ROLLUP: Is Altcoin Season Here? | Treasury’s Bond War | Robinhood Chain Mania | OpenAI’s Math Controversy

Crypto speculation is back, but is this really a new bull phase? Ryan and David unpack the altcoin surge, Treasury’s escalating bond-market fight, Robinhood’s tokenized stock boom, and the OpenAI controversy raising new questions about AI, privacy, and ownership. --- 📣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 🎯 THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://thedefireport.io/bankless 👑 BANKLESS CONTENT MCP https://www.bankless.com/premium --- TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 2:03 Altcoin Season & Degen Debasement Trade https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/BTC. D/ https://x.com/JustDeauIt/status/2095608847381733386 16:00 Treasury vs. The Bond Market https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2097708859531923682 https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2097719382533177507 https://x.com/uncnooman/status/2097579298181853548 https://x.com/Hedgeye/status/2098029288092013024 https://x.com/Hedgeye/status/2098045985926914317 https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2097746862463955076 http://pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-trump-promises-5000-dividend-for-americans-if-gop-wins-midterms 27:31 Robinhood Chain & AMC’s Tokenized Stock War https://x.com/0xcarlosg/status/2096919808235208766 https://x.com/uttam_singhk/status/2096903386168021033 https://x.com/Pumpfun/status/2097785975434846285 https://x.com/haydenzadams/status/2095874039927509161 https://x.com/haydenzadams/status/2095932954417451020 https://x.com/CEOAdam/status/2095622531524784212 https://x.com/vladtenev/status/2095711439810159027 https://x.com/CEOAdam/status/2095761359388520460 https://x.com/Ryan__Rigg/status/2097744223269188000 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/2098063002205659638 40:12 OpenAI Math & Privacy Controversy https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2097374640582668336 https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2097375276384567642 https://x.com/hosseeb/status/2097217378753106336 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/2097396382982340783 52:30 Hunter Biden’s LAPTOP Memecoin https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/2097696366596071825 https://x.com/HunterBiden/status/2097790749861638547 55:00 MetaMask Split & Ethereum’s Smart Wallet Future https://x.com/MetaMask/status/2097689508187680794 https://www.theblock.co/news/business/2026-09-09-consensys-splits-metamask-institutional-ethereum-infrastructure-businesses-414022 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/2097054140350554620 https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/2096370186094076098 https://x.com/ethlabs_org/status/2097838222621446629 https://www.theblock.co/news/ecosystems/2026-09-08-ethereum-foundation-quantum-resistance-2029-413716 1:03:24 Clarity Act’s Do-or-Die Vote https://www.theblock.co/news/regulation/2026-08-08-majority-leader-thune-files-cloture-on-clarity-act-setting-up-sept-15-senate-vote-411211 --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

• 0:04Speaker 00

  It's Friday, September 11th, and it's time for the Bankless Weekly Rollup. The AMC CEO declares war on Robinhood tokenized stocks, calling them contemptible, outrageous, disgusting, detestable, inexcusable, and vile. Wow, did he really use all of those words? Vlad, Vlad Tena from Robinhood, simply replies, "What's the concern?" spawning a war on Twitter. We got some other news as well. What else are we talking about this week, Ryan?

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Uh, Treasury. David, while you were gone, there was some war in the Treasury markets, and Besen has continued to up the stakes on that war. Now he has tripled the long-dated bond buybacks to $6 billion, yet yields are still increasing anyway. We've got to discuss that. Also, David, I want to ask you about maybe a potential altcoin season? Like a baby altcoin season? We have Zcash, we have Venice, we have Near. All of these things are up. Robinhood chain is going wild. Some people are asking whether this is altcoin season and whether it's way ahead of schedule and why?

• 1:10Speaker 00

  One of the reasons why VVV, at least of all the tokens, is up big is because OpenAI was caught red-handed stealing the work of a million-dollar math prize that had gone unsolved for decades. It has been solved, and OpenAI is taking credit. Did they actually do the work? Or was it one of OpenAI's customers doing the work? And they merely just crossed the finish line with the work that somebody else did? We're going to talk about all this drama and more. We also got some frame transactions out of the Ethereum landscape. This is account abstraction, once again, coming online as a discussion. And now people are fighting ETH because if Ethereum does anything, some people will choose to fight ETH about it. And Hunter Biden, the story of the year,

• 1:55Speaker 00

  launches a meme coin called Laptop. It's the exact movie that you would expect to happen. You don't need to watch it, so we'll just beat Reddit for you. I know everyone has waited on bated breath to talk about the Hunter Biden Laptop, but you're going to have to wait till the end. We're going to start talking about markets. Bitcoin and Ether, the blue chips of the industry, flat on the week. Meanwhile, the following tokens all hit all-time highs. Lighter, VVV, and Zcash all hit all-time highs this week. Near up 30%, Arbitrum up 40%, which brings Ryan asking the question, "Are we in an altcoin season? Is this altcoin season, Ryan? Is this altcoin season?"

• 2:35Speaker 01

  That was a hypothetical question. I know the answer to that already. But I want to get your answer to that question, okay? I know the real answer. So what do you think? I mean, this is, this doesn't usually happen, or at least that's part of the narrative, right? Bitcoin's supposed to pump first. That's supposed to confirm the early bull. I guess we got a little bit of a pump, right? When you left two weeks ago, where was Bitcoin? It had already jumped to close to 80K, right? When you'd left?

• 3:03Speaker 00

  Bitcoin pumped from like 65,000 up to 77,000 three weeks ago. And so we have actually, Bitcoin has been ranging between like 76 and 82, 81 for three weeks now, without actually going in any direction.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  We got to 81K, but we didn't get to the May highs, actually, above 82, which is somewhat interesting. So we were higher in May. But anyway, we got a bit of a bump, and now we have all of these non-Bitcoin assets pumping. So what do you think? Is that altcoin? Are we in kind of a mini micro altcoin season?

• 3:39Speaker 00

  I'm kind of reminded of a conversation I had forever ago with Mike Bolito, where he was telling me about one of the macro commentators that he likes the most, who pays attention to the Fed, you know, pays attention to macro, but also investing crypto. And it was like, it was like a funny bit where he was saying like, "Oh yeah, I think the Fed needs to ease." This is like two to three years ago. "The Fed needs to ease. We're going into an easy money era, and therefore I'm buying pudgy penguins." And like, I kind of think that's what happened in the crypto industry recently. Like, we are, like Besen is going to war against the bond market. We are doing, you know, quote-unquote "quantitative easing" in our own new way, and therefore crypto industry participants are buying meme coins.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  And so like, the D gens are just going straight to the end. And Bitcoin moves slowly, Ether moves slowly. But some of these tokens that hit all-time highs, like Lighter, Venice, Zcash, you know, like I said, Near and Arbitrum are up big. Meme coins are printing new highs in terms of DEX volume. I think that's just like a lot of the crypto D gens seeing the same pattern of just like, "Oh, we're going into an easy money era. Let's go to the riskiest table in the casino."

