ROLLUP: The Bull Market is On? | Zcash & NEAR | Kalshi Wash Trading | BlackRock Goes Onchain

The bull market may be back, but Bitcoin might not be leading it. Ryan and David break down the early-bull signals, Zcash and NEAR’s surge, rising yields, Kalshi’s wash-trading controversy, and BlackRock’s expanding crypto push. --- 📣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 0:28 Early Bull Confirmed https://thedefireport.io/research/early-bull-confirmed https://x.com/benjamincowen/status/2102007452057079986 https://x.com/benjamincowen/status/2102572123185107151 https://x.com/saylor/status/2102011709808353551 13:23 New Bull Market Leaders https://www.bankless.com/read/this-is-not-bitcoin-s-cycle https://x.com/Delphi_Digital/status/2064430003731804517 https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/zcash https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/near https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/2100789397960704285 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/2102787878552015357 https://x.com/CosimoCapital/status/2102886894115696978 33:18 Rising Yields & the Debasement Trade https://x.com/Geiger_Capital/status/2103118843061182872 https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/TVC-US10Y/ https://www.tradingview.com/chart/KZYJV3ef/ https://www.oaktreecapital.com/insights/memo/shall-we-repeal-the-laws-of-economics---part-iii 42:29 Kalshi Wash Trading Drama https://x.com/icobeast/status/2101358009477632410 https://x.com/beniduboss/status/2101459048247808010 https://news.kalshi.com/p/the-facts-behind-kalshi-s-perpetuals-volume https://cointelegraph.com/news/kalshi-says-cftc-hasnt-contacted-it-over-unusual-5b-trading-activity 47:57 Vitalik Backs Trueo https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/true https://trueo.com/ https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/2102143283493507554 https://x.com/Trueo_/article/2102123554162561272 54:37 New Tokens & Institutional Crypto Expansion https://x.com/variational_io/status/2102929439063765192 https://x.com/Ondo/status/2103106602593087575 https://x.com/WSJmarkets/status/2103092730880569691 https://x.com/BlackRock/status/2102409739175141458 https://www.blackrock.com/us/individual/literature/whitepaper/the-machine-native-economy.pdf https://www.theblock.co/news/business/2026-09-22-binance-takes-100-million-circle-stake-alongside-five-year-usdc-deal-416042 https://www.blockhead.co/2026/09/22/coinbase-opens-ipo-share-allocations-to-us-retail-customers-starting-with-smart-ring-maker-oura/ --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Bankless Nation, it is the fourth week of September and we've got a bull market on our hands. It's a bull market, but whose bull market is it? That is the question. The majors are up a little bit this week while the middle of the market is up 30%, 40%, 50% in just seven days. So what's going on? Even crypto guru Ben Cohen has said that the bull market is on. We're going to talk about, we're going to dissect the current state of the bull market.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think once Ben says it's on, he's been bearish lately. Once he says it's on, that's confirmation enough for me. We also got to discuss Zcash at a near 10-year high. I think that's a fundamental change in the market and I want to get your take on it. Also, David, tell me about Call She. They got cooked this week. There was a bunch of wash trading, a million identical $5,500 trades. The Wall Street Journal is talking about this. Some guy on Twitter is talking about this. And also I saw Vitalik has blessed a prediction market called TruO. That token was up a lot. He said, "This is the prediction market without any of the corpo slop." So we'll discuss what that means.

• 1:19Speaker 00

  Meanwhile, as we discussed, the 30-year treasury, the 10-year treasury are all printing their highest yields since like 2004. Not only is it a crypto bull market, but it's also a bond yield bull market, which is bad. Usually that's bad. Do we care? Does Bitcoin even care about high yields? I think that's another question that I want to ask. Let's just look at the charts, however. Bitcoin made its first leg up from like $63,000 up to $78,000. And people weren't totally sure if that was, you know, a head fake or not. But we have since made a second leg up from about $77,000 up to $85,000. And now people

• 2:01Speaker 00

  think it's on. I also think it's on. The second leg up off the 200-week moving average, I think, is a pretty big deal. That marks a eight-month high on Bitcoin, the highest price since January of this year. And so the people who have previously been saying there is going to be a fourth quarter dump, you know, we're not done through the bear market, we're going to once again touch the 200-week moving average once again in fourth quarter, maybe even go below it. Those people are starting to change their tune.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there's starting to be growing consensus even among the crypto cycle investor experts, people like Michael Nato from the TDR.

• 2:39Speaker 00

  The four-year cyclers?

• 2:40Speaker 01

  The four-year cyclers. Michael Nato from TDR, I would say is one of them. Ben Cohen, also from Into the Crypto verse, is another one of them. And both of them are aligning and saying that the weight of probability is exactly where they'd want to see it for calling an early bull market. In fact, we'll get to Ben in a second because he's kind of flipped on this. He was holding out, he thought we were still in the bear market, that there would be another leg down, that we wouldn't see a light at the end of the tunnel until sometime in October. And he's on this week. He's apparently changed his mind on this. But Michael Nato, I talked to him on Wednesday for the TDR podcast and he said, "I'm ready to say it now." He was, previous weeks, he was cautious that this

• 3:25Speaker 01

  was an early bull market. And he's saying he wasn't sure yet, but now he's at 85% probability. I think there was a number of metrics that really nailed that to him. One is the golden cross was confirmed. Okay, so for people who don't know what a golden cross is, that's when the 200-day moving average, the 50-day moving average crosses the 200-day moving average. And if that finally happened in previous cycles, that has indicated that we have broken the back of the bear market and we've entered the early bull phase. He has some other reasons that he thinks we're in the early bull market. So there's a reset in the holder structure. You know, he follows these on-chain metrics of the cohorts, the

• 4:09Speaker 01

  cost base of the cohorts and which cost bases are holding what coins, where you see this process of coin cycling from weak hands back to strong hands and the strong hands form the base for the next market. Anyway, that reset has completed. Now we've got a bunch of strong hands in the 56K to 92K range of Bitcoin. 37% of all supply now sits there. So we've gone through that cycle. We have a reset in leverage. You know, Michael Saylor Strategies' STRC, that's back trading at almost 100. And that is a bellwether for leverage. A lot of the leverage got flushed out during this bear cycle. We have a bunch

• 4:50Speaker 01

  of the KPIs that were hit. So, you know, realized losses as a percentage of change and realized cap, those types of things, supply and profit, all of the KPIs he'd say would be bear market bottom indicators. The majority of those were hit. We just hit the golden cross. And then this, we reclaimed the 50-week moving average. We did that two to three months from the cycle low. That's exactly what we would expect to see. And the 50-week moving average right now is 78.8K. So we've locked in at least one of those, a monthly close above 78.8K. We lock in another and another after that, then we're

• 5:30Speaker 01

  kind of like, that solidifies it. That would be, according to all previous times we've seen it, the end of the bear market and definitely final confirmation that we are in the early bull phase of the market. And I haven't kept up with Ben's work, Ben Cohen's work. I know you are having him on the Bankless Podcast tomorrow, but I think he's been a four-year cycle believer, has sort of held out and has said, "No, we're still in the bear market, right? The bull market is coming. It's coming sometime this year, but not until a little bit later." And he changed his mind on that this week?

