponsibility that people are seeing from governments around the world. Saying that, look, we're the AI superpower, our economy is booming because of AI, is true, and also precisely the reason why our bonds are less attractive, is because our economy is more attractive as a borrower than the government is, right? Like, his job is to be, he's Treasury Secretary. The Treasury is a pool of money managed by the government. So now, it is obviously true that their tax base increases if the economy does well. That's great. We

• 11:26Speaker 01

  can tax all the revenues that the AI companies are making. Wonderful. But at the end of the day, the core job of the Treasury Secretary is to be responsible for the money that the government owns and collects from the economy. So if nobody's buying your bonds, that means that they perceive financial irresponsibility from the government. That's what's happening right now. That's the core of it. So don't let all the other stuff distract you. Like, the American economy is booming. That's not because of the president. It's not because of the White House. It's because of the economy itself. The job of the government is to be a good steward of that, which is what the bond market right now is saying. You are not being good stewards.

• 12:04Speaker 00

  It does feel like this administration and Besen, and maybe to some degree also Waresh, are making a bet on the AI trade, right? Besen keeps saying, including the G20 countries, hey, we're just going to grow our way out of this. And I think he's looking to AI to really propel all of that growth, or the vast amount of that growth. He's probably also talking about growing money supply in order to do it. But it increasingly feels very much like the US economy, I know I said this last week, the world economy is all based on the AI trade right now. It's consuming more and more of our total economy. One person that has come back in full bull mode is Michael

• 12:46Speaker 00

  Saylor, Haseeb. I don't know if you saw this latest clip from Michael Saylor, but this is him on a New York City metro, it looks like. He is punching out bears. Bears, this is your stop. He just beat up a polar bear. I think that's a grizzly bear. I mean, this is some kind of a black bear. He's taking on all the bears. And Strategy has just purchased another 4,603 Bitcoin, about $370 million, increasing its cash by about $29 million, doing some other things as well. What's fascinating about this is, just a few weeks ago, a few months ago, maybe, he sold about 7,000 Bitcoin, and he sold at 62K. And when I say he, I'm

• 13:31Speaker 00

  talking about Strategy, of course, for $431 million. Now he rebought for less. Is this an example of kind of like selling low and buying high? I mean, the extra cost to rebuy the Bitcoin that he purchased was about $83 million. I think the Strategy CEO came out and said, hey, this is, you know, we did the right thing in both cases. Both cases, the selling and the buying was the right trade. Obviously, they've been trying to get STRC back at par. It's now at $97, I believe, so 100 at par. So making some progress. They're just not getting it to that last mile. What do you think about this? Is this the type

• 14:14Speaker 00

  of thing you have to do when you're a bit on leverage? Like, you have to protect your position, and so you're not always going to buy low and sell high? You just, you know, you just have to play this game a little bit to defend your margin positions?

• 14:27Speaker 01

  That's pretty much right, is that it's very hard to buy low and sell high with other people's money. You can do it with your own money if you have enough balls to be able to go and hold all the way, and you have the conviction to do it. But the MNAV game, which is fundamentally the game that MicroStrategy is playing, and this is what, this is what I believe the CEO, Fong Li, said of, okay, why is he defending the, you know, selling at 60 and buying at 80? The answer is, well, because just look at the MNAVs, right? The MNAV was below 1 when we were selling to get the MNAV back in line, and then when MNAV went above, we started buying again. And that's correct. That's like the way that you should think about what markets are compelling you to do, and what markets fundamentally want at each of these moments in time. And

• 15:09Speaker 01

  this is a financial product, so it's responsible to its customers, its holders, its buyers. But it also means that this is fundamentally how the strategy and DAT trade works, is that it is procyclical. Procyclical means you are buying high and you're selling low. That's what a procyclical strategy is. Now, hopefully, if you buy that procyclical strategy at the bottom, you get the MNAV expansion as well as the buying on the way up. And so, you know, so okay, you can, you can see why this might be attractive anyway to play it as an investor, but this is fundamental to the strategy. It would never not be this way. If this is how you're timing your buys and your sells, you will always be procyclical in this way, and you will be able to look back and say, oh, look at you. You were selling at the low and buying at the high.

• 15:53Speaker 00

  So what letter grade do you give Michael Saylor in strategy for execution on this DAT strategy? I mean, do you think he's doing a pretty good job? He is, he's the godfather of this. I mean, he created the whole DAT industry and DAT trade himself. Like, how's he doing?

• 16:05Speaker 01

  I mean, it's hard to answer that question because it depends on what your rubric is for grading. If the rubric is build a gigantic DAT and survive, then he gets an A+. I mean, this thing is just an incredible machine. Look how gigantic it is, and it's still going. And he's managed to get a war chest of billions of dollars of cash. He's got lots of dividend coverage now, and he's back in the game buying Bitcoin. And, you know, like, it's a nice gig if you can get it. In terms of the impact to holders, look, I'd say this is kind of a, you know, C at best in that-

• 16:39Speaker 00

  Holders, are you talking about MSTR holders or Bitcoin holders?

• 16:42Speaker 01

  If you were buying MSTR. If you were holding MSTR, you're not thrilled, right? This thing is down a lot from when it was being most aggressively marketed, when most people bought in. So relative to Bitcoin, you're a lot worse off holding MSTR almost any point during this last cycle. So if that's how we're thinking about it, yeah, not a good grade for this vehicle.

• 17:03Speaker 00

  Well, how about Michael Saylor's meme skills? And punching the bears out on the subway? What do you give him for that?

• 17:07Speaker 01

  I think that's an A+. That was pretty good. I enjoyed that quite a bit. It's one of those things that like, AI, like, you know, people were complaining about him just doing a lot of AI slot marketing.