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  Because that's just a spinal reflex that we have.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  You know what I call that? The Dgen debasement trade. Because it's like, it's basically the debasement trade, what you just described, except it's like going way down market, where you can get the 10x, the 25x, the 100x style returns. But I do think it's too early to call altcoin season for anything.

• 5:13Speaker 00

  I'm worried about us getting ahead of our ski tips here.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, look, Bitcoin dominance is still almost at 60%. So like, have you seen, look at the start. Do you see anything that has shaken up Bitcoin dominance? You cannot call a Bitcoin, you know, altcoin season when Bitcoin dominance is near 60%. But, and Michael NATO actually reminded me of this. In 2023, which I don't think any of us would think of as a particularly bullish year for crypto. It was like, we were sort of rebounding. There was like, we were just trying to get over 2022 and FTX. It turned out to be sort of an early bull, but there were pockets.

• 5:54Speaker 00

  It was a repair year.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  It was a repair year. It did not feel particularly bullish, right? Not until we got to kind of the BlackRock ETF did things really start to feel bullish in crypto.

• 6:02Speaker 00

  Which was like October 2023, I think.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, but do you remember all of these pockets of speculation back in 2023? So we had Blur. Do you remember that? That was February 2023. In March 2023, the ARP token actually launched. So we got an L2 kind of revival. We had Bitcoin Ordinals, that was also in March. We had

• 6:24Speaker 00

  Oh, interesting.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  WorldCoin launching in 2023 as well. That was in July. We had, do you remember 2023 summer, Friendtec? Remember when that came on the scene?

• 6:34Speaker 00

  Oh my lord.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Just a pocket of pure speculation. And the speculation bubble kind of like moved from thing to thing throughout 2023. Toward the year end, we had the GTO airdrop and the TIA airdrop. And there were all these

• 6:48Speaker 00

  The GTO and TIA airdrops were absolutely the starting pistol for the following year.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  They were, but it was this moving bubble of speculation because it was just the crypto natives who were here. I still think it's that. I still think it's crypto natives are here. And this is a bubble, you know, a pocket of air of speculation that's moved to kind of Robinhood chain, but too early to call a full altcoin season. Do you think as well that there can be an altcoin season without Ether, the asset, David? Without Ether getting its due, okay? This was a

• 7:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I do, actually. We had that last time, that we've already seen that.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Okay, but maybe this time is different. This was a post from Michael NATO as well. He said, "Robinhood buying a ton of ETH seems like an obvious move at this point. They'll likely make money on it." And he says, "As I think more about ETH this cycle, this is probably the bull case nobody's talking about, not the store of value narrative, just institutions deploying and buying and then signaling to the community with ETH purchases." So he's saying Robinhood, potentially, they have the success of the Robinhood chain. How do you get in good with the crypto natives who are buying all the meme coin assets in the Robinhood chain? Will you buy some ETH and you put it on the balance sheet? You'll probably make money on that trade alone, particularly when you get behind it, and that could be a catalyst for ETH.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  He's also big in this idea of like, uh, new wealth creation, you know? And I know you've talked about this in the past, which is like ICO, wealth creation, NFT, wealth creation, meme coin, wealth creation.

• 8:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, you have to have some wealth creation episode in order for the full bull to get running. Well, the question is, who are the meme coin traders on Robinhood right now? And if they are getting wealthy right now, where are they going to deploy that? And Mike's thesis is, it's actually coming from parts of the ETH community who missed out on pump fun and all this Solana meme coin shenanigans.

• 8:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, the Unk Plumbers won the last battle.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, you think of the archetype of someone like Eric Connor, for instance, who's sort of like a ETH maxi of maxi. He didn't do much with respect to like

• 8:56Speaker 00

  Not as much anymore.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  Not anymore.

• 8:58Speaker 00

  Ethereum aligned, but he is

• 9:00Speaker 01

  But what's he trading now? What's he trading on Robinhood now? Boner coin is what, like, okay?

• 9:05Speaker 00

  Boner.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Right, so he thinks that wealth creation event might actually feed back into Ether, the asset. Anyway, there's, there's a little, speaking of boners, there's a little bit.

• 9:14Speaker 00

  I don't know if I want to consider this a wealth creation event. I would like to throw a soft flag at meme coins being wealth creation event. Like ICOs, which in hindsight were terrible. I'm not excusing them. At least had a semblance of, hey, we are going to create something that is going to be good for the world. And meme coins are just, it's a meme coin called boner. It doesn't pretend to be anything. It's not, that's the whole point. And so I would like to not perfectly equate meme coins with the pattern of generative startups, even though our

• 9:49Speaker 01

  I'm not saying generative startups.

• 9:50Speaker 00

  Past history of generative startups are heaven terrible.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  No, no one's, I'm not making any moral claims on these things or any even utility type claims or any good-for-society claims. I'm just saying it's a wealth creation. And if you look over on Robinhood chain, there is wealth being created. There are market caps and coins going up right now. And so, you know, are they going to keep all of their wealth in boner coin? Or are they going to move that into some other asset? That's the wealth creation event.

• 10:17Speaker 00

  Ryan, the last thing I said to you before disappearing for Burning Man at the end of the weekly rollup before I logged off was, hey, there's this like meta happening that's kind of like early, but it's like these weird paired tokenized stocks with a meme coin thing. And so people are like putting a meme coin in an LP pool with a tokenized stock. And that was it. And that was the end of the weekly rollup. And then I was gone for two weeks. The last thing I did before I logged off was I bought $1,000 of boner at a $370,000 market cap. And then

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 10:49Speaker 00

  Five days later, I look at my phone connected to Starlink and I'm up $120,000.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 10:55Speaker 00

  And Eric Carter is up $2 million.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  Congrats on that trade.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  That was wild.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  What enticed you to buy that specific coin at that time?

• 11:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, like, how did I pick out boner? I was like, thinking about this.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  Oh, is that the one that's like, that's paired against the Hims stock, right? Which is like,

• 11:12Speaker 00

  Hims stock, yes.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  erectile dysfunction, you know, stock or something like that?

• 11:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's like, there's like boner advertisements all over New York City. And it's all kind of like ED coded, like soft coded. Because it gives like,

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Soft coded?

• 11:23Speaker 00

  A male,

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Be hard coded, I think.

• 11:26Speaker 00

  buying this product, you, you get some sort of like deniability by is like, it's like not actually speaking the words into existence. It's like only, it's like a wink, wink, nudge, nudge kind of thing.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Okay, it's like a health product.

• 11:39Speaker 00

  Your question was like, of all the meme coins that I bought, how did I, how did I choose to buy boner of all of them?

• 11:46Speaker 01

  And also, what does that say about you? That's my question.

• 11:50Speaker 00

  I'll get to that. I'll put that on the premium feed.