• 6:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, both Mike and Ben, I categorize as these guys who move slowly and require a lot of evidence, but when they change their mind, it's firm. As in, they're not going to change their mind again in one or two or three weeks. And so it's kind of a big deal because it takes a lot of evidence for them to change their mind. The last time I was talking to Mike on the TDR, we really talked about comparing the last bear market to this one. And the last bear market was, you know, we had the Terra Luna collapse followed by the 3Rs capital contagion, followed by FTX, like one, two, three sucker punches that created so much pain and pressure, downwards pressure on the market, followed by the Gary

• 6:52Speaker 00

  Gensler era of Operation Choke Point 2.0. Pretty bad time. Yeah. And during that time, you had Bitcoin not at the 200-week moving average, but below the 200-week moving average for almost two-thirds of a year, and then again for another third of a year later. And so a meaningful amount of time below the 200-week moving average, which was unique, idiosyncratic in Bitcoin's trading history. And then also when I was on the TDR with Mike last, we talked about how we are at, Bitcoin is at the 200-week moving average. But also, we had no 3Rs capital, we had no SBF. We have not Gary Gensler, but the two

• 7:35Speaker 00

  most positive crypto regulators at the SEC and CFTC. This bear market is different. Granted, we were saying that when Bitcoin was at the 200-week moving average, Bitcoin could have potentially broken down below the 200-week moving average. But I think now if you are accepting that we are indeed in a bull market, we're not going back down to the 200-week moving average for a while. You can take this bear market, which was a pretty short time, a pretty short time at the 200-week moving average, never got below it, compare that to the actual fundamentals of, we don't have to pay for our sins because we didn't have very many sins. Michael Saylor paid for his sins by selling Bitcoin under

• 8:17Speaker 00

  his purchase price. And we didn't spend too much time there. And so to me, those two things are congruent. Like, very big, painful bear market for very valid reasons in the past. This bear market, much shorter because we have a lot less debt and we get to move on quicker. I think those two things check out.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, the 200-week moving average is 65.5K right now. And you're right, we did spend some time below that, but not very much time this bear cycle below the 200-week.

• 8:44Speaker 00

  The furthest we ever got below was about 5% to 8%. Last bear market, we got 35% below the 200-week moving average and stayed there for a while.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, if we do, now here's a if type of scenario. If we do hit that 65K or go below that for some period of time, say, we get a few monthly closes below that 65K amount, you're saying you don't think we will, Michael NATO agrees, so does Ben Cowan now, they all agree. But if we did, I think that would break the back of this early bull thesis. So that's a number to watch out for.

• 9:22Speaker 00

  Oh, certainly. But like, that's in the evidence of we went down there, it's already broken.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  See, this is like, all of the people saying it's not going to happen in this consensus that we are in early bull does raise an eyebrow for me a little bit, because if everyone's saying it, then it's like, well, maybe, but.

• 9:41Speaker 00

  Well, previously, everyone was saying that we were going to break down in October in Q4, and so that also raises an eyebrow. As of being in the market, you should always have an eyebrow raised.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. Okay, but I do agree that it looks like we are in the early bull phase. So, you know, I think that's probably true. Ben Cowan talked about, he actually released a video, "Why I Was Wrong." Maybe we're gonna have to ask him why.

• 10:05Speaker 00

  Not why you, Ryan, was wrong, why I, Ben, was wrong.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Why Ben was wrong. He's bullish now, of course. What he got wrong, in his words, he said, "I assume the interest rate hike," he's talking about the Fed hike that just happened with WASH last week, "would immediately bring Bitcoin down," and it didn't. So where he got it wrong is, he said, "My thesis was that rising energy prices would cause the long end to go up, then they would raise rates in September, then the dollar would go up and Bitcoin would reprice because of the rate hike." That's why, essentially, he thought there would be one more leg down. Also, previous bear cycles have lasted nine to 12 months. It was getting towards about nine months, but you could see it last 12. That's why he was calling for kind of a bottom October toward the end of this year.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  But what he got right, or wrong, I would say, if you could sum it up, is probably macro. It's just over-indexing on macro, and Bitcoin crypto just plowed through all of those macro concerns. And that, I think, is a lesson for all of us. It's just like, I enjoy some good old-fashioned macro commentary, I really do. But I have to treat that, and I think any savvy investor who's been here for a while, including Ben, Ben knows this, you have to treat that macro analysis with a grain of salt, because it's a very complex engine. There's so many other factors. The thing that won out here, I think, was coinholder rotation and seller exhaustion,

• 11:33Speaker 01

  and it was just time to go up after nine months of crypto winter. And so you don't want to be out of the market when the market decides it's just time to go up.

• 11:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I do, I do take that perspective. I was trying to not be a four-cycler on the way down, but for some reason, I see myself being a four-cycler on the way up. CoinDesk had a pretty interesting article, I thought was pretty interesting. It says, "The data proves that Bitcoin doesn't care about rising bond yields over the long term." And they had a bunch of analysis, and they basically say that the correlation between the 10-year yields and Bitcoin is at 0.18 inverse. And so, you know, if yields go up, Bitcoin goes down with a 0.18 correlation, which is very low. That's just not, that's insignificant. And one of the reasons why I think it's insignificant is because so much of crypto

• 12:29Speaker 00

  cycles are herd mentality, and when it's time to go up, it's time to go up. People, like, the last bears sell, then they're not in control of the market, and the only people left are those left to bid, and people who have cash see the herd, get the contagion of like, "Well, somebody's making money over there, let me allocate, let me allocate." And all of a sudden, everyone's allocating, and we get momentum on our side. So like, my rationale for why Bitcoin is up at the 200-week moving average and why it's up season right now, and things have been going up for like, five weeks straight, is because it's time. People are bullish, people are allocating, and that is spreading in like a contagion across the investor field.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Well, in the words of Michael Saylor, to all of the former bears, he says this to Ben Cowan, "Welcome back." So, welcome back, early bull market.