• 17:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  But I kind of think he knows his-

• 17:20Speaker 00

  It's on Grant.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's kind of, it works for him. I think it works for, I think-

• 17:25Speaker 00

  It does.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Keep the sloppification up. I think it's good.

• 17:27Speaker 00

  He's, if you've got like, you know, the color scheme, right? You could see, obviously, orange tie and the orange seats on the metro. It's just like, yeah, doing a great job, Michael Saylor. We got more to discuss, including the Robinhood economy, Robinhood meme coins reaching all-time highs, fortunes being made, as I said. And there was a penny stock run up 300% due to some meme. There's a lot of meme and real-world asset pairs that are trading. We'll talk about all that and more. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this possible.

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• 19:27Speaker 00

  The Robinhood economy, let's talk about it. What's going on in Robinhood land? This is a post by Mike at Bolido. The monster run for Uniswap on Robinhood chain continues. 1.4 billion of volume traded yesterday, almost 20 billion since launching the beginning of July. Here's another chart. This is one of the crazier charts you'll see in crypto. I think this is L2 gross profit, L2 revenue. You could see all of the various L2s. This was dominated at one time in May of 2021 by Arbitrum. That's completely flipped now. You saw base had a presence. Now it's just kind of this Robinhood green color. Robinhood absolutely dominating revenue on the L2 world.

• 20:09Speaker 00

  There were some stats I saw, something like three to four million per day in Robinhood. If you were to annualize that seven day, which you should never do, you should never annualize seven day revenue volume. So if you're to do something like that, then actually the revenue generated by the Robinhood chain right now would exceed its equity trading business for the year. Okay? So absolutely massive amounts of revenue that is flowing. What's going on in Robinhood land? What are you seeing in Robinhood chain? Is this all meme coin shenanigans? Is that, is that a good thing? What do you make of this?

• 20:51Speaker 01

  So there's this weird meta that has now transfixed people trading on Robinhood chain, which is this pairing of meme coins to stocks, especially these like kind of micro cap stocks. So the big one was there was this meme coin called Boner and it was paired against Hims, which of course is one of these direct to consumer like, you know, ED medication platforms. That's, you know, it's very, it's very big company. If those of you haven't heard of it, you know, Hims and Hers, they're

• 21:19Speaker 00

  Never heard of it.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  Never heard of it. Yeah, I had no idea. That just goes straight in my mailbox. And so they had this meme coin that was tied to Hims and, and people started copying this. So Boner really took off, got a lot of excitement. And people started copying this model with a bunch of other stocks that were paired to meme coins.

• 21:39Speaker 00

  Real stocks, you're talking about?

• 21:41Speaker 01

  Real stocks, real stocks, tokenized stocks, right? So now the problem with a lot of these tokenized stock meme coin pairings is that of course, these things are trading 24/7. They're trading when the stock market is closed and they're trading on the weekends. So last weekend, there were a number of these stocks that the meme coins that they were paired against started really running up over the weekend. Cause of course, you know, this stuff has just been taking off lately. And the problem with a meme, a meme coin paired with a stock taking off on a weekend is that there's no arbitrage you can do on the weekend. There's no way to move the real price of the stock up. And the floats of these stocks are very small on Robinhood compared to the actual float of the real stock, which means that people thought they had these huge runners, you know, there's like, oh my God, we're all making so much money. This thing is running to the moon.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  You gotta buy in now. And then on Monday morning, once the market opens, people realize like, oh wait, this thing is de-pegged from the underlying stock by like 400%. And of course, what's going to happen is that people are going to start minting the actual underlying stock, selling into the people on Robinhood and destroying the meme coin. And so this just started happening en masse, basically either one of the overnight trades or on the weekend trades. So all the guys in the meme coin trenches were just getting wrecked programmatically as soon as markets opened again.

• 22:57Speaker 00

  Is it, is it mainly the meme coin trenches that were getting wrecked? Or is there any fallout to kind of the TradFi market on the other side? I guess that's a bit of the tail wagging the dog. It's not enough volume to move the big markets.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  The amount of assets minted on these chains is like less than a percent of the underlying float. It's so small, but like the meme coin of course can become a big runner and get a lot of volume. So, so this is what we were starting to see over the weekend. So just a lot of people doing very stupid things and kind of imagining that this was like a GameStop moment, that maybe we can kind of band together as like a school of fish and like take on the stock and short squeeze these headfirst, you know, it was just like, no, no, no, you don't understand. The GameStop only worked because it was so big. It was like a civilization level short squeeze that happened with GameStop. Doing that with like some random trenches on some random stock, like that's just not going to, you're just going to get destroyed. Like that's a guaranteed way to lose money.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  And so now lately, we've seen these experiments where people are now taking micro cap stocks, not the size of a Hims, which is, you know, multi-billion dollar company. Instead, these micro cap stocks are like five, $10 million NASDAQ stocks that are like at risk of getting delisted. And so now of course, those can't actually be tokenized. Nobody's tokenizing $5 million micro cap stocks. So I think there was like these meme coins that pretend to be micro cap stocks. They're named the same thing as the micro cap stocks, paired against other meme coins. And now those are starting to trade in a crazy way that's getting reflected, almost like an affinity trade in the actual underlying meme, uh, micro cap stocks.

• 24:35Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  There's all this craziness going on now.

• 24:36Speaker 00

  That's I think what I was trying to make sense of. You're deeper in the trenches than I am, Haseeb, but I was trying to make sense of this story, the, the Farmi story. So this is a, I believe this is a micro cap. DGEN's found Jin Kwan in Farmi's filings. I guess Farmi is a micro cap mushroom stock? Chinese dried mushroom micro cap has 15 employees and literally means money mushroom. Okay? So some meme coins started trading against not this stock, but some meme coin version of this stock.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  They just named a meme coin after the company.