• 11:55Speaker 00

  Boner, it makes sixth graders laugh. So that's good. That's bullish.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:01Speaker 00

  It kind of was reminiscent of fart coin of just like, it's so simple. It's so memetic. Like, why did fart coin run like two years ago? Because fart, it's fart. It's like such a memetic, you like, you laughed at farts so many times when you were in middle school and high school. So same kind of, same kind of category. It's very simple, very memetic. And then it also fit into the category that I was telling you about, like, before I logged off, which was like, it's paired with a tokenized stock. It's very simple. It's very memetic. Like fart coin ran because we hadn't tokenized farts yet. Boner ran because we hadn't tokenized boners yet. And it was, those things like came together. And it's like, okay, I think, I think this is like valid enough.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  A brilliant logic, David. I think you should, you know, go full, full, full time meme coin trading with this type of insight. I think, I think you'd do really well in this market.

• 12:54Speaker 00

  Unlike most people who bought boner, I, I, I, I, okay, I'm kind of think that this is a local top on the casino, if you will. And like, one of the reasons why I think that's true is like, if you look at the PONs token, which is like the new meme coin launchpad, that thing is down like 50% off of its highs. Robinhood REV activity is down off of its highs. I was writing an email to the Hims CEO, inviting him to come on the podcast just because he was in the meta.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:30Speaker 00

  And I was like, trying to like, think about this from the receiver side. Because like, sometimes stretch guests, you need to like, put a lot more effort. You know the deal. You have to put more effort into like enticing them to come on the podcast. And so I'm trying to like, put myself into the position of the Hims CEO, because he followed the boner Twitter account. Because again, boner is paired with Hims. And so like,

• 13:50Speaker 01

  And Hims is, Hims is going up as a result of boner, at least, you know, short term?

• 13:55Speaker 00

  I'm not sure. I'm not sure.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 13:57Speaker 00

  If Hims tokenized stock on Robinhood like dislocated because there was so much demand for it.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 14:02Speaker 00

  And so the theory is of this tokenized stock meme coin LP thing, is that this is going to be really helpful for the equity on the public market, because you have a new set of buyers coming in for the speculative meme coin reasons. And so I go and pull open the data. I got to go look at the receipts. And Hims is a $6.5 billion company. It has a 30% outstanding short supply. So it's heavily shorted. And so the idea is that these tokenized stock meme coin things will help short squeeze the stock, because there's enough demand to buy the tokenized version. And so there will, those with the enough buying pressure will do a short squeeze on the hedge fund, same thing as GME. There

• 14:44Speaker 00

  is $3.5 million of tokenized him stock on Robinhood chain on a $6.5 billion stock.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. It's not even worth his time.

• 14:53Speaker 00

  That is not happening. There is no short squeeze that is happening.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:58Speaker 00

  And so I think that whole narrative is very far fetched. We're seeing a, this is just this week. So this could be very short term. We may be just doing a break before chips go back on the table. But I think this is like, a kind of a, I think we're kind of toppy on this current iteration of the casino. And same thing with the kind of the flag that I was throwing earlier. So like meme coins are not wealth generative activity. This is not new. The tokenized stock meme coin LP positions are like kind of novel in meme coin land. But broadly, this is still meme coins. This is still the same movie that we've seen. This is not going to escape, reach escape velocity out of the

• 15:39Speaker 00

  crypto industry in the same way that NFTs did. I kind of think that the meme coin speculative frenzy that we have seen in the last like six weeks is about to be over. I don't know if I want to say that so confidently, but it kind of feels that way. Anyways, I sold most of my boner.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, I was gonna say, I hope you've sold your boner then.

• 15:59Speaker 00

  I sold most of my boner.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  If this, this is your true opinion, we'll discuss a bit more about this, including the AMC stock trade. But on more serious matters, let's talk about the global bond market, shall we? So I think when you left.

• 16:15Speaker 00

  Let's pivot into the bond.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  A hard pivot. Shall we use that term? Okay, so the bond war, this is like week four. I think as you were leaving, the treasury put, the Besen put was starting, that trade was starting to be put on. At the time you left, it was $2 billion. You're gonna buy long dated bonds, $2 billion per week, had a way to do that. That went to $4 billion. And now, David, it's at six. So just this week, we are up 3X. Here's a tweet, "The US Treasury announced it is buying back $6 billion in long-term debt, tripling levels seen before the recent intervention announcement." So they keep upping the stakes here in an

• 16:56Speaker 01

  effort to get treasury yields down. This was a fascinating clip from Besen. He was speaking at a fireside chat. Let me just play this.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  Whenever people say, oh, well, Treasury Secretary is taking a risk. Well, it's my dream. I have asymmetric information. I am the house now. So, right? So when we intervene with the Japanese yen, I have pretty good insight into what the Japanese, what the Bank of Japan is going to do, what Japanese policymakers are going to do.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Do you hear that, David? I am the house now. Does this?

• 17:37Speaker 00

  I'm not, I'm not bullish. That's, that's an Icarus. He's Icarus-ing. You are not the house, sir. The, the market is the house. You are a large player, but you are not larger than the market.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  It, there's, there's something reminiscent. We've seen our share of Icaruses in crypto over the years. And he's not Icarus-ing that hard, but he's getting up there. And yeah, it doesn't make me feel good about where bond yields are going. On that.

• 18:04Speaker 00

  I think it's very notable that the buybacks tripled and then yields have risen.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  Yes, they have.

• 18:10Speaker 00

  And if you listen to my episode with Jim Bianco, he has a perfect explanation for this, is that you want to incent bond buyers by hiking rates, because it's giving them confidence that inflation is going to be under control. Besen is doing the opposite. He is doing QE. He is injecting money. He's injecting liquidity, which is going to induce more inflation. And so it's causing bonds, bondholders to sell because they are not confident that inflation is going to be under control. And so the more QE that Besen buys, or the more bonds that Besen buys, the more bond sellers are coming into the market, is Jim Bianco's rationale. And if that, that would predict exactly this effect that happened this week.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  Well, I think there's an element of that. He keeps rationing it up and he's tripled the buys. And this is the 30-year yield. It's a 5.3%. I mean, highest since 2007. It continues to make all time highs. This is the 10-year. It's also creeping up. All of this has an effect on politics and of course, midterms. So this is mortgage rates, mortgage rates after kind of decreasing to close to 6%, they're back up, heading towards 7%. We also have inflation, as you mentioned, like diesel is at a record, almost $6 per gallon right now. But basically, the 30-year and the 10-year and the bond market sets

• 19:38Speaker 01

  the cost of capital. So you can imagine any kind of loan product, whether it's a car loan, whether it's a credit card, whether it's a mortgage, those numbers are going up with the bond market continuing to go up. And I don't know if you saw this, David, but this happened, I guess, the day before we've recorded. This is Donald Trump injecting his input into this, not specifically about bonds, but the politics of affordability. Here's what he said.