• 13:22Speaker 00

  Feels good.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Now, that doesn't necessarily answer the question as to whose bull market this will be. So say we are in the early phases of a crypto bull cycle. The question now, any investor in this space has to ask is, okay, what assets do I want to hold for this next fifth crypto bull cycle? And the answer previous to that was certainly Bitcoin. You want to have a good portion of Bitcoin outperform the last cycle by a lot.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  Will that continue this cycle? It's been interesting to see a bunch of other tokens, some altcoins, let's say, outperforming. Ether up a little bit on the week, about 9%, but you'd even consider ETH a blue chip, and maybe we'll talk about that in a little bit. Let's first maybe talk about some of the coins that you've seen outperforming, and whether we can extract any pattern from this early bull phase into what we might see into the future. What's been doing really well?

• 14:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, you said ETH was up a little bit. It was up 9%, which is a good amount, but it's a little bit in comparison to Athena, which is up 40%, Uniswap up 30%, Ondo up 30%, Jupiter up 30%, Arbitrum up 30%. And so, the benchmark, the hurdle to be above the market was something like, you needed to be up 15% or 20% this week to be beating like, an index of all legitimate crypto assets.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  What do those things have in common? What's the thing that ties them together?

• 15:01Speaker 00

  I'm so glad you asked, Ryan. They make money. They all print revenue. Athena prints revenue. Uniswap, the fee burn on Robinhood chain is printing uni-fee burn. You know, Ondo, revenue, Jupiter, all of these things have revenue. Arbitrum, the only significant Layer 2 token to receive the pump, is getting revenue 10% of Robinhood chain fees, which is why Arbitrum and not any other Layer 2 tokens are up this week. It's revenue.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Arbitrum is up, which is like, in a world where Layer 2s are just, they've been just bleeding for the last few years. It's not like there's a secular narrative, "Oh, let's pump L2 tokens this time around." Only arb is pumping, and it's pumping because of its ties to revenue from the Robinhood chain that you can clearly see. It's a different reason for, you know, it being up than we've seen in previous cycles.

• 15:56Speaker 00

  Just like, we talked about keeping one eyebrow raised during the bull market. Bitcoin Cash moved 50%.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Don't tell me that.

• 16:06Speaker 00

  And so, like.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  What are you gonna tell me? Let me look at XRP. How did that do on the week?

• 16:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, how did XRP do?

• 16:12Speaker 01

  XRP.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  Um, on the 17-day.

• 16:18Speaker 00

  17%.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  17%. So, okay, well, I don't know that that disproves it, David, because it is true that everything is getting a bit of a raise from this, but also, it is true that the cash flow generating tokens, the tokens with buybacks and a real revenue story are outperforming disproportionately.

• 16:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  There are some exceptions.

• 16:42Speaker 00

  It's been that true for a while. Delphi Digital put out a tweet about like, how revenue generating assets, a basket of revenue generating assets were up like, 17%, while the blue chips, ETH, Bitcoin, Solana, were down 30%. And they put that tweet out in June, and that's been only even more true ever since.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Well, some people have been going farther. So I actually saw publisher David Feld from Bankless publish this in Bankless in the newsletter, "This is not Bitcoin's cycle." And he made the case, "Okay, look at all of these assets that are pumping. They're pumping, they're growing fast because of cash flows. Guess which doesn't have cash flow? That is Bitcoin. And by the way, who is the next marginal buyer of Bitcoin? Saylor has all he wants. Last cycle, we had ETFs, and you could quite clearly see institutions being the next marginal buyer. Does Bitcoin have that this cycle? Will it continue to outperform? And another way to take a look at that is like, market cap Bitcoin dominance, right now, it's at about 59%.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  The usual model for what happens during the early bull cycle is we get early Bitcoin dominance. So Bitcoin dominance increases early in the cycle, and then alts follow later. So it's always Bitcoin leads, then alts follow. Is this going to be a little bit different this time? Like, maybe, what David Feld is saying is, maybe this will not be Bitcoin's cycle, at least not to the extent it was in previous cycles and certainly in last cycle. Do you buy that argument? Do you think that other crypto assets are going to get their time in the sun, and Bitcoin just doesn't have as much potential this cycle? Also, obviously, much larger market cap. You have to take that into account, right?

• 18:27Speaker 01

  You can't, we're not comparing apples to apples when we compare like, a multi-trillion-dollar asset to something that's, you know, in the, you know, tens of billions. But that aside, do you think Bitcoin will do as well this cycle as last cycle, or you think other crypto assets will take center stage here?

• 18:45Speaker 00

  I do go back to the era of like DeFi summer, where Bitcoin and Ether were unresponsive while there was like money flying hands, euphoria, insane amount of wealth generated in like the lower market cap assets or the brand new assets. And then what happened, you know, Bitcoin went from $6,000 to $60,000. You know, Ether went from $300 to $4,000 plus. And so like, maybe like the attention always starts inside of the crypto sphere and then it, you know, then it overflows and attracts attention. And that's what moves the blue chips. And so that pattern could

• 19:26Speaker 00

  still play out. But nonetheless, I am also concerned, like the average typical commentator on crypto Twitter, I would say is just like, our blue chips are really big and they're hard to move. And who is the marginal buyer of Bitcoin? When gold is still doing its job as gold, and who's the marginal buyer of Ether after like Tom Lee? I don't know who's buying the blue chips, because it's not me. I'm done. They're too big.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  Right. It's not going to come from crypto natives. It has to come from some new set of buyers and the markets maybe still establishing that. I still think there are net new buyers, right? Even Michael Howell is certainly not a crypto native, someone I do follow. I enjoy his macro takes. I enjoy his global liquidity takes. He still talks about Bitcoin as a 5X kind of levered gold type position. In that if you believe in the basement, you could buy gold, or you can buy Bitcoin, and it has a 5X multiple to gold when global liquidity goes back up. Right? So there is a set of institutional believers out there who aren't sort of the crypto natives that you interact with, that I do think will continue

• 20:33Speaker 01

  to be the marginal buyers of Bitcoin. And they are going to believe even more this cycle as Bitcoin recovers, as new time, all time highs are breached.