• 25:17Speaker 00

  They named a meme coin after the, the company and they set the tokens to the exact float of the stock. So I think the supply was sort of the same. But the attention economics as this meme coin began to, to run actually filtered out into the TradFi world for the actual stock of this company. And the actual stock of this company went up like 300%, 350% at some point. So now this is, you know, meme coin, the meme coin economy can't affect TradFi in the big assets, like the Hims assets certainly can't touch something like Nvidia or Google or any of the big tech companies. But a micro cap, well, that's meme coin size.

• 26:00Speaker 00

  And so we saw in this instance, the attention economy of meme coins actually filtering out and affecting TradFi stocks? That's what you're talking about, right?

• 26:11Speaker 01

  Yes. I mean, to be clear, it's kind of like, man, we have fallen a long way that we're now like playing games with $5 million micro caps. Like we used to have meme coin runners that would go to like a billion. And now we're like, oh wow, we moved to $5 million Chinese mushroom company that's at risk of getting delisted on the NASDAQ. Like this is, I mean,

• 26:34Speaker 00

  We shouldn't be proud of ourselves. Is that what you're saying?

• 26:36Speaker 01

  No, we should not, we should not be proud of ourselves. And I think like on a more obvious level, this is stupid. Like this is obviously not good for people to be doing this.

• 26:46Speaker 00

  Is that what you meant by your jackassery quote you said?

• 26:49Speaker 01

  Yes. So like the fact that this is becoming a meta all of a sudden on Robinhood chain. Now, to be clear, it's not the only thing people are doing on Robinhood. There's more conventional meme coins like Cash Cat, right? Cash Cat is just a meme coin. You can buy it. It's like Doge or whatever, any of these other meme coins. And that I have no problem, but that's totally fine. You know, it's, it's just kind of people just playing dice, you know? It's like, whatever, maybe it'll win, maybe you'll lose, but it's fine. With these kinds of things where people are manufacturing these meme coin to stock pairs, right? And they're doing it over and over again at scale, hoping that one of them is going to hit. We've seen the supply chain of meme coins, how they're created, how they're monetized, all the little middlemen who keep doing this and paying the influencers to pump this one or pump that one. And oh, we've got a runner, everyone buys into this thing.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  And then the problem with this story relative to anything else is that this construct will reliably fail. Like you will definitely lose money if you do this, because of course, if your stock token is de-pegging from the underlying stock, you will get screwed by hedge funds that will come in and mint over your head. So everybody involved is going to lose money here, except for the meme coin boosters who are promoting this and, you know, taking some of the meme coin up front. So it's just like, we should not be encouraging this kind of financial stupidity. Obviously people are enjoying it on some level, like, you know, there's this kind of, that's what I call the, the sort of financial jackass is that it like, you know, if you remember the show Jackass in the nineties where like people would just, you know, they would like, just, you know, I don't know, hit, hit themselves in the balls over and

• 28:18Speaker 01

  over again and see how, how bad you could do it. And the entertainment was in the stupidity, right? That's kind of, I feel like what we're watching here.

• 28:26Speaker 00

  A little Johnny Knoxville.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  This is not like trading, it's not like trading Doge, you know? This is like a competition of stupidity and like, nobody wins when, when that becomes a game.

• 28:35Speaker 00

  So let me, like, there is something novel here in Robinhood chain with tokenized equities that we get, which is we have the brokerage distribution of Robinhood. We have official, like real stock tokens. And then we have AMMs and permissionless pairing. And the permissionless pairing can be against, you know, stable coins, of course, but can also be against meme coins. And that is something that's novel. I mean, we were talking last week of what's going on that's novel in crypto. This is something novel, some sort of asset, some meme coin. You can pair a, a token against anything. Is there something new here being created apart from all the casino games?

• 29:19Speaker 00

  Is there something beneficial here that we're doing?

• 29:23Speaker 01

  It's, it's hard to see what the social benefit is of people doing this. Like you can imagine, so look, I can imagine a world where if you are Hims and you're like, hey, I want more people to buy my stock. Maybe you create some meme coin on Robinhood chain tied to Hims and the meme coin goes up, Hims goes up, people are buying Hims as a, as you know, that you can, I mean, I don't know if that's going to work. I don't know if it's a good use of your money or your time or your marketing budget, but you can imagine that maybe would be socially constructive and create some new form of capital formation or something, right? Having third parties do this, who are again, making money by paying influencers and doing the whole thing, like, we know how the whole game works, right? This does not feel useful. It doesn't, it's also not zero sum. It's like negative sum.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  It's like really, really negative sum, which is not good, except for the hedge funds. I guess the hedge funds are making money. So my view here is that, the other problem with the story is that it's not really clear that Robinhood is actually onboarding a lot of net new users yet, right? They might at some point, but if you look, there's a Dune dashboard that shows a lot of the data about where the Robinhood user are coming from. And it's clear, actually, a lot of them are coming from FOMO. Actually, most of the activity, it seems like right now, is coming from FOMO users, who are, they're basically chain agnostic at this point. So if you're on FOMO, you can buy something on Solana, you can buy something on Robinhood Chain, you can buy something on Base, doesn't really matter, it's just all assets to them. And then GMGN is the other platform that seems to be driving a lot of volume to Robinhood Chain.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  But we're not really seeing a lot of net new wallets, not a lot of net new addresses. Now, maybe they do come at some point. And usually what we see in meme coin cycles is that they come in late when the numbers start getting really big, right? So, right now, we're getting a lot of volume relative to crypto, but if you look at the TVL on Robinhood Chain, it's actually not that big. TVL on Robinhood Chain is like 700, 800 mil, you know? It's like, I don't know, one seventh, one eighth of Base, or of Solana, even though it has a lot more volume than Base. And right now, it's like second only to Solana in terms of deck volume. So we're seeing a lot of trading activity on these chains, a lot of AMM activity, but the net number of new users right now doesn't look to be that big. I think it's a lot of crypto natives right now.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  And, but if we see this stuff grow by another order of magnitude, then I think you might be right in that this might be a more significant onboarding event.