• 20:09Speaker 03

  But what we're doing is, because we've done so well, and because our country is making so much money, that only I can make this promise to you. And here is my promise. If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them, because of our economic, tremendous economic success, like in, in history, we've never had anything like what's happening. But because of our tremendous strength and success economically, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  There you go, David. A $5,000 dividend to every adult in the United States of America. The cost of this would be about a trillion dollars. Of course tariffs would pay for all of this. Tariffs meanwhile, I think they raised about 150 billion and have been spent already 10 times that amount. And this is an additional 1 trillion. So Trump with just a direct appeal to populism on the backdrop of basically a top three issue, maybe the top issue for voters, which is like cost of living affordability. There's a Reuters poll I saw today. 74% say

• 21:36Speaker 01

  cost of living is on the wrong track. It's a top issue for both parties and the cost of capital rising, the bond market rising does nothing to improve that. Makes it far worse. So what's going to happen there?

• 21:52Speaker 00

  Did the markets react after he said this?

• 21:56Speaker 01

  I don't-

• 21:56Speaker 00

  Because Donald Trump says a lot of things.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, he's like, he said if Republicans win the Senate and the House, it's kind of a, that's probably not going to happen, right? Like the Senate and the House?

• 22:06Speaker 00

  Not before people are incented with $5,000.

• 22:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. You think that's really going to move people into, into kind of, you know, like-

• 22:13Speaker 00

  No.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  Do you think you can actually get voters to just be bribed for $5,000 in order to vote? Especially when it's a promise coming from Donald Trump. Like you just like, you don't know whether you can cash that check, whether that would actually happen or not.

• 22:26Speaker 00

  Right.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Or whether it's just rhetoric?

• 22:28Speaker 00

  Yeah. This does trigger my memory of when we all got $1,200 helicopter money from the Biden administration during COVID. And then Brian Armstrong tweeted out the most incredible chart ever, which was a chart of dollar deposits into Coinbase by count. And there was like, you know, you would see a lot of $1,000 deposits. You would see a lot of $5,000 deposits. But like the week of the $1,200-

• 22:54Speaker 01

  It was like $1,200 checks?

• 22:56Speaker 00

  The number of $1,200 deposits into Coinbase was just like, it blew up the chart. And I think people, the government, everyone should take note that when the government hands you money, people take it to buy Bitcoin or hard assets generally.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  Or the degen debasement assets like meme coins and whatever shenanigans.

• 23:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. But like, they're not keeping it in your system because obviously if you disrespect your financial system, people are going to take the money that you are disrespecting it with and take it elsewhere and remove it from the system.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  Here's the thing though, I know we've been, this whole rally has been kicked off by the debasement trade and sort of the Besen put, you know, four weeks ago, this crypto rally. I don't think that this, the reason for the yields going up is just debasement and just inflation, right? It's, it's AI. And has he made this point the last couple of weeks? It's just the cost of capital is going up because AI is so profitable and they can make profit on a token and they need capital, they need debt instruments.

• 24:01Speaker 00

  A AI token.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I should say. An AI token. They, they can generate tons of cash on that and they need a lot of investment in order to continue that build out and they will pay top dollar yields to investors. And so the nominal GDP is going up and in that backdrop, yields will go up and they will continue to go up. Another era to look at actually is the 1980s where the, the market was just kind of like humming. And I read a Michael Howell post earlier this week who compared right now to actually 1987. He says, kind of like that. We, the yields were very high, but we also had GDP and an economy that was like raging and, and hot. And so sometimes high yields are not just examples of like

• 24:47Speaker 01

  a debasement trade. It can be that the economy is kind of booming and nominal returns and nominal GDP is increasing upwards. So a lot of that is happening, which is why like, I don't know if it makes sense for Besen to fight this secular trend.

• 25:03Speaker 00

  Look, Besen has way more experience than me.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 25:06Speaker 00

  Has way more information than me.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  Yes, he is the house now.

• 25:08Speaker 00

  But like, he is the house. But man, I don't like, it just doesn't make me comfortable to see the government react to the market and try to win a thumb war over the market. Like you don't, the market always wins. The market is the house. You are not the house, sir.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  It feels a little panicky. Uh, we got to talk more about Robinhood, including the AMC CEO. You said it was this, he used these words contemptible, outrageous, disgusting and detestable. What is he talking about? We'll discuss all that and more. But before we do, let's thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 25:41Speaker 00

  I've been trading crypto assets for almost a decade and I've used so many wallets, exchanges, aggregators, front ends, and I'm kind of always looking for the same thing. One interface with deep liquidity across a bunch of chains and assets and the ability to act in private and I still control my own funds. And I've never really found it. And I'm always switching wallets, juggling gas fees or getting eaten by slippage. Near.com feels fundamentally different to me. My account is easy to use and I can take all the actions I want from any chain while my activity remains confidential. It runs on Near, which has moved over $23 billion cross-chain using post-quantum signing and has over five years of uptime. Near.com is the best way to be on-chain and be in control. Get 20% of your trading fees back through the Bankless link. It's in the show notes, not

• 26:25Speaker 00

  investment advice. Bankless Nation, we've built something for you. Introducing the Bankless MCP. ChatGPT and Claude are great at a lot of things, but ask them anything beyond the basics of crypto about protocol mechanics, tokenomics, or just what happened last week in crypto and the gaps will start to show. The problem is context. Bankless, on the other hand, has spent almost a decade building one of the deepest archives of crypto data anywhere. More than 2,000 podcast transcripts, 10,000 articles and countless conversations with the people actually building this industry. And now we've structured all of that data into the Bankless MCP. So you can go and connect it to your Claude or ChatGPT and suddenly your AI can answer your crypto queries with the entire Bankless archive behind it. And every new Bankless article or episode gets added automatically. So the context

• 27:09Speaker 00

  keeps staying up to date. The Bankless MCP is exclusively available to Bankless premium subscribers. So you can go to bankless.com, upgrade to premium and connect the MCP in just a few minutes and all of a sudden your crypto queries to your AI LLM, whatever you use, will get a thousand times better. So go check it out. There is a link in the show notes and once you become a Bankless premium member, you can hop into the Bankless Discord and let me know how you like it. Cheers. Ryan, you should never ever annualize a weekly chart, but if you did, the Robinhood chain is printing Robinhood $1.5 billion of annualized revenue-

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Insane.

• 27:44Speaker 00

  Just from the chain. Don't annualize a weekly chart, but the metrics coming out of Robinhood chain are, is pretty damn crazy. Uh, Robinhood chain is now the number one blockchain by revenue, uh, generated $30 million this last week, uh, this last week. Uh, most of this is from meme coin trading, but also because these meme coins are paired with tokenized stocks, that means that it's also tokenized stock volume as well. So that's one of the big unlocks here is that because Robinhood has invested in the whole tokenized stock ecosystem, they are capturing this activity. And really like, it's also interesting to say, interesting to learn that I think like 70 or 80% of

• 28:27Speaker 00

  the volume on Robinhood chain, on at least on the meme coin activity is coming from the FOMO app. And so FOMO is acting as a huge conduit of activity. Uh, and the FOMO plus Robinhood chain combination is generating the most speculative fervor of activity since the whole meme coin mania on Solana in like 2023. Uh, and so once again, the meta is meme coins. It was meme coins last time. It was meme coins the time before that. And now with Robinhood chain and a brand new social trading app, it's meme coins once again. Uh, but it is pretty cool nonetheless to see a big chain launch and generate a lot of excitement and activity in crypto.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  I saw this even pump fun is trying to catch up on that pair meta with a, a stock and a meme coin. So they just launched custom pairs, allow you to pair any meme coin on pump with tokenized stock or even commodity, gold, any type of asset. So that seems to be the current narrative of choice. You do not think this has legs, as you said earlier, but it is providing, providing some gasoline and energy to all of the, even some of the blue chip DeFi on the Robinhood chain. So most notably, Uniswap is absolutely pumping. So this is a uni burn. Of course they have the fee burn now. I mean, for years it was

• 29:48Speaker 01

  like uni token, when burn, when burn. Now they have it, it's active.