• 20:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, I do think on the longest of timeframes, like if you believe that thesis, and therefore you are looking to have exposure to the basement, and you weigh Bitcoin or gold, and you have a 10 plus year time horizon, then I bet you that that plays out. I think the very large, wide, random walk that Bitcoin walks to like around the debasement exposure line is very frustrating for investors. Because like, you can be correct about the basement on a five to eight year timeframe, but Bitcoin just randomly walked down negative 30% while gold was more steady around the debasement line. But then Bitcoin does the thing where in two years, it makes it all back and then some. So it's a very frustrating random walk.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Well, let's talk about an asset that's at all time highs, and that is a bit of an outlier from what we just said, which is, we said, assets that were pumping are assets that have some sort of cash flow or revenue attached them. And yet here we have Zcash, which just made a 10 year all time high on the price. Now, I'm not sure if that's market cap all time highs, probably still.

• 21:51Speaker 00

  It's total market cap all time high. Market cap all time high is by far up massively, because Zcash has been super inflationary.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, it's the opposite of what I think, of course.

• 22:01Speaker 00

  This is why the Zcash chart is kind of fucked, especially in the first like third of its life, but also most importantly, in the first like, one month of its life. Because people like somebody, I tweeted out, Zcash all time high. And then I think Austin came into my replies and was like, technically, it's a recent era all time high. And if you go and you look at the Zcash all time high chart, it starts at like $10,000.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  But are you talking about in price or in market cap?

• 22:28Speaker 00

  In price, in price, in price. Like the first Zcash tokens were trading at $10,000 for like, a day.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  You're talking about this stupid thing here.

• 22:38Speaker 00

  That thing does not count. Yeah, of course it does not count.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  That's stupid.

• 22:42Speaker 00

  The thing that the line, the vertical line that is like reminiscent of Hunter Biden's laptop token, does not count.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it doesn't. I mean, market cap, I think is the true expression of like, how is this doing as a store of value asset? So Zcash quite clearly is in the store of value asset category. It's a crypto monetary asset. It's like early bankless thesis stuff, where we were like, okay, there are crypto assets that are emerging that will have monetary properties. It's sort of the Bitcoin play, but private. And now we are at a market cap of, we exceeded $26 billion last week. And this has been an insane over performer, even during the bear market, and certainly in the early bull market. Like, what are we up here, Zcash? We went from about eight billion now, we went from, just even during the bear

• 23:34Speaker 01

  market up to now, it's like $7 billion right now?

• 23:38Speaker 00

  And $7 billion was after it pumped for the first time. And it's, I think that was even, not even a year ago. Like when Zcash went from a $300 million market cap up to like 2 billion. When was that? That first vertical lineup?

• 23:53Speaker 01

  What, what's that? The first vertical right here?

• 23:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, that one.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  10 billion?

• 23:57Speaker 00

  10 billion at the top. What was it? What date?

• 23:59Speaker 01

  We're talking about 2025, November 2025.

• 24:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's September 2026. This whole Zcash thing is less than a year old. It's put on $26 billion in less than a year.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  In the bear market, and into the early bull market, put that much on. And when you start getting to $26 billion, and you don't have cash flows, you are a store of value crypto asset. And you know, part of your explainer for this was just like, this is Bitcoiners rotating in. It's like it's catching the Bitcoin bid trophy.

• 24:29Speaker 00

  It's not ETH money, it's not Solana money, because those assets aren't big enough. It's Bitcoiners shaving off like 1% of their market cap. And when that goes into a $200 million market cap, it goes to $26 billion.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  It's Winklevoss twins, it's Barry Silberd, it's Grayscale, you know, there's an EDF here, you can kind of, you could see that rotation into this. But the reason it's meaningful, I think, is because this is a true competitor, maybe to Bitcoin? I mean, $26 billion is still slight, in terms of Bitcoin's total market cap. But the category it's pursuing is store of value. And the only other asset to even try to claim at this type of market cap level, that it was pursuing a store of value type strategy, has been Ether, Ether the asset. And not even the full Ethereum community has, has kind of claimed that, you

• 25:24Speaker 01

  know? And Vitalik has, you know, been a little wishy washy even about that. And so we have another crypto money that seems to be emerging in the game. And you wonder if that's going to persist for this entire market cycle. And if it does, what are we going to get to? Hundreds of billions of dollars for Zcash?

• 25:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's hard to say that Zcash is a Bitcoin competitor when you have a $1.7 trillion asset, shoulder to shoulder with a $26 billion asset. Like, that's a 65X difference. But I think the point we want to make is that it is a competitor for the marginal flow of dollars in 2026, buying assets. And so are they going to buy Bitcoin? Or are they going to buy Zcash? And if that flow split is 50/50 from the marginal buyer of Zcash, like that, that does make it a competitor. The other, go for it.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, don't you think it's the first viable competitor that we've sort of seen?

• 26:19Speaker 00

  It's like, after Ether had its like very valid attempt in 2021.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  Well, who's pursuing the store of value race right now? Still, still left in crypto.

• 26:27Speaker 00

  Right? I mean, do you think Ether is in the race?

• 26:29Speaker 01

  I do. Absolutely. I think Ether is in the race. I think it's Bitcoin, I think it's ETH. And I think now, when you get over $25 billion, Zcash is in the race too. And I don't see anything else.

• 26:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. There's, there's one more to keep an eye on, that I know that the team is like interested, has their eye on the ball here, which is like the Near team. And I do think that there is an interesting pairing between Zcash and Near, and Bitcoin and Ether. So Ether won the blessing of like the Bitcoin bid, like the trophy of Bitcoiners are going to buy this thing, because there's going to be like, an agreement that like, okay, maybe, maybe hedging my Bitcoin exposure of my multi trillion dollar asset with a little bit of ETH is a good idea. And so that's why ETH just did so well in 2021. And that's, and I think that same thing is happening to Zcash today. Then there's like, why? Also

• 27:26Speaker 00

  because of the privacy, the technical superiority, the more, the more modern asset, the one with less tech debt. And I think Near is also kind of fulfilling that same thing. It's also on the privacy meta. So you have Zcash, the private money. And then what is Near doing? It's doing private Intense. And so cross chain, like it just privatizes your asset transfers across chain. And the, the volume around Near Intense is up like 85% on the two week. The Near is the biggest mover of the week this week, is up 54% in seven days. And I think if like, there's, in addition to the Bitcoin bid, there's always been this like second place trophy, which is like the smart contract bid, that Ether,