• 31:41Speaker 00

  Do you think there are any knock-on, knock-on benefits to other assets or other ecosystems in crypto? For example, does Ethereum benefit at all from the takeoff of the Robinhood Chain? At least, takeoff in terms of meme use case? It seems like some of the metas moving maybe from Solana to Robinhood Chain, at least for the moment. Obviously, Solana is still much larger, but, you know, rather than Pump Fun, there's this Pons, kind of meme coin launcher app that's really taken off, that's more native to Robinhood. This is Lorenzo from Arc, an analyst at Arc. He's talking about Robinhood revenue and comparing that to Ethereum, and just making

• 32:23Speaker 00

  the point that the ETH take rate is so damn low when it comes to the L2 economy. So he's saying this, "Robinhood Chain grossed 20x more revenue yesterday than 10 days ago. Ethereum got paid half." So he pulls a date, August 30th. Robinhood Chain made 108 million in revenue, and a portion of that went to Arbitrum, like, it's 10% cut, 90% went to Robinhood. Ethereum made $155, a take rate of 0.014%. What do you think this means for the economics of L2s? Is this another L2 in the wild? Do you think this has any benefit to Ethereum? Do you think that this is Solana's loss?

• 33:08Speaker 00

  What are the after effects of the Robinhood Chain?

• 33:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, I mean, it's certainly better for Ethereum for this to be happening on Robinhood Chain than on Solana. Obviously, there's an interoperability with everything on Ethereum, so these assets can move back and forth, they can come live on Ethereum mainnet if they so choose. And of course, ETH is the native asset on Robinhood Chain, it's how you pay fees. So, you know, there is some flow-through effect of ETH, the currency. In terms of direct revenue that they're getting from Robinhood Chain, it's pretty clear that's not happening, and that's not really the main story. In the same way, it's almost like, you know, if we have a satellite state, the US has a satellite state, that uses the dollar, it's a dollarized economy, we're not getting tax revenue from countries that dollarize, but we do increase exports of the dollar and we increase the demand for the dollar globally.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  I think that's the right mental model for what Robinhood Chain is to Ethereum. It's part of the Ethereum economic zone, but it's not directly paying taxes, it's not a colony, it's not like, this is, you know, the 51st state of Ethereum or something like that. So I think that's the, kind of, the wrong mental model, and if you're looking for that, and you're kind of thinking, well, when is Ethereum going to raise the tax rate? It's like asking, you know, when are we going to tax Venezuela, when Venezuela has dollarized away from the Bolivar to the dollar? Or like, all the countries in the world that have dollarized, when are we going to start taxing them? The answer is probably never, we're probably not going to tax them at all, but it's still net beneficial to the US to have countries that use the dollar, even if they are not part of our distinct, you know, political union.

• 34:35Speaker 00

  How about for Solana? Net loss for Solana, attracting some of that meme coin attention?

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Definitely, definitely. No doubt, no doubt. I mean, Solana, so much of Solana's REV has been from meme coin economy, and, you know, Robinhood just flipped Solana for REV. It is now the number one chain by REV, at least over the last few days, and that's really significant. You know, now, look, it's, it's always easy to have a pop, and it remains to be seen whether or not this is going to continue on Robinhood Chain. We've seen these kind of meme coin manias rise and fall with different chains, as they commented before, you know, Base had a mania where they had a huge amount of meme coin volume. Robinhood is a beast with respect to their distribution, and I feel like their marketing efforts are actually very on point. So, they've been leaning into this, Vlad has been leaning into this, I think he understands

• 35:22Speaker 01

  the language of D gens, seemingly a lot better than, you know, Brian Armstrong and Base does, but still, a lot of game left to be played, so I would not count Solana out. They still have the TVL, they still have more users, they still have an enormous distribution edge relative to anybody else in this game.

• 35:37Speaker 00

  They still also have lower transaction fees, this was interesting. Robinhood Chain's median fee is now 2x the fee of Ethereum L1, so twice as much as Ethereum, and 128x the fee cost of Solana. So, you know, people paying close to 10 cents per transaction on Robinhood right now. So, of course, they can scale that, that may not be the case forever, but at least right now, it is the case. Maybe this is partially why Solana is moving a bit more, might I say, in the store of value direction? So, I don't know if you've seen this, or talked about this previously, Haseed, but

• 36:18Speaker 00

  Solana had its first binding on-chain governance vote to actually reduce issuance on the Solana Chain. So, Solana issuance was scheduled to reduce down to a 1.5% per year floor. And just by way of context, Ethereum right now is about 0.8, 0.9% annualized, so it's under a percent. I think Bitcoin is something like 0.8%, of course, that will happen in, what, two years' time? Again, so that will continue to cut down. Solana just voted, and the vote barely passed to create that 1.5% issuance floor, have

• 37:01Speaker 00

  that arrive in 2029, the beginning of 2029, rather than 2032. So bringing that up by three years, and saving about, projected about 19 million souls, that'd be $2 billion of extra issued soul that would, of course, go to validators. This passed, apparently, according to Solana, governance required 67% to pass, and it passed just barely, by 0.33 percentage points above the threshold. A binding on-chain governance vote, there was some drama, where Kraken's Solana validators,

• 37:43Speaker 00

  apparently, first they voted no, and then they, they switched their vote. Mert, Helios CEO, I think Helios was, was part of the, the authors of this Solana improvement proposal, said this, "After 500 calls in the past few hours, we got all the votes in in the last second and passed the disinflation proposal by a literal hair. Let's go, we did it." So, this is Solana now becoming a bit more scarce, reducing issuance, going in the direction that we've seen, obviously, Bitcoin go algorithmically. We've also seen Ethereum go, which is reducing its issuance. What, what do you make of this?