• 29:52Speaker 00

  Wind fee switch.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  200 million per year in burn. It's getting close to that. At least on the seven day. Would you just say you shouldn't annualize a one week chart? Well, if you did annualize the Uniswap burn, at least right now, $200 million and a lot of that is on the back of this Robinhood meme economy taking shape with stocks and with meme coins. But there is someone we've been talking about who is not too happy about it. This guy's name is Adam Aaron. He is the CEO of AMC and he said that line, "I find this practice to be contemptible, outrageous, disgusting, despicable. It's vile. How can this possibly be legal?" What's he talking about, David?

• 30:36Speaker 00

  He's not talking about meme coins, which is usually the words that you hear being pointed towards meme coins. He's talking about the tokenized stocks.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  His own stock, right?

• 30:47Speaker 00

  His own stock AMC is a tokenized stock on Robinhood chain and that is the practice that he thinks is contemptible. Vlad Tenev, the CEO of Robinhood, he replied to this very long paragraph of text on that Adam Aaron, the AMC CEO put on Twitter. He simply replied, "What's the concern?" Question mark. Aaron tweeted his reply. It's like, "I'll tell you what the concern is." And then another very long paragraph of text. And then I never really got to the bottom of what he was really concerned about other than how these stocks don't have shareholder rights, don't have governance rights. And

• 31:28Speaker 00

  so if you are an owner of the AMC tokenized stock, you don't, you aren't able to use that stock to govern over AMC. Does he really care about that? Is that really what he's concerned about? Is that some of his shareholders aren't able to participate in governance? That's what matters to him the most?

• 31:48Speaker 01

  It's kind of funny because wasn't AMC like one of the sort of GME type meme?

• 31:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was like it was GME adjacent. Yeah, for sure.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  I don't know why he's so angry because he's been in this game for a while. But he ends this the second tweet, multiple paragraphs. I hereby call on you and Robinhood to voluntarily cease and desist the trading of AMC stock tokens. You must cease and desist this. Vlad was actually on Squawk Box the following morning, asked about this. And I think he gives some details into the structure of these types of tokenized stocks and the rights they do confer and the rights they don't. Let's go play that clip.

• 32:30Speaker 04

  I kind of hear what you're saying, but I understand Adam Aronson's frustration with this. He's trying to build something. He's trying to continue to build something. And, you know, he wants investors who are interested and believe in his product to come to him, not to go through you. He thinks if they go to you instead of going to him, his stock price is not going to do as well. He points out validly that if they're going to you instead of him, they don't get a chance to vote as a shareholder. I can understand why a CEO would be frustrated and upset about that. What makes you think that other CEOs aren't going to think the same thing? Hey, if they're interested in buying shares of my company, they should buy it from me, not buy something that you've modeled to to transfer off of it through you that that

• 33:15Speaker 04

  may in turn hurt my stock price because I'm not getting all the people who are interested in buying my stock buying it.

• 33:20Speaker 05

  I mean, I think that there's two things there. Number one, these are products available outside the US in 120 plus countries. And in a lot of those places, people don't have easy access to US equities. There's no underlying brokerage infrastructure. There's no Robinhood where you can go on your app and buy shares. So we think a lot of this is actually net new business and the opportunity for these companies to access a wholly new global.

• 33:54Speaker 04

  Business for you. What's Adam Aronson get from it?

• 33:56Speaker 05

  Well, he gets access to a whole new shareholder base, people who have exposure to his stock.

• 34:02Speaker 04

  Who do.

• 34:03Speaker 05

  And because the tokens are backed one by one to one by underlying shares, there is stock purchase backing these tokens. So I think that's just a misconception, obviously.

• 34:19Speaker 06

  And just so I understand, because it's one to one, does the token come with all of the voting rights and everything else that's associated, dividends and the like with owning the actual stock?

• 34:35Speaker 05

  It comes with dividends. Voting rights, not in this case because it is a debt security and the shares are held as collateral. But again, that's not dissimilar to how an ADR or an ETF would function, right? If you have an ETF and you get exposure to an underlying, you're not voting in each underlying.

• 35:00Speaker 06

  Can Larry Fink vote my stuff? I want to put him in charge, Vlad. I really like his politics. Is that possible? Can I?

• 35:08Speaker 05

  We can look into that, Joe.

• 35:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, thanks. Vlad, can you vote the shares?

• 35:13Speaker 05

  Me personally? I mean, I.

• 35:18Speaker 06

  No, I'm saying, is Robinhood going to be voting the share in the same way that Joe's unhappy that Larry's voting shares, though it's his firm? Is Robinhood voting those shares?

• 35:29Speaker 05

  I think that we haven't really announced plans for the voting aspect of that. So, I mean, we can, we'll certainly share more if we have it. But again, there is established, there is established precedent for creating these types of products. And, you know, they, they give exposure to these assets to people all over the world. So I do think this is the future. The entire financial industry is headed in this direction. The US is also working on innovation exemptions to allow for tokenized securities out here.

• 36:14Speaker 05

  And it'll take time to educate the issuers, the market, but we already see the benefits. And I think it's a little bit ironic in this case because one of the benefits of tokenization is that you have instant settlement. So actually, the underlying reasons behind the GameStop and AMC issues in 2021 would largely be resolved with this new infrastructure.

• 36:44Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 36:45Speaker 00

  I thought Vlad made fantastic points there. And I actually really think that the concerns from the AMC CEO and even the Squawk Box hosts are just misunderstood. They like, okay, Vlad, you get a new investor base, but not the AMC, not the AMC Corporation is just wrong. It is a conduit. The Robinhood tokenized ox is a conduit between a new investor base that would not have otherwise bought the stock and AMC. AMC does get the economic connection between these buyers that doesn't get the shareholder governance connections, but honestly, who the hell cares? And AMC does get all the benefits. Robinhood and Vlad are not running interference or running interception.

• 37:26Speaker 00

  They are unlocking access on behalf of AMC or any other tokenized stock company and investors who wouldn't otherwise have access, which is the whole rest of the world. The meme coin people get their hands on it first, and that's always kind of distasteful for people who are not in the meme coin world. But the whole idea of like neo-brokergages and tokenized docs on permissionless blockchains enabling access to people who do not have access to US capital markets is a foundational point that should interest every single US company. And all I'm seeing when I see the AMC CEO get upset is that like, you didn't ask us permission, like you didn't ask us if this is okay.