• 28:08Speaker 00

  Ethereum has won, Solana then won it later. Like, Solana won the dominant smart contract bid flows beyond 2021. And I think one of the reason why Near is up so much in the last seven days is because it's winning the smart contract bid. And that is the marginal flows. And so kind of going back to this problem statement that, A, I put in my article, but we were talking about earlier, is like, the assets that are more attractive than our blue chips are these much smaller cap assets, the $26 billion market cap asset, instead of the $1.7 trillion one. Or in Near's case, it's like the, what is it? $8 billion asset, instead of the $500 billion one. So the blue chips are not getting the bids,

• 28:48Speaker 00

  and it's going down to these more modern, more, more new assets that are capturing the marginal flow.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  I think that could be the case. It could also be the case that just Near is the recipient of kind of this revenue meta pump as well. I mean, Intense are generating cash flow on Near as well. And you can kind of see that. You could see, it has product market fit in a set of applications, right? It's like the Intense application around privacy, also doing things in AI. So maybe it's coming for some of the smart contract bid, but I'm not sure. It certainly doesn't seem like it's coming for the store of value bid, though, which is like, what ETH bulls in sort of the, you know, the glory years would, would claim. And it does seem to be trying to actually create a business that is generating cash

• 29:38Speaker 01

  flow with apps and revenue and sort of more, more central kind of control over the product roadmap.

• 29:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is. It's doing kind of like the ultrasound money thing where it's using the revenues from confidential intents to like buy and burn near and they have like, they're averaging, I think, like 60% of near issuance is getting bought and burnt. And they're doing the ultrasound money thing. I still think the ultrasound money narrative for Ethereum was the best narrative that we had. And then, and then ETH price went from down from like 4,000 down to like 800. And we all threw out ultrasound money to the garbage. I still think it's the best narrative. It's still worth that being the narrative. And I think like, that's kind of why Near is stealing the week, won the week this week is because, is because of something like downstream to that.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  Well, remains to be seen whether this momentum can hold and what's going to do well during the early bull, but we're going to be talking about it on a week to week basis. Coming up next, there was a Howard Marks memo. I was waiting for this to drop, talking about yields and why treasury market, bond market is going crazy, what assets to buy in order to hedge against them. I want to talk about that. Also, does he mention cryptocurrencies in the memo? We'll discuss all that and more, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this possible.

• 31:00Speaker 00

  I've been trading crypto for almost a decade and I've used so many different wallets, exchanges, aggregators or front ends. And I'm basically always looking for the same thing, just one interface with a deep liquidity across a bunch of chains and assets where I can access markets like perps, earn yield, trade confidentially, and still control all of my funds. And I've never really found it. And I'm just always switching wallets, juggling gas fees, or getting eaten by slippage. But near.com feels fundamentally different to me. I can do anything I want from any chain and keep all of my activity confidential. Crypto, tokenized assets, perps, payments, I can even earn yield confidentially. One account over 30 chains confidential by default. It's the way that crypto ought to work and it's powered by Near, which has moved over $30 billion cross-chain, uses post-quantum

• 31:45Speaker 00

  signatures, and has run over five years on mainnet with zero downtime. Near.com is the best way to be on-chain and be in control. Get 20% of your trading fees back on near.com using the Bankless link in the show notes, not 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

• 32:29Speaker 00

  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 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, we got some more all-time highs to discuss. The US 10-year is at an all-time

• 33:07Speaker 00

  high of 5.15% yields. The 30-year is at 5.44%. These are highs not seen for over 20 years.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, almost all-time highs during the decade, you know, period, not all-time highs.

• 33:24Speaker 00

  All-time highs during the contrast years of us and our audience.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's all-time highs for the show. All-time highs for the crypto industry. And honestly, show no signs of stopping. I mean, they just keep going up, growing at quite a pace. So David, did you read the Howard Marks memo?

• 33:44Speaker 00

  No, because I knew you would tell me all about it.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  You know who Howard Marks is though, right? It's just like legendary investor.

• 33:51Speaker 00

  But for the benefit of our listeners, why don't you go ahead and tell us?

• 33:54Speaker 01

  I don't know. For me, he's kind of in the Hall of Fame. And he's a bond investor, but he has just like these memos that he writes, almost like Warren Buffett-like, that kind of makes sense of the current environment of the market. He's, you know, very, very seasoned, very reasonable, very rational, and often, often right. And so I read every one of his memos that come out. It's just like, every couple months or so, he'll publish something on what's going on. This memo was about yields. And he knows a ton about them because he is, of course, a bond investor. So it's called, Shall We Repeal the Law of Economics? And he gives reasons, three reasons for why yields are rising. And it's reasons

• 34:37Speaker 01

  that our audience is probably familiar with. We've talked about this. And so Howard Marks is really reinforcing some of these ideas. So number one, yields are rising because inflation is high, stubbornly high, he calls it. So we have inflation, PCE at about 3.7%. And recall the target. There is a target out there. And the Fed has still said the target is 2%. Well, we've been above 2% for a long time.

• 35:04Speaker 00

  Since COVID. COVID really popped our ability to hold 2%.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. And 2% is just like, we've never gotten back there. In fact, we're in 3% range and the high 3% and rising. So we have the war in Iran, we have oil prices, lenders are demanding some protection from inflation. So they demand that in the form of higher yields. That's the first reason. The second reason, which has been a Bankless theme, of course, and a theme of all of crypto, is there is zero fiscal discipline in the US. And not just the US, all countries around the world, you know, fiscal situation blowing out of control, sovereign debt is, you know, exploding. There's no signs of reining it in. He said that the US has a golden credit card. There's no credit limit. The bill never

• 35:51Speaker 01

  comes. And this is, of course, the US flexing its ability as the sovereign reserve asset and the global reserve currency. It's kind of flexing that golden credit card capability. 40 trillion in debt, 1 trillion a year in interest payments, now exceeding the amount that we spend on our military in the US. We're just spending that amount in interest. So we know about that. Zero fiscal discipline. The third is a capital demand squeeze. So he talks about, you've got $5 trillion in AI build-out that need to be funded by debt instruments. So this is AI data center build-out needing funds, needing capital in the form

• 36:34Speaker 01

  of debt. And they're willing to pay for that capital in the form of yields. At the same time, you have treasury and it's trying to issue its debt too. So you got 2 trillion in treasury that needs to be issued. This is US bonds. Whereas you have 5 trillion in AI debt, you know, the AI people are good for it because they have the cash flows to support it.

• 36:55Speaker 00

  Do we know that?