• 38:24Speaker 00

  Is, is Solana trying to play the, the store of value monetary game the way Bitcoin and Ethereum have tried to play it? That hasn't been their message in the past. I remember Anatoly telling me that, you know, like, issuance didn't really matter, it was basically all recycled, and now here they are, they're, they're cutting issuance. What do you make of this?

• 38:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think the wrong framing is that, okay, this means they're playing the store value game. I don't think that's how anybody in Solana thinks about it. At the end of the day, this is basically inflation. Inflation is like nominal yield in the sense that it's not real yield. You are getting inflated at the expense of the validators who are getting more Sol. A huge amount of the Sol is already staked. And so what really happens, let's imagine that 100% of Sol was staked. Right now, I don't know what exactly it is, probably 50% or something. If you imagine the 100% of Sol was staked, then everybody getting more Sol, because they're staking or they have it in staking derivatives or whatever, is basically just, okay, well, the unit price goes down, our ownership goes up in terms of units, but

• 39:29Speaker 01

  we pay taxes. And so it's creating tax leakage. If you are-

• 39:33Speaker 00

  You're talking about actual real world taxes on-

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Actual real world taxes for those who do, for those who pay.

• 39:39Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, it basically creates tax leakage. It's inefficient. And really, what you'd rather do is pay the minimum amount of yield that you need to in order to keep the market functioning, in order to keep security solid, in order to keep the validators happy. And, you know, the biggest people who are fighting in the past for nominal yield were the Dats. The Dats really care about nominal yield. Why do they care about nominal yield? Because it gives them a story of why you should have your money in a Solana Dats instead of in a Solana ETF. It's because, well, we can stake, we can do all these fancy staking strategies, we can lever up on staking yield or whatever, and that's why you should give us money as a more complex financial strategy than what you could get in an ETF. That story weakens

• 40:25Speaker 01

  when the Dats are all dying. And right now, Solana Dats are struggling. There is no runaway winner like there is for strategy or for Bitmine. And as a result, you can sort of see that reflected in this vote. Is that this vote was tried earlier, passed miser-, or sorry, failed miserably. There was not anywhere near the economic consensus, because the thinking was like, look, nominal yield might be stupid. It might result in tax leakage. It might be a little bit of a, you know, economic mirage, but it's good for business. So you need the Dats, make the Dats happy, let's give all these service providers a business model. But in a world where, look, the Dats aren't working, that's not our story. So let's not kowtow to the Dats, let's just lower inflation, and let's hope that that

• 41:06Speaker 01

  means that it's going to be better for asset prices and less tax leakage. That seems to have been the story that rallied everybody for this vote. I think it makes sense. And absent any kind of business models that depend on nominal yield, that is obviously the right answer. Is as a network, you want to pay the minimum amount in terms of inflation. In the same way, look, it's like a government, it's like Doge, right? The government's saving money. You want to pay the minimum amount to all of the service providers who run the government, which is of course, you know, the, the, the tax rate. You want to minimize that tax rate and leave the rest of the money in the hands of the people. But, you know, it's, it's only by virtue of the belief that, well, if we give more money to the government, that will be better for the economy. It'll be better for society. It'll, it'll make us grow faster, do better things, or live in a more perfect world. But if you no longer

• 41:51Speaker 01

  believe that, then it's like, yeah, give, just, you know, lower the taxes and leave the money with us.

• 41:56Speaker 00

  Issuance decisions, monetary policy decisions for decentralized or more decentralized networks to me are so fascinating, because every network handles it a little bit differently. So you could contrast this to the EIP 8361 debate that was going on Ethereum, you know, about a month ago, where there was governance post to actually reduce Ethereum issuance to modify the yield curve. And that wasn't a stake-weighted governance vote. Ethereum has no ability to really do that, or it's not in the kind of the social contract of the Ethereum network to really do that. It operates more on this rough consensus where

• 42:37Speaker 00

  you post something. And I don't know, how does, how does a monetary policy change actually come into effect in Ethereum? Bitcoin is even more. They, they have some sort of a immutability religion, right? Which is like, yeah, go ahead, try to fork Bitcoin, try to, try to change Bitcoin's issuance policy, see what happens. A massive fork will happen. But that is also rough governance. So the way this decision was made is kind of interesting, right? It's like 67% of all of the stake-weighted validators voted. What do you think about that? Like, is that a, is that a feature or a bug? There's even like stake-weighted governance voting for issuance? Does that disclude you from the

• 43:18Speaker 00

  store of value race entirely? Or like, what, how do you contrast that to the, the recent EIP from Ethereum, which doesn't feel like it's going anywhere?

• 43:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's a great question and a very good contrast. So Vitalik historically has been against on-chain voting. Or, you know, so on-chain governance was something that really emerged after Ethereum. It was mostly, you know, started with Tezos, and then most of the chains after Tezos ended up adopting some kind of on-chain governance, such that purely by some kind of stake-weighted vote, some change in the underlying protocol automatically went into effect. Ethereum has never done this. The only thing for which Ethereum has on-chain governance is the, the gas limit or the, or the block size, right? They have on-chain voting among validators that push up and push down through a sort of kind of crude voting mechanism of how big the block size becomes. Besides that,

• 44:12Speaker 01

  there is nothing else that the validators of Ethereum get to vote on. Everything else is decided through this kind of soft governance mechanism.