• 38:09Speaker 00

  But all of the benefits are almost, other than shareholder governance, almost one to one given straight back to the company who has issued a public equity. And so I think this is just actually fantastic marketing for Robinhood. And he gets to explain what these things are on Squawk Box. And so maybe this is just part of the process that we need to go through for the world to become normalized to tokenized stocks, and this is just what this looks like.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, they're not tokenized stocks in their ideal form, right? So they're outside of the US, they're kind of, you know, outside US jurisdiction. It's, and this is because SEC rules, quite frankly. So we can get tokenized stocks that have all of the governance shareholder rights that the AMC, you know, CEO might want. And also Vlad's point is ETFs don't even have those. I mean, they don't infer a governance right. But the broader point is like, I have no idea why this dude is so upset because like, it doesn't affect his existing shareholders. It just broadens his base of prospective shareholders. It's like net benefit, like there's nothing bad. They cost him nothing.

• 39:19Speaker 00

  The way I think he's interpreting it is that if they are buying the Robinhood tokenized share, they are not buying my actual equity and therefore I get none of the benefits because those things are completely decoupled.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  He's a CEO. He's smart enough. He's smart enough to know this.

• 39:36Speaker 00

  It seems to be what he is arguing and what the Squawk Box hosts also don't understand is that these are one, like near one to one representations and a $1 purchase of an AMC tokenized stock does equate to a $1 purchase of the AMC equity.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  It's funny, you could find meme coins distasteful, but that was not what his rant was about at all.

• 39:57Speaker 00

  No, it wasn't about the meme coins at all. Anyways, I hope that this actually does a lot of positive marketing for tokenized stocks and that just adds fuel to the fire of this whole innovation that crypto finally has arrived that we've talked about for like a decade now.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  Tell me about the OpenAI case. Did they actually steal from a mathematician? What is the news here?

• 40:18Speaker 00

  Okay, so there is this like millennium math prize, a million dollar math problem. There's a few of these out there, like I think six or something. One of them got solved this last week, thanks to the work of artificial intelligence, thanks to LLMs, thanks to intelligence. The drama here, the debacle here, is that the two people working on the problem, Tristan Buckmaster and Levant Alapataji, sorry, I butchered that last name, were working, they've been working on this problem. They are the two humans working on this problem. And they spent a year working on this problem using both Anthropic cowork and OpenAI Codex.

• 41:00Speaker 00

  And so they were working on this problem as humans do, but feeding this into OpenAI Codex. They had published something close to a breakthrough. They were coming very, very close to solving this math problem. And then OpenAI publishes the solution to the math problem about the same time as they were getting ready to release their paper, talking about how close they were. And so this has created a bunch of drama about why is there a coincidence in timing between these two people who are using OpenAI Codex, almost nearly cracking the, cracking this case, cracking this math problem. And then OpenAI does solve the problem and then releases their solution.

• 41:44Speaker 00

  And so there has apparently been reports, statements from Tristan Buckmaster, the mathematician who is the human behind this, about some sort of negotiation happening between them and OpenAI about who gets the credit. And OpenAI is happy to give the monetary prize to Tristan and her, his co-author Levant, Levant, but they still want to take credit for actually solving the problem. And the claim is that OpenAI took the inputs that Tristan and his co-mathematician Levant were putting into OpenAI Codex, and they were using that as a jumping off point.

• 42:27Speaker 00

  And they, and then OpenAI used a ton of compute to basically finish the job and truly solve the problem. There's privacy concerns here, there's provenance concerns here. And also, one interesting bit is that the Levant character is an employee at Anthropic. And so in this negotiation between OpenAI and Tristan, the mathematician, they wanted Levant removed from the credit because they don't want anything associated with Anthropic. And so this has triggered a bunch of people in the privacy world and the just like data sovereignty world to say like, look at what OpenAI is doing, probably also Anthropic too. They are just consuming data and using it to train their models and inform their own processes.

• 43:13Speaker 00

  And these people are not your friends. They are not your friends, they will take your credit and they will take all of the fame that they can associated with it.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  Okay, so the soft allegation here from Tristan is OpenAI basically stole my homework and now solved this as a result of basically my chat logs with OpenAI. And there's a word for this that comes to mind in crypto that we talk about all the time, which is the word front-running. This is, the allegation is that OpenAI front-ran these mathematicians, took their proprietary information, they thought this was a private chat, and then actually used it in order to get the prize, capture the, you know, the notoriety, solve the problem and front-run their user base.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  And I think that's a, that's a fascinating way to frame it and certainly brings to light, like what actually do companies like OpenAI and Anthropic use the chat logs and data for? And by default, David, they could use any of your chat logs for internal training. It's sort of vague as to what they're doing, but like that's the default. You have to turn that off in Anthropic, in Claude, I should say, and also ChatGPT, if you want them to not do that. And even then, it's like, are they really doing it? It's a pinky promise. I mean, OpenAI came out and said, we didn't actually use any of these chat logs.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  They said, we cannot rule out that identified data derived from their usage of our product helped improve our models. But they're explicitly saying, no, we, we didn't steal these researchers' homework. And it's like, very difficult to prove. Can you actually prove this?

• 44:56Speaker 00

  Right.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  There's such an asymmetry in terms of a user's ability to like, point at a large tech company like, you know, OpenAI and say, you stole from me. And I mean, how are they supposed to collect proof? We're like, where's, you know, so, so even the mathematicians here don't have evidence of this. But to your point, it really brings data sovereignty into the forefront. And I mean, is this part of the reason why some things are pumping like the VVV token? Like, you know, some of the privacy meta is happening in crypto. It's just like, people are realizing, big tech does not have your back when it comes to data sovereignty, when it comes to privacy.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  And, you know, you could go with the anti-tech movement of like, okay, let's just go back to paper. Let's not use AI, let's not use computers. Or you could go to kind of the crypto data sovereignty expression of this, which is like, hey, use tech, but users retain the sovereignty of their own data. Like, that's a message I feel like is, comes from crypto, is part of the ethos and is maybe a reason why VVV is getting the uptick and some of the privacy tokens are doing well.

• 46:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, there are a couple of things I want to underscore here that I like, if you just kind of try and remove the drama, some, some things are worth stating. One is that it can be true that when OpenAI, so at OpenAI, a team of OpenAI employers, employees created a prompt to solve the math problem in question. What's, what's the name of the math problem? The Navier-Stokes math problem, millennium prize problem. So OpenAI team members typed in a prompt to their own model, which I think was also like unreleased. It's not even the new ChatGPT 6 model. It's something even more frontier that they have access to, that no one else has access to. And so they typed in a prompt that was like, solve this math problem.