• 36:56Speaker 01

  I mean, they have the profit right now. And so, and also, if, you know, Nvidia chips, if that's kind of the new oil, if that is a commodity, as Jensen, people like Jensen are saying, then it's also collateral backed as well. So it's, it's a competitive debt instrument. And that's just raising the cost of capital up. So he says about Besen, you know, Besen has been going around saying, I don't think yields reflect the underlying fundamentals of this strong US economy. And he says, on the contrary, I think US long-term bond yields are reflecting the actual fundamentals that we have. If you just look at those three things, inflation, no fiscal discipline, and the AI capital

• 37:39Speaker 01

  squeeze, it's sucking all the capital. So he reiterates those points. That's the reason, according to Howard Marks, yields are rising. The question is, how do you protect yourself as an investor from what he's essentially calling kind of the debasement type trade? And he said, you could do a few things. One, you can have assets denominated in currencies other than the dollar. But the problem with that is the other currencies have a similar type of effect. They're debasing as well. Two, you could go to non-financial assets like gold or non-US real estate. You could try that. Or three, you could do non-US companies.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  The problem is, there's not a lot of great companies out there. And the US companies are overperforming. Or he says cryptocurrencies. He actually mentioned cryptocurrencies in the memo. So that's something. A friend asked him, okay, Howard, should I sell my stocks? And his answer was this, the problem we face isn't a problem with the US stock market or with US companies. The problem is with the US fiscal management. And ultimately, it's a problem with the US dollar. He basically saying, American companies are good. In fact, maybe they're great. It's the American government that's bad. And so, don't sell your stocks?

• 39:01Speaker 01

  That's actually a way to protect from some of this debasement as well. So I thought it was a well-reasoned, well-rationed, insightful memo and kind of gave me some, connected a lot of dots on what's going on in the current environment for me at least.

• 39:21Speaker 00

  This connects to a bit of discourse that I've been seeing around the timeline that I'm picking up on. And I'll pause and give a disclaimer that this is bull fuel, what I'm about to say. And I'm trying to not be too drunk in this bull market.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  Okay, Tom Lee.

• 39:38Speaker 00

  I'm taking evidence, I'm taking insight from my guru, Ranald Adams, of during a bull market, you want to be a little tipsy. You don't want to be sober. You want to be a little tipsy.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  It's pretty early. It's pretty early in the night to be drunk, David. So.

• 39:51Speaker 00

  I'm decently tipsy.

• 39:52Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 39:53Speaker 00

  And so I'm into bull stuff. But a bull, the bull stuff that I've been seeing on the timeline that I agree with, one came from a while ago, which came from Ansem, actually, when I was listening to his Market Bubble podcast. And he talks about like, the way that Zoomers and millennials escape inflation is through investing. And so investing is a bitch, or inflation is a bitch. It's punishing everyone. You get out of that by investing.

• 40:16Speaker 01

  You have to own assets. That's step one.

• 40:20Speaker 00

  The other, the other bull takes, so that was a while ago, that was months ago. The other bull takes I've been seeing on the timeline is like, what if the bond market is, you know, printing in 5, 6, 7% because the economy is fucking cooking? And this is something I've been seeing from Felix from Forward Guidance about the economy is ripping, the economy, there's money flying around in the economy. The economy is looking good. So the bond, the bond market is printing in higher yields because it wants to allocate to the stock market. And the stock market is the place to put your capital. And the bond market, the yields on the bond market are just reflecting the cost of capital because everyone wants to invest. So what if the actual fundamentals are great of the stock

• 41:01Speaker 00

  market, of equities, now is the time to invest? And the bond market yields like, sorry, US Treasury, you're shit out of luck. Everyone wants to take their money and invest in growth assets because that's the only way to escape inflation.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  Which is also somewhat ironic because a lot of these growth assets in the US capital markets are US-based companies, right? And so that is still fundamentals of the United States of America at some level and future potential tax revenue. Right? So maybe-

• 41:31Speaker 00

  But the tax revenue is just not going to be able to pay the debt. Like it's going to-

• 41:35Speaker 01

  It's a debate.

• 41:37Speaker 00

  You have to debate. The tax revenue is the most helpful thing. There was one time I typed into Claude or something. I was like, what if we just did away with taxes? What would be the repercussions? Like, do we need taxes? Can't we just print the money to pay? And it was like, no, dude. Like, tax revenue is the majority of the reason as to why there's not hyperinflation. And so if you did away with the tax revenue, like, it would be massively catastrophic to inflation. But nonetheless, tax revenue does not cover debt. And so therefore, the debt compounds.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  That's right. I think that's what's going to happen. And it's pretty sensible to hold assets. And I guess just almost any asset you can hold is certainly better than the dollar and certainly better than bonds. David, there's a story breaking from Kalshi this week. Did they get caught red-handed doing stuff?

• 42:29Speaker 00

  I don't know if they have officially got caught red-handed. This was one of the Twitter stories for the decades. There is a Twitter persona, his name's ICO Beast. I've interacted with him a few times on Twitter before, but he got hired by Kalshi as like a crypto lead. And basically on Twitter, he has just been promoting Kalshi. Like, our metrics are, look, look great. Like, Kalshi is the best. Look how big our perps volume is. This most recent tweet was a picture of the Kalshi's, like, market share of, like, regulated onshore perps volume. And he asked chat, is 96.7% a lot? Because that's how much the volume dominance Kalshi has over polymarket perps.

• 43:08Speaker 00

  Then, an account named Benny on Twitter responded, it's easy to have 96% like market volume dominance when three quarters of your volume is wash traded. And then ICO Beast replied like, no, you're, you're wrong and dumb. And-

• 43:24Speaker 01

  I love this. Cope, seethe, rage.

• 43:28Speaker 00

  Now, these words, these words are just imprinted upon the future of crypto Twitter and all the Twitter surrounding these polymarkets. ICO Beast follows up with, why the fuck would anyone try to wash trade when you have trading fees? Incredible intellect on display. Benny, then, a few tweets later, self-informed, so called themselves like, I'm an autist on Twitter. Don't, don't haunt me.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  Don't piss me off.

• 43:55Speaker 00

  Don't piss me off. Yeah. ICO B says, better to remain silent and then, and thoughts of fool than open your mouth and remove all doubt. I'll give you a few minutes to think through this and delete this. Benny responds saying like, no, no, no. Like, reverse Uno card, you. And then, nothing happens for a few hours. And then Benny releases a monster thread with a bunch of evidence, like hardcore evidence for wash trading on Kalshi. So I'll summarize his points. Point number one, there's a massive dislocation between ETH volume and open interest on the ETH market. So on the ETH volume, there's half a billion dollars traded hands on the volume on the ETH perpetual. The open interest is 3.1 million.