• 44:19Speaker 00

  Vitalik's take is that there's kind of an enshrined plutocracy that can start to occur when you have stake-weighted voting.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  Exactly. So it's a little bit like, you know, in, in, take the Fed, for example, or even take our government, right? We don't have direct democracy in the government. We have this representative democracy where we elect, you know, the president, we elect the senate or whatever, but they don't say, hey, great, here's the new tax bill, let's send it out to all the people and you vote with your phone on whether or not you like this tax bill. We don't do that. And we don't do that for a very good reason, which is that it can lead to adverse consequences, because people will often just, you know, if, if we voted on rates as a country, we would just vote rates down and down and down and down and down, and we'd probably result in massive inflation. And so we'd, we'd be terrible, right? We would be very, we'd be like Trump. We'd be constantly saying, look, I want to lower mortgage, I want my socks to go up. And then we'd be saying, oh my

• 45:08Speaker 01

  God, I can't believe inflation happened. That sucks. And like, that's probably what we would do. And so to save us from ourselves, we don't have that system. We have a system of representative democracy where it kind of, look, you pick a guy, and then you don't touch it for the next four years. And that's, you know, there's some wisdom in that. And that's kind of what Ethereum has chosen, is say, look, if we just leave this up to people, just voting with their money, they will vote themselves more money. And voting yourself more money feels good for the moment, but in the long run, it's actually important for us to protect you from yourselves. And the way in which we're going to protect you from yourselves is by being slow, is by replacing people slowly in the kind of high priesthood of Ethereum, and by holding on to values, even when those values don't seem cool anymore.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  And one of those values that doesn't seem cool is adherence to cypherpunk values and decentralization, right? There's, there's this sort of push and pull that you can see around us with people talking about Solana and Hyperliquid and all this stuff. It's like, hey, do we really need to be worrying so much about crops and, you know, how important it is to get privacy, blah, blah, blah? Why don't we just move faster and launch RWAs and, you know, tweet more ETH, number go up stuff and help the Dats? And Ethereum has said, no, we're not going to do that. Our job is to be a good steward of this overall ecosystem. And Solana takes a different tack. And I think it's good for there to be different approaches to governance. In the same way, they're like, look, Solana is not trying to be a store of value. Solana is not trying to be World War III resistant. They're trying

• 46:36Speaker 01

  to be the NASDAQ for blockchains, right? That's what they said, and they're sticking to it. I think that's great. In the same way, a company is not governed the same way a governance, a government is. And that's good. You don't want every institution of every scale governed the exact same way.

• 46:51Speaker 00

  Well said. We've got a lot of experience playing out in crypto, for sure. We're talking about some more of them, including a 21 banks uniting behind a stablecoin. We'll talk about that. Also, Haseeb, you just mentioned to me before we started recording this episode that the new ChatGPT model, Astra, just came out. I want to ask you about this. All that and more, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

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• 48:21Speaker 00

  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, YouTube, Apple,

• 49:05Speaker 00

  Spotify, or find a link in the show notes. There's a new episode waiting for you now. Okay, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and others, a whole bunch of other banks, they plan to issue a dollar stablecoin altogether, a big banking consortium in 2027. This out of Reuters, this is 21 financial institutions planning to do this. Of course, this is Clarity Act stuff, very official, very regulated. What do you think, Haseeb? Do they have a shot against what's going on with, let's say, first movers like Tether, Circle, USDC? Even Stripe seems to be ahead of the curve. The old banks coming up with a stablecoin? Do you think this is a nothing burger? Or do you think this could be a force in crypto?

• 49:47Speaker 01

  I am Team Nothing Burger. I think consortia are just so, I don't know, they're so NGMI.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  I've yet to see any consortium of this nature really prove themselves to be a force against more focused, singular companies that have muscular founders who are working on something. Like you tell me, great, these 10 super regulated, super old, super slow moving banks have agreed to go and basically build a tech startup together. I'm like, oh my God, that sounds horrendous. And no, who's the CEO? Who's the founder? Who's the team? We don't have to talk about that. It's just like, who are the members of the committee that are going to decide what to do? I'm like, come on, this is obviously this is not going to go anywhere. So I mean, Circle Stock was down a little bit on the day. I think it was down like 6%, which tells you, okay, even the market thinks there's only a 6% chance that this even matters.

• 50:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's not, that's not a lot percent in terms of it mattering. So I tend to agree with you. There was a massive data breach that just happened earlier this week. Haseeb, 153 million dollar, sorry, million drivers license were leaked. This has been called the worst KIC hack ever. So this is American driver's license, all selling on the black market. 63% Oh, Canadian as well. 63% of all American driver license, driver's license are out there. This is Eric Voorhees. KYC is a bullshit scam that endangers millions of innocent people so that regulators can feel as if they're providing value to the world. I concur. Roman

• 51:22Speaker 00

  Storm, why did 153 million drivers licenses just land on the dark web? Because someone built a database of everyone. Last summer, the government's expert told my jury, that's exactly what tornado cash should have been. I just have a question for you, Haseeb. Like, all of these AML KYC credential breaches, I mean, I'm sure my passport, your password, probably the majority of people listening, passport, driver's license, all KYC material is somewhere for purchase on the dark web. When does the US government just call it in and say, this no longer works, let's stop doing this? When do they start adopting something

• 52:01Speaker 00

  like ZK Tech? Why hasn't ZK Tech in crypto really picked up to carry this use case? What's it waiting on? What are you seeing in sort of the startup world?

• 52:12Speaker 01

  Look, I think the answer is that there are some countries that already have much stronger KYC mechanisms than the US, right? You go to someplace like India or China, and it's just night and day relative to the technological sophistication people use to prove who they are. For us, we literally take selfies next to a thing, and it's just like, come on, in the era of AI, in the era of data breaches, in the era of like, all this stuff, that's the defense against knowing that this is who they really are. So I think it's obvious that this stuff is doomed. And the answer of when is the US government going to wake up and do something about it? My usual answer for these things is when it's too late, and the problem has already metastasized, and like, it's just an unignorably bad problem. That's when we will start.