• 46:54Speaker 00

  The model, it can be true that the model did not look at user data, but at the same time, the model itself was trained on the data anyways. And so the training can happen. So like when the mathematicians in question, Tristan and Levant, when they uploaded all of their drafts to OpenAI Codex, the OpenAI models are able to be trained on that data. But when the OpenAI researchers or users, the team members typed in the prompt, solve this math problem, it can also be true that that data was not accessed because maybe they were actually, they didn't have their hands on the data. Both of those things can be true.

• 47:36Speaker 00

  So the LLMs can be trained on the data, but when the LM is being prompted, it doesn't have access to the data. That is the gap that OpenAI didn't really close here, saying like, yeah, we're not, we're not using your data, but our LLMs are totally being trained on them, is the thing that they did not say.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  Well, it's them benefiting from their data. And you made the point that that's actually part of the business model, right?

• 47:58Speaker 00

  Totally. That is the business model of Anthropic, OpenAI, and probably all of the Chinese models. Because if you are not using all of the data accessible to you.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  Not the Chinese models, probably not. Like, because like Chinese models are just, they're open source, open weight. Anyone can run the inference. I mean, I think it's less so the Chinese models.

• 48:20Speaker 00

  The, the point I want to make is that if you are in the arms race of model development, you need to get your hands on as much data as possible. That's right. If that's OpenAI, that's Anthropic, and that's probably also Chinese models too. You need to get your hands on as much data as possible. And so OpenAI and Anthropic, one of the benefits of being in the position of being a consumer product, a direct-to-consumer product, is you get to have first access to all of this data. If you are not using that data, you are disadvantaging yourself as a matter of principle to protect your users' data sovereignty. So Dario and Sam are like, I don't care about those principles. I will suck up as much data as possible to improve the product because I'm in an arms race. So that's what's happening.

• 49:05Speaker 00

  And so that's just kind of like the toxic nature of the AI arms race. It is what it is. Also, zooming out. AI, LLMs solve this math problem. That happened. And so ignoring the drama about OpenAI or Anthropic, and who gets credit and like the humans that did the work, whatever, whatever, whatever. We have a millennium math problem, one of the six math problems that got solved because of AI. And I think it's also worth like, it's shrouded by all this drama and this credit. But it's still cool that AI solving huge math problems. And we are still not yet at the final capabilities of these AI models. And so it's worth stating that we are solving very cool problems and the future is going to be sick.

• 49:49Speaker 00

  And meanwhile, we have all this drama along the way, but it is very, very cool that AI is solving massive math problems.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Data sovereignty, though, right? Like be careful what you put in your chat logs with a Claude or an OpenAI, right? On their enterprise tiers, apparently, you know, there's the legal contracts where they can't peep into your data. I don't know, there's a lot.

• 50:09Speaker 00

  But we don't know because once the data gets into the weights, the weight, the model weights of a LLM model are a black box. We don't know what data is in there. We just know that the weights are what they are. And once the data goes in there, you have no way to prove about whether your data got used to shift the tuning of those weights or not.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  It's all a big question of who's going to capture the value on top of all of the data. And more and more value seems to be captured by some of these frontier labs. And I think people are rightfully worried about that.

• 50:42Speaker 00

  Anyways, Venice, the platform that can't steal your data, is up 40% on the news. Also, Near pushed through like 20 or 30% up on the week this week. And the Near AI cloud platform, if you, listener, are interested in not having this happen to you, this is what Ilya and the Near team are, have been working on and have been building on, like self-sovereign, user-sovereign AI, user-owned AI. And so it's cool that in crypto, we have the antidote to this problem, all this drama that's happening in the AI arms race. And so Near AI, Near sovereign. And so the Near AI cloud is built to exactly protect user data.

• 51:23Speaker 00

  And so shout out to Near, shout out to our partners at Near for helping build that and giving our users protection over their data. Ryan, are you ready to talk about the Hunter Biden laptop?

• 51:34Speaker 01

  I am, but I think we need a break for sponsors first, don't we?

• 51:37Speaker 00

  We do. And so we'll get right to the hottest story of the week, right after we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible.

• 51:43Speaker 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, YouTube, Apple, Spotify.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  We'll find a link in the show notes, there's a new episode waiting for you now.

• 52:30Speaker 00

  On September 7th, the Wall Street Journal reported that Hunter Biden will be launching a meme coin called Laptop on the base chain. About four minutes later after the story broke, Hunter Biden posted the ticker and the date on X with a Fox News clip about said Laptop. The Laptop, Biden said, Hunter Biden said, had been turned into a weapon against him, but he was turning it into a token, a symbol of resilience, redemption, and recovery. He would go after Trump's meme coin Grift, citing nearly a million wallets that had collectively $3.8 billion in losses.

• 53:06Speaker 00

  And hashtag or ticker Laptop, he promised, would be different and compensate all those people who lost money on the Trump meme coin Grift.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 53:18Speaker 00

  Oh, no. Anyways, after crashing 99%, Hunter Biden had to go to Twitter to defend the launch on X. He blamed predatory snipers and also claimed that no one on the Hunter Biden team or in the Hunter Biden insider circle were able to sell any tokens, which earned himself a community note, which identified multiple wallets receiving 100 million tokens, 10% of the supply before the launch, and sold them all.

• 53:47Speaker 00

  Okay, so if I had to just give you a formula, starting with the Libra coin, it's an insider wallet, blame snipers, say you're doing this for some positive reason.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  Wait, the Libra coin, the Argentina coin debacle?

• 54:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I don't want to blame Malay because he was just kind of a useful idiot, unfortunately. But like, we've seen this movie so many times before. We've seen this movie, yeah. Like, say we're doing something good, blame snipers, there's insider wallets that get allocation early, they sell. The person in question says that the team is locked up and can't sell, the token dumps 99%. It's like, if you wanted to write the most normal movie about a shitty meme coin launch and have nothing change whatsoever about the formula, this was it.

• 54:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, you just swap out the political celebrity, whatever, with someone else and rinse, wash, repeat.

• 54:47Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  Depressing, depressing stuff, David.

• 54:51Speaker 00

  Also, why go against literally the world's greatest meme lord, Donald Trump, with a meme coin? Like, you're going to lose.

• 55:01Speaker 01

  MetaMask is spinning out of ConsenSys, which is interesting. MetaMask, of course, was part of ConsenSys, ConsenSys, kind of an early Ethereum conglomerate. But they had an enterprise structure with their L2, Lenea, Bezu, all their institutional products. And then they also had this wallet, which is the MetaMask wallet. They are now splitting those two things into separate entities. So MetaMask is now off on its own. They're going to focus on the consumer use cases. Saw MetaMask rolled out like a Mastercard-type product. You see where the future of that's going. It's kind of like consumer fintech meets crypto wallet. They're boasting, how many users do they have, like 30 million users?

• 55:46Speaker 01

  A ton of users.

• 55:47Speaker 00

  The most, yeah.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  On the MetaMask side of things. And then everything else is staying within ConsenSys. Joe Lubin is actually going to be the CEO of the MetaMask product. Oh, 100 million downloads was the stat I wanted to give. No mass token in the announcement, so don't know if that's coming, if that's ever coming. That has been a rumor for a lot of years, but big news that MetaMask is now splitting out of ConsenSys.