• 44:38Speaker 00

  And so that is a daily turnover of 174 times the amount of actual open interest there is. That's just like absurd. Massive dislocation, too much volume for open interest. That's the first bit of evidence. The second bit of evidence is that the position leaderboard is tiny. The number one position on the ETH market was up a whopping $17,000. When $500 million is changing hands daily, you'd expect people to be up or down more than $17,000. But all the winners or losers were in the 10-digit range or the six-digit range. So tiny. Third, there was the same trade size, about $5,500, accounts for over 50%, 50% of all trading volume.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  That's pretty suspicious.

• 45:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. This came from Kalshi's API specifically. Later, the Wall Street Journal reported on this and found nearly 1 million near identical trades at $5,500 with more than $5 billion of volume traded in that size in that same month. Now, the fourth bit of evidence, the original claim from ICO Beast was, why would there be wash trading when we have fees? Because if you're wash trading back and forth, you're paying the fees. The obvious answer is that Kalshi gives volume rebates to market makers, so that's mute. But wait, there's more. Number five, the market makers allowed to market make on Kalshi are selected by Kalshi. Bloomberg previously reported that Jump Trading was given an ownership stake in Kalshi and allowed to market make on Kalshi.

• 46:05Speaker 00

  So not only is Jump Trading given the fee rebate, so the fees don't matter, but they own equity in the platform and therefore are incentivized to pump volume through it. But wait, there's one more. This has spilled over to the prediction market side of the business, where Benny showed that Kalshi has done some very manipulative metric accounting for how it accounts volume on its platform by showing the number of contracts traded, which, a contract on a prediction market trades for less than a dollar. You know, you buy 30 cents to win a dollar. So a contract for here is 30 cents. But they just add this dollar sign, add this errant dollar sign to the contract amount. I don't know why they put the dollar sign there, but when 100,000 contracts are traded

• 46:48Speaker 00

  at 30 cents, it's reported as 100,000 contracts, but with a dollar sign, making it look like $100,000 was traded when only $30,000 was traded, which more than 3X is that reported volume number. And so as a result, a lot of eyes are on Kalshi. Kalshi has stated that the CFTC is not investigating Kalshi for wash trading or anything like that. I think we're all kind of like waiting to see how this falls out. But the TLDR moral of the story is, don't piss off autistic people on Twitter.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  Has Kalshi responded to this? I see a whole response with a TLDR.

• 47:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a handful of, they try, they say, facts behind the Kalshi perpetual volume, saying the repeated $5,500 tickets are one paid market maker quoting fixed sizes, hundreds of distinct takers. So the maker is producing $5,500 size-

• 47:45Speaker 01

  Seems like they're not denying all of it. Maybe some of it.

• 47:48Speaker 00

  Yes. It's, they are talking about it, it's, a lot of it is unsaid. And so that's why I kind of think the story's not over.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  Okay. I did see headlines about that. Thank you for explaining it, David. In contrast to that, I saw a tweet from Vitalik this week, talking about a prediction market called TruO. And he said this about it. It's actually moving from base back to the Ethereum L1, so a kind of reverse L2, back, back to L1 kind of direction. He said this, glad to see that Ethereum L1 will have a new, strong prediction market contender that is dedicated to decentralization, being ethical and not corpus slop, and to actually, and actually trying to do interesting and meaningful things with this class of economic primitive.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  It was earlier this year, I think I saw a comment from Vitalik, basically a blanket criticism of some of the prediction markets. He's long been a champion of prediction markets in general, right? He's been all over this since like, you know, 2015, 2016, the early days of Augur. But he offered some criticism in February. He said, over-converging, that prediction markets were over-converging to an unhealthy product market fit, embracing short-term cryptocurrency price bets, the sports betting, the dopamine stuff, not the kind of long-term fulfillment or societal information value that he had hoped. So that was his criticism. And he's saying that, that TruO is maybe doing things right with decentralization and

• 49:22Speaker 01

  ethics and more of the Vitalik-style virtue that, that he really appreciates. The true token, it does have a token, was up about 10X after this Vitalik tweet. So it shows-

• 49:35Speaker 00

  What did it start at? Where was the market cap it started at?

• 49:38Speaker 01

  It's like 10X, but right now it's an $8 million market cap. So it's like, basically-

• 49:43Speaker 00

  After the pump, it's at $8 million.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. So this is a micro market cap. So I guess the Vitalik tweet gives you something, but it doesn't give you a lot of things. And it's basically, I mean, not used. The total value locked of TruO is 1 to 2 million dollars, seven-day trading value.

• 50:00Speaker 00

  The market cap was $1.3 million before the Vitalik tweet. It peaked at $17 million. It's currently at 9, $10 million.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we have total value locked in TruO of about $2 million, seven-day trading value about 3,000.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  It's just, it was interesting to me in contrast, David, because something I've been working through and, and, you know, struggling with is this idea of just like, what makes TruO better than something like polymarket or even Kalshi? Like, what makes a thing corporate slop or corpus slop? Does that matter? And one thing that I feel a little exhausted from is picking between virtue and traction. It's like this forced choice sometimes in crypto where it's just like, you have the virtue path, but no one's ever going to use it. You'll have like 1 to 2 million in total value lock, but it'll be virtuous, right?

• 51:01Speaker 01

  Versus the traction path, where you have to sell all your ethics and become corpus slop. And just this real, like, growing sense of virtue without any traction is kind of meaningless. It's kind of hot air. And so, just an interesting contrast point. I don't, like, Vitalik, as we've talked about before, he's very much priest class. He's very much monk class. He's sort of the, the conscience of crypto, if you will. And sometimes that character class ignores market sensibilities, ignores product market fit, and-

• 51:40Speaker 01

  It's a whole, it's just like, what, um, what are we doing here if we're not trying to get traction for our protocols? And sometimes that requires the market telling us what works and what doesn't. And I'm like happy to cheer for virtue, but I want to invest in virtue that the market actually values. Because virtue for virtue's sake just gets you unused protocols and mechanisms that don't work and incentives in the wrong direction.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  Anyway, I'm glad to see Vitalik supporting apps. It's just, it feels like it's from a different era when we were, you know, trying to support stablecoins like Rye or something like that. And it turned out that Tether just dominated everything, not based on kind of a virtue, but the minimum level of decentralization necessary to grow a product. And I feel like I just don't want to go back to that world.