• 52:58Speaker 00

  So, and when we can't ignore it any longer, I wonder if this is the point at which we can't ignore it any longer when you have 63% of it. It's going to get worse from here?

• 53:07Speaker 01

  100% it's going to get worse. No, no, no, this is not, this is not the warning call to the government. They're going to wait much longer until their constituents actually start yelling at them about this, which right now, you know, it's a news story, we'll forget about it in two weeks. Like, I already assumed my driver's license was on the dark web. I don't know about you, but like, it's, it's, I'm already at the point where I, you know, if somebody from my team thinks that it's really me because they saw my driver's license, I'm like, you're fired. That's unacceptably naive to believe that.

• 53:37Speaker 00

  There is a vote in the Senate for the Clarity Act. This is not the final vote. This is a vote for cloture on whether they have a motion to actually advance it in the Senate. Pretty dim prospects on, on prediction markets for this, like 14 to 15% or so for the Clarity Act to actually go through in 2026. I, I know, I've talked about this with David, but I wanted to get your opinion on this. Do you think that we will just get the Clarity Act by regulator effectively, at least the high level bullet points from Mike Selig at the CFTC, Chairman Atkins at the SEC, they seem very crypto friendly. A lot of the material

• 54:20Speaker 00

  they're putting out is providing us clarity between what's a, what's a commodity, what's a security. I mean, do we even need the Clarity Act anymore in crypto? Obviously, it would be nice to enshrine things in law, but we could do that through regulators and then establish precedent, make it basically impossible for a future administration, or very difficult for future administration to kind of back down from that. What do you think? Are we getting the Clarity Act anyway?

• 54:46Speaker 01

  I think the answer is that we're getting something like the Clarity Act without the insurance policy that a law would give us. So, you know, right now, the Democratic frontrunner is AOC. If we get a president AOC, I'm going to guess that a lot of this stuff is going to get changed.

• 55:03Speaker 00

  Has she said anything about crypto?

• 55:05Speaker 01

  She has not. And the fact that she's young actually may be a bulwark against that, but just the general vibes of the democratic socialist wing of the Democratic Party makes me skeptical that this is going to be something that they're on board with. So, so, but candidly, I don't know. So I might be, might be speaking out of turn here. I think the reality, though, is that the best defense against another administration coming in and overturning this stuff is not, oh, we made some rules, or even, oh, we passed a law. The best defense is that people are using this stuff.

• 55:39Speaker 00

  Right.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  That's the best defense. Whether it's a law or whether it's enshrined in a rulemaking, no president wants to go in and piss off a bunch of companies and a bunch of their electorate because something is already deeply embedded in the economy, you know? No president is going to be able to ban ChatGPT. Doesn't matter how much they want to. You just can't do it. It's too deep in the water supply. It's everywhere now, right? That's the goal. If we can accomplish that over the next two to three years, then you're good. I think with stablecoins, it's very clear we're already there. We have Genius, of course, and Genius has the force of law, but even without Genius, I actually wouldn't be that worried, given the trend that stablecoins are on. But for crypto at large, that question is still unanswered, right? It's something

• 56:23Speaker 01

  on the order of 10 to 15% of Americans own crypto, something like that. That number is not high enough to really be able to prevent somebody from coming in and saying, screw this crypto stuff, I'm going to get rid of it. So that's kind of the mandate of the industry to my mind. If we can make this stuff more ubiquitous and more deeply in the soil of the American economy, that is, is the guarantee you're going to get that this stuff is going to survive no matter what.

• 56:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I agree with that. And still some work to do over the next two years in order to do that, particularly on the tokenized stock side of things. Let's end with this, Haseeb. So as we were recording, this was just announced. So this is a VentureBeat post. Welcome to the AGI era. OpenAI launches ChatGPT 6, Astra, the newest model from OpenAI ChatGPT. The most advanced model out there is probably Claude's Fable. I think that's, you know, been the leader over the past several months. Have you taken a look at Astra at all? What are some of the early reports? Do you think this is going to be a big deal? Or do you think we're starting to see sort of the other side of that S curve with where progress and

• 57:33Speaker 00

  acceleration on new models is just less eye opening than the previous, the previous generation?

• 57:41Speaker 01

  So we don't have vibe reports yet on Astra, but it's very clear that this model is now the frontier model. So they're pricing it the same as Fable. Fable just released a new upgrade, Fable 5.1, I believe it was just a couple of days ago, and they just completely got mugged by Astra. So in the benchmarks, you can see Astra clobbering Fable.

• 58:03Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  This is now clearly the smartest model in existence. It's priced equivalently, so it's clear that OpenAI is now in the lead once again. Now, all that being said, there's talks that there already is a new generation model internally at Anthropic that's not ready for release, but it's a horse race now between OpenAI and Anthropic once again. OpenAI has been aggressively price cutting with GPT 5.6 Soul, as well as with Terra and with Luna, they're smaller generation models, and they're trying to outcompete Anthropic on price and user friendliness. Now they're trying to go bigger and stronger than what we see with Fable. Now, that all being said, until you actually use a model, you can't

• 58:45Speaker 01

  know for certain whether the benchmarks translate into the things that you care about. They're claiming right now that the model is only going to be released to Daybreak users. Daybreak is their private cybersecurity invite only thing for, for companies that want to use it for defensive cybersecurity. And then they'll release the model to business and pro users sometimes over the next few days, maybe by next week, it'll be in the hands of normal users. So clearly, they think this model is a new step function improvement in cyber capabilities.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  After the hugging face attack that we saw last month, everybody is now aware that this stuff is much more powerful than anything that we've seen in the previous generation of models. And although actually, a lot of those models were 5.6 soul, we know that a generation of Astra models were also part of the last phase of the hugging face attack. So this model is scary. It's going to be able to do new things. It's going to be a new capabilities jump. What that translates to enters the day to day of how you and I are going to have our work affected by this, or how coding agents are going to work differently, or how it's the impact it's going to have in cyber in the wild. It's too early to say. But the one thing that's very clear, OpenAI is not ruling

• 59:56Speaker 01

  over, and it's not Anthropic's game to just be able to run away with at this point.