• 56:16Speaker 00

  IPO?

• 56:18Speaker 01

  I don't know. I mean, there've been rumors for a long time that ConsenSys was going to IPO. This might be a step towards that.

• 56:24Speaker 00

  ConsenSys IPOing without MetaMask is much more why. Like MetaMask and like one or two in Fura is the whole, like, the whole pie. And so MetaMask, I've mentioned this on the podcast many, many times before, is a, like, auditing mess, if you will. Like, they started in 2015, they paid their first employees with Ether, they didn't have payroll, there was no books. Like, it was a complete jumbled mess in the beginning. And I'm sure that that is just like kind of unresolved because of how much of a spaghetti, unorganized mess that ConsenSys was in the first few years.

• 57:05Speaker 00

  I'm sure that they have shaped up, but like going back and fixing that is, I don't really know how to take a company public. It's far easier and cleaner to spin out the things of ConsenSys that make money and then have liquidity events on those things.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe that's what they do. Maybe there's going to be a MetaMask IPO, is what you're saying.

• 57:23Speaker 00

  MetaMask IPO, Infura IPO, like IPO these things individually. And that's how Joseph Lubin and the ConsenSys equity holders get their liquidity event.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  There was some news on the week from the Ethereum world about frame transactions. I think Vitalik put out a post, this is a feature that is going to be a headline feature, not in the next Hard Fork, not in Glampsterdam, which is supposed to still happen this year, 2026, but the one after that, Hogata, it's called, in 2027. And frame transactions are going to be a headliner, a feature of that Hogata Hard Fork. Vitalik talked about it. Can you simplify it for us? And you're pretty bullish on it, actually. Can you tell me why?

• 58:12Speaker 00

  Account abstraction, yeah. We've had account abstraction as a subject in Ethereum land for forever. Even Ethereum Layer 2s tried to beat the Ethereum Layer 1 with account abstraction. Account abstraction is of smart wallets. It's actually kind of like hard to explain because it's conceptually very different. It is an alternative to externally owned accounts. And so rather than having a dumb wallet, kind of in the same way that like Bitcoin is kind of like a dumb blockchain, it's like a simple blockchain, and Ethereum is a smart contract blockchain. Externally owned accounts, which is your ledger, your MetaMask, your, you know, your normal wallet, is a dumb wallet, and account abstraction is a smart wallet.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  It's programmable, right? So you could do stuff like, you don't have to pay gas in ETH anymore. You could pay it in whatever token you have, including stablecoins. An application can sponsor the gas fee, so you could have gasless transactions. You could have pass keys as sort of the private keys during sign-ins, you can batch transactions.

• 59:11Speaker 00

  You can swap out private keys. You can have the same, you can have the same address, but a new private key, which is how actually much of Ethereum can become quantum proof, quantum resistant. When, we were talking about like Near two months ago or so, becoming quantum resistant first, it's because they had this structure.

• 59:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:28Speaker 00

  And so you can easily swap out a address or the private key and have your front end address be the same.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  So that's what frame transactions?

• 59:37Speaker 00

  Limitless as to what you can do, yes.

• 59:38Speaker 01

  But that's what frame transactions are, and it's coming in Hogata. Like, I guess, I feel like we have been promised or we have talked about account abstraction so many different ways over the last like 10 years in Ethereum, right? Like, at some level, I'm like, okay, like, cool, but like, why has it taken so long to get here? And why is this now being prioritized? You have any thoughts on that?

• 1:00:04Speaker 00

  It was always prioritized in some sense, like it was always destiny to have merged into Ethereum in the future. Why did it take so long? Because Ethereum is a startup mentality, or because Ethereum and the EF development is a nonprofit mentality, not a startup mentality. It would have been far better to have had account abstraction during the wave of mass building in crypto during 2020 through 2022. Having those synergies aligned, having all the builders plus account abstraction would have been phenomenal for the development of not just Ethereum, but the industry at large. It's a shame that it has been taken so long. It has a shame that crypto as a whole and Ethereum as a whole has been, has taken so long.

• 1:00:47Speaker 00

  Why is it taking 10 years? Because Ethereum is a decentralized system. We needed to argue on standards. We didn't have as much data now as we did then.

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  I think on account abstraction, though, people forget there were like precursor EIPs to this, like multiple things tried. Do you remember there's the ERC 4337, which is just basically wallet would have to adopt it, that would be more account abstraction. The adoption levels, you know, never really took off. It didn't really become kind of the default choice for wallets. But at least that like tested out the idea of smart accounts and programmability and how that would work inside of the Ethereum network. So I feel like now that we have those building blocks in place, there's more, you know, it's battle tested, I suppose. And so now they can go all in on frames and just make it part of the core protocol.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  But the big reason I think this was prioritized, David, is because like you're going to need to replace signatures due to quantum. The signatures in Ethereum are not quantum secure. Those have to be replaced. Ethereum also, the EF came out this week and said, by 2029, we want to have the entire Ethereum stack quantum secure. Okay. So that's a lot of things to replace. This is one of them. This, I think, is why the EF has prioritized. I don't think it was because of better UX. I think they haven't cared about that as much as other things.

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  I think it was really quantum signatures that kind of pushed it as this like, we have to have this in order to get to our deadline in 2029. That's how I read it.

• 1:02:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, I do remember talking, I can't remember which EF researcher it was, when the first iteration of account abstraction got merged for 4337. Like account abstraction had been discussed in 2016 and 2017 and 2018. And then it got put onto the shelf and then it finally had its first implementation in 2023 with 4337. And like one of the researchers, the quote that like resonates in my brain was like, this just proves that there was no good reason for why we put account abstraction on the shelf in the first place. We could have had this forever ago. And that was in 2023. And so like, once again, if you beat a horse, beat a dead horse, to answer your question, why did it take 10 years?

• 1:03:09Speaker 00

  There's no good reason. Other than like, there was no forcing function other than quantum.

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  Right, right. Well, I guess glad we have quantum as a forcing function. I'm not sure. I'm not sure the reason, but getting it next year, that is the big news. David, let's end with this. So next week, the Clarity Act, it's do or die week. They vote on cloture. Odds on polymarket are about 15% right now. People think it's going to fail because...

• 1:03:37Speaker 00

  15% that it passes.

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  That it passes. So the odds of failure are 85%. The, the reason is because the ethics language hasn't really been, that bridge hasn't been crossed. Probably the Democrats also just don't want to throw another bone to crypto or to Trump, any things on his agenda prior to midterms. So I don't think this is going to happen. Are you bothered by this? Or like, hey, 15% is not zero.

• 1:04:07Speaker 00

  15% is like, it's possible.

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  We'll see where it goes. We'll see where it goes next week.

• 1:04:12Speaker 00

  Bankless Nation, thanks for sticking with us another week. Hopefully this is the start of a very long and glorious bull market. And if it is, we will be here along the way. Crypto is risky however, but not risky enough. The institutions are landed, so we are going even further west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you were with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.