• 52:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, there was an era in crypto where the industry was mostly unbuilt. And that was like the 2019 and earlier era. And I think that's when we were allowed to like be fully virtuous, fully imaginative about what's possible. That was coming up on a decade ago, like seven years ago. A lot, we have a lot of evidence now and we now need to like wait both virtue and usage. When we like think about what we are building here. And, and I think, I think your sentiment is felt amongst many of just like, okay, like my like, doing the whole virtue thing can only take me so far. And at some point, like I have to reprioritize other things because everyone is a market participant here.

• 53:27Speaker 00

  And so everyone's money is on the line. So it's, it's personal for everyone here. All right, coming up next, we got a bunch of things to talk about. We got the variational token, probably one of the biggest tokens, maybe the biggest token launch of this year. We also have Ondo and BlackRock collaborating on Ondo Intelligent Portfolios. And a few of the things we're going to talk about all this and more. But first, we're going to hear some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible.

• 53:50Speaker 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,

• 54:34Speaker 01

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

• 54:37Speaker 00

  Variational has announced their TGE, their airdrop. If you don't know what variational is, it's kind of like hyper liquid. It's kind of like lighter, it's not exactly like that. The way that it works is that the variational product quotes you a quote on a particular asset or instrument that you want to buy, whether it's an option or a perpetual or spot or something. It's kind of like a perp exchange aggregator or an options aggregator.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  Is this like one inch, one inch for perps?

• 55:09Speaker 00

  Yes, but more than perps. Yeah, more, it's one, an aggregator of financial instruments of sorts. And the cool thing is that they pour it over into TradFi. And so they have market maker agreements, both in TradFi and on variational. And so they can kind of list assets that aren't tokenized, if that makes sense. It's, it's very similar to hyper liquid and lighter, but also very distinctly different. It's very, very hyped. It's potentially going to be the biggest airdrop of this year. That's what people are talking about it. They are airdropping 32% of the supply. They're doing the hyper liquid, like lighter thing of 100% of revenue is directed to the treasury to buy and burn the V A R token. I'm interviewing the team on Friday.

• 55:50Speaker 01

  Oh, cool.

• 55:50Speaker 00

  Bankless subscribers will get that early and then it will come out sometime the following week. So that's pretty cool.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  Dude, I saw this Ondo and BlackRock collaboration, Ondo Intelligent Portfolios. And these look to me almost, they're not ETFs, but they almost look like, what was Bitwise calling them? Vaults. They almost look like vaults, sort of a smart contract with a set of assets that's managed by some third party who makes sure that they're managing risk well. What is this though?

• 56:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, these are, these are vaults. These are single tokens that wrap professionally designed models, that's what BlackRock is doing, into a single token with Ondo tokenized stocks. So it's a single token that you can buy and then there's Ondo tokenized stocks as a part of that token, like the constituent of that token, the makeup. And then the strategy is built and developed by BlackRock. So it's like BlackRock's models, Ondo's assets and Ondo's vaults. And so I think it's kind of cool.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  There's three products here. There's a high income, there's diversified growth, and then there's a high growth. And you own these by owning the assets. What, what is actually inside of them? Like high income, is that like, what is that? Is that bonds of various types?

• 57:04Speaker 00

  Yes. What's in them is Ondo tokenized real world assets. And those are, so you're buying an Ondo vault, which is an asset that wraps up Ondo tokenized assets into a strategy.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  And the strategy is managed by BlackRock. So they do the risk management, they put their brand on the strategy.

• 57:22Speaker 00

  Yes. I don't know if it's like managed, but the strategy is like proprietary knowledge from BlackRock.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  Very cool. Okay.

• 57:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  I also know as BlackRock put out this post, and this is like, they're, they're all in on crypto this cycle. Of course, they were last cycle with ETFs, but this is a post talking about machine native money and how AI represents machine native intelligence, but digital assets represent machine native money. They're propagating this story that basically with the success of AI, what is AI going to need? It's going to need programmable money. What is programmable money? That is all crypto assets, that is all blockchain stuff. And so if AI is successful, then crypto assets are successful. This is something we've talked about for a while, of course, but the significance is it's a BlackRock report going,

• 58:14Speaker 01

  you know, whatever, $10 trillion assets under management going out to all of their institutions and clients. And so good to have them in our corner from a narrative perspective, I guess, continuing to pump the crypto bags.

• 58:29Speaker 00

  Also news on this week, Binance takes a $100 million stake in Circle, which is interesting, I would say. 1.24 million Circle shares at a 5% discount to your lockup. Plus a five-year USDC deal where Circle pays Binance monthly incentives on USDC balances. So like Binance gets the yield, which is probably now what makes sense because Binance has a bunch of USDC. Binance kind of being brought into the fold, you know, it used to be offshore. It's, it's starting to creep, getting crept on by the United States government so that it's kind of closer.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  This is probably also Circle worried about all their exchange eggs being in the Coinbase basket too. And losing some of that negotiating power.

• 59:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. God, if it was my job to manage the tension between Circle and Coinbase, I would be so stressed out. Anyways, speaking of Coinbase, Coinbase has opened up IPO allocations to US retail investors. So you can buy into IPOs as a retail investor through Coinbase, starting with Aura, the whole like Aura ring products. And so this is Coinbase on its arc to get more into like feature parity with Robinhood on the equity side of things. So Coinbase is kind of cornered, not cornered, but like owns a lot of markets.

• 59:44Speaker 01

  Dipping a toe in the water. I feel like from Coinbase, I still want like the Robinhood features of, I want to be able to buy my stocks at Coinbase.

• 59:52Speaker 00

  You can do that.

• 59:54Speaker 01

  As a US customer right now, I can buy stocks?

• 59:56Speaker 00

  Pretty sure. Haven't, haven't they had stocks on Coinbase for a while?

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  This is, it's crazy that I don't know about this.

• 1:00:05Speaker 00

  Coinbase is doing a lot of good stuff like this. They need to fix their goddamn web app. Their web app is so broken. It's been broken for a while. I know that they know it. Why can't they fix it?

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  Send on that, dude.

• 1:00:19Speaker 00

  That's bad. That's how we will tie that episode off. Risks and disclaimers, bankless station, you guys know the deal. Crypto is risky, but not risky enough. The institutions have 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.