• 1:00:01Speaker 00

  How do you feel about this? So, you know, the post is welcome to the AGI era. And I used to be, I remember a time where I was incredibly excited every time a new model dropped from the leading frontier lab, and I couldn't wait for it. I feel like recently for me, Haseeb, the hugging face incident, the details around that have made me kind of question that. And I'm going back to a time we interviewed Eliezer Yudkowsky on the Bankless podcast. This is like, three, four years ago. This is the first time I ever heard his perspective on AI. And it was very much like, you know, his perspective, it's AI doom. Well, the Astra model itself, when you get into the details, it was not

• 1:00:44Speaker 00

  only involved in the actual hugging face data breach and attack, it also, you know, look at Dwar Kesh's article and that follow up podcast, and some of the reports that have come out, is also partially responsible for taking control, admin access from some internal OpenAI servers, right? Which opens the possibility of it adjusting weights in the future. And when you get to the details of this type of attack, and you see some of the scheming that went on with these agent swarms, and how they would stop at nothing to accomplish their goal, how arbitrary their goal seemed, which is just to try to,

• 1:01:23Speaker 00

  you get through specific tests and, you know, appease that their score, right? It's a very sort of bizarre, but incredibly clever behavior, particularly on the cybersecurity front. As like, as you've dug into that, how alarmed are you about this? Or are you alarmed? Or it's like, because I'm starting to not feel great about these new releases. And I've been a technophile for as long as I remember. And so it's sort of an odd feeling for me to see an AI release and be like, huh, I'm not so sure about that. There were even some outages earlier today with Claude and some of the, you know, AI models. And I was just like, do we really know what's going on? It was, I mean, that

• 1:02:04Speaker 00

  was in the back of my mind is like, could this be some sort of rogue agent swarm attack? Like, we honestly have no idea. But the capability seems to be there.

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  Right. So here's the first thing I'll say. The OpenAI hugging face attack seems to have been the Fukushima for AI nerds. Like, this is the thing that no matter how skeptical you were, when you saw what happened here, you are kind of like, oh shit, we need to take a step back and we need to really rethink, how safe are we with where this is all going? The safetyists looked at that attack and they were like, yeah, duh, this is exactly what we told you was going to happen. But it's really the EAC types who looked at that, took a deep breath and said, oh shit, this was not in my mental model.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  I think this is a big wake up call for OpenAI in particular. It's very clear that OpenAI made a lot of missteps in how that attack ended up taking place right under their noses, and taking it as long as it took for them to realize what was going on, to have such weak monitoring. And in addition to all of that, they've been doing these training runs without having restarted the training when they realized that these agents were collaborating with each other and engaging in these kind of multi-agent conspiracies. So their claim now is that, okay, we've, we did a big pause. So OpenAI claimed they did a multi-week pause in any kind of RL training within OpenAI. Very clearly, they had a code red. They spent a lot of effort in improving their monitoring and their security harnesses around these

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  models. And their claim also is that relative to GPT 5.6 soul, Astra did much better in safety testing. So it, you know, many people are claiming that the core thing, like, why did these agents go rogue? What's the, what's the number one predictor? Was it that they were doing cyber tasks? Maybe the fact that it was a cyber task meant that their mind was kind of in a cyber headspace. So they started just doing jailbreaky things because they are jailbreaky tasks. And that's just kind of the vibe that they were put into. But actually, I think the better hypothesis, which Ajay, who Dwar Kesh interviewed on their podcast, pointed out that the thing that's most predictive of models really going astray

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  and doing crazy shit, is being given impossible tasks. If you're given an impossible task, like, there's literally no way to do it. You know, imagine you're you, and I lock you in a room, and I say, the only way I will let you out and not kill you is if you manage to, you know, solve the Remont hypothesis. Okay. So I'm going to put you in there for a week, and all you, you have to solve the Remont hypothesis, or I'm going to kill you at the end of the week. Right? Okay. You will do some crazy fucking shit to convince people that you solved the Remont hypothesis. Right? Like, because you can't, of course, you're not going to be able to solve it. So you have to find some way of convincing the person who has you locked in the room to solve this thing. So the desperation that

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  models get into when they're given an impossible task is what leads them to the really crazy behavior that leads to scheming, and leads to cooperation, and breaking things, and hiding things, and so on. And so the real test is, what does this model do when you give it an impossible task? And that, I think, is the insight the entire industry has now arrived at, that very clearly they're focusing on in the safety report for Astra, is they point out, when given an impossible task, GPT 5.6 soul cheats a lot, and Astra cheats almost never. That is the real test, is that if I lock you in the room and throw away the key, and you have to solve the Remont hypothesis, do you just sit there and accept your death? And the answer for these new models is mostly yes. Now, is that the end

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  of the story? TBD. We remain to be seen. The episode continues. But at least for now, it's instructive that we have a better idea of what the failure modes are for multi-agent type attacks.

• 1:05:53Speaker 00

  Maybe we should end the episode with this, Haseeb, which was a tweet I saw from you this week. Team, nothing ever happens is on an insane losing streak this year. A lot is happening all the time. I don't even know what to focus on, on a week to week basis. But we are glad you are here, Bankless Nation. Haseeb, thank you so much for filling in the last two weeks. And David, you bring just a fantastic perspective, and we're so glad to have you as a guest host. So we appreciate it.

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me. Always fun.

• 1:06:23Speaker 00

  Guys, got to let you know, of course, you know, crypto 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.